Thursday, March 30, 2006
Coutler, McCain, Falwell
Ann Coulter, Ann Coulter, Ann Coulter…
Where have you been lately, Ann? You used to be the mouthpiece for the bigots and misshapen monsters of the right. You were lauded. You were Sean Hannity’s regular guest.
I want Ann Coulter to get more exposure. I want every conservative slug on FOX News to wrap his/her arms around the woman who called Arabs “ragheads,” who has advocated everything from repealing womens’ right to vote to dismantling the New Deal. We need people like you, Ann, even if you are a clown. We need demagogues like you to remind people of what conservativism is really about.
So Ann lied about her address. Is this a surprise, coming from a subject of an Outside the Spectrum Beat Down Session?
I won’t put Ann on the Dead to Me List because I enjoy her too much. My only hope is that, when she is convicted of a class three felony in Palm Beach, she will only get a slap on the wrist, be sent to jail for a few months, and come back with some serious “street cred.”
I also won’t put John McCain on the Dead to Me List, even though he irritates me endlessly. In addition to communing with Jerry Falwell, all of a sudden McCain is having second thoughts about his opposition to the constitutional ban on same sex marriage that is being proposed.
Haven’t I covered this enough? Do we need a refresher course on what Jerry Falwell stands for? We do, methinks.
"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them," Falwell wrote in his book America Can Be Saved. He lost a lawsuit in 1984 when he denied and was then caught on tape saying that a gay-oriented church was a “vile and Satantic system” that will “One day be utterly annhiliated and there will be celebration in heaven.” In 1994 he produced a video slandering Bill Clinton in which his producer posed as a journalist who was “afraid for his life,” and who detailed the “crimes” attributable the Bill Clinton, including murder. His producer, Patrick Matrisciana, later admitted the hoax.
In 1999, you may remember, Falwell’s journal alleged that the Teletubbies character Tinky Winky was a covert gay character. In 2001, after September 11th, Falwell blamed the attacks on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."
Falwell later issued a weak “apology” for his remarks, saying that “I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize.”
I don’t know why anyone would get that impression from his remarks.
To my knowledge he has never apologized, however, for saying AIDS was a scourge from God sent to punish homosexuals.
He also had this choice quote about Jimmy Carter and forgiveness:
"His message of peace and reconciliation under almost all circumstances is simply incompatible with Christian teachings as I interpret them. This 'turn the other cheek' business is all well and good but it's not what Jesus fought and died for. What we need to do is take the battle to the Muslim heathens and do unto them before they do unto us."
I love the part where Falwell dismisses “this ‘turn the other cheek’ business.”
He also, on the September 30th, 2002 60 Minutes show, said that “I think Muhammad was a terrorist” because “he was a violent man, a man of war.” Please read this in the context of “What we need to do is take the battle to the Muslim heathens and do unto them before they do unto us.”
Come on, for God’s sake. This guy should be radioactive. Instead McCain is courting Falwell.
And in more news, Bush blames Saddam for sectarian violence. I think that, from now on, when any administration official stands up to talk about the War in Iraq carnival music should be played in the background. U.S. involvement will last six weeks…or six years. Whatever. I understand the masterminds at the Pentagon no longer have an idea how much longer the war will last, or how much more it will cost, or how many more U.S. soldiers will come home maimed or dead.
I also like the president giving the Iraqis a kick in the ass: "I also want the Iraqi people to hear -- it's about time you get a unity government going,” he said.
My question to the president is this: what’s the rush? It took our founding fathers decades to form a stable central government, as conservatives have been telling me for three years. Stay the course, right?
One thing I love about Drinky is his “stay the course” attitude with regard to global warming. First he refused to acknowledge it for years, then he acknowledged it, now he’s questioning whether or not it’s man-made.
When corporations tell you it would hurt business too much to do anything significant to curb greenhouse gasses and when Jerry Falwell is telling you that science is the work of the devil you get republicans like Bush stepping forward to bravely challenge established science. If your party is willing to write religion into law and throw evolution to the wolves, why wouldn’t they do so for an inconvenient (for business) conclusion of science like global warming?
The GOP is founded on irrationality. They enjoy the benefits of science but reject its conclusions that threaten their worldview. That’s why they question evolution, global warming, polls that show Bush’s JAR in the 30s, polls that show that 72% of U.S. soldiers want out of Iraq by the end of the year, a survey that shows that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the war, etc.
And a correction or clarification to an earlier post. A day or two ago I mocked conservatives for the liberal McCain-Kennedy Immigration Proposal. You might argue it’s not that liberal, though it is still liberal compared to the far more extreme measures many on the right advocate.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Junta
Ahh, a treasure trove of information over at Thinkprogress. DeLay’s 13 worst ethical lapses here. John McCain, that “maverick,” heals the breach with Jerry Falwell here.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, there are no moderates in the GOP. John McCain may work with Ted Kennedy on occasion, but like any other republican he will still go back to the Deep Well of maggoty fundamentalism to shore up his base.
It is the fundamental problem of a criminal junta founded on a base of fundamentalist ministers, unreconstructed secessionists, and willfully ignorant jingoists, funded by a corporate network that knows no allegiance to anything except greater profit. When Ken Mehlman is policing the moderates like the SAVAK secret police it is just a further reflection of the rottenness of the organization. Being founded on that is bad enough, but when your party enforces discipline to the party line in a draconian fashion it simply makes it that much worse.
So we have Regnery Press, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, the American Spectator, FOX News, and every other outlet of corporatist propaganda feeding the jingoists with disinformation and warping your political base. James Dobson and Jerry Falwell are twitching the lash to inspire Terri Schiavo-like legislation and judicial appointments like Pryor. Corporations are writing tax laws, environmental legislation, campaign finance laws, and immigration laws. You will never find a good politician emerging from this network.
And to add insult to injury, you have Ken Mehlman enforcing party discipline and telling the republicans that they can’t distance themselves from a blatantly criminal president whose JAR is in the 30’s.
Go ahead. Rally behind the president even as he sinks beneath the waves. It’s political suicide, but more than that, it’s blatant gangsterism. You can’t criticize the president in the Republican Party, even if he’s wrong, even if he’s breaking the law.
This is why I call the Republican Party a criminal junta. They are nothing more than a syndicate. They cover up each other’s crimes and support each other, right or wrong.
You might say the same thing about democrats, but democrats never sank this low. Democrats never went to bat for Tom DeLay, keeping him as their majority leader in the House until he was actually indicted, and then rewriting the House rules so that indicted leaders didn’t have to step down. Democrats never had a guy like Pat Roberts who delayed a vote on investigating the president’s activities that he admitted were illegal, and then strong-armed republicans until he had enough votes to block an investigation entirely.
Democrats have never been able to break the will of every “moderate” in their party. Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove have forced more party-line votes out of these republicans than anyone else in living memory. They made “moderates” like Arlen Specter, Mike DeWine, Olympia Snowe, and others eat their own words and vote to block an investigation of the president’s wiretapping a month after they said it was warranted.
