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?
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Resolution
I laugh.
So today we have the spectacle of Arlen Specter, as all of us lefties predicted, caving into the right wing of his party and defending Drinky’s illegal wiretapping program.
On the floor of the Senate, pleading like the co-dependent spouse of the abusive husband just captured by the police: “Sure he broke the law! But his intentions were good…he just gets a little carried away sometimes!”
His intentions were good? Is that the defense now?
His state of mind as he broke the law is something that a jury can speculate on, Specter. You won’t even start an investigation and you’re already guessing at his motives.
Disgusting. What is worse, the monster or the apologist for the monster?
Feingold floated his censure resolution just so we could get just a little more of this: craven apologias for blatant lawbreaking.
He knows as well as we do that the resolution will never pass a republican senate that won’t even authorize an investigation. Even most democrats don’t have the spine to back the resolution they know is just the first and mildest form of reprimand the president deserves.
Congress knows that most people aren’t even really aware of the NSA wiretapping scandal, and those that are are poorly informed at best. I’ve spoken with them. Many have a vague feeling that the Patriot Act or some such allows the president to wiretap without warrants. They are uneasy about the idea, but they don’t even know what FISA is. Essentially no one has read it.
Congress also knows that what the president did and is continuing to do is unambiguously illegal. FISA is explicit. It’s been on the books for 28 years. It’s not rocket science.
So democrats know by now that republicans will block any effort to punish the president for breaking the law. They know that public support for punishing the president is uncertain because of the public ignorance.
But they also know that the more the NSA wiretapping scandal is kept in the spotlight, the more public resentment for the president’s actions will grow, as more and more people become aware of FISA and the legal limits of the president’s spying power.
Republicans also know this, and that’s why they are so desperate to sweep it under the rug. That’s why they won’t commission a special prosecutor. That’s why they won’t start their own investigation. That’s why Bill Frist wants to vote on the resolution, vote it down, and move on.
Frist also realizes that most democrats are hesitant to jump on board an issue before the public does. He knows that if there is a vote on the resolution and most democrats vote against it, they will have painted themselves into a corner. If they come back after November with more votes and try to do the same thing, republicans will excoriate them for suddenly deciding that the president did break the law.
Of course, there are defenses against this. Democrats might launch an investigation, and when the tiniest little bit of new information comes out about the NSA program the democrats could turn around and say, “New information. This changes a lot. The president must be brought to justice.”
Still, it would be a setback for democrats to be split on this issue now, because for the next seven months everyone and his brother would be on talk radio and writing in newspapers saying “Even a majority of democrats voted against a censure” etc, etc.
I applaud Feingold for doing what was right, and what was politically astute. Put the resolution out there. Let it twist in the wind a little. Let the debates continue. Keep the issue in the newspapers.
One thing democrats unfortunately share with republicans is this: they don’t have the courage of their convictions. They know what the right thing to do is. Unfortunately, they are more focused on poll numbers.
This is the ugly legacy of the DLC, of the Clintons, of every triangulator in the Democratic Party. It doesn’t work. It didn’t work for Al Gore and it didn’t work for John Kerry. If democrats try and become republican-lite they will never win because they will never be as willing to lie and enforce draconian party discipline because their base won’t allow it. As the GOP learned recently with the Dubai Ports deal, you can’t turn xenophobia off and on like a water spigot. You can’t change the beliefs of your base at will to allow you to constantly appeal to the ignorant middle.
Democrats don’t want to be whipped on the national security vote, but they don’t seem to realize that the scared subset of the population has always been lost to them anyway. Bush’s criminal incompetence was on full display by 2004 and he still won. Give up on the nationalist warmonger vote, guys. You don’t want to have to pander to them anyway.
I understand that dems want to play it really safe until November, leading in the polls and watching the GOP spectacularly self-destruct, but if you keep changing your position depending on which way the wind is blowing this month you’re going to tie yourself up in knots and expose yourself to ridicule. W has a job approval rating of 34%, for Christ’s sake: stop trying to hit him and just hit him.
It is clear that justice will not be done unless the public gets involved, something Glenn Greenwald, as usual, pointed out a week or two ago. The court cases are still pending. The more attention that gets drawn to this issue, the better. If I were Russ Feingold I would keep introducing this resolution, week after week, until it finally produced results.
Monday, March 13, 2006
The Real GOP
Krugman has been on a roll lately.
Recently he wrote an op-ed piece excoriating the administration critics who have so recently figured out that Drinky is “incompetent” and “vindictive,” resurrecting some of their quotes from a few years back when they criticized him for saying the exact same thing.
Today he writes another masterpiece. Check it out.
There is no better columnist at the New York Times than Krugman. That’s why the rightists hate him so much.
But I want to return to a subject I touched on briefly yesterday: the irrationality of the American electorate.
I mean that in a perjorative and a literal way: when 51% of the country believes in literal creationism, when three-quarters of the country believes in miracles, you have an electorate that is not rational. You have an electorate that uses faith and religious doctrine to inform its beliefs about the world even when that faith and doctrine flies in the face of settled science.
Chomsky says it better than I could: “These numbers aren’t duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You’d have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this.” Chomsky goes on, detailing some other irrational American beliefs. “Again, you’ve got to go back to pre-technological societies, or devastated peasant societies, to get numbers like that.”
This is the religious irrationality that Driftglass rages against. It is the foundation of the Republican Party. Every time they stage another “God-and-country” rally that passes for a political rally they throw red meat to their base.
But the levers of power are firmly in the hands of the corporate elite. That’s why their tax cuts are aimed at the wealthy. That’s why Drinky won’t do anything about the illegal immigration that massively depresses labor wages until he is dragged, kicking and screaming, to the negotiating table. That’s why conservatives destroy environmental standards to make business easier for corporations.
Conservatives still have to get elected, so they throw the occasional bone to their base. That’s what Terri Schiavo was about. That’s what conservative judicial appointments are for. I can’t remember how many talk radio hosts and editorial writers said that the conservative activists they talked to worked to get Bush elected primarily for the conservative judicial appointments they knew would follow. That’s why Harriet Miers, though relatively conservative, provoked a backlash that led to her withdrawal.
It’s hard to forge a balancing act between the corporate elite and the Beast, especially when, in certain areas, their desires are conflicting. That’s why Bush lied incessantly about the nature of his tax cuts: God-and-country types aren’t too keen on giving money to people who live off on dividends. Thank God Fox News is there to spread the disinformation. Bush has taken a beating for years over immigration from all sides, especially in his base, but when it comes to issues that involve money he has proven he is willing to defy the will of the majority of the people that sent him to Washington.
Because it’s so hard to perform the balancing act, the corporatists in Washington learned long ago to beat the war drum. It’s very effective at stifling dissent. With Reagan it was Communism and the Cold War. With Bush it’s the War on Terror, another Cold War, another interminable conflict against a phantom that may take eighty years to dispel.
9/11 was a Godsend for Karl Rove, and he knew it. He knew it because Americans have always held the irrational belief that republicans are better at defending the country than democrats, ostensibly because they are more willing to wage war on countries that have nothing to do with our real enemies. Reagan found his phantom in Nicaragua, a nation that was Communist because he said it was, a pitiful third-world democracy that was a threat to our security because he said it was. Drinky found his phantom in Iraq, a nation that was allied with Al-Qaeda because he said it was, a nation that was a front in the War on Terror because he said it was.
There is no War on Terror. Terrorist attacks around the world have risen, as I have pointed out in the past. Iraq never had a “collaborative relationship” with Al Qaeda, as governmental study after governmental study has detailed. Iraq never gave any more funding or support to terrorists than Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or any other Arab nation. Iraq never had WMDs, Iraq had oil.
The security of our ports and borders is rancid, as bad as it was on September 11th, as the 9/11 Commission has reported, as many others have noted.
Drinky has failed to engage the governors of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and many other nations to form a cooperative relationship to quash terrorism in the countries in which it festers.
The War on Terror isn’t a policy failure, it is a shallow head-fake, a weak feint to distract the American people from the treacherous policies of a worthless corporate shill, a posturing puppet who scared his country into waging a war to secure oil supplies while he raided the treasury and raped the environment.
This is what you get when you elect the leader of a party founded on corporatism to the highest office in the land.
Whenever I listen to the least noxious, the most central ideals of what the GOP stands for I am appalled. They are always paired like Siamese twins: limit government spending and encourage corporate growth.
These are really nice ways of framing reality. Conservatives don’t want to limit all government spending: they love massive military budgets in the hundreds of billions per year. It’s those social programs that need “reform.” They should, theoretically, hate pork and earmarks, but we have seen those cancers expand explosively over the last six years.
And what about encouraging corporate growth? Is that what our government should do? This is the fundamental cancer that has eaten the soul of the GOP. Should the role of government simply be to stay small and efficient and stay out of the way of corporations? Limit the ability of people to sue companies for damages? Loosen environmental standards to allow corporations to exploit our natural resources without cleaning up the mess? Lower taxes on corporations and dividends?
When this thinking permeates your political party you will send people to Washington who think that the only role of government is to serve as an appendage to companies to make life easier for them. You will get Drinky as your president. The majority of the electorate will get screwed.
Corporations are hierarchical, top-down power structures. They are dictatorships. If you don’t like the decisions coming down the pipe you can plead your case or quit. You don’t get to vote.
It never ceases to amaze me that people insist on democracies for their government but spend the bulk of their day living in an autocracy. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can form and join companies where we do get to vote. But that’s a subject for another day.
