Inactive Thinking It Through
Entries by Thomas M. Spencer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
STOP THE BLOG -- I WANT TO GET OFF
Well I guess it’s about time to come clean folks. I’ve loved this blogging thing over the last fifteen months but, I’m afraid to say, it’s time to hang it up.
There are several reasons for stopping it now. First of all, I’m spending way too much time on it and it’s time for me to use that time more productively. I promised myself that if it ever became an obligation or began to feel like a job, I’d have to quit.
And I’ve reached that point I’m afraid. I’m thoroughly burned out. Rick Shenkman, my editor here at HNN, suggested an extended hiatus but I’m not sure that would do any good. My wife is right. I can’t sort of “half do” this thing. I’ve either got to go forward full bore or hang it up. I am also beginning to feel like I’m repeating myself a lot of the time on this blog. In my opinion that’s a sure sign that I should hang it up.
I’ll admit that at one point a few months ago I believed I could turn this into some sort of a semi-paying gig or something. However, that apparently isn’t going to happen. I’ve faced the fact that I’m not ever likely to be an Atrios, an Eric Alterman, a Kevin Drum, or a Josh Marshall. Furthermore, I’m not sure I’ve got the time to do so even if I wanted to – and still teach my four classes every semester and do research.
And, speaking of research, I have just recently received a research grant from my university and I need to start spending my time working on that project. I applied for the grant last year but, due to budget woes, they canceled all research grants at my university. Well folks, I got a grant a couple of weeks ago and I need to work on that project. I plan to present a paper at a conference next April and it’s high time I got to working on that. I also need to start working on my next book. The research project is part of that. An essay anthology I’ve edited is hopefully coming out next year but I need to start working on an actual book. It’s about time to do so. Blogging has been a fun thing to do during the year that I didn’t get my research grant, but it’s time to start working on my project. I love doing research and scholarly writing (it’s why I became a historian after all) and it’s now time to return to it. I simply can’t keep working gratis on this blog while neglecting my research.
Furthermore, I am a great deal more busy now than when I started this blog in August of 2002. I have just been elected to serve on the Missouri Humanities Council and I’m more active in my church (I’m now a Deacon and I sing in the choir). I was doing neither of those things when I started blogging. I’ve also been exercising for at least 4-5 hours per week (I’ve lost more than 30 pounds since May) and that’s taking a fair amount of my time. During the fall and spring soccer seasons, I coach two teams and referee a game or two every weekend.
Therefore, after a lot of thought, I’ve come to the painful conclusion that something has got to give folks – and this blog, I’m afraid, is what’s got to go.
I’ve achieved a lot with this blog. Since I started this blog, I’ve had almost 500,000 (more than 497,000) unique visitors and right at 700,000 hits. I’ve been mentioned in a magazine article about the John Lott affair. I’m consistently listed as one of the top 80 or so blogs out there in TTLB’s blogospheric ecosystem – and I’m humbled by that. I’m actually hanging it up at the point at which my blog is getting the largest number of hits per day since I started last year. I spent the first four or five months struggling to surpass the 10,000 visitor mark. I now routinely get 2,000-3,000 visitors and more than 4,000 hits per day.
For my readers, I’ve appreciated your loyalty and hopefully we only have a little more than a year left in this unmitigated disaster called the Bush presidency. I know many of you use my blogroll. I believe the blog will stay here folks so you can keep coming here to use it.
As for my fellow liberal bloggers, please keep up the faith and fight the good fight. I’ll keep reading you and I’ll probably leave comments on your boards every now and then. I don’t know how to tell you all how much I’ve appreciated the blogging fellowship and reading you all every day.
I may still write the occasional piece for HNN and, who knows, I may eventually blog again (I never say never to anything) but, at the moment, it’s time for me to focus my time and energy on other things.
Happy trails everyone.
Peace.
Monday, November 17, 2003
BUSY
'Nuff said.
Sunday, November 16, 2003
THE THOUGHT POLICE ARE HERE
Holy cow. The Marine's Girl is being intimidated into shutting down her blog because of an e-mail that's been sent to the Marine Corps.
Her sin? Well, not unexpectedly, she's committed the crime of being against W's policies while her boyfriend, a marine, is in Iraq.
I don't necessarily blame her. Who knows what will happen to her boyfriend if they decide to make an example of him.
So much for free speech, huh?
This is pretty chilling, eh?
But, of course, this isn't anything like McCarthyism.
Of course not. Perish the thought.
Glenn would probably approve -- because she's saying something against Bush. We've seen today that he doesn't really care what you say as long as you're on his side.
GOVERNING WITH ALL THE KEEN SKILL OF DELTA HOUSE
Here's an entertaining column about the sorry state of affairs in Iraq.
Here's just a bit to pique your interest:
Isn't it amazing, and sad, that the only consistent voice with any credibility when it comes to Iraq has been 20-year-old Jessica Lynch, the former Army private who has resisted efforts by the Pentagon to turn her into a Sgt. York of the Persian Gulf?Read the rest of it.Nearly 400 U.S. body bags later, the White House is only now concluding that it installed Spanky and Our Gang to run Iraq, led by Ahmad Chalabi, the Dennis Kozlowski of the Sunni Triangle?
Perhaps this is the inevitable, bloody, costly result of engaging in a war with less thought given to an exit strategy than Butch and Sundance pondering their options only after they've been surrounded by the Bolivian army.
So amid the fretting over an ultra- ultra-top-top-secret CIA report that was leaked faster than an Elvis sighting in News Of The World, Iraqi Viceroy Paul Bremer was hastily recalled to Washington for high-level consultations.
But in consulting with the very people who thought the conquest of Iraq would be more of a cakewalk than Cassius Clay dispatching Sonny Liston, Bremer had to feel as if he had been invited to a housewarming party at Tara.
Saturday, November 15, 2003
OH, THAT MARK BYRON
I had forgotten that I'd had a run-in with Mark Byron (the fellow who fantasizes about killing Democratic senators) before. Longtime readers of mine might remember it.
It was more than 13 months ago. Byron put up a ridiculous post on his blog in which he insisted that liberals were overly emotional. However, he contended, conservatives, by contrast, were all about reason. (My two posts on the subject are here and here.)
His argument was bunk then and it certainly is now. Let's just use Byron himself as an example. Just a couple of days ago, "Mr. Rational Conservative" Mark Byron launched into a deranged, irrational and quite emotional fantasy about killing his political enemies in order to give his hero W a compliant congress. It was bad enough that he thought such a horrible thing but he went much further than thinking about it. He actually wrote this horrific fantasy down and shared it with thousands of people via the internet.
Anyone who thinks more than four or five minutes can realize what's wrong with posting such a story. Yet Byron, in a fit of emotional rage, shared this story with all of us.
I think it's safe to say that Byron, through his own actions, has just proved my point about how conservatives are much more emotional and less rational than liberals.
I assume he'll grant me this now. It seems the least he can do, right?
MORE SIGNS OF SUCCESS IN IRAQ
W said "bring it on" -- and the bad guys sure keep bringing it. 17 soldiers have been killed this time. Several news services are reporting that this crash was caused by a direct hit from an RPG. I'm getting tired of this folks.
Sigh.
What a damn mess.
I'm sure Glenn will ignore this -- like the Chinook shootdown -- as well.
THE "INSTY HYPOCRISY WATCH" CONTINUES
Still nothing as of 9:23 a.m. the next day. You'd think, as the self-appointed guardian of blogospheric propriety, this would be important to Glenn, wouldn't you?
I guess if you're a righty blogger you can post murderous fantasies about killing senators and, as long as you're suggesting only killing Democrats, I guess Glenn doesn't mind.
Update: It's not a good day for Glenn folks. Mark Kleiman also nails Glenn for questioning the patriotism of General Wesley Clark.
Predictably, Glenn is now claiming he didn't mean it like that.
Right.
Some of us remember the horrible things you said about war critics, Glenn.
Nice try though.
Update 2: Oh yeah, the day is getting worse for Glenn. Hesiod has now dropped him from the blogroll.
Hesiod said this was the last straw for him. Hesiod has a great deal more patience than I do.
Glenn was gone from my blogroll long ago.
Update 3: Still nothing on this as of 1:01 p.m.
Update 4: Still nothing as of 6:36 p.m. However, I'm sure if a liberal blogger had done something like this, Glenn would've blogged it within an hour of the post going up.
I suspect Glenn's going to ignore this one folks.
What an astonishing hypocrite he is.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Kevin nails Insty today as well.
Update 5: He finally responded at 10:35 p.m.. I'll fess up and admit sending Glenn an e-mail that tipped him. To his credit, Glenn responded very quickly after he read Byron's post.
This just seemed too damn important not to do so. Murderous fantasies cannot be allowed to pass uncondemned. However, Glenn should drop Byron from his blogroll. It seems the least he can do.
This does, however, make me wonder how much attention Glenn pays to what's going on in his own end of the blogosphere.
At times, I can't help but wonder if he just posts the stuff people send him and pays little attention beyond that.
That's pretty lazy, isn't it?
Update 6 (11/16/03): Glenn has now tried to minimize his criticism by linking in an update to a defender of Byron's. So I guess I'll have to take back the kind words.
Sigh. I can't say I'm surprised.
Jesse has a good discussion going about this here.
Update 7: You know that was such a chickenshit thing to do -- to link to a defender of Byron's post. I guess Glenn really is "objectively pro-murder of Democrats" after all.
How shameful. I should hope he's embarrassed by now.
Friday, November 14, 2003
INSTA-IDEOLOGICAL BLINDNESS
Color me surprised but Glenn still hasn't mentioned Mark Byron's murderous fantasy yet. He's back from his "morning break" and has been blogging for nearly two hours.
Why the silence, Glenn? You are quick to jump on liberal bloggers about anything but you won't chastise the folks on your side when they so obviously step beyond the bounds of propriety?
Why not?
Why not indeed.
I'll keep watching for you and let you know if Glenn continues to ignore a homicidal fantasy by a righty blogger in favor of such incredibly important topics as the low-carb menu at Ruby Tuesday's.
Update: Nothing as of 3:55 p.m. folks.
Update 2: Nothing as of 6:33 p.m. folks.
Boy, Glenn's outrage is awfully selective, isn't it?
Someone prominently on his blogroll does something like this and he doesn't even comment? So much for being the moral conscience of the blogosphere, huh?
Update 3: Nothing as of 9:23 p.m. folks.
It's been about 18 hours since Jesse's post and nearly twelve hours since my first post -- and still no response from Insty regarding a shockingly inappropriate post by someone featured prominently on his blogroll.
However, Glenn has blogged about Native Americans genetically altering corn thousands of years ago. Now, don't get me wrong, I really do know a few scholars who would find that post quite interesting -- but very few other people.
How long is it going to take Glenn to say something about this?
A SICK PUPPY
Jesse points us to a sick right wing puppy's blog post of a fantasy about the killing of Democratic Senators so he can get his four judicial nominees:
WASHINGTON-January 6, 2004. A paramilitary organization calling itself the Christian Liberation Front changed the balance of power in Washington by a pair of brutal attacks this afternoon. A force estimated at about 200 CLF commandos stormed the Supreme Court building, killing 35 people, including five Supreme Court Justices. At the same time, a contingent of 1,000 CLF paramilitaries attacked the Hart Senate Office Building, where a Senate Democratic Caucus meeting was being held. Approximately 50 people were killed in the attack. Once the commandos had seized the building, they systematically killed Democratic senators from states with Republican governors. Here is a list of the 21 senators killedJesse suggests that Glenn Reynolds comment on this since this guy is on his blogroll and he links to him fairly often.Daniel Akaka Byron Dorgan Mary Landrieu
John Breaux Bob Graham Blanche Lincoln
Hillary Clinton Ernest Hollings Barbara Mikulski
Kent Conrad Daniel Inouyye David Pryor
Tom Daschle Tim Johnson Harry Reid
Mark Dayton Ted Kennedy Paul Sarbanes
Chris Dodd John Kerry Chuch SchumerJoe Lieberman was campaigning in South Carolina, and missed the assassins. The attackers turned themselves in to police, and are proudly confessing their crimes, cooperating with authorities.
If the governors appoint Republican replacements, there will be 72 Republicans in the US Senate until replacement elections can be held. Even if a few Democrats are named, there will be likely at least 60 votes to vote for cloture and appoint replacements for the slain Supreme Court justices, changing the balance of power on the court.
Um, yeah. I'd think he should -- and remove him from his blogroll. I wonder if this is why Glenn took a "blog break" this morning?
This whole thing is sick and absolutely indefensible. I'm also not sure a call to the FBI would be out of line either.
I don't know how anyone could write something like this.
Update: In the comments to Jesse's post, there's an interesting (and not violent or offensive in any way) fantasy. However, when it was posted in the comments to his post, Mark Byron found it so offensive he deleted it immediately.
I'll repost it here:
WASHINGTON-January 6, 2004. A wannabe paramilitary organization calling itself the Christian Liberation Front changed the balance of power in Washington by attempting to stage a pair of brutal attacks yesterday. A force estimated at one CLF commando named Mark Byron, carrying a homemade assault weapon and screaming "My EZ-Uzi is not subject to interstate commerce laws! Just ask the 9th Circuit!" attempted to storm the Supreme Court building and kill dozens of innocent non-fetuses as well as Supreme Court justices whose rulings he considered less-than-biblical. At the same time, a contingent of one other CLF paramilitary named Ann Coulter, after getting lost while trying to find the New York Times' Washington bureau, attempted to drive a rented truck filled with fertilizer-based explosives into the Hart Senate Office Building during a caucus of Senate Democrats. U.S. Capitol Police repulsed both attacks, and because God is merciful and pro-life, neither of the attackers was turned into Swiss cheese in a hail of bullets but rather placed under arrest without anyone getting hurt.Now, let me get this straight. Any opposition to the posting of his pathologically violent "fantasy" is somehow violating his right to free speech and McCarthyistic.FOREIGN PLOT
Documentation found in the suspects' computers indicated that funding for the attack came from Australia, said investigators who spoke on condition of anonymity. The investigators also were looking into the timing of the assaults, both of which began precisely at 6:02 p.m., and in particular why Fox News was reporting live from both of the scenes in a split-screen on Brit Hume's show as the assailants attempted to reach their targets.
Investigators added that the suspects' computers also held incoming emails of support for the attacks from numerous conservative Republican politicians, including current elected officeholders, appointees and other occupants of the highest levels of government, as well as from conservative Christian leaders loosely organized through the web site mostfunsincethecrusades.com. "All of these messages were couched as descriptions of `fantasies' but that was the most thinly veiled attempt at code since Osama bin Laden's last video," one investigator said. "The messages denied supporting the plot, saying merely that `it has a following in the darker parts of my mind,' but you know you're dealing with hardened terrorists when you see tortured use of the passive tense like that."
TIDE TURNS
The news that self-proclaimed patriotic Republicans would even fantasize about much less support an action so inimical to democracy apparently prompted a strong backlash from the American people. National polls rushed into the field last night in the hours after the startling event found widespread disgust at the attacks and at Republicans for any hint of condoning them. President Bush's job approval rating plummeted from around 50% to statistically insignificant levels, with more than 90% of registered voters saying they definitely would vote against Bush in November. By similar margins, voters said they would reject Republicans running for Senate and House; the poll numbers suggested that Democrats would easily win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
And thus the attempted attack changed the balance of power in Washington by taking it away from the Republicans, who Byron and Coulter seemed to forget were the ones who had the power in the first place.
However, at the same time, a squeaky clean satire based on his original post is beyond the bounds and therefore should be deleted from the comments section immediately!
How hypocritical is that?
Welcome to the strange ethical universe of the righty blogger folks.
Thursday, November 13, 2003
MORE SLEIGHT OF HAND WITH W'S POLL NUMBERS
You know, if the president's job rating doesn't go up, why pretend that it has? Get a load of this misleading headline regarding a recent CBS poll. If you actually read the poll in question, it has a great deal of bad news for the president -- including the fact that his approval numbers have actually gone down. Furthermore, almost all of these polls ask other questions about the Iraq situation that indicates he's in big trouble with the public.
(BTW, I am astonished that 62% of Americans still think Saddam had WMDs. I know it's always hard to admit you were gullibly led like sheep down the primrose path. However, don't you think it's about time for these folks to admit they were misled by the administration? Not that there wasn't plenty of evidence of that at the time if they'd have gotten off their lazy backsides to find it. The fact that the American people keep desperately hanging on to the hope that Saddam had WMDs demonstrates mostly that, predictably, these poor gullible souls don't want to admit their government lied to them.)
Anyway, I'm really getting tired of reading that W got a "bounce" on the economy because, once you actually read the polls in question, his approval numbers are usually holding steady or even, in the case of this CBS poll, actually going down. I commented on Newsweek's rather bizarre positive spin on their poll just a few days ago.
Why can't the media just say the obvious? If you peruse the recent polls, most of them show W's approval numbers holding steady at a rather mediocre level (mostly the low 50s) and there are no signs there will be much improvement soon.
What's wrong with just being honest?
A MADE-FOR-TELEVISION EXHIBITION OF MANUFACTURED OUTRAGE
Surely Republicans in the Senate don't think Americans will fall for this 30 hour cry-a-thon about four judicial nominees, will they? It's also even more ridiculous when you find out that 168 of W's 172 nominees have been confirmed.
All this about four nominees -- are you kidding me?
Their case for unfairness completely falls apart when you realize that Republicans blocked 60 of Clinton's nominees.
But it'll all look good on Faux News tonight -- which I suspect is all this is about anyway.
MODO RIPS OFF...
Josh Marshall and Gene Lyons in one column -- without any sort of attribution.
Impressive.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
A BIT OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE FROM GENE LYONS
Gene Lyons is apparently not biting on the "we're going to fight the election of 2004 on the doctrine of pre-emption" meme.
(BTW, Gene's column is about to go into syndication, so I won't be able to get it via e-mail once that starts. Just FYI.)
Anyway, here's his column for this week. I can tell the Dean supporters are going to love this one.
Gene Lyons
November 12, 2003Howard Dean, Rebel Rouser
As a white Southern male, I'd like to explain my views about Howard Dean and the confederate flag. Here are my credentials: I've lived in Arkansas since 1972, drive a pickup truck, currently own four hunting dogs, two horses, and three shotguns. I've hunted deer and ducks, consider fried catfish a delicacy, and haven't missed a Razorback game in years. I don't believe Faith Hill's ever recorded a song worth hearing twice, but that girl's got a smile that'd make a mule get down on its knees and thank God for Mississippi.
Enough stereotypes for you? Because it's also true that I'm of Irish Catholic descent, was born and raised in New Jersey--state motto: "Oh yeah, who says?"--and hardly knew where Arkansas was until I followed my wife home from grad school at the University of Virginia. Offer me NASCAR tickets or a root canal, and I'd opt for the dental work. Does that disqualify me? Some Professional Southerners would say so, but few Arkansans.
You accept Arkansas, Arkansas pretty much accepts you. Little Rock's nothing like Richmond, or Charleston, S.C.. There's little talk about the glories of the pre-Civil War South. "Arkansas aristocrat" is a phrase that won't make. Indeed, "Thank God for Mississippi" is sometimes said to be the state motto, as our neighbor to the east often makes Arkansas look, well, so enlightened by contrast. You can infer somebody's politics by whether or not they think it's funny.
Anyhow, I've been on the lookout for confederate flags over the past week, but haven't actually seen any. Not even at the feed store or the biker bar out on the old Conway highway. The old boy at the saddle shop had some baseball caps with a rebel flag motif, but didn't appear to have sold many. They looked out of place with the boots and bridles and cowboy hats. Wearing one would pretty much be the equivalent of going around with your middle finger stuck in the air.
People who act like that don't vote anyway. Even if they did, Howard Dean could win the support of every rebel flag-waving redneck in Arkansas and still lose badly--which I'm persuaded he'd do if he got the Democratic nomination, losing the presidential election in the process.
But enough about one small Southern state, albeit one whose electoral votes could easily turn the 2004 election. My larger point is that the South is a big, complicated place. Racial melodrama simply doesn't dominate public debate throughout the region anymore, as Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) did his opportunistic best to point out during the recent Democratic debate.
"The people that I grew up with, the vast majority of them, they don't drive around with Confederate flags on pickup trucks," he said. "The last thing we need in the South," he told Dean "is somebody like you coming down and telling us what we need to do."
Sigh. See, in my view, the whole point of America and the Democratic party is that this kind of identity politics is a dead end. Howard Dean made his point a lot more effectively when I heard him at a Little Rock appearance earlier this year. What he planned to ask Southern white men, the former Vermont governor said, was "You've been voting Republican for thirty years, ever since Nixon. What have you got to show for it? Better schools? Better jobs? Reliable health insurance?"
Bringing a potentially divisive symbol like the rebel flag into it wasn't the smartest thing Dean's done in an otherwise cleverly innovative campaign. But his rivals' make-believe outrage made them look ridiculous. Does anybody really think that Al Sharpton and Sen. John Kerry were personally offended?
What hurts Democrats most in such charades is the absurd ritual of forcing somebody like Dean to apologize for a remark everybody knows wasn't offensive in the first place. It feeds the perception that they're fakers and panderers to trumped-up, phony grievances every one--a party dominated by sissies and snobs.
And that's an image that Republicans have become unpleasantly clever at manipulating. See, it's not race that sets the South apart these days as much as religion: specifically a suburbanized brand of Protestant fundamentalism that comforts people uneasy with rapid social and technological change, by offering rigid moral certitude and positing modernity and cosmopolitanism as the enemy.
If White House political guru Karl Rove gets his way, from Arlington, Virginia to El Paso, Texas, the 2004 election will turn not on Iraq or the dubious glories of the Bush economy but on liberal judges, partial-birth abortion, and gay marriage.
Given President Bush's manifest failures, Arkansas's not the only Southern-accented state that the right Democratic nominee could win in 2004. But Dean's vulnerability on the cultural/religious issues, I fear, could doom his candidacy across the region.
THE NEW MCCARTHYISM
Just as in 2002, the Bush administration plans to question their opponents' patriotism in their effort to win the election:
Faced with growing public uneasiness over Iraq, Republican Party officials intend to change the terms of the political debate heading into next year's election by focusing on the "doctrine of preemption," portraying President Bush as a visionary acting to prevent future terrorist attacks on US soil despite the costs and casualties involved overseas.And, I might add, W didn't do a damned thing about terrorism between January and September of 2001 -- even blowing off a rather lengthy briefing on the subject by the outgoing Clinton administration officials. So trying to pin this one on the Clenis is going to be awfully hard when you so obviously spent the first eight months of your administration trying to figure out how to pay off your rich campaign supporters and energy companies who bankrolled your re-election effort with tax breaks and new energy policies. But I digress.The strategy will involve the dismissal of Democrats as the party of "protests, pessimism and political hate speech," Ed Gillespie, Republican National Committee chairman, wrote in a recent memo to party officials -- a move designed to shift attention toward Bush's broader foreign policy objectives rather than the accounts of bloodshed. Republicans hope to convince voters that Democrats are too indecisive and faint-hearted -- and perhaps unpatriotic -- to protect US interests, arguing that inaction during the Clinton years led to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"The president's critics are adopting a policy that will make us more vulnerable in a dangerous world," Gillespie wrote. "Specifically, they now reject the policy of pre-emptive self-defense and would return us to a policy of reacting to terrorism in its aftermath."
Inviting a fierce foreign policy debate in the months to come, Gillespie continued: "The bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, Khobar Towers, our embassies in East Africa, and the USS Cole were treated as criminal matters instead of the terrorist acts they were. After Sept. 11, President Bush made clear that we will no longer simply respond to terrorist acts, but will confront gathering threats before they become certain tragedies."
And, btw, as if on cue, Nick Kristof writes a column today that reads as if it was written from the RNC memo in question.
Does the RNC provide the media with everything that we read about these days? Since they more or less ran the media coverage of the last couple of elections, I'm guessing that this is now officially the case.
We saw the results of this rather immoral "win at all costs" approach to an election back in 2002 (although it is interesting to point out that the 2002 election wasn't the walkover it was portrayed at the time). I expect the Mighty Wurlitzer will pound out these notes with even more fervor next year since it's a presidential election this time.
We have an administration that will now use fear and patriotism in the most manipulative way possible folks. I would argue it provides us with a true sense of this administration's morally bankrupt nature -- they'll do anything to win. As we now know, this administration is made up of people who believing lying about the case for a war is okay. Therefore, these same people certainly won't view telling lies in order to smear their political opponents as outside the bounds of propriety.
W, Karl Rove, and their minions essentially view nothing these days as beyond the pale folks.
And that fact is truly frightening.
[Links via Atrios]
WHITE HOUSE IN FULL PANIC MODE
Apparently, even in the eyes of the White House, the wheels are coming off in Iraq. As Hesiod notes in this excellent post, the White House is now considering firing Bremer and reorganizing our Iraq efforts yet again. What will that be, the third or fourth time?
W and the boys are also considering restarting "major combat operations" apparently. If that happens, it's an open admission this war is going poorly. No up-is-down spin will work in that instance. Furthermore, this CIA assessment is pretty scary as well -- they see the security situation worsening -- despite all of the administration's spin to the contrary.
The most recent Nasiryah bombing demonstrates, quite obviously, that the Iraq situation is dangerously close to spinning completely out of control -- if it's not there already. I don't know, 30-35 attacks against U.S. soldiers per day and multiple terrorist actions against other targets in Iraq pretty much fits my definition of a situation that's "out of control," how about you?
I think we can start using the word quagmire now folks. It's clearly reaching that point -- and we're about to pour $87B more big ones down the Iraq War hole.
BTW, this mess is exactly why you don't pursue a fool's errand of a war.
Not that I didn't warn everyone of this -- for months before this war even started.
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
GOOD KRUGMAN COLUMN
Go read it.
WHAT'S UP WITH SITEMETER?
Does anyone know what's up with Sitemeter? It has been down for several hours now. They haven't gone out of business, have they?
FOX V. FRANKEN TRANSCRIPT
Atrios points us to the Fox v. Franken transcript. The whole thing is pretty damned hilarious but here's a particularly funny part:
THE COURT: Do you think the use of the phrase "lying liars" can be a joke?The whole thing is very entertaining -- and these things are usually quite boring. Go read it.MS. HANSWIRTH: It can be, but it isn't necessarily. I mean, look at the title of Mr. O'Reilly's book "The Completely Ridiculous and American Life."
THE COURT: Let me ask you about that: Mr. O'Reilly uses in his book "the good, the bad and the completely ridiculous." Is that not a play on "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"?
MS. HANSWIRTH: I don't know.
THE COURT: You don't know whether that's a play on "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."
MS. HANSWIRTH: I don't know.
THE COURT: Well, assume that it is. Is that not a play on a trademarked phrase?
MS. HANSWIRTH: That's a title of a movie.
THE COURT: Yes. And I assume there's some kind of protection for the title of the movie "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."
MS. HANSWIRTH: Your Honor, there generally --
THE COURT: I think that I have in some of the papers, it might have been the amicus brief, a representation that the phrase "the good, the bad and the ugly" is a trademarked phrase.
MS. HANSWIRTH: I don't know that that's the case. And I don't know --
THE COURT: Well, I mean, isn't Mr. O'Reilly doing exactly the same thing using a trademarked phrase in the title of his book? The good, the bad --
MS. HANSWIRTH: He's not doing it to confuse. He's certainly not using it to sell the product.
THE COURT: Do you think that Mr. Franken and the publisher are intending to confuse buyers into thinking that he, Mr. Franken, is somehow associated with Fox?
MS. HANSWIRTH: I think what they're doing is they're intending to use the trademark to sell the product. And they are. They've admitted that. The way that they've set it up is too ambiguous. Once again, it does not say parody satire. It is the only trademark on that book, unlike the O'Reilly book, which has Fox News's "The O'Reilly Factor" prominent trademark on it at least three times that I can see from here.
TWO BUSH HAIKUS
I like this one:
No child left behind,And this one:
Clean skies, healthy forests and
Iraq. Pants on fire!
Screwed the country badIndeed.
Two thousand four awaits him
He'll go just like Dad.
Monday, November 10, 2003
A FLASHBACK
Jesse over at Pandagon reminds us (a repost from December 26, 2002) exactly who made the list of "The Twenty Most Annoying Conservatives of 2002."
It's great. Go read it.
He tells us he's shooting for a December rollout of the 2003 version.
I can't wait.
How'd I miss this back then?
And, reviewing the archives, I posted a bunch that day too!
That was the day that Glenn Reynolds sent me a profanity-laced e-mail.
Ah, I remember it well.
That's one of the first times it became apparent that I really get under Insty's skin -- a fact I'm quite proud of actually.
W AS STUFFED SUIT
This is an excellent column. Here's a bit of it:
There is an old Brady Bunch episode in which Greg is plucked out of obscurity by a talent scout who says she is going to make him a rock star. It turns out his singing ability didn't attract her - a production studio would make Greg's voice sound however she wanted - but he had the right physique for the glittering costume.Go read the rest of it.This is how George Bush got to be president. He was the perfect front man for the corporate interests and right-wing ideologues who were looking for a guy who was both electable and malleable.
Like Greg, he fit the suit.
While it is true that candidate Bush with his "gentleman's C's" suffered from a lack of depth - the man had a startling lack of interest in geopolitics - the oligarchs knew that in the age of sound bites you don't need the ability to explicate at length. The mileage one could get from the meaningless phrase "compassionate conservative" would be worth a wall full of well-digested books by Benjamin Barber, Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama.
Moreover, what Bush had was far more valuable: a gold-card pedigree, giving him nationwide credibility, an outside-the-Beltway Marshal Matt Dillon affectation and, it seemed initially at least, the ability to hide his fierce conservatism within a common touch.
But as the war in Iraq continues to go badly, sending back news of a daily casualty count, Bush's common-touch artifice is beginning to wear thinner than the backside of his Crawford jeans. Showing through is the real Bush, his swaggering arrogance, unidimensional understanding of issues, congenital lack of sympathy and intense pique at challenging questions.
When Bush was asked at a recent news conference whether he could promise that there will be fewer American troops in Iraq in a year, he refused to answer, calling it a "trick question." Bush has no oratorical powers to justify his policies and treats anyone who asks him to do so as his enemy.
Last Sunday, when a missile downed a Chinook helicopter in the deadliest assault on American troops since the Iraqi invasion began in March, Bush declined to comment. He made no public appearance that day, nor did he issue a statement expressing his shared grief with the families. It was explained that the president was taking a "down" day at his ranch in Texas, between campaign appearances. Only the next day, did he refer to the incident obliquely, saying, "We mourn every loss."
LYNCHING PRIVATE LYNCH
Billmon has a fascinating post up about how Private Lynch has been transformed from "True American Hero" to "a disgrace and proof that women shouldn't be in the military" in the eyes of many talk radio listeners. By refusing to go along with the Mighty Wurlitzer's version of events, she's making some red state morons who listen to Rush Limbaugh very angry.
Here's a tidbit of it just to pique your interest:
I've been watching the latest twists and turns in the saga of Pvt. Jessica Lynch with growing bemusement, if not outright amusement. It's a classic example of a story that's been spun so many ways it's lost all narrative coherence -- and is collapsing back into the disconnected shards of reality from which it was originally created.Go read the rest of it. Isn't it interesting how there is essentially no bloom left on the Iraq War rose?What's impressive, though, is the way Lynch herself is emerging from the wreckage of a phony story as a real person -- and a woman who seems determined to be the subject, not the object, of her own life. The finger that pulls the string, instead of the top that gets spun.
Needless to say, the people formerly doing the spinning aren't too happy to find their top now has a mind of its own. Having "saved" Private Lynch, the conservative propaganda machine is now looking for a way to destroy her. Turning Jessica Lynch into Jane Fonda may prove a little bit harder than convincing the true believers we've always been at war with Eurasia. But perhaps not much.
MORE ON PRESCOTT BUSH'S NAZI CONNECTIONS
As I've said before, this Nazi thing doesn't have anything to do with W but it is interesting. Now it appears Prescott Bush continued to be involved with these companies until 1951 -- and hid that fact from the government.
It also is interesting that we're only learning this five decades later, isn't it?
Sunday, November 9, 2003
DAVE PREDICTED IT
Yep. Dave (of Seeing the Forest) predicted back in May that the Republicans would play the "blame the Democrats" strategy regarding the investigation into cooked pre-war intelligence. He predicted they'd pretend that this bogus argument was reason enough to cancel any sort of serious investigation into how the administration lied us into the war.
Again, how can they get away with this? These really are the people who thought lying about a consensual blowjob merited impeachment, right?
Surely our media is going to call them on this, right?
Right.
I'm sure.
RUMSFELD DENIES HIS OWN STATEMENTS
In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi citizenry and that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.You've got to read this one to believe it. You know you're in trouble when you're denying stuff that you said a few months ago, aren't you?Now, after both statements have been shown to be either incorrect or vastly exaggerated, Rumsfeld - with the same trademark confidence that he exuded before the war - is denying that he ever made such assertions.
In recent testy exchanges with reporters, Rumsfeld interrupted the questioners and attacked the premise of the questions if they dealt with his pre-war comments about weapons of mass destruction and Americans-as-liberators.
Damn, this makes you wonder if this guy can lie about anything, doesn't it?
It's official. Rumsfeld has become a cartoon.
[Link via Atrios]
Saturday, November 8, 2003
THE PRO-BUSH SPIN
After reading the appallingly dishonest headline "Economic Gains Bolster Bush" I'm still trying to figure out how in the world Newsweek can possibly spin these recent poll results as providing anything positive for the president.
Here's the opening paragraph:
With news that the economy grew at a surprisingly robust 7.2 percent annual rate and that some 300,000 new jobs were added during the third quarter, an increasing number of voters say they approve of the way the President George W. Bush is handling the economy, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll. While more registered voters say they disapprove rather than approve of the way Bush is handling the economy (48 percent vs. 44 percent), the margin has narrowed considerably since October’s 37 percent vs. 56 percent.Okay, so fewer people think W's an absolute damn fool with regard to economic matters. Okay, well that sounds like his public support is increasing.
However, wait a minute -- take a look at the rest of the article. Almost nothing else in the poll is positive for Bush, including the fact that his approval rating has not come up at all since the last poll:
Bush’s overall approval rating is holding steady at about 52 percent, though that’s down considerably from its peak of 88 percent in the weeks following the September 11 attacks. Half approve of his approach to education. However, approval ratings of the president policies on the following are still stuck below the halfway mark, as they have been for the past few months: taxes (45 percent), the environment (44 percent) and foreign policy in general (46 percent). Just 36 percent approve of his health care policies.Wait. Wait. I thought they said "economic gains bolster Bush." If his approval rating remains the same and his poll results on other issues are about the same, how can they say his support is "bolstered" by the new economic numbers?
In reality, this poll has a great deal of bad news for the president and shows W has not gained an inch in support on most issues and, to top it all off, his approval rating is staying quite steady at the rather mediocre level of 52 percent.
Yet, because one poll question shows an improvement, the folks at Newsweek have spun this poll as showing his public support has been "bolstered."
How the hell can they say that?
Am I missing something?
Update: Here's a bit more about this poll -- it now shows 50% of Americans don't want to re-elect Bush. How did this poll "bolster" anything for W?
THREE BLASTS IN RIYADH
I hear there have been some more signs of our success in the war on terror tonight in Riyadh.
Great. Just great.
THEY HAVE NO SHAME
Knowing W will come out looking like a dishonest snake if there's any serious investigation into the lies he told about pre-war intelligence, Republicans are trying to shut down an investigation by pretending this memo indicates the investigation will somehow be a sort of political bag job.
This is pretty damn desperate, isn't it?
These really are the same guys who thought lying about a consensual blowjob (which is one hell of a lot less important than lying to get us into a fool's errand of a war) was worth presidential impeachment, right?
As Josh Marshall put it in a post last night:
Two guys walk into a ring for a fight. One knows he’s about to get creamed. But he can’t bear the shame and humiliation of walking away from a fight. So at the very last moment he whips out some phony claim that the other guy’s cheating.Such appalling hypocrisy really should have a major political price.He puffs himself up with forced indignation. And huffily storms off.
Everybody knows it was bogus --- the accused, the accuser, everyone else. But it gives the coward just enough of an angle, just enough of a smokescreen to get out of the place without having a glove laid on him and with a bit of his dignity intact.
This is of course more or less exactly what the Republicans are doing with the hullabaloo over this unsent Democratic staff memo.
Precisely the same.
I doubt it will -- but it should.
BIG TIME BUMMER
Art Silber is having to shut down his blog for a while because of the transit strike. Go read his explanation here.
Welcome to life in modern Los Angeles, eh? Since only 400,000 working class and poor folks use public transit, no one in power really gives a damn about ending it very soon.
How screwy is that?
Anyway, let me second Atrios, and encourage you to hit Art's tip jar if you can.
Friday, November 7, 2003
W IN DEEP DOO-DOO
Boy, now W really may be in trouble. Take a look at Public Opinion Watch (PDF version) this week.
W is now losing on his signature issue, taxes. Things are not good. Here's the most interesting part:
On the economy, the findings are equally daunting for the Rove team. For example, when asked whether most Americans are better off financially than they were in 2001 when Bush became president, just 9 percent (!) say that Americans are better off, compared to 49 percent who say that they are not as well off and 41 percent who say that they are about the same. The comparable figures for Poppa Bush in October of 1991: 7 percent better off, 48 percent not as well off, 41 percent the same. Eerily similar, no?However, in order to have history repeat itself, the economy has to stay about where it is now. I think public opinion has certainly turned against W at this point. If the economy remains more or less flaccid, he's in deep trouble.And when asked how they themselves are doing financially during the Bush presidency, 22 percent say that they are better off, 27 percent say that they are not as well off, and 50 percent say that they are about the same. Again the analogous figures for Bush pere are almost identical: 20 percent better off, 27 percent not as well off, and 53 percent the same.
Finally, Public Opinion Watch's favorite finding from the entire poll: only 40 percent now say that Bush "understands the problems of people like you," compared to 58 percent who think he does not. Sounds like folks think he's out of touch. Say, didn't they think that about some other president not so long ago?
However, you know what I think will happen if the economy rebounds so I won't repeat it again.
LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, THE PRO-U.S. PROPAGANDA VERSION
This article from the Christian Science Monitor is astonishing. Here's a bit of it:
For 15 years, high school history teacher Abtsam Jassom has dutifully taught 20th-century history according to the Baath Party. In it, America was the greedy invader, every Iraqi war was justified and victorious, and Zionists were the cause of world suffering. Now, however, with the ouster of former President Saddam Hussein, US officials say teachers will finally be free to teach a more factual account of historical events. But the question is: Whose account will that be?I suspect these new history texts will say absolutely nothing about W's spurious charges last year that Saddam had WMDs, right? Or about Ronny Reagan and George Bush essentially creating Saddam and his army and looking the other way while he developed chemical and biological weapons programs in the 1980s, right?The first indicator of what a Saddam-free education will look like is arriving this month, as millions of newly revised textbooks roll off the printing presses to be distributed to Iraq's 5.5 million schoolchildren in 16,000 schools. All 563 texts were heavily edited and revised over the summer by a team of US-appointed Iraqi educators. Every image of Saddam and the Baath Party has been removed.
But so has much more - including most of modern history. Pressured for time, and hoping to avoid political controversy, the Ministry of Education under the US-led coalition government removed any content considered "controversial," including the 1991 Gulf War; the Iran-Iraq war; and all references to Israelis, Americans, or Kurds.
"Entire swaths of 20th-century history have been deleted," says Bill Evers, a US Defense Department employee, and one of three American advisers to the Ministry of Education.
The new downsized versions of textbooks underscore the political challenge facing the primarily US-backed government, and the private, and nonprofit groups charged with everything from rebuilding schools to retraining teachers to rewriting text. While US advisers don't want to be seen as heavy-handed in influencing the way Iraqis interpret history, neither do they want to be in the position of endorsing texts that could be anti-American, anti-Israeli, or radically religious.
As a result, some charge, in a matter of months Iraqi education has gone from one-sided to 'no-sided.'
"We considered anything anti-American to be propaganda and we took it out," says Fuad Hussein, the Iraqi in charge of curriculum for the Ministry of Education. "In some cases, we had to remove entire chapters."
Iraq, even if it is a frigging disastrous money pit for the United States, has also largely become an exercise in wish fulfillment for W and his corporate conservative supporters. In Iraq they've gotten a flat tax system and an enormous feeding trough where corporations that supported the Bush campaign financially can gorge themselves.
Now, as if all of that wasn't enough, the right wing ideologues have the ultimate opportunity -- to write the history of Iraq according to their particular point of view.
Can you imagine what these Iraqi students must think of the history they're being told? Contrary to the reality right in front of the students' eyes, their history texts will tell Iraqi students that the U.S. never did them any harm and that nothing controversial involving the United States ever happened. This within just a few months of a war that, according to very reliable sources probably resulted in the killing of more than 10,000 innocent civilians.
Calling this Orwellian doesn't quite cut it, huh?
This sort of thing makes you wonder what W and his minions would do if they could control the school curriculum in this country, doesn't it?
[Link via Atrios]
DAMN -- AGAIN
Another helicopter has apparently been shot down in Iraq. This time it has cost the lives of six soldiers.
BTW, has anyone noticed, paradoxically, that the soldiers keep on dying (33 in November alone) but we didn't hear as much about it this week?
For example, why didn't I hear about this helicopter shootdown on CNN during the half hour I had it on this morning?
Thursday, November 6, 2003
MORE LIES FROM THE LYING LIARS
It is astonishing that some Republican mouthpieces are trying to deny reality and claim the administration didn't really say Saddam was an imminent threat. You and I know this is a lie -- the only thing that amazes me is that Americans aren't outraged by this transparent attempt to airbrush their public statements from a year ago.
Josh Marshall has them dead to rights on this. Here's just a bit of his article:
Here’s how Vice President Cheney described the threat in August 2002: “What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness.”Of course, my argument would be that the fact the administration's sycophants are trying this ludicrous line of spin tells you the administration is quite worried. As Iraq becomes a bigger headache for them, this administration runs the risk of morphing into the contemporary equivalent of the Lyndon Johnson administration. By 1968, with Vietnam spinning out of control, Americans knew LBJ lied to get us into the Vietnam War -- and he paid a major political price for it.A month later, Bush called Iraq an “urgent threat to America.”
The next month, he described the threat like this: “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. … Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Or Fleischer two days after that: “Another way to look at this is if Saddam Hussein holds a gun to your head even while he denies that he actually owns a gun, how safe should you feel?”
Or the president justifying war as it got under way: “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.”
For more than six months, Bush and his top deputies told Americans that Iraq posed a grave, immediate and imminent threat. Delay risked horrors like WMD terrorist handoffs or mushroom clouds billowing over American cities.
I'm sure the folks in this administration are seeing that historical parallel as uncomfortably obvious so they're trying to spin the whole thing this way. LBJ did a lot of bad things but I don't remember him trying to wriggle off from starting the Vietnam War. I don't remember reading about him ever trying to do that. Perhaps he did. I wasn't old enough then (I was born in 1967) to tell you unfortunately. But I don't recall anything like that. Do you?
However, as much as W and the boys try, Americans know they lied to us about Saddam being an imminent threat. You'd have to be a damn fool to think otherwise. I told you last year numerous times -- before the war took place.
As Josh so succinctly puts it:
Just as they can’t undo what they did, the White House and its supporters can’t undo what they said.Indeed.There’s no use denying it. It was only a year ago. We were there. We remember.
RUNNING SCARED FROM THE RNC
Eric Alterman has an excellent article about the Reagans mini-series flap right here.
I'm snowed again folks. More later today -- maybe.
A BROKERED CONVENTION FOR THE DEMOCRATS?
Kevin Drum links to the post of Gene's article below and asks a rather important question: Is the rule change regarding the proportional awarding of delegates to the Democratic National Convention going to lead to a brokered convention? Are Democrats going to shoot themselves in the foot and be feuding next August about who their candidate should be?
Maybe the most important question to ask is actually this: What idiot thought this rule change was a good idea?
Wednesday, November 5, 2003
NOW THIS IS IMPRESSIVE
TORONTO, Nov. 4 -- A Canadian citizen who was detained last year at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York as a suspected terrorist said Tuesday he was secretly deported to Syria and endured 10 months of torture in a Syrian prison.I'm so disgusted I don't even know where to begin. We might as well be a police state these days, huh?Maher Arar, 33, who was released last month, said at a news conference in Ottawa that he pleaded with U.S. authorities to let him continue on to Canada, where he has lived for 15 years and has a family. But instead, he was flown under U.S. guard to Jordan and handed over to Syria, where he was born. Arar denied any connection to terrorism and said he would fight to clear his name.
U.S. officials said Tuesday that Arar was deported because he had been put on a terrorist watch list after information from "multiple international intelligence agencies" linked him to terrorist groups.
Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the Arar case fits the profile of a covert CIA "extraordinary rendition" -- the practice of turning over low-level, suspected terrorists to foreign intelligence services, some of which are known to torture prisoners.
Arar's case has brought repeated apologies from the Canadian government, which says it is investigating what information the Royal Canadian Mounted Police gave to U.S. authorities. Canada's foreign minister, Bill Graham, also said he would question the Syrian ambassador about Arar's statements about torture. In an interview on CBC Radio, Imad Moustafa, the Syrian chargé d'affaires in Washington, denied that Arar had been tortured.
Arar said U.S. officials apparently based the terrorism accusation on his connection to Abdullah Almalki, another Syrian-born Canadian. Almalki is being detained by Syrian authorities, although no charges against him have been reported. Arar said he knew Almalki only casually before his detention but encountered him at the Syrian prison where both were tortured.
Arar, whose case has become a cause celebre in Canada, demanded a public inquiry. "I am not a terrorist," he said. "I am not a member of al Qaeda. I have never been to Afghanistan."
Read the rest of the article -- if you've got the stomach for it.
LYONS: "TOUT SHEET FOR 2004 DEMOCRATIC RACE"
Here's Gene's column for today!
Gene LyonsUpdate: Holy cow! Gene's column from last week just appeared in my local rag, the Maryville Daily Forum.
November 5, 2003Tout Sheet for 2004 Democratic Race
Serious people dislike horse-race political coverage. Apart from cable-TV spectacles like the Kobe Bryant trial, nothing's more mindless than handicapping presidential campaigns. Alas, high-mindedness tends to be self-defeating in American politics. Besides titillation at hearing words like "panties" on TV, people follow celebrity trials for the same reason they watch ballgames: to see who wins.
George W. Bush can certainly be beaten. A recent ABCNEWS/Washington Post poll shows him leading a generic Democrat just 48-47, within the margin of error. Only 47 percent approve of his handling of Iraq; 51 percent disapprove. Even larger majorities disapprove of Bush's record on the Federal budget, taxes, health care, Social Security, etc. Most Democrats would see his election (I almost wrote "re-election") as a national catastrophe. A Marist poll shows 44 percent of registered voters definitely planning to vote against Bush; only 38 percent definitely supporting him.
But you can't beat somebody with nobody, and right now only party activists are paying attention to the contest for the Democratic nomination. Polls also reveal that many have no idea who's running nor what they stand for. True, this is partly due to the congenital sloth and ignorance of American voters, a taboo subject pundits avoid, both because it insults the customers and diminishes our own self-importance.
But public indifference also results from the perception that the Democratic contest makes for lousy TV. A recent debate on CNN drew a 1.8 share, right down there with "World's Strongest Man" contests and infomercials on The Shaving Channel. With nine candidates, there's no possibility of real debate, and the entire exercise is contaminated by fakery. Every minute spent gravely attending to Dennis Kucinich or Carol Mosely-Braun is a minute better spent channel surfing for a beer ad with cute babes.
Nationally, only four among the Democrats poll in double figures: Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman. Dean leads with a paltry 17 percent. But the most striking figure in the ABCNEWS/Washington Post poll is that 76 percent of Democratic voters say they might change their minds; 53 percent say they probably will.
Of course the race isn't being held nationally, or even state by state in the ordinary sense. What hasn't yet sunk in among journalists covering the race is the likely impact of the amazingly complicated rule changes the party has imposed on itself for 2004 in the interest of "fairness." Massive confusion appears likelier. There are no winner-take-all primaries. Instead, delegates will be awarded proportionally to all candidates receiving more than 15 percent of the vote in each congressional district, from sea to shining sea.
To be nominated, a candidate must win a majority (2160) of delegates to the June convention. Given that there are 796 party-appointed "superdelegates," to lock up the nomination before the Boston convention, somebody has to win 61 percent of the elected delegates in a nine candidate field over two short months between February and early April 2004. Given strong regional differences and favorite son candidates, the odds of a deadlocked and/or brokered convention appear extremely high.
Would that make for good TV? Maybe. Or it could degenerate into farce, perpetuating the notion that Democrats are too ineffectual to govern. Anyhow, in the interest of generating a little buzz, I asked e-mail pals across the country whose opinions I respect to give me simulated pari-mutuel odds on the Democratic race as if it were being held at Churchill Downs. Then I ran them through a kitchen blender and came up with a tout sheet:
Here's how it looks:
*Howard Dean: 4-1. Early speed in Iowa, neighboring New Hampshire. Fades in South Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri on Feb. 3, Virginia & Tennessee on Feb 9. Anybody-but-Dean sentiment rises in backstretch.
*Dick Gephardt: 6-1. Strong in Iowa, wins native Missouri, union-dominated Michigan on Feb. 7, but could be out of the money before Super Tuesday, March 2.
*Wesley Clark: 5-1. Must finish third behind New Englanders in N.H., win in S.C., Virginia, Tennessee. Needs to act more like general, less like henpecked sitcom Dad.
*John Kerry: 12-1. Must do better than expected in Iowa and N.H., or pressure will build for him to pull up by mid-March.
*John Edwards: 30-1. Dynamite in the paddock, weak on the track. Must defeat Clark in early Southern contests to remain viable.
*Joe Lieberman: 50-1. Unpopular with Dem bettors due to no show in 2004 Cheney debate, softness during Florida debacle.
*Al Sharpton, Carol Mosely Braun, Dennis Kucinich: 1000-1. Clear the track for the real horses, you fools.
*Hillary Clinton: 100-1. A sucker bet. Dream on, Karl Rove. She ain't running.
*Al Gore: 10-1. The Washington press would hate it, but Honest Al could plod home a winner in the event of a nine horse pileup on the clubhouse turn.
I can't believe it!
LINKS AND SARCASM
Boy, W sure is doing well these days, eh? Now more Americans want to vote against him as vote for him. That can't be good.
I know that if the economy rebounds, all of this won't matter. W could grow horns and a sharp pointy tail (hasn't he already?) and we'll still get four more years of him. However, the unemployment numbers is still looking quite bad. Unemployment is up 125% for October. That's not good for W -- or the rest of us.
BTW, The Daily Show is crushing Faux and other cable networks in its timeslot -- at least in the all important 18-49 demographic. Of course, Daily Show viewers get a much more realistic picture of the present from Jon Stewart than from Fox anyway.
After much soul-searching, I have added a PayPal donation button (below the blogroll). If you enjoy what you read here and can afford to send a buck or two my way, I'd greatly appreciate it. If not, don't sweat it, just enjoy the commentary!
Oh yeah, and Donald Luskin, predictably, has backed down on suing Atrios. He's also deeply damaged his reputation in the blogosphere.
Another busy day today folks. I have an exam to give, an entire set of papers to finish, I'm still working on my tenure and promotion portfolio, etc.
I'll stop boring you with the details -- and get to work.
Tuesday, November 4, 2003
LAZY REPORTING AND LINDA TRIPP
Eric Alterman gives us the lowdown about Linda Tripp's latest lawsuit. She essentially bullied the Pentagon into handing her $600,000 when she's the one who lied about her arrest record.
I guess it pays to have W in the White House and to have some of the best right-wing lawyers in the business. W and the boys just wanted her to go away apparently.
Don't we all?
BUSY
I'm snowed folks and, as my wife pointed out to me this morning, I'm spending way too much time blogging with as much as I've got on my plate. I can't believe I posted six times yesterday considering all that I had to do. That was pretty insane of me.
How much do I have to do? Well, let's see, I have some course prep to do for tonight's class, a set of papers to grade, a tenure and promotion application to finish, and tons of other smaller jobs. As my wife tells me, I really do have a life outside the blogosphere and that life is calling me at the moment.
I'll continue to blog folks -- I'm not hanging it up or anything -- but posting may be lighter for a while.
Monday, November 3, 2003
IT'S NOW OFFICIAL
Not only does this administration lie -- they now doctor transcripts and lie about just what it is the president has said in major addresses.
Folks, it's now official. This administration has now gone beyond Richard Nixon -- they're now charting virgin territory in dishonesty.
Holy cow.
When are the American people going to wake up, folks?
DONE FOR THE DAY
Believe it or not, I'm just now done grading for the day. I went to the pool for my swim and then home for dinner and my birthday cake -- and then I came back to the office for two and half more hours.
Sigh (again).
MORE ON INSTY
Jesse at Pandagon (added to the blogroll a couple of days ago) has more on Insty's unwillingness to confront the problems in Iraq:
It's a "tough week" in Iraq. And that's about it. You see, he likes to focus much more on longer-term issues, such as Maureen Dowd columns, 57-year-old pieces on pre-Marshall Plan Europe, and heartwarming stories of supporting the troops. Because Lord knows an ongoing terrorist insurgency in a country against American troops won't have any long-term importance until, you know, it goes on for a long time.As I've said already, I think Insty's having a major league case of denial.
I suspect he's just like most of the enthusiastic warmongers in the blogosphere who supported this war. You remember them, don't you? I'm sure Insty's just like all of those righty readers I used to have back in March and April who used to post to the comment boards and send me e-mail.
You remember them, don't you? They were so confident and sure of themselves back then.
Strangely enough, these are the same guys who quietly ran away with their tail between their legs back in April and May as it became obvious I was exactly right about this horrific mess in Iraq.
Surely you remember them, don't you?
For some reason, I never hear from them anymore. I wonder why?
It was so long ago, wasn't it?
I'm sure it seems like it to them.
IS W FLUNKING THE DOVER TEST?
Atrios points us to this excellent Mark Shields column.
At Harvard on January 19, 2000, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton provided a valuable standard, both to determine whether the United States ought to send the nation's warriors into combat and to enlist "the support of the American people as well as the Congress" needed to sustain that involvement. In Shelton's judgment, such a grave decision:Indeed."(M)ust be subjected to what I call the 'Dover test.' Is the American public prepared for the sight of our most precious resource coming home in flag-draped caskets into Dover Air Force Base in Delaware -- which is a point entry for our Armed Forces?