This is a gang. This is a syndicate. This is an organization that has never been good, and is now enforcing top-down party discipline like a third-world dictatorship.
I have yet to see Joe Leiberman get a Come to Jesus phone call from Howard Dean. I have yet to see Hillary Clinton get forced to eat her own words by her party leadership when she teams up with republicans to advocate a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning.
This is how democracy gets subverted. When elected officials are forced to sign on to a national agenda despite what their constituents may want, when they are forced to cover up the wrong doings of their leadership because they’re in the same political party, they are abdicating their fundamental responsibilities to their constituents to be representatives of their wishes.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Immigration
And in further news…
Alec Baldwin uncorks on Hannity. LOL. Just listen.
Scalia uncorks on the media. Is this guy actually a Supreme Court justice?
Veterans for “Truth” author Jerome Corsi is a plagiarist? No! Such a truthful and upstanding citizen would never steal!
The Memo. Please. NOW the media actually discovers there are, like, memos in Britain of Bush’s interactions with Blair where Bush, long before the war started, revealed he was determined to go to war. Ha! It’s called the Downing Street Memo, you retards, and it’s been public for a loooong time. Is this media payback for Bush’s “the media isn’t reporting the good news” bullshit?
Helen Thomas spends some time having fun with Scott McClellan, making poor Scotty run in circles, trying the say the memo isn’t accurate without actually denying the memo is accurate. Truly tortuous prose, that. Olbermann, Matthews, and others are piling on. Take that, Drinky!
Now, regarding the massive protests in L.A. recently, I seem to recall a certain Victor Davis Hansen citing similar protests in France as evidence of the rottenness of their socialist culture…hmmm…what do these protests say about us, Victor? Is this evidence of our rotten capitalist culture? Of course not, he’d say, it is just evidence that our borders have been open for too long. Indeed…and who has controlled our executive branch for six years, Victor? Who is in charge of safeguarding our borders?
Immigration has been a major issue for conservatives for years, but when your leadership only pauses from looting the treasury long enough to throw you an occasional bone, problems like this tend to build up. With Terri Schiavo GOP lawmakers could throw a bone to cultural conservatives with no downside, with a law with no national impact, written specifically for one person. But with immigration the corporate donors have a very different idea of what good immigration policy looks like.
Michael Savage was apoplectic yesterday about this issue. I laugh. This is what happens when your party is run by corporatists, you bloviating xenophobe.
Immigration is one of the issues that will split the corporatist head from the fundy body of the conservative establishment. If I were a democrat on the hill I would pound this issue until the cows came home. If I was calculating I would have no problem with outflanking Preznit Drinky on this issue and forcing him to veto the bill.
I doubt he would, but just making him speak out against a bill with restrictive rules on immigration and “guest workers” would send his JARs into Gehenna and keep GOP congresspeople up late at night with chills and cold sweats. They might actually even have to buck their corporate masters for once and write a bill that reflects the will of the majority of their country and their party.
If I was calculating I might rewrite that law a few years in the future, if democrats are in control of the congress, to loosen it a little, just to give something to immigrants once we’ve had a chance to regulate and monitor the immigrants coming to our shores. Give it a little test spin, I say.
So far, Dubya is obliging with his “Screw my base” policy of pushing for loose borders and guest worker programs, though he is a little short on specifics, his base gets the idea. Bwahahahaha!
At this point in his presidency I can’t tell if he is deliberately trying to get a job approval rating in the 20s or if he is so mindlessly devoted to his corporate masters that he has no idea of the trouble he’s in. Remember what the Dubai Ports Deal did to his JARs? How about lopping another five points off?
His father and Jimmy Carter saw JARs this bad, but they were the victims of bad economies that were largely out of their control. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were never this foolish. I remember being angry with Bush 41 because he seemed out of touch and he didn’t seem like he had a plan for the economy (if that even would have done anything). He is positively brilliant compared to his witless son.
No president since Richard Nixon has suffered like this when the economy was strong. JARs are a measure of popularity, not necessarily ability, but I won’t deny I take a malicious delight in watching the worst president in American history slowly roast under an unending flamethrower of vitriol from the press, the world, the left, and the right.
The sad part is that, due to the stupidity of fifty million voters, he is our president. Some of us saw this coming from a mile away, but some of us took six years to figure out that this man is not a good conservative, a good American, or a good man.
He is also not alone. John McCain recently teamed up with Ted Kennedy to write a nice, loose immigration bill. Ha! You likey that, conservatives? Your war hero hooked up with the Antichrist, Ted Kennedy, to write a bill that includes those guest worker provisions your president wanted!
Frist is going to be coming to the Senate with a tough immigration bill. I don’t think I’m being cynical by saying that “She does Respond” is posturing for 2008. He recently flip-flopped (oh, yeah, only John Kerry does that) changed his mind on stem cell research, like he had suddenly been presented with new evidence, last year. We’ll see what the bill looks like when the piranhas—I mean senators—are done adding amendments. She Does Respond is, after all, himself a master of completely altering bills with last-minute amendments pasted on in the dark of night by the light of the smoldering kindling of the congress’s procedural rules.
I must say I am disappointed in Harry Reid’s determination to thwart She Does Respond what seems like partisan political reasons. The reason he gives (Frist’s measure will bypass the Judiciary Committee) reeks of intellectual dishonesty. Hillary has picked out one provision in the bill (turning undocumented workers into felons and criminalizing aiding them) and is using that as justification to oppose the whole bill.
Give me a break, Nanny State (that’s my new nickname for Hillary). When are you going to tack the right on an issue that has some gray area in it? I think we both know this bill won’t lead to mass arrests of people who did nothing other than give water to dehydrated border crossers. How about demanding compromise instead?
Well conservatives, we all know you find many advocates for stronger border security in the Democratic Party. What amuses me is how your preznit wants to loosen up the borders with a guest worker policy. I’m sure none of those guest workers would ever consider jumping ship once they get inside the border.
Rats, Dolls, and Rails
Andy Card, the man at the epicenter of the Iraq War intelligence fiasco and the Valeria Plame Affair, is leaving the White House.
Like rats off a sinking ship, as I’ve said before.
Andrew Card’s replacement, of course, is every bit as promising as his predecessor. The budget director presided over a deficit explosion.
And in more amusing news, Sean Penn has a small plastic doll of Ann Coulter he abuses when angry. Don’t get too close to him, Ann. Sean has a fiery temper! “There are cigarette burns in some funny places,” he says of the doll.
He also has some choice words for the pundit: “She’s a pure snake-oil salesman. She doesn’t believe a word she says.”
I beg to differ, Mr. Penn. She has previously said she means every word she says. While we can speculate as to her motives, why bother? She preaches hatred. Maybe just to sell books. Does it matter whether she’s a bigot or a liar?
And more news that our president has failed to protect us. Port security? Rail security? Anyone? Where is this War on Terror? Oh, I forgot. We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here, or protect our ports, rail lines, or borders. Foolish thinking like that is a pre-9/11 mentality, despite what the 9/11 Commission says. What do they know about terrorism?