Do we want the balance of power in this country to be in this private sector? Do we want government’s main job to be to make life easy for AT&T?
How about making life easier for people? How about cheap tuition loans, Headstart, health care, social security?
As Gordon Gekko said, “Economics is a zero-sum game, Buddy!” When you shift the tax burden away from companies you place it more firmly on the shoulders of the individuals. When you enact legislation to make it harder for people to sue companies for wrongdoing you make life harder for people. Yet these ideas are the cornerstones of modern Republican political thought.
It doesn’t make any sense unless you are on the corporate payroll. Voodoo economics has never generated growth in the economy any greater than the growth in the economy in the nineties, when Clinton raised taxes. The American economy has an amazing ability to lumber along at a 3.5% growth rate regardless of Clinton’s taxes or Drinky’s tax cuts in 2002. There isn’t even a correlation, much less a causation, between growth and tax cuts.
Again, the data has never been there, but what was once the demented brain child of Reagan’s Rightists is now taken for granted by every republican like it has been proved to be irrefutably true. Because they want it to be true. Because that means they make more money.
Meanwhile, as their every wish is fulfilled by a republican congress and a republican president, real wages stagnate and job growth is feeble. The top 1% and the top .5% and the top .1% of earners in the country see their incomes explode. Alan Greenspan issues an ominous warning about this trend and then retires. But it’s champagne and caviar time in the boardrooms.
Recently he wrote an op-ed piece excoriating the administration critics who have so recently figured out that Drinky is “incompetent” and “vindictive,” resurrecting some of their quotes from a few years back when they criticized him for saying the exact same thing.
Today he writes another masterpiece. Check it out.
There is no better columnist at the New York Times than Krugman. That’s why the rightists hate him so much.
But I want to return to a subject I touched on briefly yesterday: the irrationality of the American electorate.
I mean that in a perjorative and a literal way: when 51% of the country believes in literal creationism, when three-quarters of the country believes in miracles, you have an electorate that is not rational. You have an electorate that uses faith and religious doctrine to inform its beliefs about the world even when that faith and doctrine flies in the face of settled science.
Chomsky says it better than I could: “These numbers aren’t duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You’d have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this.” Chomsky goes on, detailing some other irrational American beliefs. “Again, you’ve got to go back to pre-technological societies, or devastated peasant societies, to get numbers like that.”
This is the religious irrationality that Driftglass rages against. It is the foundation of the Republican Party. Every time they stage another “God-and-country” rally that passes for a political rally they throw red meat to their base.
But the levers of power are firmly in the hands of the corporate elite. That’s why their tax cuts are aimed at the wealthy. That’s why Drinky won’t do anything about the illegal immigration that massively depresses labor wages until he is dragged, kicking and screaming, to the negotiating table. That’s why conservatives destroy environmental standards to make business easier for corporations.
Conservatives still have to get elected, so they throw the occasional bone to their base. That’s what Terri Schiavo was about. That’s what conservative judicial appointments are for. I can’t remember how many talk radio hosts and editorial writers said that the conservative activists they talked to worked to get Bush elected primarily for the conservative judicial appointments they knew would follow. That’s why Harriet Miers, though relatively conservative, provoked a backlash that led to her withdrawal.
It’s hard to forge a balancing act between the corporate elite and the Beast, especially when, in certain areas, their desires are conflicting. That’s why Bush lied incessantly about the nature of his tax cuts: God-and-country types aren’t too keen on giving money to people who live off on dividends. Thank God Fox News is there to spread the disinformation. Bush has taken a beating for years over immigration from all sides, especially in his base, but when it comes to issues that involve money he has proven he is willing to defy the will of the majority of the people that sent him to Washington.
Because it’s so hard to perform the balancing act, the corporatists in Washington learned long ago to beat the war drum. It’s very effective at stifling dissent. With Reagan it was Communism and the Cold War. With Bush it’s the War on Terror, another Cold War, another interminable conflict against a phantom that may take eighty years to dispel.
9/11 was a Godsend for Karl Rove, and he knew it. He knew it because Americans have always held the irrational belief that republicans are better at defending the country than democrats, ostensibly because they are more willing to wage war on countries that have nothing to do with our real enemies. Reagan found his phantom in Nicaragua, a nation that was Communist because he said it was, a pitiful third-world democracy that was a threat to our security because he said it was. Drinky found his phantom in Iraq, a nation that was allied with Al-Qaeda because he said it was, a nation that was a front in the War on Terror because he said it was.
There is no War on Terror. Terrorist attacks around the world have risen, as I have pointed out in the past. Iraq never had a “collaborative relationship” with Al Qaeda, as governmental study after governmental study has detailed. Iraq never gave any more funding or support to terrorists than Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or any other Arab nation. Iraq never had WMDs, Iraq had oil.
The security of our ports and borders is rancid, as bad as it was on September 11th, as the 9/11 Commission has reported, as many others have noted.
Drinky has failed to engage the governors of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and many other nations to form a cooperative relationship to quash terrorism in the countries in which it festers.
The War on Terror isn’t a policy failure, it is a shallow head-fake, a weak feint to distract the American people from the treacherous policies of a worthless corporate shill, a posturing puppet who scared his country into waging a war to secure oil supplies while he raided the treasury and raped the environment.
This is what you get when you elect the leader of a party founded on corporatism to the highest office in the land.
Whenever I listen to the least noxious, the most central ideals of what the GOP stands for I am appalled. They are always paired like Siamese twins: limit government spending and encourage corporate growth.
These are really nice ways of framing reality. Conservatives don’t want to limit all government spending: they love massive military budgets in the hundreds of billions per year. It’s those social programs that need “reform.” They should, theoretically, hate pork and earmarks, but we have seen those cancers expand explosively over the last six years.
And what about encouraging corporate growth? Is that what our government should do? This is the fundamental cancer that has eaten the soul of the GOP. Should the role of government simply be to stay small and efficient and stay out of the way of corporations? Limit the ability of people to sue companies for damages? Loosen environmental standards to allow corporations to exploit our natural resources without cleaning up the mess? Lower taxes on corporations and dividends?
When this thinking permeates your political party you will send people to Washington who think that the only role of government is to serve as an appendage to companies to make life easier for them. You will get Drinky as your president. The majority of the electorate will get screwed.
Corporations are hierarchical, top-down power structures. They are dictatorships. If you don’t like the decisions coming down the pipe you can plead your case or quit. You don’t get to vote.
It never ceases to amaze me that people insist on democracies for their government but spend the bulk of their day living in an autocracy. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can form and join companies where we do get to vote. But that’s a subject for another day.
Do we want the balance of power in this country to be in this private sector? Do we want government’s main job to be to make life easy for AT&T?
How about making life easier for people? How about cheap tuition loans, Headstart, health care, social security?
As Gordon Gekko said, “Economics is a zero-sum game, Buddy!” When you shift the tax burden away from companies you place it more firmly on the shoulders of the individuals. When you enact legislation to make it harder for people to sue companies for wrongdoing you make life harder for people. Yet these ideas are the cornerstones of modern Republican political thought.
It doesn’t make any sense unless you are on the corporate payroll. Voodoo economics has never generated growth in the economy any greater than the growth in the economy in the nineties, when Clinton raised taxes. The American economy has an amazing ability to lumber along at a 3.5% growth rate regardless of Clinton’s taxes or Drinky’s tax cuts in 2002. There isn’t even a correlation, much less a causation, between growth and tax cuts.
Again, the data has never been there, but what was once the demented brain child of Reagan’s Rightists is now taken for granted by every republican like it has been proved to be irrefutably true. Because they want it to be true. Because that means they make more money.
Meanwhile, as their every wish is fulfilled by a republican congress and a republican president, real wages stagnate and job growth is feeble. The top 1% and the top .5% and the top .1% of earners in the country see their incomes explode. Alan Greenspan issues an ominous warning about this trend and then retires. But it’s champagne and caviar time in the boardrooms.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
P.S.: Most Americans Are Imbeciles
Most Americans are simply stupid.
51% of Americans believe that God waved his hand, and humans were created poof from nothing, and that evolution didn’t happen.
And the Rapture is comin! Praise Jebus!
Although this story is old, the lesson isn’t. The laws and government of this country are worth no more than the people who make them. As long as half of this country is stupid there will always be a GOP, and Drinky and his ilk will always exist, and the laws of this government will be disposable.
Adding to the Dead to Me List
So the Chicago Tribune had a truly disgusting article on the font page, an “investigative” piece of journalism written by one John Crewdson, a piece I won’t bother to refute point-by-point because the Chicago Tribune is dead to me.
But let this one be for the record: if a newspaper has a bias on its editorial page that bias will leak into its “news” reporting. Just look at page 18 of the Tribune. Trusting a newspaper with a biased editorial page to give you honest reporting is like trusting Claude Allen with your domestic strategy when you already know he’s a thief. One thing affects the other. You can’t get a job as a security guard when you have a felony record.
But no real surprise, das right is barely paying attention.
One sad effect of being so far out of the mainstream is that John Conyers and Russ Feingold look like lunatics when they advocate the truth and defend the law and the Constitution. Feingold floats a resolution everyone knows will never pass, just because it’s what should pass, because, even though everyone already knows it, Feingold doesn’t want senators to be able to claim ignorance. He wants them on the record as voting against even censuring the president.
Fuckin’ a, Russ. Give ‘em Hell.