This is an issue, I think, that should be raised early on. It should be discussed, and it should be decided by our political leadership before any operation begins."
In the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration chose instead to duck Shelton's "Dover test." The scene so familiar to older Americans -- of the military honor guard in white gloves, respectfully accompanying from the aircraft to the waiting loved ones the remains of the fallen warrior in the coffin covered by Old Glory, often with a military band offering an appropriately solemn piece -- was simply banned. George W. Bush's war against Iraq could not flunk the Dover test because there would be no Dover test.
...
Where is the outrage on the part of the press? Are we lapdogs? The administration in full spin control insists that the reality on the ground in Iraq is much more positive than the press reports. Yet the administration denies reality at home -- the reality of the recent heroism of this nation's fallen sons and daughters.
By official government policy,. there is no band to welcome them home. No honor guard to present the folded flag to their widow and orphan, to make certain the family knows that their loss is also their country's loss, that they do not weep alone. It is a cruel and ugly policy that robs the patriot of the glory and public honor he has earned and deserves.
The time is long past in 2003 to take the Dover test.
CONGRATS KOS!
Congrats on the birth of Aristotle Alberto, Kos!
I'm still plugging away at the grading folks.
"I DON'T BLOG MUCH ON DAY-TO-DAY EVENTS THERE"
You know, the more I think about it, Glenn's rather lame response to the Chinook shootdown is pretty annoying. Of course he blogs day-to-day events there when those events suit his purposes. He just ignores them when they don't. The Chinook shootdown is just the latest in a long line of examples I'm sure.
I mean, heck folks, on October 19th he blogged about how Iraq's Burger King is already in the top 10 in sales worldwide! That sounds pretty "day-to-day" to me. (Thanks to Anonymous Blogger in comments to the original post for the tip.)
It's just yet another example of how Glenn's blogging is awfully selective. You can run a search of his blog and find numerous other examples of "day-to-day" events in Iraq that he has blogged about.
It's a busy (birth)day for me folks. I won't be enjoying it much. I have plenty of papers to grade.
Sigh.
Sunday, November 2, 2003
THE LOCHNER BATTLE CONTINUES IN THE BLOGOSPHERE
The Lochner battle continues in the blogosphere. Here is a sampling of excellent lefty commentary on the lunacy of the Lochner decision:
Nathan Newman has an excellent post about the appalling inconsistency of the Lochner court here.
Allen Brill responds to Bernstein's defense of Janice Brown (the aforementioned rightwing loon) here.
Ralph Luker responds here (scroll down to "Law and Gospel").
While that's not a direct response to you David, it's the closest I can come at the present.
I CAN'T HELP IT
It's time for a change of pace. How 'bout those Cowboys?
It's wonderful for my Cowboys to beat Steve Spurrier's Redskins to go to 6-2. I'm still trying to figure out how the Cowboys lost to Atlanta the first week.
I think Bill Parcells was a good hire.
AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON, MR. WOLFOWITZ
Q: Hi, Mr. Wolfowitz. My name is Ruthy Coffman. I think I speak for many of us here when I say that your policies are deplorable. They're responsible for the deaths of innocents and the disintegration of American civil liberties. [Applause]Astonishing. Nothing impresses me more than impugning the patriotism of people who have just raised a legitimate criticism of your policy, eh? How creepy!We are tired, Secretary Wolfowitz, of being feared and hated by the world. We are tired of watching Americans and Iraqis die, and international institutions cry out in anger against us. We are simply tired of your policies. We hate them, and we will never stop opposing them. We will never tire or falter in our search for justice. And in the name of this ideal and the ideal of freedom, we assembled a message for you that was taken away from us and that message says that the killing of innocents is not the solution, but rather the problem. Thank you. [Applause and jeers]
Wolfowitz: I have to infer from that that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power. [Applause]
***snip***
Q: I'd just like to say that people like Ruthy and myself have always opposed Saddam Hussein, especially when Saddam Hussein was being funded by the United States throughout the '80s. And -- [Applause] And after the killings of the Kurds when the United States increased aid to Iraq. We were there opposing him as well. People like us were there. We are for democracy. And I have a question.
What do you plan to do when Bush is defeated in 2004 and you will no longer have the power to push forward the project for New American Century's policy of American military and economic dominance over the people of the world? [Applause]
Wolfowitz: I don't know if it was just Freudian or you intended to say it that way, but you said you opposed Saddam Hussein especially when the United States supported him.
It seems to me that the north star of your comment is that you dislike this country and its policies. [Applause]
And it seems to me a time to have supported the United States and to push the United States harder was in 1991 when Saddam Hussein was slaughtering those innocents so viciously.
BTW, you'll note that the administration of Bush I stood idly by in 1991 while Saddam was slaughtering those innocents in southern Iraq. Therefore, supporting the U.S. policy in 1991 wouldn't have changed anything.
Not that I think we should've invaded Iraq in 1991. I'm just pointing it out.
[Link via Skeptical Notion]
INSTY'S SELECTIVE OUTRAGE
Hesiod notes that Glenn still hasn't posted anything about the Chinook shootdown. You'd think Glenn would want to keep us updated on our -- to use W's words -- marvelous "progress" in Iraq.
He still hasn't as of 1:43 CST.
However, this morning Glenn has already linked to a lame critique of Maureen Dowd's column.
That's certainly of equal importance with the unraveling mess in Iraq, right?
How long will it take him to mention it? Anyone want to start a pool? Use the comment board if you want.
Sometimes I'm downright offended that his blog is viewed by many as representative of the blogosphere.
Update: Nothing about it yet as of 3:08 p.m. CST
Update 2: Nothing about it as of 3:32 p.m. CST. In other Insty-related news, you should read this post by Atrios.
Glenn tries to pretend the press got it wrong in the 1940s regarding the occupation of Germany. As usual, Glenn is misleading his readers. The major difference between then and now is that Truman's folks back then weren't committed ideologues who would NEVER admit they were wrong.
Unlike Wolfowitz who, when faced with criticism just impugns the patriotism of administration critics, Truman's policymakers took their critics seriously and actually changed the policy in response.
Would that we could expect such an approach from W and the boys, huh?
Update 3: Nothing as of 5:02 p.m. CST. How long will it take for Glenn to face up to the horrific reality of the mess W and the boys have made of Iraq? Or how long will it take for Glenn, at least, to acknowledge this rather major potentially turning point event?
But Glenn's just MIA today, isn't he?
Update 4: As of 7:12 p.m. CST, nothing. Glenn keeps adding updates to the lame post about Maureen Dowd's column though.
Why nothing about the Chinook shootdown from the "New York Times of bloggers," huh Glenn?
What's your excuse, Glenn?
Update 5: This is probably as close as we'll get to a response from Glenn.
Yeah, I know. It's lame. What did you expect?
Technically he didn't address the shootdown so I guess it doesn't really count. Since I suspect Glenn is living in the warmonger, er, warblogger dream world (meaning he's in denial about this fool's errand of a war), I suspect he never will mention it.
Impressive, eh?
RIGHT WING POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
“The Reagans” was always meant to be a warts-and-all portrait of an American icon, with ample attention to the president’s hands-off approach to governing, his wife’s behind-the-scenes power plays and their estrangement from their children. Still, CBS thought the movie was, so to speak, fair and balanced. It credits Reagan with defeating the Soviet Union, and its central theme is the First Couple’s love affair. The script was vetted by two teams of lawyers, and producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, who would not be interviewed by NEWSWEEK, have insisted that every fact (though not every line of dialogue) is supported by at least two sources. Before a New York Times story last month detailed conservatives’ complaints, network executives reportedly loved the movie. “They all thought it was brilliant,” says someone who worked on the film.I don't know what's worse -- the fact that conservatives don't realize they're being astonishingly hypocritical about political correctness or that CBS apparently has no problem editing out scenes from a historical drama that actually took place.But the day the Times’s story broke—”The Reagans” crew calls it “Black Tuesday”—the movie instantly became trouble. CBS chairman Leslie Moonves, who approved both the script and a juicy eight-minute trailer, ordered the lawyers to look at the movie again, and asked for assurances that the facts were all in order. When he was told everything was fine, Moonves started editing anyway. “There are things we think go too far,” he told CNBC’s Tina Brown last week. (Moonves also declined to be interviewed by NEWSWEEK.) At that point, Ackerman removed himself from the editing in protest and the actors stopped talking. “Nobody seems to know what’s going on,” Ackerman told NEWSWEEK. “Whatever is going on is going on very secretly.”
It's like conservatives don't even believe in the right to freedom of expression these days, isn't it?
Yet another nail in the coffin of the long dead myth of the "liberal media," eh?
DAMN
The horrific reality that is Iraq once again rears its ugly head.
No matter how much ridiculous spinning the administration does (The schools! The schools!), reality has a nasty habit of biting you in the butt, doesn't it?
It's all quite tragic -- and exactly why I was opposed to this war in the first place.
Saturday, November 1, 2003
ART SILBER HAS JOINED...
HNN's Liberty & Power group blog.
Cool.
Welcome on board here at HNN, Art.
I wonder if Art got them to start using permalinks? I wanted to link to something a few days ago but didn't because they weren't using permalinks. I was going to respond to Beito's berating of me for calling Janice Brown a loon.
I was just going to say that, in my opinion, anyone who still defends the indefensible Lochner decision is a loon. That decision was a prime example of laissez faire judicial hypocrisy. It's hard to take seriously such a hypocritical use of the big, bad federal government by supposed small government advocates.
Anyway, I just gave up responding when I saw they didn't have permalinks. However, they do now.
CONSERVATIVES MAKING IT UP, PART II
If you ever wondered about the journalistic integrity of conservative columnists these days, here's your answer. Ann Coulter wannabe (isn't that pathetic?) Kathleen Parker just changed a "quote" in her column for today because it was a bit over the top.
Parker changed it from this:
Miller is not alone, though some are more sanguine when it comes to evaluating the roster of contenders. Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot.to this:
Miller is not alone, though some are more sanguine when it comes to evaluating the roster of contenders. Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and slapped."Wait. Wait. Hold on a minute. As a "journalist" you're not supposed to change a "quote," are you?
Well I guess you can change a quote if you just made it up. My guess is she felt free to change it because, as several of the commenters to Atrios's post on this have noted, she probably made the whole thing up in the first place. The "former Delta Force member" thing does make the whole quote pretty suspicious.
And these are the folks who have the gall to insist that the mainstream media is corrupt. Isn't it funny when the folks who live in glass houses throw stones?
This whole episode demonstrates just how corrupt the conservative media is these days. These folks apparently consider doctoring quotes and lowering the level of discourse to appalling levels in order to attack the president's critics just a part of their job description.
It's all about carrying water for the administration these days, isn't it Ms. Parker?
If the hacks in the conservative punditocracy had any shame, this would be profoundly embarrassing to them.
WHEN IN DOUBT, MAKE IT UP
Though the Bush administration has for months claimed that foreign fighters were entering Iraq to kill Americans, U.S. military commanders who are responsible for monitoring the borders here say that they have not witnessed a large infiltration of foreign terrorists.My goodness. It's gotten so bad that this administration is now making claims for CYA purposes without any evidence to support them.As recently as Tuesday, President Bush said that "the foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits."
But officers whose areas of operations include Iraq's borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran -- the primary Arab entry points into Iraq -- all said there is no evidence that a significant number of foreign terrorists have entered the country.
"We cover the border, so we would know if they came in or not," said Lt. Col. Antonio Aguto, executive officer of the U.S. Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which monitors Iraq's border with Syria and Saudi Arabia. "Most of them are locals."
The officers said that very few foreigners have been captured while crossing into Iraq illegally, arrested later inside Iraq or detained when trying to enter the country at existing border checkpoints.
One intelligence officer said emphatically that there was simply no evidence to support the claim.
"We keep hearing that, but we haven't seen anything to back it up," the officer said.
Well, come to think of it, that's what this administration has done regarding Iraq for two years now. I guess it's not that much of a change after all.
On a related note, if you're wanting a comprehensive analysis of the mistakes by this administration that resulted in the horrific mess that is Iraq today, go here. This piece is by David Rieff and is in the New York Times Magazine.
It's a long and comprehensive analysis and well worth your time.
Friday, October 31, 2003
ONLY THE RNC...
could think that Republicans are owed a "right of review" for historical accuracy of a miniseries on the life of the Reagans.
No matter how fictionalized parts of it are, I suspect it's much more accurate on the whole than that 9/11 fantasy docudrama that was on Showtime a while back.
Oh yeah, new GYWO as well.
[Both links via Atrios]
Update: Here's my last blog post about the Showtime docudrama. "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis" aired in September.
Here's just a bit of the review of it from the WaPo (click through for the link):
Simultaneously dull and disgraceful, "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," a new Showtime movie, uses the tragic attack on America in 2001 as the basis for a reelection campaign movie on behalf of George W. Bush.Strangely enough, the RNC didn't say a thing about "historical accuracy" when this propagandistic love letter to W was released. I wonder why?The film is an insult to those who perished in the attacks and, really, an insult to America generally, but it's so insanely boring that people aren't likely to become very outraged over it. Written by conservative Republican Lionel Chetwynd, who admits to a bias in Bush's favor, the film -- premiering on Showtime tomorrow night at 8 -- is primitive propaganda that portrays Bush as the noblest hero since Mighty Mouse.
BUSH'S FEMA HELD DAVIS'S APPLICATION FOR AID FOR MONTHS (WHILE IT WORKED TO DEFEAT DAVIS) AND THEN REJECTED CALIFORNIA'S REQUEST ONLY HOURS BEFORE THE FOREST FIRES STARTED
Holy cow.
The Bush administration took six months to evaluate Gov. Gray Davis' emergency request last spring for $430 million to clear dead trees from fire-prone areas of Southern California.Can you imagine what we'd be hearing if Clinton's administration had done this? I know we certainly wouldn't be hearing anything like this:The request was finally denied Oct. 24, only hours before wildfires roared out of control in what has become the largest fire disaster in California history.
Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs), a leader in the effort to get federal assistance for fire prevention, questioned Thursday why the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not rule sooner.
"FEMA's decision was wrong," Bono said. "The timing couldn't have been worse.... We knew this disaster was going to happen with certainty. It was only a matter of when, and we were trying to beat the clock with removing the dead trees."
"It's almost classic government," Lewis said in an interview outside the House chamber. "When you get below the third level in a bureaucracy, they don't believe it's going to happen until they see a fire rolling.... It's not a Democratic or Republican problem. It's a government problem."Right. Sure. You bet.
I hope Bush isn't thinking he's got a shot in California next year.
He just lost it.
GETTING WARMER
I think Josh is getting warmer on who forged the Niger documents. Sounds like it was the Italian intelligence service to me -- working at the behest of Bush's erstwhile ally Silvio Berlusconi:
The US and UK start a major roll-out on the nuclear claims. But the response is generally disappointing. There’s major push-back from the IAEA and, secretly in the US, from the CIA.BTW, the magazine in question is owned by Berlusconi. The White House needed evidence and -- voila! -- Berlusconi provided it for them.It was precisely at this moment (in the last days of September and the first of October) that the advocates of the Niger story were most in need of some new evidence. And it was precisely at this moment when the new evidence --- at first seemingly incontrovertible --- popped up in Rome.
And the day after the reporter gets the docs the Editor-in-Chief of her magazine instructs her to take them to the American Embassy.
And remember too that it wasn’t publicly known at the time that Niger was the country in question.
Is it possible that the White House knew it was fraudulent? Did they request some cooked evidence from Berlusconi?
I don't know of course. I'm just asking what I think are reasonable questions.
You know, the kind of stuff the press stopped doing a couple of years ago.
QUITE A TRICK
Paul Krugman tells us that yesterday's GDP growth could be a turning point for the economy -- or not. However, he notes, the growth comes almost entirely from consumer debt. I'm not sure that's so good.
If the growth continues, does it vindicate Bush's policies? Here's Krugman's answer:
To put it more bluntly: it would be quite a trick to run the biggest budget deficit in the history of the planet, and still end a presidential term with fewer jobs than when you started. And despite yesterday's good news, that's a trick President Bush still seems likely to pull off.Indeed.
Thursday, October 30, 2003
CORRUPT CRONY CAPITALISM...
is apparently alive and well in the Bush administration.
This story is quite eye-opening. Admittedly, we all knew the fix was in regarding the no bid Iraq contracts but this just confirms that it may be even worse than we thought it was, doesn't it?
The untold billions of our tax dollars flowing to Cheney's Halliburton 24-7 is getting increasingly creepy, isn't it?
You'd think that such an obvious example of corruption on the part of the president and vice president would elicit widespread outrage among Americans, wouldn't you?
I guess not. I'm trying to decide if it's simply because we're so cynical these days we expect it or if Americans just don't care that their government is bought and paid for by millions of dollars in campaign donations.
Personally, I think it's one helluva sorry comment on our political system, our media, and the morals of the electorate that this sort of thing is even tolerated.
YALE LAW PROFESSOR JACK BALKIN ON...
Of course, Luskin could sue Atrios for Atrios's own comments, for example, that Atrios suggested that Luskin was a stalker. But read in context, Atrios' post is (a) not an allegation of actual criminal behavior, and (b) is a protected statement of satire and opinion. He is making fun of Luskin's own comparison of himself as someone who stalks Paul Krugman. Luskin's argument that Atrios has libeled him shouldn't survive a motion for summary judgment. Of course, the real problem is that getting to that point will cost Atrios money to defend himself.I wonder if Luskin's going to have any shred of a reputation left when he's done making a fool of himself. It's apparent that he's certainly lost the respect of about every blogger on the planet now.Luskin should be ashamed of himself for having any part in sending this letter. It's a disservice to the blogging community, and inconsistent with respect for freedom of expression.
What's most upsetting is that he is employing a frivolous lawsuit in order to punish someone for exercising their First Amendment rights and that he is piggybacking an abusive subpoena to expose Atrios' identity. So he's not only engaged in frivolous litigation (aren't conservatives against frivolous lawsuits?), but also an abuse of the discovery process (aren't conservatives opposed to the dirty tricks of trial lawyers?). I guess Luskin is only opposed to frivolous lawsuits by other people, and dirty tricks by lawyers who are not representing him.
That's a protected statement of opinion too, by the way.
I just added Balkin's blog to the blogroll too by the way.
GONNA PARTY LIKE IT'S 1984
If this continues, George W. Bush will be re-elected.
As I've said before, this administration is following Reagan's 1984 strategy. They've been waiting for the economy to cyclically rebound (independently of their economic policies) and plan to use that as the launchpad for re-election.
That strategy, if this recovery holds up, has apparently paid off.
THE INVESTIGATION CONTINUES
Apparently, the career folks at the FBI are quite serious about the investigation of the Wilson-Plame scandal. The fact the career folks have apparently asked Ashcroft to appoint a special prosecutor or recuse himself sounds like they've found something to me.
The White House wants this to end soon. However, it doesn't sound like it's going to be wrapped up any time soon. As Mark Kleiman puts it:
But I'm not so sure that keeping it in-house will turn out to be any better. The FBI and the Criminal Division have a great deal of face to lose by coming up dry. And if they don't come up dry -- if they identify the sources of the information -- then a failure to prosecute is almost unthinkable. I'm betting that this does "go on into the election year," and that it will be in the news "forever," if "forever" is defined as "through Election Day."Stay tuned folks. This could still get pretty interesting.The story quotes Charles Schumer as saying that several of his Republican colleagues told him privately that he was right to be pushing for a special counsel. If true, that's not good news for Bush.
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
WHO IS LUSKIN'S LAWYER?
Well, Luskin's law firm is apparently Hanify & King in Boston. And the guy who signed the threatening letter is on their staff, Jeffery J. Upton. His picture and bio make it clear that he's on the low end of the totem pole there. I suspect none of the folks higher up in the firm wanted anything to do with this.
Isn't it astonishing that Republicans who so frequently decry frivolous lawsuits are usually the first to threaten such lawsuits?
With the sort of beating Luskin is taking on the internet today from folks on both sides of the political spectrum, I'd expect him to back off soon on this.
And, if he doesn't, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if NRO drops him -- and soon.
After all, this is pretty embarrassing for them as well.
Update: When I put this post up, I thought I'd found something new. I didn't realize at the time that Kos had put this information up a few hours earlier. Oh well.
BTW, if you want to learn more about Don Luskin, go read his resume here. Despite all my years of higher education, in no way do I think someone has to go to college to be accomplished and be somebody (Luskin went to Yale for one year and that's it for his higher education). Of course, there is something amusing about someone calling their resume a curriculum vitae when all it's got on it involving any sort of curriculum is a vague reference to making it through a freshman year at Yale.
However, I can't help but mention that his resume certainly indicates that Luskin sure does change jobs a lot -- every couple of years as a matter of fact. I can't help but wonder if he's one of those folks f that lucky class who doesn't really need to work. I mean, heck, he got into George W's alma mater of Yale and about half of the folks who get into Ivy League schools these days get in because of their familial connections. I've met quite a few folks like this in my life.
Furthermore, as someone who often studies folks of this social class in his historical work, I can't help but wonder if Luskin's a member of the same privileged social class as W. He's started a couple of businesses just in the last five years. After the failure of a business, most of us wouldn't have the resources to just start one up right away. That's something folks with independent wealth -- or wealthy backers -- can do. That's the sort of thing W did in the 1980s while Poppy was vice president.
Honestly, it's really none of my business but, since this information is readily available, I couldn't help but say a little about it. I've seen this sort of work history many times in my own research after all.
But this is just idle speculation. I'll stop it now.
KRUGMAN'S INTERNET STALKER GOES OFF THE LEGAL DEEP END
To learn more about this go here, here, and here.
Holy cow. What a nimrod!
Surely he's embarrassed about this by now, right?
IS W GOING TO CUT AND RUN IN IRAQ?
Atrios and Kevin ask this interesting question today.
Surely not, right?
After all, we claimed we were going to improve life for the average Iraqi.
We certainly haven't done that yet.
Also, if we really cut and run, what's to stop Saddam from returning to power?
WHY DOES W LIE ABOUT SUCH INNOCUOUS THINGS...
as who was responsible for the "Mission Accomplished" banner displayed during his embarrassing publicity stunt on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln?
CalPundit wonders aloud about this and so does Josh Marshall.
Folks I think the answer is simple. This president's ego is so large that he won't even admit that it was an obvious mistake back in April to claim that "all of the hard stuff in Iraq is over."
I mean, heck folks, that's the same reason these guys went through the White House website and changed "combat operations" to "major combat operations" a couple of months ago.
These guys can never want to admit they've been wrong -- and, astonishingly enough, they've been wrong about damn-near everything the last three years: the economy, the deficit, the war in Iraq, the threat posed by terrorists hijacking airplanes in 2001, etc.
We're now seeing nearly daily occurrences of the arrogant folks who make up the White House's "alternate reality political spin machine" bumping into the rather rude realities of the universe the rest of us live in.
It's getting a bit surreal, isn't it?
LYONS: "THE DOCTOR IS IN"
Here's Gene's column for the week!
Gene LyonsHere we go again folks. The all-knowing cool kid Heathers of the Washington press corps are going to attempt to give Wesley Clark the Al Gore treatment.
October 29, 2003The Doctor is In; Pundits Psychoanalyze Clark
Last month, this column predicted that the GOP response to Gen. Wesley Clark's presidential candidacy would be to turn him into the Democratic equivalent of Gen. Jack D. Ripper, the megalomaniacal crackpot in the classic film "Dr. Strangelove." Portraying Clark as mad with ambition appeared to be the only way to deal with his otherwise perfect political resume--first in his class at West Point, Rhodes Scholar, a Purple Heart and Silver Star for valor in Vietnam, NATO Supreme Commander, all that.
Besides, the outlines of the strategy were already visible. It clearly behooves Republicans to take him out now. Clark as the Democratic nominee would make Bush's re-election unlikely. Early profiles by members of what ABCNews.com's The Note calls "The Gang of 500" bristled with anonymous quotes from Pentagon detractors depicting Clark as, in Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's words, "too weird for prime time." Note the TV metaphor. Cohen wondered if "the personal qualities that bothered his [nameless] critics would be intolerable in a president. We like our presidents as we like our morning TV hosts--comfy."
"In an institution filled with ambitious men," wrote Post reporter Lois Romano more recently, "some viewed Clark as over the top, someone who would do or say anything to get ahead-and get his way." Now to a rational mind, accusing a West Point valedictorian, four-star general and presidential candidate of ambition is about as newsworthy as charging a golden retriever with an unseemly zeal for chasing tennis balls.
If the phrase "would do or say anything" sounds familiar, that's because it comes directly out of the GOP playbook. The last Democrat depicted as crazed with ambition was Al Gore, who never figured out how to counter a barrage of false accusations, such as the absurd canard that he claimed he'd "invented the internet," ceaselessly reiterated by Washington pundits taking dictation from the Republican National Committee.
Although unconscious, there's a subtly royalist overtone to such comments. George W. Bush, see, doesn't have to be a striver. No valedictorian he, Bush knows how to play the role of relaxed TV host/president precisely because as a humble, everyday American aristocrat he was born to it. Hence his accomplishments in life needn't make you, the humble voter or journalism major, feel inferior.
The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, albeit a fine reporter not beloved by the Bush White House, once gave a revealing explanation of the press's visceral antipathy to Gore on CNN's "Reliable Sources." Gore, Milbank said, "has been disliked all along and it was because he gives a sense that he's better than us as reporters. Whereas President Bush probably is sure that he's better than us--he's probably right, but he does not convey that sense. He does not seem to be dripping with contempt when he looks at us, and I think that has something to do with the coverage."
With Bush currently scolding the press for reporting the ongoing catastrophe in Iraq, Milbank may wish to revise his comments. Nevertheless, the importance of sheer, unadulterated envy in the media's eager acceptance of the whisper campaign against Clark almost can't be overstated. Romano's Washington Post profile depicted his response to anonymous detractors as downright pathological.
"In interviews," she wrote, Clark "displayed the outward calm of a man who cannot bear to convey doubt or failure." [my italics] Actually, he sounded more exasperated to me. "How do you think I could have succeeded in the military if every-body didn't like me? It's impossible," he said. "Do you realize I was the first person promoted to full colonel in my entire year group of 2,000 officers? I was the only one selected. Do you realize that?...Do you realize I was the only one of my West Point class picked to command a brigade when I was picked?...I was the first person picked for brigadier general. You have to balance this out...A lot of people love me."
Now I doubt that Clark volunteered that some people love him without first being told others hate him. (The ellipses are Romano's.) Nevertheless, the doctor was definitely IN at the Washington Post, not to mention at The New Republic, the allegedly "liberal" magazine where one Adam Kushner opined that Clark's response to anonymous slurs made him appear "self-assured to the point of delusion."
Delusion, mind you, a psychiatric term denoting dogged belief in false ideas. Unless Clark made up the facts, it's a callow, ugly smear. The problem is that nobody but Clark himself can deal with it, and preferably on national TV. During a recent Democratic debate, he referred to a rival general's unspecified slurs on his "character and integrity" as sheer "McCarthyism." But he may need to confront symbolism with symbolism and go all Ollie North on them, treating the whispers as an insult to his patriotism, and standing in front of a flag.
Isn't it infuriating that there really are idiots out there who really believe all that claptrap about the "liberal media?"
WILSON-PLAME SCANDAL LOSING STEAM
Here's the latest from David Corn on the Wilson-Plame scandal.
Isn't it amazing that what is easily the worst scandal since Watergate is apparently going to run out of steam because the media won't pursue it?
Liberal media my, er, hind foot.
The most interesting part of this scandal is that several members of the media know exactly who the leakers are because they were called by them.
This scandal is one of those interesting moments when you wonder just what a source would have to do for a member of the media to divulge them. These guys have come awfully close to committing treason. They have also imperiled national security and endangered the lives of scores of people.
Yet the media is still protecting them.
That's interesting, isn't it?
GREAT
“If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You’re dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out.”Ladies and Gentleman, the unending wisdom of former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
EVERYONE PLEASE WELCOME...
A Marine's Girl to the blogroll.
She's got a great blog and, heck, if she can get e-mail back from Anderson Cooper well, I've got to have her on the blogroll!
KANSAS LOOKS TO JOIN MISSOURI...
in instituting a right-to-carry law. John Lott, academic fraud that he is, is interviewed for this article. I'm also happy to say that this reporter interviewed John Donohue, who actually uses the word "fraud" in the article to describe Lott, for the article as well. (Tim Lambert has more about this here).
You'll recall that my home state of Missouri just instituted a law (although its implementation has been delayed by a judge) despite the fact that it failed in a statewide referendum four years ago. Furthermore, the governor's veto was overridden only because of a very suspicious pass given to a lawmaker who was on active duty for the National Guard. The NRA wanted this one and apparently even the Army itself went out of its way to please them.
But I'm sure the only reason I'm opposed to these laws is because I want criminals to kill people, right Clayton?
HESIOD NOTES THAT...
The 9/11 Commission is getting better and more complete cooperation from the Government of Pakistan, than from the Bush administration.Holy cow. That's pretty amazing, isn't it?
Go read the post for the sorry details.
KRUGMAN: "A WILLFUL IGNORANCE"
You know your assignment. Go read it.
Monday, October 27, 2003
FOLLOW-UPS
I just thought I'd point you to a couple of posts by other bloggers on topics I've posted about.
For more on the Bill Rehnquist Republicans in Kentucky, go here. If Josh is looking into it, there's something there folks. He almost singlehandedly destroyed Republican misinformation efforts claiming voter fraud in South Dakota last year.
Also, for more on the White House's attempt to freely revise history on its website, go here.
You've now been updated.
GO READ...
Art Silber. He has a lot of good stuff up today.
More later.
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE
Just read it.
It's folks like General Dempsey that are helping to create the quagmire in Iraq.
W SAYS
Again, I will repeat myself, that the more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They love terror. They love to try to create fear and chaos. And what we're determined in this administration is not to be intimidated by these killers. As a matter of fact, we're even more determined to work with the Iraqi people to create the conditions of freedom and peace, because it's in our national interest we do so. It's in the interest of long-term peace in the world that we work for a free and secure and peaceful Iraq. A free and secure Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will have enormous historical impact.Progress? What the hell progress would that be? And I'm really tired of hearing about the schools. My understanding is very few schools closed for the war anyway. This litany of "progress" presented by W is yet more administration up-is-downism.
Also, whenever you hear the "they hate freedom" stuff you know W and the boys are scraping the bottom of the rhetorical barrel. That's idiotic "good vs. evil" silliness for people who don't want to take time to think about anything. They want some simple half-reasoned excuse for this mess we've gotten ourselves involved in.
Surely even W can come up with something better than that pap, right?
WELCOME TO THE QUAGMIRE
Holy cow. I don't even know what to say.
Contrary to administration spin, I guess things aren't going so well in Iraq.
Sunday, October 26, 2003
HOLY PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY BATMAN!
Atrios points us to this webpage that explains that the White House has prevented all external web searches of its website that include the term "Iraq."
Now why would you want to do that? It wouldn't have anything to do with the fact you don't want folks to be able to do a google search of the White House website that would reveal exactly how the president and White House lied in the run-up to the war, would it?
Holy cow. This is shameless (and very Nixonian).
So now W and the boys are purposefully hiding information from the American people.
How's that for "restoring honor and dignity" to the White House?
FRANK RICH COMMENTS...
on the mess that is Iraq and the Bush administration's disastrous media campaign to convince us all that everything is great in Iraq.
I think Rich gets it just about right:
It's at times like this that we must be grateful that Disney didn't succeed in jettisoning "Nightline" for David Letterman. (The administration is only too happy to send its top brass to Mr. Letterman when it doesn't send them to Oprah — Colin Powell most recently.) If the Oct. 15 "Nightline" wasn't an Edward R. Murrow turning point in the coverage of the war on terrorism, it's the closest we've seen to one since 9/11. There will be others, because this administration doesn't realize that trying to control the news is always a loser. Most of the press was as slow to challenge Joe McCarthy, the Robert McNamara Pentagon and the Nixon administration as it has been to challenge the wartime Bush White House. But in America, at least, history always catches up with those who try to falsify it in real time. That's what L.B.J. and Nixon both learned the hard way.Given today's events, his words have even more weight.
Iraq is a genuine mess folks -- not that you didn't know that and not that I didn't predict it long before the war even took place.
REALITY RUDELY INTRUDED...
upon the dream world that the Bushies live in today.
First, the nuclear threat so frequently claimed by the W and the boys in the run-up to the war has been revealed to be a total fraud:
According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.In short, they lied to us about the aluminum tubes. Of course, I told you all that back in January, right?Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.
Most notably, investigators have judged the aluminum tubes to be "innocuous," according to Australian Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Meekin, who commands the Joint Captured Enemy Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay. That finding is pivotal, because the Bush administration built its case on the proposition that Iraq aimed to use those tubes as centrifuge rotors to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear warhead.
In other dream world news, the administration tries to tell you that things are going well in Iraq, insisting that things are going okay. Well, except for the inconvenient fact that the attacks on U.S. troops are increasing by the day.
How well are things going today in Iraq? Well, not so well. Today, Paul Wolfowitz himself barely escaped a daring attack on U.S. headquarters at the al-Rasheed hotel in Baghdad.
Well, at least you've got to give Wolfowitz credit for having the courage to actually stay in Baghdad. Most VIPs don't have such courage and spend the night in Kuwait for, well, rather obvious reasons now.
Saturday, October 25, 2003
TIRED OF WHITE HOUSE STONEWALLING...
the Republican head of the 9/11 commission, Thomas Kean, is preparing to issue subpoenas to the White House for documents that are still being withheld from the commission.
My goodness. Clinton turned over everything that was ever asked of him and even let Starr's investigators go through Hillary and Chelsea's underwear drawers. This administration won't even turn over documents that could help us to better prevent another 9/11-type attack.
It also is beginning to sound like W knew more than he's been letting on:
Anything that has to do with 9/11, we have to see it — anything. There are a lot of theories about 9/11, and as long as there is any document out there that bears on any of those theories, we're going to leave questions unanswered. And we cannot leave questions unanswered."I ask, for the millionth time since I started this blog, what are they hiding?While Mr. Kean said he was barred by an agreement with the White House from describing the Oval Office documents at issue in any detail — he said the White House was "quite nervous" about any public hint at their contents — other commission officials said they included the detailed daily intelligence reports that were provided to Mr. Bush in the weeks leading up to Sept. 11. The reports are known within the White House as the Presidential Daily Briefing.
Friday, October 24, 2003
REPUBLICANS REPRISE THE ROLE OF JIM CROW IN KENTUCKY
Holy cow. After all the bad pub they have gotten the last year from Trent Lott and Haley Barbour happily cavorting with unreconstructed southern racists, you'd think Republicans in the South would at least pretend they believed in democracy for everyone these days:
Jefferson County Republicans intend to place Election Day challengers at 59 voting precincts in predominantly black neighborhoods, a move that NAACP leaders yesterday called blatant intimidation.Of course, this isn't exactly a new idea. You'll recall that William Rehnquist used to think it was great fun to challenge voters with darker skins whom he thought might vote for the wrong person during his misspent youth in Arizona.The GOP election workers, most of whom live outside the targeted precincts in western and central Louisville, Portland and Newburg, will be on hand to challenge voters who they suspect aren't eligible.
Jefferson County GOP Chairman Jack Richardson IV said the precincts were chosen at random or because the Republican Party has had trouble finding registered voters in those areas to serve as election workers. The challengers, who will receive the same training as precinct workers, could fill in if needed.
Richardson said the precincts weren't chosen because of their racial makeup or voting patterns. Using challengers is a "legal, proper and permissible" way to ensure that voters are bona fide, he said.
I also can't help but be reminded of my current U.S. Senator's unfortunate choice of words on election night in 2000. He lost the governor's race that night to Bob Holden and many Missouri Republicans blamed the loss on the fact that the polls were kept open in St. Louis for a couple of extra hours. (Probably not but that's another story.) The next year, suspiciously, Jim made $100,000 teaching a couple of classes "part-time" at Wash U in St. Louis. I'm sure there was nothing improper in that appointment, huh?
But, anyway, I'll always remember the smile on Talent's face as he gleefully declaring after the polls were ordered closed: "We kept them out of the polls! We've stopped them from voting!"
Nice.
TWO GOOD HISTORY-RELATED POSTS
Sorry I didn't blog much today folks. I worked on my tenure and promotion application for several hours and then I came home and raked leaves.
I slogged through the ghosts of teaching evaluations past this afternoon.
Anyone who has worked on a tenure and promotion portfolio will understand exactly what that means.
NOW THAT'S A PUTDOWN
James Brolin has won numerous Emmys and Golden Globes; he's had three hit series and 30 feature films, including 'Traffic' and 'Antwone Fisher.' Meanwhile, Michael Reagan, who was born into the Lucky Sperm Club, has parlayed that into nothing but being a second-rate radio personality."Ouch.
[Link via Nitpicker]
WHY THE DIFFERENCE?
You're really going to have to explain to me just why Shoshana Johnson isn't getting the exact same benefits as Jessica Lynch. Now, naive me, I happen to think that soldiers who are wounded in a war deserve to get everything because they've sacrificed for their country -- as have all the folks who are toiling away in the hellhole that is Iraq right now -- whether I agreed with the war or not.
I'm sure some warblogger can explain all of this to me however. How about it, Glenn?
Isn't it amazing that W and the boys promised all of these things to the military during the campaign and have yet to deliver on any of them? I mean, hell, this year all they've done is get hundreds of these poor guys killed and commit them to a endless hellish peacekeeping mission in Iraq. Meanwhile they've been cutting their combat pay and screwing veterans of earlier wars out of their benefits. Whenever the press or the public is safely out of view, W and the boys sure do stick it to our soldiers, huh?
Surely the folks in the military are smart enough to wise up to this, right? I mean, heck folks, if this is what W's support looks like, I'd sure as hell hate to see what his enmity looks like.
[Link via Atrios]
ANOTHER LOON NOMINATED TO THE FEDERAL BENCH
Boy, where's does W find these wingnuts?
California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, ran into skeptical questioning Wednesday from Senate Democrats for speeches in which she referred to the New Deal era as "the triumph of our socialist revolution" and disputed whether the Bill of Rights applied to the states.The New Deal was a "socialist revolution." Yeah, right. Give me a break. Sometimes these loons really do go too far.
IN HOOVER'S LEAGUE
Boy, now Krugman really lets W have it today. As usual, in everyone's eyes but those of his internet stalker Donald Luskin, he's got him cold:
Still, Mr. Snow may get lucky, and the job market may pick up. But his prediction was a huge climb-down from administration predictions earlier this year, when the White House insisted that it expected the economy to add more than five million jobs by next November.My goodness. W really does have nearly as bad a record on job creation as Herbert Hoover. If it weren't for his adept stage managers and a very compliant media, W would already be out of the running for next year's election.And even if Mr. Snow's forecast comes true, that won't vindicate the administration's economic policy. In fact, while private analysts are criticizing Mr. Snow for being overly optimistic, I think the stronger criticism is that he's trying to lower the bar: to define as success a performance that, even if it materializes, should really be considered a dismal failure.
Bear in mind that the payroll employment figure right now is down 2.6 million compared with what it was when George W. Bush took office. So Mr. Snow is predicting that his boss will be the first occupant of the White House since Herbert Hoover to end a term with fewer jobs available than when he started. This is what he calls success?
Bear in mind also that just increasing the number of jobs isn't good enough. If we want to improve the dismal prospects of job seekers — currently, 75 percent of those who lose jobs still haven't found new jobs when their unemployment benefits run out — the number of jobs must grow faster than the number of people who want to work. Indeed, because the working-age population of the United States is steadily growing, the economy must add about 130,000 jobs each month just to prevent the labor market from deteriorating.
...
Mr. Bush's employment policies would truly have been a success if he had left the job market no worse than he found it. In fact, even his own Treasury secretary thinks he'll fall five million or so jobs short of that mark.
I know, I know, the usual suspects will roll out the usual explanations. It is, of course, Bill Clinton's fault. (Just for the record, the average rate of job creation during the whole of the Clinton administration was about 225,000 jobs a month. Mr. Clinton presided over the creation of 11 million jobs during each of his two terms.) Or maybe Osama bin Laden did it.
But surely there must be a statute of limitations on these excuses. By the time of the election, Mr. Bush will have had almost four years to deal with the legacy of the technology bubble, and more than three years to deal with the economic fallout from 9/11.
...
Mr. Bush's handlers have often managed to have small achievements hailed as triumphs by persuading people to set the bar very low. Now his officials are trying to convince the public that if, after several years of dismal performance, they can achieve one year of job creation at a rate below the average rate Bill Clinton achieved over eight years, this will constitute a great economic victory.
And, while we're on the topic of the job market and the compliant media, do you remember when the Mighty Wurlitzer was telling us that the job market was improving a couple of weeks ago? The big claim was that jobless claims actually fell for a couple of weeks in a row? Do you remember that?
Nope. Didn't happen. After trumpeting it to all the media outlets (who, being the loyal scribes they are, promptly wrote stories about it), this turned out not to be true at all. The jobless figures actually rose during the two weeks in question once the revised figures came in. But have you seen a story on that?
I'm beginning to get very suspicious of this little shell game the administration is playing with the weekly unemployment figures.
I mean, heck folks, they lie about everything else. What's to stop them from lying about this too?
Thursday, October 23, 2003
HARMONIZING WITH THE MIGHTY WURLITZER
Oh, now here's a shock. The media is misleading Americans about the numbers of killed and wounded in Iraq.
Nothing like a press that is consciously trying to help the administration convince Americans this war isn't a fool's errand.
Of course, you all probably knew that, didn't you?
MORE THAN A WHIFF OF DESPERATION
Tim Lambert takes apart Clayton Cramer's latest defense of John Lott. Cramer has taken to using the fullblown "Bellesiles defense" now. You remember that one, don't you? That's the one where you argue that all of the criticism is just politically motivated.
Man, Clayton Cramer has now become what he supposedly despised, hasn't he?
I'm not even sure calling this "ironic" quite covers it.
Update: In response to Tim linking to the post, Cramer has now moved it off the front page of his blog to his archives.
I'm not exactly surprised.
INSTAHISTORY
Glenn's flunking U.S. history again.
Of course, I should point out that this certainly isn't the first time nor, sadly, will it be the last.
You'd think some sort of basic knowledge of U.S. history and commitment to historical fact would be necessary for a law professor.
I guess not.
LYONS: "BUSH BIZARRO WORLD"
Here's Gene Lyons's column for the week. Since I was out of town yesterday, I didn't get it posted.
Enjoy!
Gene Lyons
October, 22, 2003Bush Bizarro World
Either Rush Limbaugh's housekeeper has been doping my morning coffee, or we are living in Bizarro World. If you don't recall the old DC comics, Bizarro World was created accidentally by the mad scientist Lex Luthor in a futile quest to clone Superman for evil purposes. Bizarro Superman turned out to have most of the Man of Steel's powers, but none of his intelligence.
Greenish in hue and speaking pidgin English like Tarzan or George W. Bush, he showed up at the Daily Planet and began stalking Lois Lane. Needless to say, the real Superman defeated his rival in aerial combat, although Bizarro World adventures became a continuing theme, a distorted mirror image of the caped crusader's preferred reality of "Truth, Justice and the American Way."
So has Lex Luthor cloned the GOP? The State Department's battling the Pentagon over Iraq, the CIA's at war with the White House over who leaked a covert operative's identity, Rush Limbaugh's a junkie, a steroid-enhanced masher's governor of California, a three-star general's making speeches claiming that God appointed George W. Bush to fight a Holy War against Satan's Islamic allies, and what's the big problem worrying conservative pundits?
Why a scourge of irrational "Bush-haters." Columinists at the New York Times and Washington Post have advanced to the Bizzaro World notion that people who think Bush lies a lot are the equivalent of crackpots who wrote best-selling books and peddled videos portraying Bill Clinton as a drug dealer and serial murderer.
But let's forget the serious stuff and have some fun with sex, drugs, and Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, shall we?
Spare me the crocodile tears about poor Rush Limbaugh, OK? Here's a guy who's become a multi-millionaire celebrity by masquerading as Mr. Personal Responsibility and mocking the weaknesses of others. No sooner had Limbaugh been forced to admit he was addicted to prescription pain-killers--Schedule II narcotics, incidentally, like heroin and cocaine--than his own words got thrown in his face.
The answer to harsh prison terms given African-Americans, Limbaugh argued, wasn't mercy. "Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this stuff," he said. "The answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of jail because we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too."
Discussing an NBA player's drug problems on TV, Limbaugh once said that experts be damned, "I don't buy into the disease part of drug abuse. The first time you reach for a substance you are making a choice."
No sooner did Rush get caught in a Federal drug probe, however, than he lapsed into therapy-speak. Suddenly drug addiction wasn't a crime, but a medical problem. Just as compulsive gambling mutated from a moral to a psychological problem after "Book of Virtues" author Bill Bennett needed to have his fingers surgically removed from a slot machine lever. "Defining deviancy down," Republicans used to call it.
To me, the last word on Limbaugh was pronounced by Joe Seehausen, executive director of the Libertarian Party. "America's drug warriors are shameless hypocrites who believe in one standard of justice for ordinary Americans and another for themselves, their families and their political allies."
Regarding Gov.-elect Schwarzenegger, it was funny watching Bizzaro World pundits who'd waxed apoplectic over Bill Clinton's idiotic dalliance with Monica Lewinsky suddenly unable to distinguish between consensual and forced sex. Conservative Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman, however, nailed them:
At best, the evidence indicates that Schwarzenegger has a habit of sexual battery….When Clinton submitted to oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, conservatives thought it was morally repugnant. They also thought it disqualified him from remaining in office…Yet they're happy to have as governor of California someone who, by his own admission, has forced himself on unwilling women. Their new darling is a more aggressive sexual predator than the president they tried to remove from office. Morality? Law? They'll leave it to liberals to fret about such irrelevancies. But if the charges persist and multiply, I predict conservatives will find a way to address Arnold's behavior: They'll blame it on Clinton."
Then there's Gen. Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence. In church speeches, Boykin has shown photos he says depict "demonic presences" over Muslim cities. An adept of the "my-God-is-red-hot, your-god-ain't- diddley-squat" school of fundamentalist theology, he boasted of telling a defeated opponent who'd invoked Allah that "my God was a real God and his was an idol."
Since an alleged "Christian-Jewish crusade" against Islam constitutes Osama bin Laden's single best recruiting slogan, you'd think Boykin would be cashiered. But now he says he didn't mean it. In Bush Bizarro World, that's good enough.
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
BUSY DAY FOR ME
I'm going to be incommunicado for a while -- more than likely for the rest of the day. What I'm doing today I may or may not comment on. I haven't decided.
The normal routine will resume tomorrow.
MORE FROM SEYMOUR HERSH
Here's an interview with Seymour Hersh about his latest article. It's quite interesting. He also recalls another time that the CIA gave in to administration pressure and just wrote it the way they wanted -- not surprisingly it was during the Reagan administration:
One official I talked to reminded me what happened in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when Ronald Reagan was convinced that Cuba was behind everything going on in Central America—that all of the aspiration for freedom in Central America, the unrest there, was the work of Communist outside agitators. The community fought them for a long time, but they eventually gave up, and the analysts began to write it the way they wanted. The fact of the matter is that unless there’s very strong independent leadership on top the analysts will break and fold. In this case, George Tenet simply wasn’t strong enough. He’s a decent man, a kind man, and a perfectly honorable man, but after 9/11 he was in trouble, and the way he held on to his job was by going along and not telling the White House anything they didn’t want to hear.It's a good interview. Go read the rest of it.
RUSH IN "FEMINAZI HELL"
From "psychodynamic role-playing and yoga" to "adventure therapy," "Climbing Wall," "the desert experience" and "equine-assisted therapy" (yes, bonding with horses), Limbaugh may just think he died and went to "feminazi" hell. The website depicts photos of people with a decidedly Berkeley look sitting around on the floor in what seem like consciousness-raising sessions. Picture Rush holding his fellow travelers’ hands and singing Kumbayah. Surely he’ll be reciting a line from the very president he lambasted for years: "I feel your pain." How many on the right would have thought that Bill Clinton would be getting the last chuckle, out there aiding his feminazi wife’s successful political career while their man Rush is wandering the desert reciting New Age mantras?Go read the rest of it. It's hilarious -- and quite interesting.
[Link via Atrios]
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
450K SERVED
Thanks folks. A few hours ago I had my 450,000th visitor to the blog. I'm sure this visitor came via a link from Buzzflash, Hesiod or Mark Kleiman. I've also had nearly 634,000 hits as well since I installed my hitcounter in September of 2002.
As always, thanks for stopping by. I hope to give you good reason to come back.
DEAD AMERICAN SOLDIERS?
What dead American soldiers?
I don't see any dead American soldiers!
What are you talking about?
The whole thing is quite shameful but, given the nature of this administration, not exactly surprising.
And W hasn't gone to a single memorial service since becoming president either.
Impressive.
KRUGMAN: "LISTENING TO MAHATHIR"
Krugman's column this morning is pretty good.
Go read it.
Monday, October 20, 2003
A CASE OF WILLFUL DECEPTION
Did a former CIA agent forge the Niger documents to expose W and the boys as fraudulent manipulators of intelligence?
This and other explosive questions are raised in the latest bombshell Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker.
And Hersh lays a lot of the blame for the mishandling and manipulation of intelligence directly on Condi:
In early October, David Kay, the former U.N. inspector who is the head of the Administration’s Iraq Survey Group, made his interim report to Congress on the status of the search for Iraq’s W.M.D.s. “We have not yet found stocks of weapons,” Kay reported, “but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war.” In the area of nuclear weapons, Kay said, “Despite evidence of Saddam’s continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.” Kay was widely seen as having made the best case possible for President Bush’s prewar claims of an imminent W.M.D. threat. But what he found fell far short of those claims, and the report was regarded as a blow to the Administration. President Bush, however, saw it differently. He told reporters that he felt vindicated by the report, in that it showed that “Saddam Hussein was a threat, a serious danger.”This story exposes this administration's short-circuiting of the intelligence vetting process -- primarily so they could cherry-pick the intelligence information in order to make their fraudulent case for war.The President’s response raises the question of what, if anything, the Administration learned from the failure, so far, to find significant quantities of W.M.D.s in Iraq. Any President depends heavily on his staff for the vetting of intelligence and a reasonable summary and analysis of the world’s day-to-day events. The ultimate authority in the White House for such issues lies with the President’s national-security adviser—in this case,Condoleezza Rice. The former White House official told me, “Maybe the Secretary of Defense and his people are short-circuiting the process, and creating a separate channel to the Vice-President. Still, at the end of the day all the policies have to be hashed out in the interagency process, led by the national-security adviser.” What happened instead, he said, “was a real abdication of responsibility by Condi.”
One of the more eye-opening passages is this one:
By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.So W and Cheney had convinced themselves that Saddam had WMDs and wouldn't listen to anyone who said anything different. As Josh put it earlier this evening, they clearly had deceived themselves:Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. “They’d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,” Greg Thielmann told me. “There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi’s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President.”
A routine settled in: the Pentagon’s defector reports, classified “secret,” would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR analyses of the reports—invariably scathing but also classified—would remain secret.
“It became a personality issue,” a Pentagon consultant said of the Bush Administration’s handling of intelligence. “My fact is better than your fact. The whole thing is a failure of process. Nobody goes to primary sources.” The intelligence community was in full retreat.
At heart this was an issue of people who had something they were just dying to find, just dying to believe in. By cutting themselves off from anybody who was a dissenting voice --- which usually also meant anybody who knew what they were doing --- they managed to isolate themselves with their own credulity and walk their country into a profound embarrassment and a potential disaster.However, I'd argue that, since W and the boys were receiving these reports from the CIA knocking Chalabi's defectors' intelligence, it seems obvious to me that W and Cheney knew they were using questionable intelligence to make their case. That is what makes this whole mess more than simple incompetence. Therefore, this one breaks the plane and becomes a case of willful deception of the public.
Folks, I can't help but think that in another era (or, more plausibly, if the president simply was a member of the other political party) this would have easily been viewed as an impeachable offense.
Do you agree?
THAT'S OKAY TIM
I'd really like to be wrong about this stuff every now and then. I really would.
However, I'd argue that you should never underestimate right wingers' capacity for utter breathtaking hypocrisy. It's one of their most enduring character traits.
And righty bloggers, I'm afraid, are particularly hypocritical. And I'm not just talking about the "gun enthusiasts" orbiting Planet Instahack who are still defending John Lott.
Let me give you one very recent (and not very original) example to make my point. Right wingers, of course, excoriated Clinton for his consensual affair with Lewinsky, claiming it proved he didn't have the integrity to be president.
Predictably, these same folks also spent months during the run-up to the war blasting Hollywood figures for opposing the war and insisting they should just keep their mouths shut regarding politics. Then, without missing a beat, these same folks happily supported Arnold the Gropinator, all the while minimizing his boorish assaultive behavior and blissfully ignoring significant evidence that he'd had several extra-marital affairs.
Therefore, it's really quite hard to take these world class hypocrites very seriously when they try to play the role of the morals police these days.
You can expect these folks to get even more grumpy as the public tide turns against their man W. I expect support for the righty agenda to virtually vanish within the next four or five months -- unless the economy really begins a miraculous turnaround.
As always, of course, we'll see.
THE ASTONISHING INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY OF JONAH GOLDBERG
Art Silber takes Jonah Goldberg apart today:
I have to note still again the unbelievably dishonest nature of the argument that "nobody...has made a remotely persuasive case for why it would have been good to keep Saddam in power." Listen up, Goldberg and all you other hawks who believe this crap and haven't learned the basics of thinking: nobody made that "persuasive case" -- because nobody ever tried to. Nobody believed it was good "to keep Saddam in power." Nobody. Got it, you stupid morons? Jesus.Indeed.That is not the question, and it was never the question. Talk about shifting the burden of proof. If you want to initiate an invasion, begin a lengthy occupation, lose American lives, and massively distort the American economy for many decades to come, the burden of proof is yours, not mine, and not the burden of anyone else who opposed this war.
Read the rest of it.
E-MAIL HOWIE
Howie Kurtz is such a Republican tool. I mean even when he's trying to be even-handed he can't help but slant things Bush's way. Read this article about Bush hatred and you'll see what I mean. He interviews absolutely loopy wingnuts like Laura Ingraham and pretends they're average rational people or something.