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Immigration, Corruption, and Elections
Thank God for immigration. At last the GOP can focus on an issue other than that of the lawbreaking of their leader.
I’m happy to say that immigration is one of many issues I’m happy to debate. The influx of 8 million undocumented immigrants over the last decade or so has certainly put a strain on our society, and the remedies for it have been long in coming.
Despite being the supposed paragon of immigrant nations, our government has set limits on immigrants for a century and a half, as I recall from my American history database. We have never in living memory been a nation with open borders, nor should we be, if the example of virtually every other industrialized nation on Earth is an example.
Undocumented workers break the U.S. system of government. They don’t pay taxes, they are a flight risk when charged with a crime, and they, because of their undocumented status, are prone to being abused in a myriad number of ways by their employers and their neighbors.
If you were an undocumented worker and you were the victim of a crime, would you report it when it might lead to your own arrest? What undocumented worker can claim the protection of the government if he or she is victimized by his/her employer?
So these people need to be documented, but there is a broad debate on how to document them, and how to regulate the borders, and how many new immigrants to allow into the country every year.
This is a wedge issue that is splitting the right in half. The corporate types just love that cheap labor. The rest are not too keen on foreigners in their midst, many of which don’t speak English.
Bush has taken the corporate line, in defiance of the will of the majority of Americans and even the majority of his base, a fact that should not come as a surprise after six years of failing to resolve the issue and the Dubai Ports Deal. A list of the people and organizations he has met with recently about this issue is quite enlightening. He echoes Vincente Fox, brazenly enough, when he says that these workers do jobs ordinary Americans are unwilling to do.
Of course, that’s utter bullshit. Americans are perfectly willing to mow lawns, clear tables, and act as domestic servants, just not for $6 an hour.
If immigration is curbed it will result in a tighter labor market, which will lead to a rise in prices for these services. It will also result in more money being paid, on average, to the people that perform those services.
Business is none to eager to be forced to raise the prices it charges for these services, because as my handy supply and demand curves tell me, this will mean a reduction in demand for these services, which should mean less profit for the big guys.
It will also mean that your average family will drop $100 going out to eat at TGI Fridays instead of $80. I’m not sure if I really care about the modest price increases in services this will entail.
Economists might argue that these price increases will be across the board, for services and not, but when they extrapolate to numbers that big they have to use a lot of guesstimation.
The bottom line is the same as it’s ever been: economics is a zero-sum game, Buddy. Most people will have to pay a little more for things while the poorest among us will make more money.
But in other news, Scalia shows yet again why he is hated among many liberal and centrist circles in America. The sad thing is that I don’t even necessarily disagree with him but his ethical problems vis-à-vis his continual refusal to recuse himself continue.
The issue is not as cut-an-dry as Scalia makes it out to be. Historically the United States hasn’t offered full trials for POWs, but then again, historically the United States defended the rights of slaveholders and segregationists. In this war that will never end, a war that has already lasted longer than WWII, there is no foreign government to release POWs to. Even if they were released for trial to Iraq and Afghanistan there is hardly a solid judicial system or society that could judge and reintegrate these people.
Couple that with the unacceptable way that these people have been detained and then treated once in custody and you might want to acknowledge that we need to reexamine the issue.
Previously I have endorsed the idea of military tribunals to process detainees, but that is a stop-gap measure. How, though, could a U.S. jury try these people with witnesses in Iraq and memories fading? Fundamentally, how could a society in the midst of a civil war produce and protect witnesses and documents fairly and accurately while protecting their safety after they testify on the witness stand?
I don’t have answers, nor have I ever even seen these questions addressed. This administration simply doesn’t care to address these questions. Their position has been for years to simply detain whom they will, torture whom they will, and leave any questionable people in prison for an indefinite period of time.
That is not an acceptable solution to the problem that has made us a pariah to the world. We need solutions, not a blanket dismissal from Scalia. I trust he will examine the issue more acutely when in comes before him in the Supreme Court. I don’t trust his judgment as to the answer.
As usual, Greenwald writes the best blog around. While recent posts circle unerringly over the same, sadly obvious fact (the Bush Administration simply believes it has the power to make or break any laws linked in any way to national defense), his March 24 blog is revealing.
I rarely cite these types of examples, because they’re obvious, because they litter the journalistic landscape like apples in October. Domenech, the recently-discredited plagiarist and Washington Post hire, brought this level of ethics to Jon Cornyn’s office and Regnery’s books (including Hugh Hewitt’s and Michelle Malkin’s books).
The New Yorker ran a story in the current issue about the mass of diseased legal thinking in the Executive Branch that produced torture justifications. Deceit and cronyism are diseases that have completely taken over the conservative political apparatus.
I could cite more examples, but I have written for months with justifications of this belief.
This last bit is a little shout-out to the righties who, after having defended their GOP president and congressmen unflaggingly, for years, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, now remain convinced that the GOP will hold their seats in the House and Senate and coast into 2008 strong and still in control.
Or not.
Complacency will kill your party, conservatives. My question to everyone else is this: Had Enough?
Friday, March 24, 2006
Cakewalk
Rummy, Rummy, Rummy.
Why do Drinky and von Rumsfeld continually lie to us?
At least Rumsfeld’s lie is “subtle” enough that he might assume that the horde of misshapen things that comprise his base might not pick up on it. But, of course, to the rest of us it appears as the stinking, fetid falsehood that it really is, an insult to our intelligence and a reminder that he never predicted the insurgency, a reminder that instead of prepping us for a long, nasty war he made us believe that it would only last a brief time.
While the right will parse his words like their enemy, Bill Clinton, to show that maybe, just maybe Rummy was really talking about something else, the public that heard those words was left with the clear impression that this thing would be history in six months. And that, of course, was false.
But in their endless quest to control all of the media, not just half of it, fascists will beat up the media and cry about the negative coverage of Iraq and all other issues that they defend, like the corporate media is, somehow, the one industry in America that just hates republicans.
This has passed the point of absurdity. The war has dragged on for three years and the president seems resigned to the fact that it may drag on for three more. The New York Times ran an editorial yesterday citing reports that the war effort may cost 1 trillion in total costs when you factor in long-term care for disabled veterans and lost earnings on capital sunk into the black hole of Iraq, a price we will pay in installments for the next generation or two.
They can cry and scream all they want, but they can’t hide a three-year-long war. They can cite progress on building schools and assembling one temporary government after another, but they can’t dismiss hundreds of billions of dollars as no big deal.
This is not a “cakewalk.”
And in other news, Russia betrayed us to the Iraqis. So when do we invade?
Further proof, if we need any, that you can find a reason to invade virtually any nation on Earth. Bad governments, vague terrorism contacts, alleged WMDs, it doesn’t make a difference. All we, as citizens, can do is trust our government to use its intelligence judiciously and honestly.