John Conyers floats the same kind of unhinged bills with almost no support in the House and he looks like Don Quixote when all he is calling for is an investigation into the lawbreaking of George Bush that the rest of the world already knows about.
John Conyers may look bizarre in the U.S. Congress, but, sadly enough, it is the U.S. Congress that looks ridiculous in the context of the World and the truth. The United States is barely more popular than Iran in public opinion polls across the world. France and Poland enjoy a better reputation. No western nation has a congress and a president that are considered more dishonest and dangerous.
But that’s an ad populum argument, and I know it. The problem is that the evidence is out there for everyone to see, and they still don’t. They aren’t paying attention as their government is run by a fascist junta. They don’t even know who Valerie Plame is. And they get information from FOX News like it’s just some new version of ABC.
FOX News is not and never will be NBC, and the Senate of Bill Frist is not and never will be an honest and responsible organ of government. There’s a difference, meatheads, and ignorance can’t change reality.
While I won’t blame the victim, I get tired of the American people complaining about how crooked politicians are and then proceeding to ignore politics as the politicians rape the government. Make an effort, for fuck’s sake! I can’t vote for you!
Because when naked criminality goes unpunished, you get this. Fristy is your leader now, eh? Is that all you got? Should we be surprised when you nominated George W. Bush to the presidency twice? Bill “She Does Respond” Frist is your guy?
Or how about John McCain. Poor, pasty John has been a bitch of the Far Right for so long he can’t feel James Dobson’s collar anymore. He forgot South Carolina a week after it happened and spent the next six years on the dick of the guy who raped him.
Anybody else, Republicans? Any other lying, criminal slaves of the Reverends or whipped moderates you want to float? Should I care, considering your entire party is dead to me?
I’m on a roll today, you should know.
Another thing I tire of is corporate media outlets covering the president’s illegal wiretapping like it’s a debatable issue, giving equal or more than equal weight to the administration’s defense, and then concluding the article with a rhetorical “oh well,” like this Christian Science Monitor article, emphasizing that punishment for breaking the law isn’t “appropriate.”
Just for this one article, Christian Science Monitor, you are dead to me. Take your faith healing and voodoo witchdoctor cult and get the fuck out.
But let this one be for the record: if a newspaper has a bias on its editorial page that bias will leak into its “news” reporting. Just look at page 18 of the Tribune. Trusting a newspaper with a biased editorial page to give you honest reporting is like trusting Claude Allen with your domestic strategy when you already know he’s a thief. One thing affects the other. You can’t get a job as a security guard when you have a felony record.
But no real surprise, das right is barely paying attention.
One sad effect of being so far out of the mainstream is that John Conyers and Russ Feingold look like lunatics when they advocate the truth and defend the law and the Constitution. Feingold floats a resolution everyone knows will never pass, just because it’s what should pass, because, even though everyone already knows it, Feingold doesn’t want senators to be able to claim ignorance. He wants them on the record as voting against even censuring the president.
Fuckin’ a, Russ. Give ‘em Hell.
John Conyers floats the same kind of unhinged bills with almost no support in the House and he looks like Don Quixote when all he is calling for is an investigation into the lawbreaking of George Bush that the rest of the world already knows about.
John Conyers may look bizarre in the U.S. Congress, but, sadly enough, it is the U.S. Congress that looks ridiculous in the context of the World and the truth. The United States is barely more popular than Iran in public opinion polls across the world. France and Poland enjoy a better reputation. No western nation has a congress and a president that are considered more dishonest and dangerous.
But that’s an ad populum argument, and I know it. The problem is that the evidence is out there for everyone to see, and they still don’t. They aren’t paying attention as their government is run by a fascist junta. They don’t even know who Valerie Plame is. And they get information from FOX News like it’s just some new version of ABC.
FOX News is not and never will be NBC, and the Senate of Bill Frist is not and never will be an honest and responsible organ of government. There’s a difference, meatheads, and ignorance can’t change reality.
While I won’t blame the victim, I get tired of the American people complaining about how crooked politicians are and then proceeding to ignore politics as the politicians rape the government. Make an effort, for fuck’s sake! I can’t vote for you!
Because when naked criminality goes unpunished, you get this. Fristy is your leader now, eh? Is that all you got? Should we be surprised when you nominated George W. Bush to the presidency twice? Bill “She Does Respond” Frist is your guy?
Or how about John McCain. Poor, pasty John has been a bitch of the Far Right for so long he can’t feel James Dobson’s collar anymore. He forgot South Carolina a week after it happened and spent the next six years on the dick of the guy who raped him.
Anybody else, Republicans? Any other lying, criminal slaves of the Reverends or whipped moderates you want to float? Should I care, considering your entire party is dead to me?
I’m on a roll today, you should know.
Another thing I tire of is corporate media outlets covering the president’s illegal wiretapping like it’s a debatable issue, giving equal or more than equal weight to the administration’s defense, and then concluding the article with a rhetorical “oh well,” like this Christian Science Monitor article, emphasizing that punishment for breaking the law isn’t “appropriate.”
Just for this one article, Christian Science Monitor, you are dead to me. Take your faith healing and voodoo witchdoctor cult and get the fuck out.
Friday, March 10, 2006
Glenn Greenwald and I think alike, and he also excoriates the democrats in congress for their tepid response to the republican dismantling of the Constitution. Some lowlights:
Rockefeller, the ranking democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the republican effort to monitor the president’s illegal wiretapping with a laughably loose oversight committee “a step in the right direction.”
Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein were similarly deferential to Alberto Gonzales on the president’s wiretapping prerogative. Check out this article.
Dick Durbin, ever a strong critic of the administration until he is bludgeoned by right-wing hacks and forced to apologize for telling the truth, whined that Drinky could have done everything legally if he had just come to the compliant congress for a rubber stamp: “Why didn’t you work with us, when you knew you had such strong bipartisan support?” Whined the senator from Illinois, the man who was bullied by conservatives into crying on the senate floor and apologizing for criticizing the Gitmo abuses.
Rockefeller, the ranking democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the republican effort to monitor the president’s illegal wiretapping with a laughably loose oversight committee “a step in the right direction.”
Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein were similarly deferential to Alberto Gonzales on the president’s wiretapping prerogative. Check out this article.
Dick Durbin, ever a strong critic of the administration until he is bludgeoned by right-wing hacks and forced to apologize for telling the truth, whined that Drinky could have done everything legally if he had just come to the compliant congress for a rubber stamp: “Why didn’t you work with us, when you knew you had such strong bipartisan support?” Whined the senator from Illinois, the man who was bullied by conservatives into crying on the senate floor and apologizing for criticizing the Gitmo abuses.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
So now Drinky's inadequacy is so rancid he made Faith Hill swear.
Ohh, this story is worth many that are a thousand times longer. The sunniest, most famous for being nice and moderate and non-political country singer around is reduced to cursing at the sight of the wreckage of New Orleans and the rebuilding that isn't.
*Sigh*
James Dobson, the new Jerry Falwell, the new Ayatollah of the Christianofascism, went on the defensive on FOX News and lied his ass off. Is this surprising? Is is shocking anymore when the debased leaders of the inbred flocks gets caught lying, or advocating assassination, or screwing his secretary?
But in the real news, I want to give a special shout-out to all the dems in congress who are sleeping through the president slowly dismantling the constitution. Nancy Pelosi's strongest condemnation of the President strong-arming the Senate Intelligence Committee into blocking an investigation was to criticize the additional legislation proposed as "legislating in the dark." Way to bring the wood, Nancy. You'll let conservatives ass-rape you over strong words about budgetary bills, for the love of fucking God, but you suddenly don't have the courage to stand up and call lawbreaking what it is.
And a hat tip the corporate media, sleeping through it all, also. Check out CNN's website one fucking day after the story: see anything? Of course not! It's the incredible disappearing fourth amendment!
Ohh, this story is worth many that are a thousand times longer. The sunniest, most famous for being nice and moderate and non-political country singer around is reduced to cursing at the sight of the wreckage of New Orleans and the rebuilding that isn't.
*Sigh*
James Dobson, the new Jerry Falwell, the new Ayatollah of the Christianofascism, went on the defensive on FOX News and lied his ass off. Is this surprising? Is is shocking anymore when the debased leaders of the inbred flocks gets caught lying, or advocating assassination, or screwing his secretary?
But in the real news, I want to give a special shout-out to all the dems in congress who are sleeping through the president slowly dismantling the constitution. Nancy Pelosi's strongest condemnation of the President strong-arming the Senate Intelligence Committee into blocking an investigation was to criticize the additional legislation proposed as "legislating in the dark." Way to bring the wood, Nancy. You'll let conservatives ass-rape you over strong words about budgetary bills, for the love of fucking God, but you suddenly don't have the courage to stand up and call lawbreaking what it is.
And a hat tip the corporate media, sleeping through it all, also. Check out CNN's website one fucking day after the story: see anything? Of course not! It's the incredible disappearing fourth amendment!
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Roberts Blocks Inquiry Into Illegal Wiretapping
I honestly don’t know who I despise the more, the fool…
Or the fool who follows him.
Pat Roberts thinks that because his constituents have a mean I.Q. of 43 that he won’t be held accountable for aiding and abetting a criminal president.
The better half of this country is going to hang your master from a gibbet, Roberts, and slope-browed wheelmen like yourself who served him will fare much worse. As I have said before, the better half of this country will write your obituary. I personally guarantee it.
