Multi Medium

Wanker Of The Day

John McCain, with honorable mention for CBS:

Keith Olbermann led his broadcast tonight with Spencer Ackerman’s report on John McCain’s most recent gaffe: in an interview with Katie Couric, McCain claimed “the surge” was responsible for the “Anbar Awakening” — which actually began in September, 2006, months before the surge was even announced.

The strange thing, as Keith notes, is that CBS edited the gaffe out of its broadcast. Fortunately, they posted a transcript — and video — online.

Once again, John McCain reveals the depth of his foreign policy expertise, and the media demonstrates its clear liberal bias…

But wait, there’s more - John McCain also demonstrates the depth of his commitment to the environment:

And I’d like to mention offshore drilling if I could. My friends, we have to drill offshore. We have to do it! Oil executives say within a couple years we could be seeing results from it. So why not do it?

Well, if the oil executives are in favor, that pretty much settles it, right?  I mean, who could possibly be more trustworthy on the subject of offshore drilling?

Add comment July 23rd, 2008 at 07:32am Posted by Eli

My Pipple!

They make me so proud:

Among the most high-profile Jews in Congress, Lieberman is viewed far more unfavorably than the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to a new poll. Only 37 percent of Jews view the Connecticut Independent in a favorable light compared to 48 percent who have a negative perception. As for Obama, 60 percent of Jews view him favorably while 34 percent view him unfavorably.

The findings were released as part of a recent survey of American Jews by the new progressive pro-Israel group J Street. They seem to upturn some of this year’s conventional political wisdom.

Obama, who is set to travel to Israel this week, is often described in the press as facing significant obstacles to winning Jewish support, in part because of false claims that he is a Muslim. Lieberman, meanwhile, is regularly quoted disparaging Obama’s credentials on topics considered dear to the Jewish voter’s heart: toughness on Iran and support for the Jewish state. Asked recently whether he should be questioning Obama’s commitment to Israel, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee responded, “why wouldn’t I do that?”

Lieberman does score better among the 900 Jewish voters polled than other major political and religious figures. President Bush is viewed unfavorably by 74 percent of Jews, compared to 22 percent who see him in a positive light. McCain, meanwhile, is viewed favorably by just 34 percent of Jews, while 57 said they had a negative perception….

(…)

…As Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent noted in a review of the J Street poll, Jews are “liberal as hell.”

“Seventy-four percent of us view Bush unfavorably and 83 percent of us disapprove of his job performance,” Ackerman wrote. “While 76 percent of the country as a whole says the U.S. is on the wrong track, an astonishing 90 percent of American Jews say the same. Only 21 percent of us approve of the Iraq war and only 29 percent think Bush is good for Israel, and those are clearly the shmucks that kissed ass in Hebrew school and snitched when the rest of us used the synagogue phone booth and cloakroom to make out.”

Now I’m all verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. Here’s a topic: Joe Lieberman is neither moderate nor a Democrat. Discuss.

Joe Lieberman does not speak for me.

Add comment July 22nd, 2008 at 11:33am Posted by Eli

Barack Obama, Statesman

I like what Pelosi and Reid are doing here:

Pelosi:

President Bush has long maintained that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq should be governed by the situation in Iraq. It is now clear that the situation in Iraq is that Prime Minister al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders want the withdrawal of our combat forces to be completed within a 16-month period, as recommended by Senator Obama.

Reid:

As Senator Obama visits Iraq to listen to our troops and commanders and meet with Iraqi leaders, it is becoming clear that America, Iraq and the world are coalescing around Senator Obama’s plan to end the war.

This weekend, Prime Minister Al-Maliki spoke in favor of the Obama plan. Today, despite pressure from the White House, Iraqi government officials publicly reiterated their support.

They are establishing the idea that Barack Obama is the man with the plan to get us out of Iraq, and that even the Iraqis are on board with it.  This will be a very effective message in November, especially when contrasted with McCain’s “We’ll stay in Iraq a hundred years even if the Iraqis clearly don’t want us there.”

Add comment July 22nd, 2008 at 08:01am Posted by Eli

Stupid Or Evil?

It’s always so hard to tell with Republicans:

It is becoming increasingly clear that it is really one or the other; either John McCain is addled and confused in the face of trying to keep up with all that he must as a candidate for the most powerful position in the world, or he is a dishonorable cad that will blithely pass out confidential information and place important people’s lives in danger to serve his own vain powerlust.