This is something we can’t do with our government, an issue that doesn’t seem to phase congressional republicans at all. Where is Phase II again?
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Front Men
Aaah, another day, another Pravda puppet rally.
I once, a month or two ago, described the gruesome spectacle of the administration’s Potemkin Town Hall meetings as having all the charm of a fat, aging man energetically humping a blow-up doll. I have discovered that they do not get prettier with the passage of time.
The fat, aging man is our utterly uncharismatic president sitting at 34% in the polls. The blow-up doll, of course, is the fake village people who crowd the meetings.
Normally if I saw such a spectacle I would tap the man on the shoulder and tell him to:
- Try intercourse with real people. It’s better.
- Lose some weight and reform your habits.
- If you just can’t resist, don’t do something like that in public. It’s obscene.
But, of course, such advice would be lost on an administration that is a PR front for a corporatist junta, and it would also be lost on a president who has been shielded from reality his entire life, and who maintains that shield vigorously by continually surrounding himself with yes men and sycophants.
The one trait of JFK that I always liked was his open-mindedness. He sought out disagreement and debate. As one person who worked with him put it, “You could yell at him, insult him, do anything to him, you just couldn’t bore him.”
Our current Preznit shares no such intellectual curiosity and tolerance for debate. His supporters have historically called it “leadership.” I have historically called it “wanton igonorace.”
But now, slowly, the conservatives are coming around to the fact that Dear Leader lives in a bubble. This rally is just business as usual for the GOP. The show must go on.
Reagan was the last time I saw a president so clearly as a charlatan, a man who was simply a charismatic front man for a corporate syndicate. He didn’t know what was going on in the nation. He fell asleep in his own cabinet meetings. He set a record for the most vacation days ever taken by a president. Every reputable account of people who used to work with him portrayed him as an idiot.
Aside from pretty speeches scripted by Peggy Noonan, there was no substance to the man, which made it easier for me to dismiss him instead of hate him. But even to dismiss him is to do him a disservice: he accomplished what he needed to. Or, more appropriately, his administration accomplished what it needed to. All he needed to do was look good and read off of the teleprompter.
Reagan was the first president to completely prove that a president could be utterly unfit, but he could still get elected if the PR campaign was good. He was the first president to prove the style not only trumps substance, it eliminates the need for substance entirely. Republicans proved that an actor is all you need to take over the White House.
He was also a statist reactionary, which earns him the laudation of modern conservatives as the modern father of their party. It is fitting.
But Bush is a new low. He never pulled himself up from a working class family, like Reagan did. He utterly lacks the charisma of his predecessor. And he shares Reagan’s destructive foreign policy and Reagan’s utter stupidity. He shares Reagan’s ignorance.
Time will tell whether Drinky will hang like an albatross around the neck of his party for years to come, and I think it will. But I don’t trust the judgment of the American electorate to learn anything from Bush’s demented presidency. Reagan left office with a huge approval rating. Bush was elected twice. We don’t learn from our mistakes.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Shame
This is the cost of war.
No, it’s not a dead Iraqi child, though I think that the corporate media has made a decision, collectively, to not show the brutality of war, and that we do need to see the human costs of our decision. Check out some of the foreign newspapers to the left. You will actually see pictures of the aftermaths of battles in Iraq. The last time the U.S. media showed something like that was when it showed the rubble left in the wake of the U.S. airstrike on that Pakistani border village. Before that, I can’t remember the last time I saw pictures of carnage in Iraq.
I really don’t like to sound like a pacifist, because I’m not, but tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in this war. If you believe the military, the number is 33,000. If you believe the Lancet study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the number is 100,000.
We did indeed liberate Iraqis from a despot, but we also started a war that has led to the death of at least eleven times as many civilians as died on September 11th, and maybe closer to thirty times as many, in a nation far smaller than our own.
This is why war is a last resort, not just another tool in a nation’s toolbox. This is why war should be an act of desperation, not an extension of diplomacy to get another nation to bend to our will on any number of issues. This is why war is only justified, in international law, to repel an invasion or to stop an ongoing genocide.
Because despite all the smart bombs and surgical strikes, you can’t wage war on a government. You can only wage war on a people. Every war in the history of mankind, from the Peloponnesian War to this current one, results in the death of far more civilians than military personnel. And call me crazy, but military personnel are people, too.
The President, and Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, and all the other neocons in the administration thought they could swoop into Iraq, remove Saddam Hussein, and leave in a matter of months, or a year, after quickly setting up an Iraqi government. They thought they could do all this with a quarter of the troops that had been used in the Gulf War.
They were wrong. We have earned the enmity of the international community, created a war zone in a country we liberated, lost 2,500 troops, and sunk $400 billion in the war so far, and now the President thinks that we will need to maintain a presence in Iraq past the end of his presidency in 2008.
And all this not because we were genuinely threatened by Saddam Hussein, but simply because, in the words of Paul Pillar, “the desire to shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region.”
We have learned nothing since Vietnam. We never learned that it is folly of the highest order to start a war based on a political theory.
We have also, apparently, never learned that imperial presidential powers are a road to perdition.
I would have though the disasters of the Johnson and Nixon presidencies would have taught us something. I was wrong.
Or maybe it is more accurate to say that the lesser half of this country never learned these lessons. The generals that questioned the administration’s judgment were muzzled. The massive war protests were ignored. The protestors of Drinky’s warrantless wiretapping program are called “extreme” and even smeared as traitors by their opponents, as are the people who protest extraordinary rendition, and torture, and indefinite detainment for anyone the president labels an “enemy combatant.”
Why don’t you ask the 2,500 families of the dead Americans lost in this war who they think is a more loyal American, the war protestors or the imperialists who sent their loved ones to Iraq to die in a Godforsaken desert out of a desire to shake up the power structures of the Middle East.
It goes the same way every time, and I tire of the same trick being played on Americans, over and over again, generation after generation. From the fictitious border invasion that started the Mexican-American War in 1848 to the sinking of the “civilian” ship the Lusitania in 1917 to the Gulf of Tonkin charade in 1964 to the “weapons of mass destruction” hobgoblin in 2003, the trick never changes, just the actors.
The trick is the same even when it is only used to justify economic aid or a small military intervention in a third-world country, as Latin America learned the hard way in the 20th century. America roars in, with a divine mandate to spread democracy, and invades a third world nation to civilize the savages, even if that means killing them. Don’t pay much attention to the “democracy” we installed in Chile in 1973, or Vietnam in the sixties, or South Korea in the fifties, or Guatemala and Nicaragua and countless other Latin American nations all throughout the twentieth century. If those democracies were worse than the governments they replaced, it was just an honest mistake we happen to make over and over and over again. And if we happen to support dictatorships in the meantime, it is only a matter of necessity.
It is only when we ask the question of “necessary for whom” do we get an understanding of the world that is not filled with so many holes and intellectual contradictions that it serves only as a mockery of itself. Who in America benefited when Eisenhower instructed the CIA to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Guatemala in 1954? Which Americans benefited when he used the CIA to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953? Which Americans benefited When Nixon used the CIA to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Chile in 1973? Which Americans benefited when Reagan subverted the government of every nation in Latin America in the 1980s?