In a case of very bad timing, he also mentions the Prescott Bush Nazi factoid but only as evidence of irrational Bush hatred:
York also notes that Sheldon Drobny, who is arranging financing for a liberal talk radio network, has alleged online that the president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, did business with the Third Reich but that "as in any fascist regime, the press is prevented from publishing it."Let me add my voice to Hesiod's and suggest that readers e-mail Howie and let him know that this isn't some unfounded rumor, it's a fact.
And, by the way, why didn't the media ever really cover this story? I would argue it's irrelevant to W but it at least deserved to be reported.
So much for the liberal media, eh?
MORE ON PRESCOTT BUSH'S NAZI CONNECTION
Here's a link to the original (more detailed story) about the Prescott Bush Nazi connection from the New Hampshire Gazette.
Again, I would argue this doesn't have anything to do with W. It does tell you something about his grandfather though, doesn't it? Clearly making money off Nazi Germany didn't bother him much. In fact I would argue it's pretty scandalous that the government paid him $1.5M for the seized assets -- and I'm sure he didn't donate it to charity or anything.
It is interesting that the Bush family and apparently the press have conspired to keep this skeleton in the family closet for so long, isn't it?
[Link via e-mail from Bob Fertik at Democrats.com]
Sunday, October 19, 2003
CLAYTON CRAMER HAS JUST ABOUT...
used up his credibility with his increasingly frantic defenses of John Lott.
How many times has he desperately misrepresented Tim Lambert in the last couple of weeks?
As Cramer continues to embarrass himself daily, it's becoming harder and harder to believe that this is the same guy who credibly took down Bellesiles's critics a year ago.
What a difference a year makes, huh?
I'm not exactly surprised however. I predicted all of this last January and February if you recall. (To find the Lott posts, just do a "find" search for "Lott.")
If you recall, way back in January I argued there was a simple reason for why the Lott case was so important to them:
As I've said many times, these folks only went after Bellesiles tooth and nail because they disagreed with his thesis and now they believe Lott's flimsy alibi because they agree with his thesis. To admit that's what's going on would essentially destroy the "dishonest libruls supported Bellesiles" morality play that is so important for their particular worldview to work.Lott's defenders have now proved themselves to be even more sycophantic than Bellesiles's defenders. I'd argue that's not exactly something to be proud of.They won't dare admit that they're doing the same thing Bellesiles's supporters did because it threatens more than Lott. It calls into question their entire cartoonish view of academia itself.
And they wouldn't dare do that, would they?
However, I must say that it's all unfolding exactly as I expected it would.
Ah, the irony is quite delicious, isn't it?
WELCOME TO BUSH AND ASHCROFT'S AMERICA...
where freedom of the press and freedom of speech no longer exist.
I really am about to decide that Ashcroft has got a big roll of "U.S. Constitution toilet paper" over at the Justice Department these days.
If right wing extremist Ashcroft had any integrity or honor, I'd say "shame on you" and it might make an impact on him.
However, we all know he doesn't, don't we?
And be sure to read the first story about how they're controlling press access to hospitals in Baghdad. That's why some in the press has been so antagonistic to the "success counteroffensive" by the White House. They know it's all about news management, not improving the reality in Baghdad.
This story also makes a point I made a couple of days ago:
“All the TV wants to cover is some sensational, isolated terrorist attack,” Evans told NEWSWEEK on his flight back to Washington. “I went over expecting to find an environment where people were frightened. But I found a country that was alive with hope and optimism.” Yet reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war. But that didn’t stop a group of Republican senators from tearing into American reporters covering Iraq earlier this month. “I was not told by the media... that thousands and thousands of Iraqi schoolchildren went back to school,” said Larry Craig of Idaho, who recently toured Iraq. The senator neglected to mention that he slept both nights of his trip in Kuwait, not Iraq.As I've said, as soon as the administration starts having its VIPs spend the night in Baghdad, that's when we'll know that things are going okay in Iraq.
Until then, they're lying when they say that everything's hunky-dory in Iraq.
NOT A GOOD DAY FOR PAUL BREMER
First, Bremer and his so-called experts have ignored an exhaustive study of the potential problems in rebuilding Iraq.
Second, by playing hardball with the international community regarding oversight of Iraqi oil revenues, he has made himself look awfully petty and even a wee bit crooked.
This is willful incompetence folks.
It's only a matter of time before Iraq really does become a quagmire (if it isn't already), isn't it?
Saturday, October 18, 2003
WHO DIDN'T KNOW THIS?
I'm with Atrios, I really thought most folks already knew this:
President Bush's grandfather was a director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler's rise to power, government documents show.I also have to say I'm not sure what in the world this has to do with W.Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp., a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
Fritz Thyssen was an early financial supporter of Hitler, whose Nazi party Thyssen believed was preferable to communism. The documents do not show any evidence Bush directly aided that effort. His position with Union Banking never was a political issue for Bush, who was elected to the Senate from Connecticut in 1952.
...
Union Banking was seized by the government in October 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
However, this has been widely known for years, right?
Friday, October 17, 2003
THE SWEET SPOT
Here's a link to Krugman's latest column. As usual, it's quite good.
I think Krugman's absolutely right on the proper political strategy for a candidate advocating a repeal of W's tax cuts.
A REBUKE FROM BUSH I?
Now this is an interesting column. Did you know that George H.W. Bush just gave his most coveted public service award to Teddy Kennedy?
Gigi Meyer spins this as a public rebuke of W. I don't know about that. However, it's at least an interesting idea, isn't it?
MORE NATTERING NABOBS OF NEGATIVISM
I'm sure W and the boys would tell us to not pay attention to such minor things as the deaths of four soldiers in a single day.
Things in Iraq are really going quite well, right?
The media I'm sure has filtered out a story about some school reopening today which, in the minds of some Republicans these days, is much more important than the measly deaths of a few soldiers per day.
Hesiod puts it quite well this morning:
Unfortunately, Iraqi guerrillas and U.S. troops are refusing to cooperate with the Bush administration's concerted effort to tell everyone about all the "good" things that are happening in Iraq. If only those unpatriotic, negative soldiers would avoid getting in the way of Iraqi bullets and explosives, things would be hunky dory.Boy, W and the boys sure did pick a bad time for a media counteroffensive insisting that things are really quite good in Iraq, didn't they?Take these 4 insubordinate military policemen, for example. They violated express orders from Secretary Rumsfeld that they were, under no circumstances, to die in the line of duty...lest they step on the President's message to the homefront.
I understand that as soon as the bodies are flown home and buried by their families, formal Court martial proceedings will ensue.
Thursday, October 16, 2003
MORE COMPARISONS TO ORWELL
Billmon points us to this excellent column by James Pinkerton. Here's just a bit:
There's nothing like a war to bring out the inner George Orwell in a government. In ways little and small, Uncle Sam has been morphing into Big Brother - spinning the news, even, apparently, manufacturing news.Now go read the rest of it.Yesterday, the Gannett News Service reported that 11 different U.S. newspapers had unwittingly printed identical five-paragraph letters-to-the- editor from soldiers in Iraq. The letters were full of upbeat puff - "the quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored" - the kind that some PR blitzer might dream up.
None of the soldiers contacted by Gannett for comment said that they had written the letter; it had been handed to them for signature, they said, by Army superiors. Indeed, one soldier said he hadn't even seen the letter before it appeared in his hometown paper.
Somewhere, Orwell's ghost is smiling grimly. In his novel "1984," the British writer imagined a Ministry of Truth that would be responsible for manufacturing news of victories and triumphs. Now, it's no longer fiction; it's your tax dollars at work.
Another Orwellian concept was "doublethink," defined as the ability "to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed." This administration is doublethinking, doubletime, in its effort to justify the Iraq war - and so the inconvenient truth is shipped off to convenient oblivion.
Last Thursday, for example, President George W. Bush declared, "America must not forget the lessons of September 11th . . . We must fight this war until the work is done." Bush seems to be saying that we invaded Iraq because Iraq was involved in 9/11.
But, of course, that's not true, as Bush himself admitted in an off-message moment. The truth is that 9/11 gave the neoconservatives who influence Bush the excuse they needed for "regime change," which they had advocated long before 9/11. Now, after the fact, Bush is asking Americans to make the doublethink leap of faith: The United States was attacked by al-Qaida, so we had to attack Saddam Hussein. Got that?
As Billmon notes, Pinkerton is one of the few conservatives who isn't currently parroting the up-is-down party line. It's nice to know that there are a few genuine conservative columnists with integrity these days. Steve Chapman at the Chicago Tribune is another conservative who deserves a nod for telling the truth in the run-up to the war.
On a related note, not a single conservative left a message on my comment boards yesterday in response to this post.
I thought all of the supposedly committed warmongers stopped reading this blog when the going got tough back in April and May.
I love how righties like Insty insist that only lefty readers do that. Sorry buddy. My experience is that it's the righties who run as fast as their little legs will carry them from contrary opinions -- back to the soothing sounds of Faux News, Rushycontin and the blogs of folks like Glenn.
TOUCHY FEELY REPUBLICANISM
"The story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable. It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.”You know, I'll bet those soldiers' families don't feel that way.
THE NIXONIAN APPROACH
Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush - living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge - told his top officials to "stop the leaks" to the media, or else.Isn't that hilarious?News of Bush's order leaked almost immediately.
Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.
However, we should think about this a bit more. Either Bush isn't able to stop the leaking at all (as evidenced by this story) or, hypocritically, he's only talking about "bad leaks." Good leaks are okay -- especially leaks that make him look like he's "taking charge."
Did any of you see Nightline last night? Ted Koppel just really let Dan Bartlett have it. This story has a sentence in it that is reminiscent of the interview last night:
"What's most revealing is the extent of frustration taking hold," said historian Robert Dallek of Boston University, a biographer of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy. "It's really reminiscent of Johnson and Vietnam. Members of the Senate... and the media were giving him grief. It sounds like Bush is falling into that pattern. He's blaming the media, much like Johnson did."Or, as Ted Koppel suggested numerous times last night, like Richard Nixon.
The parallels are quite striking. You now have a president who is so thin-skinned (and, in W's case, incurious) that he doesn't read the newspapers. He therefore gets his news from his aides who are acting, to use a White House term, as his filter. That's why W keeps telling us how great things are in Iraq. The administration's actions in the wake of the Wilson-Plame scandal are quite Nixonian as well.
The fact that Bush has surrounded himself with so many ex-Nixon people is also quite spooky.
This is getting quite interesting, isn't it?
BTW, if things are going so well in Iraq, why doesn't Bush go there? If things are going so well in Iraq why is it that administration VIPs and congressional visitors never spend the night there? (For those of you who don't know, VIP visitors to Iraq these days usually spend the night in Kuwait.)
I think these two things tell you enough about how well things are really going in Iraq, don't they?
[Link via Atrios]
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND MILITARY?
I think it's time for General William Boykin to retire.
You've got to read this stuff to believe it.
W WAS APPARENTLY PLANNING FOR WAR WITH IRAQ...
before he became president. And now we know that the Big Dog warned him personally about al-Qaida:
Former President Bill Clinton says he warned President George W. Bush before he left office in 2001 that Osama bin Laden was the biggest security threat the United States faced.Ah, the utter incompetence of the Bush administration. Have they ever done anything in a competent manner?Speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the History Channel on Wednesday, Clinton said he discussed security issues with Bush in his "exit interview," a formal and often candid meeting between a sitting president and the president-elect.
"In his campaign, Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and a national missile defence," Clinton said. "I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden."
The U.S. government has blamed bin Laden's Al Qaeda network for the September 11 attacks.
Let me just briefly recap this administration's record of incompetence. They ignored warnings from Clinton officials about al-Qaeda, ignored intelligence during August of 2001 suggesting plane hijackings by terrorists, bungled the war in Afghanistan and bungled the war in Iraq. On top of all this, they have horribly mismanaged the American economy and Federal budget.
Again, is there anything W and the boys have done well?
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
YET AGAIN...
Jay Bookman, who was an early critic of Bush-Cheney-Halliburton, Inc.'s warplans, hits one out of the park today:
The true policy choice is between actions that make things better for the United States and actions that make things worse. If we were to assess the invasion of Iraq on those grounds, the outcome would be something like this:Indeed.Saddam had no WMD, no nuclear program and no ties to al-Qaida. So invading Iraq did little or nothing to improve our security. It did, however, come at a cost that may take decades to fully tally.
The invasion has strained our alliances and international standing, making it difficult to draw support against real threats in North Korea and Iran. Our military is overextended. The financial toll is $150 billion and counting; the toll in U.S. lives continues to mount as well.
If the administration truly did expect all that, they are bigger fools than even their harshest critics have claimed.
Heh.
LYONS: "NINE CANDIDATES IN SEARCH OF AN AUDIENCE"
Here's Gene Lyons's column for the week!
Gene Lyons
October 15, 2003Nine Candidates in Search of an Audience
Maybe it’s a good thing a lot more people watched the Yankees-Red Sox melodrama on TV last week than the Democratic presidential debate sponsored by CNN. Thanks to the miracle of videotape, I managed to see both. Staged in Arizona, the latest production of “Nine Candidates in Search of an Audience” showcased less the candidates’ merits than their party’s traditional inability to discipline itself even with the most crucial presidential election in a generation approaching.
Then over the weekend, I heard a Republican savant on the radio vending the preposterous theory that Wesley Clark had entered the race as a “stalking horse” for Hillary Clinton. Invoking the Hillary Monster has become the GOP’s surest means of extracting cash from Moron-Americans who haven’t already flung it away on RV excursions to Branson, Missouri or yielded to the pleas of faith-healing televangelists. The Democrat party, the fellow claimed, is being run entirely by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
If so, here’s my advice to Chappaqua, N.Y.‘s fun couple: ditch four or five of these jokers at once. Nine candidates isn’t a political contest, it’s a litter. With all nine standing behind podiums in a semi-circle, the CNN exercise resembled less a debate than a game show, with emcee Judy Woodruff preening, posing, interrupting, scolding, and generally acting as if she--as the representative of Washington’s celebrity press corps--were the star, and the candidates hapless contestants to be discarded in favor of next week’s nobodies. On one or two occasions, Woodruff actually turned her back and walked away from a candidate giving an answer that evidently displeased her.
Maybe the experience was good for Clark, who as a four-star general can’t have been patronized to his face very often. But the effect was to render the entire field rather foolish. Already diminished by the necessity of pretending what everybody knows to be false, i.e. that all nine candidates are equally deserving of being taken seriously in the context of a presidential race, the actual contenders risk resembling people who take handmade signs emblazoned with network call letters to the ballpark hoping to appear on TV. Watching Woodruff parade back and forth, I half expected to see Howard Dean or John Kerry whip out cell phones and begin waving maniacally to some pal in a bar who couldn’t get tickets.
More seriously, what Bill Clinton and anybody else who qualifies as a Democratic senior statesman needs to do is persuade the following four candidates to drop the ego trip for the sake of the party: Dennis Kucinich, Carol Mosely-Braun, Al Sharpton and John Edwards. Doing so publicly might become necessary. None has any chance whatsoever to become the nominee. Their participation only distracts attention from the candidates who do, and contributes to the air of solemn fakery that made last week’s CNN extravaganza both tedious and faintly embar-rassing. They should endorse somebody soon and go away. Say what you will about the Republicans: it’s hard to fault their TV production values. You’ll never see a nine candidate GOP debate.
Now me, I’d also tell Joe Lieberman to take a hike. But only a sound drubbing at the polls seems apt to get his attention. Meanwhile, the very real danger the party appears to be sleepwalking into is that with almost all the Democratic primary contests concentrated into a period of fewer than six weeks between late January and early March 2004, the strong possibility exists of a deadlocked convention--the very problem the early primaries were set up to avoid. Facing a well-financed and politically ruthless Republican machine, the Democrats hoped to give their candidate an early running start.
Besides the foreshortened primary schedule, making less efficient the normal winnowing process as candidates like Lieberman and Edwards are forced to face political reality, two additional factors make gridlock likely: an October 10 Gallup poll showing Clark narrowly leading with the support of 21 percent of registered Democrats, Dean with 16 percent, Kerry and Lieberman with 13 percent each, and Gephardt with 8 percent. The results are skewed regionally, with the three New Englanders drawing little support in the South. (Clark leads in all regions.) Secondly, convention delegates are selected proportionally in all fifty states to candidates winning more than 15 percent of the votes.
If the primaries took place simultaneously tomorrow, in short, the likelihood of any candidate securing a majority of the 4318 delegate votes needed to secure the presidential nomination would be small. (Of the total, 798 are “super delegates” appointed by party elders; giving Bill Clinton, interestingly, a bigger role than the average ex-president.) Fixated upon their ritualized starring roles in New Hampshire and Iowa, Washington media savants haven’t grasped how rule changes may have changed the game. But come the July convention, the nation could be in for one hell of a TV show.
IRAQ WAR MAKES US ALL LESS SAFE
War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.Yep. That's what I said would happen, isn't it?The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Washington must impose security in Iraq to prevent the country from "ripening into a cause celebre for radical Islamic terrorists," it concluded. "Nation-building" in Iraq was paramount and might require more troops than initially planned.
OH YEAH, POWELL LIED
Isn't it astonishing when it takes the media eight months to figure out something that was rather obvious at the time?
If you recall, I've spent a great deal of space on this blog talking about Powell's presentation (most recent blog entries here and here) as the turning point moment in the whole run-up to the war. Americans believed Powell and therefore supported the war. Americans, like the O.J. jury, were looking for an excuse to believe and Powell's presentation gave them that excuse.
However, obviously, the whole presentation was bogus. As I've said before, Powell's presentation may be one of the lowest points in the diplomatic history of the United States. The Secretary of State went before the U.N. and knowingly lied to the international community.
But the worst part is that it really wasn't that hard to figure out that Powell's presentation was bogus all the way back in February. Unfortunately, most Americans couldn't be bothered to fact-check the administration.
I've always wondered how all those conservative readers of mine who sent me gloating e-mails back in February feel about all of this now. I suspect they've stopped reading me by now. I'm sure much of what I say is way too uncomfortable for them. After all, I turned out to be right about damn-near everything I said about the bogus case for war and what the aftermath of the war would be like. And, if you recall, I kept saying "I hope I'm wrong" (and I did) but, unfortunately, I haven't been.
But, hey, if you're still out there guys, why don't you let me know how you feel about this now? How does it feel to find out your party's president and his administration lied to us and led us into a war based on lies?
You guys were all so certain about everything back in February and March -- and then, as the whole thing began to unravel, I stopped hearing from you. Have you all left? Am I preaching to the choir now?
I'm serious. Use the comment boards. I'm quite interested to hear how you're all dealing with this.
[Link via Atrios]
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
YOU'VE GOT TO HEAR THIS
to believe it. How about the practice of requiring a monthly bribe from an Iraqi company merely to allow them access to the crumbs that fall from the table after the U.S. companies are finished gobbling up the reconstruction dollars?
This is pretty shocking stuff folks. You also ought to hear the belligerent and insensitive way this loudmouthed American businessman talks to this wealthy Iraqi fellow.
I'm not even quite sure what to say about this. I find the whole thing quite offensive.
I found this link over at Talking Points Memo. Josh has got a bunch of good stuff up over there.
It's been a long and tough day at work folks. I just got finished. I'm beat.
Hopefully I'll have more time to blog tomorrow.
THE UNPRECEDENTED MIDTERM GERRYMANDERING...
in Texas has been completed.
Do Republicans have no shame?
BUSY DAY
Go read this.
Monday, October 13, 2003
LET ME SECOND...
Josh's book recommendation for Columbus Day.
One of my minor fields on my doctorate was in Latin American history. I worked with Jeff Gould and Peter Guardino at Indiana. I became somewhat fascinated with the Mexican Revolution as well and read many fantastic books on that as well. I spent a whole day in my Foreign Relations class a couple of weeks ago talking about Wilson and the Mexican Revolution.
Anyway, Bernal Diaz's The Conquest of New Spain was one of my favorite books as well. It's a fascinating story of cultural conflict.
INTERNET SOCK PUPPET UPDATE
It appears that Michael Bellesiles, apparently desiring to keep up with his fellow disgraced gun researcher John Lott, also seems to have created an internet sock puppet. This internet sock puppet posts here at HNN and his name is "Benny Smith."
Meanwhile, even though his diehard supporters such as Clayton Cramer remain in their damn-near pathological state of denial, Lott's reputation takes another major beating in this article by Chris Mooney in Mother Jones. This article is quite devastating. You should read it.
And while we're at it, you should read the rather lame "it's all too complicated for me" defense of Lott by Cramer here.
I won't even tell you how hilarious it is to hear Cramer call someone like Saul Cornell a "partisan." If that isn't a case of the pot calling the kettle black, I haven't seen one.
And, despite Cramer's rather obnoxious delusions of grandeur, he really isn't the one who brought Bellesiles down. The WMQ article and the independent inquiry by Emory did. It is good that critics of Bellesiles were persistent, I won't deny that. However, ultimately it was the academic inquiries that brought Bellesiles down.
And, despite his rather prominent fits of pique to the contrary on this website, the Bellesiles case ultimately demonstrates that the historical profession can police itself. The same can't be said of certain ideologically-driven think tanks that support certain other prominent gun researchers I'm afraid.
BTW, why doesn't Cramer support an inquiry of Lott? If his hero Lott's data backs up his conclusions, he'll be exonerated, right?
[Links via Ralph Luker and Tim Lambert]
A COUPLE OF LINKS
You should read this editorial about Dick Cheney from Joe Klein. Here's the money quote:
Indeed, Cheney has assumed the role that powerful National Security Advisers like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski played in the past. He has been the President's closest foreign-policy confidant. He has not merely coordinated policy, he has conceptualized it. Rumsfeld's outburst obscured the most important question raised by the President's apparent decision to give Condoleezza Rice a more prominent role in Iraq policy: Does this mean that the President is finally turning away from the Vice President?You also should take a look at this quite humorous Tom Tomorrow comic. It's quite good.If so, it certainly is about time. Bush's speech last week was part of an aggressive public relations effort to spread the news that things aren't so bad in Iraq—a sure sign that things aren't so good. The American military has done wonders in restoring order and building civil society in the north and south of the country. But the Sunni triangle festers, and we are one strategically placed truck bomb—or coordinated sequence of bombs—away from disaster. This sort of uncertainty should be a revelation to the Vice President. His worldview is a simple one, bereft of even the neoconservative romance with exporting democracy. He believes that America has the power to create the world it wants—whether that means going it alone in Iraq, putting Ahmed Chalabi in power there or pretending that Yasser Arafat is not the Palestinian leader. These miscalculations have diminished America's military strength, its position in the world and perhaps its national security. Cheney has all the qualities this President admires. Cheney is tough, discreet, secure in his judgments—but he has been wrong too often, and now George W. Bush must decide what he wants to do about that.
Sunday, October 12, 2003
AND A GOOD TIME WAS HAD BY ALL
I think I've mentioned before that I went to Mizzou for my master's. (As you probably know, I went to Indiana for my PhD.) I actually sat on the 40 yard line for the infamous "Fifth Down" game against Colorado in 1990.
Therefore, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Mizzou take Nebraska apart last night. After having that unforgettable heartbreaking loss back in 1997 on that kicked ball, this was especially nice.
And Mizzou could've scored again if they wanted to -- they were getting ten yards a pop against that supposedly number 1 ranked defense in the nation on that last series. I must admit to wanting them to hang 50 on NU. However, they simply decided not to do so. They showed more class in that one decision than Nebraska did in the last two and a half decades' worth of running the score up into the 60s and 70s to pad their high rankings in the polls.
Needless to say, I enjoyed it a great deal.
BUT WE DIDN'T MEAN TO!
Can you believe W and the boys are trying this lame line of defense:
Administration sources said they believe that the officials who discussed Plame were not trying to expose her, but were using the information as a tool to try to persuade reporters to ignore Wilson. The officials wanted to convince the reporters that he had benefited from nepotism in being chosen for the mission.Now, isn't that outrageous? You didn't really mean to expose her? As if dropping this little revelation in the middle of a larger campaign to smear Ambassador Wilson somehow makes it okay? Are you kidding me?
Can you imagine what Republicans would be saying if Clinton administration officials were trying something this flimsy after one of them committed treason by outting an undercover CIA operative? How much of Tom DeLay's slobber would they be mopping up off the floor over at the Faux studios by now do you think?
This new line of defense, I guess, is a modification of the "stupidity defense" trial balloon put out earlier this week by Republican media sycophant Mikey Isikoff.
BTW, as we all expected, the WaPo exposes Isikoff as the great journalistic fraud that he is.
Yep. These two "senior administration officials" called six reporters offering this little detail up. This story wasn't the result of a mistake on some source's fault at all. Of course, if Mikey actually read the WaPo occasionally he'd know that. It's time to quit making stuff up to protect your heroes Mikey.
You should read both the WaPo story and Josh's parsing of it. You also ought to read Billmon's post about it as well. You can then consider youself brought up to speed on the latest developments in this scandal.
Saturday, October 11, 2003
THE FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY...
of W and the boys is just breathtaking, isn't it?
And the ratio of taxes to the size of the overall economy is at the lowest in 44 years. And, at the same time, the economy still isn't growing very much.
That should put the nail in the coffin of trickle-down supply-side economics, shouldn't it?
Shouldn't it?
IN THE COMPANY OF ALDRICH AMES
Boy, how's this for a revelation:
Plame was one of a group of spies that the CIA suspected, but wasn’t sure, might have been compromised by Aldrich Ames. Because of that, she was brought back stateside for her own protection, though she continued to work as a NOC.So the creeps in the White House have just done one of the things that Aldrich Ames was convicted and sent to jail for the rest of his life for doing.So, yes, there were some potential problems with Plame’s cover: not because her status wasn’t a serious matter or a closely guard secret, but because it had quite possibly already been a casualty of Ames’ treason.
In other words, you might say that Plame’s cover has been under attack for more than a decade. Those two ‘senior administration officials’ just finished the job that Rick Ames --- one of the arch-traitors of American history --- started.
Nice company.
How's that for an eye opener?
This tells you just how serious this is, doesn't it?
Can W really continue to condone treason?
Surely not, right?
Friday, October 10, 2003
WHY A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR IS NECESSARY
Here's a good editorial explaining why a special prosecutor is necessary for the Wilson-Plame scandal.
As for this weekend, I'll be doing my three hours of soccer tomorrow and my in-laws are in town visiting.
I'll blog tomorrow at some point. I'm just not sure when.
JOSH WAS APPARENTLY RIGHT
It appears that the White House is now trying to argue that Rove, Libby and Abrams didn't do anything wrong because Plame's name wasn't "classified information." This is big folks.
QUESTION: Scott, earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?So Josh was right. I think we've found our culprits now. The White House is trying to protect Rove, Libby and Abrams by using this "not classified information" dodge.MCCLELLAN: Those individuals -- I talked -- I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that's where it stands.
QUESTION: So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?
MCCLELLAN: They assured me that they were not involved in this.
QUESTION: Can I follow up on that?
QUESTION: They were not involved in what?
MCCLELLAN: The leaking of classified information.
QUESTION: Did you undertake that of your own volition, or were you instructed to go to these --
MCCLELLAN: I spoke to those individuals myself.
This is a bombshell.
Now watch the SCLM bury it.
TELLING LIES ABOUT IRAQ AND 9/11 IS A HARD HABIT TO BREAK
Dick Cheney just can't help himself, can he?
The vice president said, “The ultimate nightmare could bring devastation to our country on as scale we have never experienced.”My goodness. You'd think they'd have stopped peddling this long ago discredited pap by now, wouldn't you?“Instead of losing thousands of lives, we might lose tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands in a single day of war,” Cheney said.
“Remember what we saw on the morning of 9-11. And knowing the nature of these enemies, we have as clear a responsibility as could ever fall to government,” Cheney said. “We must do everything in our power to keep terrorists from ever acquiring weapons of mass destruction.”
MORE ON CIVILITY
Krugman's internet stalker, Donald Luskin, makes a fool of himself yet again today. He claims that Atrios is uncivil towards him and whines about it. This from the guy who recently described meeting Krugman as coming "face to face with evil." Holy Cow! What hypocrisy!
Why the NRO pays this ignoramus to spout off about Krugman's columns I'll never know. Apparently my undergraduate minor in economics and a couple of graduate courses in it provide me with enough knowledge in economics to understand Krugman's columns.
The same can't be said for Luskin unfortunately.
BOB NOVAK'S NOSE IS GROWING
Josh has got the story here.
CIVILITY -- FOR REPUBLICANS ONLY
Paul Krugman takes on David Brooks. He says a lot of things that needed to be said.
Read the whole thing but here's the "money quote" for me:
But there's more going on than a simple attempt to impose a double standard. All this fuss about the rudeness of the Bush administration's critics is an attempt to preclude serious discussion of that administration's policies. For there is no way to be both honest and polite about what has happened in these past three years.In-damn-deed.On the fiscal front, this administration has used deceptive accounting to ram through repeated long-run tax cuts in the face of mounting deficits. And it continues to push for more tax cuts, when even the most sober observers now talk starkly about the risk to our solvency. It's impolite to say that George W. Bush is the most fiscally irresponsible president in American history, but it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
On the foreign policy front, this administration hyped the threat from Iraq, ignoring warnings from military professionals that a prolonged postwar occupation would tie down much of our Army and undermine our military readiness. (Joseph Galloway, co-author of "We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young," says that "we have perhaps the finest Army in history," but that "Donald H. Rumsfeld and his civilian aides have done just about everything they could to destroy that Army.") It's impolite to say that Mr. Bush has damaged our national security with his military adventurism, but it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Still, some would say that criticism should focus only on Mr. Bush's policies, not on his person. But no administration in memory has made paeans to the president's character — his "honor and integrity" — so central to its political strategy. Nor has any previous administration been so determined to portray the president as a hero, going so far as to pose him in line with the heads on Mount Rushmore, or arrange that landing on the aircraft carrier. Surely, then, Mr. Bush's critics have the right to point out that the life story of the man inside the flight suit isn't particularly heroic — that he has never taken a risk or made a sacrifice for the sake of his country, and that his business career is a story of murky deals and insider privilege.
In the months after 9/11, a shocked nation wanted to believe the best of its leader, and Mr. Bush was treated with reverence. But he abused the trust placed in him, pushing a partisan agenda that has left the nation weakened and divided. Yes, I know that's a rude thing to say. But it's also the truth.
IS RUMMY ON THE WAY OUT?
Is Rumsfeld finally on the way out? Listen to this passage from a CNN story:
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld canceled a news conference Thursday in part to avoid questions about whether the White House recently reduced his role in Iraq's reconstruction, Pentagon and NATO officials said.Is this sort of treatment a sign that Rumsfeld is finally going to get canned? If so, it's only about two years too late. There has been speculation Rummy was on the way out before 9/11 and that it saved his job.The White House said Monday it is creating an Iraq Stabilization Group to be headed by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. The group will be responsible for handling the day-to-day administration of Iraq, a task previously handled by the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld was scheduled to brief reporters at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Colorado. He was questioned at Wednesday's NATO press briefing about his relationship with Rice, a memo she circulated establishing the new Iraq Stabilization Group, and whether he was "in the loop."
The defense secretary has "said everything he has to say about it," Pentagon officials said.
We'll see.
[Link via Atrios]
Thursday, October 9, 2003
RUSH LIMBAUGH UPDATE
It does appear that the Oxycontin abuse led to Rush's deafness. As I said a week ago, that's pathetic.
Art Silber has the update.
BTW, doctors say you really can take 30 Oxycontin a day and still function. It is hard to believe but I'll take their word for it.
AMPLIFYING THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE
Josh's column at The Hill yesterday is quite good and makes an excellent point that deserves further, well, amplification.
Josh points out the obvious point that the president could be doing more to out the leakers and that it's reaching theatre of the absurd:
According to late news reports, the Justice Department’s investigation is looking at hundreds of people in the White House and perhaps still more hundreds at the State and Defense departments. White House spokeswoman Ashley Snee marvels that they’re looking at “almost 2,000 people.”Yet the real interesting point is that the President is using the spin that this is about "leaks of classified information" (instead of the illegal and security-endangering outing of a CIA agent by an administration official close in W's inner circle) to continue to frighten folks in the CIA who might speak up about the administration's creative and selective use of intelligence in making the case for war with Iraq:Yet all the available evidence tells us that the range of possible suspects is no more than a couple dozen people. It’s like investigating a robbery by deposing every resident of the city.
From the beginning, the White House has pursued a conscious policy of changing the subject from one of blowing Plame’s cover to one of opposition to all “leaks of classified information” — something this White House has been after Congress about for almost two years.Creepy, eh? W and the boys are using this investigation to intimidate other intelligence agents into keep their mouths shut. That's twisted, isn't it? This is an investigation into their own malfeasance -- but they're using it to frighten other folks away from telling the truth.Go back and look at transcripts from the president and his press secretary, Scott McClellan, and you’ll see that that’s always the phrasing they use.
What’s the point of this? On the one hand, it produces sound bites about something general and vague — leaks — rather than something petty and despicable — blowing the cover of one of our own clandestine hunters of weapons of mass destruction for political gain. But there’s much more to it.
People who follow national security and intelligence issues have been waiting for months to see whether disgruntled bureaucrats at the Pentagon, State or the CIA would start going to the press with uncomfortable stories about things the administration did leading up to the war. The White House has been wondering, too.
Some of those leaks might involve classified information. Even if they don’t, they might come close enough to the line to scare off some midlevel bureaucrat with children and a mortgage.
By making the issue any and all leaks of classified information, the White House is sending a message that anyone interested in causing the White House more trouble should be very scared indeed. Bush made the point explicitly Monday, telling reporters that the investigation “will help set a clear signal we expect other leaks to stop as well.”
Again, what do we have here? There were apparently two overlapping motives for outing Plame: to get back at a career civil servant for embarrassing the White House and to warn others off doing anything similar.
Now the investigation into that bad act is being used to amplify the original message.
It all comes down to the same thing. Bush says he wants to find the culprits, but he’s done none of the things he could do to accomplish those ends easily. His priority is beating up on the victims of the White House’s initial bad acts (Wilson and Plame) and using the current investigation to help make sure everyone else keeps quiet.
These guys really are a great bunch, huh?
I'm beginning to wonder if our country could honestly survive another four years with these guys in charge.
THE STUPIDITY DEFENSE
More on administration shill Michael Isikoff's "stupidity defense" from Mark Kleiman and Arthur Silber.
I have to second what Art says here. You have to be appallingly stupid to think that claiming you're stupid is a good defense. It does make you wonder just how bad things really are for them if they're resorting to this already.
I don't think Isikoff's trial balloon from the administration is going over very well.
NOW LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT
Administration officials leaking the identity of a CIA operative, therefore endangering national security and putting several people's lives at risk was a "goof" and just part of hardball politics?
All of this from the same silly dipshit who believed that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was worth creating a constitutional crisis over?
You're kidding, right?
Oh and you've got to read this one folks. This entire article is comprised entirely of pro-administration spin based around a rather major factual error by Isikoff (an excellent catch by Atrios here).
No, Mikey. Novak wasn't the only one called before his column ran -- six different people were. This wasn't an error on the part of the source for the first WaPo article, no matter how much you might like it to be so. It has since been confirmed by multiple media sources -- including the WaPo here.
Nice try though.
Now, why the hell does Isikoff still have a job?
Wednesday, October 8, 2003
IS THE WHITE HOUSE LYING ABOUT LIBBY AND ABRAMS?
I think Josh may be on to something here:
That makes me wonder just how air-tight McClellan’s statement is. What he said was that “They [i.e., Libby and Abrams] were not involved in leaking classified information, nor did they condone it.”Good question. Why the peculiar phrasing? Are they getting so desperate that they're telling baldfaced lies hoping this will all go away?Now presumably Plame’s identity was classified information. But why frame this denial is such a precise, lawyerly and frankly off-point fashion? Why not just say they told no one about Plame’s identity. Or even just, they did not disclose the identity of any agent from the Directorate of Operations?
A BIT OF VENTING...
from John Scalzi. Sometimes it's good for the soul folks. Here are a few select bits:
First: Californians, boy, did you ever get played, you dumb-ass losers. This was, at its root, one of the most flagrantly un-democratic (small "d") elections in the history of the United States, and you followed the script as if you were giggling, squealing paid extras. The recall was bought and paid for by one guy and orchestrated by a few zealots with an extremely narrow agenda, and both these parties were more than happy to push your emotional buttons to get you to do what they wanted you to do, which was boot the current and conventionally-elected office-holder for a chance to install someone more amenable to their own interests. Florida 2000 paranoids aside, this is the closest thing to a coup we've had in the country, and you swallowed it like it was a tasty treat. It's sickening, really.Go read the rest of it....
Admittedly, at this moment conservative Republicans are the people who are apparently the most inclined to piss on the election process, which is a culmination of a couple of decades of incestuous intellectual fermentation resulting in an insensate desire for power at nearly any cost. But in their time, Democrats have been more than happy to pull equally undemocratic tricks for their advantage. This recall election is a kissing cousin to a poll tax: Both ostensibly legal (in their time and place), but both designed to skew and corrupt the election process for a select group over others.
...
So, to wrap things up: If you voted for the recall, you might have thought you were voting to boot Gray Davis out of office. But that's because you're a moron, easily distracted by sparkly lights and shiny objects. You were really voting to let small, inherently undemocratic groups run your state all the time, forever. The fact that you thought you were doing the former when in fact you were doing the latter suggests that you would have been more helpful in the governance of your state by hurling yourself off the Golden Gate Bridge and smacking into the bay below with a nice, bone-powdering swack. In addition to clearing out four million bottom-feeders from an already-overpopulated state, California might still have a government still nominally beholden to voters, instead of through special-interest control by mob rule proxy. Good job.
[Link via ,CalPundit]
SO MUCH FOR THE RECALL BEING A NEW POLITICAL STORY
Voter turnout in California was actually lower than last November. It also was the same old story: Republicans turned out and voted for their guy, Independents voted for the recall and Arnold, and Democrats, as in 2002, just stayed home. No real news here folks.
Therefore, folks, this election means little or nothing about some sort of sea change in politics in California or elsewhere. It's just another low turnout off-year election in a state that one side managed to win by charging up their troops.
So, in short, don't be discouraged. This recall thing meant little or nothing nationally. It demonstrated the anger that Republicans and Independents feel about the situation in California but little else.
And, by the way, according to recent polls independent voters nationwide have the same levels of anger towards George W. Bush right now that they had toward Gray Davis in California.
I also don't share the belief that this whole thing was terrible for Democrats. Now Arnie has to solve California's problems. His first plan is to repeal the car tax which will blow a great big deficit hole in the state's budget that he's going to have to come up with a plan to fill. Early indications are not promising that he'll have any sort of realistic plan.
Arnie also ran for office saying that he wasn't really a Republican, so this doesn't exactly reveal any new support for the Republican agenda. If anything, it shows that Republicans need to moderate their message if they're going to win in California. I also wouldn't look for Arnie to associate with W and the boys anytime soon -- at least if he wants to remain a popular governor.
I still think ultimately that this recall will turn out to have been a mistake -- but we'll have to wait and see on that.
Terry has got an excellent commentary on the recall as well.
NOPE
Krugman didn't win the Nobel.
However, my congrats to Robert F. Engle and Clive Granger for winning the Nobel Prize in Economics this year.
VALERIE PLAME, THE SPY NEXT DOOR
You really should read this fascinating profile of Valerie Plame.
Plame was not a minor operative:
Her activities during her years overseas remain classified, but she became the creme de la creme of spies: a "noc," an officer with "nonofficial cover." Nocs have cover jobs that have nothing to do with the U.S. government. They work in business, in social clubs, as scientists or secretaries (they are prohibited from posing as journalists), and if detected or arrested by a foreign government, they do not have diplomatic protection and rights. They are on their own. Even their fellow operatives don't know who they are, and only the strongest and smartest are picked for these assignments.Bob Novak now officially looks like a moron for claiming she was some garden variety analyst. Plame's mother puts it quite succinctly:
We've been very proud of her -- no question," she added. Diane Plame and her husband, who is 83 and a World War II veteran, are "very angry" about the disclosure and fearful for their daughter's safety.And CIA agents are not amused by this betrayal of a career intelligence agent:"They spoiled it. They more than spoiled it -- they brought a lot of harm," Diane Plame said, referring to the leakers and to Novak. "For people to come out and say this would cause no harm, what kind of IQs do they have?"
The outing has sparked a furor in the intelligence community, with some saying they feel betrayed by their government.All of the Republican excuses on this one are falling apart one by one, aren't they?"We feel like the peasants with torches and pitchforks," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who was in Plame's officer training class in 1985-86. "The robber barons aren't going to be allowed to get away with this."
No matter what the White House wants, this one isn't going away. And the more I read about this scandal, the more it seems likely that the White House has already told some lies about it already.
The fact that W and the boys have already tried to rule three of the most likely candidates out of it (Rove and Libby are two of them) sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me.
I suspect it's about to get even more interesting -- especially if the White House keeps up the charade that there's no way for us to find out who the leaker was.
Stay tuned.
Tuesday, October 7, 2003
MY GOODNESS
Explain to me who in their right mind would elect an actor with no political experience, who ran a campaign that had essentially no real ideas behind it, and who looked terrible on several occasions in response to several very serious allegations?
I'm astonished. I'm afraid California is going to get exactly what it deserves. I expect it will be a comedy of errors for months on end in Sacramento. I think this will backfire on Republicans bigtime. Of course, I've been saying that for months.
And, when things seem to be at their darkest, that's when I expect Arnie to screw up and grope somebody in Sacramento.
As always, we'll see.
IS PAUL KRUGMAN GOING TO...
win the Nobel Prize for Economics tomorrow?
That would be cool, wouldn't it?
After all, Krugman's NYT column -- no matter how good it is -- is not his day job.
I'm told he's pretty good at that economics stuff too.
[Link via Atrios]
I DON'T KNOW FOLKS...
but this sounds like a lie to me. W claims he has no idea who the leaker is. However, how does he know it's a "senior administration official?"
And, if he really doesn't know, I remind you that the only reason he doesn't know is because he refuses to ask them.
Aren't you getting tired of this charade? It's not hundreds or thousands of people folks, the number is under ten yet W refuses to ask them about it.
Why not?
HOW NIXONIAN OF YOU, MR. PRESIDENT
This is astonishing:
White House lawyers will review phone logs and other records supplied by presidential aides before turning the documents over to the Justice Department officials conducting the investigation into who leaked a CIA undercover operative's identity, officials said Monday.Yep. It's definitely time for an independent counsel now. This is creepy.The disclosure inspired new Democratic calls for an independent inquiry.
"To allow the White House counsel to review records before the prosecutors would see them is just about unheard of in the way cases are always prosecuted," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., speaking on NBC's Today show. "And the possibility of mischief, or worse than mischief, is very, very large."
Administration officials said the White House counsel's office may need up to two weeks to organize documents that some 2,000 employees are required to submit by 5 p.m. Tuesday.
The documents must also be reviewed for national security or executive privilege concerns and to ensure the filings are responsive to Justice Department requests for information, White House aides said. The department is investigating whether Bush administration officials exposed a CIA operative's identity to reporters and a columnist, Robert Novak.
I hope that Gonzales isn't destroying evidence -- but there's really no way to tell, is there?
Don't you love the timing on this? They've waited until everything will be drowned out by the idiocy of the California recall and then announced they're reviewing the documents before handing them over.
And you won't hear a damned thing about it from the media because it's Arnis day.
[Link via Mark Kleiman]
Update: Here's Mark's Plamesville Update for today as well.
BTW, I'm certain this is about Karl Rove now.
Monday, October 6, 2003
PLAMESVILLE UPDATE
Mark Kleiman's latest Plamesville Update is here. As usual, the Plamesville Update page is the best place to get up-to-date news on the Wilson-Plame scandal. Here's a juicy passage to entice you to click the link:
Maybe Rove kept this from the President, and from the rest of the senior staff, but there's now no way to say with a straight face that at least one person at the very top of the White House knew about this more than ten weeks before the sudden decision -- after the Justice Department's investigation had forced the matter onto the front page -- to "get to the bottom of this."I just added Open Source Politics (the website that houses the Plamesville Update and is becoming a very popular blog in its own right) to the "News Sources" section of my blogroll. I've been meaning to do so since they've had me on their blogroll for a while now.Constructing an innocent explanation for that long delay is not going to be an easy task. The President has a Constitutional duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," which presumably includes trying to root out wrongdoing in his immediate official family rather than standing passively by as they cover it up.
His best defense seems to be that his reliance on staff (the people Machiavelli calls "flatterers") for all his information has so cordoned him off from reality that he really didn't know. [*] That might keep him out of jail, but it's not a very good argument for his re-election.
In other blogroll news, after recovering from my fit of pique, I have returned Daily Kos to its proper place on my blogroll.
I'm still pretty pissed I got dropped from Kos's blogroll without so much as a courtesy e-mail but, what the hell, Kos's blog is just too good to leave off.
To readers who kept writing e-mail to me about this, I apologize for the temporary inconvenience.
REMEMBER TEXAS REDISTRICTING?
The comedy hasn't stopped in Texas, even after the Democrats went back to Austin. Even with a majority in both houses of the Texas lege, Republicans still can't agree on a redistricting map for their unprecedented power grab.
Is the Republican Party going to reimburse the state for the multiple special sessions?
At this point I really think they should. I'm sure W's got the cash. Send him a bill.
THE REPUBLICAN DISTRACTION MACHINE SHIFTS INTO HIGH GEAR
Ah, Republican obfuscation. Isn't it impressive?
Except that this scandal doesn't have anything to do with Wilson anymore folks. Josh gets it just about right:
We now have the farcical spectacle of the Justice Department initiating a massive investigation --- with the net thrown almost comically wide --- in order to find out what the president could find out in a few hours, tops.Indeed. Of course part of the problem Josh is that there are people in the media who want to be led astray like this. They want, consciously or not, to protect W and the boys.That's the whole story right there.
The president has said he wants to get to the bottom of this. Yet he has done nothing to get to the bottom of it. The only credible explanation is the obvious one: that he doesn't want to get to the bottom of it.
Whether the Justice Department can find the culprits on its own is an interesting legal chess game. But no more.
The president's lieutenants did this. Rather than trying to punish them, he's trying to protect them. The only thing the White House has been aggressive about is attacking the victims of its own bad-acts: Wilson and Plame.
These simple --- and I think indisputable --- facts tell you all you need to know about what's happening here.
Furthermore, it's not just that the media is falling for the obfuscation campaign, some of them are willingly and consciously playing the role the White House wants them to play. Folks like Novak, Safire, and Howie are the most obvious administration shills at the present moment.
Sunday, October 5, 2003
CLAYTON CRAMER, TRUE BELIEVER
Goodness. I was worried that Clayton Cramer would open his yap about the Lott affair and reveal himself to be incapable of seeing the shortcomings of John Lott. Unfortunately, I was exactly right. Cramer so clearly believes that Lott walks on water after all. As is usually the case, Tim Lambert has the story.
Here's Tim's penultimate paragraph:
The shortcomings that Cramer complains about are only shortcomings if the data was used for another task, something that Donohue did not do. Cramer’s post was clearly misleading, using an out-of-context quote to imply that Donohue did something that he did not do. Using Cramer’s reasoning he is now no position to throw stones at, say, Bellesiles.Go read the whole post to understand how Lambert reaches this conclusion. Of course, it's also possible that Cramer simply didn't understand what Donohue was doing -- but I doubt it. It's a misleading post folks.
Just for your amusement, I'll also share with you an excerpt of an e-mail Cramer sent to Tim Lambert that reveals a great deal:
I don’t know if you actually found Dr. Lott engaged in a lie or not, but I do know that your irrational desire to see victims disarmed and murdered by criminals puts you on my list of people not to bother with anymore.How's that for a reasoned intellectual response? That's so out there I don't even know where to start. So critics of Lott are irrational and want people to be murdered by criminals, huh?
Holy cow. I don't even know where to start on that one.
I think it's safe to say that Cramer long ago crossed the line between reason and emotion regarding his view of John Lott's situation. Like any true believer, he simply can't believe the truth right in front of him. Like Bellesiles, Cramer's hero is a fraud and he can't accept it.
Most true believers usually can't see the truth about their heroes after all. Sometimes you wonder if Cramer realizes the irony of his being in exactly the same situation that defenders of Bellesiles were in a year or so ago.
I doubt it.
THE PARTY OF MORAL BANKRUPTCY
Fifteen women have now come forward to say that Arnie has groped them. I'm detecting a pattern of behavior here, aren't you?
Oh yeah. That's right. This is only a big deal if you're a Democrat. In fact, then unsubstantiated rumors that were never proven are still stated as if they were fact. In this case, you've got 15 women on the record claiming he did this. Anyone noting a bit of hypocrisy here on the part of the GOP? Remember all the unsubstantiated rumors they peddled about Clinton? And now they apparently don't care at all about these numerous stories about Arnold?
All of this is leading to quite a softening in support for the recall apparently. That's not a real big surprise is it? If Arnie wins, it's only a matter of time before he harasses someone as governor. Now that would be embarrassing, wouldn't it? However, I'm inreasingly certain that the same number of Republican lapdogs would defend him in that instance as well.
Also, aren't you getting just a wee bit offended by the GOP's effort to blame the victim? Both Arnie in California and W and Rove in Washington are trying to blame their victims for everything. In W's case, this long ago stopped being about Wilson. It's about your administration's own conduct, Mr. President. I'd suggest, buddy, that you pretend like you give a damn or this really could bring your administration down around your ears.
Furthermore, David Corn's latest column points out that the White House didn't exactly fall all over themselves trying to find the leaker back in July at all. In fact, they continued to try and use it politically. As Atrios put it so succinctly earlier today:
The significance of David Corn's article is that if Rove and the Roverers weren't responsible for the original blowing of Plame's cover, but instead pushed the information onto reporters afterwards... Then the White House's response to hearing about the leak was not to investigate who the responsible party was, but rather to try and use that information to push their agenda. Bush should ask for Rove's head over this one, whether or not he did anything illegal.I would agree. Rove has now done something unethical regardless of whether he was in on the first leak or not. Anyone want to bet on whether W will do that?
Isn't it amazing how the events of the last few months have proven that the folks in the GOP don't really mean a damn thing that they say? Just to use a few obvious examples, several recent stories prove that the GOP clearly doesn't really care about "family values," national security, making us safer from terrorism, or basic ethics at all. However, they still have the gall to continue to claim that they do.
I'm not even sure that the word "hypocrisy" quite covers what I'm seeing from the GOP lately. I think a phrase like "total moral bankruptcy" is probably closer to the truth.
After all their constant babble about moral certitude, the GOP as a party is obviously ethically and morally adrift. Republicans are becoming quite good at situational ethics these days, aren't they?
And, as is no surprise, the problem really starts at the top.
Saturday, October 4, 2003
YET AGAIN, IT'S TIME TO GIGGLE AT INSTY
As Roger Ailes (not the bald repulsive one) points out, it's time once again to laugh and point at Insty.
Sometimes he's such a predictable sycophant for W, it becomes quite comic.
Also, as this post proves for the umpteenth time, the only thing that is more predictable than his playing the lapdog for W is his hatred of the French.
Now why is it that people still read that guy?
Isn't it frightening that anytime the media wants to interview a blogger, he ends up speaking for all of us?
SOUNDS LIKE THE BROWN SHIRTS TO ME
And this so soon after the story about Arnie's admiration of you-know-who:
The truth is available only on AM talk radio these days, and I think a couple of recruits in Arnold's Army did what they had to do. They spotted protest signs in the crowd and goose-stepped over to take care of business.Impressive, eh?Not that they could have known, but the signs were carried by two Catholic nuns in their 60s. According to the nuns, their attackers snatched them away.
The silencing of dissent, coming just a day after Arnold denied reports that he once said he admired Hitler, had the nuns trembling.
"A sign was ripped from my hands," said Jo'Ann DeQuattro, a Holy Name sister whose sign said, "Groping Equals Sexual Harassment."
"I was assaulted physically," said Sister Jo'Ann.
She and Sister France White, of the Holy Child order, were headed for the exits when I saw them. Sister France had taped a sign to herself that said "Grope Free Zone." Sister Jo'Ann had her arm around Sister France to protect her.
Sister France said she gave a "groping" protest sign to a man who held a "Recall Arnold" sign, and watched as he was set upon and had the sign ripped away from him.
"People began fighting with him, and he was escorted out," said Sister France.
As for her own sign getting swiped, Sister France said:
"I believe a woman standing behind me grabbed it. A whole group of people were around us saying, 'Go home' and things like 'Get a life.' "
Sister France still had the "Grope Free Zone" sign taped to her when they decided to leave the rally, so Sister Jo'Ann suggested an exit strategy.
"She was afraid there was going to be more of it, so she said, 'We've gotta get out of here,' and walked behind me, real close behind, so Schwarzenegger followers wouldn't be hitting me as we left."
[Link via Atrios]
These are the sort of folks who are supporting Arnie folks. As Mark Morford put it yesterday:
And Schwarzenegger's bouncing around like a Hummer on meth, inflicting that weird maniacal grin and massive blocklike head all over the unsuspecting media, as pretty much the entire population of even slightly aware and intelligent people in California and in fact all over the nation go, oh holy Christ, please dear God no.Heh.
PILING STUPID ON TOP OF STUPID
Now Bob Novak hasn't just blown Plame's cover he's also named the CIA front company she claimed to work for. Brilliant Bob. Just effing brilliant.
And why'd he do it? Well, so he could try to make the irrelevant argument that the Wilsons are partisan Democrats. This long ago stopped being Wilson, Bob you moron. This is about blowing an agent's cover and endangering national security on WMDs.
Quit trying to change the subject Bob. You're quickly revealing yourself to be the slimeball I thought you were.
Kevin, as usual, has a good point to make on this:
You know, a lot of conservatives are resisting the idea that the Plame affair is for real because it's just so far-fetched. Why would smart people like Karl Rove or Scooter Libby expose a CIA agent over something as trivial as Joe Wilson writing a New York Times op-ed? Especially when doing so didn't really do much to discredit him anyway?Also, you really ought to read the Post article above. Isn't it hilarious how this administration pretends this is some enormous investigation that's taking all this time and effort away from governing? They act like it's an onerous task or something. (I guess they have conveniently forgotten the multiple large rooms worth of documents that Ken Starr demanded from Clinton's administration for his investigation of the pseudo scandals, haven't they?)Well, why would anyone feed Robert Novak information about a CIA front company just so that he can make the point on national TV that Valerie Plame is a Democrat? Is it really worth doing that just to add minutely to the Republican meme that this is all a partisan feud rather than a genuine national security matter?