Although the House investigation is also looking to be of extremely limited scope, the lawsuits will remain, and the Congress will change in November.
This kind of criminality is not new to Washington, just its scope: never before has a political party ripped up the gears of justice and congressional operations so blatantly to protect a member. If Nixon had had this congress, he would never have been forced from office, proof that the GOP has actually regressed since the days of Watergate.
Conservatives, your party is a disease, a filth that deserves nothing but insults, unwavering contempt, and prosecution. There will be no more debate on civilized matters until you are excised.
If I were a democratic congressman I would simply walk out. Reid shutting the Senate down is not enough. I would rather break this Congress than see it run by Pat Roberts.
There are no other stories today that mean anything. Pat Roberts, Republican Congress, you are dead to me.
As usual, if you need a concise break down of the details and you haven’t read the NYT, check out Greenwald. In fact, read him even if you already know the details. He’s always dead-on.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Bush Cuts Funding for Disabled Children
So in the news today…
More Dubai bullshit, as the gubmint still has a month to sell this to the American people…
I tune in to Lush, just because I haven’t heard Crazy Uncle Limbaugh completely make stuff up as he goes along for awhile. After listening for 5 minutes I learned the following:
- The war in Iraq in really going well: for example, one caller pointed out that nowadays 40% of Baghdad is patrolled by Iraqis.
- We shouldn’t care about the mindset of terrorists or terrorist sympathizers or suspected terrorists: they’re all just crazy and fodder for our guns.
- Liberal Hollywood really isn’t progressive: look at the few Oscars that African-Americans get!
- Liberal Hollywood is out of touch.
You bore me, Limbaugh. I can read off of the DC Talkers RNC Talking Points, too. I don’t need you to do it for me.
Over to Thinkprogress, which has just a gem of a story with this headline: Bush Cuts Funding for Disabled Children.
Ouch. Double ouch. That’s so bad it’s cartoonish.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Reagan's Legacy
So Bill Kristol, the Dark Prince of Tendentious Journalism (as the Editor of The Weekly Standard, the most biliously far-right publication in the country; I mean fascist far right. I mean these guys make The American Spectator and National Review look like pussies) has come to the conclusion that most conservatives think Drinky is incompetent.
In related news, Pat Robertson just lost his job.
I never want to be confused with disastrousizers, but this is the beginning of the wheels falling off this wagon. When Bill Kristol, your batboy, the guy who went for the plate for you (along with a couple of his writers) to defend torture in the face of overwhelming opposition within your own party, comes out and says you’re a boob, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.
This is Brutus deciding he’s bloodied his hands for Caesar one too may times. This is Hess deciding that, despite his raging anti-Semitism, he can’t follow der Fuehrer any further down the path he’s decided to tread.
Though they’re all still criminals, some of them think that bailing out of the plane before it hits bottom is going to save them. But Hess was still a criminal, and Brutus was no better than Caesar, if not worse.
Your opinions are a matter of historical record, Kristol, and they will forever be frozen in time in microfiche and microfilm records, in databases, on hard drives, and framed behind glass in my office, because they are shining examples of absolute evil right in the heart of the American political discussion.
They are shining examples of the diseased thinking that runs one of the parties in this country, and I’m not talking about democrats.
I love the grudging admission of a flaw that lefties have been screaming about for six years: incompetence. I love the tip o’ the hat to that particular problem, like it exists in a vacuum, like it was invisible until now, like they haven’t been defending this president’s incompetence for six years.
False intelligence leading to the war in Iraq? Who cares! It’s still a worthy mission! War critics are blame-America-firsters, defeatists, cut-and-runners, and traitors.
He ignored intelligence indicating there were no weapons, that we wouldn’t be greeted with flowers, that he needed more than 120,000 troops, that it would take years and hundreds of billions of dollars to reconstruct Iraq? Not true, they said at the time.
He appointed a horse show association president to be the head of FEMA, he was warned repeatedly about the impending Katrina disaster and dismissed the concerns, and he went on vacation as New Orleans sunk beneath the waves. But we all remember how, according to the right, local authorities were really to blame, Nagin was a clown, we don’t want to play the “blame game,” etc.
I might cover a dozen lesser examples, but I think we all can remember the specifics of Katrina and Iraq. We all remember who was defending the President’s incompetence and who was flagellating it, only to be accused of insincerity, partisanship, and dishonesty.
So now that we have The Prince of Darkness stating the obvious. I have read other administration critics on the web describe this as “rats jumping off a sinking ship” and “the neocon machine putting on a display of reform to mollify the masses.”
This comes in the immediate wake of news that Fox and CNN/USA Today/Gallup have both run polls that confirm the CBS poll: Fox has Drinky’s JAR at 39% and CNN/USA Today/Gallup has it at 38%.
Conservatives, though they have been surprisingly comfortable living in the 40’s for the past year, are now hitting the panic button. Bill Kristol is jumping ship and Pat Robertson just got thrown overboard.
Old-school conservatives are beginning to criticize the administration.
Bill Frist, as usual, is working overtime to cover up for the president’s policies. Glenn Greenwald has a post here, as usual the best writing on the subject anywhere on the Internet. Frist is actually making the democratic cover-up of Dan Rostenkowski’s dealings pale by comparison.
Glenn has a host of great blogs, so spend some time there. Greenwald echoes my post about conservative ship-jumpers (or is it vice-versa) here and has a great post about the NSA program here and here.
Greenwald skewers the Administration and states bluntly that he believes Administration spying domestically goes beyond the NSA wiretapping scandal. Some choice Greenwald moments:
I say this advisedly: the Administration is now in full-blown shameless lying mode.
Gonzales had weeks to prepare for this testimony. He is a trained lawyer. Unlike most witnesses in a lawsuit, he was never cut off by the questioner. He was free to speak at will in response to every question for as long as he wanted, and to say whatever he wanted. Why is it necessary for him to issue a 6-page single-spaced letter, the bulk of which is devoted to "clarifying" what was his unambiguous (false) testimony to the Committee just a few weeks ago?
Former Clinton administration State Department official Harold Hongju Koh, who is now Dean of Yale Law School, told Specter’s committee that the NSA spying was "as blatantly illegal a program as I’ve seen."
Although it remains to be seen what the extent of the NSA wiretapping program is and if there are others, we will never know with Bill Frist and Pat Roberts blocking for the administration.
They have ample reason to think they can sweep any lawbreaking under the rug. Reagan and his administration simply ignored (so loudly and unabashedly one might use the word “flaunted”) U.S. and international law to fund terrorists in Nicaragua. The U.N. Court of Justice ruled against them and they ignored it. The Security Council ruled against them twice and they vetoed the resolution twice. The General Assembly ruled against them in a crushing 94-3 rebuke of the Administration’s policy and Reagan ignored it, and America did too. In violating U.S. law, however, Reagan faced an onlslaught from within his own country. A docile democratic congress declined to impeach the president for his misbehavior and merely let flagrant lawbreakers like Oliver North and Elliott Abrams off in exchange for testimony, which they provided, proudly detailing how they ignored the Boland Amendment to fund terrorists by selling arms to terrorists and sneering at the presumption of congress that it thought it could constrain the foreign policy of a warlike president with law. Elliott called the congressional investigators “pious clowns.”
The investigations dragged on for years, with the same docile democratic congress not making essentially any effort to expedite the process, although new revelations came out and the trials of some went on. But when the investigation began to swing in the direction of George H.W. Bush, with Caspar Weinburger’s people saying that the sitting Vice President at the time wes very involved with the operation, George H. W. Bush pardoned all of the Iran-Contra felons that had worked with him under Reagan to implement the Contra Affair on his last days in office, an act that is within arm’s reach of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre for the sheer audacity of its self-servicing derailment of the workings of the legal system in this country.
There was no Terri-Schiavo-Bill legislative process whereby democrats rammed a bill through congress to make a law that applied to one person that democrats wanted to affect in flagrant opposition to the findings of the courts and the will of the majority of America. There was no nuclear option threat to crush dissent in the opposing party and to eliminate any option of the minority in congress to block legislation by the majority. There was no Bill Frist threatening the nuclear option, threatening to rearrange the laws of any committee that ruled against the wishes of the dominant party, threatening, in short, the change any rule of congressional procedure that would give democrats a chance to stop legislation started and favored by the 5-person republican majority.
There was no witchhunt of Reagan, no democratic congress ripping apart the laws of the country to forward a partisan democratic agenda. There were tepid investigations for years that were never aided with the extraordinary excercises of legislative and executive power that republicans have mustered for their agenda. The public, after the congressional hearings, lost interest in the Iran Contra Affair, and so did congress. Without public discontent the Reagan and then Bush Administrations stonewalled and obstructed justice relentlessly until GHW Bush’s last days, when he simply dismissed the prosecutors with a contemptuous wave.
The media, then as now, slept through this public rape of justice like it had never happened. They didn’t care, just like they eventually stopped making a fuss about Reagan’s problem with the truth, just like they did with George W. Bush’s problem with the truth. They might report it when a democrat, like Bill Clinton or Al Gore, told a lie, but when it became part and parcel of a republican administration they simply didn’t care.
Throw in Tom DeLay gerrymandering Texas twice in 3 years to cement a republican majority and you have an idea of what we are talking about when we say republicans are destroying democracy. They are very premeditatingly ripping the gears out of the machinery of government to further an agenda that serves only themselves.