And was it really that important to topple the government of Vietnam in 1964? Was it really that important to help Indonesia butcher its dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s? Did we really need Turkey as an ally so badly that we needed to look the other way as they exterminated thousands of Kurdish villages in the 1990s with the aid of record amounts of U.S. military hardware sales? Do we really need Israel as an ally so badly that we can ignore the depredations of the one nation on Earth in violation of more U.N. Security Council resolutions than any other?
Why the Hell did we fund the dictatorship of Morocco for decades? They don’t even have resources we need! They’re not even located in a strategic area of the world!
We are not a fumbling, good-natured nation; we have been ruled for generations by politicians who play chess with world governments and sacrifice real people’s lives for corporate investments and political theories. For the loss of $13 million that wasn’t even really ours we tossed Guatemala’s government in 1954 and plunged them into civil chaos that took them decades to recover from, if they even have. We don’t support democracy, and we never have. We support friendly governments, period. We are still staunch allies of Saudi Arabia, but Hugo Chavez is just a vile dictator. We have no problem with Uzbekistan, but France is a failed socialist state that is a poor ally in the War on Terror. The United Arab Emirates are a great ally of ours, according to the president, despite the fact that they are an alliance of monarchs, and Pakistan, though a military dictatorship, is another ally.
Germany is “Old Europe” and Russia is corrupt, as the pundits on the right are quick to point out when they oppose an initiative of ours in the War on Terror or in dealing with Iran, but I hear nothing but deafening silence from these astute judges of character on the genocide in the Sudan or on the draconian measures of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who recently bulldozed the homes of 750,000 poor people in his country who are now sleeping in the streets.
Africa has no oil. It is riddled with AIDS, poverty, and ruin. It is of no strategic interest to the United States. That’s why Bill Clinton never did anything to avert the genocide in Rwanda, and that’s why Drinky won’t do anything to avert the genocide in the Sudan, or to use the awesome power of the U.S. military to topple a dicatator like Mugabe. There is simply no money in it.
So instead Drinky plays the same shell game his predecessors played, though Bush is far more clumsy at it than they were, and his duplicity is far less excusable in an era when we have left Jim Crow and Nikita Khrushchev behind. He dangles the hobgoblin of Terror in our faces for years, instilling fear, rallying support. Nevermind that 9/11 occurred on his watch and might have been preventable, according to numerous stories that have surfaced regularly over the past five years like this one. He proceeds to orchestrate a campaign of misinformation that would have looked clumsy in the 1920s, much less in the Information Age: endless war, terror alerts, slandering critics as traitors, disseminating disinformation through the media his junta controls like FOX News (the #1 news outlet in America), talk radio, Regnery Press, the Wall Street Journal, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines and blogs.
Mussolini would have approved of this level of media control. To have the #1 TV news station and almost the entire radio news market under your control is a feat that has rarely been equaled by fascists in world history, and Mussolini and Hitler were rulers of far smaller countries than the United States. Only the oligarchy of the Soviet Union at its peak and that of Communist China could exceed that of the United States for sheer number of people under their control through propaganda and fear.
Nationalism isn’t a divine right. You are only justified in being proud of your homeland when you homeland is something to be proud of. Yet half of this country labors in a small world where criticizing your homeland is treason, where America is always right, and where we are constantly threatened by foreign powers. How long have we been at war? We fought the Cold War from 1945 to 1990, the Gulf War in 1991, some brief military interventions in the nineties, and now we are lost in yet another interminable War on Terror that shows no signs of ever ending.
It should be called the War of Terror, and it has been being waged on the American people for years. I understand the fact that terrorists attacked us on 9/11, and that there really are people out there who want to kill Americans.
But we are only seeing half of the equation if we focus so solipsistically on what they have done to us without acknowledging what we have done to them. There have always been people out there who wanted to kill Americans, and if your brother or sister was blown apart by an Israeli missile strike on a suspected terrorist’s car using a Boeing Apache chopper you might want to kill Americans, too. If you lived in a village in Guatemala or El Salvador where your sister was raped and killed by CIA-trained governmental death squads you might want to kill Americans, too. If your family was exterminated by governmental death squads in Indonesia in 1965 with the aid of CIA equipment and signals intelligence you might have been one of those cheering in the streets of Jakarta when 9/11 happened. If your family was among the 2 million Vietnamese civilians who were wiped off the face of the planet in the Vietnam War, you might also have cheered when 9/11 happened.
Apartheid says that Islam is as Islam does. I would counter that America is as America does. We are no better than the Arab Street if we dismiss the death of innocents with a wave of the hand and then react with outrage when they reply in kind. Blanketing an area with bombs and killing thousands of civilians in an effort to wipe out a hundred insurgents is no more moral than going into a village suspected of harboring insurgents and spraying bullets indiscriminately with an M16. Just because it’s done from a greater distance doesn’t mean it’s more defensible.
If you acknowledge that civilian deaths are acceptable collateral damage in a war against an enemy you open a Pandora’s box of problems that will haunt you for the rest of your life. You will forever strive to walk a tightrope over an abyss by saying that killing as limited an amount of civilians as possible to defeat an enemy is morally superior to deliberately targeting civilians of an enemy nation to defeat an enemy.
And who knows what words are spoken and left unspoken in the planning rooms of our generals. Have they ever used indiscriminant destruction of civilian areas to intimidate, destroy the morale of, or flush out insurgents? I simply don’t know. We have before. We incinerated 100,000 civilians in Dresden in WWII in a firebomb raid against a city that we knew had no military targets in it. Churchill explained that Dresden was an “important communications nexus” for the German army, an intellectual way of saying that it had a lot of roads and telegraph lines running through it. The people who lived next to those roads and lines were inconsequential.
I can’t help but think we thought the same thing of the civilians in Veitnam, looking at the vast number of them we killed.
We must judge ourselves with the same clear and unsparing vision we level on others. To do so is not treason: it is justice. It is fairness. It is goodness. It is reason and compassion at the same time, to be willing to make the same sacrifices that you demand of others.
To do so is to do the only thing you can do if you wish to be a nation that is a beacon to others. To do so is to accept responsibility for leadership by showing that you are worthy of it. To do so is to realize Christ’s Golden Rule. To do so is to be a good Christian, a good American, a good person.
If my country demands that I do any less I will simply refuse. I would rather be a good person than a good American. America is not nor has ever been a tautological equivalent of goodness. It must be made that way, and it must be maintained in that status by labor that never ceases as long as you and I draw breath.
It is not laborious to be a patriot, or to have blind faith in your president, or to dismiss the suffering of others, or to desire a hegemony over most of the planet. Labor means sacrifice. Sacrifice means giving something of yourself.