The last time there was an insinuation made that McCain was confused and couldn’t keep things straight, there was much consternation and soiling of undergarments by the McCain camp and across the board covering of his butt by the mainstream media. (See here and here). But these are not occasional incidents with McCain. Sunni or Shia? Sudan or Somalia? He is for immigration reform or against it? Does Czeckloslavakia still exist or not (Um, no Senator, it ceased existence over 15 years ago, and you’ve been there since then more than once). And then there is this painful example of cognitive dysfunction.

Yesterday John McCain went all in with his chips of mental incompetence. From Reuters:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain commented on Friday on the unannounced timing of a high-security trip by Barack Obama to Iraq, saying he believed his Democratic rival was going this weekend.
…
“I believe that either today or tomorrow — and I’m not privy to his schedule — Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators” who make up a congressional delegation, McCain said at a Republican fund-raiser.

John McCain must have a far different definition of “high security” and “Senatorial courtesy” than has been known and understood throughout the history of this country. Apparently McCain not only doesn’t care about Obama’s safety, but has a similar disregard for the health and well being for the other fellow Congressional members with Obama on the trip, their staffers and the secret service personnel that have to protect all of them. As Teddy Partridge noted, this isn’t quite on the level of outing a covert CIA spy, but it is sure in the ballpark. For a comparison, consider how when Bush travels to Iraq they often don’t even tell the press, much less publicize the specific dates he will be going; pretty much the same for even lesser Bush Administration officials. McCain’s trips are kept secret as to most details for security reasons.

(…)

Irrespective of McCain’s motivation for callously leaking the details of Obama’s trip into the war zone, or the leaking source of his information, it was a foolish, ignorant and pathetically selfish act. Is McCain such an addled septuagenarian that he can’t help but make these fundamental errors? Does McCain not have the mental faculties remaining after all these years to keep even the most basic things straight? Perhaps he is just no longer up to the task.

Because it is either that or he is such a dishonorable vindictive cad that he did this intentionally. Which one is it Senator McCain, the citizens of this country deserve an answer once and for all. Either way, he is patently unfit for the job he is applying for, President of the United States.

You know, it could always be both…

Add comment July 19th, 2008 at 07:53pm Posted by Eli

Juxtaposition Of The Day

From the Washington Post:

The Air Force’s top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on “comfort capsules” to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world, with at least four top generals involved in design details such as the color of the capsules’ carpet and leather chairs, according to internal e-mails and budget documents.

(…)

Air Force documents spell out how each of the capsules is to be “aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule,” with beds, a couch, a table, a 37-inch flat-screen monitor with stereo speakers, and a full-length mirror.

(…)

Air Force officials say the program dates from a 2006 decision by Air Force Gen. Duncan J. McNabb that existing seats on transport planes, including some that match those on commercial airliners, may be fine for airmen and troops but inadequate for the top brass….

And from the NYT:

Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.

During just one six-month period — August 2006 through January 2007 — at least 283 electrical fires destroyed or damaged American military facilities in Iraq, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, documents obtained by The New York Times show. Two soldiers died in an electrical fire at their base near Tikrit in 2006, the records note, while another was injured while jumping from a burning guard tower in May 2007.

And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis.

Electrical problems were the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq, according to an Army survey issued in February 2007. It noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.”

The Army report said KBR, the Houston-based company that is responsible for providing basic services for American troops in Iraq, including housing, did its own study and found a “systemic problem” with electrical work.

But the Pentagon did little to address the issue until a Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, was electrocuted in January while showering. His death, caused by poor electrical grounding, drew the attention of lawmakers and Pentagon leaders after his family pushed for answers. Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general have begun investigations, and this month senior Army officials ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR.

(…)

Since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, tens of thousands of American troops have been housed in Iraqi buildings that date from the Saddam Hussein era. KBR and other contractors have been paid millions of dollars to repair and upgrade the buildings, including their electrical systems. KBR officials say they handle the maintenance for 4,000 structures and an additional 35,000 containers used as housing in the war zone.

The reports of shoddy electrical work have raised new questions about the Bush administration’s heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq, particularly because they come after other high-profile disputes involving KBR. They include accusations of overbilling, providing unsafe water to soldiers and failing to protect female employees who were sexually assaulted.