But the republicans have learned, through Reagan and both Bushes, that flagrant lawbreaking can work, and it can be quickly swept from the public’s eye before enough people see it to raise a furor that elected officials would have to respond to. They have made a living out of the fact that you can lie publicly and obviously to every knowledgeable person in America, and as long as the majority of your electorate agrees with you or is not paying attention, you can get away with it.
The only people that Pat Roberts really cares about are the people who vote him into office every six years and, to a lesser extent, his party bosses (who, in a confusion of causation, help form the opinions of his constituency by controlling hate radio, national organizations with outlets in Kansas, and armies of political footsoldiers and media shills). If 51% of his electorate think Valerie Plame wasn’t really a spy, or even if 51% of them don’t care, Roberts can safely go on Sunday morning talk shows and flatly say he doubts she was undercover, even when he knows better, even when everyone sitting around him knows better. If most Illinoisans have never heard of George Soros than Denny Hastert is free to speculate or imply that George Soros might be drug dealer, a supposition that would be criticized as a McCarthyite slander in a truly polite society, but not like one in Washington and Illinois, where political power is all that matters and most people are not paying attention, respectively.
Depsite this I never cease to get offended by people that lie to my face, especially when they do so because they think they can get away with it despite my efforts. Such contempt for the truth and my abilities would be offensive to anyone with self esteem.
But politicians have long realized that the truth is a malleable thing, and no politicians like the modern GOP have based an entire party’s platform on lies and the defense of the same lies.
Conservatives in prominent places usually look to Ronald Reagen as their ideal president, which says a lot about what direction their party has gone on in the last 26 years. He’s their ideal: he was good-looking and charismatic, which is very important when you’re a leader. He lied constantly and was rarely publicly criticized for it, as he was popular and his political backers were influential and his electorate was ignorant. He enacted massive tax cuts, which pleased his donors, and he relentlessly beat the war drum, which rallied the more puerile half of the country to his standard for eight years. He appointed conservative judges, which mollified the real core of his electorate, Christian and cultural conservatives.
He was a conservative they all loved, because he delivered the key to the treasury and the courts but was still able to pull off his act as a populist. They lionize Reagan because he delivered the agenda of the radical right to them while simultaneoulsy remaining popular, an impressive feat indeed. But because Reagan did it with a cocky smile conservatives know they can praise him as the founder of modern conservativism because people who have only vaguely good memories of the eighties won’t rip them for it.
Reagan is the founder of modern conservativism. He was so radical at the time (1979) Jimmy Carter thought he could beat Reagen, even with a 30% approval rating, just because Reagan was that radical. But he won, because Carter simply had no answers.
So Ronald Reagan just scooted right into the history books, leaving a wake of partisan warfare waged on the American People. Let’s revisit some choice Reagan quotes:
California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying: "I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964" in 1966.
Ronald Reagan tells Time magazine: "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say 'But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time,'" in May 1976.
"The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees," he said in 1979.
…and all the other anecdotes that he just made up. "All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk," in 1980. "History shows that when the taxes of a nation approach about 20 percent of the people's income, there begins to be a lack of respect for government... When it reaches 25 percent, there comes an increase in lawlessness," also in 1980. "Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G.I. Bill of Rights with respect to education or anything," again in 1980.
Once elected, the circus continued. After President Reagan vetoes an emergency spending bill which would have prevented a shutdown of the federal government, House Speaker Tip O'Neill tells a reporter: "He knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can't even carry on a conversation about the budget. It's an absolute and utter disgrace."
James Watt, Secretary of the Interior, he of the “I don’t know how many more generations will have to take care of the environment before the Rapture” quote unleashes another gem, this time describing his staff to “counter” charges of bigotry: "We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent,” which is the funniest “defense” against bigotry I’ve ever read, anywhere. He was forced to resign shortly thereafter, back in days when the GOP didn’t have a death grip on government.
But Reagan was no fascist, no sir. In 1985 he realized that "I think that there's nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery [Bitburg], where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps," thus finding a surprising moral equivalence between the Jewish victims of Hitler and the soldiers who sent them to their graves, a moral equivalence that would have rocked Hanna Arendt’s world if she only had had the vision of Ronald Reagan.
After giving a speech at the Bergen-Belsen death camp, President Ronald Reagan accompanies German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to the military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany. There Reagan lays a wreath in memory of the German war dead. In addition to roughly 2,000 German soldiers of both World Wars, 49 members of the Waffen SS are also buried there, which didn’t faze him one bit.
I seem to remember a much less “inappropriate” Nazi comment from Dick Durbin raising a firestorm of phony conservative resentment, but then again, Reagan’s comments came at a time when a partisan congress hadn’t co-opted government. Democrats were a wee bit more understanding.
Reagan wonders aloud about the AIDS pandemic: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague... [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments." [Dutch, p. 458] his official biographer quoted him as saying.
This panoply of deceptiveness reeks of purposefulness because of two reasons: one, how repeated it was; two, because all of his lies and false anecdotes had a similar theme: the cultural/Christian conservative belief system. Look at the lies above in order and go find the point of the lie and see if it doesn’t echo the GOP agenda point for point:
- Racism, if Martin Luther King has taught us anything, is explicit here.
- The New Deal, social programs, etc. are all evil.
- The environment is not in jeopardy, as oil industry funded scientists will be happy to tell you.
- Taxes hurt countries.
- See #2.
- When you are a bigot you surround yourself with bigots.
- OK, the Nazi quote is inexplicable to me, aside from the affection Republicans have for authority when it is strong and conservative.
- Christian fundamentalism on full display, here. Falwell was proud.
So in reflecting on Reagan’s poisonous legacy, I see an exact equivalence in Drinky’s presidency, point for point. Despite what they may say when their depravity is made too obvious for further defense, they have defended Drinky at every opportunity because his policies have been in a strict lock step with Reagan’s.
- Bush has been an opponent of Affirmative Action and many other programs that are aimed at ameliorating the condition of minorities.
- Bush has worked hard to dismantle or renovated the New Deal and other programs aimed at helping the poor, including privatizing Social Security and suffocating the Americorp.
- Bush has repeatedly denied the existence of global warming and pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, put former industry lobbyists in charge of the Department of the Interior, undermined the EPA, and worked hard to lower pollution standards.
- Bush has delivered relentlessly on the tax cuts conservatives cherish.
- See #2.
- Bush has surrounded himself with sycophants and repeatedly ignored or demoted critics of his policies within his own administration, as I have detailed previously and as even many conservatives now admit, belatedly.
- Reagan and Bush both believed in a strong central authority (when that authority was a republican, of course) and a belligerent foreign policy. Though his supporters will still say his foreign policy was “strong” while that of democrats like Bill Clinton was “weak.”
- Bush is a born-again Christian who never ceases to make a point of his conservative Christian values. He is opposed to abortion, of course, but goes further than that to oppose stem-cell research and gay marriage.
So what are conservatives like Bill Kristol getting antsy about? Maybe the Katrina debacle, many also doubt the war in Iraq, after two years of little progress. Even Bill Buckley, among others, has publicly criticized the administration’s war effort.
But these criticisms are weak indeed, coming from a group that still backs the president’s NSA wiretapping program and even seeks to block even an investigation into it.
These guys aren’t concerned about the rampant lawlessness of the executive, only his ancillary incompetence at war planning and disaster management. They’re still on board with the whole torture/extraordinary rendition/intelligence manipulation/environmental destruction thing. And they will still go to back for the next republican congressman or presidential candidate that advocates this.
They haven’t changed. Their party has been run by Ronald Reagan for 26 years and it still is.
Friday, March 03, 2006
Retard Diplomacy
So now the Preznit is selling nuclear technology to India. What do we get in return? We get the Preznit’s assurance that nuclear power in India will diminish the worldwide demand curve that is forcing up the price of oil.
Jimmy Carter would be handling this oil addiction of ours more skillfully than President Bush. Giving India that ability to mass produce nuclear weapons that it already has, in small quantities, is a dangerous thing to do. We should be getting something massive in return.
Instead what we have here is retard diplomacy from the dumbest president in history, a man who makes Jimmy Carter look competent, a man who makes George H.W. Bush look like he had a domestic policy all along.
Like the Medicare Drug Benefit or Hillarycare, this is a plan with immediate, detrimental aspects to it and questionable results that involve logic that is tortuously convoluted because its creator doesn’t have the courage for the simple, moral answer that would fly in face of his campaign donors.
Giving dangerous nuclear technology to India to ease world oil demand to stabilize prices in America is like constructing a machine to flip a light switch when all you have to do is reach out. If Drinky wanted to ease the oil squeeze right now, without selling dangerous technology, all he has to do is raised CAFE standards or invest something other than a token amount of money in alternative energy resources, an amount of money like, say, a few hundred billion we’ve spent to illegally invade a foreign country and then vainly try to rebuild it as sectarian strife rages for year after year. Call me crazy, but methinks the Preznit has a problem with priorities.
This is the solution to our oil problems from a man who ran three oil companies into the ground.
Even conservatives agree that the Preznit has a problem with being surrounded by people that won’t correct him when he’s wrong or misguided. That admission is like the co-dependent wife of the violently abusive husband saying that he has a little anger problem, but it’s not really his fault, people never hold him responsible for his misbehavior.
Think about that last one for a while. I count three oxymorons in the above sentence. See if you can find more. It’s like Where’s Waldo.
The Drinkmeister has been a petulant, ignorant, vindictive son of privilege for his entire besotted life, which all the smart people were well aware of before he ran for president in 2000. That is exactly how I described him six years ago to my family.