Cheering on the troops is not sacrifice. Enjoying a tax cut in a time of war is not a sacrifice. A sacrifice would be forgoing our corporate interests by simply allowing a democratic regime to exist without our meddling, without our funding a corporate-friendly political party to allow it to seize power in the government, without our political intimidation. A sacrifice would be occasionally helping a desperate nation not because we wanted access to their resources, but instead simply because they were in desperate need of help.
I think of the blood we have spilled in Iraq and the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent and continue to spend and I hang my head in shame at the loss. We have spent $400 billion in Iraq, with the bill mounting daily. We pledged only $950 million to help the families of the 186,000 dead and over a million displaced in the Asian Tsunami of 2004. I think of the real good that might have been done by $400 billion spent on something other than a war and I am ashamed of my people and my government.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Just Ugly News
Check it out, baby.
Stephen Hayes, conspiracy theorist and propagandist of the right, how I hate thee.
If men’s faces were like their souls, our cities would look like Hell, as the old saying roughly goes.
Bill Kristol has finally figured out what I figured out last week, that Russ “Stuntman” Feingold has cleverly stoked the fires of the wiretapping issue by submitting a censure resolution. Starting to see the big picture, Bill? Bwahahahaha!
Drifty scores one for the good guys, detailing the lastest delusional rhetoric of Darth “last throes” Cheney on Sunday morning, eventually getting so sick of the rhetoric that he finally growls, “And, sorry, that’s all the Cheney I can stomach today. He’s a tumor in a suit, who lies as casually and unabashedly as my cat cleans its ass.”
LOL.
And in other news…can you smell the smoke, republicans? I mean JESUS! When your president visits and suddenly DeWine and Voinovich are too busy to attend…ouch. I don’t remember this ever happening to Clinton, though H.W. might have had to endure such snubs in the last year of his presidency. Either way, that’s really nasty stuff.
Check out Christy Hardin Smith from Firedoglake just roast Mirengoff from Powerline on C-Span. Double ouch! “President Clinton was almost impeached for a “purely procedural” count.” Oooo...man…it’s ugly what happens to the noisome, slimy things of the political world when they muster the courage to face someone who actually has a grasp of the issue (Smith is Reddhedd at Firedoglake, link to the left, check her out). I am not surprised that she’s a prosecutor, much like Glenn Greenwald, my other favorite blogger.
Ahhh…sweet, sweet Arianna…her prose is like unto the purest gust of air from the highest mountaintop…
And welcome to the Dead to Me list, Mr. Boehner, just for K Street complicity and fumbling, ham handed fascist rhetoric that would have given Benito Mussolini himself pause. You certainly are a worthy successor to the moral sewage spill of a human being that preceded you.
If you want to look at the lies of the day, go ahead. But after twenty years of paying attention to politics and five months of blogging daily, I am simply a little too jaded at this point to really take note of Bush flatly denying he ever linked Iraq to 9/11. I mean, is anyone who pays attention to the news really shocked or appalled anymore? I know Drinky is speaking to the gibbering, twitchy, inbred mass that comprises his base, but isn’t it a truism that only people who don’t pay attention to the news vote for him? What use does Dear Leader have for the media when the only people who pay attention already know he’s utterly depraved? Who are you talking to, Drinky?
Karl Rove figured out that as long as some of his words filter down to the masses without any critical commentary from the supine corporate press he can have an impact. But it’s a dangerous game to lie so obviously, and a simply pigeon-stupid game to lie when you don’t have to. Clinton lying about Kosovo wasn’t dangerous for him because no one cared and the war lasted all of three weeks; Drinky is lying about the very same message he pounded into peoples’ heads for years. Drinky could lie about his budget because no one in America was actually going to read it; everyone in America knows about the war and remembers our justifications for going there.
Granted, it doesn’t top Bill Frist saying, so recently after the war started, that “I’m not sure WMDs were our primary reason for going there.” Then again, few people pay attention to what any senator says. The president is a whole different ballgame.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
The Recent Past
Driftglass is always beautiful when he roasts David Brooks, and today is no exception. I especially love this part, the culmination if Driftglass explaining Brooks’s elaborate theory about how Bush is really a “Sekrit Genius” and can’t be to blame for Iraq. But pay special attention to this: And because his existential terror at facing the abyss of the complete implosion of ideology-an ideology on which both his psyche and livelihood are entirely dependent -runs so deep that instead of using Occam's Razor to shave this dog’s ugly ass, Bobo (like all Republicans still clinging hysterically to the Bush Bandwagon as it plummets out of control towards the pointy rocks) must desperately invent increasingly weird, disassociative, Rube Goldberg linguistic contraptions to rationalize away the obvious fact that… …Dubya’s an Idiot. This is the same stink of intellectual dishonesty that clings to The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, Newsmax, Powerline, National Review, etc. You will see the same “increasingly weird, disassociative, Rube Goldberg linguistic contraptions” to rationalize inconvenient facts and situations away for conservatives in this country like the theory that WMDs slipped into Syria, or that the CIA mislead the president. Upon closer investigation these theories simply reek of willful dishonesty. The CIA only handles about 20% of the intelligence in this country. The bulk of it is handled through the Defense Department. The State Department handles more and it is separate from both the CIA and the DoD. Bush appointed a dozen people to process the information concerning Iraq who were all PNAC signees and neocon warmongers and a dozen more to sell that shit to the American people in the form of the White House Iraq Group, among them Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, Karl Rove, Andrew Card, Mary Matalin, and “Scooter” Libby. So keep these names in mind when you see them raise their ugly heads on Sunday morning talk shows and the like. Mary Matalin defending George W. Bush is like Spirew Agnew vouching for Richard Nixon. Mary Matalin was one of the masterminds behind the political ploy to question the motives of democrats who criticize the president, in other words, call them terrorist sympathizers. The White House set up an extensive apparatus composed of loyal PNAC signees to be in charge of processing information regarding Iraq. John Bolton was in the State Department as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control when he gave Greg Thielmann the boot and started piping intelligence straight into the State Department. Don Rumsfeld set up the Office of Special Plans to second-guess the CIA and to operate under the auspices of the hard-liners in the White House, like himself, Dick Cheney, and W. “Scooter” was also among those who applied pressure. William Luti and Douglas Feith ran the operations of the Office, in which they hired out gunslingers from right-wing think tanks and corporate-military organizations like PNAC to help them “analyze” information and stovepipe it directly into the State of the Union Address like it was verified fact, all with the consonance of George W. Bush, Don Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. But, of course, it was really the CIA’s fault. Sure it was. So who was punished or disgraced or disciplined after it was found there were no WMDs? No one. Being a conservative means never having to mean it when you say you’re sorry. Bolton got appointed Ambassador to the UN. Wolfowitz was chosen to be president of the World Bank. The analysts were given praise. Tenet was given The Medal of Freedom. They weren’t punished because they didn’t fail. They did what they were told to do. Check out Paul Pillar jumping ship. Read his analysis here. Are we waiting for God himself to part the clouds and thunder, “The intelligence was doctored, you idiots!” That was the guy at the CIA for analyzing intelligence concerning the Middle East.