Officials say the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq that companies like KBR were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the operations. Some of the electrical work, for example, was turned over to subcontractors, some of which hired unskilled Iraqis who were paid only a few dollars a day.

Government officials responsible for contract oversight, meanwhile, were also unable to keep up, so that unsafe electrical work was not challenged by government auditors.

Several electricians who worked for KBR have said previously in interviews that they repeatedly warned KBR managers and Pentagon and military officials about unsafe electrical work. They said that supervisors had ignored their concerns or, in some cases, lacked the training to understand the problems.

So, to sum up: The Pentagon spares no expense to make sure Air Force generals can fly anywhere in the lap of luxury, but can’t be bothered to ensure that Army grunts don’t get electrocuted in the shower.  Fantastic.  That should do wonders for morale.

So tell me again which troops it is we’re supposed to be supporting? ‘Cuz it seems like there might be some kind of minimum rank requirement.

Add comment July 18th, 2008 at 07:19am Posted by Eli

Mission Accomplished!

Well, at least the Iraqupation is working out great for somebody:

In a 1998 interview, Osama bin Laden — the terrorist organizer of 9/11 who still roams free — listed as one of his many grievances against the U.S. that Americans “have stolen $36 trillion from Muslims” by purchasing oil from Persian Gulf countries at low prices. The real price of a barrel of oil should be $144, bin Laden demanded.

Ten years ago today, the price of a barrel of oil was just $11. Heading into this holiday weekend, the price of a barrel of oil rested at $144 — a thirteen-fold increase.

One month after 9/11, the New York Times wrote of possible “nightmare” scenarios that would deliver bin Laden’s goal. Neela Banerjee warned that among the “misguided decisions” that would put oil supplies at risk would be “that the United States attacks Iraq.” The Times included this quote in its story:

“If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he’d turn off the tap,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. “He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel” — about six times what it sells for now.

If there were no George W. Bush, bin Laden would have to invent him.  And vice versa.

3 comments July 6th, 2008 at 12:28pm Posted by Eli

B&W Creepy Carousel Photoblogging

Some photos from a carousel thingy at the Three Rivers Arts Festival. When will these people learn that elephants and merry-go-rounds don’t mix???

Not only is it creepy, but it’s not really functional, either. I don’t see any way a kid could sit on that, unless it’s, like, a fetus. The CAUTION tape really adds to the whole overall kid-friendly vibe.

…A gecko fetus.

Ah, here’s the seating. Surprisingly cushy-looking, really.

Add comment June 26th, 2008 at 08:41pm Posted by Eli

Go Wes, Young Man?

Wes Clark shreds McCain’s credibility on national security.

I gotta say, the more I think about it, the more I like Wes Clark for Obama’s running mate, or at least a high-profile surrogate for national security.  McCain is using his service and his uniform to enhance his credibility on Iraq, Iran, and foreign policy/national security in general, but the reality is that he doesn’t have any better understanding of it than Dubya.  As Clark says, McCain’s approach is simply “force, force, and more force” - and we’ve seen how well that’s worked in Iraq.

Putting Clark on the ticket, or at least on the Obama campaign, reminds me of the great scene in Annie Hall, where Woody Allen brings Marshall McLuhan out from behind a sign to shut up a pontificating know-it-all.  After all these years of hearing Republicans tell us that Democrats (and especially Obama, who McCain is portraying as young and green and maybe even some kind of draft dodger, even though he was 12 when Vietnam ended) don’t understand military matters, I would love to see Obama pull Wes Clark out to say, “Excuse me - I’m the military, and you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

(h/t looseheadprop)

2 comments June 19th, 2008 at 07:19am Posted by Eli

In Soviet America, Media Censors YOU!

(If the conservatives can call us fascists, then surely we can call them communists)

Here’s a paragraph from an NYT editorial on media censorship in Russia. Does it sound a little… familiar?

Equally insidious as government censorship is the growing self-censorship among Russian journalists. The fear, mostly of losing their jobs, is especially true at national television networks, where most Russians get their information. News about Chechnya or Georgia or Iran now follows the government line. Mr. Putin’s opponents or Mr. Medvedev’s critics are viewed as un-newsworthy, and public affairs shows on Russian television are growing more like those in the Soviet days when “news” meant reading a handout from the Kremlin.