Why indeed. The bottom line, I think, is that these guys just don't care. When it comes to dealing with enemies, they lash out with everything they've got no matter how trivial it is and no matter what collateral damage it might cause. There's just no sense of proportion at all.
I wonder what's going to be next from them?
Contrary to what Republicans say, this is actually pretty simple folks. There are about nine or ten people tops who could be involved and the most likely names (Libby and Rove) are already known. They're all close to the president.
W should just call these folks in one by one and ask them, "did you leak Plame's identity?"
Why not?
After all, doesn't this involve a leak that potentially imperils national security? What's he afraid of?
Friday, October 3, 2003
THIS IS EXTREMELY TACKY
Missouri Republican Sen. Kit Bond on Thursday fired his communications director for running a political Web site named for the tail number of a plane that crashed in 2000, killing the state's Democratic governor.The website, I'm happy to say, has already been taken down. But here's a google cache of it."The actions of a member of my staff in using official computers to make hurtful personal attacks on public servants were totally unacceptable and will not be tolerated," Bond said in a statement issued Thursday.
The staff member was Ernie Blazar, Bond's communications director the past three years. Bond aide Jason Van Eaton confirmed Thursday that Blazar had been fired.
The Web site had Republican-leaning commentary with links to political news and other Web sites. Blazar, using pseudonyms, apparently ran the site and e-mailed other political Web sites during working hours, and some of it was done on his Senate computer.
The site's title -- N8354N -- "is not random," a note on the Web site read. "It marks an inflection point in current Missouri politics. On that day, the worm began to turn." Content was removed from the site early Thursday morning.
Boy, Republicans sure know how to find the gutter, don't they?
TODAY'S UP-IS-DOWN-ISM
W says the war in Iraq was justified because Saddam was a threat to the U.S. according to the Kay report which demonstrates that, well, Saddam was no threat to the United States.
No WMDs -- but he was still somehow a threat to those of us over here. Right.
Here's my favorite part of W's furiously spinning speech:
He added, "Sometimes the American people like the decisions I make, sometimes they don't. But they need to know I make tough decisions, based upon what I think is right, given the intelligence I know, in order to do my job, which is to secure this country and to bring peace."Translation: "Sometimes you like what we decide to do. Sometimes you don't. However, if you don't, you can just screw off. Hell, I know I'm right even though I haven't read the report I'm now commenting on!"
When W says something like this don't you want to respond like this: Do they have gravity on your planet?
WSJ UNKNOWINGLY CUTS ITS OWN THROAT
Here's a good post from Josh:
In any case, getting into this bigger war won't help because it will only show that they pulled these sorts of shenanigans against their own intelligence agency because of the latter's inability to prove a White House hypothesis that turned out to be completely wrong. So rather than crime without context you have crime in the service of ideological zeal and self-deception.Go read the rest of it.One of the failings of ideologues is their inability to see that everyone else isn't necessarily an ideologue like them. So when the analysts at Langley didn't find evidence to support the White House's brainstorms, the folks at the White House assumed that the analysts were just Saddam-hugging ideologues rather than trained professionals --- albeit with their own very real biases and assumptions --- who were in most cases acting on their own inability to find any evidence to substantiate what the White House was so desperate to prove.
Breaking the law in one thing. But delving deeper is liable to show that the administration took the public's support for a war on terror, pocketed it, and then went to war against its own intelligence agencies and, in some cases, reality.
PLAMESVILLE UPDATE
Mark A.R. Kleiman's Plamesville Update for today is now up.
Today's development is that Plame's job was not minor, in fact it was of the "most clandestine status" a CIA officer can have. That means that burning her really did compromise national security folks. That also means that the earlier "analyst versus operative" story of Bob Novak's is, as they say, no longer operative.
This is a rather major development, as Mark notes:
Cannistraro's revelation also robs the "slime and defend" approach of any logical point, though perhaps not of political effectiveness. As long as the facts about Plame's status was an open question, believing that a serious crime had been committed depended, in part, on believing that Wilson was more or less telling the truth.Look for much more of what the White House and Republicans are saying about this scandal to be inoperative in the next few days or weeks.But now we know, independently of anything Wilson says, that her identity was a real national-security secret and that two people close to the President revealed that secret. The identities of the criminals remain unknown to us, though not to some of the media organizations covering the story, but the fact of a serious crime committed by important officials can no longer be changed by anything anyone says, true or false, about Joseph Wilson.
This story was never about Wilson, and the attempt to make it a story about Wilson, rather than about high crimes in high places, was always a red herring. Anyone who raises Wilson as an issue now either doesn't understand the situation or is trying to change the subject.
It's getting good folks. Their lies are now starting to catch up with them and rather quickly. In this case, this little lie was exposed only a couple of days after it was first tried out.
THE WHEELS ARE COMING OFF ARNIE'S CAMPAIGN
Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign is just imploding before our very eyes, isn't it? Candy Crowley's report this morning on CNN was quite hilarious. She asked Arnie over and over to explain how it was possible that:
1. Much of what is out there in the media is false.
2. However, you don't remember which parts are true and which parts are false.
3. Yet you have to apologize for being a "bad boy" for that stuff that you can't remember.
As Crowley said at the end of the report, "It's going to be a long four days."
The only question is whether these revelations and his disastrous performances under pressure are enough to derail Arnie at this late point. If this campaign were two or three weeks longer, I think Arnie would fade to third place or so.
One of my colleagues in the department wants Arnie to win. He believes it will be such an amazing embarrassment that it will further doom Republicans nationally next year as idiotic thing after idiotic thing that Arnie says gets national coverage.
I think my colleague may very well may be right.
As always, we'll see.
FOR W, POLITICS COMES FIRST
Here's a link to Krugman's latest column. Go read it. (Check the little box if you want to leave this page open.) I'll wait.
Okay, you're back. Now folks I don't even know quite where to start here. Krugman is right in that this is what should have happened eleven weeks ago:
An outraged President Bush immediately demanded the names of those responsible for exposing Ms. Plame. He repeated his father's statement that "those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our sources" are "the most insidious of traitors." There are limits to politics, Mr. Bush declared; Mr. Wilson's decision to go public about his mission had embarrassed him, but that was no excuse for actions that were both felonious and unpatriotic.But it didn't, did it? I'm sorry but it takes one hell of a sleazeball to ignore this and pretend it doesn't exist and then, when under pressure, to pretend this thing is all about "leaking classified information." No, W, you nimrod, it's not about leaking of classified information although I'm sure that's what the index card by your Fruit Loops yesterday told you to repeat over and over. It's about revealing a CIA agent's name. A CIA agent, I remind you, who was working on stopping the proliferation of WMDs. You know that stuff W and the boys told us was the reason for that little $221B war we're still fighting?
That's probably the worst part of all this. This scandal reveals to you the amoral (or is it immoral?) political nature of this administration. Politics comes before everything -- even patriotism and basic human decency. They don't give a shit if the act was bordering on treason, they'll "slime and defend" until it all goes away. This latest "leaking" spin on their part is the perfect example. As Atrios said a short while ago, the problem in Bush's opinion is not leaking, this White House leaks all the time, it's the leaks he doesn't like that are the problem.
Kevin has suggested that this "leaking spin" is coming right from the top and may be what Ashcroft uses to pretend there are too many candidates so the investigation is therefore impossible. As Kevin put it:
Granted, the conceivable universe of possible leakers may number in the hundreds, but surely we have considerable reason to believe that the actual universe of leakers is limited to about a dozen senior people in the White House? I'm all for making sure that every scrap of evidence is preserved, but I hope this isn't the start of a lame effort to drag this out and then pretend that it just wasn't possible to do an exhaustive investigation.Folks, there are about 10 people who are candidates for having done this (Scooter Libby is currently the leading candidate). It's really not that hard. Subpoena the phone logs and figure it out.
As far as I'm concerned, you don't even have to tell us exactly who they called (although it probably won't be that hard to find out), but someone should be charged with a crime for this. This is far too serious.
As I've said already, the Wilson-Plame scandal really makes any of the Clinton pseudo-scandals look like a joke.
Let's ponder this -- a extramarital consensual blowjob versus the endangering of national security through compromising the CIA's WMD proliferation program.
Which do you think is more serious?
I'll bet I know the answer.
Thursday, October 2, 2003
PATHETIC
If Rush lost his hearing (scroll down and read updates 1 and 2) because of drug abuse, that's just pathetic. (I do apologize for the link to Right Wing News but, oh well, they've got the story.) Can you imagine how awful it would be to have done something like that to yourself?
I can't blast away at the man because drug abuse is tragic no matter who it is -- even a insensitive boorish right wing bigot like Rush Limbaugh. I just can't fathom the tragedy of having such a problem that you could do that to yourself.
If this story is true, I think it's time for Rush to check into rehab -- for several months.
ZIPPO
That's what David Kay has found in six months with 1400 people searching for WMDs.
Where's the outrage folks? This was sold to us as a certainty. Rumsfeld told us during the war "we know where they are," remember?
We fought a war because of WMDs -- and there are none. People should be extremely pissed off right now.
I find it hilarious that they need more time. What the heck are they going to find that they haven't already? That sounds like "give us some time and we'll gin up or manufacture something," doesn't it?
NEW GYWO
Here.
(The top panel is quite good, eh?)
RUSH'S APPARENT DRUG PROBLEM
Here's a link to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on Rush Limbaugh's apparent drug problem and his alleged habit of buying illegal prescription painkillers.
The most damning part of the article is this:
Limbaugh's lawyers, Jerry Fox and Dan Zachary, refused to comment on the accusations.Uh-oh.
I don't have much more to say about it other than it would explain exactly how he lost all of that weight a few years ago, wouldn't it?
Update: Atrios reports:
It appears that Limbaugh is a part of a drug investigation, but they're targetting the suppliers and not the buyers.Yep.Sure is nice being a rich white illegal drug user.
CATCHING UP
I've been reading nearly 200 exams over the last week. Therefore, I'm just now catching up on my NYT editorial page reading.
Go read Krugman's latest column from a couple of days ago here. I'll give you the "money quote":
There's a moral here: optimists who expect the administration to get its Iraq policy on track are kidding themselves. Think about it: the cost of the occupation is exploding, and military experts warn that our army is dangerously overcommitted. Yet officials are still allowing Iraqi reconstruction to languish, and the disaffection of the Iraqi public to grow, while they steer choice contracts to their friends. What makes you think they will ever change their ways?Mighty crooked bunch we've got in the White House, eh? Go read the rest of it.
MoDo's column is pretty good this morning as well. Here's the most hilarious quote:
The men who won the 2000 election by promising to restore honor and integrity to the White House spent yesterday doing a pretty good imitation of O. J. Simpson, looking for the culprit. You could just picture President Bush with his Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, magnifying glass and bloodhound Barney. Silly. The White House knows who did it. All Mr. Bush has to do is roll heads.Indeed.
MY GOODNESS...
the White House may be putting us through this crisis to save Scooter Libby! I meant that as a joke. I honestly didn't realize that might actually be the case.
And, let me tell you folks, I now think that, in addition to Rove, Cheney was involved with this. It's not Rove they're protecting but Cheney. This begins to make more sense now. I've been reading speculation from readers and others that this is about Cheney. I think this development is confirmation that this is certainly plausible. We also may now know who told the political staff about Plame's identity -- it very well may have been Dick Cheney himself.
My goodness. This just became a bigger story and the insane defense of the White House now is, at the very least, more understandable.
It appears they're protecting the Vice President.
Holy Cow.
Wednesday, October 1, 2003
THE HACKS' SPIN ISN'T WORKING...
as evidenced by this poll in which 83% of Americans say this is a serious matter and 69% favor a special counsel.
And W is coming close to losing the trust of people across the political spectrum -- Americans of all political stripes now want a special counsel and believe it is necessary
The view that this is a serious matter transcended party lines. Seventy-two percent of Republicans and 83 percent of independents joined the 90 percent of Democrats who said it was at least somewhat serious.So, therefore, more than 90% of American are in favor of a frog march for whomever is the perpetrator of this vile deed.In addition, 56 percent of Republicans found it likely that White House officials leaked the name, and Republicans, by 52 percent to 42 percent, favored a special counsel.
Americans exhibited little tolerance of the classified leaks and those responsible. If a White House official is the culprit, 91 percent believe that person should be fired and 82 percent believe that person should face criminal charges.
I think W and the boys are on the precipice folks. Unless they look like they give a damn about this scandal, they're in enormous trouble. And they're not doing too well in convincing folks they're serious about this.
I mean, heck folks, when your press secretary has to admit you haven't even any asked anyone on your staff about this at all, that certainly looks like someone who doesn't care one damn bit about getting to the truth of the matter. It's W's inability to do such a simple thing that looks the most dishonest at this point.
I think one of these polls ought to ask Americans whether they think Dear MisLeader should ask his staff who it was who blew Plame's cover.
I suspect the overwhelming majority of Americans would answer that question in the affirmative.
MORE FROM THE HACKING HACKITY HACKS AT THE NRO
Kevin's got a great post closely analyzing (not fisking of course) the latest pathetic entry in what he calls the "Karl Rove Talking Points Sweepstakes."
Go give it a read. The president's sycophants are now openly lying about the basic points of this whole story hoping to spin their way out of it.
Nice try guys.
(Yes, I borrowed the title of this post from this post over at Atrios. It was too damned good not to steal it.)
LYONS: "ADVICE TO BUSH: QUIT WHILE YOU'RE AHEAD"
Here's Gene Lyons's column for the week:
Advice to Bush: Quit While You're AheadShortly before 9/11, a worldly-wise philospher on the seacoast of Maine made me a prediction. "Remember where you heard it," he said. "George W. Bush will never run for a second term. He'll resign the presidency. It's his life story: his father's friends get him a job he doesn't deserve, he screws it up, somebody else takes the blame, he quits, then father's friends buy him a bigger job he doesn't deserve and he does it all over again."
It's true the man has always failed upward. Bush even messed up his cushiest job ever, as Texas Rangers' "owner." In reality, he was like a glorified Wal-Mart greeter, a minority shareholder playing tycoon in the box seats. Even so, he had a role in the worst trade of the 1990s, sending Sammy Sosa to Chicago for the equivalent of $49.95 and a litter of kittens. As a happy Cubs fan, perhaps I should show more gratitude.
The obvious problem with predicting his resignation, however, is that there are no bigger jobs for sale than President of the United States. Bush couldn't quit without admitting abject failure. Unlike Lyndon Baines Johnson, the last Texan in the White House, there's no indication he's got the intestinal fortitude. So I rang up my Down East friend to see if he'd revised the forecast. Returning my call after a hard day of tending his lobster pots, he was even more emphatic.
"Read any newspapers lately?" he asked. "He'll cut and run."
I remain dubious. Still, it's good Bush doesn't read newspapers or watch TV news, as he told FoxNews recently, instead relying upon briefings by his trusty aides. The evidence of his failures is all over the front page. Even as the jobless economic recovery continued, consumer confidence dropped and the stock market declined. Poverty levels have risen sharply on Bush's watch; Americans are losing health insurance in record numbers. Polls show near majorities agreeing that Bush is "in over his head."
But it's fallout from Bush's excellent adventure in Iraq that's causing him the most trouble. Months after he swaggered across an aircraft carrier under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," Americans continue to kill and die there. Meanwhile, the adminstration can't keep its story straight. For months, the White House insisted that a forthcoming report by U.S. arms inspector David Kay would unearth Saddam Hussein's vaunted weapons of mass destruction. Now they say it may never be released.
Australian journalist John Pilger found a videotape of Secretary of State Colin Powell telling diplomats in Cairo in early 2001 that the U.S. had Saddam in a box: "He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction," Powell said. "He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."
Without explaining how a country powerless to menace Jordan posed a threat to the U.S., Bush and Powell alibied that 9/11 had changed the equation. Except that Bush had recently admitted that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11." Made after a blustering performance on "Meet the Press" by Vice President Cheney, the belated confession must have come as news to the reported 69 percent of Americans who'd been encouraged to think Saddam bore personal responsibility. Indeed, Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress justifying war stipulated that Iraq was among "those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
With Americans still reeling from the $87 billion price tag to pay Bush and Cheney's pals at Halliburton and Bechtel to rebuild Iraq, the president's speech at the United Nations was received coldly. Calling people ingrates and cowards, then asking them to risk lives and treasure cleaning up the mess you've made is generally a poor marketing strategy.
Meanwhile, bureaucratic warfare has broken out all over Washington. The House Intelligence Committee rebuked CIA director George Tenet for his agency's role in touting Iraq's non-existent WMDs. The Defense Intelligence Agency faulted the Pentagon's--i.e. Rumsfeld and Cheney's--credulous reliance upon imaginary "intelligence" from defectors affiliated with Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.
But the story that has Washington journalists all worked up is what some see as Tenet's revenge: the CIA's insistence upon a criminal investigation to determine which White House operatives fingered Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a spy to columnist Robert Novak. The proverbial "senior administration official" told the Washington Post it was done "purely and simply for revenge" over Wilson's role in exposing the administration's phony claim that Iraq sought to buy African uranium. At least six other journalists were also told.
Which means two things: first, the leak was calculated and deliberate; second, scores of media insiders already know the leaker's identity, and suspect that the scandal may reach very close to the top.
NOVAK IS COVERING FOR ROVE
Bob recites quite a collection of misleading Republican talking points in his column today. He even uses that hack May's column for cover. It's pretty pathetic.
So much for Bob's integrity, eh?
I'm with Atrios, it's time for CNN to suspend Novak. He's clearly trying to cover for the White House. Bob is saying things he has to know are false now.
[Link via CalPundit]
DAMN
Four killed in Iraq yesterday.
This war certainly is turning out to be a genuine disaster, isn't it?
[Link via Atrios]
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
THE GUARDIAN REPORTS...
that I'm right about Karl Rove.
Several of the journalists are saying privately, yes it was Karl Rove who I talked to. Now, the thing is that the journalists are not going to name Karl Rove publicly because you don't name your sources, and to do so would discredit them as journalists. So the White House is safe for the time being, but Karl Rove's name is very much out there.And the "we're too professional to have done anything this stupid" defense doesn't sound very convincing from the gang who has screwed up more things than they've gotten right and hasn't done a damn thing right in several months, eh?
That Rove is our guy is the only thing that makes sense. I mean, honestly, they really wouldn't be doing all of this for Scooter Libby.
We'll see I guess.
At this point I think the press is just amazed that they keep lying about it.
MCCLELLAN DIGS THE WHITE HOUSE IN DEEPER
The guy who started all of this, David Corn, gives us an effective update on where things stand. His concluding paragraph is particularly good:
The facts are closing in on Bush and his crowd. And perhaps the law--that is, if Bush's comrades at the Justice Department are on the level. As Iraq continues to be a $170 billion headache, they have tied themselves to the mast of their prewar misrepresentations. As the Wilson leak threatens to become a primetime scandal, they are yielding no ground and hoping this inconvenience blows past. All in all, a precarious position for Bush. These are messes too severe to be straightened out by McClellan's heavy-handed, ludicrous spin.I think that is becoming obvious to the press corps as well.
[Link via Atrios]
KEVIN HAS A GOOD ROUNDUP...
of the latest "circle the wagons" excuses being provided by this administration's sycophants.
But, he boils it down quite well for all of us:
The bottom line remains pretty much the same: A couple of top Bush administration officials blabbed about a clandestine CIA operative to the press in order to try to discredit her husband, and now they're covering it up. Either you think that's OK or you don't. I don't.Kevin also agrees with me that the names are going to come out sooner or later:
And there are too many people who know the names of the leakers for that to stay secret very much longer.Indeed.It might be a couple of days or a couple of weeks, but both of these questions are going to be answered. When they are, the Bush loyalists peddling the excuses above are going to have to put up or shut up.
I STILL THINK ROVE WAS INVOLVED
I was preparing to write a post about how Bob Novak had changed his story but then I discovered Josh Marshall had already done so.
Honestly, folks, why is Bob Novak changing his story? My guess is that Rove has called him and really let him have it. Novak's being told if he ever wants to talk to ANYONE in this administration ever again, he'd better help them get out of this jam.
Furthermore, this issue about CIA "operative" versus "analyst" is a red herring folks. We wouldn't be having this scandal of she were just an analyst. Do you really think we'd be hearing all of this and that the CIA would call for a DOJ investigation of the leak of the identity of an analyst?
Come on folks, get real. Sometimes I wonder if the media thinks through the logic of what they're being told sometimes.
Oh yeah. Here's the latest WaPo story this morning as well. W still believes he can get out of this one unscathed apparently. I also love how the usual media lapdogs are telling us nothing will ever come of this because it's a leak investigation and those seldom go anywhere.
Folks, the difference here is that these idiots called six journalists with this -- not one or two. And, from what I can tell, these guys have been talking to their colleagues. This is the best known secret in Washington these days I suspect. It's only a matter of time before their names become known folks. W and the boys are hoping it'll blow over.
I think they're wrong. I agree with Torie "fashion plate" Clarke who said on CNN last night that the quickest way to end all of this would be to have those involved resign and face charges. She said that's the quickest way for this administration to put it behind them now.
Why won't W and the boys do this? Well, one possibility is, if Rove didn't make the calls himself, whomever did the calling knows that Rove was certainly "involved" and that McClellan lied about that very thing yesterday. They've now got Rove by the you-know-whats and want to be spared the humiliation and jail time. As I've said numerous times, I believe if one of the culprits (whom I think was either directly or indirectly involved) here wasn't Rove, we wouldn't be going through all of this. They'd have quickly jettisoned whomever it was and moved on.
I wonder how long it will be before someone in the media, tired of waiting for W and the boys to come clean, talks about just who it was that was shopping this information around.
I think it'll happen within the next couple of weeks. What do you think?
That's when the next firestorm will consume this White House.
Update: Josh notes that, since Alberto Gonzales's letter to the White House staff refers to Plame as an "undercover CIA employee," this "analyst" versus "operative" line is "no longer operative."
As I said earlier, it was obviously a deflective red herring that was meant to provide Republicans with an excuse to stop paying attention now -- sort of like May's "everybody knew it" excuse yesterday.
Monday, September 29, 2003
A BIT OF REVIEW
From my very first post on July 16th about the Wilson-Plame scandal:
This case apparently involves deciding that your own petulant score with Wilson is more important than a vital CIA program to root out Weapons of Mass Destruction across the globe. This one disclosure could've done more damage to national security than any of the myriad other mistakes by this administration in the last several months, including the ill-advised invasion of Iraq, which has also apparently made us less safe rather than more.I obviously still stand by those words.Whoever blew her cover should resign immediately and face prosecution for doing so.
If W knew about this and approved of it, it would provide significant and damning evidence that the man doesn't have the judgement to be the president of the United States.
If you want to review the early history of the Wilson-Plame scandal, just peruse my July archive a bit. (If you're wanting to link to anything, the permalinks don't work unless you insert "1573" for "900" in the permalink's URL.)
As you'll see by reviewing that month's posts, it was during the middle of July that the wheels really began coming off for this administration.
SOMEBODY KNOWS SOMETHING
Isn't it interesting that the folks in the press corps are banging away at McClellan about Karl Rove?
McCLELLAN: He wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved.I mean, heck, why are the folks in the press corps doing that? It's not like they know who called...hey, wait a minute! At least six of them (and probably more) in that room do know who it was that called shopping this story around.QUESTION: How does he know that?
QUESTION: How does he know that?
McCLELLAN: The President knows.
QUESTION: What, is he clairvoyant? How does he know?
The fact they won't leave McClellan alone when he denies it and are apparently incredulous when he tries to say Rove isn't involved should tell us all we need to know really. As I said earlier, I think McClellan's lying. Even if Rove didn't make the call himself (and he very well may have), I suspect he knew all about it and was therefore certainly involved.
That's just my two cents on this at the moment.
A COUPLE OF W'S SYCOPHANTS AT NRO ARE EMBARRASSING THEMSELVES
Mark Levin and Cliff May over at NRO are shamelessly trying to spin this thing as a non-scandal. They sound pretty desperate to me.
I think Josh puts it quite well:
As the lawyers say, when the facts are on your side, bang the facts. When the law's on your side, bang the law. When you've got neither, bang the table.Indeed.When you don't even got a table, it would seem, you bang yourself.
Heh.
Update: I had forgotten about what a partisan hack May is. You ought to take a look at this post of mine taking apart an attack piece of his in July.
WHITE HOUSE DENIES ROVE HAS ANY INVOLVEMENT IN THE WILSON-PLAME SCANDAL
He wasn't involved," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said of Rove. "The president knows he wasn't involved. ... It's simply not true."Well, Scott, does the president actually know who was involved?
Why am I having trouble believing Rove played NO ROLE in this whole thing whatsoever? I have a suspicion that McClellan just lied to the American people.
We'll see I guess. If he lied, expect someone to contradict him "off the record" soon.
Oh yeah. Mark Kleiman has several good posts up about the Wilson-Plame affair and an excellent run-down of it here.
HOW SERIOUS DOES W THINK THIS SCANDAL IS?
White House officials said they would turn over phone logs if the Justice Department asked them to. But the aides said Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq.Not very apparently.
W still thinks he can get his buddies out of it, doesn't he?
The arrogance of these guys is just astounding, isn't it?
The other possibility is that he wants to keep himself ignorant of it so that he doesn't have to answer questions (lie?) about it in public.
W and the boys certainly have restored "honor and dignity" to the White House, eh?
Update: Josh, as usual, has more. BTW, as Josh tells us, Rove has called Novak before:
Sources close to the former president [George H.W. Bush] say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted.Hmmm...
Sunday, September 28, 2003
INSTY CONTINUES TO EMBARRASS HIMSELF
Atrios responds to the continuing foolishness of Insty:
Let me spell it out for you Glenn. This isn't about now-Solicitor General Ted Olson making shit up under the name "Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short" writing for a Scaife-funded right wing attack mag, or Gary Aldrich claiming the White House Christmas tree was decorated with crack pipes and dildos, or Dan Burton blowing up watermelons.A classic moment in the history of the blogosphere, eh?This is one SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL accusing TWO TOP WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS of committing rather serious felonies. If the allegations are true, it's also about a president who, at least knowing about this after the fact, kept these people around for months during a time of war.
THE CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE IMPLICATING KARL ROVE
I've been thinking about this for the last few hours. Everyone keeps talking about how this could involve Karl Rove. I think it's even more obvious than that folks. The central figure in all of this IS Karl Rove. That would explain everything that's happened so far.
Do you really think that the administration would've let this go on for so long and imperil them in such a debilitating way if the leaker of Plame's identity were one of the minor players like Steve Hadley, Dan Barlett, John Gordon or Scooter Libby?
I mean, honestly folks, those guys are minor players who certainly aren't considered "Bush's brain." They'd have jettisoned Condi Rice herself, perfect token though she is, by now if it would've got them off the hook.
The fact that the press knows exactly who is involved yet won't tell us also provides further evidence that one of the leakers of Plame's identity is Rove. The press is afraid of Rove's rather Machiavellian approach to everything -- including basic press access. They're afraid if they finger Rove directly that their access to Dear MisLeader will be cut off.
It makes perfect sense if you think about it that way, doesn't it?
I think that's what's going on here folks. We're watching the White House try to protect the fellow who they believe to be the brains of their operation. Otherwise they'd have dumped anyone else over the side by now.
Again, this is just my opinion but I believe it to be a rather rational one.
THE ALLEGED FELONS ARE STILL WORKING IN THE WHITE HOUSE
So the president knows that two of his top aides blew the cover of a CIA employee under non-official-cover to take revenge against one of the his critics, and that in doing so they almost certainly broke federal law. In the unlikely -- but possible -- event that he does not yet know their identities right now he could pick up the phone and find out in a matter of minutes.Why indeed.But he's leaving them in place and, as far as we know, hasn't disciplined them in any way. He's waiting for the Justice Department to decide whether there should be a criminal investigation.
Why?
THE FIRESTORM CONTINUES
Interestingly enough, as the blogospheric storm gets going (see all the usual folks: Atrios, Josh, CalPundit, Hesiod, etc. for the latest updates and excellent commentary), I haven't seen much on the television news where much of the American public (that doesn't read newspapers or, for that matter, doesn't read in general) gets its news.
We were talking about a lie about consensual sex for weeks and months on end folks. Here we have a felony apparently committed by two of W's closest advisors and we're not even really talking about it?
Where's the damn outrage folks?
You'll also note that the right side of the blogosphere has been astonishingly quiet about this little matter. Admittedly, Insty has already embarrassed himself with the "it's really too complicated for me to understand" defense.
Now, I don't know about you, but I think Glenn's smart enough to understand it and have an opinion. He's just trying real hard not to think about it too much.
I mean, heck folks, major felonies (some might even say it's damn near treason) have apparently been committed by some of his heroes in the administration merely for political revenge. I'm sure it just boggles Glenn's mind.
And, again, this isn't something minor like lying about consensual sex in a deposition for a lawsuit about a completely unrelated matter folks.
If this is true (and it certainly looks like it is), a major crime that may have made all of us less safe has been committed.
Update: Jeff Cooper says in comments:
Tom, in fairness there are right-leaning bloggers who not only are writing about the story but are upset about it. John Cole suggested it might be time for a perp walk, and Daniel Drezner said that this was the kind of story that could cause him to switch parties.. Tom Maguire has been following this story for as long as Mark Kleiman and I have; he's skeptical about some aspects of it, but he fully recognizes its seriousness.If I've unfairly maligned these three righty bloggers, I do apologize. If you want to follow the links, click on the comments and follow them.I fully agree that Glenn's post this morning is laughable. Too complicated to understand. Indeed. Heh.
Admittedly, I'm not in touch at all with the righty blogosphere so I was taking Hesiod's word for it entirely. However, you'll have to agree that three bloggers does not exactly make the right side of the blogosphere "fair and balanced" regarding this story now, does it?
FROG MARCH APPROACHING?
Atrios and CalPundit have good recaps of the Wilson-Plame scandal.
If you want to know how serious it is, Josh has this comment on Condi Rice's appearance on Faux this morning:
When your best argument is 'the Justice Department is investigating us and we hope they get to the bottom of it', you're in a jam.And, by the way, don't your ears prick up every time they say "But the president didn't know." Haven't we heard that before?
Finally, Kevin's latest post on it makes an excellent point:
Now that this story has been confirmed, it really makes you face up to the true contemptibility of the whole affair. Think about it: two top White House officials, the ones who run this country and are supposed to guard the security of our country, blew the cover of a CIA agent solely to gain some petty revenge on a minor political opponent.I think that about covers it, don't you?I just don't know how much worse it gets than that. As much as I despise the team in the White House, I always thought that — in their own way — they were doing what they thought was best for America. I never thought they would betray their own country just out of spite. I really didn't.
But if they'll do something like this, they'll do anything. I guess Krugman was right all along: these are radical ideologues who care about nothing except staying in power and will do anything, no matter how craven and malevolent, to get what they want.
At this point it's awfully hard to believe these same people used to say that Clinton's administration was corrupt and immoral, isn't it?
Saturday, September 27, 2003
KABOOM!!! IT'S TAKING OFF NOW FOLKS -- WAPO'S GOT IT
Here's the story in the WaPo that will now blow this sucker wide open now.
Jeepers, take a look at this:
A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account eventually touched off a controversy over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.And now folks in this administration are turning on each other."Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.
Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers' allegation was that Wilson had benefited from nepotism because the Niger mission had been his wife's idea. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife."
The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists. The official said he had no indication that Bush knew about the calls. Columnist Robert Novak published the agent's name in a July column about Wilson's mission.
It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."
Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's occupation, has suggested publicly that he believes Bush's senior adviser, Karl C. Rove, broke her cover. He said Aug. 21 at a public forum in Seattle that it is of keen interest to him "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."
This one's really getting interesting fast, isn't it?
[Link via (who else?) Talking Points Memo]
DOJ HAS OPENED THE PRELIMINARY PROBE
The preliminary probe has begun into the Wilson-Plame affair over at Ashcroft's Department of Justice. This was triggered automatically by the CIA's findings that a crime appears to have been committed. Now it's up to Ashcroft and Company to decide if the FBI should be called in.
With the proper amount of skepticism, Atrios said earlier this evening:
We'll see if it's a real one or a fake one.If it seemingly disappears from Ashcroft's radar screen or if Rove and Company are quickly exonerated, that will be very suspicious.
As I said earlier, several different folks (bloggers and journalists) I've been reading have reported that journalists told them the White House was shopping this story around. That certainly sounds like there's something to it folks.
Stay tuned.
MORE REPUBLICAN CRONYISM
This one has me speechless:
So, you start a company to privatize education and take on the teachers unions. Your company fails miserably both in terms of the market and academic success. Then after you've hollowed the company out to cover your other bad debts friendly pols come along to bail you out with a couple hundred million from the teachers' (and other public employees') pension fund. I love symmetry.Josh has really been in the zone the last couple of days, hasn't he?
THE FOX IS NOW OFFICIALLY IN CHARGE OF THE HENHOUSE
As Josh Marshall explains, John Ashcroft now will decide if an investigation by the FBI is warranted in the Wilson-Plame affair. Supposedly many in the White House press corps have admitted that the White House was shopping this story around for a couple of days before Novak bit on it.
The CIA has done its own investigation and has found evidence a crime has been committed. They have now requested an official investigation from Ashcroft.
So, if nothing comes of this, we know exactly who to blame, don't we?
Ashcroft is well known for his even-handedness, right? I'm not holding my breath that Ashcroft does a damn thing myself.
Oh yeah, and while you're over at Josh's reading about the corrupt nature of this administration, you might as well read his next post down about the crony capitalist corruption that goes to the core of the GOP party as well. I knew Haley Barbour's name would show up eventually.
Isn't it great when political cronies of a president use the reconstruction business after an immoral and unnecessary war to enrich themselves?
It's hilarious that Republicans tried to tell us that Clinton's administration was corrupt, isn't it? I guess Republicans know where of they speak.
Compared to W and the boys, Clinton's administration was apparently as squeaky clean as a church quilting circle.
Update: Josh wonders aloud why this isn't getting any more attention from the media:
But news that the CIA has recommended an investigation of White House aides for criminal wrongdoing is a pretty big deal. So the fact that no one else has picked it up strikes me as odd.Odd indeed.
Update 2: DOJ has opened the preliminary inquiry (See post above).
Update 3: Kaboom! This one's breaking fast folks -- and Bush administration officials are turning on each other! (See this post above.)
Friday, September 26, 2003
DEFINITELY A FAUX NEWS CHANNEL
This is reprehensible. I don't care for Tucker Carlson's politics either but that doesn't mean you do this to him. Only the idiots at Fox could do something like this -- and only Fox's bottom feeder viewers could call up Carlson's children and cuss them out.
(Faux's wingnut viewers are upset at Carlson because he's pretty critical of W these days.)
On a related note, I'm also taking this opportunity to add Steve Gilliard's blog to the blogroll as well.
"A MISERABLE FAILURE"
With one phrase Dick Gephardt has defined the issue to be decided next November. Can a "miserable failure" of a president win re-election? Bush's victory would testify to a civic failure more dangerous to the American future than any policies implemented or continued during a second Bush term. A majority would have demonstrated that democratic accountability is finished. That you can fail in everything and still be re-elected president.That's about as effective a condemnation of W's presidency as I've ever heard....
The Founders feared that the republic would succumb to corruption without republican citizenship—without citizens who could transcend privatism and hold elected officials to account, demanding probity and competence, and judging their performance against both the clamorous necessities of the time and the mute claims of posterity. They made property a criterion for voting because it secured a measure of economic independence. Property-less wage laborers, they feared, would vote as their employers instructed them to. The extension of democracy to those who could not rise to the responsibilities of republican freedom would corrupt the republic—hasten its decay into oligarchy or mob rule.
For all their worldliness the Founders were naïve to regard property as a shield of incorruptibility or the property-less as inherently corruptible. Their core insight, however, remains valid. A republic can be corrupted at the top and bottom, by leaders and led. The re-election of George W. Bush would signal that a kind of corruption had set in among the led. Our miserable failure as republican citizens would match his as President.
Be sure to read the rest of this piece by Jack Beatty from the Atlantic.
And I agree that the inattention of the American people is certainly partially to blame for our current predicament. We have reached a point where the average American is not sufficiently engaged in their own governance to even feel they can hold an opinion on the events of the day. The corrupt and unnecessary war we have just engaged in (and the fact that most Americans apparently supported it) certainly proves that.
As I've said many times, many Americans were looking for an excuse to believe the administration and Colin Powell's presentation gave them one in February. Unfortunately, that U.N. presentation has now turned out to be largely bogus -- but there was sufficient evidence to tell that way back in February.
But most Americans couldn't be bothered to fact-check the administration. If that isn't a sign of corruption on both ends of the equation, nothing is.
The link to this story was sent to me by Dwight Meredith of the recently (sigh) shut down blog PLA.
IRAQ WAR A "BRAIN FART?"
General Anthony Zinni says:
We should be...extremely proud of what our people did out there....It kills me when I hear of the continuing casualties and the sacrifice that's being made. It also kills me when I hear someone say that, well, each one of those is a personal tragedy, but in the overall scheme of things, they're insignificant statistically." (Perhaps he had in mind the comment Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made in June, when he played down attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq by saying, "You've got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month; there's going to be violence in a big city.") Zinni continued: "When we put [our enlisted men and women] in harm's way, it had better count for something, It can't be because some policy wonk back here has a brain fart of an idea of a strategy that isn't thought out.It really is astonishing to realize, as Atrios so memorably put it a short while ago, that this was the plan for postwar Iraq by Rummy and Company:
They really did think they'd just install King Chalabi I, and he'd be showered with rose petals as he sold off the oil fields.And that fact, my friends, gets to the utter depths of this administration's unfathomable incompetence.
You and I knew it wasn't going to be that easy, didn't we?
WHY CAN'T CONSERVATIVE PUNDITS...
like Ann Coulter and David Limbaugh ever just tell the truth?
Isn't it hilarious that these lying liars have the gall to spill tons of ink claiming that liberals are lying?
BUSH'S LAST BUDGET REQUEST FOR IRAQ AS MUCH OR MORE THAN THE MARSHALL PLAN
I grew up hearing about the Marshall Plan and I've studied it. Isn't it shocking that Bush's last budget request for Iraq is as much or more than the entire Marshall Plan? In fact, folks, this war and reconstruction over the next year or so will cost probably twice to four times as much as what the Marshall Plan did.
My goodness. If that doesn't give you pause I don't know what will. I'm not sure "sticker shock" quite covers it. So much for "war on the cheap," huh?
But Rummy wants you to know that, expensive though it is, this stuff we're doing in Iraq isn't nation-building.
I'm with Art. These guys aren't liars. They're delusional psychotics.
[Art Silber link via Bill O'Atrios]
OPTIMISM AND CRONY CAPITALISM
The Wall Street Journal believes that W's support will eventually stabilize at a point "closer to the current 49% than to zero."
How's that for showing confidence in your man, huh?
In other words, the WSJ just showed that even Republicans think W's in trouble.
Oh yeah, and while you're over at TPM, read this post about the uber-crony capitalism of the Bushies. One of W's bestest cronies is now running a company that promises to get you the sweetest deals on reconstruction in Iraq.
Unbelievable.
This paragraph looks even more accurate today than it did last night:
In the best traditions of a banana republic, Bush is actively concentrating power and wealth. Friends-of-Bill walked away with nothing compared with the Friends-of-Bush. They are being given everything they want on a platter - silver of course - and the spoils include what has been promised to you, me and future generations of Americans.Doesn't it?
You'd better get it in boys. These just may be the last days of Rome after all.
Thursday, September 25, 2003
THIS IS ABOUT RIGHT
In the best traditions of a banana republic, Bush is actively concentrating power and wealth. Friends-of-Bill walked away with nothing compared with the Friends-of-Bush. They are being given everything they want on a platter - silver of course - and the spoils include what has been promised to you, me and future generations of Americans.Read the rest of it. This sort of thing should be what the Democratic presidential nominee says about W next year.
This is a devastating and well-reasoned piece.
[Link via Bartcop]
RUMMY'S CRITICS IN MARCH AND APRIL HAVE NOW BEEN VINDICATED
“Windbags of war,” quipped a television critic back in April as cable news airwaves normally filled with slick broadcasters were invaded by graying former generals. With American troops thrusting into Iraq, television networks put these retired officers on retainer to ride shotgun with their anchors. When several of them dared warn that the American war plan spread U.S. forces dangerously thin, the Pentagon quickly launched a broadside that all but accused them of undermining the war effort. Five months later, however, American troops are dying in a guerrilla war, more National Guard and reservists are being mobilized and the Bush team has few allies abroad willing to send their own sons into harm’s way. The “winds of war” appear to have shifted.And I ask, for the umpteenth time, why the hell does Donald Rumsfeld still have a job?...
“I argued on the air during the war, that the coalition did not have enough troops to finish the conventional campaign against the Iraqi Army and simultaneously disperse to centers of regional and tribal power to establish the safe and secure environment needed to support reconstruction,” says Gen. Meigs, a retired four star general, former commander U.S. forces in Europe who appeared on MSNBC during the war. “I think that position has been born out by events.”
...
But these experts say — and have said for months — that the more important and lasting errors made by the administration was the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and send its entire strength, including Republican Guard, fedayeen militia units and senior officers, back to their home villages without vetting them or creating POW camps.
“This is a 400,000 man army that disappeared into thin air, was never engaged or defeated on the battlefield,” says McCaffrey. “That was a stupid thing to do. We should have kept every officer we captured; we should have kept every member of Republican Guard and every fedayeen until we could finger print and get a digital photo of them, releasing them knowing where they live. But we had no troops to guard and process them, just as we had insufficient troops to guard key buildings, to garrison key towns and to search for weapons of mass destruction.”
“Now, elements of this army is attacking us with truck bombs, mortars, RPGs, remote controlled mines — all stuff in the Iraqi Army arsenal,” McCaffrey says.
Meigs agrees: “Dismissing the entire Iraqi Army en masse after the war ... was a major mistake. We should have done what the Germans did with the East German Army after reunification [in 1990]. Send away all over the rank of major and sift through the rest for the ones that could be used to form a new Army, then use them to help maintain a secure environment as part of our effort.”
...
But he and his retired colleagues have been right about the trouble the Pentagon was courting from the start, and they deserve an apology from the Bush administration as public as the unwarranted criticism leveled at them during the war. They’re unlikely to get it, but at least one of them, a former CNN analyst named Wesley Clark, is seeking satisfaction on another battlefield.
W'S CREDIBILITY IS EXHAUSTED
Josh has a good post up about why W's numbers are in free fall:
I'm hearing many conservatives say now that the White House political office is off their game. But I see no real evidence of this. The problem is more fundamental. For quite some time this White House has functioned like a heavily leveraged business, an overextended investor that suddenly gets a margin call. To extend the business metaphor, the White House has been surviving not on profits but expectations of future profits or, in other words, credibility. The White House has been able to get the public to sit tight with a lot of objectively poor news (a poor economy, big deficits, bad news from abroad) on the basis of trust.I think Josh is on the mark there. Boy, now this prediction of mine from March 24th is looking on-target:But a combination of the manifest incompetence of the planning for post-war Iraq and the dishonesty of the build-up for the war have become increasingly difficult to defend or deny. And that's struck a grave blow against the president's credibility.
Credibility of course is unitary. And the erosion has ricocheted from foreign policy to domestic policy and back again in escalating fashion. Suddenly the White House's explanations for why the country has fallen back into half trillion dollar deficits are ringing hollow.
As we've seen recently, a hollowed-out company can push along for some time so long as no one takes a good look at the books or calls in their loans. But when it happens the fall can be dramatic.
W really should get a serious "rally around the flag" effect for a while -- until Americans realize, once again, that the economy sucks and that this president has no plans to do much about it except reward his rich contributors with tax cuts. That realization should set in sometime early next year -- just as the presidential campaign gets started. About that time Iraq should become increasingly expensive and chaotic as well.Damn near prophetic, eh?
This prediction from May is looking pretty good as well.
COMMENTS BACK UP
Haloscan comments are back up folks.
While comments were down, Michael Hatley posted a response to this post about George W and History on his own blog. A link to this post would have appeared in the comments, so I thought I'd share it with you here.
Comment away! In fact, as far as I'm concerned, use the comments to this post to say whatever you'd like!
W STRIKES OUT
Not surprisingly, W leaves the U.N. empty-handed. No troops or funds for Iraq.
Chalk this up as yet another in a long line of major diplomatic failures for the Bush administration.
And, just think, if they had been patient and waited a few months to begin this war, they might have gotten both international support and a real international coalition. I still wouldn't have supported the war but it certainly would've been viewed by the world as much more legitimate.
Of course, it would've been really embarrassing to have gotten everyone involved in this war -- and then found zip in the way of WMDs, wouldn't it?
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
COMMENTS DOWN
I don't know what's up with the comments. They haven't worked all day. I've noticed that Haloscan comments aren't working for anyone today. Hopefully they'll be back up tomorrow.
You're welcome to send me an e-mail in lieu of comments.
W'S APPROVAL IS BELOW 50%...
in the NBC/Wall St. Journal poll.
Expect the other polls to follow suit -- and soon.
It's all coming apart for W folks.
[Link via Atrios]
YOU KNOW IT'S BAD WHEN...
Glenn Reynolds abandons John Lott. "Bogus attacks," eh Glenn? Isn't it funny when Insty behaves just like the Bellesiles supporters did in the midst of that scandal but isn't self-aware enough to realize it?
And, as Ralph Luker notes, it's well past time for Clayton Cramer to
belly up to the bar. It isn't enough to claim that Lott is credible because you want him to be credible.Oh, Clayton? Don't you agree?
[Links via Tim Lambert]
HISTORY AND GEORGE W
As someone who often feels like his blog is his "alter ego," the historian part of me can't help but ponder the historical legacy of George W. I'm still not convinced that W and the boys are done yet. I can't help but worry that W and the boys will find some way to scare enough Americans into voting for them next year to achieve re-election.
However, it is interesting to ponder what could save W next year other than well-orchestrated fear-mongering and divisive Republican campaign tactics. W could still be saved by a miraculous turnaround in the economy. However, that is looking less and less likely. The president and his minions have been telling us the economy and unemployment are going to improve for months now -- to no avail. I would argue that unless the signs of serious recovery are there by the end of the year, W's in a world of hurt.
Without the economy giving Americans a reason to vote for him, W has no other achievement worthy of much merit. Nearly every thing he's touched has turned out terribly. What's interesting is to ponder that Republicans have been telling us for years that if you'll just give us everything we've been asking for, wonderful things will happen. The sun will shine brighter and the economy will take off in a way that will make the 1990s look like, well, the 1980s.
So, suffice it to say, Republicans have gotten their wish over the last couple of years: we've got criminally-low taxes, essentially a polluters-first environmental policy, and a unilateral and muscular foreign policy that has given the administration a free hand to invade and attack any country it deems a threat.
And, guess what? Things on all these fronts are quite a bit worse now than they were when the Republicans took control of all three branches of government three years ago.
Now, admittedly, as a historian I must admit that some presidents are saved by economic turnarounds they deserve little or no credit for. Both Reagan and Clinton would've been cooked if the economy hadn't gone into very muscular turnarounds that saved them. At this point in Reagan and Clinton's first terms, it was clear the economy was on the road to recovery and jobs were being created.
At this point, one cannot say the same thing for W's presidency. While the economy continues to grow at a low to moderate rate, the same cannot be said for unemployment. Interestingly enough, W's presidency is showing a remarkably consistent pattern of mirroring that of his father's -- despite his every attempt to avoid history repeating itself.
In fact, W's economic record is now quite a bit worse than his father's. W has now presided over the largest downturn in employment since the Great Depression -- and the problem shows no signs of abating any time soon.
How much did Reagan's and Clinton's policies have to do with their respective recoveries? Since I'm not an economist, I can't really say for certain but Clinton's economic boom certainly lasted longer and was quite a bit more robust. But, since I'm not an economic historian, I'll leave that judgement to others more qualified than I am. However, I think we'd all agree, rightly or wrongly, presidents get undeserved credit for economic good times and undeserved blame for economic hard times. So far I see absolutely no evidence that W's policies have impacted the economy one way or the other -- and that's not good news for George W. And I don't think most Americans will buy the "it would've been a lot worse without the enormous tax cuts" argument that W and the boys will be repeating ad nauseum next year. That's not exactly a very imaginative defense, is it?
And this lack of imagination applies not only to the White House but to the party itself. In fact, Republicans these days, instead of coming up with new ideas or altering their policies, are reduced to forging on ahead with the same tired and unimaginative business-friendly tax-cutting formula that has, well, gotten us nowhere so far.
Now, as I'm sure you remember, quite a while back I bristled at Helen Thomas's judgement that W was the "worst president in all of American history." In my opinion as a historian, I don't really believe you can judge a president until quite a while after they've left office. Only then do you know what their long-term impact (or damage) has been. Only now do I think we can begin to make historic judgements about Reagan and Bush I. Historical judgements about Clinton will be possible in the next couple of years.
Making harsh snap historic judgements about presidents while they're in office is, in my opinion, exceedingly unwise. However, I will say this much: at this point, whether he's re-elected or not, it doesn't appear history's going to be very kind to George W. Bush.
W AND THE BOYS TAKE A BEATING
Now, why is it we're not hearing anything from Kay about the WMDs in Iraq? Could it be because they have found absolutely nothing?
Mr Neil said, according to the source, the report will say its inspectors have not even unearthed "minute amounts of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons material".What's hilarious is that the report -- if it is ever made public -- will still claim that Saddam Hussein was involved in a campaign to deceive and mislead U.N. weapons inspectors. This is sort of a basic logical problem. If Saddam had no WMDs, why would that have even been necessary?
[Link via Atrios]
Hesiod also points us (Blogger is behaving badly this morning) to this exchange between Richard Perle and Medea Benjamin on Newshour last night:
RICHARD PERLE: What you just heard is a tirade against American companies in the left-wing tradition that she represents. Her characterization of the situation in Iraq is not at all borne out by many conversations I've had with Iraqis, including members of the governing council she's been referring to.Ouch. Now that's the way Richard Perle ought to be treated these days! He's been so astonishingly wrong about every damned thing involving Iraq and the Middle East that he should be drummed out of the foreign policy expert / punditry corps.MEDEA BENJAMIN: Well, I challenge to you go there with me, Mr. Perle, because I was there in July, I was there in August, I don't stay in the presidential palace, I don't go around with bodyguards and helicopters and sniffing dogs like Paul Bremer and Colin Powell. I challenge to you go with me, without any bodyguards and let's walk around the streets of the cities of Iraq and see what it looks like six months after the U.S. occupation.
RICHARD PERLE: With all due respect, your sojourns in the cities of Iraq are hardly the appropriate measure of how well we have done in restoring electricity and getting water back on track. I don't think --
MEDEA BENJAMIN: You know better sitting in Washington, D.C.?
It's like these guys don't learn a damned thing from their mistakes.
And I agree with Josh, it's like this administration is caught in a feedback loop these days.
LYONS: "BEATING TEXAS ONE MORE TIME"
Gene Lyons offers Wesley Clark a little advice this week:
Beating Texas One More TimeI'm aware that Gene's columns periodically have a great deal of local flavor in them and therefore may not interest all of you quite as much as when he sticks to national politics and references. Gene's certainly decided to be a Clark booster -- and that's okay with me.Pardon my provincialism, but part of Gen.Wesley Clark's hometown appeal is the opportunity his candidacy gives Arkansans to beat Texas again. The David & Goliath aspect of the Razorbacks vs. Longhorns sports rivalry provides a window into the Arkansas soul. I must have talked to half a dozen people at Clark's Little Rock announcement of his presidential hopes who compared it to the Hogs recent 38-28 victory in Austin.
"We do this every 12 years," somebody joked. "It's an Arkansas tradition." Indeed it was on a similarly perfect autumn day in October 1991 that my wife and I encountered Bill and Hillary Clinton at a pre-game party outside War Memorial Stadium.Clinton was engaged in his faintly risible statewide tour asking voters to let him drop his promise to serve a full term as governor to seek the presidency.
It was one of the oddest days in recent Arkansas history. That morning, we'd learned that the venerable Arkansas Gazette had folded, replaced by the implacably Republican Democrat-Gazette. That afternoon, the last Arkansas-Texas football game in the old Southwest Conference was played. After the Razorbacks won, players, band members, cheerleaders and fans lingered on the field, celebrating and lamenting the end of an era.
At the pre-game party, Diane, a Pryor loyalist and no big Clinton fan, had given the Big Dog a hug and told him to go for it. Raised and educated in Arkansas, the prospect of a homegrown president meant a lot to her. I remember asking Hillary if they'd lost their minds. Didn't she realize, I asked, that their private lives would be laid open like a fish on a cutting board? We had a brief, animated exchange that taught me a lot about her fear and loathing of the press. I've often thought about it since that day.
Seeing both Clintons as life-sized figures, I failed to comprehend the magnitude of their ambition. Nobody who spends as much time alone with books and animals as I do possibly could. Nor could anybody have anticipated how gaining the White House would turn them into symbols: media-magnified projections of the hopes and fears of millions. Nor how far Washington political journalism--pushed by right-wing, Daddy Warbucks cash, and pulled by the lure of the kind of sublunary fame available to pundits in the cable TV era--would descend to the tabloid ethics of the cult of celebrity. (I've an essay on this theme in the October Harper's Magazine.)
Clark's campaign could well hinge upon how well he understands the Washington press. So far, he's played shrewdly upon his media image as a Democrat whose credentials in the post-9/11 era might have been dreamed up by Central Casting: first in his West Point class, Rhodes Scholar, decorated Vietnam Vet, four-star general, NATO Supreme Commander, handsome, articulate, self-confident, straight as an arrow, etc. If Clark wins the nomination, we won't be seeing any TV ads showing President Junior prancing across the USS Abraham Lincoln in his tailored flyboy costume.
Clark clearly understands that trashing that impeccable image would be Job #1 for the GOP. He told an Esquire interviewer "the ultimate consideration for anyone running for president against George Bush [is] 'how much pain you can bear.'" His enemies will try to portray him as a real-life equivalent of Gen. Jack D. Ripper, the loony megalomaniac from "Dr. Strangelove." Even before Clark announced, the Washington Post ran a profile featuring some extraordinarily venomous quotes--all anonymous--portraying him as temperamental, vain and manipulative.