I mean is anything debatable and “uncertain” as long as the Right is willing to deny it? Was anyone paying attention when Pillar made his criticisms public a month or two ago? When Lou Dobbs or whoever mentions the Iraq intelligence is he honestly going to say it was “allegedly” doctored? Or will the MSM people just ignore the fact that the president lied the American people into a war, like the proverbial elephant in the room, right next to the other elephants the Bush Administration has birthed and left in full view of the American public, and will they continue on discussing the Bush Administration like it isn’t a blatantly criminal enterprise, like it’s just got the flu, it’s just tired and a little incompetent, bless its little heart?
I tire of rehashing old questions and old information, but it serves us well to remember the obvious once in a while, to not take the lessons of the past for granted.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Oh Ye of Little Faith
I rarely actually laugh at loud when I surf the net, but this one is a winner.
I know there’s no crime in being a conservative newsperson, though there should be, but let’s drop the pretense with Tweety Bird. Chris Matthews is bought and paid for. He has a long, sad history of just lovin’ the worst president in American history. You don’t do that when you’re a democratic or an independent. You also don’t give speeches to venture capitalists when you’re really a democrat, unless you are a member of a 5% minority.
And the usual stuff floating around on the internet: Is the GOP really going to run on security this November?
You make me laugh, GOP. How does that tailspin feel? Getting’ a little queasy?
Speaking of tailspin, David Brooks is swimming into dangerous territory, criticizing the handling of the war.
Driftglass will write a far more vicious and worthy rebuttal of Brooks in general, but observe closely the methodology of the GOP apologist. Greg Mitchell has a decent critique here.
Brooks, you vile political whore. So the war was a great idea, but Don Rumsfeld screwed it up?
Only conservatives could remind us endlessly that Drinky is the commander-in-chief and somehow, simultaneously, say that Don Rumsfeld is ultimately responsible for a failed war.
See how the pattern I so recently described plays out yet again? The three steps to being a conservative apologist:
- Admit responsibility for as little as possible, furiously minimizing the situation
- Throw a subordinate under the bus
- Hire a replacement and continue doing the exact same thing you were before
BoBo, I agree that Don Rumsfeld really screwed up. But all of us in the reality-based community also remembers that Drinky is the commander-in-chief, the guy who agreed with Rummy on everything and backed his every play, the guy who whipped Colin Powell into shape to conform to the neocon line.
Because no matter how furiously you try to ignore it, you can’t change the fact that it takes an incompetent person to appoint an incompetent person. And no matter how much you wish we could all go in the wayback machine to replay this war, we will never know if 300,000 more troops would have made a difference. It didn’t in Vietnam. Or maybe it might have in Iraq, but it would also have led to 4,000 more casualties and 300 billion more dollars spent because it costs that much in blood and treasure to keep a force that size suppressing an insurgency.
We’ll never know, Brooksie. What we do know beyond all doubt is that your boys screwed us into a war that is an unmitigated disaster, and you cheered them the whole way.
Right now journalists like BoBo should be on their knees begging for forgiveness in abject shame, but that, of course, isn’t going to happen. BoBo has no shame. He has an agenda.
His agenda is the same as every other corporatist’s: staunch the bleeding. Divert blame. Minimize what has happened. Make a superficial change, and continue on with business as usual.
Case in point, Dirk Kempthorne. New face, same agenda.
BoBo doesn’t want to admit what many others in the conservative party, like Bill Kristol, have tacitly acknowledged: Bush is incompetent. He’s also a rank criminal, but they aren’t willing to go that far. But if BoBo even acknowledges that Drinky is incompetent, he’ll have to acknowledge that replacing Don Rumsfeld won’t solve to problem. There’s no real use in replacing the help when the guy calling the shots is unfit.
But BoBo is one of those mainstream conservatives that, sadly, are common in the press with the likes of Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper providing commentary on the daily news. BoBo knows how to do the GOP version of damage control:
- Minimize (the war is good, it was just poorly executed)
- Throw subordinate under the bus (bye bye Rumsfeld)
- Continue as before.
These snake oil salesman still think that they can get out of this with a Reagan-era housecleaning like what happened after the Iran-Contra Affair.
Poor, poor BoBo. We passed that point long ago. Though it was an amazing feat to rehabilitate a president who financed terrorists in a foreign country in blatant defiance of the U.S. and international law, Reagan didn’t sink his country into a disastrous war. Reagan didn’t spy on Americans with the NSA. Reagan didn’t doctor intelligence to get his country into said war. And Reagan, at least, was charismatic.
So conservatives are beginning to jump ship, but for all the wrong reasons, as I have written before. Peggy Noonan is disturbed not by torture and war but instead by spending. Ditto Andrew Sullivan.
Where we you the past six years, of ye of little faith? From whence does this newfound disillusionment come?
Did this moral rejects honestly look at Drinky lying his ass off about every budget he ever proposed and think, “He’s lying to everybody, sure, but he’ll eventually veto spending bills, request less money, etc.” Is their majority so profoundly demented that they think that blatant liars will stay true to their “principles?”
Nay, gentle reader. Reagan detonated the budget too, albeit with help from his democratic congress. He requested every dollar his congress appropriated and neglected to veto fat spending bills when they crossed his desk. Democrats had a majority, true, but not one strong enough to overcome a veto on the kind of party-line vote republicans have been ruling this country with for six years.
Even if the GOP really was all about fiscal conservativism would Drinky have been a good president if he had just balanced the budget? Apparently so, according to Sullivan and Noonan.
It’s too late to jump ship now, you criminals. Back to the cage with ye, Beasts!
I normally don’t comment on the most obnoxious crap from the right, but take a look. Check this one out. Ipso Loquitor, my friends. These aren’t unhinged militia members blogging from a bunker in Montana: TownHall and Newsmax are major forums for right-of-center commentary. Or how about this one from Powerline, Blog of the Year not so long ago in Time’s estimation.
Of course, it is not only lawful to reveal illegal government programs, it is the duty of all involved. But Scott isn’t concerned with the legality of the program, a blithe comfort that is not shared by his betters.
Nevertheless, you get the idea. There are those in congress and among the masses who are firmly convinced that dissent is criminal, at least when a republican is the president. Some honestly are stupid, but those who are actually informed are simply paid for. Scott knows better. So do the rest.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
As the party of personal responsibility is busy throwing staffers under the bus, Scooter is trying desperately to not be one of them.
Major combat operations in Iraq are over...or not.
And the party formerly known as the party of personal responsiblity would also like to shed the whole "fiscal conservative" label, too. The GOP on a party-line vote extended the U.S. debt limit to a record high.
James Spader's character on Boston Legal actually has a really pithy monologue that is so cogent and concise that you really have to listen to it. Check out Crooks and Liars for the video and audio.
Major combat operations in Iraq are over...or not.