A wee bit behind on the learning curve, are we? It is just occurring to you now that this mindset might be a problem for a job this big? That a man who purposely picks people for obsequious loyalty and who is painfully ignorant and stubborn might have a problem with leadership?
Blame the president’s asinine presidency on Dick Cheney’s bad advice. Go ahead. It makes sense. That must be why Dick’s JAR is 18%. Bush is bumbling but it’s his handlers that are really to blame. That’s why they sent him into debates with a radio-controlled jacket.
This seems to be the product of an inexplicable MBA management style from the seventies where the CEO serves only to adjucate among battling department heads. Of course, the system breaks down when the judge is an idiot and the department heads are all crooks.
Because you won’t get responsible oil policy from Dick Cheney either. You won’t get competent media management from a V.P. who shuns them like a vampire shuns the light of day. You won’t get good foreign policy advice from a Sec. Of Defense who dismissed the better half of Europe as “Old Europe,” quickly and efficiently pissing off half of the civilized world.
I remember a French Minister getting steamed at Rumsfeld’s remarks. He called out the President, like “Zese eese a little imepertinent for a defense secretary, no? Perhaps zhou shood jerk zee leesh a little?”
Which cracked me up, both to see a Frenchman angry and to see it slowly dawn on the world that we really were run by imperial psychopaths who were about to lay waste to the Middle East. The slowly-growing look of horror in the Frenchman’s eyes as the little wheels in his head clicked into place and he said, to himself, “Sheet. Zey really ahre a buench of nutjobs, arehn’t they?” is a memory I will treasure forever.
War in Iraq: 350 billion YR2005 dollars and growing.
Stunned Look on Frenchman’s Face As He Realized That the Idiot Son of Ronald Reagan Was Going Nuke-yoo-lur: Priceless.
Which brings me to how much the world hates us. Well, not everybody. Israel appreciates the need to exterminate terrorists with extreme prejudice, even if they are surrounded by civilians, even if you’re not really sure they’re terrorists. But outside of a few choice nations who are on the receiving end of $300 million in arms grants a year, our current president and foreign policy are none too popular.
Which suits the inbred hillbilly half of this country just fine, because they don’t admit criticism from lesser beings. But isn’t it a little alarming that this president is greeted with massive demonstrations wherever he goes? India? Argentina? Southeast Asia and Australia? The Philippines? Anyone out there? Helloooo!
But this doesn’t faze the hate-radio controlled right. Prisoner abuse? Screw ‘em. Katrina disaster? Screw the darkies. International pariahdom? Screw the world.
Coupled with all the other disasters that have accumulated over the past five years despite the cries of the left, it reminds me of a certain post by Driftglass not too long ago about the current and near-future state of politics in America…
The list just goes on and on and on, but the song remains the same. Stupid, venal people amply warned that they were driving us all off yet another cliff. Stupid, venal people shrieking that everyone else is a traitor and that they didn’t need no smarty-pants liberals telling ‘em how to drive. Squealing, “Hey, we won, so shut the fuck up.”Then wheeeeee! Off the cliff we go-go-go…Then the Bad Thing happens.Then…crickets and tumbleweed and an airless, freaked-out silence from the Right like unto a mime having a panic attack lying face down in the dust on the dark side of the Moon. Followed by a spongy, squishy sound made by millions of baffled brows beetling in that damp confusion that the s-l-o-w children get when confronted -- yet again -- with overwhelming evidence of the consequences of their reckless, arrogant moronity.Followed by a return to their default, factory setting of running in hysterical circles and wildly blaming Evil Liberals or the French or Bill Clinton or feminists or queers for the blood on their own hands and the dead on their own watch.“We didn’t knooooow!” they wail, as we roll in wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of evidence that they damned well did know.“No one could have predicted...,” they whine, as we chopper in ton after ton of proof that Iraq/Katrina/9-11/Global Warming/North Korea/Iran/Every-other-fucking-thing were all quite predictable, and had been foreseen, but their Dear Leader had simply chosen to ignore the inconvenient mile-high, DayGlo warning signs on his way to and from vacation.
And might I add the grudging acceptance of 10% of the blame for what happened followed by 90% of blame-anybody-but-us as they are slowly pulled to Earth by the inexorable power of the gravity well of Truth, screaming weakly in the thin air and flailing helplessly as they shrink from sight on their journey to the cold, hard Earth.
Happy landings.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Senate Republicans
I read Bob Herbert in The New York Times and thank God for him. He excoriates Conrad Burns, the republican senator from Montana, for being a racist. Just read the quotes, ladies and gentlemen. They speak for themselves. Ipso loquitor.
And God bless ExxonMobil, which runs ads daily in The New York Times in a mad effort to spend some of that 360 billion in market capital to rehabilitate its rapidly degenerating image. According to ExxonMobil, in today’s ad, oil production hasn’t reached anything near its peak, despite what every non-industry funded expert says. The future is limitless for oil. You can trust ExxonMobil.
I laughed out loud when I read their ad, and I thank them for the joke. I don’t know who is buying this snake oil or who they think they can sell this to but I appreciate the effort. Our own president, the most shameless corporate shill in U.S. history, told us that we have a dangerous addiction to oil, but the people that sell you that oil beg to differ. Of course you do, ExxonMobile. I understand. Maybe you better stay on the low-down for a few years and sell that stuff to the only people who have ever bought it: the politicians who cash your checks. The rest of us aren’t so willing to vacuum our brains out of our skulls to buy that nonsense when we’re not getting paid by you.
But back to Burns, who reminds me of a point I’ve made in the past but not adequately supported: congressional republicans are a degenerate mob of racists, homophobes, and corporate shills.
I’ve described many of them in the past: Olympia Snowe, Pat Roberts, Chuck Hagel, Mike DeWine, Lindsay Graham, you name it. But I could really go down a list of all the republican people in congress and point out glaring examples of shamelessness.
Burns gets me because of his poorly veiled racism. It’s really just not very subtle at all. But the people of Montana keep sending him to Washington because they’re racist hillbillies, too.
That’s right, you heard me. I hold voters who send white supremacists to Washington accountable for their votes. I don’t care if they back Burns or others because they are effective legislators or whatnot: racism is racism, and it is and should be an absolute deal-breaker for your fitness to serve in congress. Period. This is not a debatable point.
Racism is just part of the program for the party of the Southern Strategy, however. That’s just a wart on the face of a party with a truly black heart. Let’s look at the other conservative senators in congress and check them out, shall we? Let’s go down that list. I’ve included only the 27 worst offenders.
Jeff Sessions, Alabama: Hah! I love Jeff Sessions. He’s one of the most conservative senators in Washington. Speaking on antiwar protestors in September of last year, he said “I don’t know what they stand for, other than to blame America first,” echoing the conservative talking point of the last five years. He was one of the few vocal enemies of John McCain’s anti-torture amendment, which as my very few readers out there will know places him in a very special part of Hell. Sessions has labeled the ACLU and the NAACP as “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” Is any of this a surprise coming from a senator from Alabama?
Tim Hutchinson, Arkansas: I love this guy too. He actually graduated from Bob Jones University. I am laughing right know as I try to type this.
Richard Luger, Indiana; Chuck Grassley, Iowa; Mitch McConnell, Kentucky;: These republicans are not ideologues, but they are loyal politicodrones of the GOP who backed every radical program the Executive could devise: they all voted to confirm Janice Rogers Brown to the Appellate Court, a woman who is so radically conservative she has said she wants to dismantle the New Deal; they all voted to confirm William Pryor, the radical Christian judge who fought the federal government tooth and nail to post the ten commandments in his court; they all were the driving force behind slashing taxes for the top bracket and businesses while driving up the federal deficit.
Sam Brownback, Kansas: Brownback, Like Rick Santorum and several others, is a rigid social conservative who, in addition the opposing abortion, opposes stem-cell research. He is an advocate of the flat tax.
Pat Roberts, Kansas: Probably the worst member of the senate in living memory. He has defended the President’s illegal wiretapping, stonewalled the investigation into intelligence leading to the war in Iraq, denied that Valerie Plame was ever undercover, voted to deny patients the right to sue HMOs and collect punitive damages, and voted against campaign finance reform repeatedly.
Olympia Snowe, Maine; Susan Collins, Maine: Both moderate republicans who nevertheless voted along party lines repeatedly with regards to confirming Pryor and Brown.
http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_keyvote_member.php?vote_id=3532
Trent Lott, Mississippi: Aaah, Trent. A soft-spoken, charming gentleman from Mississippi who nevertheless has a long, sad history of supporting segregation. When this came to light in 2002 with his endorsement of Strom Thurmond he was forced from his leadership position in the Senate.
John Ashcroft, Missouri: Ashcroft came to national attention in 2000 by losing his senate bid to a dead man, which shows that the voters of Missouri might be smarter than we think. Drinky thought this man would make a great Attorney General and nominated him for the post, which he won on a razor-thin 52-48 margin in a party-line vote. Democrats were hung up on Ashcroft’s opposition to desegregation, no biggie. Ashcroft promptly anointed himself with cooking oil, as he does whenever he is sworn into an office. He covered the semi-nude “Spirit of Justice” statue with a curtain because of its scandalously exposed breast.