It’s downright uncanny.

Add comment June 9th, 2008 at 09:45pm Posted by Eli

Supporting The Troops… Dubya-Style

Yeah, Dubya loves the troops so much that he’s using them as hostages…

President Bush is threatening the lives of American troops if Congress doesn’t give him the money he wants for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan….  The Commander-in-Chief  has also pledged to stop paying troops in combat if America’s wallet isn’t handed over straightaway.

From The Hill:

Bush said that if Congress does not act promptly, “critical accounts at the Department of Defense will soon run dry.” He added that civilian employees may face “temporary layoffs,” and the Pentagon would be forced to “close down a vital program that is getting potential insurgents off the streets and into jobs.” If the supplemental spending bill is not enacted after July, Bush said, the department would “no longer be able to pay our troops,” including ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I just want to be clear about two points:

1. Insurgents kill Americans.  So when the President says that the Pentagon would be forced to “close down” a program that gets “potential insurgents off the streets,” he’s really saying that he’ll deliberately allow the threat to American troops in Iraq increase if he doesn’t get his money.  He’s playing chicken with Congress at the expense of American lives in Iraq.  Make no mistake about it: More insurgents on the streets would lead to more American deaths.

(…)

2. Bush is also threatening to stop paying troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This is funny, because I don’t hear him threatening to cut the contracts of Halliburton, Blackwater, SAIC, and DynCorp–and thus cutting their employees’ inflated salaries.

This is a clear indication that the Bush administration is more loyal to contractors than to soldiers. When forced to cut spending, Bush would rather starve members of the Armed Forces than cut the exorbitant pay checks given to those who work for privatized military companies.

Impeachment is too late at this point, but there’s no reason that this appalling behavior shouldn’t be hung around John McCain’s neck–thus ensuring that the betrayal of the American military doesn’t extend past January 2009.

At the very least, Obama needs to put McCain on the spot and force him to either repudiate Bush on this and pledge that he would never make these kinds of threats if he became president.  Either McCain helps pressure Dubya to abandon this stance, or he clings to him and destroys what’s left of his own pro-troop, independent-from-Dubya reputation even further (opposing the new GI Bill really didn’t help).

True, it’d be giving McCain an opportunity to score some points at Dubya’s expense, but I don’t think he’d take it.

2 comments June 8th, 2008 at 01:13pm Posted by Eli

Today Must Be Chutzpah Day

The All-Seeing Eye Of Froomkin sets the tone:

Yesterday’s long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee report further solidifies the argument that the Bush administration’s most blatant appeals to fear in its campaign to sell the Iraq war were flatly unsupported.

Some of what President Bush and others said about Iraq was corroborated by what later turned out to be inaccurate intelligence. But their most compelling and gut-wrenching allegations — for instance, that Saddam Hussein was ready to supply his friends in al-Qaeda with nuclear weapons — were simply made up.

(…)

The White House response? That officials in Congress and elsewhere were saying the same things about Iraq. Or in other words, that other people bought the administration line. It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you’ve engaged in a propaganda campaign by noting that it worked.

Can’t really add anything to that…

But wait, there’s more!  Remember John McCain’s crazy anti-Muslim spiritual guide, Rod Parsley?

Shortly after Sen. John McCain publicly rejected the endorsements of John Hagee and Rod Parsley, Parsley released his own statement rescinding his endorsement and then sort of disappeared from sight.  Sometime since then, Parsley apparently decided that he had a bit more to get off his chest and so he released a video on his Center for Moral Clarity website in which he reiterated many of the points he made in his initial statement but added some attacks on what he claimed were the “politically vicious and misguided” hit-squads who exposed his radical views, claiming that his views on Islam are “very much in the mainstream” and insisting that he made a “clear distinction between Muslim terrorists and the vast majority of peaceful Muslims.”

Of course, Parsley is on record having told his congregation and massive TV audience that “America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed” and “Islam is an anti-Christ religion that intends through violence to conquer the world,” as well as writing that so-called “Muslim extremists” are really “mainstream believers who are drawing from the well at the very heart of Islam.”

What a dillweed.

And then there’s the Log Cabin Republicans:

Log Cabin has had a long relationship with Sen. McCain, going back to our national office’s opening in the mid-90s.  He has had an open door to us at Log Cabin and has a record of inclusion.