"I have watched him at close range for 35 years, in which I have looked at the allegation, and I found it totally unsupported," responded Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey... "That's not to say he isn't ambitious and quick. He is probably among the top five most talented I've met in my life. I think he is a national treasure who has a lot to offer the country."
Evaluating this stuff, it's helpful to remember the sheer nastiness of Pentagon infighting. When it comes to office politics, soldiers are worse than professors.
The alternate GOP line of attack advanced by New York Times columnist William Safire--that Arkansan Clark is merely a stalking horse for Hillary Clinton's conspiratorial plotting--will get them nowhere. Besides conflicting with the mad ambition theme, Clark's too clearly nobody's puppet.
But where Clark can go badly wrong is by trusting the self-promoting stars and starlets of the Washington press. As a presidential candidate, he's dealing with a different breed than monthly magazine writers who've composed admiring profiles. No more open-ended conversations, or thinking out loud in the presence of reporters like the ones for the New York Times and Washington Post who turned his perfectly consistent--if imprecisely expressed--thoughts about Iraq into a widely-hyped "flip-flop" last week.
Sad to say, he needs to keep them at arms length and feed them nothing but soundbites.
I'll be honest and say I haven't really made up my mind yet on who to support in 2004. I just know we've got to get Junior out of there.
However, as someone who grew up in Arkansas, whose mother and father both have UT PhDs and who went to college in Texas (but not at UT), I can't help but enjoy it every time Arkansas beat Texas and enjoy Gene's references. Interestingly enough, my mother now cheers for Arkansas when the two schools face each other in any sport.
On a personal note, I actually was in the stands in Austin for the Hogs' last victory on the Longhorns' home turf in 1988.
WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF IDEAS?
Well, one approach is to lump together all of your lame, bizarre, loopy, and stalled bills (most of which will apparently do little for the economy) and call it a "jobs package."
Santorum said the package would include, “The energy bill, the highway bill, asbestos reform, class action reform, SBA [Small Business Administration] authorization, a whole laundry list of things.”Sounds a bit desperate to me. How about you?
They say it will create 4 million jobs.
Right.
We've heard that before, haven't we?
[Link via Atrios]
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
WILLIAM RIVERS PITT SAYS
A moment will come on January 20th, 2005. It will be cold in Washington D.C. A man who is not George W. Bush will raise his hand and swear and oath to preserve, protect and defend the United States of America. The words “So help me God” will be snatched by the wind and carried across seas and mountains to the furthest corner of the planet. When that happens, all of the Earth will be joined together in the deepest and most profound exhalation of relief. When that happens, George W. Bush will have become in his absence what he completely failed to be with his presence: A uniter.Indeed.
Heh.
[Link via Interesting Times]
BUSY DAY FOLKS
I'm snowed. Go read Josh. He's got some great stuff up.
More later.
I'M WITH KEVIN...
since Karl Rove has obviously been checking his phone logs for a phone call from Wesley Clark, it wouldn't be that hard for him to check if Bob Novak called in July, would it?
You know, the infamous phone call in which Rove may have committed an aggravated felony by outting a CIA agent?
Don't hold your breath.
Monday, September 22, 2003
WHY IS THE REPUBLICAN ATTACK MACHINE AFTER WESLEY CLARK?
Could it be because Clark's ALREADY ahead in the polls in head-to-head matchups with W? That's amazing!
Of course, I should point out that both Kerry and Lieberman are also running about the same against Bush -- but newcomer Clark is running the strongest at the moment.
BTW, W's approval rating in the CNN-USA Today / Gallup Poll is now 50%. Will he be under the magic 50 in the next one?
Boy, W doesn't look quite so invincible anymore, does he?
Unfortunately, it's still a long way to the election folks -- plenty of time for W's special brand of McCarthyistic fear-mongering and demagoguery.
[Link via Atrios]
IT SOUNDS LIKE...
the West Wing's only going to be around one more season to me. These changes sound like a recipe for a ratings disaster.
Oh well.
I SAY SOMETHING NICE ABOUT BOB NOVAK...
and then he goes and does something like this.
I guess Bob's just a lying liar after all.
Atrios also wants Drudge and Novak to remember that the people in charge in this administration have their own rather major skeletons in the closet with regard to meeting with and helping scumbags like Saddam and Osama.
It's deja vu all over again, isn't it?
But surely the press won't just parrot the RNC talking points again, will they?
CHAPMAN: THE STORIES GET STRANGER BY THE DAY
Conservative columnist Steve Chapman's b.s. detector is going off every time W or Condi open their mouths and say something about Iraq these days.
I'll post just a bit of the article to pique your interest:
The president never tires of claiming, as he did last week, that "Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties." But "ties" is a mush word that suggests much and proves nothing. I have "ties" to Sammy Sosa because we work for businesses that are owned by the same corporation, Tribune Co. But that doesn't mean he leaves tickets for me at the Will Call window. The administration has yet to show that the flimsy connections it alleges presented a threat to Americans.Chapman has been devastatingly critical of the administration's Iraq fixation for nearly a year now. Chapman's anti-war columns certainly demonstrate that even conservatives don't have to be lapdogs for the administration. Both Chapman and Bob Novak both have spoken out against the war for quite some time now.
Sunday, September 21, 2003
WHAT SHOULD TEXAS DEMOCRATS DO NEXT?
I bring this blogburst by Texas Democrats to your attention. You should go read these informative posts about what it is that Texas Democrats should do next.
I'm sure that many Texas Republicans are very embarrassed by the actions of their party over the last few months in redistricting the state. I can't help but think this is going to boomerang on Texas Republicans.
Wouldn't it be sweet revenge to have both W defeated nationally in 2004 and his Republican allies turned out in Texas?
WITH THE EVENTS OF THE LAST SEVERAL MONTHS...
how in the world is W's approval standing at 51%?
Are the pollsters just calling Republicans these days?
Just from personal experience, I haven't met someone who actually approves of W's handling of anything in quite a while -- and I live in a state that voted for W!
JAMES MCPHERSON LETS...
W have it for his "historical revisionism" comment.
He also lays the wood to Condi Rice.
(For those of you who don't know, James McPherson is the President of the American Historical Association.)
Saturday, September 20, 2003
THEY'RE STARTING TO GET IT
From the Star-Tribune:
Cheney also said that success in Iraq would strike a blow at the "geographic base" of the terrorists behind Sept. 11, a statement that left people asking, "Huh?" He was clearly trying to have it both ways: avoid an explicit statement that could be proven wrong while still spinning the question with all he had -- which was very little.Indeed.Defenders of the administration want to label those who have doubts about the truthfulness of the White House as "liberals" or "anti-American" or "unpatriotic." Those labels are just so much name-calling. There's nothing liberal or conservative, unpatriotic or anti-American about being upset that those who hold the highest offices in the land somehow find it impossible to level with the American people on such serious matters as national security and foreign policy.
If lies about private, consensual, albeit adulterous, sex can bring the impeachment of a president, it's not remotely wrong to raise questions about misstatements on issues that go to the very survival of this nation.
Taken in conjunction with this eye-opening column in Newsweek, it appears now even the administration's lapdogs in the media are starting to get it.
THE IRAQ DEBACLE WILL BE COMPLETE...
when W tries to jawbone the U.N. once again on Tuesday. He's going to try and convince the U.N. that they should be providing money and soldiers to bail us out of this mess of our own making.
If W says what his handlers insist he's going to say this speech is going to be an utter disaster on the international relations front just as his address a couple of weeks on the domestic front. All of a sudden, W and the boys just can't do anything right, can they?
Do folks in the U.N. frequently throw tomatoes during speeches?
And speaking of the walking, talking disaster we call Mr. President, you really should read this devastating piece in the Village Voice about how W's education and fiscal policies are leaving every child and every state in America far behind. Here's just a bit to whet your appetite:
War has a way of taking the air out of national discussion, but we should try to remember that the president's catchiest slogan both during his campaign and since is "No Child Left Behind." It's a terrific sentiment—a noble end that has now been turned into a banality. He said it was his brightest accomplishment as governor of Texas. He said the Houston schools were the model. We wanted to believe him. We all know education is crucial to a healthy community and we all say we really care about it. So we were the pigeons in the front rows.Like everything else with this administration, it's all a game of keeping up appearances -- and it's all collapsing in on them bit by bit.Over the past year or so, getting headlines in Texas but only modest coverage elsewhere, the "Texas Miracle" has been disrobed. It was a scam, a hoax. The governor had put the fear of Bush into the school bureaucracy. You will perform, the principals and superintendents were told. You will dramatically bring down the dropout rate and dramatically raise the reading and math scores. Bonuses were promised to those who succeeded, demotions and pay-docking to those who didn't.
Suddenly, as if in the Land of Oz, kids in low-income districts who had been dropping out of high school at rates of 30 and 40 percent and higher were apparently born again, burying their faces in their books into the wee hours. And then the truth came out. They were still dropping out at the same old percentages; they just weren't being counted as dropouts. They weren't even being listed as "whereabouts unknown"—as if they might have moved to another district and forgotten to leave a forwarding address. They had simply disappeared. They were los desaparecidos. Maybe General Pinochet had them kidnapped for interrogation and torture.
...
Congress, which should have done its homework on Houston before it swallowed the president's hooey, has begun complaining about his underfunding of the program. Rod Paige, Bush's education secretary, says the funding is just fine. No surprise there—he was the superintendent of the "miracle" Houston school district before Bush tapped him for the cabinet. Interestingly, the Texas educational authorities are now beginning to impose penalties on those in the Houston system who falsely reported no dropouts. Do you suppose the president will dock Paige's pay?
I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it -- but the problem is we're all going to pay a price for the horrific mess W has made out of everything he's touched.
I just wish that only the morons that voted for this guy (a minority of the voters in this nation I'll remind you) would have to pay the price but, unfortunately, you and I know it's not going to work out that way, don't we?
EXHAUSTED
I'm exhausted from my three hours of soccer. My little Under 10 boys team played great today but we lost 2-1 to a team that played like a bunch of thugs, pushing and shoving my kids right and left. And their coach apparently cared not one whit about it.
It was quite annoying.
Oh well.
Now I'm off to watch the rest of the Northwest Bearcat football game at the stadium (six blocks from my house).
More later.
IS ASHCROFT LYING?
John Ashcroft claims the Justice Department has made "zero" requests of information from libraries about patrons. However, his own Assistant Attorney General now claims about fifty such requests since the Patriot Act became law.
Is Ashcroft lying?
Is his assistant?
[Link via Atrios]
TWO GOOD POSTS ON A BUSY MORNING
Go read this post by Atrios and this post by Billmon.
I'm headed out for three hours of soccer.
More later.
Friday, September 19, 2003
400K SERVED
Just a few minutes ago, I had my 400,000th visitor via a link from Atrios. I've also had more than 566,000 hits since I installed my hitcounter one year and one day ago (on September 18th of last year) as well. (I blogged for five weeks without a hitcounter.)
As always, I do appreciate it folks. I do hope you'll come back and visit us often.
LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
It appears that today is the day for philosophical discussions on how and why the Bush administration lies to us about damned-near everything. They're really quite good at it. They've turned lying into an art form. Well, hell, there's got to be something they're good at! Because, come to think of it, they've failed at everything else, haven't they?
First, we have an article from the Guardian about Paul Krugman. In this article about his new book, Krugman argues that the administration lies because they reject the legitimacy of the political system and political culture of the United States itself and will do anything to essentially dismantle it in order to take us all back to the good old days of the Gilded Age when the rich were super rich and, well, no one else did very well at all.
Then we have this column by Andrew Greeley about how the administration's big lie on Iraq is collapsing in on itself. Greeley contends the American people no longer buy the premise that IraqWar Part II was part of the war on terror. In fact, Americans now believe something I argued for months before the war started as a major reason not to pursue it, that the war would make us all less safe, not more. As the bedlam in Iraq continues, it becomes remarkably clear that, as Greeley contends, the big lie that Iraq was part of the "war on terror" is falling apart:
''War on terror'' is a metaphor. It is not an actual war, like the World War or the Vietnamese or Korean wars. It is rather a struggle against fanatical Islamic terrorists, exacerbated if not caused by the conflict in Palestine. When one turns a metaphor into a national policy, one not only misunderstands what is going on, one begins to slide toward the big lie. One invades Iraq because one needed a war.And we also have an excellent post this morning from Kevin about this subject as well. He captures the consternation of the administration's critics quite well so I'll quote him here:
The brazen lie and the "nondisprovable" lie are bad enough — but I guess they don't bother me as much as they should because I feel like all politicians do this. But the fact that you have to parse the Bush administration's words so ultra-finely in order to get to their meaning strikes me as something new. It's as if they listened to Bill Clinton talking about the meaning of the word "is" and suddenly got a brainstorm that this technique could be applied to everything.I taught about the Philippine Insurrection this morning in my American Foreign Relations class. It's a rather interesting study in the turn-of-the-century version of the Big U.S. Foreign Policy Lie. American policymakers in 1898 and 1899 insisted we had been involved in the Spanish-American War because we wanted to free the Cubans and the Filipinos from their colonial masters. However, once the war was over, we began to view and administer Cuba and the Philippines as colonies. The hypocrisy of U.S. policymakers was astonishingly obvious to anyone who was paying attention.And this is why the president's fans can pretend to be outraged when he's called on his lying. "It's not a lie!" they scream, and they're right in a hyper-technical sense. But in every other sense, they're dead wrong. What else do you call a deliberate — but very carefully crafted — attempt to deceive?
The Filipinos, who had been lied to so many times by American policymakers before the war it's impossible to count them, eventually rebelled in 1899. A ruinous and awful guerilla war ensued that lasted for three years and cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Filipino lives. Most Americans at the time didn't know very much about it because the administration kept the information from them and justified it with the usual bromides about helping our inferior little brown brothers see the light.
But, ultimately, what makes that situation different from the current one is that most Americans probably bought McKinley's Big Lie and supported American imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines. You can't say the same thing today. Sure, most Americans support the "war on terror." However, once Americans begin to doubt that Iraq ever was really part of that war, support for this continued mess in Iraq and the administration's foreign policy will drop rapidly.
As I've suggested many times, it's at that point we'll really learn about the true moral nature of this administration. If they begin to change course and level with us, that would be a positive development. However, don't count on that ever happening. My guess is they'll cling more and more desperately to the Big Lie that Iraq was part of the war on terror and, as they did in their rather desperate-sounding campaign rhetoric last year, they'll accuse critics of being unpatriotic and not supporting the "war on terror."
Unfortunately for the administration, that charge will have less and less impact on those who aren't already predisposed to believe every last thing that the administration says. These folks will already know the charge is bogus and merely chalk it up to an administration that will say or do anything to stay in power.
In other words, even people who don't consider themselves critics of the administration will agree with those of us who are critics of the administration.
If that happens, W is done and no amount of fear-mongering or excuse-making can save him.
I'M SO SORRY I MISSED...
Apparently this program, as Atrios puts it, is "Porn for Bushies."
Ugh.
AH, W'S EVER-CHANGING STORIES...
about what happened on 9/11 are quite odd, aren't they? Why doesn't anyone ever ask the White House to straighten this stuff out for us all?
Do you think they'd have let Bill Clinton or, better yet, a President Al Gore get away with telling stories like this?
KARL ROVE'S WORST NIGHTMARE
Ruy over at Donkey Rising describes the developing 2004 election situation quite well:
It’s been remarked that Bush’s poll ratings in most respects seem to be returning to about what they were prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That’s true and in some cases they’re actually worse. The public is now 10 points less likely to think Bush is honest and trustworthy; 7 points less likely to think he is moderate, not extreme, 6 points less likely to think he is for working and middle class families and 5 points less likely to think he "cares about people like you". In addition, the public is 12 points more likely to think he has a go-it-alone policy that hurts our relations with our allies.I'm beginning to read many folks out here in the blogosphere who are saying W is going to get creamed next year.Similarly, when comparing the ratings on which parties are trusted to do a better job on the issues, Democrats now have the same leads or better that they had prior to 9/11 and Republicans are not doing much better today than they did then. Democrats are favored by 35 points on the environment today (33 points before 9/11), by 26 points on Medicare (26 points previously), by 24 points on health care (21 previously), by 20 points on retirement and social security (16 previously), by 20 points on prescription drugs (22 previously), by 20 points on the federal budget and deficits (just 3 previously), by 12 points on the economy (3 previously) and by 11 points on education (7 previously). For the Republicans, they are favored by 6 points today on taxes (but were favored by 12 points before 9/11) and by 22 points on keeping America strong (but they were running a 16 point lead even before 9/11).
The conclusion is inescapable. Much of the Bush’s political capital from 9/11 has been dissipated. More than anyone would have thought a year ago, the 2004 election seems likely to be fought on the actual merits and demerits of the entire Bush presidency, not just the two months after 9/11. And, in DR’s opinion, that’s pretty bad –- extremely bad –- news for Bush.
Hold on folks. If the average American used their common sense and/or just voted his or her pocket book and/or wouldn't allow themselves to be frightened into voting a certain way, I'd agree. However, W and the boys use fear very effectively -- and they haven't really even warmed up the 2004 election year model of the "Scare-O-Matic" yet.
I do think Republicans are in trouble and this administration looks more amateurish on every front with each passing minute. Interestingly enough, I'd argue that it isn't that W and the boys have gotten any worse at their jobs over the last few months or anything.
It's just that the media is finally paying attention to just how bad they are at their jobs.
Thursday, September 18, 2003
THE WORST DAY IN IRAQ?
According to published reports (linked to by Atrios here), it appears that at least eight soldiers have died in three separate incidents today -- and perhaps many more. I'm only updating the awful numbers at the right when it becomes official -- in other words when the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count website updates.
I'm beginning to get a little suspicious about the fact the military won't officially confirm the casualties from the ambush this morning. There are several media reports now that we've lost eight soldiers in the ambush.
Regardless, six deaths from combat (which seems likely the minimum we'll suffer in the three incidents today judging from several media accounts) would easily make it the worst day in Iraq so far.
I remind you all once again that we didn't have to do this.
I really feel horrible for the guys we've put in that horrible situation over there.
I know a few of them -- and I worry a great deal about them.
SIX DEGREES OF OSAMA
As a companion post to my post yesterday on the administration's Saddam-al Qaeda two step, read this post over at the Mahablog. I especially like this passage:
What the neocons are trying to do is akin to a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game. Much of the world is swarming with Muslim terrorist groups, and sometimes these groups work together, and sometimes they don't, and some individuals move between groups, and if you look hard enough you can always find this guy who knew this other guy who was in an al Qaeda cell, and the first guy met with somebody who knew Saddam Hussein ten years ago, according to another guy.You really should read the rest of the post.Hell, using this same technique, we could prove that George W. Bush was in league with al Qaeda. There are fewer degrees of separation between him and Osama than most other people on the planet.
IT'S ALL FRANCE'S FAULT
Boy, Tom Friedman's column is a real beaut today. I was pondering writing a post responding to its ridiculous argument but, fortunately, Terry already did.
Go read his post so that I don't have to waste time writing mine.
Thanks Terry for saving me the effort. You've done a very good deed for the blogosphere today.
It really is about time for Friedman to find something else to do, don't you think?
MAJOR ATTACK ON U.S. CONVOY WEST OF BAGHDAD
Hesiod points us to this report of a major attack on a convoy west of Baghdad. According to some accounts as many as eight U.S. soldiers may have been killed.
Damn.
Update: Here's another report, saying 8-10 soldiers have been killed.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
PARSING W
Anyone else think that the administration's Saddam-9/11 two-step is becoming very irritating -- and highly disingenuous?
W and the boys apparently think we're stupid enough to forget that they said Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda at every possible opportunity. The president even repeated this assertion today. (If you want a nice collection of the twenty or so times W and his minions claimed this before the war -- without a shred of evidence -- go here.)
Now, ladies and gentlemen, let's review for a moment. Who do we all believe was behind the 9/11 attacks?
Why, al-Qaeda of course!
So, therefore, W and the boys are really stretching credulity to the breaking point, aren't they? It takes a lot of moxie to now claim at this late date that the assertion that Saddam had "ties with al-Qaeda" was "technically accurate" but that it wasn't the same thing as claiming he was part of the 9/11 plot.
Again, I come back to the same question once again: Do they really just think we're all that stupid?
A TIZZY BY ANY OTHER NAME
I'm with Kevin on what Hillary co-chairing Clark's campaign would do:
I don't know if this is really true or if it's just some breathless conspiracy mongering from the Times, but this would sure accomplish a couple of things fast. First, although Bill Clinton can't endorse a primary candidate himself, this would certainly send a crystal clear message that he does, in fact, endorse Clark. That would be an enormous boost. Second, it would provide instant fundraising muscle that no one else could match.That would be hilarious to see, wouldn't it?But really, none of that matters. What really matters is that it would send the radical right into uncontrollable wild-eyed sputtering fountains of rage and indignation, and that would be fun to watch. For that reason, I hope the report is true.
THE DNC IS...
This blog has just been added to the blogroll -- along with the Clarksphere.
THE LYING CONTINUES
My goodness, Atrios points us to this blistering editorial about the numerous lies told by Cheney on ONE program on Sunday morning. I think it's safe to say that the press is getting tired of being lied to by these guys too.
I mean, heck, when Cheney comes out of his hidey-hole (or as Gene puts it in his column this morning, his "lair"), you know it's getting bad. And Cheney is usually the one who tells the largest number of fibs-per-minute in a television appearance. In many ways, W is actually a great deal more measured and careful with his words than Cheney is. Cheney will damn-near say anything, no matter how preposterous.
And speaking of preposterous, how many of you saw Condi Rice's performance on Nightline last night? That was outrageous, wasn't it? She tried to walk back half of the things they said before the war. Fortunately, Ted Koppel wasn't buying it. However, that was about as brazen an attempt to lie about your past lies that I've ever seen by an administration official.
I mean, heck, to name just a few things, she told us (as Rummy did yesterday) that the administration didn't imply that Saddam was behind 9/11, that things are going great in Iraq, and that this foreign policy was reducing terrorism.
Condi's appearance last night was such an astonishing display of up-is-downism that I kept expecting to see Ted and Condi comfortably sitting on the ceiling when they returned from one of the commercial breaks. Condi said such outrageously false things that I thought it wasn't a stretch to think that she had to be from another universe which might not have gravity or something.
This, folks, is exactly what it looks like when the wheels come off.
LYONS: "BUSH II: TRAGEDY OR FARCE?"
Here's Gene's excellent column for the week!
Gene Lyons
September 17, 2003Bush II: Tragedy or farce? L. Jean Lewis Revisited
History repeats itself, Karl Marx famously observed, first as tragedy, then as farce. Like most Marxist dogma, it won't stand much skeptical scrutiny. Take the Bush administration, for example, tragedy or farce?
Judging by the president's wary expression during his recent speech calling for $87 billion to rebuild Iraq--enough to fund Medicare for two years, or pay the salaries of 1,740,000 teachers, cops or firefighters at $50,000 per annum--Bush himself clearly has no clue. Except that submitting the bill wasn't as cool as swaggering across an aircraft carrier flight deck to pronounce "mission accomplished" in a tailored aviator costume.
Polls show that with budget deficits approaching a record $500 billion, Americans are reeling from sticker shock. Indeed, Bush did such a bad job that Vice-president Dick Cheney emerged from his lair to make what a Los Angeles Times editorial called "sweeping, unproven claims about Saddam Hussein's connections to terrorism" on "Meet the Press." In another sign opinion is turning, the Washington Post gave front page space to an article demonstrating that much of what Cheney said was either factually false or sheer speculation.
But what really appeared to irk Cheney were suggestions that multibillion dollar, no-bid contracts in Iraq awarded by the Pentagon to his old company, Halliburton, may have had something to do with political influence. After cashing in $30 million worth of Halliburton stock options upon assuming the vice-presidency, Cheney says he has taken no further interest in the corporation's fortunes. He described as "political cheap shots," any suggestions to the contrary. "Nobody has produced one single shred of evidence that there's anything wrong or inappropriate here," he said.
What's more, and this is where the story diverges into sheer slapstick, there's not much chance that Pentagon investigators ever will. Newsweek reports that none other than L. Jean Lewis, the preposterous GOP heroine of congressional Whitewater hearings, has been named chief-of-staff of the Defense Department's inspector general--an agency with 1240 employees and $160 million budget whose task is auditing Pentagon contracts for waste and fraud. It's a $118,000 a year job for a woman who once peddled "Presidential BITCH" t-shirts and coffee mugs mocking Hillary Clinton out of her government office at the now-defunct Resolution Trust Corporation.
Apparently Lucy Ricardo was unavailable for the job. When last seen publicly, Lewis was being half-carried out of a 1995 Senate hearing after fainting when Demo-crats began to question her about a letter by Little Rock's Republican U.S. Attorney Charles Banks refusing to initiate a September 1992 investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton's Whitewater dealings for which she'd presented no credible evidence. "[T]he insistence for urgency in this case," Banks had written "appears to suggest an intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process of the upcoming presidential election."
Having prosecuted Jim McDougal's handling of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, Banks knew perfectly well what Kenneth Starr eventually spent six years and $70 million dollars proving: the Clintons were, if anything, the pigeons in McDougal's flim-flams. He added prophetically that media coverage of the kind investigation L. Jean Lewis was frantically pushing tended to "'legitimize what can't be proven,'" adding that "I cannot be a party to such actions."
Both Banks' letter and Lewis's nationally-televised comic opera swoon, it will be recalled, went unreported in the New York Times and Washington Post, the two newspapers most deeply committed to the bogus scandal she helped them conjure out of thin air. It says a lot about today's Republicans that Banks' principled action in the face of the first Bush White House's covert efforts to convene an "October Surprise" probe of the Democratic nominee probably doomed his chances for a federal judgeship.
Documents showed that Lewis and like-minded RTC colleagues spent thousands of man-hours probing Madison Guaranty, ignoring Arkansas S & L collapses ten and twenty times larger in their futile quest. But if getting Whitewater upside-down disqualified a person from employment, half of official Washington and most of the city's name- brand journalists would be out of work.
Of much greater concern was Lewis's bizarre testimony. Under oath, she swore the "Presidential BITCH" T-shirts signified no political bias, and that she personally didn't mind being called a bitch. Before both House and Senate comittees she denied pressuring Justice Department officials to act before the 1992 election. But FBI agents and prosecutors testified that she'd hounded them repeatedly and made melodramatic statements about "altering history." Contemporaneous documents proved it.
Lewis also secretly recorded conversations with colleagues, misrepresented their contents, then swore that a defective tape- recorder had magically turned itself on. Senate investigators proved she'd actually used a brand new machine, and turned the matter over to Kenneth Starr for investigation. But you know what happened to that.
So rest easy, taxpayers, L. Jean Lewis is on the job.
NARCISSISM
Terry's en fuego right now! Terry demonstrates that Saddam isn't the only one who has a problem with narcissism:
State Department types were taken aback last week to find that a longtime diplomatic photo exhibit along a busy corridor to the cafeteria had been taken down. The two dozen mostly grainy black and white shots were a historic progression of great diplomatic moments, sources recalled.There was an original political cartoon from the Jefferson era showing Britain and France pick-pocketing the Americans; there were pictures of negotiations with Indian tribes over land; President Woodrow Wilson at Versailles; former secretary of state Elihu Root somewhere; Roosevelt and Churchill signing the Atlantic Charter; former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze in cowboy boots at Jackson Hole; a splendid shot of the old State Department building; and a photo of President Ronald Reagan at a meeting with a very young Colin L. Powell seated behind him.
Then they were gone. And what was put up in their place? What else? A George W. Bush family album montage of 21 large photos of the president as diplomat. He's speaking at the United Nations and meeting with foreign leaders. There are several shots of Bush with first lady Laura Bush -- exiting a plane, touring the Forum in Rome and visiting Japan. (There's one of just Laura Bush and Jordan's Queen Noor at a U.N. conference.) There's one of Bush meeting in happier days with his very good friend Jacques Chirac, president of France, and another with his even better friend, Gerhard Schroeder, chancellor of Germany. There's a fine shot of him yucking it up in Beijing with former Chicom boss Jiang Zemin, aka the Robin Williams of the Middle Kingdom.
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
THE GORING OF WESLEY CLARK
Boy, was Terry right or what?
George Will's completely discredited lie about there being "no Canadian Middle Eastern think tank" is now being repeated in order to discredit Wesley Clark.
How do people like this sleep at night?
People like Barone and the other "kool kids" in the media are poisoning the well of American political discourse by repeating such false tales to pre-emptively discredit a candidate they know is a threat to their boy.
I'M GOING TO ASK THIS AGAIN
What are they hiding?
I mean, heck, it was okay for Ken Starr to turn the presidential residence upside down and examine every dust bunny under Chelsea's bed and to rifle through Hillary's underwear drawer a few years back. However, if we want to find out what sort of contacts Dick Cheney had with the energy industry, that's somehow off limits.
I can't help but wonder just who Cheney met with and why he's so secretive about it.
RUMSFELD ADMITS THE PRESIDENT IS LYING ABOUT SADDAM-AL QAEDA LINK
I don't think Rummy got the memo! Holy moly! Rumsfeld just admitted it!
Q: There have been a number of public opinion polls that show a fairly sizable percentage of the public believes that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks. Do you believe that?So, every time W repeats that claim he's lying. I would also assume that means he has been the entire time, right?Rumsfeld: I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that. We know he was giving $25,000 a family for anyone who would go out and kill innocent men, women and children. And we know of various other activities. But on that specific one, no.
Rumsfeld also just admitted that stories like this are true. Rumsfeld and others wanted to hit Saddam within hours of the 9/11 attacks -- even though he had no connection to them:
With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.I assume this will be a major scandal, right?Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.
"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
The media will trumpet this from the rooftops, right?
Right.
IT'S OFFICIAL
Life in Iraq is now a damn-sight worse for the average Iraqi than it was under Saddam.
The city has slid into the bedlam of lawlessness.
How else do you describe 872 murders last month?
No, not last year, last month.
The daily rate per day in Baghdad is now equal to New York's average monthly total.
Now, why is it that the Iraqis aren't pleased with us?
THE FIRST SUB 50% APPROVAL RATING FOR W IS IN!
And, as Donkey Rising (just added to the blogroll) points out, it's a Republican poll.
Oh my.
Avalanche soon to follow. Americans are rapidly losing faith in W's leadership.
It took them long enough, didn't it?
[Link via Atrios]
Monday, September 15, 2003
W LIES SHAMELESSLY ABOUT HIS EDUCATION PROGRAMS
Amazing. W now just lies from start to finish about things -- this time, as Kevin tells us, W tells several enormous whoppers about his education policies in a prepared speech. In this David Corn column that Kevin links to, Corn demonstrates that W was being quite misleading indeed:
September is back-to-school time, and Bush hit the road to promote his education policies. During a speech at a Nashville elementary school, he hailed his education record by noting that "the budget for next year boosts funding for elementary and secondary education to $53.1 billion. That's a 26-percent increase since I took office. In other words, we understand that resources need to flow to help solve the problems." A few things were untrue in these remarks. Bush's proposed elementary and secondary education budget for next year is $34.9 billion, not $53.1 billion, according to his own Department of Education. It's his total proposed education budget that is $53.1 billion. More importantly, there is no next-year "boost" in this budget. Elementary and secondary education received $35.8 billion in 2003. Bush's 2004 budget cuts that back nearly a billion dollars, and the overall education spending in his budget is the same as the 2003 level.I'm not sure that calling this shameless quite covers it. As Tucker Carlson says in this Salon interview (in which he comes off as oddly reasonable), Team Bush is very comfortable with telling baldfaced lies -- and has been since the campaign in 2000:
Then I heard that [on the campaign bus, Bush communications director] Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane.At this point, the entire Bush team has once again crossed this line from, as Carlson puts it, "bravado into mental illness." I'm simply not sure W, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, et. al, know the difference between their own carefully constructed alternative spin universe and reality.I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness.
They get carried away, consultants do, in the heat of the campaign, they're really invested in this. A lot of times they really like the candidate. That's all conventional. But on some level, you think, there's a hint of recognition that there is reality -- even if they don't recognize reality exists -- there is an objective truth. With Karen you didn't get that sense at all. A lot of people like her. A lot of people I know like her. I'm not one of them.
In this administration's bizarre up-is-down universe the deficit is manageable, the Iraq War is going well, the economy is recovering, unemployment is okay, the environment is great, Saddam is connected to al-Qaeda, and Halliburton and its subsidiaries are getting all of those no-bid contracts because they're the best companies for the job.
I suspect this "alternative universe" syndrome is going to get worse before it gets better.
Now, if W starts fondling a pair of ball bearings, then we'll need to get worried -- for our own sake.
Otherwise, I say let him sink.
NO RECALL VOTE...
for now. I wonder how far behind Arnie will be in a few more months?
NO WMD PROGRAMS EITHER APPARENTLY
My goodness! Apparently David Kay can't even find anything he can gin up to provide cover for the administration with regard to WMDs in Iraq.
Even though W and the boys have been furiously trying to move the goal posts for months now, it may all have been to no avail. It's now appearing likely that we may never see the much-vaunted Kay report on WMDs in Iraq.
I'll take this opportunity to remind you that the threat from Saddam's WMDs were the reason given for why we went to war and killed thousands of innocent civilians (around 10,000 apparently).
However, this development really doesn't surprise me that much.
How about you?
Update: Kevin's got a good post up about this as well.
TALES OF LIBERALISM'S DEMISE WERE A BIT PREMATURE
Boy, I think it's safe to say liberalism is back, huh?
In a sales surge that surprised politicians and booksellers alike, five liberal books will be among The New York Times's top 15 hard-cover nonfiction bestsellers on today's list, mounting what some sales specialists see as a left-wing assault on the conservatives' decade-long hold on popular culture.And to think that apparently most of these conservative "best-sellers" are only on the list because Mellon-Scaife buys thousands of them! I wonder where Mellon-Scaife's warehouse with hundreds of thousands of these books is? It's probably near Pittsburgh somewhere.Until now, book publishing -- like talk radio and opinion magazines -- was dominated by right-wing political titles, including polemics by the leading radio and television pundits. The airwaves, bestseller lists, and the opinion press were widely viewed as links in a network that helped prompt investigations of President Clinton and assisted the elections of a Republican House, Senate, and presidency.
The extent of the conservative dominance of popular culture so alarmed Democrats that former vice president Al Gore, among others, proposed earlier this year creating a new television network to promote liberal causes.
This week, "Treason" by the popular conservative agitator Ann Coulter clocks in at number five, but no other right-leaning political book appears anywhere in the top 30. The top position belongs to Al Franken's "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)," a satirical body blow to the conservative punditry. A more cerebral attack on the same conservatives, Joe Conason's "Big Lies" registers at number eight.
Isn't it interesting when a supposed cultural phenomenon gets exposed as a fraud?
Sunday, September 14, 2003
THE WRATH OF GOD?
Anyone else notice how Hurricane Isabel is drawing a bead on Washington?
The Wrath of God perhaps?
I mean, of course, you have to believe in all that stuff but I can't help but make the comment nonetheless.
Now, for the millionth time, I hope that Isabel doesn't hit any part of the East Coast but it's increasingly looking like at this point that it's headed straight for the Chesapeake Bay.
This certainly bears watching, doesn't it?
REPUBLICAN LIES COME FULL CIRCLE
Atrios points out that the administration has appointed one of the Bush I administration's Whitewater Lying Liars to a $118,000 per year job in the Pentagon. Lewis, who (as Orcinus explains here) has a well-documented history of telling astonishing lies about Democrats while covering up for Republicans has been put in charge of...wait for it boys and girls...auditing contracts in Iraq.
My goodness, they're repaying this loyal lying footsoldier with a job in which she'll cover up for Republicans yet again. She threw a fit a decade ago about Clinton's deal in which he actually lost tens of thousands of dollars. However, I'm sure this lying shill will see nothing wrong with looking the other way as Halliburton and others rob the federal treasury of tens of billions of dollars in the name of "reconstructing" Iraq.
Atrios provides us with one of the "highlights" of Lewis's earlier life as an RTC employee in the first Bush administration in which she lied to Ken Starr and even Senator Pothole:
Lewis filed her criminal referral just two months before the 1992 presidential election. The timing was so embarrassingly obvious that it pissed off the Little Rock F.B.I. office and the U.S. attorney. They told their bosses in D.C. that it looked like Lewis was playing politics, and that in their opinion there was "absolutely no factual basis to suggest criminal activity on the part of any of the individuals listed as witnesses," including the Clintons. But later Lewis tried again, this time charging that deposits in McDougal’s S&L had been illegally diverted to Clinton’s campaign fund. When, once again, her charges fell into a void, friendly reporters, who had been getting loads of leaks from her, began to imply that she was the victim of a bureaucratic cover-up. The cry of Cover-Up, once sounded, reverberates for a long time, and it made Lewis something of a heroine to the right wing. She was duly called to testify at the Senate’s Whitewater hearings, run by Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato (also known as "Senator Shakedown," because of his own ways of raising money). But the Democrats were ready for Lewis. As they began reading the Justice Department’s low opinion of her grasp of the law, she began to tremble, and then fainted dead away. While thousands watching C-SPAN saw her swoon, the Times and Post reporters were apparently looking elsewhere, because neither paper reported it, nor mentioned the Justice Department’s stern judgment.If you ever wanted clear evidence that this is a dishonest and fundamentally immoral administration, stories like this, in which loyal lying Republican shills from the Whitewater pseudo-scandal are rewarded with six-figure jobs that are to involve the purported "oversight" of public contracts for the president's crony capitalist buddies, certainly provide all the evidence you need.
Saturday, September 13, 2003
51% OF AMERICANS OPPOSE W'S $87B FOR IRAQ
Holy moly. Most Americans now clearly believe this war is costing way too damn much -- and feel the administration has misled them about all of this. If you'll recall, war critics like me warned everyone about how this war was really going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars months before this war even started.
Now why do think W and the boys have been so coy in telling us what this war will really cost over the last few months?
And if you think it's really going to just cost $221B (it's actually $79B (appropriated in March) + $87B (asked for by W on Sunday) + $55B (the administration admitted it will need $55B more on Tuesday which, curiously enough, most of the mainstream press hasn't even reported yet)), I've got some beachfront property in southeastern Nebraska I'd love to show you.
I think middle 40s in approval ratings are just around the corner folks.
Like father, like son.
[Link via Atrios]
EEEWWW
John Lott linked to me. I'm going to have to go take a shower.
Tim Lambert explains why Lott is now lying about his lies (the creation date recorded by his computer was September 2 -- so he's lying yet again). As Lambert demonstrates, this is just another distraction so he can avoid answering all of the other major questions that exist about his work.
I think it's fairly safe to say Lott doesn't have many fans left. He linked to me yesterday and he's sent me a whopping 8 visitors so far.
Heck, I'll bet seven of the visits are from Mary Rosh.
DAMN
Friday, September 12, 2003
WHAT'S A GOOD REPUBLICAN TO DO?
This must've been really hard for him, right?
You've got to choose between doing your duty and serving your country or breaking numerous military regulations in flying back to Missouri from Gitmo so, once there, you can vote to override the governor's veto of a bill that makes it legal for folks in Missouri to carry concealed weapons with them everywhere.
Well, you and I now know the answer to that question, don't we?
This guy's hide should be nailed to the wall for this one -- and that of his commanding officer as well.
Do you think it'll happen?
Nah.
Of course not.
[Thanks to David de la Fuente in the comments to this post for the link]
WOULDN'T IT BE FUNNY...
It's looking more likely all the time.
And, any way this goes, the Republicans lose. This recall is idiotic.
If Davis isn't recalled, they look like morons who wasted the state's money. If Davis is recalled and Bustamante wins, they look like morons who did all this and it backfired on them politically.
If Davis is recalled and Arnold wins, Arnie then has to come up with cuts and a plan for the budget -- and early indications on that score are not good. Arnold's already looking like just another evasive politician with his painfully vague platitudes about the budget problems. If the economy doesn't improve and he can't solve the budget problem, he'll take the Republicans down with him.
I've always been amazed Republicans pursued this recall.
It's a loser for them no matter what happens.
KRUGMAN: "EXPLOITING THE ATROCITY"
Paul Krugman's column today is excellent. He says something similar to what I've been saying here. Get ready for the true nastiness to start. As these guys begin to feel they're going to lose, it's going to get awful:
The result, clearly, will be an ugly, bitter campaign - probably the nastiest of modern American history. Four months ago it seemed that the 2004 campaign would be all slow-mo films of Mr. Bush in his flight suit. But at this point, it's likely to be pictures of Howard Dean or Wesley Clark that morph into Saddam Hussein. And Donald Rumsfeld has already rolled out the stab-in-the-back argument: if you criticize the administration, you're lending aid and comfort to the enemy.And if we get a "Dubya-dip" recession, I don't even want to think what these guys will do to try and hang on.
If that happens, war with Iran and a resulting $1 trillion deficit may be in our immediate future.
The other day, one of my students told me he thought W was cooked, done, finito. I told him "You underestimate how well these guys cynically use fear. I wouldn't be crowing just yet."
WHO CARES WHAT THE PEOPLE THINK?
I'm sad to say Missouri has now joined thirty-five other states now and passed a right-to-carry law. The legislature overrode the Governor's veto of this bill yesterday. Defeated in a statewide referendum four years ago, the NRA and gun rights groups, armed no doubt with cooked studies by charlatans like John Lott, finally twisted enough arms in the legislature to get their bill.
I'm actually just surprised it took so long to be honest. Missouri's legislature, comically misproportioned to make rural Missouri much more powerful than it should be in both houses of the legislature, has been in favor of such legislation for about a decade. Only vetoes by Governor Carnahan and Governor Holden had stopped this thing from becoming law.
It is interesting to ponder how blithely legislators were able to brush off their defeat of four years ago and pretend that all of the people of Missouri want this law. As I've said before, Missouri is marked by a profound rural-urban split. Rural folks, who seldom see gun violence and are therefore not really afraid of it being a problem for them, want this law. Urban folks, who are threatened and worry about gun violence every day, don't. Unsurprisingly, my mindless Republican automaton legislator, of course, voted to override the veto and voted for it the first time around. This despite the fact that my county (the largest county in population in his district) and my town (his hometown) voted against the referendum legislation four years ago.
But hey, who really gives a damn about what the people want? They were irrelevant to the equation. The NRA and gun "enthusiasts" wanted this bill and, finally, millions of dollars in campaign contributions later, they got it.
That, I'm afraid, is the real story here.
GITMO DETAINEES TO BE DETAINED INDEFINITELY
Rumsfeld admitted yesterday that he doesn't give a damn if we ever file charges against the more than 600 detainees at Gitmo:
"Our interest is in not trying them and letting them out," he said. "Our interest is in — during this global war on terror — keeping them off the streets, and so that's what's taking place."I think Morat sums this up quite well:
Let's see: We want to hold them for the length of the War on Terror, the timespan of which ranges from 'A really long time' to 'forever', but we don't really plan to actually try or charge most of them.I mean, heck folks, doesn't it seem like a part of basic human rights that we at least charge these folks with something eventually?Not even under the rather....loose...standards of a military tribunal. Which, I might add, are so loose that most legal associations feel that participating in them is a violation of legal ethics. Not that it matters, as the US's opinion is that even if the kangaroo court/Military tribunal acquits them, we still don't have to release them.
Isn't that great? Because America is all about indefinite detention of suspects, even if the case against them is so weak that a kangaroo court won't convict them.
Isn't this a violation of the U.N. charter?
Wonderful, W and the boys have just made sure we've just become what we supposedly despise -- a state that holds people indefinitely without charges.
Thursday, September 11, 2003
GOP TALKING POINTS APPARENTLY PREPARED BY AN OFFICIAL IN THE WHITE HOUSE ON GOVERNMENT TIME
Holy cow. I didn't even see this comment when it was first posted but Sean-Paul did.
Judging from the time and date stamp on the PDF document, these seemingly innocuous GOP talking points on Iraq I linked to yesterday were apparently prepared by a White House official, Brian Besanceney, Deputy Communications Director, on government time.
Therefore, you and I as taxpayers paid Besanceney to prepare these political talking points for the Republican Party boys and girls.
At the very least, that's a violation of White House ethics rules, isn't it?
Update: Apparently this document is a White House "fact sheet" not GOP talking points. In which case it would be perfectly okay for a Deputy Communications Director to work on this document. I honestly can't tell myself. Is this an official White House document -- or not?
If I've maligned Mr. Besanceney unjustly, I do apologize.
BTW, isn't it pretty scandalous that the press is more or less publishing White House "fact sheets" verbatim?
Man, this certainly demonstrates that the press these days is more or less behaving as "scribes" for the White House, doesn't it?
KEVIN SAYS
Basically, Lott wants to pretend that Model 2 is the one he's always used. That way, when he corrects the data errors, his results still hold up. Unfortunately for Lott, his attempts to rewrite history were as clumsy as they were dishonest. His original table did use Model 1, his results do go away when the corrected data is plugged in, and he did respond to this by furtively devising a new model that would continue to give him the results he wanted.I agree....
And a note to Glenn Reynolds, who has said he is "not sufficiently knowledgeable to opine on the statistical questions": my timeline deliberately avoids discussing the validity of the competing econometric models, which I'm not competent to judge either. Rather, it simply shows how Lott works, something that anyone is competent to judge. He's a liar and a cheat, and merely being "quite reluctant" to rely on him is far too weak a response.
The evidence is clear. John Lott should be fired from the American Enterprise Institute forthwith and banned from polite society.
HURRICANE ISABEL...
just became a Category 5 storm. Isabel is now effectively capable of destroying W's chances at re-election by striking anywhere along the east coast -- which is where it appears to be currently heading.
Our National Guard is stretched so thin because of deployments to Iraq that there will likely be no effective response to such a disaster -- like there wasn't to Hugo and Andrew under Poppy (Hurricane Andrew put the nail in Bush I's coffin in Florida in 1992).
At times, history really does appear to be repeating itself, doesn't it?
I'm sure W is already preparing his excuses.
Again, of course I hope Isabel doesn't strike anywhere on the east coast but it's looking more likely by the moment.
We'll see.
This could get interesting.
THE FALLING MAN
Here's an interesting story in Esquire magazine about the most famous photograph of the events of 9/11. Here's just a paragraph of it to pique your interest:
There was no terror or confusion at the Associated Press. There was, instead, that feeling of history being manufactured; although the office was as crowded as he'd ever seen it, there was, instead, "the wonderful calm that comes into play when people are really doing their jobs." So Drew did his: He inserted the disc from his digital camera into his laptop and recognized, instantly, what only his camera had seen—something iconic in the extended annihilation of a falling man. He didn't look at any of the other pictures in the sequence; he didn't have to. "You learn in photo editing to look for the frame," he says. "You have to recognize it. That picture just jumped off the screen because of its verticality and symmetry. It just had that look." He sent the image to the AP's server. The next morning, it appeared on page seven of The New York Times. It appeared in hundreds of newspapers, all over the country, all over the world. The man inside the frame—the Falling Man—was not identified.The photographer, Richard Drew, has also written an editorial about this photograph in the L.A. Times as well.
Both of these pieces raise questions about why we're uncomfortable with these images. I'll admit that as I was watching Ric Burns's film about the WTC on PBS the other night, it was those images that were the most disturbing and difficult for me to deal with.
Why is that?
Is it the desperation?
Is it that it makes us feel uncomfortable that we could be in such a horrible situation -- and we don't really want to think about it?
I don't know.
What do you think?
KEEPING THINGS IN PROPORTION
Read this post by Jim Henley.
[Link via college bud Kuff]
FOR THE 9/11 ANNIVERSARY, THE SCARE-O-MATIC IS SWITCHED TO HIGH
Get a load of this "Worldwide Caution" statement from the State Department:
Looking at the last few months, Al-Qaida and its associated organizations have struck in the Middle East in Riyadh, in North Africa in Casablanca, and in East Asia in Indonesia. We therefore assess that European or Eurasian locations could be venues for the next round of attacks, possibly to closely coincide with the anniversary of the 11 September attack. We expect Al-Qaida will strive for new attacks that will be more devastating than the September 11 attack, possibly involving nonconventional weapons such as chemical or biological agents. We also cannot rule out the potential for Al Qaida to attempt a second catastrophic attack within the U. S.Boy, is there anything the State Department didn't include as a possibility? I guess we should expect this from an administration that was caught so flat-footed two years ago that the whole day was an utter disaster for them. This statement is the ultimate in fear-mongering and CYA, isn't it?Terrorist actions may include, but are not limited to, suicide operations, hijackings, bombings or kidnappings. These may also involve commercial aircraft and threats to include conventional weapons, such as explosive devices. Terrorists do not distinguish between official and civilian targets. These may include facilities where American citizens and other foreigners congregate or visit, including residential areas, clubs, restaurants, places of worship, schools, hotels, outdoor recreation events or resorts and beaches. U.S. citizens should remain in a heightened state of personal security awareness when attendance at such locations is unavoidable.
I can see the news channels plan to wallow in the 9/11 anniversary all day long. I had just started this blog last year on September 11, 2002. It was a little less than a month old when I wrote this post about how the administration and Republicans were cynically using 9/11 for political purposes.
That post stands up pretty well a year later, doesn't it?
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
JUST HOW DISHONEST IS JOHN LOTT?
Pretty damn dishonest it appears:
I wondered when Lott had created this new version of Table 3a, so I looked at the modification date on the file. It said January 18, 2004, which is, uh, next year. Of course, the modification date doesn’t have to be when the file was last modified—you can set it to any date you please, but why would Lott set it to next year? It was only when I wrote the date out in numerical form that I was able to figure it out. The modification date was set to 01/18/04. On the page where you download the file, Lott claims that it was “corrected: April 18, 2003”, or, in numerical form, 04/18/03. Bingo! Lott was trying to set the modification date to April 18, 2003 so it would look like he created this version of the table first. He managed to set the day of the month to 18, but screwed up and set the year to 04 instead of setting the month to 04.My goodness. I'm speechless. Not only is Lott trying to falsify his data (read the post), he's even trying to alter the dates on these newly-changed tables to make it look like he didn't change anything!
All right, Insty and Clayton, it's now time to admit that Lott's a fraud.
Even if you can't understand all the econometrics Glenn, Tim has now demonstrated that Lott is deliberately trying to mislead people about his research results.
IS HURRICANE ISABEL GOING TO MAKE SURE FLORIDA'S ELECTORAL VOTES ARE IN PLAY NEXT YEAR?
Hesiod raises the interesting possibility that history may be repeating itself once again. You see, because of the Iraq mess, W has now stretched Florida's National Guard so thin that it would be very difficult for them to play any role in the cleanup after a major hurricane in Florida.
He suggests that, if Florida gets hammered by a major hurricane (as it was in 1992) like Isabel, we could see the people of Florida decide, as they did in 1992, that this guy just doesn't care enough and that it's time to vote for the other guy. It could easily bring Florida's electoral votes more easily into the reach of the Democratic candidate.
And, of course, this problem is compounded by the fact that W didn't really win Florida the last time around. If folks in Florida just vote the same way they did in 2000 and the votes are actually counted competently, it's quite likely a Democrat will win Florida next year anyway -- no matter what happens.
And it's pretty hard for W to win without Florida. Most of W's "in the pocket" red states at this point at least have too few electoral votes to put him over the top without Florida.
It goes without saying that I truly hope, for the people of Florida's sake, that this doesn't happen but Hurricane Isabel appears to be heading right for south Florida at the moment.
GEORGE WILL MAKES STUFF UP AND THE POST DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN
Terry's been trying to get the WaPo to run a correction of an obvious error (or, as is more likely, a willful deception) in George Will's column now for nearly two weeks. He even talked to the Ombudsman and the editorial department today to no avail.
After you read this post, you'll realize that they clearly just don't give a damn.
So much for wanting to get it right, huh?
Impressive, eh?
I CAN'T SAY I'M SURPRISED
In the District, President Bush serves as commander in chief of the D.C. National Guard, the way governors do in their states. So you might have expected him to show up yesterday at the funeral for Spec. Darryl T. Dent, 21, the D.C. guardsman who was killed recently in Iraq.Sigh.Canaan Baptist Church, where Dent's funeral was held, is at 16th and Newton streets NW, not five miles from the White House. Bush could have jogged to the wake, had a courier drop off flowers and a card or, at the very least, telephoned the slain soldier's family.
Call Bush AWOL, missing in action -- or just too busy fundraising. But he blew it.
"We haven't heard from him or the White House, not a word," said Marion Bruce, Dent's aunt and family spokeswoman. "I don't want to speak for the whole family, but I am not pleased."
Several District officials attended the funeral, including Mayor Anthony A. Williams and D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Dent is to be buried today at Arlington National Cemetery.
During a nationally broadcast speech last year, Bush referred to Williams as "my mayor." That being the case, he could have attended Dent's funeral as a simple gesture of sorrow over the death of a neighbor who also happened to be a soldier under his command.
Of course, that would not have been as stylish as, say, staging a landing on an aircraft carrier. And being seen at a soldier's funeral probably wouldn't make it look like the war was over, as Bush declared on the flight deck of that ship.
But it would have been the right thing to do.
[Link via Hesiod]
E.J. DIONNE SAYS
The fiscal burden for this war does not have to be piled onto future generations. And it should not be borne by Americans most in need, the ones who would suffer from the budget cuts that bigger deficits would inevitably bring on. It's now obvious that the country cannot afford huge expenditures for war and reconstruction along with continued outsized tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.Indeed.If Bush wants us to believe that this war is as important as he says it is, he needs to ask something from himself and something from Americans who can most afford it. That means rescinding some of his tax cuts for the most well-off even if his campaign contributors squawk. If Bush and his friends aren't willing to sacrifice anything for this cause, they abandon the right to ask sacrifices from of the rest of us.
Heh.
WILL KAY GET A FREE PASS -- LIKE COLIN LAST FEBRUARY?
Here's a good article from Editor and Publisher wondering aloud if David Kay is going to get the same kind of free pass on his veracity that Colin Powell got back in February.
If you recall, I linked to the same story back in August and wondered the same thing:
Let's review Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N., shall we? I remember all the triumphant e-mails and posts on my comment boards back in February about how this was a slam-dunk. Boy, what a difference a few months makes, huh? Six months later, Powell's presentation very well may now stand as one of the lowest points in the diplomatic history of the United States.The folks over at Editor and Publisher wonder if the media is getting ready to do the same misleading thing again -- act like this just takes care of it and we can "move on" now.