Ashcroft is one of many nearly delusional right-wing Christian conservatives in the GOP. He is a fierce advocate of the war on drugs and has a tough-on-marijuana stance and has enacted stricter mandatory jail time sentences for drug users. He focused on cracking down on casual drug users as Governor of Missouri. As Attorney General he was the strongest advocate for expanded law-enforcement powers of the Executive Branch.
Conrad Burns, Montana: We’ve already covered Burns before, a man who has the odious task of getting along “with all those niggers in Washington.” As an aside I will note the perhaps curious fact that all the most racist and “conservative” senators in the Senate like Burns have been the loudest advocates of the imperial power of the presidency with regards to the NSA wiretapping scandal, immunity to investigation for intelligence manipulation, etc.
Chuck Hagel, Nebraska: a political “maverick” who, somehow, has had the courage to criticize the president on the war in Iraq but saw no problem with the President’s wiretapping, and vociferously defended it.
Jesse Helms, North Carolina: Wow. That is all I can think of when mentally reviewing the record of Jesse Helms, an unapologetic racist and xenophobe. He became infamous as a conservative commentator on WRAL-TV insulting blacks and other minorities. In one of his editorials he called the University of North Carolina the “University of Negroes and Communists.” He opposed the creation of a holiday for Martin Luther King. He has the “humorous” habit of calling all African-Americans “Fred.” After gaining the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he blocked the payment of U.S. dues to the U.N. Now, Elizabeth Dole took his seat in 2003, so I’m breaking the rules by including him here, but I just wanted us to take a look at a lion of the GOP for the past thirty years, the longest-serving popularly-elected senator in North Carolina, and a stain on the record of this country and the Republican Party that will take a generation to expunge.
Mike DeWine, Ohio: A “yes” vote on the “Defense of Marriage” Act. I just can’t wrap my head around the Orwellian language there. This “defense” act was written to outlaw gay marriage with a constitutional amendment. A million names would have been more accurate, like “The Definition of Marriage Act,” or “The Gay Marriage Ban.” But instead they choose a name that states that there is some kind of assault on marriage taking place and marriage must be defended! Little things like this make me mad.
DeWine, like Hagel, is a “maverick” who simultaneously broke with party lines to raise the minimum wage and not allow drilling in ANWR while simultaneously defending the Preznit’s wiretapping. With DeWine, however, I’ve heard a Come to Jesus call directed at him from the RNC after the nuclear option compromise. Come to think of it, Hagel is probably suffering from the same threat and they both have decided to become good soldiers in face of an electoral threat.
Tom Coburn, Oklahoma: Coburn, the doctor who can detect lies just by your breathing rate and body language! Coburn has said that he favors the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and homosexuality is the greatest threat to America. I am not making this up. Coburn paused from doing his crossword puzzle during the hearings on John Roberts and sobbed publicly as he decried the partisanship of Congress before returning to his crossword puzzle and partisan politics. He has said that “I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants. If you have them, you're healthier than if you don't.” He has said that global warming “is just a load of crap.”
You know what, I just can’t keep up with all of this. Get to wikipedia’s article on him. I am beginning to laugh so hard at the lesbian epidemic in Coalgate, OK, that I can’t type.
I actually agree with him, completely, and I think that every woman in America should get them. I also think there should be an official investigation into the medical schools that granted a medical degree to Bill Frist and Tom Coburn.
Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania: You probably already know too much about Santorum, but let’s refresh our memories.
Santorum was the lead senator working with Tom DeLay at crafting the K Street Project. He’s a far-right Christian conservative who, of course, is pro-life and anti-gay. And I mean Anti Gay. He doesn’t just oppose gay marriage and civil unions: he thinks homosexual acts should be illegal. He thinks being homosexual should be a crime, though he thinks this should be legislated at the state level. He’s a strong advocate of Intelligent Design. He’s advocated for a partial privatization of welfare. He was, along will Bill Frist, the pointman for Dobson in ramming the Terri Schiavo Bill through the Senate. Despite two centuries of Supreme Court rulings to the contrary, he doesn’t believe a “right to privacy” exists in the Constitution, and thus opposes the Supreme Court’s efforts to defend birth control rights and abortion, among other things.
His son, Gabriel Michael, was stillborn in 1996. He took the corpse home and spent time with it and his family, singing songs to it and cradling it.
Read that last sentence a couple of times and just let it sink in.
What do you think are the chances that he gets along just famously with John Ashcroft?
Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania: another so-called “maverick.” After the last six years of utter sycophancy and complicity in the republican Congress I simply don’t think “moderate republicans” exist. Specter is “pro-choice,” but he voted to confirm Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the most openly pro-life nominee in recent history. He was initially hostile to the revelation of the President’s illegal wiretapping, but has since decided that it’s okey-dokey.
Forget about Arlen Specter. The man who criticized the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton and voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1990 knows when he has run the length of his leash, and that time has come. The Massa is making Specter heel and we shouldn’t forget what that “R” at the end of his name means.
Bill Frist, Tennessee: I tire of Bill, and I’ve already written about him too much. So, Bill! Does she respond or doesn’t she?
Orrin Hatch, Utah: One of the most vocal defenders of Preznit Drinky through his worst excesses. You name it, Hatch has never deviated from the party line.
More later…
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
In Other News
IN other news, republicans have failed for years to actually secure our borders, as the Bush Administration fast-tracked the Dubai Ports deal for no explicable reason despite security concerns and despite the fact that the Dubai company was in violation of U.S. law by boycotting Israel, our alleged ally.
Things are not looking good for the beleaguered members of the Vice President’s Office. Rumors are circulating that Dick, whose approval rating has been a radioactive 18% for the last year or so, might resign soon. Whether or not he does, it must be hard to be as universally reviled as he is, though why half of his base dislikes him when they approve of the president is beyond me or any sane person to understand. His former lieutenant, Scooter, is getting a stern rebuke from the judge presiding over his case. No fishing expedition for you, Scooter. You must now try very, very hard to forget….forgeeeeet…..
Gitmo and similar abuses continue to swim about in the psyche and the courts.
Lindsay Graham, joining a long list of republican congresspeople who have unforgivably abdicated their responsibilities as representatives and human beings, made it clear recently that not only should the president have the power to spy on Americans on American soil without a warrant, he actually wants to help. Thank you, South Carolina, for sending this man to congress to represent you. From the state that fired the first shot in the Civil War, from the home of racism in America, comes men like Lindsay Graham. You know, I have some friends and family who say that South Carolina is a damp, fetid den of racists, sexists, unreconstructed secessionists, and knuckle-dragging hillbillies. Every year you prove them right.
In the laugher of the day, John Bolton is leading the charge at the U.N. to oppose reforms to the Human Rights Commission. The United States, whose administration has flaunted the opinions of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The U.N. Human Rights Commission, and world opinion repeatedly over the last five years now wants to make sure that other countries that flaunt human rights standards don’t get a chance to sit on the committee.
Do you honestly think that the world will follow our lead when our leadership has done what it’s done over the last five years with regard to international law and human rights?
Night of the Living Dead
I listened to Attention Deficit reading Vile Victor’s latest missive today.
A year or two ago I would have been more angry than I am today, as their diseased movement sinks beneath the waves of history. But they will never be irrelevant. The same ignorant electorate that sent Drinky and his disgusting, sycophantic congress to Washington in 2000 and again in 2004 will rear their ugly heads again, mark my words.
Vile Victor, the neocon without peer, sees no problems in Iraq. That civil war that was supposed to happen? Never did. Elections show progress. Stay the course.
A vile piece, as usual, but pretty tame by Hanson’s standards. He only brutalized the truth a half-dozen or so times.
In Victor’s world, as I mentioned yesterday, statistics don’t matter. So just forget the fact that 80% of Iraqis want us out in a year. Forget the fact that 72% of our own soldiers want out within a year. Forget the fact that a majority of Americans are displeased or outright angry at the Bush Administration’s handling of the war. Forget the fact that several stories in the New York Times over the last month have described in detail how the electrical grid and water supplies of Iraq are as bad as they were two years ago and worse than they were four years ago. Forget the fact that despite elections, the formation of interim governments, and two years of training Iraqi security forces the level of violence in Iraq has not gone down one iota.
This is what “success” looks like in the world of Vile Victor. These are the preconditions that indicate to Hanson that victory is, of course, just around the corner.
Being an imperialist is bad enough, but being a stupid imperialist is truly bad. This is just one facet of his Vileness’s profound dementia. People like him should be in a mental ward, not publishing grist for the mill of the right-wing hate machine, and they certainly shouldn’t be the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, and the Secretary of Defense.
I look forward to the day when neoconservative warmongers like him are consigned to writing angry letters to the president like PNAC did in the nineties. Back to the cage with you, animal!
Your president is a failure. His presidency has been an unmitigated disaster. He raped the environment, exploded the national debt, threw money to corporate cronies like a drunk Carnival partier throwing beads to pretty girls, lied our country into a criminal war, bungled the war, slandered dissenters, jailed foreigners indefinitely, extradited suspects to countries like Syria for interrogation and torture, presided over the abuse and torture of prisoners under guidelines his administration set, spied on Americans on American soil without bothering to get a warrant, and strong-armed Congress into stonewalling any and all investigations into his numerous crimes.