We understand the general election starts today and Log Cabin will do its part to educate gay and lesbian voters about Sen. McCain in the weeks ahead.  Contrary to what many Democrats are saying, Sen. McCain is not George W. Bush.  Most gays and lesbians understand that fact.  Sen. McCain isn’t going to use gay people as a wedge issue.  He won the GOP nomination with no help (and with outright hostility) from many so-called “social conservatives.”  This is a significant achievement for all gay and lesbian Americans.

…McCain didn’t just vote (twice) against the marriage amendment.  He put himself on the line, bucked his own party leadership and President Bush, and took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to speak against the proposal.  In 2004, he gave one of the most impassioned speeches from the Senate floor on the issue.  That isn’t insignificant.

Is his record perfect?  No.  But it’s inclusive and shows positive signs.  We will hear more about his priorities and record in the months ahead.  Stay tuned…

If this sounds hard to believe, that’s because it is:

Uh, he didn’t look like he was putting anything on the line when he did this:

I believe that the institution of marriage should be reserved for the union of one man and one woman, said Sen. McCain. The Protect Marriage Arizona Amendment would allow the people of Arizona to decide on the definition of marriage in our state. I wholeheartedly support the Protect Marriage Arizona Amendment and I hope that the voters in Arizona choose to support it as well.

– John McCain in 2005.

* Or when he made this commercial for the failed 2006 Arizona Marriage Amendment, which would have effectively banned same-sex couples from legal recognition of any kind?

* What about this?:

Advisers to Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid say he will not try to “soften” the Republican party’s platform on abortion and same-sex marriage to appeal to more voters.

Sounds like the Log Cabin is more like a houseboat, floating down Denial River.  Good luck with that education program, guys.

Add comment June 6th, 2008 at 07:10pm Posted by Eli

Pat Roberts Accidentally Sabotages McCain

Hey, remember this?

The [Senate] Intelligence Committee began a comprehensive investigation nearly five years ago. Initially, the committee was prepared to release one authoritative document on the Iraq intelligence, what it said, and how it was handled. With the 2004 presidential election looming, then-Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) split the report in two — one on how wrong the intelligence community and agencies were (released before the ‘04 election) and another on how the White House used/misused/abused the available information (to be released after the ‘04 election).

Roberts played fast and loose for years. First he said publicly that he’d “try” to have Phase II available to the public before the 2004 election. He didn’t. Roberts then gave his word, in writing, that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee would have a draft report on controversial “public statements” from administration officials by April 2006. That didn’t happen, either. Then he indicated that he wanted to give up on the second part of the investigation altogether. (In January, we learned that the investigation was impeded by the Vice President.)

Well, it finally came out, and it pretty much confirmed what most reality-based people already believed:

[Y]ou’ll never guess what investigators found.

A long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence Committee report made public Thursday concludes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made public statements to promote an invasion of Iraq that they knew at the time were not supported by available intelligence.

In a statement, Intelligence Committee Chairman John Rockefeller (D- W. Va.) said, “There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.”

Key points from the report, by way of Rockefeller’s office:

* Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.

* Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.

* Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.

* Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.

* The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.

* The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

To this day, Still-President Bush will talk about his obviously false pre-war claims in the context of mistaken intelligence, which “everybody” believed at the time. But this long-overdue report is a reminder of just how wrong the Bush defense is — he (and his team) weren’t fooled by errors, they fooled others with arguments they knew had no foundation in fact.

Now here’s the beauty part:

And then, of course, there’s John McCain, who’s running on his national security expertise and judgment on military matters, who bought every line Bush told him, then parroted it to the nation. Worse, McCain has assured voters that “every [intelligence] assessment” justified the 2003 invasion. Today reminds us how wrong this is.

Or as Joe at Americablog puts it:

Republican Senators fought very hard to prevent the release of this intel report back in 2004 to insure Bush’s re-election. And, they wouldn’t release this report back in 2006 to protect their own re-elections. All that delay has resulted in the release of this report in 2008 — leaving John McCain to defend the Bush Iraq war agenda. In some ways, it was worth the wait.

This report makes the illegitimacy of the Iraq invasion even more mainstream and “official” (as opposed to being something that can be dismissed as a dirty hippie conspiracy theory), and makes McCain’s claim that “every assessment” justified it even more untenable.  I wonder if he’ll keep saying that - I hope he does.