I also wrote a post back in June in which I pointed out the same thing they do -- which is that there was evidence at the time that Powell's presentation was fishy. However, I suggest there's another cause for this and I think the same thing was true with the media back in February as well:
Well [the reason for this post is] to point out that, even in the astonishingly pro-war media culture of February and March, if one wanted to read closely, you could see that Powell's presentation didn't check out.Will the media do it to us again? Will they try to make us all "feel better" again by telling us that this provides the excuse we all needed to believe the administration? Like all citizens, we ultimately want to believe our government and are susceptible to the "look, they really were telling the truth" argument -- even if it is demonstrably bogus at the time it is made.However, most Americans, I'm afraid to say, were nowhere close to that critical of what their government was telling them. Like the O.J. jury, they were looking for an excuse to believe the administration and Powell provided them with that excuse.
Now, like most people who know they've been duped, they're too sheepish to admit it -- and will continue to be unless it gets a lot worse in Iraq. My guess is, unfortunately, that day is coming.
And, I'm afraid, this sort of problem certainly speaks to the general inattention of the American people. They don't want to spend the time to discern for themselves whether their government is telling the truth, so they just believe what the media tells them.
So it's not, I'm afraid, just the media's fault folks, it's also ours.
(If you want an index of sorts to my February posts on Powell's presentation, go here.)
GOP TALKING POINTS ON THE $87B
Sean-Paul has posted a link to a copy of the GOP/White House's official talking points on the additional $87B for Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you'll notice, it's exactly what we're hearing from the media.
Tuesday, September 9, 2003
READ KRUGMAN
It's a good column. Go read it.
Today's my marathon six-hours-in-the-classroom day. I'm tired.
I'll see you tomorrow.
PAUL GREENBERG PROVES...
once again that he's way too much of a conventional partisan hack these days to ever even be considered for a Pulitzer.
After reading this phony little editorial hissy fit about how the mean old Democrats are keeping out Estrada because of his ethnicity (drawn straight from the RNC's talking points on this I'm sure), it's hard to believe this guy ever wrote legitimate editorials supporting Civil Rights, isn't it?
[Link via TBogg]
TBOGG'S IN THE ZONE
No tin-horn terrorist crocker-croaker, pretending to be a policeman, is gonna keep President Bring Em On from getting to a fundraiser, by god. "Come and get me, you bastards!", the president screamed while shaking his tiny little fist. Meanwhile Condi breaks out a fresh adult diaper and checks her bag for a package of baby moist wipes...
FRANK O'BANNON OUT OF SURGERY
I just checked Jeff Cooper's blog and discovered -- to my horror -- that Frank O'Bannon, the governor of Indiana, suffered a massive stroke and a cerebral hemmorrhage yesterday. He's out of surgery now and it's unclear if he'll make it. He was elected governor in 1996. When I left Indiana in August of 1997, he was in his first year as governor.
How'd I miss this?
It goes without saying that my thoughts and prayers are with the O'Bannons. Frank O'Bannon is a great man and the most honest public servant I've ever seen in politics.
HOW ABOUT $142B?
Holy cow. The president gives a speech on Sunday night and by Tuesday morning, W and his minions have to admit they need $142B not $87B for Iraq.
Willful deception or incompetence?
If you go through this article and add up the proposed spending for Iraq, you can quickly come to a mind boggling figure: $79B + $87B + $55B = $221B. My goodness. Over a two year span, that means that more than 5% of federal outlays will be to pay for Iraq!
Did these folks really think they could pay for all of this with the first $79B -- or did they plan to come back to us later and ask for a lot more money?
Again, willful deception or incompetence?
And, by the way, I'm pretty sure the budget deficit will be over $600B next year. If my math is right, that's about 25% of federal outlays. But I'm sure they'll claim the deficit is lower right up until they're made to admit the reality -- probably right in the middle of next fall's campaign.
Again, willful deception or incompetence?
Can we really afford to keep these folks in the White House much longer?
I'm not sure we can afford to keep them there until January of 2005 -- although we have little choice I'm afraid.
Update: Go take a look at this chart. It's really quite depressing, isn't it?
I'd like to see a similar chart for what we could do with $221B, wouldn't you?
Monday, September 8, 2003
JOSH SAYS
So here the whole sordid business comes full circle. The administration games the public into an endeavor by exaggerating the gains and minimizing the price. Then the gains are revealed as not quite so great. And the price is revealed as very much greater. And if all that weren't bad enough, the operation is bungled on several fronts. So the gamers and the scammers say it's the fault of the critics who tried to carve through the mumbo-jumbo in the first place. And when the public has a touch of buyers' remorse over a product that was peddled on false advertising, the answer lies in the public's own degeneracy and division.Okay, I was with Josh until that last sentence.It's everyone's fault but theirs. 'The terrorists', domestic enemies, cultural declension, the French, perhaps tomorrow the decline of reading, the end of corporal punishment in the schools, permissive parenting, bad posture, rock 'n roll, space aliens. The administration is choking on its own lies and evasions. And we have to bail them out because the ship of state is our ship.
Before I try to comment further, let me just stop and ask a rather basic question: what the hell does that last sentence mean?
Update: Thanks so much to those who translated that last sentence for me. I think Loopster in comments translates it best, so I'll just put what he has to say here:
Here's what it means to me: Like it or not, we're tied, chained, lassoed to these guys, these insane freaks who run our government, simply by virtue of the fact they, well, run the government. When Josh says, "bail them out," I think it's meant as a rhetorical precursor to the "ship of state" image he's about to spring. Unfortunately, the term "bail out" has taken on a negative connotation, as in "the sort of federal windfall that only the most privileged and powerful failures receive."I agree with this. Unfortunately, if there's any way to spin this horrible disaster as a success the shameless folks in this administration will do so. We have to hope someone in this administration eventually comes to their senses.So when he says, "bail them out," I think he means we have to do what we can to clean up the mess these creeps have made, because it's our mess too, and it's going to ruin our lives if we let it get any bigger. That doesn't mean supporting them personally or politically, it just means that the awfulness they've created is too big to write off as "their problem."
I don't know, do you think W can go for the "war trifecta." He's screwed up Aghanistan and Iraq. Can he go three-for-three and screw up in Korea, too?
I'll shut up now. That last one frightens me too much.
A war in Korea would truly make Iraq look like a cakewalk.
NEW ADDITIONS TO THE BLOGROLL
I've added a couple of blogs to the blogroll, Corrente (by the four bloggers who took over for Eschaton this summer) and Ralph Luker. I'm on the prowl for a few other new ones.
I'll let you know immediately when I add them.
DEJA VU
Atrios reminds us that we've seen this all before:
Back when the poor ADD-suffering warbloggers still had their eyes fixed on the shiny bauble that was the Afganistan conflict, whenever some Americanhating liberal like myself would suggest that maybe, just maybe, things weren't going so well in that country, howls of of outrage would come my way. I eventually (mostly) stopped bothering, as, well, what was the point. Then the War Fairy came along with a NEW nice and shiny bauble, called Iraq, and they were distracted from their original toy.It is hilarious that so many warbloggers, instead of admitting the failure of the policy, want to blame those of us on the left side of the blogosphere for this administration's failures yet again.Well, now, Iraq is a mess and once again the people in charge are blaming their critics. These people live in a bizarre world where if only a bunch of dorks chained to their computers have enough "steely resolve," you know, to watch other people's kids go and die (clap louder!), then the Bush administration, which has managed to fuck up everything in its path, will triumph over the forces of evil.
Learned my lessson I guess. Afghanistan is a mess. Iraq is a mess.
My goodness, every grand idea the folks in this administration put forward turns out just the opposite of how they say it will, every thing they've touched over the last three years has turned to, well, shit, so you'd think these warbloggers would eventually get tired of giving us the same old excuses and saying the same old things.
I guess not.
We HAVE seen this all before. I think warbloggers very frequently suffer from something I defined months ago (October of last year) as "Blogospheric Syndrome":
If you begin to believe that your blogging is going to change the world or American politics, you might be just a wee bit out of touch with reality. As I've said before, many bloggers apparently live too much in the blogosphere which causes them to often miss the forest for the trees.This latest line of b.s. from the White House also reminds me of this post from nearly a year ago last September:
As someone who is relatively new to this blogging thing, it was surprising to hear that war blogs ever were a good source for reasoned debate and analysis. I have found that most of them eschew any sort of analysis in favor of good old-fashioned chest-thumping and cheerleading. And Jeff [Cooper] points out that most of them impugn the patriotism of the administration's opponents instead of answering their criticisms. I find this to be almost universally the case with most of the more popular war blogs.Man, now I'm really getting a feeling of Deja vu. How about you?...
However, the same folks in the blogosphere who are blasting the administration's critics are only following the lead of their heroes in the White House. The administration long ago gave up making any sort of reasoned case with evidence for war with Iraq. Like their supporters in the blogosphere, they're content to make assertions without evidence and to question the patriotism of their critics rather than attempt to answer their questions. I'm just surprised anyone would expect reasoned discussion and debate from these folks, whether we're talking about Republicans in Washington or war bloggers. Maybe at one time they were capable of it but clearly they no longer are.
BUSY
This pesky job of mine is getting in the way of my blogging. Anyway, I think you should go read this post by Arthur Silber and this post by Kevin about the rising tide of McCarthyistic calls for critics of the administration to shut up already -- and accusing them of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
I sure hope that Arthur's wrong about a new Sedition Act but, given the attitudes of the neo-cons these days, I wouldn't exactly rule it out. Arthur's right that it's going to get increasingly nasty as we get closer to election time -- especially if W's numbers continue to be down in the dumps.
You also ought to read this post by Atrios about the latest political misstep by Gray Davis.
I personally think it's outrageous that Davis has stooped to making fun of Arnold's accent. I mean, hell folks, why doesn't he just make fun of the fact that Arnold apparently has no policy plans and no sense of what the heck to do about the state's budget -- that would be perfectly within bounds. However, making nativistic comments about a "ferner's" accent is just way beyond the pale.
BLOGROLL HOUSEKEEPING
I have just gone through the blogroll and updated it. I've been meaning to do this for a while. A couple of URLs have changed and I've updated them. I also removed all blogs that have apparently gone inactive. If your blog used to be there but I judged it inactive and you want to be "reinstated," let me know and I'll happily do so.
As I grudgingly removed Ted Barlow (who has decided to shut down his old blog), I added Crooked Timber, where Ted Barlow currently is blogging, so Ted's still with us, just in a different location.
Now for the not-so-fun stuff. If you dropped me from your blogroll, you've been dropped from here as well. There aren't but a couple of you -- but I'm sure you know who you are. If we had more or less a reciprocal agreement, you can consider it terminated. I don't like to do such things but that's the way it is folks. If you don't see fit to continue helping me, I certainly won't continue helping you.
On the bright side, all of this means I'll probably add a few more blogs to the blogroll in the next few weeks. The blogroll was so big before I hadn't felt like I could add any more to it. However, I don't want the blogroll to get so crowded that people can't ever hope to visit all of the blogs on it, so there are definite limits to the number of blogs I'll add.
I just thought I'd update you all on this because otherwise I'll get e-mails wanting to know what's up.
Now you know.
A NEW KIND OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
What oppressed minority needs Affirmative Action protection in Colorado colleges and universities!
Why political conservatives of course!
Now isn't this just a teensy, eensy bit hypocritical?
And they're even seeking advice from Crazy Davey on drawing up the new "Affirmative Action for Conservatives" policy.
Conservatives attack Affirmative Action for creating a quota system and then, when they're in control, they draw up, well, a quota system!
Isn't this just amazing?
THIS IS ABOUT RIGHT
The media, not long ago, were dogged in their pursuit of a stained dress, a gift of a four-in-hand, a book of poems, a decades-old land deal, a missing file, a lie about a tryst or two; slavish in their regurgitation of leaks from an obsessed independent counsel. Will the media today, mesmerized by Rummy, the Svengali, or cowed by the bamboozling Bush, awake from their stupor and cast aside their obeisance to a commander-in-chief who uses "terrorism" to scare us into subjection and who was, in a war not long ago, AWOL?Indeed.
KAY BAILEY HUTCHINSON SAYS
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, issued a statement to say she was willing to work with Bush to get the money he wants for U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But she said other countries must begin contributing to the effort. "I do not think the American taxpayer should be alone in support of this war and will work to ensure we have partners in this effort," she said.Kay, my friend, we lost our credibility to ask others to contribute to the effort back in February and March when we told everyone else in the world to go to hell.
Now, admittedly, no one would accuse Hutchinson of being the sharpest knife in the drawer. I always remember her as the Texas State Treasurer during my college days who apparently thought her state office workers were allowed to work on her Senate campaign on state time.
However, even Kay Bailey Hutchinson has to be smart enough (and honest enough) to acknowledge this little logic flaw in her argument, wouldn't you think?
You should read the rest of this article as well. Let's just say last night's speech was not the home run the White House clearly hoped it would be and leave it at that.
Sunday, September 7, 2003
I'M BUMMED
Dwight Meredith is shutting down P.L.A. Good luck Dwight! I've really enjoyed reading your blog and getting to know you!
LOTT UPDATE
Tim Lambert's got some interesting stuff about Lott the fraud up on his blog. First, he's caught Insty decrying the NYT for coverage of gun issues that he argued was "riddled with amateurish errors and apparent deception" by linking to a column on NRO that was, you guessed it, riddled with amateurish errors and apparent deception. Boy, Glenn sure does impress with his close attention to detail, doesn't he?
Second, the Federalist Society (which we all know is more or less a fraudulent GOP legal front group anyway) is about to embarrass itself yet again by sending Lott out on a speaking tour. They asked historian Saul Cornell of Ohio State to debate Lott.
Here's Saul's response to their request:
Lott has been accused of research fraud and has lied on a host of other topics related to his research, including his participation in Internet discussions under a false female identity (cyber-cross dressing—very un-Federalist Society if you ask me—can you imagine Publius in drag?) I would gladly debate with any serious academic on this or other topics, but I have a general rule about not sharing the stage with frauds. In fact no serious scholar would even bother with Lott at this moment. He is only being kept afloat because he has never passed a serious tenure review and has jumped around on a series of ideologically funded fellowships. If he were in a regular academic job, he would certainly be the subject of an independent investigation. I would urge you to reconsider the invitation. I could easily suggest a host of more congenial and interesting! persons to defend either the individual rights view or concealed carry laws. If Lott comes to town you are apt to make the issue seem silly—just imagine all of the Mary Rosh (Lott’s twisted cyber-sister) street antics you would encourage. Do you really want to make the cause of gun rights look just silly? I certainly would not want to encourage this. The decision is up to you, but I think you are making a mistake.I think Saul hits the nail on the head, don't you?
ARE YOU READY?
It's televised address time for W tonight. It's only a little while until we see that "deer in the headlights" look W gets when he begins his Herculean struggle with the Tele-Prompter. It's not a very pretty sight.
What will W say to try and say himself? He's staring the potential end of his presidency square in the face: a flaccid economy and a deficit spiraling out of control combined with the security nightmare that is post-war Iraq may be close to striking a knockout blow to his re-election hopes. Most polls now show a majority of Americans want to give someone else the job next year.
How will W try to reverse this alarming trend? Will he try to warm up the scare-o-matic? Will he tell us he's got a "secret plan" to end the war? Will he apologize to the American people for all the lies he's told over the last several months? Will he apologize to the U.N. for maligning it -- especially now that he's had to go crawling back?
We'll know in a short while, won't we?
Feel free to post your reactions to the speech on the comment board to this post. I'll be interested in hearing your feedback.
Update: My reaction to the speech is in comments. Join in the fun folks! Comment away!
I'M FRESH OUT OF PATIENCE, HOW ABOUT YOU?
In his address tonight, W is going to ask us all to have patience with the horrible mess we've made of post-war Iraq.
Have patience, huh? Do W and the boys not realize that's exactly what the entire world said to us in February and March?
I think I'll exhibit the same patience with the administration regarding Iraq now that W and the boys did regarding the U.N. inspection regime back in December, January and February.
How about you?
Saturday, September 6, 2003
I THINK IT'S SAFE TO SAY...
judging from this review that, to put it in the vernacular, "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis" sucks bigtime:
Simultaneously dull and disgraceful, "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," a new Showtime movie, uses the tragic attack on America in 2001 as the basis for a reelection campaign movie on behalf of George W. Bush.Like I said, this movie apparently is so horrible it's hilarious Go read the rest of this review and then schedule something else to do (watch paint dry or mow the lawn perhaps?) tomorrow night.The film is an insult to those who perished in the attacks and, really, an insult to America generally, but it's so insanely boring that people aren't likely to become very outraged over it. Written by conservative Republican Lionel Chetwynd, who admits to a bias in Bush's favor, the film -- premiering on Showtime tomorrow night at 8 -- is primitive propaganda that portrays Bush as the noblest hero since Mighty Mouse.
Nothing in historical record suggests Bush acted particularly heroically Sept. 11, 2001, but Chetwynd's script has him all but saddling up a horse and riding over to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban man-to-man. When Bush announces he will give a speech to the nation from the White House and aides try to talk him into seeking a safer location, Bush bellows, "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come on over and get me. I'll be home!"
Bush repeatedly demands he be taken to the White House as Air Force One flies aimlessly about on that horrible September day: "I've got to get back to Washington because I'm not going to let those people keep me from getting home," he barks. And earlier: "Get me home! . . . The American people want to know where their damn president is." And still earlier: "People can't have an AWOL president!"
All this may be pure fantasy that occurred only in Chetwynd's head, or wishful thinking by members of the Bush administration, who cooperated with Chetwynd in his research. Actual footage of the World Trade Center towers burning and collapsing is used as part of this love letter to the president, an especially unseemly touch.
Heck, while I'm sure Glenn Reynolds will watch it, after such a horrible review, who else will?
DID HE EVER MAKE GOOD ON THIS PROMISE?
And I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clear he had nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.Well, did he? I don't watch the troglodyte myself so I wouldn't know. This quote comes from this excellent collection of quotes from the lying liars right here.
-- Bill O'Reilly, March 18, 2003
It's quite an impressive collection, don't you think?
Every time one of W's sycophants tries to convince you that W and the boys really didn't imply that Saddam had tons of WMDs, you can just point them to this list.
OOOPS, IT'S ALREADY TRUE
According to this Zogby poll, W's below the Mendoza line already. Only 45% rated his job performance positively.
That's not good.
Look for other indexes to move below 50% in the next month. Zogby is always ahead of the others -- but the others usually come along within the next month or so.
So much for W as a "popular" president, eh?
[Link via Atrios]
THE GAG ORDER FOR U.S. TROOPS IS APPARENTLY NOT WORKING
"I don't give a damn about Rumsfeld. All I give a damn about is going home," Specialist Rue Gretton said, humping packs of water bottles on his shoulders from a truck.And if you want to see something surreal, read this interview with Rumsfeld by Dan Rather."The only thing his visit meant for us was we had to clean up a lot of mess to make the place look pretty. And he didn't even look at it anyway," Gretton said after soldiers swept the dusty streets around the complex of lakes and mansions.
...
"If I got to talk to Rumsfeld I'd tell him to give us a return date. We've been here six months and the rumor is we'll be here until at least March. This is totally, totally uncalled for," she said.
...
When the Armed Forces Network showed earlier footage of Rumsfeld saying that fresh U.S. troops were unnecessary in Iraq, soldiers at the base threw their hands in the air and shouted "No way" at the television.
"I ain't happy. No way am I happy seeing that," said Specialist Devon Pierce, whose wife was due to give birth to his first son in two weeks. "This tour is hard, real hard. It's too much. It should be six months."
Now, do you believe a single thing that Rummy says in that interview?
Well I'm off to coach two soccer games and ref a third.
More later.
Friday, September 5, 2003
SCARE-O-MATIC SCHEDULED FOR SUNDAY
W will address us on Sunday about Iraq and the War on Terra. Since W's approval ratings are right at 50%, it's time to use patriotism and fear to bump them up a bit.
I mean, heck, since he's just now back from his annual month-long vacation it's time to roll out this year's "product" after all. Let's hope this year's "product" doesn't involve the deaths of thousands of people on the other side of the world.
How many times has W done this sort of thing during his presidency?
Surely people aren't stupid enough to go for this again, are they?
EARLY SIGNS OF AN APPROACHING DUBYA-DIP RECESSION?
There were 93,000 jobs lost last month (analysts were expecting a small gain) and unemployment remains virtually unchanged at 6.1%.
Finally, we're hearing some analysts begin to change their irritating pollyanna tune:
Friday’s reports no longer reflected a cyclical economy trying to add jobs after a recession — “which is depressing,” said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo. Analysts had expected companies to add some jobs last month.Honestly, folks, who gives a damn about the rest of it as long as millions are still unemployed?...
If hiring doesn’t improve, the recovery could be in jeopardy because consumers worried about their job prospects will stop spending. That’s been the driving force in the U.S. economy.
And, more importantly for W, who in his right mind votes for the economic genius who provides us with long-term tax cuts for the rich that provide little or no short-term stimulus?
I'm thinking W will be under fifty in approval ratings by this time next month.
Look for the Bush team to warm up the "scare-o-matic" shortly.
Frequent vague terror alerts, anyone?
LOTT TELLS A "BALDFACED LIE"
Kevin tells us how John Lott is now telling lies about his lies to the WaPo. I'm with him. It's pathetic.
When is AEI going to get tired of this, I wonder?
Doesn't it embarrass them?
Surely they'll take care of this little problem soon.
GENERAL ANTHONY C. ZINNI SAYS
My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," said Zinni, who was severely wounded while serving as an infantry officer in that conflict. "I ask you, is it happening again?"I think Rummy just crossed Tony Zinni off his Christmas card list.
A GREAT LINE
Just four months after Operation Flight Suit, the superpower has become a supplicant to nations it used to insult. Mission accomplished!Indeed.
Oh yeah, and Josh has a great post up about how Wolfowitz has now officially morphed into the Iraqi Information Minister:
Paul Wolfowitz told reporters today that it's not the US which has changed positions, but the UN. We've wanted a new UN resolution for months. It's just that the UN has finally come around to our position. The bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad "changed the atmosphere in New York."I assume that W and the boys now realize that they've made us look like damned fools to the rest of the world, right?How about that? Wolfowitz is an awfully sharp guy. But he's turning into the Comical Ali of the collapse of neoconservative grand strategy in the Middle East.
The UN is putty in our hands!
We have bent them to our will!
The humiliation of the French is complete!
Thursday, September 4, 2003
BAD, BAD, BAD.
That's what Ruy Teixeira says about W's poll numbers in this week's Public Opinion Watch. Things are really looking bad on all fronts for W:
Bad, bad, bad. But of course the economy is Bush’s worst area. What of Bush’s strong suit: national security and the supposedly popular war in Iraq? Well, that war may have been mighty popular when the troops were barreling into Baghdad and Saddam’s statue was coming down, but it ain’t so popular anymore. According to the CBS News poll, the country is now about evenly split between those who think the results of the war were worth the costs and those who disagree. The public is also evenly split between those who think that the United States is in control of the Iraq situation and those who think we aren’t.Read the rest of it.Not so good. And the Newsweek poll released on August 23 has Bush’s approval rating on Iraq down to 54 percent, off four points since late July and down eleven points since the end of May. Only 18 percent are very confident that the United States will be able to establish a stable, democratic form of government in Iraq and just 16 percent think that efforts to rebuild Iraq are going very well.
And wait, there’s more! Recent developments have raised doubts in a substantial segment of the public about whether going to war with Iraq was the right thing to do. These developments include the number of U.S. military casualties since the end of major combat was declared, reports about the long-term cost of the occupation, and the fact that no banned chemical or biological weapons have yet been found. In each case, about half the public says that the development has raised doubts about the rightness of the war. In another indicator of wavering commitment, a slight plurality (48 percent to 47 percent) is now willing to say that they would support a withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from Iraq in response to ongoing attacks on our forces.
In addition, we’re getting close to an even split about whether the Bush administration purposely misled the public to build support for the Iraq war (43 percent say they did; 51 percent say they didn’t). No wonder an August 22 Washington Post story was headlined “Security May Not Be Safe Issue for Bush in ’04.” It isn’t. The Newsweek poll, in fact, finds more registered voters (49 percent) saying that they would not like to see Bush reelected than say that they would like to see him get a second term (44 percent). That’s quite a turnaround from early May, when registered voters favored Bush’s reelection by 51 percent to 38 percent.
To add to President Bush’s woes, a CBS News poll released on August 29 suggests that he is in particular trouble with independent voters, just the kind of swing voters whose support he needs to get reelected. Bush’s overall job approval is at 53 percent among independents, drops to 44 percent on foreign policy (with 43 percent disapproval), and then collapses to 32 percent on the economy (with a stunning 58 percent disapproval).
W's in trouble folks -- and the economy and unemployment numbers indicate no major positive developments any time soon.
HUBRIS
Here's a good piece from the Christian Science Monitor about the hubris of W and the boys regarding the War in Iraq:
Is it not time for us to recognize that there was a good deal of hubris behind our decision to invade Iraq? It impelled Congress to pass a resolution in support of an attack, the president to decide to invade, and the American public to give wide support to his doing so. The initial fighting went well, but the enemy's tactics since have not been what we anticipated.I agree entirely. Our hubris has brought us to an expensive, dangerous, and potentially catastrophic precipice in Iraq. If we fail now, the war on terror will go right down the tubes. That's what ultimately makes me the most angry. We didn't have to do this. We didn't have to make Iraq a terrorist haven that we'd have to clear out -- but we sure as hell have to do so now.In fact, most of the assumptions behind our invasion have been proven wrong: The intelligence did not support the imminence of a threat, the Iraqis have not broadly welcomed us as liberators, the idea that we could manage this action almost unilaterally is giving way to pleas for troops and money from other nations, the aversion to giving the UN a meaningful role is eroding daily, and the reluctance to get involved in nation building is being supplanted by just that.
Despite these reversals of course, our current policy appears to be to "stay the course." The problem with not acknowledging that we are changing course is that it makes us do so begrudgingly. The longer we hesitate to increase our troop strength in Iraq; to pour billions of dollars of our own money into reconstruction; and to invite the UN to play a substantive, decisionmaking role, the more the chance of failure increases.
Failure in Iraq is simply unacceptable. It would not be just a severe embarrassment, as it was in Vietnam. It would be caving-in to terrorists, and not just to terrorists in Iraq. The president's worldwide "war on terrorism" would be seen as having folded up the minute the going got tough. Whether Al Qaeda has operated out of Iraq in the past or not, it almost certainly would do so in the future.
And just how far does this hubris go? Well Josh Marshall points us to this interesting article about the security situation in Iraq.
Buried in the middle of the article is this rather major bombshell that exposes the astonishing arrogance/hubris/stupidity of Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks:
It seems that almost everyone here believes we’re sitting on a precipice, and leaning precariously toward civil disaster. But it didn’t have to happen this way.My goodness. These geniuses ignored a book written by a Pentagon urban warfare expert in September before the war that describes exactly how to do it in great detail! A book, I might add, that also accurately predicted the problems we now face in Iraq!A year ago, American General John Abizaid published an internal Defense Department book about urban warfare. Abizaid’s “Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations” (see sidebar) was all but ignored by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, who ran the Iraq war and the initial postwar occupation.
Abizaid wrote about the massive troop requirements for urban warfare; warned of rapid burnout of soldiers and equipment assigned to urban battlegrounds; and time and again referenced catastrophic instances of over-confidence and under-preparedness among commanders and of disastrous misunderstandings of local cultures and their motivations. He also stressed how “essential” it is that “law enforcement” and other “routine activities” be “returned to civilian agencies as quickly as possible.”
Abizaid was brought in a month ago to clean up the mess created by Franks and Rumsfeld. But it might be too late.
Now, honestly folks, explain to me just why the hell it is that Donald Rumsfeld still has a job?
BUSY DAY
In response to my post below, we've got a great discussion thread going regarding teaching writing with blogs. Dr. Tryon, instructor of the course in question, has joined in as well. Feel free to join it if you're interested.
Unfortunately, I've been so busy today I haven't been able to contribute much.
My day gets busier from here. Now I've got to get my 76 swim laps in and then I've got soccer practice (I'm coaching two teams and still refereeing this year).
More later.
THE JOBLESS RECOVERY...
continues. Jobless claims are over 400,000 again. But if you just read this up-is-down story from MSNBC, it reads like it's all good news or something. Sure worker productivity increased but, hey, who gives a damn about that?
BTW, it's going to get ugly in the coming months in the job market probably. We just have to hope the "Dubya Dip" isn't coming our way next year. No real signs currently that another recession is in the future but we'll have to wait and see.
HEY, WHAT'S ANOTHER $60B?
They can't give scheduled pay raises to federal employees but, hey, this administration sure can come up with another $60B for Iraq pronto, can't they?
Now, before you attack me for not understanding that Iraq is a pressing need that we have to fund, let me just tell you I understand that and actually support this increase. We've made this mess and now we've got to clean it up.
However, let me take this golden opportunity to remind you that we didn't have to pursue this war. Nothing made us do it. In fact it turns out now that the majority of what we were told in the run-up to the war has turned out not to be true and the post-war has been nothing short of a disaster.
Isn't it just about time for most Americans to recognize they were duped and admit it?
And surely they're smart enough not to vote for an administration that consistently lies to them, are they?
But look for the administration and its allies to turn increasingly nasty over the next few months as it becomes clear that they're in trouble. Art Silber notes that the true believers in this administration's foreign policy lunacy are already accusing critics of the administration of being the reason for our failures in Iraq:
If you doubted my point about the religious fervor of the true believers' mentality, take a look at this entry. (But damn it, providing a link to that place I just delinked!) The fact that we need to go to the U.N. is the fault of all those who oppose the administration's foreign policy. It can't be that the policy itself might be deluded, or correct but badly executed, or any other explanation. Oh, no: it's the fault of anyone who even dares to criticize what we are doing. Here's a prediction: look for much more of this kind of thing. And if you thought the debate just before and during the war got unpleasant, you ain't seen nothing yet.If you thought the campaign last fall was outrageous, just wait for the true McCarthyism to start next year. It's coming folks. Given their gutter-dwelling campaign tactics last year before the midterms, it's clear W and the boys will do or say anything to stay in office.
This is going to get ugly folks.
As I've said before, if W goes down, it's going to be quite spectacular.
Wednesday, September 3, 2003
WRITING, BLOGS, AND A BIT OF INTROSPECTION
A freshman writing class taught by Dr. Chuck Tryon at Georgia Tech is studying blogs. As someone who teaches two or three 100-level history courses loaded with freshman every semester, I can't help but feel conflicted about this idea.
For starters, I see some painful writing trainwrecks in my assignments every semester and, at least in the spring, these are from students who have at least made it out of one semester of a two-semester freshman writing sequence. I can't help but have the curmudgeonly response about how basic grammar, syntax and organization would be a better focus for basic writing courses than reading blogs -- at least judging from the evidence that I frequently see in my 100-level papers.
However, on the other hand, most of the bloggers I read are truly good writers. They provide excellent models for students on how to write short, effective argument-driven pieces. Now, admittedly, some bloggers don't really fit this criteria. Insty is, I'm afraid to say, not a particularly effective writer (i.e., "objectively pro-Saddam"? Say what?) but I suspect his readers don't really read him for his writing or even his point of view anymore. They read him because he is the major clearinghouse on the webs for links to right-wing columns and stories of interest to righties. Therefore, in Insty's case, I'm not sure I'd be sending my students off to study the tortured syntax that is Insty's writing.
I mean, heck folks, we on the left all know that Atrios is a much better writer than Insty could ever hope to be. Atrios, Hesiod, Josh Marshall and Kevin over at CalPundit (just to name some of the most influential lefty bloggers) write very effective short opinion pieces that are as good as anything I read anywhere in the mainstream media.
If you've been reading this blog long, you know my blog writing has gone through quite a transformation since I started a little over a year ago. As an academic who writes books and articles, my writing on this blog a year ago was quite a bit more lengthy and involved than it often is now. Why is that? Part of it I suspect is that I don't have as much time to put into it these days as I did back then. Another reason for the change is that I'm beginning to feel like everyone that reads this blog now probably has some idea of just where I'm coming from and how I feel about things -- especially if you went through the mental trauma of the damn war on this blog with me in March and April.
The more I think about it, I'm not really sure I would send students to my blog to study writing! In fact, to be honest, I don't say anything about my blog to my own students. A few of my upper-level students have discovered the blog and talk to me about it every now and then. As far as other folks on campus, I've received both positive (from faculty colleagues) and negative comments (from others on campus -- I'd prefer not to go into those to be honest) about my blog. I know some faculty members who think it's downright odd that I write this thing and some I'm pretty sure make fun of it behind my back.
At times I do think about the amount of time I spend blogging and wonder why I do it. Part of it I'm sure is the excitement of knowing that thousands of people a day are reading what you write. It's a frightening thing to realize that more people will read what you write here in a day than will probably ever read your academic writing.
Probably the main reason I blog is that it truly is a wonderful form of self-expression. We live in troubling times with an administration that has made numerous troubling decisions and shows no signs of making sense any time soon. Many bloggers say that blogging stops them from shouting at the television or, worse yet, throwing things at the television. I would imagine that's true for me as well. It is wonderful therapy for dealing with these sorts of problems.
So, in the end, I'm still not really sure how I feel about the idea that students are being sent to read blogs in a freshman writing class. I think they can read some wonderful writers and learn a great deal about just what it means to be an engaged and fully-informed citizen of the twenty-first century.
However, I'm sure it also takes time away from some lessons about basic writing that I don't think can be learned any other way than writing papers, turning them in, and getting constructive criticism from an instructor. My mother was a freshman English instructor at a local university when I was growing up and I remember her saying that the only way you really learn to write is by repetition and practice. I'm not sure what reading blogs will do for students regarding the very basic mechanics and process of writing.
I just hope that Dr. Tryon's students ultimately learn something and enjoy it. As with most things you do in teaching at the university level, you never know how it's going to work out until you give a shot.
Here's hoping it works out well. I'll have to check in when I've got time during the semester.
Update: My blogging colleague here at HNN, Ralph Luker, comments on this (no permalinks, scroll down to "Blogging as Writing") as well.
And, upon further review, I really didn't mean it to sound like I'm saying righties can't write. That's simply not true. There are some righty bloggers out there who write well. I'm just saying that Insty certainly isn't one of them.
ARNOLD JUST LOST...
You know, I think Gray Davis is a bad enough governor that I was willing to be convinced that Arnold could do a better job of managing the legislature and solving some problems that a Democrat might have a hard time with. But instead of using his celebrity to deliver some much needed straight talk, Arnold's behavior has instead been simply arrogant and cynical. I don't think he's made a single substantive statement in the past four weeks, and apparently he expects to win simply by insisting that he will march into Sacramento and kick some ass. To him, I guess it's just another notch on his career belt.I agree with Kevin that Arnold hasn't done a thing right since he entered the race. I thought his ego would probably make him a bad governor and, judging from the campaign so far, I think I'm right on that score.He had his chance and he blew it. Too bad.
Furthermore, as I've said before, if Arnold's not ahead now, he's probably never going to be.
So much for the "Governator," eh?
Folks, I think Arnold's short political career is about to end before it really even started.
CONDI AND RUMMY MISLEAD US ABOUT HISTORY AGAIN
You know, it's embarrassing when you'll just say anything that's on the teleprompter and shamelessly mislead us about our own history for political purposes, isn't it?
As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number, the administration counseled patience. "The war on terror is a test of our strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will," President Bush told an American Legion convention.Rummy and Condi haven't been doing too well on the history front lately. If you recall, Rummy made the hilarious comparison between Iraq and Shays' Rebellion a couple of months ago and back in October of last year Condi, in a moment of weakness, suggested we should've fought Russia in 1948.National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation pander. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. "But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers—called 'werewolves'—engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them—much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants."
Speaking to the same group on the same day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted,
One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?Well, no, it doesn't. The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts....
It's hard to understand exactly what Rumsfeld was saying, but if he meant that the Nazi resisters killed Americans after the surrender, this would be news. According to America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new study by former Ambassador James Dobbins, who had a lead role in the Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo reconstruction efforts, and a team of RAND Corporation researchers, the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany—and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases—was zero.
So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford's Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)? Perhaps the British have some intelligence on the matter that still has not been made public. Of course, as the president himself has noted, there is a lot of revisionist history going around.
I'm really about to give this administration an F for its knowledge of American history. Like so many other things, they apparently believe in a "faith-based" approach to history as well. It's seen as merely another tool for use by the administration's agitprop machine.
I also should mention that we here at HNN also have an excellent (and much more scholarly) article up about this today as well. While I don't necessarily agree with everything that Herf says about the Iraq War, he certainly provides us with a more detailed and accurate depiction of post-war Germany than Rummy and Condi.
THE KOOL-AID OF RIGHTEOUS CERTAINTY
Morat gets it just right:
Yet here it is. It didn't take a genius to realize that a slowing economy and massive tax cuts would eliminate the Clinton surplus, nor that large increases in spending would place us back in the red. It didn't take a genius to realize that the GOP's control of Congress and the White House would make it difficult to blame the Democrats. It didn't take a genius to realize that rebuilding Iraq wasn't going to be cheap or easy, and it certainly didn't take a genius to realize that all of this would come to a head as Bush was gearing up for reelection.This administration certainly believes in "faith-based" solutions -- to the economy, foreign policy, Saddam's WMDs, the environment, to everything really.And yet...here we are. I blogged, back in early June, that the problem with Donald Rumsfeld was that he was a crackpot in the truest sense of the word. That Rumsfeld had, in a manner of speaking, drunk the Kool-aid of righteous certainty. As Josh Marshall laid out (in far better prose), it's not just Rumsfeld. It's all of them.
Our country is led by people who have a righteous certainty in their beliefs. People to whom facts and data are irrelevant to the truths that live in their own hearts. Anyone who disagrees with them is, by definition, acting on bias or ideology alone, because the Truth is as the Bush administration decrees.
I have met people like this before. Talked to them, argued with them, spent years learning how they think. Talk to perpetual motion enthusiasts and Young Earth Creationists long enough, and you'll start to understand the Bush Administration mindset. Especially the Creationists.
It's not a problem to discard data and expert opinion when it contradicts the Truth, because that data is flawed and those experts wrong...by definition. Bush will follow this path to the bitter end, and I sincerely doubt anyone can sway him. Because he believes, to his very core, that his policies will work. And no data, no facts, no expert can make him believe otherwise.
And I'm afraid Morat is right. Despite all evidence that nearly every policy position they hold is unpopular and is leading to a fiscal, foreign policy and environmental disaster, they won't stop pursuing these policies until they are fired by the American people -- hopefully in 2004.
We just have to hope we can all hang on until then. We've got a lot of bridges to rebuild -- and not just in Iraq.
END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY?
Billmon, in a fascinating post, suggests that, through their dogged pursuit of this war and the chaotic aftermath, W and the boys have just undone -- and officially ended -- the American Century:
Power, a good friend recently remarked, is an odd thing -- it's most impressive when it isn't being used. A wise hegemon goes to great lengths to conceal the true extent of its power. It always leaves something in the tool kit, so to speak, so that enemies and allies alike can never be sure exactly what's in there.This is really quite an interesting and provocative idea. Through their arrogance and desire to show the unilateral power of the United States, W, Cheney and the Neocons have unintentionally demonstrated the basic limits of U.S. power. Our military, no matter how impressive, cannot occupy and bring peace to a nation like Iraq by itself.But the Bush Administration has let the cat out of the bag. It has exposed to the world the limits of U.S. military power -- both ithe size of the forces (divisions, troops) and the relative ineffectiveness of those forces on a complex social and political battlefield like the one America faces in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.
Even more to the point, Bush has signaled that the financial and political burdens of unilateralism are simply too great for any U.S. administration to carry for long. Forced to choose between greater mobilization at home (more troops, less tax cuts) and compromise abroad, Bush appears to have opted for the latter.
These events no doubt will be noted, and closely studied, by friend and foe alike.
One could also easily argue they've made the world a much more dangerous place in the process. We can no longer bluff our way through major crises by threatening to use our military power.
I suspect that's likely to be the major lesson that comes out of this war -- at least for people who are willing to be honest with themselves about it anyway.
LYONS: "INVENTING A NEW METAPHOR IN IRAQ"
Gene Lyons
September 3, 2003Inventing a New Metaphor in Iraq
Remember moral clarity? Not long ago, anybody who suggested that attacking Iraq might create worse problems than it would solve was dismissed as a cowardly moral relativist who couldn't distinguish good from evil.
To President Bush and the visionaries who sold him and the nation on "preemptive" war, everything was melodramatically simple. Saddam Hussein was a wicked tyrant whose removal would bring tranquility to the Middle East. Because Saddam was (and is), in fact, a murderous gangster, arguing against the war required counting past two, a degree of sophistication deemed decadent and unpatriotic.
Writing recently in the American Prospect, Jason Vest quoted "a very senior national security official" earnestly telling him before the war that "Americans would be welcomed in Iraq, and not with a fleeting shower of goodwill but with a 'deluge' of 'rose water and flowers' that would last in perpetuity." Such statements were almost as common before the war as warnings about Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction."
With relative ease, Iraq would be turned into an Arab Switzerland. Best of all, a veritable gusher of Iraqi petrodollars produced by the entrepreneurial skills of returning Iraqi exiles would pay for it. Vest had asked the unnamed official, a man with no military experience, what he thought of a cautionary report from the U.S. Army War College.
Entitled "Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario,"it emphasized the need for careful pre-invasion planning it said the Bush administration, in its ideological auto-intoxication, hadn't undertaken. "Without an overwhelming effort to prepare for occupation," it concluded "the US may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America's own making."
The official smugly debunked the Army's warnings. He was particularly dismissive of Army chief-of-staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, as "bullshit from a Clintonite enamored of using the army for peacekeeping and nation building and not winning wars." Shinseki was forced into retirement after angering Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld by telling a congressional committee that hundreds of thousands of American troops would be needed to to occupy Iraq for the forseeable future, perhaps as long as a decade. Other naysayers, reports Col. David Hackworth in his syndicated column, are being purged by "Rummy's" civilian ideologues--most of whom have never heard a shot fired in anger.
President Bush pronounces his faith unshaken, although he no longer expects it to be easy. Willpower and sacrifice are now required. Nor will the occupation pay for itself. The cost of putting Iraq's infrastructure back in working order, civilian administrator Paul Bremer told the Washington Post last week, was "almost impossible to exaggerate." His best estimate was "tens of billions of dollars."
At the White House, it's still thought decadent to count past two. It's all terribly simple to Bush: Good Guys vs. Bad Guys, evildoers vs. freedom fighters, an action/adventure film scenario. Speaking to the American Legion on August 26, the president described al Qaeda's religious zealots and Saddam's Baathists as one and the same: "They know that a democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East would be a further defeat for their ideology of terror," he said. "They know that the spread of peace and hope in the Middle East would undermine the appeal of bitterness, resentment and violence. And the more progress we make in Iraq, the more desperate the terrorists will become. Freedom is a threat to their way of life."
Three days later, a truck bomb detonated at one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines, killing Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim and 125 of his followers--the most ominous in a series of sickening atrocities. Hakim had returned from exile in Iran urging forbearance toward the American occupation. A U.S. Marine major offered the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid three suspects: "former Baath Party operatives working with foreigners, rivals of Hakim within the Shiite community and his former allies in Iran seeking 'some sort of retribution.'" Out in the street, Shadid wrote, some shouted and others whispered theories that ran the gamut of possibilities--Sunni Muslim militants hostile to Shiites, Iran, Israel, the United States and Hussein loyalists."
Others blame Saudi, Syrian, and Palestinian extremists. "America considers itself the superpower of the world, but here it is powerless to keep any semblance of order," a Baghdad elementary school teacher told the Los Angeles Times. "The Americans fired our police and our army. Now there is no security and foreign terrorists are coming across our borders."
Meanwhile, the same ideologues who predicted a cakewalk in Iraq have changed metaphors. Iraq has become "flypaper," a killing ground to which Arab terrorists--evidently a finite number in their theories--are inexorably drawn.
Nobody mentions moral clarity anymore.
Tuesday, September 2, 2003
EXHAUSTED
I just finished my sixth hour in the classroom today. I'm exhausted. I don't know if I'll be blogging anymore today. I've got to recuperate.
As usual, I had a good time. I enjoy it -- especially the give-and-take with my students -- but it really is exhausting.
My Tuesdays really are a beast this semester.
UP-IS-DOWN-ISM RUN AMOK
You really should read Josh Marshall's Washington Monthly article about the "Post-Modern President." It's quite good.
I'd say more but it's a busy day folks.
THE CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE LOTT AND BELLESILES CASES
I do find interesting two comparisons between the two cases. The historians, after the Bellesiles evidence began to come apart, went into the evaluation of his writing with zeal and care. By contrast, American criminologists, while a few of them have written critically of More Guns, Less Crime, have simply had no public role in pursuing the question of Lott’s unethical behavior in attributing his purported survey results to other parties and in promulgating statistics for which absolutely no documentation can be produced. The compilation of that record has been left (so far as I know) to two people, and you know who they are. The historians seem to have different standards from the criminologists who should have been involved in compiling that record but were not. (I apologize if I have overlooked some relevant writing by American criminologists. I am assuming that some mention of it would have found its way into the Lambert web site.)I do find it fascinating that after listening to all the sound and fury over Bellesiles that we don't have the same about Lott. And, if you recall, by now Bellesiles was in serious trouble. I see nothing like that going on with Lott.The other salient difference is that the institution that housed Bellesiles when he did his alleged research ultimately did the responsible thing and got a third-party, totally professional evaluation of it for public distribution. But neither the University of Chicago, nor Yale University, nor the American Enterprise Institute, where at various times Lott did and published his work, has lifted a finger (so far as we now know) to help clarify the record for public consumption.
Of course, I suspect Lott's studies are no longer even read by serious criminologists who know he's just a pro-gun shill who will claim anything apparently to advance that cause. I'm not even sure if he was ever viewed as much of an authority on anything by real criminologists. I don't know enough about the field to tell you.
Unfortunately folks, as you well know, the damage is already done. We've got right-to-carry laws in the vast majority of states (mine being one of the notable exceptions of course) and there's not much we can do about it at this point.
I just wish, as Molly Ivins so memorably suggested a few years ago, these folks would be required to publicly identify themselves to the rest of us. She suggested they wear a beanie or a cap with a propeller on the top or something so the rest of us could avoid them and therefore remain safer.
Alas, no progress on that last bit of reform yet it appears.
Update: I just would like to point out that I'm not arguing here that Lott was really that influential in getting these laws passed. Read the post carefully folks. That's not what I'm saying.
I'm just pointing out that the battle, unfortunately, has already been lost. As my pal ArchPundit puts it, Lott is just a tool for the NRA -- and a fairly minor one at that.
I just thought I should clarify that point.
WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH MECHA?
As David Neiwert and Ted Barlow attest, there isn't much to it at all. Furthermore, as someone who at least has a passable reading ability in Spanish, I can translate this supposedly racist slogan another way.
Here's the slogan:
Por la Raza, todo. Fuera la Raza, nada.Righties such as Mickey Kaus have been arguing this should be translated as:
For the Race, everything.They've therefore attacked Cruz Bustamante as being part of a "racist" and exclusionary group back when he was in college.
For those outside the race, nothing.
As Neiwert points out, this is an intellectually dishonest translation of the slogan. Neiwert provides the following translation for it:
In the service of the race, everythingI would even argue for a third potential translation that, like the group's current slogan ("La union hace la fuerza" or "Unity creates power”), emphasizes racial unity:
Apart from the race, nothing
In the service of the race, everything.I think the reference here is one of unity and hispanic consciousness -- again, like the current slogan for the group. In other words, if you're helping your people, that's good. If you're not, you're achieving nothing for them and you've lost your identity in the process.
Outside the race, nothing.
As Neiwert and Ted suggest this whole thing is just another vain attempt to distract folks from Arnie's significant and current ties to an even more objectionable group, U.S. English.
Should we therefore be surprised that Republican partisan shills like Insty are pushing this foolishness?
Of course not.
[Links via Atrios]
Monday, September 1, 2003
A POTENTIAL HUMANITARIAN DISASTER
Atrios points us to this frightening story from, ugh, Drudge.
I'm with Atrios, I hope and pray this is NOT true:
SOLDIERS and civilians in Iraq face a health timebomb after dangerously high levels of radiation were measured around Baghdad.How's that for absolute incompetence?Levels between 1,000 and 1,900 times higher than normal were recorded at four sites around the Iraqi capital where depleted uranium (DU) munitions have been used across wide areas.
Experts estimate that Britain and the US used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of armour-piercing shells made of DU during attacks on Iraqi forces.
That figure eclipses the 375tons used in the 1991 Gulf War. Unlike that largely desert-based conflict, most of the rounds fired in March and April were in heavily residential areas.
DU rounds are highly combustible and tiny particles of the radioactive material are left on the battleground.
If inhaled the material can attack the body causing cancers, chronic illness, long-term disabilities and genetic birth defects - none of which will be apparent for at least five years.
Veterans of the first Gulf War believe that DU exposure has played a role in leaving more than 5,000 of them chronically ill and almost 600 dead.
The Royal Society, Britain's leading scientific body, described America's failure to confirm how much or where they used DU rounds as an "appalling situation".
...
He said: "Really these things are dirty bombs. Exactly the sort of device that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair keep talking about being in the hands of terrorists."
If true, this is our fault -- entirely. If you recall, I talked about this before the war and worried aloud about it.
Sigh.
If anyone can find me a better source than Drudge for this story, I'd appreciate it. I suspect someone's preparing to break the story and Drudge just got wind of it.
That, after all, is what Drudge does for the most part. He's essentially a journalistic parasite.
Sunday, August 31, 2003
KEVIN SAYS
I know this is beating a dead horse, but what on earth are the Bushies thinking? They started a war no one else wanted, they treated anyone opposed to the war as virtual traitors to humanity, and they are still insisting that America needs to be 100% in charge of everything that goes on in Iraq.In-damn-deed.But despite all that they're "puzzled" about how to get the rest of the world to pony up to help us out of our mess? Even though the rest of the world warned us repeatedly about the likely result of our adventure? What planet are they living on?
For chrissake, we told the rest of the world to go to hell before the war, and they haven't forgotten. They aren't going to bail us out unless we give them considerable authority over the reconstruction effort, and they might not help us even if we do. We're on our own.
The Bush administration has been incompetent and arrogant throughout this entire effort. Their prewar conduct was seemingly designed to make sure the rest of the world was against us, they were criminally negligent in their postwar planning, and George Bush personally has shown immense cowardice by consistently refusing to prepare Congress and the American public for the real cost and length of the war. He's paying the price for that cowardice now, as he watches support for the reconstruction dwindle because its expense, length, and cost in lives is taking most people by surprise.
It's pretty obvious why liberals should oppose George Bush's reelection, but the fact is that conservatives ought to oppose him too. His incompetence and cowardice has betrayed the very things they claim to stand for.
WHAT'S IT LIKE TO DRIVE ACROSS WAR-TORN BAGHDAD?
Riverbend tells us.
Haven't we improved the life of the average Iraqi?
Saturday, August 30, 2003
DOWD: "LESS HOBBES, MORE LOCKE"
Maureen Dowd hits the nail on the head in tomorrow's column:
It has also now become radiantly clear that we have to drag Dick Cheney out of the dark and smog. Less Hobbes, more Locke.Indeed.So far, American foreign policy has been guided by the vice president's gloomy theories that fear and force are the best motivators in the world, that war is man's natural state and that the last great superpower has sovereign authority to do as it pleases without much consultation with subjects or other nations.
We can now see the disturbing results of all the decisions Mr. Cheney made in secret meetings.
The General Accounting Office issued a report last week noting that the vice president shaped our energy policy with clandestine advice from "petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, electricity industry representatives and lobbyists."
Favoritism to energy pals led to last week's insane decision to gut part of the Clean Air Act and allow power plants, refineries and other industrial sites to belch pollutants.
Another Bush-Cheney energy crony is Anthony Alexander of Ohio's FirstEnergy Corporation, which helped trigger the blackout after failing to upgrade its transmission system properly since deregulation. He was a Bush Pioneer, having raised at least $100,000 for the campaign.
This logrolling attitude has led to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers allowing Halliburton — which made Mr. Cheney a rich man with $20 million worth of cashed-in stock — to get no-bid contracts in Iraq totaling $1.7 billion, and that's just a start.
All this, and high gas prices, too?
THE AGE OF RUPERT MURDOCH
You should read this interesting profile of Rupert Murdoch in The Atlantic.
I'm not sure I agree that we're heading back to having an openly partisan press like existed before Joseph Pulitzer in the Gilded Age but it's certainly an interesting -- and frightening -- idea to ponder.
It would at least make Faux admits it is not really a news channel but the GOP's agitprop network. The folks at Faux could therefore drop the outlandish charade of pretending to be "fair and balanced."
Friday, August 29, 2003
CHENEY COMMITS A CRIME -- AND THE PRESS YAWNS
Atrios points us to this column by John W. Dean which contains the following bombshell:
Then this August's Report was issued. It was not the thorough, comprehensive Report GAO wanted it to be. (Indeed, GAO's Comptroller General has stressed that "the Vice President's persistent denial of access to" records "precluded GAO from fully achieving our objectives and substantially limited our analysis.") But it is enough to shock, and disturb, the reader.So now the Vice President has intentionally lied to Congress. Now there's some honor and dignity, huh?The Report shows that Cheney's claim to Congress, in the August 2, 2001 letter, that responsive documents were provided to GAO, was plainly false.
According to the Report, Cheney provided GAO with 77 pages of "documents retrieved from the files of the Office of the Vice President responsive to" GAO's inquiry regarding the Energy Task Force's "receipt, disbursement, and use of public funds."
To any lawyer, a mere 77-page document production seems suspiciously slim - especially when it is meant to represent information from a group of people on a fairly broad topic. Surely there were more documents that were not turned over.
Moreover, it turned out, as the Report reveals, that the documents that were turned over were useless: "The materials were virtually impossible to analyze, as they consisted, for example, of pages with dollar amounts but no indication of the nature or purpose of the expenditure." They were further described as "predominantly reimbursement requests, assorted telephone bills and random items, such as the executive director's credit card receipt for pizza."