He destroyed and undermined small, efficient programs for no other reason than they helped the poor. He put more former lobbyists in positions of government designed to monitor the industries they had just lobbied for than any president in history. He pushed the envelope in competing with Reagan for the most vacation time ever taken by a president. He appointed a man whose full-time job for eleven years was the director of an Arabian horse association as the head of FEMA and was then shocked when FEMA mangled the response to Hurricane Katrina. He played the guitar as New Orleans sunk beneath the waves. He lectured us on the “dangers” of “irresponsible debate.” He smirked at inopportune times. He mocked a woman on death row. He mangled the English language like it was a recent acquisition if his, making himself and his country look stupid. He ignored and insulted foreign countries and isolated his country internationally, giving encouragement to foreign dictators to do the same. He paid journalists to write positive stories about his administration’s policies, in America and in Iraq. He let a gay male escort with virtually no journalistic credentials into the White House Press Room to toss him softball questions.
In short, your president sucked like Rich Gannon. He was, by far, the worst president in history. The nine billion dollars “lost” in Iraq and the billions of no-bid contracts given out to companies like Halliburton quite simply dwarf, in absolute or inflation-adjusted dollars, any of the graft in the Grant or Harding Administrations. He has displayed all of the brutality, oppressiveness, secrecy, and lawlessness of Nixon without any of Nixon’s intelligence or political astuteness. He has looted the treasury, undermined the operations of the federal government designed to protect consumers and the environment, lied, and ignored the basic functions of his branch of government like Reagan but without any of the folksy charm or inspiring charisma. He has waged brutal, imperial war like Eisenhower or Johnson without any of the humanity of either man.
He now has an approval rating of 34%, the lowest of any president since his father, and the lowest of any president since Nixon during a time of economic well-being.
“Suck” is simply insufficient to describe how ineffably bad this man is, personally, professionally, and morally. Only quantum physics or some other science with access to scientific notation and the concept of antimatter can describe how cosmically, incredibly bad George W. Bush is.
Do I hate him? Of course. The simple truth is this: if you don’t hate George W. Bush, there is something deeply wrong with you. You are undoubtedly demented, and quite possibly, as Driftglass would say, a rat-fuck failure of a human being.
Drinky’s legacy will hang like an albatross around the neck of tens of millions of conservatives, in Washington and elsewhere, who voted for him, defended his worst excesses, biliously slandered his opponents, called into talk radio shows and sung his praises, lied about his actions, and wrote op-ed pieces in journals and newspapers advocating him and his policies.
I will be one of many who will remind you of this for the rest of your God forsaken lives.
But first, the better half of this country is going to hang your beloved president from a gibbet. We will sue him court, impeach him in congress, flood the streets and the newspapers with protest, and destroy every initiative of his until the day he leaves office. Tom DeLay will not get re-elected and may very well go to jail for many years. A half-dozen senators and dozens of representatives face a battle for re-election this November that they probably can’t win, because they’re crooks, because they’re republicans, because they’re wrong.
We’ll talk about what democrats will do for this country after we’re done removing the criminals and rank traitors for Washington. This election isn’t about who has better ideas for running the country. Polite debates like that are reserved for times when two relatively honest sides debate the fine points of governance. This election is about simply restoring law and order to a congress that has gone completely out of control. We can worry about turning the electricity on in Iraq when we’re done capturing the people who keep blowing up the generators.
This is a situation that needs to be controlled. I remember the day when a republican congress granted a special prosecutor a mandate to investigate a democratic president for absolutely anything they could possibly think up, year after year, for seven years. You name it, it was investigated: a million-dollar real estate deal that looked fishy buried deep in the president’s past? Investigated. Some firings in the White House Travel Office that some people complained about? Investigated. The President selling access to the Lincoln Bedroom? Investigated. The V.P. making campaign fundraising calls on government phones? Investigated. All examined by a special prosecutor with an endless mandate and limitless, congressionally-approved funds.
Nowadays the republican congress has (surprise!) lost its enthusiasm for harassing and investigating the president. They suddenly believe that a president should have imperial powers. Their deference would make a 19th-century geisha blush with shame. The president leads the country into a war that is in clear violation of international law and against the will of the vast majority of the world based on evidence of WMDs and allegations of Al Qaeda links that all turn out to be completely false. Worthy of a special prosecutor? Apparently not. Congressional investigation? Still waiting for it two years after the fact. A few more years of stonewalling and Pat Roberts knows it will all be a moot point anyway.
You will never live this down, conservatives. You have officially nominated one too many criminal men to be your president, your senator, your representative. The wheels are coming off your party in a way that no political party has ever seen. Every year you cling to power with the benefit of gerrymandered political districts and razor-thin electoral victories cobbled together with scare tactics and nationalism is just one more year you will have to answer for, and I see the reckoning being messy, vindictive, and unfair. When both parties are crooked than the balance will be muted, but when you send George W. Bush to the White House, when you elect Tom DeLay as your House majority leader, you have crossed a terrible line, because there are no corollaries in the Democratic Party and there haven’t been for thirty years.
Because Joe McCarthy was your guy. Richard Nixon was your guy. Strom Thurmond was your guy.
George W. Bush is your guy. Dick Cheney is your guy. Bill Frist is your guy. Jack Abramoff wasn’t a pioneer for Al Gore. Orifice and Lush and Apartheid and Attention Deficit and Ann Coulter are your foot soldiers.
You’ve got nothing. It doesn’t take Einstein to connect the dots here. That lineup of perps admits no democrats and it admits no comparisons.
There simply are no corrolaries in the Democratic Party, no matter how hard I or anyone else looks. Do you want to compare Dan Rostenkowski with Tom DeLay? What democrat are you going to put opposite Richard Nixon? Do you want to do a side-by-side comparison of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush? Are you going to tell me that there has ever been a democratic shill as shameless as Lush or Orifice? Who are you going to target, Jerry Springer? Michael Moore?
There are no comparisons. Dan Rostenkowski didn’t gerrymander his home state twice in three years, Tom DeLay did. Dan Rostenkowski didn’t sell his congress to lobbyists and the K Street project, Tom DeLay did. And while both men stole similar amounts of money and accepted gifts and graft, Dan Rostenkowksi never said “I am the federal government,” Tom DeLay did. And while both men’s parties scrambled to shield these criminals from repercussions, Dan Rostenkowski never pimped for sweat shops in the Mariana Islands and other crooked corporations, Tom DeLay did.
There has never been a democratic leader in a generation and a half who was as crooked as all the leaders of the GOP have been in recent years. Richard Nixon was the president. George W. Bush is the president. Bill Frist is the majority leader. Dick Cheney is your Vice President.
I haven’t even mentioned Spirew Agnew yet. But we haven’t forgotten. Nor have we forgotten Newt Gingrich, the leader of the “revolution” who was censured, humiliated, and then cast down as your Speaker five short years after he led this “revolution.” You would think this might have given pause to the voters in America, that they might have doubted a revolution led by a man who was so quickly ushered into the political closet and forgotten about, but they forgot, and you kept going, but we haven’t forgotten. And then Trent Lott, your Senate leader, was humiliated and forced from office, just like Gingrich, just three short years later.
And the circus of repudiated republican leaders continued, but you machine kept helpfully replacing one crook with another, and it didn’t seem to matter. DeLay came and he was humiliated and pushed from office as the leader in the House two years after Lott’s resignation. And now you have Bill “She Does Respond” Frist leading you in the Senate, like you never learned a lesson from three House or Senate republican leaders censured and sent from office in seven years.
Your leaders, republicans. Your presidents, your congressional majority leaders. An almost unbroken line of criminals.
I could throw in Ronald Reagan, who financed terrorists in Nicaragua, but why argue at this point. I might remind you of George H. W. Bush pardoning Iran-Contra felons when the investigations were wheeling in his direction, but why bother. I might laugh at his hypocrisy at championing family values when he had cheated on his wife, but let’s not get lost in the details.
These are your leaders, republicans, and while you may cry and thrash and stomp your feet no one will ever think that Jimmy Carter was as bad as Richard Nixon, or that your witch hunt in the nineties turned up more dirt than the shit bubbling to the surface in this administration without even the benefit of a skeptical congressional investigation. Your leaders are criminals.
While it’s amazing what a well-oiled corporate machine can do to keep the corpse of the Republican Party shambling forward through a blizzard of lawbreaking and humiliation, in an equally important way it only serves to remind us of how unholy your party is. It just keeps the bribery, greed, dishonesty, and dementia on display year after year for the whole world to see. It might have been smarter to lay low for a while and retool, but that opportunity has passed long ago. It is officially Night of the Walking Dead time, and to see the Republican Party shuffle forward to midterm elections and on to 2008 is so frightening, at this point, that I almost can’t bear to watch.
But what I and others want you to know, what we want to whisper in your ear before your legs fall off and you land face-first on the hard-packed earth is that when you regroup, when you bury the political bodies in the dark of night of yet another round of congressional leaders and unearth a yet another horrible new presidential candidate stitched together from the parts of previous degenerate republican politicians, we will be waiting, just like we were waiting when you had the arrogance to try to resurrect Robert Bork and appoint Nixon’s hatchet man in the Saturday Night Massacre to the Supreme Court. We will be waiting with video clips, quotes, congressional records, police records, and the testimony of witnesses. We will begin firing with all the ammunition you have supplied us for thirty years and more and we will keep firing until you drop, dead again, to the earth. And we will repeat the process over and over and over again until you are finally dead forever or until you are finally able to build a party not based on lies, ignorance, billionaire contributors, and fascism. And if and when you are prepared to join the community of responsible participators in government we will still brand you with a scarlet letter of shame as a perpetual reminder of where you came from and what is waiting for you if you ever fall off the wagon again.
Happy landings.