2 comments June 5th, 2008 at 06:38pm Posted by Eli

MoDo Has One Of Her Good Days

Yes, more of this and less “Obambi,” please:

So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bushies, to reveal “What Happened,” as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from a genial, humble, bipartisan good ol’ boy to a delusional, disconnected, arrogant, ideological flop.

Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White House press secretary — Secret Service code name Matrix — takes a stab at illuminating Junior’s bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous screw-up.

How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White House and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?

(…)

Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging to all concerned.

It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any facts or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, those snap decisions can be ruinous.

(…)

In Washington, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more narcissistic and practical than that.

The people who should be sounding the alarm for democracy’s sake, and the sake of all the young Americans losing lives and limbs, get truly outraged only when they are played for fools and fall guys, when their own reputations are at stake.

(…)

McClellan did not realize the value of a favorite maxim — “The truth shall set you free” — until he was hung out to dry by his bosses in the Valerie Plame affair, repeating the lies Karl Rove and Scooter Libby brazenly told him about not being the leakers.

“Clearly,” McClellan says, sounding like the breast-heaving heroine of a Victorian romance, “I had allowed myself to be deceived.” He felt “something fall out of me into the abyss.”

And that was even before “the breaking point,” when he learned the worst about his idol — that the president who had denounced leaks about his warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized Dick Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.

“Yeah, I did,” Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force One. His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was “as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score.”

He recalled the first time that he had begun to suspect that W. might be just another dissembling pol: when he overheard his boss, during his 2000 bid, ludicrously telling a supporter that he couldn’t remember, from his wild partying days, if he had tried cocaine.

“He isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie,” McClellan said, but added, “I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true.” He’d see a lot more of it over the next six years before Bush tearfully booted him out.

MoDo is exactly right.  None of these people (she also mentions Tenet and Powell’s conspicuously late revelations) are motivated by conscience; if they were, they would have resigned and spoken out when they realized that their boss was an amoral lying liar arrogantly leading the country down the path to ruin.

Instead, they waited until they were personally aggrieved and/or saw the potential for dollar signs, thus tainting the credibility of their almost-certainly-truthful revelations.  Instead of being a cry of conscience howled shortly after his “breaking point,” Scottie’s memoir looks more like an exercise in paying back and cashing in, allowing Dubya’s minions to attack his motivations instead of refuting his accusations (except for the sensational but largely irrelevant cocaine story).

3 comments June 1st, 2008 at 01:53pm Posted by Eli

I Wonder What It Was Like…

To be Landay & Strobel in the early days of BushCo’s drumbeating for the Iraq invasion.  I figure that at first they must have been racing to get their stories out, afraid that some other news organization would beat them to the explosive scoop: White House Lying About Case For War!

And then, gradually, realizing that they weren’t actually racing against anybody.  No-one was trying to beat them to the story, no-one else wanted anything to do with it.  I wonder if they doubted their own sanity a little bit, the way that you do when you’re the only person who sees something, or thinks a certain way.  Hell, I wonder if either one of them could have sustained it alone, without someone else to reassure him that they were seeing the same things, that he wasn’t deluding himself and chasing shadows.

How sad is that, really?  The biggest story of the decade, and nobody wanted to cover it.

Add comment May 30th, 2008 at 10:18pm Posted by Eli

Grammar Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias

This might be the lamest defense ever:

Yesterday at a townhall meeting in Wisconsin, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed that troops in Iraq are already down to “pre-surge levels”:

So I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr city are quiet and it’s long and it’s hard and it’s tough and there will be setbacks.

(…)

This assertion is wrong. There are now 155,000 troops in Iraq — far above the 130,000 before the surge.

But today on a conference call with reporters, the McCain campaign tried to dismiss this factually inaccurate statement. “So what?” said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), a strong McCain supporter. “What does that amount to?” He added that McCain just “misspoke.” According to adviser Randy Scheunemann, McCain meant to say that troops will be eventually drawn down to pre-surge levels. From his response to the AP’s Liz Sidoti:

SIDOTI: Randy, I’m a little confused here. If the question is over the tense of the statement, why is he not wrong?