In sum, the incomplete document production was not only nonresponsive - it was insulting. So the GAO pressed for responsive documents numerous times in different ways: letters, telephone exchanges and meetings.
Perhaps the most pointed of these was a July 18, 2001 letter from the Comptroller to the Vice President. It noted that GAO had "been given 77 pages of miscellaneous records purporting to relate to these direct and indirect costs. Because the relevance of these records is unclear, we continue to request all records responsive to our request, including any records that clarify the nature and purpose of the costs." (Emphasis added.)
...
Despite receiving this letter, Cheney still claimed to Congress, a few weeks later, on August 2, that responsive documents had been produced.
Of course, Cheney is a busy man. Yet there can be no question as to whether he was aware of the July 18, 2001 letter from the Comptroller complaining about the 77 pages of documents' being unresponsive: He even attached it to his own August 2 letter to Congress, as part of a chronology. And again, he personally signed that August 2 letter.
Nor can there be any question that Cheney knows what it means to produce responsive documents - and not to do so. In the same paragraph of the August 2 letter in which he claims he was responsive to the Energy Task Force request, he makes a lesser claim with respect to another GAO request - stating that there, he had merely "provided substantial responses." (Emphasis added.)
Plainly, Cheney knows the difference between being responsive; offering a substantial response; and sending insulting non-responsive materials, featuring unexplained phone bills, columns of unidentified figures, and a pizza receipt.
Thus, Cheney's claim to have produced responsive documents was a false statement and, all evidence suggests, an intentional one. That means it is also a criminal offense - a false statement to Congress. (In a previous column, I discussed the false statements statute and its application.)
But does anybody in the SCLM care?
What do you think?
IS THIS NOT THE MOST CALLOUS THING YOU'VE EVER HEARD?
Perhaps the only hope lies in the story going around town that President Bush has told the Pentagon he wants "no more American dead" after next March. By then, the electoral campaign will be well under way, and perhaps zealotry will give way to reality--or at least to a change in administration.That's just breathtakingly outrageous, isn't it?
W doesn't give a damn about the deaths of American soldiers -- until it gets in the way of his re-elect, er, um, election of course.
Read the rest of Geyer's column too. It's pretty interesting.
[Link via Atrios]
NEW LINKS
I'm adding Iraqi blogger Riverbend to the blogroll. It's a very interesting read. Along with Dear Raed, there are now two Iraqi bloggers on my blogroll. Their blogs provide needed perspective in these troubling times.
For similar reasons, I'm also adding the website of Iraq Today, an independent English newspaper in Iraq, to the news sources links section as well.
I think it's a good idea to read about the situation in Iraq from Iraqis themselves, instead of from the all-too-familiar apologists in the U.S. media.
ME TOO
Fellow bloggers -- go read Nitpicker and do what I just did: volunteer to represent the lefty blogosphere on O'Reilly!
It's fun, educational, and you don't have to worry about him ever taking you up on it because, as Terry puts it:
The thing is, O'Reilly, you bitch about us attacking you, so let us explain ourselves. If you don't, you're the worst kind of man: A powerful coward.Heh.
Update: Oh yeah. Speaking of O'Reilly, you really ought to read this hilarious column (Terry links to it too) as well.
OVEREXTENDED
Paul Krugman tells us we're more than a bit overextended -- both militarily and fiscally.
Read the whole thing. However, his summation is dead-on:
Still, even the government of a superpower can't simultaneously offer tax cuts equal to 15 percent of revenue, provide all its retirees with prescription drugs and single-handedly take on the world's evildoers — single-handedly because we've alienated our allies. In fact, given the size of our budget deficit, it's not clear that we can afford to do even one of these things. Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they'll have quite a mess to clean up.A mess indeed.
Thursday, August 28, 2003
YET ANOTHER SHUCK AND JIVE FROM THE WHITE HOUSE
If you want to read the damning EPA Inspector General report about how the White House directly influenced the EPA to lie about the air quality at Ground Zero, go here. Be sure to read the rather eye-opening charts in Chapter 2 (starting on page 14).
The White House's Council on Environmental Quality essentially scrubbed the press releases to make sure they didn't perhaps frighten anyone:
Coordination and collaboration impacted the completeness of the information and the substance of the message EPA communicated to the public through its press releases. As a result of the White House CEQ’s influence, guidance for cleaning indoor spaces and information about the potential health effects from WTC debris were not included in EPA’s issued press releases. In addition, based on CEQ’s influence, reassuring information was added to at least one press release and cautionary information was deleted from EPA’s draft version of that press release.When it became clear that they were caught lying to the public, suddenly no one at the EPA even would own up to writing the press releases -- and even suggested the White House wrote them:
We were unable to identify any EPA official who claimed ownership of EPA’s WTC press releases issued in September and early October 2001. When we asked the EPA Chief of Staff whether she could claim ownership of EPA’s early WTC press releases, she replied that she was not able to do so “because the ownership was joint ownership between EPA and the White House,” and that “final approval came from the White House.” She also told us that other considerations, such as the desire to reopen Wall Street and national security concerns, were considered when preparing EPA’s early press releases. The OCEMR Associate Administrator said of the September 16 release: “I did not feel like it was my press release.”I know this is becoming tiresome, but what do you think we'd be hearing if this were a Democratic administration that did this?
As Marie Cocco revealed in her column today, predictably, the White House still won't own up to doing this:
The EPA and White House reject the report's findings. "They weren't rewritten by the White House at all," acting EPA Administrator Marianne Horinko said in an interview.Isn't it good that W and the boys take responsibility for their actions?How to explain why the inspector general devoted almost an entire chapter to the political editing? It is illustrated with charts. They line up the EPA's cautious words alongside the White House happy talk.
We will likely get no real answers about why this happened, nor assurances it won't happen again. As with so much else, this administration just doesn't think we deserve them.
Gee, that's pretty sleazy, huh?
FREEDOM FOOLISHNESS
How would you feel about the leader of another country that demanded that an embarrassing scene involving one of his employees be cut from an American television program? You'd think he was an idiot who should just deal with it, wouldn't you?
Well, that's what W just did -- and the supposedly snotty French actually complied.
Gee, we're getting a bit thin-skinned over at the White House these days, aren't we?
I agree with Atrios who wonders aloud: "Doesn't the White House have anything better to do?"
Indeed.
THE LUNACY THAT IS ANN COULTER
Indeed, the war is going so well that now liberals have to create absurd straw-man arguments no one ever uttered in order to accuse the Bush administration of horrible miscalculations. Amid her sneering, PMS-induced anger toward the Bush administration, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd claimed the Bush administration was "shaken" to discover "the terrible truth: Just because we got Odai and Qusai, Iraqi militants are not going to stop blowing up Westerners." I'd love to see the quote where anyone in the Bush administration – anyone in the universe – said that.Oh yeah. This war is going really well, isn't it? Look at those numbers to the upper right if you want to know how "well" things are going in Iraq. Two more brave young men died today not that Ann apparently gives a damn because things are going "so well."
And actually it was quite common on the day of the death of Saddam's sons for folks in the media to say that there were hopes that this would lead to peace in Iraq. Apparently, they really did get this line from the administration or, in the case of this story from folks in the military.
Boy, what universe does Ann Coulter live in?
You can read the rest of the column of lunatic ravings if you want by following the link.
[Link via TBogg]
BOGUS DEFECTORS?
You've got to be frigging kidding me:
As evidence, officials say former Iraqi operatives have confirmed since the war that Hussein's regime sent "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases, Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites.Oh, now come on! Either you lied to us (given the fact every major claim they made they had been warned against by the intelligence community, this seems the most likely at this point) or you were simply wrong about it.They were shown bits of information and led to believe there was an active weapons program, only to be turned loose to make their way to Western intelligence sources," said the senior intelligence official. "Then, because they believe it, they pass polygraph tests ... and the planted information becomes true to the West, even if it was all made up to deceive us."
But, for goodness sakes, don't be pathetic enough to try to blame this on Saddam's "double agent" defectors!
These guys really just don't take responsibility for a single damned thing, do they?
But the most interesting thing in this article is that it's very apparent that David Kay won't be able to produce the promised "September surprise" of WMDs in Iraq:
Evidence recently found by survey teams in Iraq includes detailed schedules, outlines and instruction sheets, among other documents, indicating covert plans to purchase and install "dual use" equipment in civilian laboratories and factories that could be quickly converted to military use if an order were suddenly issued.But wait, that's not what the president said was going on back in January as Jay Rockefeller points out later on:"We've got a whole lot of documents that would substantiate a 'just in time' capability," said one of the recently returned survey team members. "They set up dual-use facilities so they could cook up what they needed, when they needed it. But otherwise they would be making whiter-than-white washing detergent or something."
In addition, some Iraqi scientists and technicians have claimed during interrogation that chemical and biological agents were produced under the "just in time" system as recently as 2002. But other Iraqis have said the system was never used or only produced small "test batches" in the mid- to late 1990s.
...
Another former survey team member said the evidence of a "just in time" program justifies the prewar concerns, even if the program was never activated.
"To me, there's no difference between finding a warehouse full of aerial bombs with nerve gas and a pencil-and-paper plan that will allow them to use their existing production capabilities to produce those same weapons in one week's time," he said.
"I remain cautious about whether we're going to find actual WMD," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Not just a program, but the very extensive weapons — ready for attack — that we all were told existed."If this is all Kay has found, he's not going to be saving W's rear end any time soon. Since the intelligence community warned W and the administration about the veracity of EVERY ONE of their major pre-war claims, Americans now know that the administration exaggerated intelligence or outright lied to them in order to convince them to support the fool's errand in Iraq.Rockefeller said he was "concerned" that the weapons hunters had not found "the 25,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and the 500 tons of mustard, sarin and VX nerve gas" that Bush cited in his State of the Union speech in January.
And it's now going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars, cause unbelievable budget deficits and be a major strain on the U.S. economy for a decade or more.
And let's not even talk about what it's doing to the people in Iraq. I said before the war and afterward that I suspected this war wouldn't improve the life for the average Iraqi one bit and might even make it worse.
We've certainly seen that little prediction come true, haven't we?
Of course the most fascinating thing here is our shifting justifications for the war. We have a new one every day. And this "goal post moving" on WMDs is transparent to anyone who heard any of W's pre-war speeches.
Honestly folks, how anyone can still support this administration after all of this mendacity is really beyond me. They've been a complete, total, and utter disaster on nearly every front so far.
Why don't we all just wise up and at least be smart enought not to give them four more years?
Please?
O'REILLY ADMITS THAT HE KNEW IT WAS A FRIVOLOUS LAWSUIT
I wonder if Al Franken is going to countersue?
I remind you that the judge could still impose sanctions on Faux for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
Wouldn't that be absolutely perfect?
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
ARNIE AND GANGBANGS IN THE 70S
Oh, can you imagine what Republicans would say if Arnie were a Democrat?
He'd be unfit for office and the lowest sort of human being who should never, ever, ever, hold office anywhere at any time.
"This is an example of the low morals and ethics of Democrats I'm afraid," Tom DeLay would be telling us on every talkshow today. He might even go on some of them twice.
And before you say this is ancient history, think about when the pseudo-scandal Whitewater was rumored to have taken place (it was bogus but that's another issue right now).
Yep it was around the same time -- so don't try that one Republicans.
Now, once again, I don't really care what Arnie did in the 70s but if he were a Democrat there would be an entirely different media approach and it would be an enormous scandal that would probably end with Arnie pulling out of the race.
I just thought I should point this little bit of hypocrisy out.
[Link via Atrios]
YEP. THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT.
"Get your hands off our God, God haters!" yelled the wildly gesturing, red-faced man.This genius, presumably in favor of the Ten Commandments, just violated the First and Second Commandment.
[Link via Nitpicker, who suggests God is desperately trying to disassociate himself from these folks]
W DARES TERRORISTS TO COME ATTACK THE U.S.
Digby points out how W made us the flypaper yesterday:
Wow. I thought that the wingnuts playing the Wurlitzer might say something like this, but it’s pretty damned provocative coming from the President.You know, I really did think this "flypaper" insanity was just coming from the sycophantic righty loons who will say anything in defense of W, but now that it's jumped directly into the president's mouth, I'm pretty astonished. It was a stupid idea before, it doesn't look any more intelligent when it becomes an official policy.If he meant that we were fighting terrorism abroad so that someday Americans will no longer have to fear terrorism at home, then his speech writers worded it very badly. Because this could easily be read as another version of “Bring ‘Em On,” only instead of daring Iraqis to kill American soldiers in Iraq; he’s daring terrorists to kill American citizens in America.
That isn’t flypaper. He’s not saying that we’ve drawn the terrorists all to the same place so we can kill them more efficiently. It’s taunting the bull.
Imagine you are bin Laden or some other terrorist nutball and the President of the United States says that by attacking Afghanistan and Iraq he’s keeping you from attacking the US. You’re a loser. You are so weak that as long as we "confront" you abroad you can't commit violence in New York, St. Louis or Los Angeles.
It’s very disconcerting to have to rely on Osama bin Laden and a bunch of fundamentalist holy warriors to be restrained and sophisticated enough to recognize that the President of the United States is just trash talking. It would be extremely unfortunate if terrorists took his statement as a dare to prove him wrong.
And, like Digby, the first thing that jumped to my mind when I heard that was "W, you idiot, you just dared them to come over here and attack us!"
We really do need to do everything we can to defeat this guy in 2004, don't we?
I shudder to think what could happen if he continues to royally screw things up through 2008.
THE SCLM
300 bigots and lunatics protesting around a carved rock, worthy of nonstop coverage. 100,000 people protesting a war, worthy of brief snide commentary.
LYONS: "THE WORST PRESIDENT OF OUR LIVES"
Here's Gene Lyons's latest column:
The Worst President of Our LivesNothing more unites Democrats heading into a presidential election than determination to defeat George W. Bush. Almost regardless of age, most see him as the worst president of their lives. Retiring South Carolina Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings put it this way: "I can tell you this categorically, we've got the weakest president...in the history of my 50 years of public service. I say weak president in that the poor boy campaigns all the time and pays no attention to what's going on in the Congress. Karl Rove tells him to do this or do that or whatever it is, but he's out campaigning."
Bush's sheer incompetence is impossible to overstate. The bad news and the lies just keep on coming. Yesterday, we learned that the U.S. budget deficit will reach a record $480 billion for this fiscal year. 2001 Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerloff told the German magazine Der Spiegel "this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history." He described Bush's save-the-rich tax cuts as "is a form of looting" that will bankrupt the treasury. It was also recently revealed that the White House pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to suppress findings of deadly toxins in the atmosphere in lower Manhattan after 9/11 for fear public warnings would damage the economy. Between dollars and lives, Bush chose the bottom line.
In Iraq, there have now been more American soldiers killed since Bush's theatrical aircraft carrier landing off San Diego than before he announced the end of combat. More than two dozen have died since the president left Washington to spend time roping and branding golf carts on his Texas ranch earlier this month.
Oh, and remember that deadly fleet of unmanned airplanes the Bush administration warned us Saddam Hussein was fixing to launch at the United States unless we invaded Iraq? Upon further review, as they say during NFL games, Air Force intelligence experts have decided they were harmless reconnaissance drones after all.
Determination aside, however, so far Democrats appear to lack a candidate who seems a good bet to win. Of the nine men and women running for the nomination, several--Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich, Carol Mosely-Braun--have no chance whatsoever of securing the nomination. Despite high name-recognition, Sen. Joe Lieberman is going nowhere; I've heard passionate Democrats say they might sit out a Bush-Lieberman contest.
North Carolina Sen. John Edwards once appeared to have the requisite charisma, but voters seem to think he lacks gravitas, to use the cliché of the moment. Whatever the reason, he's not catching on. Rep. Dick Gephardt has run before without getting anywhere, and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts--another candidate who appeared to have everything going for him, including Vietnam heroism--impresses people with his intelligence, toughness and thoughtfulness, but has difficulty getting them to relate to him personally. "Cold" and "aloof" are the words you hear most often. Even if that just means "tall Yankee," it's a problem.
Which brings us to the short Yankee in the race, Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont. By all accounts, Dean appears the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. Dean's brainy, quick-witted, aggressive, well-organized, a good fund-raiser, has a cadre of passionate supporters and as impressive a track record as it's possible to have running a tiny, rural, state like Vermont. Pundits have been underestimating his insurgent appeal almost as badly as they've been overestimating Bush's fabulous popularity. Show me a state Bush lost to Gore in 2000 that he's a cinch to win in 2004. See what I mean?
The worse things get in Iraq, moreover, the better Dean's outspoken anti-war views could end up looking. But the problems with a Dean candidacy begin when you start trying to name states Gore lost that the Vermonter looks likely to win. OK, maybe New Hampshire. Even so, many Democrats can't get past the suspicion that Dean can't compete in the South or the Midwest farm belt and would end up a virtuous, albeit spirited, loser.
Maybe that's why, as Amy Sullivan points out in the September Washington Monthly (here) the number of undecided Democratic voters has actually been rising in recent months, and why, as she argues persuasively, there's still time for Gen. Wesley Clark to win the nomination.
"Arguably," she writes "Clark matches each of the strengths of the current crop of contenders, and then raises them one. His Army background-stretching from Vietnam to Kosovo-out-oomphs Kerry's military record. His service as commander of NATO forces compares favorably to Dean's executive experience as governor of a small New England state. He adds gravitas to Edwards's aesthetic appeal, charisma to Lieberman's thoughtfulness, and sincerity to Gephardt's liberal policies."
If Clark runs, he can win. And unlike Bush, if he wins, he can govern.
9/11 AS STALINIST CINEMA
You've got to read this review from the Village Voice of the upcoming hilariously over-the-top and inaccurate telemovie of Bush on 9/11, DC 9/11.
As long as there are parents and children in this world, people will yearn for the illusion of a wise, selfless, divinely inspired leader. As expressed in DC 9/11, this desire is far less complex than the bizarre wish-fulfillment provided by The West Wing—unless a political miracle occurs and that fantasy materializes with the election of Howard Dean. Both these presidential soap operas offer utopian visions of political leadership. But unlike The West Wing, DC 9/11 gumps a fictionalized hero into real catastrophe to create the myth of a defining moment, and stake its claim on historical truth.Indeed.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
GIVING AID AND COMFORT TO TERRORISTS
Terry over Nitpicker points out that's exactly Oliver North was knowingly doing about twenty years ago.
And why is this guy on a talk show tonight? Shouldn't North be, well, somewhere else entirely?
Hey, Insty and other like-minded conserva-tarians, shouldn't people like Oliver North be shunned? I mean this guy really did aid terrorists after all -- or is this sort of treatment reserved these days only for Democrats who opposed on principle a war that was based upon multiple layers of lies by a Republican president?
Am I detecting a wee bit of a double-standard here?
PAULA REALLY IS A DITZ!
Hesiod discovers that Paul Zahn doesn't know the difference between David Brooks and David Brock.
That's impressive, isn't it?
And she's just the sort of ignoramus that is made an anchor these days.
YOU SHOULD READ ABOUT...
How horrible.
My son is eight years old.
WILSON-PLAME SCANDAL UPDATE: WILSON FINGERS ROVE
Mark Kleiman gives us an update on the Wilson-Plame scandal -- and this one's a bombshell. According to Wilson, the aggravated felon is Karl Rove himself. It wouldn't surprise me but getting Rove to admit it may be the hard part.
You can watch the video here.
I'm with Mark on this one. If Wilson has dropped this bombshell without knowing for sure it was Rove, he has damaged his credibility and it was a very bad idea.
It does seem like the question for Rove is rather simple: "Mr. Rove, did you talk to Robert Novak around the time of that column? If so, did you talk about Joseph Wilson's wife?"
All right "professional" journalists, have at it. One of you needs to ask Rove this question.
I'm not holding my breath.
So, let's see, Cheney has apparently obstructed an investigation and Rove may have outted a CIA agent.
Boy, W sure has surrounded himself with some great guys, huh?
This administration looks more like Nixon's every day, doesn't it?
KRUGMAN: "DUST AND DECEPTION"
You should read Krugman's column this morning.
I do hope New Yorkers will remember how this administration really didn't give a damn about their health in the wake of 9/11. New Yorkers should, therefore, give the GOP the proper warm reception in September of next year for their national convention.
If W is in serious political trouble by then (which seems more likely every day), having the convention in New York City may be one of the more colossal mistakes made by a party in American political history.
It could be as bad as when Democrats in 1968 thought Chicago would be a great place for a convention or, worse yet, when Democrats thought Charleston would provide a great kick off to the 1860 campaign.
Monday, August 25, 2003
CAN YOU IMAGINE...
what we'd be hearing from Republicans if this had happened in response to a GAO probe of President Al Gore's administration?
They'd still be wiping up Tom DeLay's slobber off the Faux Newsroom floor.
According to congressional Republicans, this would be the worst thing ever to happen in American history, wouldn't it?
Remember when people got really upset over things like this? You know, back before this administration proved itself to be absolutely morally bankrupt and took us into a war based on lie after lie after lie?
Therefore, this sort of stuff just seems pretty minor now.
That's not a good sign, is it?
FAUX DROPS LAWSUIT
That's not exactly a surprise but it takes a lot of moxie to take the legal butt-kicking they just took and still say this:
"It's time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he's normally accustomed to," Fox News spokeswoman Irena Steffen said.I'll bet Al's book outsells O'Reilly's next book -- and he'll do it without any rich Republican sugar daddy (Mellon-Scaife) buying a few hundred thousand copies.
WHO ARE JUDGE ROY MOORE'S FANS?
Why, just the sort of neo-confederate bigots the Republicans repudiated back in December during the Trent Lott controversy!
So much for mainstream Republicans no longer appealing to such folks, huh?
Do you think anyone in our media is smart or honest enough to make this point?
I doubt it.
I LIKE THIS SUGGESTION...
by the Horse for a new slogan for Faux News:
There's lots of other good stuff over at the Horse. Go read it.
ODDS, ENDS, AND ASSORTED SARCASM
Hesiod points out yet another example of our, ahem, inadequate planning for this war. Soldiers are being required to use Iraqi AK-47s instead of their own rifles because we didn't issue them enough of them.
Let me add my voice to numerous others. I'm sorry to hear about this TBogg. I hope your father gets better soon. Keep us posted when you have the time.
This story is pretty interesting. Of course I'm for Freedom of Speech but I can't help but think that a deck of cards produced by Marines criticizing W, Cheney, and Rumsfeld for lying us into this war would've been prohibited immediately.
I wonder how these guys will feel about all of this in a few months when a few hundred more of their colleagues have been killed. We'll see I guess.
Kevin asks an excellent question over at CalPundit: what is W thinking in approaching postwar Iraq this way? I don't know either. Does anyone? Or is the answer rather simple like it is on most things I'm afraid: he isn't.
Atrios points us to this Eric Alterman column from November of last year, reminding us that it's not only the administration that is to blame for the Iraq fiasco, it's the media as well. The media failed utterly to do its job in the months before the war, particularly the cable television media which damn-near led war cheers in their broadcasts.
There was plenty of evidence this war was an astonishing oversell long before the war took place -- go back and read my blog for months before the war. However, the flag-waving folks at MSNBC and CNN couldn't be bothered to seriously look into it. In one of the most obvious moments of media foolishness, when W said the largest anti-war demonstrations in world history were just minor "focus groups" that he didn't need to pay attention to, they just reported his words and went on to the next story.
Does the media have blood on its hands as Alterman and Atrios say?
Abso-damn-lutely.
Sunday, August 24, 2003
ATRIOS SAYS HE CAN'T FIND THE IRAQI DRONE IMAGE...
It took a little hunting but here it is:
Isn't it hilarious that W and the boys ever claimed that rickety model airplane was a threat?
ANOTHER ADMINISTRATION LIE EXPOSED
This one is about those "scary" drones the Iraqis supposedly had. You'll note that, once again, actual intelligence experts in the area tried to tell them this was bogus and, once again, they ignored these experts in an attempt to scare people into supporting the war.
There's really not much left of their case for war, is there?
BUSTAMANTE HAS A BIG LEAD OVER THE ARNIS
So, are we going to see round-the-clock coverage of Bustamante now?
I'm not a political expert or anything but if Arnie's not ahead now, I'm really not sure he's ever going to be. If this is a beauty contest, you have to be beautiful right out of the gate because it's only downhill from there.
Saturday, August 23, 2003
KRUGMAN: "CONAN THE DECEIVER"
Great Krugman column yesterday -- go read it. It chronicles how Arnie thinks he should be treated like W or something and not be held accountable for his statements and bluff his way through the election on fiscal policy.
I do think it's interesting that the polls are now showing Californians absolutely evenly divided on recalling Davis. Wouldn't it be hilarious if California goes through this charade and Davis isn't recalled? That would be just what the Republicans in California deserve of course.
I've been busy the last couple of days so I'm just now catching up on my regular reading. That job of mine has sort of gotten in the way of my blogging this week.
Sorry about that.
"GET OVER IT?"
I've just gotten finished reading David Ignatius's column from yesterday in which he tells us anti-war folks we should just "get over it" and support the president. After all, it's just too important to reconstruct Iraq. I've also been reading Josh Marshall who has linked to Ignatius's column and enthusiastically endorsed it, even quoting Abraham Lincoln in his post.
In response to this, I find myself thinking a couple of things. First of all, of course everyone should support the reconstruction of Iraq. To allow the country to collapse into chaos (you know, the current administration approach) only makes the entire world less safe, not to mention our soldiers over there who are in a hellish situation. Ignatius also joins the chorus of columnists over the last few days suggesting we need more international assistance in Iraq and that, therefore, the administration is going to have to "get over it" as well. W and the boys are going to have to seek help from other countries who have been proven absolutely right over the last few months with regard to the fool's errand that was the war with Iraq. I think Ignatius is right there too.
But I get pretty annoyed these days when I read lines like this:
This time the international community should work to get it right. The world is much sadder than a few months ago, and hopefully a bit wiser, too.In the months prior to the war, how did the international community "get it wrong?" We're the ones who "got it wrong" buddy in seeking war with Iraq.
I can't believe for Ignatius I have to review such recent history but here goes. In the weeks prior to the war, there were inspectors in Iraq. There was significant U.N. pressure being applied to Saddam Hussein's government, which was destroying weapons and cooperating grudgingly with inspectors. Now I'm as suspicious as the next guy. I thought he was probably hiding something (apparently not but that's another topic) but I thought inspectors were the best approach back in February and March. In my opinion, it was the international community that "got it right" in the first place. If you recall, most Americans thought continued inspections were the best approach back in February.
In response to these rather reasonable criticisms, all we kept hearing from the administration was how this simply wasn't enough, they were hiding things and we had to go in a "disarm" Saddam right now and that's exactly what we did -- world opinion, reasonable criticisms, logic, evidence, morality, ethics, all that be damned.
I like Busy, Busy, Busy's pithy distillation of Ignatius's column, "Shorter David Ignatius":
Those who counseled against the disastrous invasion of Iraq should forgo assigning blame for the debacle in favor of rallying to the support of those who caused it.Ignatius is just one in a long line of "useful idiots" for this administration. You know, one of the folks who try to convince us to overlook W's innumerable and major flaws for the "greater good" that we'll somehow get out of it. The terrible thing is that no matter what happens, these guys will proclaim it a success and use it in the most cynical political fashion possible against their opponents next year.
I also can't help but think that those of us who were against this war have been proven exactly right about its aftermath and deserve a little credit, not being told to shut up. Just about everything I said was a major concern before the war has turned out to be dead-on accurate.
Unfortunately, because we have no choice but live with this fraud as president for a couple of more years and because I want the best for our soldiers, the Iraqi people, and the world, I hope for success in Iraq. I didn't want this war because I didn't want our soldiers to be in precisely the situation they're in now.
However, in no way does that mean I "support" W or that I will "unite" with the folks in this administration regarding their extremely misguided foreign policy. They have proved themselves to be untruthful, incompetent, and they have dragged this country's name through the mud over the last three years. By pursuing the War in Iraq they have made what is one of the biggest mistakes in American foreign policy history. And they had to tell lie after lie to get grudging public support for it.
A president that makes such astonishing mistakes and lies to us in order to build support for a war doesn't deserve our support, only our condemnation.
Friday, August 22, 2003
THE RIGHT WING LOONINESS THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
It really isn't White House press secretary Scott McClellan's fault that his father is a right-wing loon -- although it is fair game to point it out I guess.
LBJ killed JFK, huh? Right. I feel sorry for Scott McClellan actually.
And, speaking of loony, check out this bizarre post by Insty.
McClellan's dad clearly isn't the only one who is a bit out there, huh?
Tin foil hats, anyone?
[Links via Atrios]
FAUX LOSES -- BIG TIME
"There are hard cases and there are easy cases. This is an easy case," said U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, who added that the motion for an injunction was "wholly without merit."[Link via Roger Ailes -- no, not the moron who filed this ridiculous and frivolous lawsuit]He said it is highly unlikely that consumers would be misled to think that Fox is sponsoring the book. He also said the trademark is weak.
Here's more:
"Parody is a form of artistic expression protected by the First Amendment. The keystone to parody is imitation. Mr. Franken is clearly mocking Fox," said Chin.So, in short, Faux lost about as badly as they could've lost. Of course, as a shameless GOP agitprop service masquerading as a news channel, they certainly deserved to lose like that.The judge said he thought it ironic that a media company that should be fighting to protect free speech would seek to undermine the First Amendment. He also said he thought the "fair and balanced" trademark is weak because the phrase is used so often.
...
Fox argued in its suit that the cover's tag line, "A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," was used to confuse consumers.
During arguments held before his ruling, Chin asked Fox lawyer Dorie Hansworth if she really believed that the cover was confusing.
"To me, it's quite ambiguous as to what the message is," she said. "It's a deadly serious cover ... This is much too subtle to be considered a parody."
Floyd Abrams, a lawyer representing Penguin and Franken, strongly disagreed.
"There is no way that any person not completely dense would be confused by this cover to think that Fox was accusing O'Reilly of being a liar," he said.
Chin, siding with Abrams, pointed out that the word "Lies" in the title is printed in large red letters next to a photo of O'Reilly. He said that there was no likelihood that book buyers would think that the sponsor is Fox or O'Reilly.
"Fair and Balanced" my, er, hind foot.
E.J. DIONNE: "BEHIND THE FAILURE"
E.J. Dionne writes a column today that sounds a lot like Bob Herbert's column yesterday.
I agree totally. We need international cooperation and we need it right the hell now.
This unholy mess is what unilateralism gets you folks.
W and the boys need to swallow their pride (er, arrogance actually) and ask for help.
It'll never happen, will it?
INCOMPETENCE OR CONSPIRACY?
You should read Gail Sheehy's moving article about the four 9/11 moms against the administration. These women are heroes and are singlehandedly responsible for the 9/11 commission (which, like every 9/11 investigation, is currently being stonewalled by the administration).
This article also raises all of the usual questions about inconsistencies in the administration's version of events on 9/11. Conason even goes so far to suggest something sinister:
So afraid is the Bush administration of what could be revealed by inquiries into its failures to protect Americans from terrorist attack, it is unabashedly using Kremlin tactics to muzzle members of Congress and thwart the current federal commission investigating the failures of Sept. 11. But there is at least one force that the administration cannot scare off or shut up. They call themselves "Just Four Moms from New Jersey," or simply "the girls."Just like with any cataclysmic event (the attack on Pearl Harbor for example), there are numerous things that just don't "match up":
Lorie checked out the North American Aerospace Defense Command, whose specific mission includes a response to any form of an air attack on America. It was created to provide a defense of critical command-and-control targets. At 8:40 a.m. on 9/11, the F.A.A. notified NORAD that Flight No. 11 had been hijacked. Three minutes later, the F.A.A. notified NORAD that Flight No. 175 was also hijacked. By 9:02 a.m., both planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, but there had been no action by NORAD. Both agencies also knew there were two other hijacked planes in the air that had been violently diverted from their flight pattern. All other air traffic had been ordered grounded. NORAD operates out of Andrews Air Force Base, which is within sight of the Pentagon. Why didn’t NORAD scramble planes in time to intercept the two other hijacked jetliners headed for command-and-control centers in Washington? Lorie wanted to know. Where was the leadership?And how about this?:
Mindy pieced together the actions of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He had been in his Washington office engaged in his "usual intelligence briefing." After being informed of the two attacks on the World Trade Center, he proceeded with his briefing until the third hijacked plane struck the Pentagon. Mindy relayed the information to Kristen:Now, folks, there are a couple of possible explanations. One is sheer incompetence -- an astonishing level of incompetence in fact. Of course, incompetence and fear-mongering is the modus operandi of this administration, Iraq being the prime example of this at the moment."Can you believe this? Two planes hitting the Twin Towers in New York City did not rise to the level of Rumsfeld’s leaving his office and going to the war room to check out just what the hell went wrong." Mindy sounded scared. "This is my President. This is my Secretary of Defense. You mean to tell me Rumsfeld had to get up from his desk and look out his window at the burning Pentagon before he knew anything was wrong? How can that be?"
The other possibility is something more sinister. Something I almost hesitate to mention. Something I try my damnedest to not dwell on for very long. And something, I must admit, that I simply don't believe at the present moment.
That possibility, of course, is that the administration knew something quite a bit more specific than just noticing increased "chatter" on the terrorist networks in the days up to 9/11.
Now I'm not suggesting they knew anything more specific than that terrorist attacks were a possibility against major targets. Admittedly, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to back this up. When Ashcroft stopped flying commercial, that's an awfully suggestive little detail. When we hear that the president was briefed about hijackings, that's another suggestive little detail. When we think about how quickly the 19 hijackers were ascertained and find out 14 investigations were open of people linked to the hijackers, that's another detail.
Just this rather mild suggestion would be an absolute bombshell -- such an enormous bombshell that this administration, which already practices a Nixonian level of secrecy, might try to do anything to stymie an investigation. Such a bombshell that it might doom W's administration's second term immediately and hand the White House and potentially both chambers (Republican-controlled chambers that would have therefore assisted in the cover-up) to the other political party next year in a landslide.
This administration's actions over the last several months are quite consistent with that possibility.
Surely this isn't true, right?
In no way am I suggesting that the administration knew it was coming and purposefully refused to do anything about it. I'm thinking incompetence is the answer to the question, not some deep, dark conspiracy.
However, I can't help but wonder just what these guys knew -- and why they won't be more forthcoming. I think they did know at least a bit more than they are letting on.
What do you think?
ATRIOS DOESN'T GET IT
And neither do I.
In the interest of fairness, here's Mark Kleiman's response.
Thursday, August 21, 2003
NOW THIS...
is astonishingly tacky and pretty damned outrageous.
So a Republican attempt to hijack democracy in California is used as yet another marketing opportunity by the purveyors of "authentic Connecticut Mexican food" over at Taco Hell.
I guess the guy LEADING in the polls, Cruz Bustamante, doesn't even make it into the top two in the minds of the folks in management over at Taco Bell HQ. And let's not even get into the fact that they chose the "grilled stufft burrito" for him -- and everybody else.
Big business in America never fails to disappoint, does it?
(Thanks to reader Jon Bastian for the tip.)
BOB HERBERT IS RIGHT
The only way this Iraq fiasco turns around is with the help of the U.N. and some genuine allied cooperation there.
However, I'm not holding my breath that the geniuses who got us into this mess and thought it would be a glorious and quick victory have the brains to figure that out.
The idiotic right-wing blogger we-can-justify-anything-if-you-give-us-long-enough "flypaper theory" was clearly not the intention of this administration but currently is the result of numerous poor choices by the administration over the last ten months or so.
I think I'd like to use a little less American "flypaper" over in Iraq.
How about you?
52% APPROVAL FOR W...
and now more Americans in this poll would vote for the generic "someone new" than for W.
W is really not as popular as some would have you believe, is he?
Ah, that explains it! O'Reilly and Coulter are so grumpy about it they won't appear with liberal truth-teller Joe Conason on television shows.
It's either that or they're cowards. Take your pick.
So much for the "No-Spin Zone," huh?
WANT TO READ FAUX v. FRANKEN?
Here's a link to it (you'll need Adobe Acrobat).
It's pretty entertaining reading.
Here are a few select parts you may not have read elsewhere [my emphasis added]:
Moreover, since Franken's reputation as a political commentator is not of the same caliber as the stellar reputations of FNC's on-air talent, any association between Franken and Fox News is likely to blur or tarnish Fox News' distinctive mark...Gee, I think it's safe to say O'Reilly's behind this one, don't you think?...
Currently, "The O'Reilly Factor" is the most popular program on FNC. "The O'Reilly Factor" bills itself as a "No-Spin Zone" and the goal of the program is to present the audience with the straight facts while allowing the audience to reach its own conclusions about the news.
...
O'Reilly himself has become a national celebrity and one of America's most trusted sources of news and information. He is inextricably linked with Fox News and the "Fair and Balanced" trademark in the minds of the viewing public.
Do you think he's got a big ego, perhaps? Obviously so do the folks at Faux, huh?
Go read the rest of it for yourself. It's pretty hilarious.
Special thanks to my colleague in the department Dan Smith who sent me this link.
MEETINGS
I've got meetings for a few hours this morning. More later.
Go read some of the excellent blogs on the right of the page in the meantime, will you?
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
HITS?
It's been pointed out to me that in my earlier "Thank You" post yesterday, I mentioned the number of visitors, 350,000 (more than 352,000 now) but forgot to mention the number of hits.
I've had nearly 503,000 hits since I installed my hit counter last September 18th.
Now you can consider yourself completely up-to-date on my traffic.
Thanks again folks! I really do appreciate the patronage!
IS THE CIA BEHIND TERRORISM IN THE PHILIPPINES?
This is just a strange story. I'm not quite sure what to think. I'm inclined to say this is not true and sounds like a conspiracy theory but, knowing the history of the CIA, very little surprises me these days.
The last couple of paragraphs of this column are certainly hard-hitting:
These suspicions stem from a bizarre incident on May 16, 2002, in Davao. Michael Meiring, a U.S. citizen, allegedly detonated explosives in his hotel room, injuring himself badly. While recovering in the hospital, Mr. Meiring was whisked away by two men, who witnesses say identified themselves as FBI agents, and flown to the United States. Local officials have demanded that Mr. Meiring return to face charges, to little effect. BusinessWorld, a leading Philippine newspaper, has published articles openly accusing Mr. Meiring of being a CIA agent involved in covert operations "to justify the stationing of American troops and bases in Mindanao."Good shot, eh?Yet the Meiring affair has never been reported in the U.S. press. And the mutinous soldiers' incredible allegations were no more than a one-day story. Maybe it just seemed too outlandish: an out-of-control government fanning the flames of terrorism to pump up its military budget, hold onto power and violate civil liberties.
Why would Americans be interested in something like that?
Give the story a read. Let me know what you think.
THE BIG DOG'S STILL GOT IT
The Horse points us to this interesting column by Michael Wolff about a conference he went to recently.
Read down to the second page to find out about how Clinton was kicking some serious conserva-tarian rear at the conference.
You know, I sure do miss the days when we had a competent president who worried about the big issues and the people instead of keeping his ultra-rich contributors happy with taxcuts.
Don't the Clinton years just seem like halcyon days compared to the present?
I mean, heck, W can't even be bothered to put a stop to record budget deficits, much less something actually serious.
I truly suspect we'll never make major progress in the War on Terror until he's out of office folks and replaced by someone who knows what the hell he's doing.
Until then, we're just marking time -- and hoping of course that we don't have another 9/11-level disaster in the interim.
AH, THE SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY...
that is Iraq today.
W and the boys told us in January and February it was a haven for terrorists and a threat to us. That clearly wasn't the case back then.
However, because of this administration's bumbling and sheer incompetence, it certainly fits that definition today, doesn't it?
MORE REPUBLICAN REVISIONISM
Krisnelda over at Different Strings discovers Republicans aren't only trying to revise the title of W's speeches these days.
As it becomes increasingly obvious (and unpopular) that W and the boys are trying to use 9/11 politically, they've "officially" changed their rationale for holding the latest convention in the history of the GOP.
You've got to read this one to believe it.
LYONS: "A NEW FRONT IN THE 'CULTURE WAR'"
Here's Gene Lyons's column for the week:
A New Front in the "Culture War"Maybe the best way to understand what galvanizes many Democrats about the idea of Gen. Wesley Clark running for president is to ponder recent manifestations of Republican triumphalism at its most absurd: the George W. Bush "Elite Force Naval Aviator 12-inch Action Figure," and GOP attack-blonde Ann Coulter's book "Treason."
"Exacting in detail and fully equipped with authentic gear," the Bush doll comes advertised as "a meticulous 1:6 scale recreation of the Commander-in-Chief's appearance during his historic Aircraft Carrier landing" to (rather prematurely) announce an end to hostilities in Iraq last May. It may be purchased online from proBush.com, a site which also features an illustrated traitors list, including Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. John F. Kerry and an odd mix of Hollywood celebrities, recording artists and obscure academics. "If you do not support our president's decisions," it seems "you are a traitor."
The TV pundette Coulter's alleged "best seller"--its place on the New YorkTimes Book Review's list is marked by a symbol indicating bulk purchases, meaning some ideological sugar daddy's buying them up--makes an even more sweeping condemnation. Ever since FDR died, it seems, "[w]hether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America....They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down."
As embarrassing as Coulter's views are to conscientious conservatives, it's no exaggeration to say that the "liberal" sins she caricatures--atheism, cosmopolitanism, sexual license, moral relativism, communism, physical and intellectual cowardice, disloyalty and lack of patriotism--are identical to the crimes of the Jews as the Nazis depicted them. Also of "race mixers" as segregationist red-hots like Arkansas' own Justice Jim Johnson saw them. During the 90s, they morphed into the more irrational forms of Clinton-hatred. Not everybody who dislikes the former president is a bigot, it's worthwhile saying again, but all bigots loathed him.
Exploiting these dark, unsavory stereotypes was the essence of Richard M. Nixon's famous "Southern Strategy," and remains an essential part of President Junior's 2004 re-election plan. Doubters should read up on the whisper campaign against Sen. John McCain during the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary, which included insinuations that the former Vietnam POW was left emotionally unstable by his wartime ordeal, and hinting at dark secrets behind his adoption of a "non-white" child. Or, for that matter, on GOP attack ads in 2002 questioning the patriotism of Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, a Vietnam War triple amputee.
As the latter examples make clear, Gen. Clark's own history as a decorated combat veteran wouldn't render him immune to such attacks. But it would limit their effectiveness to the kinds of fools eagerly snapping up George W. Bush Elite Force Action Figures and standing in line to secure Coulter's autograph. For the great majority of Americans, the former NATO Supreme Commander's presidential candidacy could provide an historic opportunity to confront ugly stereotypes about Democratic perfidy and defeat them once and for all.
That's not to say Clark's candidacy would automatically signal a truce in the "culture wars." But it would mark an important turning point nevertheless. Responding to questions from CNN's Wolf Blitzer about a TV ads sponsored by draftwesleyclark.com over the weekend, Clark disclaimed any contact with his would-be supporters but professed to feel in the country "an enormous hunger for leadership. And I think the draft movement is evidence that, to some extent, there is still that hunger out there, despite the number of candidates in the race and despite the president's polling."
Not very modest of him, perhaps, but then humility is a quality for which 4-star generals are rarely noted. In fact, President Junior hasn't been polling all that well. A recent FoxNews/Opinion Dynamics survey asked if "he deserves to be reelected or would the country probably be better off with someone else as president?" "Someone else" led "deserves re-election" by margin of 42 to 36 percent, down eleven points from June.
The argument that it's already too late for a Clark candidacy is nicely rebutted by an analysis on the draftwesleyclark.com website pointing out that with nine Democratic candidates, 4 or 5 of them considered "serious," and with polls showing upwards of half the Democratic primary voters undecided, the race remains wide open.
My own sense is that Clark's announcement would send an electrical charge through the Democratic party. Most are angry, sick and tired of having soft-handed Beltway chickenhawks and blonde pundettes question their loyalty and malign their courage. They are spoiling for a fight and looking for a champion who's not a plastic action figure in a make-believe uniform.
But would Clark the candidate measure up to Clark the symbol? I expect we're fixing to find out.
Tuesday, August 19, 2003
YEP
In Big Lies, Joe Conason says:As someone whose specialty area in history is this era, I can vouch for what Kevin has to say and, if you recall, Insty's knowledge of American history -- even that of the region within which he lives (the South) -- isn't particularly impressive. Therefore, I really wouldn't want to be taking any history lessons from Glenn.
If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals.Megan McArdle mocks Conason's sentiments, Julian Sanchez says, "Golly, thanks liberals! I'd been under the misguided impression that these things were primarily made possible by technological development and economic growth, but it's good to be set straight," and Instapundit links approvingly.But folks, liberals really did fight for all these things, and conservatives really did resist them — and a lot of other things as well. Would they have happened anyway eventually? Maybe. But communism would probably have eventually fallen on its own too, and that doesn't stop conservatives from deifying Ronald Reagan and calling Democrats traitors. Hell, even Conason's rhetoric is pretty unexceptionable in this passage, so I'm not quite sure why the conserva-tarian crowd is getting so bent out of shape about it.
Conservatives, for some reason, are often some of the loosest with the facts of history of the twentieth century -- particularly that of the very important Progressive Era.
I guess the idea of liberal Republicans just gives these guys the willies, huh? It's easier for them to just pretend that all of the major societal advances of the 1900s and 1910s happened some other way.
I mean, heck, it would be depressing to realize that your conservative heroes fought against clean air and clean water, wouldn't it?
350K SERVED, KRUGMAN, AND DOUBLE-STANDARDS
A few hours ago, I had my 350,000th visitor (I've decided, in response to reader comments, to thank you folks every 50,000 visitors from now on). I don't know where the visitor came from since I was in my third long meeting of the day. I do appreciate your patronage of this blog. I hope to give you reason to come back often.
And now, the odds and ends:
Krugman is good today. He talks about what needs to be done to the power grid -- and how he's not optimistic that this won't be yet another opportunity for power companies to profiteer without making any substantive changes. I'm with Krugman on that one.
Also, if you think I haven't said enough about the salacious things out there about Schwarzenegger, here's your virtual one stop shop for such things. I do find it fascinating the double-standard that exists for this stuff in our media. If Clinton had gotten this sort of treatment, we'd have never heard anything at all about Lewinsky in any of the major newspapers. It's also interesting that it's the British press that may bring him down.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think any of this stuff has anything to do with Schwarzenegger's ability to fulfill his office, just as the same was true with Clinton back in 1998. It's irrelevant and between the Arnis and his wife.
However, it's amazing how the same press and the same Republicans were frothing at the mouth about what were some relatively minor things in comparison to what is apparently out there about Ahhhnuld.
Of course, if anyone remembers the unbelievable free pass that W got about his rumored cocaine use and on his going AWOL from his National Guard commitment for a year, it's not exactly surprising that the press is using the same transparent double-standard and leaving the Arnis alone, is it?
WHO ARE THE REVISIONISTS NOW?
It has become pretty clear after the bombing of the U.N. building in Baghdad today that things are going terribly in Iraq. Today it has become apparent that this fool's errand of a war may have been a horrible tar-baby-like mistake from which we may not be able to easily extricate ouselves. However, ironically at about the same time, W and the boys show they didn't really mean it when they said they were against revisionism -- at least when it serves their purposes anyway.
Atrios points us to The Likely Story blog which notes that the White House has suddenly changed the title of W's May 2nd Carrier Photo-Op address to "President Bush Announces the End of Major Combat Operations." You see, the word "Major" wasn't in the title until late yesterday. As if that little editorial revision makes W somehow less wrong about his preposterous premature claim three months ago.
These guys micromanage everything, don't they? And it still, ugh (I don't like this metaphor either), blows up in their faces. Or, more accurately, it blows up in someone else's face, usually that of our soldiers or some other innocent party.
When are Americans going to hold this White House accountable for these astonishing foreign policy mistakes?
I'm finally out of meetings but my wife has a migraine and I need to watch kiddos.
More later.
FAUX VS. FRANKEN UPDATE
Want the opinion of a trademark lawyer on this lawsuit? Go here.
I didn't know the source of Faux's quotations in the lawsuit was a minor fringe author who writes for a paper about 60 miles away from me!
I've never heard of him nor am I likely to ever again.
What a weird person to use and pretend he's an authority!
I'm off to "Meeting-fest 2003." More later.
[Link via Atrios]
Monday, August 18, 2003
"WHAT THESE PEOPLE ARE DOING MAKES IRAN-CONTRA LOOK LIKE AMATEUR HOUR"
Go read this interesting article over at TomPaine.com about the parallels between the current foreign policy mess in the Bush administration and Iran-Contra.
I wonder if eventually we'll be listening to W tell us over and over how he "can't recall" anything like in Iran-Contra.
I'm likely to have to do a lot of this work stuff (several meetings) tomorrow during the day. I suspect it will get in the way of my blogging. Isn't that annoying?
Anyway, I'll post all I can of course but it may not be much until tomorrow evening.
We'll see.
"ZSA-ZSA SADDAM?" SAY WHAT?
This my friends is ridiculous.
In fact it's downright hilarious that anyone thinks this will work.
U.S. SHIFTING FOCUS FROM FINDING OSAMA TO FINDING SADDAM
As the hunt for Saddam Hussein grows more urgent and the guerrilla war in Iraq shows little sign of abating, the Bush administration is continuing to shift highly specialized intelligence officers from the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to the Iraq crisis, according to intelligence officials who have been involved in the redeployments.Does this seem astonishingly foolish to you too? Now of course I want Saddam found if it will help to end the guerilla war (I'm not really sure it will but that's for another post) against our forces in Iraq. However, through these choices hasn't the administration just made it much more likely that Al-Qaeda will become more powerful in Afghanistan. If that happens, the administration through this decision has just made us all less safe from terrorism?The recent moves -- involving both analysts in Washington and specially trained field operatives -- follow the transfer of hundreds of elite commandos from Afghanistan duty to service in Iraq, Pentagon officials said.
The activity reflects the priority of capturing Hussein quickly, ending the guerrilla war, and locating possible weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, officials said. It also gives further ammunition, however, to critics who have long claimed that fighting the Iraq war would divert resources and attention from the hunt for bin Laden, the primary architect of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and other Al Qaeda fugitives.
"The intelligence brainpower is focused on Iraq," said a European diplomat who has recently been in Afghanistan and asked not to be named. "If you didn't have Iraq, the intellectual energy would be on Afghanistan."
And how well are things really going in Afghanistan? Not so well, as you learn later on in the same story:
About 400 guerrillas drove a convoy of trucks late Saturday from Pakistan into southeastern Afghanistan and attacked a police headquarters building, according to the Associated Press. At least 22 police and rebels were killed in the ensuing firefight. The rebels held the police building until dawn yesterday, when they destroyed it and withdrew.Our news media largely ignores reporting the news from Afghanistan these days. Why is that?Last week, Afghanistan suffered the deadliest day since the end of major combat operations in the former Taliban stronghold. A bus bombing and clashes between the newly created Afghan National Army and Taliban and Al Qaeda guerrillas left 58 people dead and dozens wounded.
I guess they'll decide it's important again the next time there's a terrorist attack.
Sunday, August 17, 2003
WESLEY CLARK SAYS
"When our airmen were flying over Kosovo, Tom DeLay led House Republicans to vote not to support their activities -- when American troops were in combat," Clark said. "To me, that's a real indicator of a man who's motivated not by patriotism or support for the troops but by partisan political purposes."Indeed.
Heh.
HEAT VS. SNOW
I'm glad to see that someone else [Morat (Aarrggh! Permalinks bloggered -- the title of the post is "More on Idiot Comments about heatwaves") and Different Strings] had the same thought I did when reading the idiotic WaPo editorial about Europeans and the heat.
My first response was "hey you idiots, why does Washington, D.C. shut down when there's three inches of snow? That's not really that big a deal, is it?"
I must admit as someone who has made his class at 8:00 (both in Indiana and here in my rather hilly region of Missouri) when we've had twelve inches or more of snow, I can't believe that some folks simply can't drive in snow but the fact is, some folks just can't.
As Different Strings notes, we're all acclimated to different weather conditions and that's just the way it is with human beings. As someone who's seen the hilarious comedic spectacle of drivers in San Antonio and Houston try to drive on a whopping inch of snow, I can attest to the acclimation argument. I really couldn't believe it when my uncle in Houston completely lost control of his car in what had to be the lamest inch of snow I've ever seen.
I just don't know how the folks at the WaPo can't realize such an obvious thing before making fools of themselves in writing that editorial.
And, btw, the high here was 101 today. In any given year, I deal with both heavy snows and days of 100+ degrees. I deal with both extremes -- so you certainly can't accuse me of being a softy heat-wise or cold-wise.
In fact, I rode 10 miles on my bike yesterday through extremely hilly terrain in 96 degrees with a heat index of more than 105.
Nonetheless, I do understand that most Americans don't deal with both extremes. Why aren't the folks at the WaPo bright enough to recognize that?
GOOD QUIP
An interesting Newsweek article about the blackout includes the following quip:
Across the country in San Diego, President George W. Bush was on brief respite from his month-long Crawford, Texas, vacation, lunching with troops at the Marine Air Corps Station in Miramar before heading to a fund-raising dinner.I think the press may finally be paying attention to the fact that W was AWOL once again, just as he was on 9/11.
I mean, heck folks, I'm sure we'd all love to take a month off from work but we just can't, can we?
A SERIOUS QUESTION
What is NIPR.mil? Should I be concerned that I'm visited a few times per day by a visitor from NIPR.mil? Is this just a blanket domain for anyone in a certain part or office in the Pentagon or did this post in March reacting to the "Shock and Awe" in downtown Baghdad put me on Don Rumsfeld's "watch list?"
Surely there are larger threats to national security than this little old blog, right?
AND NOW, ANOTHER EPISODE OF...
Conservative Short Attention Span Theatre.
Can conservatives read and comprehend anything longer than a Donald Luskin column?
Well, come to think of it, Luskin's columns are so poorly written, that's not a very good example for me to use. (NRO ought to be embarrassed they publish him much less pay him.) How about a Bill Kristol column instead? I mean, heck, Kristol's a W agitprop sort of guy but at least he can write -- and I suspect his copy editors are good.
This is just hilarious.
[Link via Atrios]
Saturday, August 16, 2003
WILSON SCANDAL UPDATE
Remember how two people close to W broke federal law a few weeks ago by outting Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife?
David Corn gives us an update about what sort of investigation is under way.