And the party formerly known as the party of personal responsiblity would also like to shed the whole "fiscal conservative" label, too. The GOP on a party-line vote extended the U.S. debt limit to a record high.
James Spader's character on Boston Legal actually has a really pithy monologue that is so cogent and concise that you really have to listen to it. Check out Crooks and Liars for the video and audio.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
The Plan
It never ceases to amaze me how some people refuse to see the truth. CBS recently re-released their job approval rating poll for Bush, weighting it to get essentially equal amounts of democrats and republicans (366 and 358 respectively) and the results are much the same: Bush’s JAR is at 34%.
This is following several other polls released after CBS’s Feb. 28 poll showing Bush’s JAR in the 30’s that also had Bush in the 30’s.
Conservatives derided the CBS poll when it was released as “biased,” as I said they would, as they do with every poll that shows a result unfavorable to their cause. I wrote comments on some conservative websites defending the accuracy of the poll and deriding the statistical ignorance of the conservatives there. I was universally dismissed.
They were wrong, but they are not ones to apologize or admit mistakes. Eric Boehlert has a great article on the situation here.
You can’t argue with these people. You can’t debate with someone who is not swayed by reason or facts. You can’t convince someone who refuses to admit when they are clearly, unambiguously wrong.
People like that have no place in governing this country. They really shouldn’t even vote. But these people are the republican base.
Or perhaps they are its leadership. The stench of intellectual dishonesty is always strongest when I approach a newsstand with The Wall Street Journal. No publication is more vile or politically skewed. While I’m not a fan of Southern Partisan, it can’t hold a candle to The Wall Street Journal. The former is the standard of the South. The latter is the standard of the corporate world.
There is a difference. I may disagree with evangelicals on a lot of things, but conservative Christians still believe in charity. I may think a lot of southerners are bigots, but a lot of southerners are decent people, too, and a lot of them even elect democrats, at least to state assemblies and to the Congress of the United States. Let us not forget that every democratic president since JFK has been a southerner.
But in the corporate world there is no such diversity of opinion, nor is there a spirit of intellectual honesty. They know which side their bread is buttered on, and they have never shown a concern for the greater good. Or democracy. Or honest debate.
They are the leadership of the GOP, and their hands have been on the wheel for decades.
Their diseased, autocratic culture has poisoned every institution that they have influenced. Just look at conservative blogs. Powerline doesn’t even allow comments. Right Wing News cut off my ability to post comments after one post in which I (in a non-vulgar manner) disagreed with the prevailing “wisdom” of the post I was commenting on.
When you take Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity out of his carefully-controlled and screened bubble environment, their arguments don’t sound very good when they’re not debating caricatures of left-wing callers. When their opponents can’t be cut off and hung up on they don’t do very well.
It is this culture that produces George W. Bush as a two-time nominee to the presidency. It is this culture that shelters Tom DeLay. It is this culture that elects Bill “She Does Respond” Frist to the leadership position in the Senate. It is this culture that chooses Pat Roberts to be the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
So this is why my lip curls in disgust when I read about conservatives who have suddenly figured out that W is “incompetent.” This is why I sneer when conservatives then try and throw his help under the bus. This is why I shake my head when they, barely a year into Drinky’s second term, start eagerly looking forward to the ’08 presidential election, searching for the next criminal to pick up the standard after the current one has failed so completely.
They won’t acknowledge that they were wrong. They won’t acknowledge the all-too recent past. They won’t recognize that Drinky floated to the top of their organization for a reason. W is not an aberration, but when it’s convenient they will scapegoat their fundamental corruption on his back like he’s the same kind of “bad apple” that tortured people at Abu Ghraib.
They see no connection between arguing for torture (see The Weekly Standard, National Review, American Spectator, Dick Cheney, Pat Roberts, etc.) and incidents of torture all across the U.S. military prison system, from Gitmo to Bagram Air Force Base. They see no connection from the criminal assertion of imperial presidential powers in the Nixon presidency to Bush’s presidency. They see no correlation between the Reagan Adminstration’s brazen repudiation of law and congressional authority and George W. Bush’s own.
Actually, they just pretend not to see the correlation. They don’t “accidentally” keep committing the same crimes, over and over again. They do it very purposefully, because they won’t acknowledge that they were wrong, even when they’re caught red-handed. That’s been Bush’s M.O. for six years, for his entire life, and now they excoriate him for it, disingenuously, like that isn’t S.O.P. for their entire power structure. When it worked they were all for it. Now that his JAR is 34% it’s “stubbornness.”
These are people who have already made up their mind where they’re going with full knowledge that it has nothing to do with what’s best for America. When something goes wrong they’ll make a small adjustment by throwing a staffer under the bus, blaming the help, tacitly acknowledge a “small” mistake, and then they’ll continue right along the same path.
Because when an administration is revealed to be lawless the buck never stops at the president’s desk. Reagan sold arms to Tehran and funded terrorists in Nicaragua, in contravention of international law, in contravention of U.S. law, and when he was caught it was Oliver North and Elliott Abrams who took the fall while the president hired a few more new faces and just kept going.
When we invaded Iraq and found no WMDs it was the CIA’s fault. When we tortured people across the globe it was the work of a few bad apples. When Katrina hit the disaster that followed was the local government’s fault. When Iraq was looking like a disaster in 2003 and 2004 and 2005 it was just because the biased mainstream media was reporting all the bad news.
There are things that the president can’t run away from, though, and they are beginning to revolt on the Right. They have suddenly discovered that their leader is a dolt. But expect no apologies or improvements.
They will only acknowledge the faults that they are forced to, just like in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005. They will still deny what they can. They will still throw the help under the bus.
So now Bush is “incompetent,” but not evil, no sir. He’s “tired.” His advisors keep him in a “bubble.” It’s the advisor’s fault. He won’t get new advisors because he’s “stubborn.”
Such was the line on CNN last night, with Anderson Cooper supplying the party line. Thanks, Cooper. You can always count on the corporate media for incisive analysis.
The problem is that conservatives are never sorry, even when they say they’re sorry. Ken Mehlman apologized for the Southern Strategy, but I don’t see him kicking Trent Lott and Conrad Burns out of the party. Reagan fired Elliott Abrams and Oliver North and John Poindexter, but instead of being repudiated by their kind they have all found new jobs in the Bush Administration (Abrams, Poindexter) or on Fox News (North). These are convicted felons we’re talking about, people. The “faulty” intel that led to the Iraq War was the CIA’s fault, but George Tenet got a Presidential Medal of Freedom after he retired. No one above the rank of captain has ever been convicted of anything in the prisoner abuse scandals. Michael Brown was thrown to the dogs and promptly revealed that the willful ignorance regarding the Katrina Disaster went all the way the president’s desk.
Drinky has yet to “clean house” regarding the mishandled Iraq War or the wiretapping scandal because those decisions can’t really be thrown at the feet of underlings. But even if he did answer for those things what would the GOP have to offer in Drinky’s place? Are we looking for leadership from the party of Bill Frist? Tom DeLay? Dick Cheney?