In short, you and I have to count on the fairness and judgement of John Ashcroft and George Tenet (Tenet has already proved himself an insufferable suck-up to this administration) for there to be much of an investigation.
I'm not holding my breath.
BTW, folks, this scandal makes the Monica Lewinsky thing look like a parking ticket -- but Republicans can't seem to be convinced to care about it.
That tells you all you need to know about their moral character, doesn't it?
"THEY'RE ABOUT A WEEK AWAY FROM GIVING ONE ANOTHER WEDGIES"
Chuck Kuffner has your Texas re-districting update. It's quite a comprehensive one.
As expected, Texas Republicans in the State Senate are looking more moronic by the minute. Only Governor Goodhair, who called this ridiculous special session, is ahead of them on the moron-o-meter at the moment.
Senate Republicans are imposing fines and sanctions against the defiant Democrats. These same folks said absolutely nothing when a Republican state senator who was a sex offender was allowed to serve out his term in 1997.
Ah, the hypocrisy is hip-deep down there, isn't it?
BUSTAMANTE LEADS AHHHNULD IN CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR'S RACE
Before the first television ads have aired, the race to succeed California Gov. Gray Davis (D) if he is recalled came down to just two men, Republican action star Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz M. Bustamante, according to a nonpartisan statewide poll to be released Saturday.So much for the invincible Schwarzenegger machine, huh? This is hilarious. If he's not ahead now, he probably never will be.The California Field Poll found 25 percent of registered voters opted for Bustamante followed by 22 percent for Schwarzenegger.
The other candidates trailed in single digits: State Sen. Tom McClintock took 9 percent; businessman Bill Simon won 8 percent; former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth received 5 percent; all three are Republicans. Independent and columnist Arianna Huffington got 4 percent, and Green Party candidate Peter Camejo received 2 percent.
Meanwhile, suspiciously, Schwarzenegger can't seem to remember that meeting in May 2001 with Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay during the middle of the California power crisis:
Huffington also criticized Schwarzenegger for meeting with former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay in May 2001 in Beverly Hills. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that Lay gave Schwarzenegger and other business and political leaders a four-page plan detailing his solution to California's energy crisis.Right."I don't remember the meeting," Schwarzenegger said.
That's lie number two.
For someone who's trying to convince Californians he isn't really a Republican politician, he sure does lie like one.
To review, it's only been three days since lie number one.
[Links via Atrios]
THE CLIFFHANGER THAT IS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
You really should read this fascinating piece by Michael Wolff. I'll quote the opening few paragraphs so you can get a sense of it:
Exactly what kind of trouble is the president in?I agree that the next few months really will tell the tale of this administration. The war is either one of the most colossal mistakes by an administration in American history, compounded by the fact that we invaded Iraq without any sort of provocation. That, as you know, is unprecedented in American history.The White House, the Democrats, and the media—all puzzled—are trying to make this calculation. You sense the precision instruments at work, measuring opinion and Zeitgeist air quality. Writers of all biases have been sent back to further develop the plot—we’ve gotten to the cliff-hanger without being sure of the outcome.
Or it’s like an interactive narrative—we can pick from opposite scenarios:
•This postwar (or post-postwar) querulousness is just a blip for the president, and, as so often before, the Bush political and communications experts will make the necessary adjustments (or do the requisite bullying) and, with relative media quiescence, charge on.But which is it? It can’t be both.•The war and its aftermath—which is unfolding pretty much exactly as the antiwar forces said it would—have created a situation of great vulnerability for the president, which the media, goaded by the Democrats, will poke and prod with mounting pleasure. The president and his men will become more and more defensive and, as the bullying becomes more brazen, prone to greater and greater mistakes. Hence the stage is set for political calamity.
It’s slightly surreal and unnerving to be caught without a clear story line—to be in such an unscripted moment. It’s highly uncommercial to have the story meander like this without narrative momentum. Everybody looks foolish and unprofessional. Certainly it’s rare for this White House and its consummate script doctors. And the media, which has grown so dependent on the White House writers, is now uncertain where to go on its own (it’s part of the problem—the media expects that the Bushies will come up with some great new plot twist).
Presidents have always been able to point to (or even, in the case of LBJ, manufacture) some sort of provocation when leading the nation into war. W tried to substitute "imminent threat" for provocation and it's becoming increasingly apparent the case for this threat was exceedingly weak.
One of the more interesting passages in Wolff's piece deals with what seems to be a rather major mistake by the Bushies:
Even the very smart media people in the Bush White House probably did not think through the fact that hooking up with Blair meant that we were going to hook up with British media—a more sour, more skeptical lot than our own. Major parts of the Brit press—including the BBC—have turned against their government in something of an us-or-you face-off. There’s now the sexed-up dossier and a dead civil servant (in terms of story line, the suicide of David Kelly, the weapons expert and BBC source, will function something like the suicide of Vince Foster—it provides the sinister subtext). And the sense that the Blair government hangs in the balance.I really think Wolff's onto something here. It may very well be the British media that brings W down.Now, not only does the British fudging of the evidence cast further doubt on the Bushies’ WMD sales pitch, but it makes the U.S. media more competitive. If the British media has found a story, why haven’t we? If they’re having fun, we should be having fun, too! The Brits, in their own competitive view, see the U.S. media as running three to four weeks behind them. Indeed, that’s a good narrative strategy: When you don’t have a clear story line, follow somebody else’s.
In the second act, after the smoking gun has been uncovered (or at least when the smoke from the smoking gun is swirling all around), there begins, for the Bush writers, the inevitable process of trying to assign the gun to somebody else.
This is the moment that in hindsight is always the one remembered as when the confession should have occurred. And indeed, someone obviously urged contrition from the president at his press conference last week. But while he got as far as the obligatory buck-stops-here mea culpa, he did not confess to the main charge: overselling the weapons.
And how much trouble is Blair in, you ask? Well, just today he's been caught lying about the source of his controversial "45 minutes" WMD claim:
The government has never admitted the key information was based on hearsay. On June 4, Tony Blair told the House of Commons: "It was alleged that the source for the 45 minute claim was an Iraqi defector of dubious reliability. He was not an Iraqi defector and he was an established and reliable source."The death watch has started for Blair's government.Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, said of the claim on May 29: "That was said on the basis of security service information - a single source, it wasn't corroborated."
The irony is that the government launched a furious attack on the BBC for broadcasting allegations that the dossier was "sexed up" based on a single, anonymous, uncorroborated source. That source was Dr Kelly.
Mr Campbell told the foreign affairs select committee: "I find it incredible ... that people can report based on one single anonymous uncorroborated source."
In fact, the foundation for the government's claim was even shakier, according to the document: a single anonymous uncorroborated source quoting another single anonymous uncorroborated source.
How much of this scandal will make it over here? Did the Bush administration convince Blair to make that claim? How much of a role did the Bush administration have in promoting the claim?
Of course, this assumes that we have a responsible press that will pursue these issues. That's the part of the story that, to me at least, seems the most problematic. The toothless flag-waving watchdogs have not exactly impressed me for the last decade or so.
Friday, August 15, 2003
I HATE TO TELL YOU THIS...
but the world doesn't revolve around you, Glenn.
[Link via Atrios]
IN HONOR OF "FAIR AND BALANCED FRIDAY"
I couldn't resist it. Image courtesy of Billmon.
THE RIGHT'S SUMMER OF HATE
Here's an interesting column by Sidney Blumenthal on Salon (get the day pass).
It's pretty interesting. I like his historical perspective on the origins of right-wing invective as well:
The origins of this garish imagination of fear lie deeper than the recent escapades of Newt Gingrich, running back to the Salem witch trials of the 17th century, the Know Nothings of the 19th century, and Father Charles Coughlin and Sen. Joseph McCarthy of the 20th. In 1964, when the first contemporary right-wing candidate, Barry Goldwater, was nominated by the Republican Party, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay on "The paranoid style in American politics." He emphasized style because it had become the essence of this brand of politics: "Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content." But this did not mean that the right-wingers of Hofstadter's time did not engage in elaborate displays of "pedantry" and accumulations of "evidence." They piled up "evidence" to create a thoroughly coherent if fictitious black-and-white picture in which enemies within conspired and only those who had a special night-vision to identify these satanic hosts could resist them in the name of patriotism.It's an interesting article. Go read it.The same year that Hofstadter published his piece on "the paranoid style," an obscure conservative named John Stormer published the "carefully documented story of America's retreat from victory" in the face of the liberal-internationalist-Communist conspiracy. It was titled "None Dare Call It Treason." The book, timed to coincide with the 1964 presidential campaign, was turned into a bestseller by the John Birch Society, a far-right-wing group, which boasted that it had distributed 6 million copies within eight months of its publication. (To this day, the Birch Society sells Stormer's book on its Web site.)
Nearly 40 years later, in the summer of 2003, the bestselling book on the right was entitled "Treason," by Ann Coulter. "Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason," she wrote. " ... Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don't. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy." Positioned discreetly next to her book on the New York Times bestseller list was a tiny dagger signifying bulk sales from unknown sources. Coulter's argument was a conservative perennial, down to the spirited defense of Joseph McCarthy. Both Stormer's and Coulter's works cited mounds of "evidence." Both warned ominously against liberal betrayal. The principal difference between "None Dare Call It Treason" and "Treason" was not in sophistication, nuance, erudition, persuasiveness, or literary quality, but in the expanded capacity of conservatives to disseminate the word far and wide through their own alternative media and in the elevation by the mainstream media of the extremist as entertainer.
A FAIR AND BALANCED EDITORIAL...
from the WaPo, making light of Europeans for having major problems with the heat. I remind you that 3000 or more people have died in the heat wave in Europe. That's around the same number as died on September 11th in this country. Therefore this editorial is neither funny nor clever. In fact, it's damned tasteless.
I guess we should just be happy that Europeans didn't write snarky editorials about how we should've known it would happen and more adequately prepared for domestic terrorism back in September of 2001.
Atrios has some suggestions for future Fair and Balanced editorials by the WaPo:
When a major Earthquake hits London, killing 3000+, a snarky editorial about how they failed to sufficiently Earthquake-proof their buildings.(A very Fair and Balanced) Indeed.When a freak snowstorm causes 3000 +road deaths from accidents and exposure in Rome, a snarky editorial about their lack of salt trucks and central heating.
When a measles epidemic kills thousands in Africa, a snarky editorial about their lack of a decent vaccination program.
When a nuclear missile strike hits Zurich, devasting much of that part of Europe, a snarky editorial about their failure to adequately invest in a missile defense program.
(A very Fair and Balanced) Heh.
Update: As Atrios points out in comments, he wrote the post in question. I've changed this post to reflect that.
IT'S "FAIR AND BALANCED FRIDAY!"
If you couldn't tell from my last post, it's officially "Fair and Balanced Friday" here in the lefty side of the blogosphere!
I'll start off with a Fair and Balanced look at the economy by the always Fair and Balanced Paul Krugman. He explains why the jobless recovery continues and will likely continue for the rest of the year. Meaning that, for the average Fair and Balanced American, the misery will go on into next year. This, my friends, in my Fair and Balanced opinion, is what will cost W the presidency if he loses it.
If you want to learn about the activities of the Arnis, here's a link to the infamous Premiere magazine article about it. In my Fair and Balanced opinion, I think Arnie may have a little trouble convincing Fair and Balanced Californians that he isn't a boor who's going to embarrass them as governor. Honestly, the Arnis apparently makes the Clenis look pretty tame.
But always remember, at least in Arnie's point of view, "Eating is not Cheating!" I'm sure religious conservatives are really going to support a man who has that Clintonesque a view of sexual relations.
Or is the real story that religious conservatives are hypocritical enough to support Arnie anyway?
Well I'm off to look at how other blogs are observing "Fair and Balanced Friday" and then I'm going to do some work.
More later.
Update: For a list of Fair and Balanced blogs observing "Fair and Balanced Friday," go here.
Update 2: "Fluffy Bunny."
A COUPLE OF FAIR AND BALANCED LINKS BEFORE I RETIRE
So, as a Fair and Balanced person, you thought the administration's democratic aspirations for Iraq within a few months -- now presented as one of the major selling points of the war since that WMD thing didn't work out -- was just pie in the sky?
Well, it turns out, the always Fair and Balanced intelligence community felt the same way -- and it tried earnestly to warn the administration in the months before the war.
I'd like to say I'm surprised but, uh, I'm not. I mean, heck, if I, as a Fair and Balanced person, can come to such a conclusion just through reading everything I can find on the internet, surely the Fair and Balanced spooks with their vast resources can come to the same conclusion.
But, once again, the administration decided that the Fair and Balanced folks who actually knew something were far too pessimistic and namby-pamby about it so to hell with them.
You also should be reading the Fair and Balanced Nitpicker every day because, doggone it, I like him!
I'm just glad the always Fair and Balanced Terry's not shouting at the Wall Street Journal editorial page in airport kiosks anymore!
Thursday, August 14, 2003
NOW THIS IS WAY OVER THE TOP
As you probably know by now, I'm not a George W. Bush fan. However, if you're honestly going to try to blame W for the power outages, some evidence would be a good idea.
I mean, heck folks, I'd love to blame every rainy day on the Bush administration but I just can't do it.
If you could show me that W had a plan on the table to upgrade and make the power grid more secure, yet dumped it because he wanted his enormous tax cut, then you'd have something.
If not, it just sounds like shrill nonsense to me.
Just my two cents folks.
W BUMBLES ALONG
The only thing worse than W speaking using a teleprompter is W speaking without a teleprompter.
If you couldn't tell, I just watched W's statement tonight.
He actually did better answering questions than making his statement.
You know those of us who do public speaking for 10-12 hours per week largely extemporaneously really get annoyed watching W struggle to make it through a three minute statement without looking like a damned fool.
WHAT'S GOING ON REGARDING THE POWER GRID?
Check this out. It's a java applet of the Eastern Interconnect Power Grid. I assume the big red circles over NYC and Detroit are bad.
This is really cool. You should check it out.
Look at the bottom of the page for instructions on how to navigate around the grid.
It takes a little bit to load but it's worth it.
MASSIVE BLACKOUTS HIT THE NORTHEAST
Boy, those pictures from New York City of people walking home is pretty amazing. Living in a town that is seven square miles you don't think about what a trial it would be to walk or bike from one end of New York City or Detroit to the other.
Some are even suggesting that the damn virus my laptop suffered from this morning may be to blame.
Amazing, huh?
I'm watching ABC right now. Ted Koppel isn't doing a bad job on this, is he?
KAY'S SEPTEMBER DATA DUMP
Josh Marshall, who at times seems to have taken up residence inside my head, has an excellent post up about Kay's "September Surprise":
We know that the Iraqis had a biological weapons program and that there were biological weapons in the country. That's wholly undisputed. If Kay produces substantial evidence of such weapons in 1995 or 1998, that's meaningless. What we're trying to figure out is whether he had them in the period when we were considering going to war.Yep. That's what I think too.What many suspect is that Kay is going to pull an intel version of a classic 1990s-era document dump. In other words, come forward with a mound of documents detailing the Iraqis' extensive programs, their histories, the means used to conceal them, whom they imported parts from, and so forth. And then conveniently leave as a footnote the fact that these program had gone pretty dormant by 2002. The idea will be to make up with paper poundage what the report lacks in relevance. Hit them with twenty reams of report about the Iraqi WMD programs and then figure that the follow-on reports about how little was actually happening in 2002 are buried in the back of the papers after no one is paying attention.
All of this is to say that we're probably set for an elaborate festival of goal post moving courtesy of Mr Kay -- the widely telegraphed switch from weapons to 'programs' being the key sign.
If you recall, I posted as much a few days ago in fact.
VIRAL UPDATE, W WANTS TO CUT SOLDIERS' PAYCHECKS
Now that was great fun. I feel like such an idiot. I very conscientiously installed the appropriate patch to Windows XP in my home computer yesterday morning to protect against the virus. However, I didn't do the same for my laptop, planning to do it later. I used my laptop to log on to the internet last night and was under attack by the virus immediately. I didn't realize it until this morning.
Now everything is apparently fixed and all is back to normal. Of course, now it would be a great idea to actually get some work done.
In other news, W is going to cut the paychecks of our soldiers currently serving (and dying) in Iraq.
That's intolerable, isn't it?
And why do they need to cut the soldiers' paychecks? To pay for the enormous tax giveaway to the rich of course! We certainly know who comes first in this administration, don't we?
Like I've said many times, I think it's actually the anti-war folks who actually give a damn about the soldiers. W, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the boy clearly view them largely as cannon fodder.
Oh these guys say all of these wonderful things about the soldiers but their actions make it quite clear that they don't really believe them.
I'M OFF KILLING THE BLASTER WORM VIRUS IN MY LAPTOP
More later.
WHAT DO YOU DO...
when your Republican superintendent (that is soon to be appointed Secretary of Education) pressures you to lower the dropout rate at your High School?
Why you lie and make up low numbers of course.
And what do the administrators in the district do about it once they find out?
Well, right now they're planning to fire the whistleblower in January.
And, I remind you again, this is in the former school district of Rod Paige, the current Secretary of Education. It began during his tenure and he had to know about the fraudulence of those numbers. Read the article. There's no way Paige didn't know those dropout numbers were fraudulent.
That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in Paige's leadership -- or his honesty -- does it?
And this, I'll remind you, is what passes for education reform in Republican circles these days.
ONLY 36% OF AMERICANS APPROVE OF W'S HANDLING OF THE ECONOMY
Americans are getting more pessimistic about the economy – 60 percent say it's bad, the highest number recorded in a CBS News poll in ten years – and a majority disapproves of the way President Bush is handling it.Let's see the media put a positive spin on those numbers! Oh my goodness, Atrios points out they're already trying to do so:With public confidence in the economy falling and the job market stagnant, the president called his economic team down to Texas on Wednesday to show the world he's on the case.
...
The public is pessimistic about the economy, and has become more so recently. 60% think the economy is in bad shape – the most negative assessment seen in this poll in ten years. Just a few months ago, opinion was more evenly divided. And this represents a marked deterioration since January 2001, when Bush first took office; then, 84% thought the economy was in good shape. ...
Many think declines in the economy and the job market have occurred under the Bush Administration’s watch, and the President receives poor ratings in this area. In this poll, 36% approve and 52% disapprove of his handling of the economy -- his most negative evaluations in this area since he took office.
..
Due in part to the positive assessments of his handling of Iraq, Bush’s overall job approval rating is more positive; 55% approve and 35% disapprove.
Overall, Bush receives only a modicum of blame for current economic conditions. Most think Bush’s policies have had an impact on the economy, but believe that impact has been small. 48% believe the Administration’s policies have had a little impact, and 37% think those policies have had a lot of impact. But perhaps as a result of the tax cuts that have been implemented, the Bush Administration’s policies are seen as having a greater effect on the economy now than the public thought in January 2002.
However, that obscures an important finding from this poll; Bush receives more blame than credit for the current economy when the questions are asked separately to people who hold different views about the direction of the economy. Among those who think the economy is on the upswing, 37% give him lot of credit for its recovery. But among those who think the economy is getting worse, 56% place a lot of blame on Bush and his policies.
Part of the problem may be that most of the public thinks Bush’s attention is not focused enough on the problem. 25% think the president is paying enough attention to the economy, while nearly three times as many -- 70% -- think he is not.
...
There is some skepticism about the president’s plan for economic recovery as well. The centerpiece of Bush’s economic and jobs program is tax cuts, but Americans think it is unlikely that the Bush tax cuts will lead to more jobs. Only 38% think it likely the new tax cuts will create more jobs, while most -- 55% -- think that is not likely to happen. Views on this have become more negative since last May.
Despite that, a solid majority - 55 percent - said they were satisfied with Bush's overall performance. That figure was bolstered by generally good ratings on Bush's handling of foreign policy, fighting terrorism and Iraq.As Atrios notes, since when is 55% a solid majority?
Yet another nail in the coffin of the liberal media myth, eh?
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
THE ADMINISTRATION'S CREDIBILITY IS GONE
Need proof the administration's credibility is gone? Read this story which completely blows the lid off the case against the fellow who supposedly tried to sell a shoulder-launched missile to terrorists. ABCNews suggests there's "a lot less than meets the eye":
Administration officials are leaving out key facts and exaggerating the significance of the alleged plot to smuggle a shoulder-launched missile into the United States, law enforcement officials told ABCNEWS. They say there's a lot less than meets the eye.Now you're really going to have to convince me that this doesn't provide evidence that the mainstream media no longer buys the first word out of the administration's spokesperson's mouth....
"Here we have a sting operation on some kind of small operator … who's bought one weapon when actually, on the gray and black market, hundreds of such weapons charge hands," said military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer.
Court documents show much of the case is based on the government's key cooperating witness, an informant seeking lenient treatment on federal drug charges, officials told ABCNEWS. He was the first person who led the government to Lakhani.
...
Government officials said the case will show that Lakhani went along with the scheme willingly and was not entrapped. But the question remains whether any of this would have happened if the government had not set it up.
They're in trouble folks.
KILLER D'S UPDATE
The Republican over-reaching continues.
Governor Goodhair should stop while he's behind -- way behind.
TEXAS AIR NATIONAL GUARD GEORGE W. BUSH ACTION FIGURE
You'd better get your bid in now!
SCHWARZENEGGER APPARENTLY DIDN'T VOTE IN 1996 OR 2000 -- AND THEREFORE DIDN'T EVEN VOTE FOR W OR BOB DOLE
Arnold Schwarzenegger, labeled by polls the early leader in California's recall election, did not vote in five of the past 11 statewide elections, records revealed Monday.Right. You really expect us to believe that, Ahhhnuld?Schwarzenegger aides said they were researching four of those five elections to see why absentee ballots were requested by the actor but not recorded as being received by elections officials. They said the actor, an Austrian immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 1983, takes voting seriously.
The Los Angeles County registrar of voters said Schwarzenegger, who lives in Brentwood, voted in six of the statewide and presidential elections going back to 1992. He voted in the 2002 primary and the general election, which included a successful ballot initiative he sponsored on after-school programs and the re-election of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis.
But the actor did not return absentee ballots for the 2000 general and primary elections after requesting them, the registrar said, meaning Schwarzenegger twice missed a chance to vote for President Bush. He did not vote in the June 1998 primary, which included a successful initiative banning bilingual education, records show.
And Schwarzenegger missed both the 1996 primary and general elections, which included the presidential campaign of Republican Bob Dole and initiatives on medical marijuana and tax increases on the wealthy. In 1996, Schwarzenegger was promoting the films "Jingle All the Way" and "Eraser" and was filming the movie "Batman & Robin."
Schwarzenegger campaign aides were researching the actor's schedule and interviewing his assistants about four 1996 and 2000 absentee ballots they said the actor requested. They said ballots are sometimes rejected or not recorded by elections officials once they are received, or his assistants could have neglected to mail them.
That, my friends, certainly sounds like Mr. Schwarzenegger's first lie.
That didn't take long, did it?
3 SOLDIERS KILLED IN IRAQ DURING THE LAST 24 HOURS
Damn:
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 13 — Iraqi insurgents have mounted fresh attacks on American troops occupying the country, killing three U.S. soldiers and wounding five more in assaults around Iraq’s deadly “Sunni triangle” in a 24-hour period, the military said Wednesday. In separate incidents, two Iraqis were killed overnight when U.S. forces returned fire at attackers, officials said.But look, there's Ahhhnuld! And he's with Kobe!
[This is meant as a mean-spirited joke of course but the scary thing is I'm sure these two things are all the media will want to talk about today. And speaking of stupid media tricks, read this WaPo story about their latest poll. W has a strong base for re-election (under 50% said they'd vote for Bush in 2004)? Is it my imagination or have the "journalists" who wrote this article put as positive a spin as you could on some very negative poll findings?]
LYONS: "FALSE IMPRESSIONS OR FALSEHOODS?"
Here's Gene Lyons' column for the week!
False Impressions or Falsehoods?Al Gore and Sen. Joe Lieberman spoke out about the Bush administration last week. What they said reinforced for many Democrats two important lessons from the 2000 campaign: first, that Gore's inability to combat the Washington celebrity press's relentless attacks upon his character and personality cost him the presidency; second, that a big factor in that failure was picking the sanctimonious Lieberman as his running mate.
Seemingly chosen to convey disapproval of President Clinton's sexual antics, Lieberman brought little to the campaign except the lukewarm approbation of Washington insiders. His debate performance against Dick Cheney resembled a timorous insurance agent trying to mollify an angry customer--appropriately enough for a politician long-devoted to keeping Connecticut's insurance industry happy. Lieberman's pussyfooting helped Cheney masquerade as a teddy bear, resulting in an administration in which the relentlessly aggressive vice-president and a phalanx of neo-conservative ideologues dominate a feckless and unaccountable president.
Anyhow, "Smokin' Joe," as Republican editorialists at my hometown Arkansas Democrat-Gazette call him, made a thinly-veiled attack on his two New England rivals for the presidency, Howard Dean and Sen. John Kerry, in a speech at the National Press Club. "A candidate who was opposed to the war against Saddam," he said "who has called for the repeal of all the Bush tax cuts, which would result in an increase in taxes on the middle class...could lead the Democratic party into the political wilderness for a long time to come."
As opposed to today, Senator? Snoozin' Joe appears to think that the presciption for taking on Bush in 2004 is Republican Lite. A surer formula for disaster can hardly be imagined. No matter, because the hapless New York Mets have a better chance of winning the World Series than Lieberman has of securing the Democratic nomination. Polls showing otherwise are an illusion based on name recognition.
Al Gore wants to fight. If only, many Democrats said last week, he'd spoken as cogently and passionately in 2000 as he did at New York University. The contest wouldn't have been close enough for Bush's Florida cronies and the Supreme Court to steal.
Gore's theme was that the Bush administration governs through a weird mix of cronyism, ideological certitude and sheer dishonesty previously unseen in our national life. "The direction in which our nation is being led," he said "is deeply troubling to me not only in Iraq but also here at home on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy. Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk."
Gore enumerated a list of "false impressions" that led the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq: that Saddam Hussein was partly reponsible for 9/11 and conspiring with al Qaeda; that he threatened to help terrorists launch poison gas and germ attacks against the U.S.; that he was acquiring enriched uranium and building a nuclear arsenal; that Iraqis would welcome US soldiers with open arms and make a quick, easy transition to democracy; and that allies who opposed the war would be only too happy after a painless victory to send soldiers and money to finish the job.
"Now, of course," Gore said "everybody knows that every single one of these impressions was just dead wrong."
Almost the same thing, he said, has happened in the economy: "The country somehow got lots of false impressions," he said "about what we could expect from the big tax cuts that were enacted, including: (1) The tax cuts would unleash a lot of new investment that would create lots of new jobs. (2) We wouldn't have to worry about a return to big budget deficits--because all the new growth in the economy caused by the tax cuts would lead to a lot of new revenue. (3) Most of the benefits would go to average middle-income families, not to the wealthy, as some partisans claimed."
"Unfortunately, here too," Gore continued "every single one of these impressions turned out to be wrong. Instead of creating jobs...we are losing millions of jobs--net losses for three years in a row. That hasn't happened since the Great Depression." Hence too the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history, and "the most dangerous we've ever had for two reasons: first, they're not temporary; they're structural and long-term; second, they are going to get even bigger just at the time when the big baby-boomer retirement surge starts."
From fighting terrorism to global warming, Gore said, what we get from Bush is the same on every issue: "a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty."
Gore says he's not running in 2004, so the press downplayed his speech, but millions of Democrats heard him loud and clear.
FRANKEN FIRES BACK
Here's Al Franken's response to Faux's lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Atrios informs us that Al Franken's book has shot to #1 on Amazon.
I'm sure Al Franken would love to thank the nimrods at Faux for all the helpful publicity, huh?
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
THE RIGHT GETS FOOLED AGAIN
Josh Marshall points us to this fascinating article by Franklin Foer in TNR online. It requires a subscription or that you sign up for a free four-week trial. I would suggest you do the free trial as I did because this piece is definitely worth your time. I knew the vast majority of this stuff but Foer does an excellent job of bringing it all together in one place. Foer makes the argument that the right has a history over the last two decades of deluding themselves into thinking they've found another George Washington or Thomas Jefferson when they've actually found yet another con artist.
Here's just a bit from the beginning to pique your interest:
n April 6, a C-17 transport plane unloaded Ahmed Chalabi in Nasiriya, the Iraqi heartland. For years, Washington conservatives had fantasized about this moment. They hadn't just touted the exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) as a potential player in postwar Iraq but as a world historic figure. In meetings, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti described him as the "George Washington of Iraq." Others suggested he could become a George Washington for the entire Muslim world. Writing in National Review about "the president-in-waiting," David Pryce-Jones argued, "[I]f anything like the expectations of Chalabi's program are fulfilled, Arab absolutism can be broken." In The Wall Street Journal, Seth Lipsky pronounced him "a democratic visionary."Josh Marshall even tells us this as well:His American boosters assumed the Nasiriya stop would be the first event in a chain culminating in a Chalabi presidency. This assumption even permeated Pentagon planning. According to a Knight Ridder report last July, top planners such as Luti and his boss, Doug Feith, believed "Chalabi, who boasted of having a secret network inside and outside the regime, and his supporters would replace Saddam and impose order."
For the most part, these supporters didn't materialize. In fact, they have been so hard to come by that Chalabi has largely stopped trying to get them. Reporters in Baghdad told me that Chalabi no longer bothers holding rallies or advertising for the INC. "He has no chance of obtaining" the people's affection, one says. Empirical evidence backs this up. According to The Daily Telegraph, in Kurdistan--a supposed bastion of INC support--only 9 percent of respondents told pollsters they wanted a Chalabi presidency. Even Chalabi's American patrons doubt his public support. They have scaled back his public operations and dismantled his Free Iraqi Forces. As The Washington Post reported in June, Iraq's top civil administrator, L. Paul Bremer, privately told Chalabi and his cadre that they "don't represent the country."
Conservatives should have seen this coming. Chalabi represents the latest incarnation of an archetype: the foreign opposition leader romanticized beyond reason. Everybody knows this romantic strain has afflicted liberals--from admirers of Joseph Stalin, such as Henry Wallace and Edmund Wilson, to glorifiers of Fidel Castro, such as Tom Hayden and Oliver Stone. And everybody knows this because conservatives have long, and justly, chastised the left for what Tom Wolfe famously called "radical chic." During the 1960s, when the right first made this critique, the hardheaded realism that dominated conservative foreign policy prevented it from embracing such hero-worship. But, starting in the 1980s, conservatives, too, began celebrating revolution and insurgency, albeit of the anti-communist variety--a celebration that was enshrined in the Reagan Doctrine. Suddenly, a generation of scruffy Third World guerrilla fighters became right-wing icons.
Frank quotes Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti calling Chalabi the "George Washington of Iraq." I'll do that one better. There's another neocon at DOD who, I'm told, has often called Chalabi the most important Muslim since the Prophet Mohammed.Boy, W, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, et. al sure did fool themselves, didn't they?
Too bad they took the rest of us -- as well as hundreds of billions of our tax dollars for the next decade -- along for the ride, huh?
And let's not even talk about the astonishing toll of pain and suffering they've inflicted upon thousands of people along the way.
NOW W AND THE BOYS ARE ENCOURAGING WINGNUTS TO SUE THE GOVERNMENT!
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe today called on US Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate whether White House officials working at the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) solicited a lawsuit filed by a conservative organization to discredit a federal report on global warming. The lawsuit, brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and filed last week against the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, seeks to invalidate a 2000 report that documents the grave dangers posed by global warming.Boy, for folks who complain about lawsuits, Republicans have seemingly spent the last three solid years in the courtroom litigating one thing after another, haven't they?Blumenthal called for the investigation after discovering an e-mail sent in June 2002 by an executive at CEI, Myron Ebell, to Phil Cooney, the Chief of Staff at CEQ, thanking Cooney for "calling and asking for our help." The e-mail goes on to suggest strategies for minimizing the problem of global warming, including finding a "fall guy (or gal)…as high up as possible" in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to blame for the report, and indicating that CEI might call for then-EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman to be fired.
"This e-mail indicates a secret initiative by the Administration to invite and orchestrate a lawsuit against itself seeking to discredit an official United States government report on global warming dangers. If White House officials conspired with anti-environmental interests in a court attack on its own EPA report, as this document suggests, it would constitute improper and possibly illegal misconduct that should be investigated and sanctioned promptly," said Blumenthal. "Such misconduct would be effectively a fraud on the court. This e-mail demonstrates again how the Administration has consistently demeaned and dismissed powerful scientific evidence of global warming dangers. Now apparently it is seeking to undermine findings that it has formally approved and issued, showing how greenhouse gas pollution damages our health and environment."
Do you want to bet whether Ashcroft even responds to the letter?
What do you think?
[Link via a tip from Morat]
GO READ TBOGG...
I mean it. Go read it now.
247
and still counting.
Here's your California farce update.
Surely the idiots in California behind this recall effort feel like damned fools now, don't they?
OBEIDI STILL BEING PUNISHED...
for not telling the administration what it wanted to hear.
The Iraqi lawyer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, who apparently told what was an outrageous lie about the treatment of Jessica Lynch at that hospital was granted asylum immediately and now has a job working for adulterer Bob Livingston's lobbying firm.
Why not the same for Obeidi?
Well, I already told you the answer, didn't I?
His story fit the administration's agenda, Obeidi's suddenly doesn't.
No asylum for you buddy until you change your tune.
[Link via Talking Points Memo]
READ KRUGMAN, DIONNE
A couple of other links I'd like to pass along:
Paul Krugman's column this morning is quite excellent. He talks about the penny-wise pound foolish fiscal policies of this administration.
Also, you should read E.J. Dionne this morning. He points out that Republicans look like idiots when they insist that criticism of W is unpatriotic. Dionne points out that if that were true, Republicans were damn-near treasonous commies for the eight years of Clinton's presidency.
In short, as the title of the column suggests, he contends Republican can dish it out but they just can't take it.
Of course, we all knew that, didn't we?
AHHHNULD HIRES WIFE-BEATER FOR MEDIA CONSULTANT
Boy, this guy is a piece of, um, work. Why in the world would Arnold screw up and hire him to craft his message?
I assume Sipple will be fired by the end of the day, right?
[Links vis Hesiod and Joe Conason]
FAUX SUES FRANKEN
I'm sorry but this is hilarious:
Fox News Network is suing humor writer Al Franken for trademark infringement over the phrase "fair and balanced" on the cover of his upcoming book, saying it has been "a signature slogan" of the network since 1996.And we all know how no one except the real meatheads believe that liberal bias junk these days, don't we?According to court papers made available on Monday, Fox is seeking a temporary or permanent injunction against Franken and publisher Penguin Group to stop them using the phrase in connection with the book to be published next month.
The network, part of the News Corp group, also asked Manhattan Supreme Court for compensatory and punitive damages.
The title of liberal satirist Franken's new book is "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." At the bottom of the planned cover is the tag line, "A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."
Fox claims the use of the phrase is intended to confuse the public and boost book sales.
In the lawsuit, Fox said the network was created "as a specific alternative to what its founders perceived as a liberal bias in the American media."
The ultimate irony in all this is that Al Franken's book is probably more "Fair and Balanced" than the average newscast over at Faux.
I don't EVER want to hear the folks over at Faux complain about frivolous lawsuits again -- because that's EXACTLY what their lawsuit is.
Come on, the folks at Faux know that the claim that the book's title is designed to "confuse the public" is disingenuous. The book is satire you humorless troglydytes!
I mean, heck, even your average trailer-dwelling and mouthbreathing Faux viewer at least knows the difference between Al Franken's book and Ann Coulter's book even if they apparently can't tell the difference between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
[Link via Hit and Run (which was just added to the blogroll by the way)]
HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY
to me! This blog is one year old today.
I was hoping to have had a half a million hits by today but I'm about 13,500 short.
For your entertainment -- and education -- I send you back to my very first post which was, of course, about the impending war.
It still stands up pretty well, doesn't it?
Admittedly, there are things that didn't come to pass but there are more things that did.
And yes, I know, the comments are down for the moment. They have been all morning.
I hope they'll be back up soon.
Update: Comments are back up. Fire away!
Wednesday, August 6, 2003
INTERESTING THEORY
Maureen Dowd suggests a plausible theory for why word was leaked last week that Powell was resigning effective January 21, 2005. While Dowd's columns often create more heat than light, this one is pretty interesting.
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Tuesday, August 5, 2003
STOP THE PRESSES!
Insty admits an error! Unfortunately, he is such a big jerk about it that he ends up looking like quite an ass by the end of the post. I hate to put it that way but Glenn, who routinely mischaracterizes liberal arguments so they fit his preconceived notions, actually has the nerve to blast Mark for a typographical error.
You know, I've been blogging for almost a year and that's the first time to my knowledge that Insty's admitted he was wrong about something. I wondered how long it would take -- now I know.
So I guess we should expect him to admit a mistake about once per year.
Mark Kleiman, the blogger who got Insty to make his annual admission, also remarks
Glenn is right to point out that the conventions of blogging, which require links to sources, provide more safeguards against misquotation than the conventions of mainstream journalism.Well of course Mark that assumes Insty will actually link to you. In my disagreements with him he frequently mischaracterized what I was saying but refused to link to me so his readers couldn't see it for themselves. That practice is as dishonest as anything I've seen the Moonie-owned Washington Times or Rush Limbaugh do. I know many other liberal bloggers who can tell similar stories.
So Mark please don't overcongratulate him for admitting he's wrong once per year and working hard to get his quotations right. If you were someone he considered a "small fry," my experience has demonstrated he wouldn't give a damn one way or the other.
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PROBLEMS WITH THE "DUMBSHIT THEORY"
Charles Dodgson makes some excellent points about just what's wrong with the "dumbshit theory" -- you know the theory floating around that Saddam destroyed his weapons but lied about it to keep us all guessing. Therefore, of course, according to those pushing this rather pitiful theory, Saddam's to blame for the invasion.
You really should read this one folks.
(I told you my rather major problems with this theory a couple of days ago.)
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JAFARI, FIRST "PRESIDENT" OF IRAQ, HAILS FROM THE PARTY THAT FOUNDED HEZBOLLAH
Holy cow! Terry at Nitpicker points us (his permalinks are bloggered) to this article by Matt Bivens of The Nation that points out our hypocrisy in saying this war with Iraq was about combatting terrorism.
Bivens notes this is especially true since we've just put a fundamentalist shiite in charge of Iraq's government -- from a party that helped found Hezbollah no less:
Iraq has its first temporary president, and his name is Ibrahim Jafari. (He'll hold the job for a month: It's a rotating presidency, handed off like a relay baton between nine "chairmen", each of whom was in turn chosen by a USDA-approved 25-member Governing Council.) Jafari hails from the Shiite fundamentalist party Al Dawa.And, let's see, why was this war with Iraq a bad idea?Dawa? Would that be the same Dawa that carried out a series of Reagan-era bombings in Kuwait of, among other things, the American and French embassies and the residential housing of American Raytheon employees -- bombings that killed five people and injured 80? The same Dawa that took inspiration from the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the Ayatollah Khomenei? The same Dawa that founded and set up Hezbollah in Lebanon? Why yes, it would. Only now, after three decades of guerrilla and terrorist violence, they've surfaced to demand a share of ruling post-Saddam Iraq, and claiming they now believe in democracy and rule of law. And we trust them on this because ... well ... who can keep track of all these guys anyway?
...
To recap: When Libya was up to head the UN Human Rights Commission, it was a national outrage (and indeed it was). But when the secretive fundamentalist sect that created Hezbollah, bombed an American embassy, and kidnapped Americans is invited not just to join but to run a US-created organization, that's just us bringing democracy.
I can't quite remember.
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Monday, August 4, 2003
HUH?
Boy, the administration sure has lost its discipline on leaks and staying on message, haven't they?
White House and State Department spokesmen on Monday denied a Washington Post report that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his top deputy had given notice that they wouldn’t serve a second term should President Bush win re-election.Ooopsy. This is the second one of these in two weeks. First, Jim Baker and now this.Powell, who turned 66 in April, has made clear that he has many interests beyond government service.
“THERE’S NO basis to the story at all,” said State Department spokesman Philip Reeker. “There was no such conversation.”
At the White House, Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council, echoed that view, saying, “The conversation didn’t happen.”
And a U.S. official close to Powell told NBC that the report was “nonsense.”
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CLINTON-HATING VS. BUSH-HATING
Both Atrios and Josh Marshall have posts up today about whether there is a workable parallel between Bush-hating and Clinton-hating.
Atrios contends that the wingers who claimed to hate Clinton because he violated certain moral principles have been exposed as hypocrites because they support W unfailingly -- and W does much the same things:
I find the comparisons between "Clinton hating," which started before the guy even took office and was associated with numerous bullshit conspiracy theories and fake scandals pushed by congressional committees and mainstream journalists/opinion writers and "Bush Hating," which have everything to do with his actual policies, rather silly.In Josh's opinion, the Clinton-hating and resulting impeachment were part of a new approach to politics on the part of the GOP during the 1990s:Ask a wingnut why they don't like Clinton and they'll claim he's a rapist, a drug runner, a communist spy, etc... etc... It rarely has much to do with any consistent or sensible evaluation of his policies. And, to the extent that they ever did they've been rendered moot by their unwavering support for Dear Leader's embrace of many of the things they claimed to hate Clinton for.
The conceit of official Washington is that the 'Clinton wars' were an inane time-wasting battle between a president with no morals and outlandish partisans with unhinged brains. It was, in this view, as though politics had simply stopped for half a dozen years or skidded off the rails into something that was utterly alien to politics, in the sense that politics has anything to do with issues and governance and so forth. Let's call this view, for the lack of a better word, Quinn-Broderism. Blumenthal's point is that the entire episode was deeply political, precisely about politics and concrete political issues, an effort on the part of one side to go outside the conventional political system and engage in a sort of political guerilla warfare. Defending Clinton, which many people have seen as the central aim of Blumenthal's book is, I think, actually quite secondary to sustaining that larger point.I would contend that impeachment was just the beginning of an ugly change on the part of the GOP to a "win at all costs" mindset that, since 1998, has become pervasive within the upper echelons of the party. It has resulted in an amoral "just win baby" attitude.
From impeachment to Florida 2000 to the 2002 midterms to the Gray Davis recall you see a party that now no longer stands for much of anything except for "hey look, we won, nanny, nanny, boo-boo." It doesn't matter if they have to destroy the village that is American politics in order to save it, they're quite willing to do so -- and have on several occasions over the last five or six years.
That's what's so frightening about IraqWar Part II. With this recent slide into amoral insanity by the GOP, it no longer is beyond the realm of possibility to suggest that this war was also about giving the president a "win" at an important time in his presidency and, correspondingly, to provide a distraction from his astonishingly disastrous record in nearly every important category of analysis.
In fact, it's no longer too big of a stretch to even suggest that the GOP and the administration could do something like this largely to get the important big "win."
And that's one thing that clearly separates Clinton from W. Regardless of what you think of Clinton, I don't think anyone would believe that Clinton would take us into a war disingenuously for largely domestic political reasons.
You really can't say the same thing about W, can you?
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GOT WAR?
It's official. If Bush wins re-election, Colin Powell will step down as Secretary of State. Now, admittedly, Powell has essentially ruined his reputation with his pathetic enabling of the warmongers in this administration but can you imagine what it would be like without him?
And W wants to appoint the serial liar / incompetent Condi Rice (you've noticed that the controversy around the uranium claim keeps getting closer and closer to Condi's door, haven't you?) or neocon warhawk extraordinaire Paul Wolfowitz to replace Powell. Heaven help us if either Condi the dishonest bumbler or Wolfowitz the warmonger become the Secretary of State. I think it's safe to say we'll get another war or two are in our immediate future with either Rice or Wolfowitz running the State Department.
How's that for an election issue?
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TEDIOUS? CHILDISH?
I must admit I was quite surprised by this post on the comment board. Is my marking of every 10,000 visitors to the blog childish and is it becoming tedious? I'll admit that when I started the practice back in December (after four months of blogging), I was just happy to have gotten 10,000 visitors.
At that time, I thought I'd be doing it once every couple of months, not once per week. I certainly don't mean it to sound pompous or like I'm bragging when I note these milestones. I honestly am just meaning to thank people for dropping by for a visit. I am proud of my numbers but I'll admit they are nowhere near stellar or incredible. I mean, heck, I know many liberal bloggers who get more visits in a day than I get in a week! Or even two weeks!
Anyway, I've always thought it was nice to thank your readers for their visits. I guess it could get tedious. Some bloggers do it and some don't. I'll admit that I'm probably the only one that does it consistently every 10,000 visits. Skippy used to do it but I don't think he does anymore.
What do you think? Let me know your opinion on the comment board.
I can certainly stop doing it I guess.
Let me know what you think.
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REMEMBER AFGHANISTAN?
Boy, you should read this article about the chaos that is Afghanistan.
When you finish the article, ask yourself if we really could afford to divert our resources to Iraq.
As expected (and predicted in this space for months before the war), the war in Iraq has made us less safe, not more.
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Sunday, August 3, 2003
THANKS YET AGAIN!
I had my 330,000th visitor a few minutes ago via a link from Buzzflash. It was only six days ago that I had my 320,000th visitor.
I've also had more than 470,000 hits as well since I installed my hitcounter last September 18th.
As always folks, I appreciate your patronage of this blog. I do sincerely hope you'll come back again.
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IT'S ABOUT TIME FOR...
the Brickyard 400.
More later.
Perhaps.
We'll see.
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KARLPALOOZA '03
Roger Ailes tells the story of Karlpalooza '03 as only he can.
Boy, don't you get the idea this spoiled rich kid is going to be in congress some day?
After all, he'd be the perfect representative for Orange County, wouldn't he?
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Saturday, August 2, 2003
WHEN OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS, CHUCK...
my college buddy, you answer it. Absolutely you should go on Fox News when they call you! I know I would.
My goodness Chuck. You certainly would do just fine. I suspect you'd have given them an excellent earful about W's ill-considered third August month-long vacation!
I've been interviewed on television once and radio three times -- all in St. Louis during 2000 regarding my book on the Veiled Prophet in St. Louis. I also did three booksignings.
Admittedly, I spend 10-12 hours per week essentially doing public speaking so nothing really bothers me at all with regard to appearing in front of people.
As I've said already Chuck, my attitude is that when opportunity knocks, you answer.
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NASCAR DADS?
I'm sorry but this NASCAR Dads article is ridiculous. I know plenty of NASCAR fans who are liberal Democrats.
I mean, heck, the people they're describing here I would refer to as the "mouth breathers." You know them: male, southern, lower middle-class to working-class whites who, as I've said before will vote for W even if he grows horns, pointy-ears, a sharp pointy tail and begins speaking obscene verse in iambic pentameter between now and the election.
These folks are members of the NRA, listen to Rush Limbaugh, currently live in trailer parks and just barely graduated from high school before beginning their lifelong job at the Jiffy Lube or the GM parts shop. They're also the folks who get interviewed every time a tornado goes through a town in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Mississippi or Alabama.
I grew up with many folks like this, so I know whereof I speak.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch the Busch Series Race.
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IF THIS IS TRUE...
we look like damned fools to the rest of the world.
In fact, it actually becomes a rather tragic question of just who's the bigger idiot, Saddam for pretending he had WMDs or W for believing him.
Sigh.
If they find no WMDs, I can tell folks in the administration are going to try to use this testimony to get themselves off the hook. They'll try to blame Saddam for the war -- it's his fault, you see, because he kept pretending he had WMDs.
However, that argument is utter bunk. The administration is the culpable and immoral one here. You don't invade another sovereign nation just because you think it has WMDs. You have to know this -- not guess about it. I mean, heck folks, wars cost thousands of lives. This one has probably already cost at least 10-15,000 lives.
Therefore, a leader has to be dead certain about the facts of the matter before getting involved in a war. The price of war is simply too great to make such a decision lightly.
At least that's the process a real leader with a grasp of basic morality would follow.
Of course, we all know that W doesn't fit that description, does he?
I'm really beginning to think W made this extremely important decision for all of us like he has made most decisions in his life, without giving the matter that much thought at all.
[Link via Talking Points Memo]
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Friday, August 1, 2003
HOW IMPORTANT ARE THOSE 28 PAGES?
The official who read the 28 pages tells The New Republic, "If the people in the administration trying to link Iraq to Al Qaeda had one-one-thousandth of the stuff that the 28 pages has linking a foreign government to Al Qaeda, they would have been in good shape." He adds: "If the 28 pages were to be made public, I have no question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change overnight."Hmmmm.
[Link via Talking Points Memo]
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HERBERT: "DYING IN IRAQ"
You really should read this column by Bob Herbert. To say that it's dead-on doesn't quite do it justice. For example, he and I agree that Iraq is a "fool's errand."
Go read it.
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RICHARD PERLE EVEN CHARGES FOR INTERVIEWS!
Roger Ailes points us to this Nation story about how Richard Perle is apparently even charging media outlets for interviews these days!
During and after his chairmanship, Perle used his insider status to demand fees for appearances on a number of foreign broadcasts, which included British, Canadian, Japanese and South Korean television. While paying interviewees is common practice in some countries, a number of media outlets made exceptions for Perle. "We did pay Perle because of his position [in a] prominent advisorship to the Secretary of Defense," says a European correspondent who, like most journalists interviewed, requested anonymity because of network discomfort at publicly discussing payment policies. Fees ranged from under $100 to $900--minor sums to someone like Perle, but federal regulations covering officials in his capacity make no distinctions based on amount.After all the revelations about Perle over the last few months, why in the world is this guy still in government service?
Roger gets a good shot in at the end of the post:
Advantage: The Nation. After all, it got Perle to respond for free.Heh.
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THE ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION KEVIN IS...
"No."
Boy, and if you read that post it's quite astonishing what this company is accused of doing -- and Glenn still makes that offensive comment. Not that I'm accusing Glenn himself of being a racist but that's quite an outrageous comment to append to that story.
Sometimes you really wonder if Glenn engages his brain before he begins moving his fingers. Or, as many of us have suggested, you really wonder if he even reads the stuff he links to or even the excerpts of things he posts to his blog anymore.
This post perhaps is evidence that he doesn't.
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SUDDENLY FINDING WMDS IN IRAQ IS TO "PLACATE CRITICS" NOT TO MAKE US ALL SAFE
Atrios is back to full-time status and, in an excellent post this morning, makes a damn good point about how the administration is trying to move the goal post for success in the IraqWar:
This is just something which has been so obvious from the beginning. They've never displayed the slightest bit of concern about finding whatever it is because it could be dangerous, but only because they need to justify their invasion.It is just damn-near evil how these guys want to try to pretend they didn't keep talking about "disarming" Saddam and how that was what the war was all about back in February and March.Liars.
And, for those who are now claiming that the Bush administration was always talkings about "weapons programs" and not "weapons," don't you remember the final double dog ultimatums we kept giving Saddam? You know, we kept telling him that he had to "disarm" or we were going to invade? Disarm WHAT?
And they really think Americans are stupid enough to fall for that, huh?
Well, of course the mouth-breathers who would support W even if he grew horns, pointy-ears, a sharp tail and began speaking obscene verse in iambic pentameter will believe it, but who else will?
This really would be hilarious if it hadn't already cost thousands of Iraqi lives, hundreds of American and British lives, $70B and counting, and left an entire nation in chaos and ruins.
We'd be hearing jokes on Leno every night about this absurd attempt by the administration to rewrite very recent history except that, of course, it's too damn serious and frightening to even joke about, isn't it?
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KRUGMAN: "STATE OF DECLINE"
Krugman's column this morning is an excellent discussion of the shape of things to come in Republican fiscal irresponsibility.
I do wonder how long we can run a deficit that is 1/3 of all federal spending, don't you?
I wonder what the fake economist over at NRO will have to say about this one.
And, by the way, it's great that our economy actually grew a bit last quarter (2.4% annual GDP), but we had a quarter last year in which it grew much more (4% actually) and it didn't make much difference. It's also nice to hear that unemployment dropped, until you realize that drop is due to the fact that 550,000 Americans stopped looking for jobs.
It would be nice to think we're out of the woods economically -- but don't count on it folks.
We've heard all of this before -- for the last two years in fact.
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Thursday, July 31, 2003
ONE GOOD THING TO COME OUT OF...
this terrorist futures market fiasco is that Poindexter is gone.
Boy, you get the idea W and the boys were looking for any excuse to cut him loose, don't you?
I've been really busy today. Did I miss anything?
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LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND IRAQWAR PART II
It's just another day for the Bush administration's constantly changing story about the reasons we went to war with Iraq, huh?
First of all, you remember all the hub-bub about the fellow who hid the centrifuge parts under his rosebush?
Well, hilariously, even he says the administration is wrong about those aluminum tubes:
The White House, for instance, has cited the case of nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi, who recently dug up plans and components for a gas centrifuge that he said he buried in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf War. The White House has pointed to the discovery as a sign of Hussein's continuing nuclear ambitions, but Obeidi told his interrogators that Iraq's nuclear program was dormant in the years before war began in March.No wonder we haven't heard anything from the W propaganda machine about this guy recently. His story doesn't fit the administration's agenda now. In fact, the administration has found damn-near nothing in its interrogations of Iraqi scientists who, quite honestly, have no reason to lie to us now. I do hope something hasn't happened to this fellow in "protective CIA custody" since April. We all know just how careful the military and CIA are in interrogations these days, right?The sources said Obeidi also disputed evidence cited by the administration -- namely Iraq's purchase of aluminum tubes that various officials said were for a new centrifuge program to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. Obeidi said the tubes were for rockets, as Iraq had said before the war.
CIA analysts do not believe he has told the whole truth, said one Bush administration official. Obeidi has left Iraq under CIA auspices after being arrested briefly by U.S. Army troops.
Josh Marshall has a great post on this here.
While you're there, you really ought to read this post as well. It's a great one about how W and the administration is now trying to pretend this war wasn't about existing WMDs at all, it was all about discovering evidence that Saddam EVER HAD ANY weapons programs:
You can see where this is going, can't you? This is really great-moments-in-goal-post-moving. Saddam had a weapons program.And how can you believe he didn't have a weapons program, when he actually used the weapons from his weapons programs, albeit fifteen years ago.
This isn't just a slip of the tongue or a Bushism. This is where we're going. As the White House now wants to define it, the question is whether Iraq ever had a weapons program. Or, to put it more precisely, whereas some people are foolish enough to believe that the standard is whether Saddam actually still had the weapons programs we know he once had, the real standard is whether Saddam actually once had the weapons programs we know he once had.