RANDY: If the question is, are we drawing down to pre-surge levels? The answer is, yes. If the question is, have we drawn down? The answer is, yes. Liz, I don’t know how to make it any clearer than that. […]

SIDOTI: He said, “We have drawn down to pre-surge levels.” And what you’re saying is, we will have drawn down to pre-surge levels by June — or, I’m sorry, by July. He was speaking in the present tense: “We have drawn down to pre-surge levels.”

RANDY: And if we want to talk about verb tenses, we can talk about verb tenses. Everybody knows — it’s been publicly announced since before April — Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker testified about it extensively. It is very well-known where we are in the surge force levels and that we are drawing down to pre-surge levels. That has not been fully completed yet, but will be completed within no more than 60 days.

“Verb tenses” aside, this claim still seems to be wrong. Michael Shear of the Washington Post points to testimony by Joint Staff director for operations Lt. Gen. Carter Ham at the end of February, where he said that the Bush administration’s goal is to reduce troop levels to only 140,000:

Q: General, coming back to Iraq and the troop numbers, so what you’re saying is by the time we get to the end of July, we’re going to be at 140,000, which looks to me like we’re still talking about significantly higher than pre-surge levels in Iraq. Am I reading that correctly?

GEN. HAM: Yes.

The Politico’s Ben Smith has more from the call, including the campaign’s cries of “nitpicking.”

So I guess McCain was actually speaking in some kind of exotic conditional future tense, i.e., “we will have eventually been drawn down to pre-post-surge levels.”

Add comment May 30th, 2008 at 05:50pm Posted by Eli

Guns Don’t Kill People…

…Shaking hands with American politicians kills people.

John McCain invited Barack Obama for a photo-op trip to Iraq together: (h/t Needlenose)

Over the weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of McCain’s top surrogates, laid the groundwork for McCain’s criticism in a television interview in which he noted Obama’s absence from Iraq and floated the idea that Obama and McCain should go together to be briefed by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Asked whether he’d be willing to take such a trip, McCain told the AP: “Sure. It would be fine.”

“I go back every few months because things are changing in Iraq,” he said. McCain questioned whether Obama has ever been briefed by Petraeus. “I would also seize that opportunity to educate Senator Obama along the way.”

The Obama campaign quickly responded in the negative:

(…)

Of course, Obama is right. This is nothing more than a cheap political stunt. But it’s worse than that. George Bush and John McCain love to take pictures with their Iraqi “friends” but those friends have a disturbing habit of turning up dead shortly thereafter:

The fact is, people are dying for these photo-ops. Being associated with the U.S. is bad enough in a country where every side seems to be against us. Being publicly photographed shaking the enemy’s hand is literally a death sentence.

Whatever the way forward is in Iraq, our politicians need to stop using Iraqi stooges for political gain. You don’t need to have been there to be taken seriously when talking about the war, and you certainly don’t need a picture of your with a scared looking sheik to be legitimate. So don’t go to Iraq! All you are doing is making your friends into targets.

Obama was right to deny McCain’s political stunt. These photo-ops kill people.

Hey, what’s a few more dead Iraqis when American votes are at stake?  Surely the competence and awesomeness of a McCain presidency would end up saving far more Iraqi lives than would be snuffed out by a thoughtless dog-and-pony tour, right?  Yes, I’m sure that must be correct.

Add comment May 29th, 2008 at 09:34pm Posted by Eli

Et Tu, Scotté?

I’m not the least bit surprised by the revelations/accusations, but I am pretty surprised by the source:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

(…)

The eagerly awaited book, while recounting many fond memories of Bush and describing him as “authentic” and “sincere,” is harsher than reporters and White House officials had expected.

McClellan was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal political aides, and most of his friends had expected him to take a few swipes at his former colleague in order to sell books but also to paint a largely affectionate portrait.

Instead, McClellan’s tone is often harsh. He writes, for example, that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House “spent most of the first week in a state of denial,” and he blames Rove for suggesting the photo of the president comfortably observing the disaster during an Air Force One flyover. McClellan says he and counselor to the president Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea and thought it had been scrapped.

But he writes that he later was told that “Karl was convinced we needed to do it — and the president agreed.”

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

(…)

“I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

(…)

McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush’s liberal critics and even charges: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Wow.  History’s judgment continues to trickle out, doesn’t it.  My only complaint is that Scottie is a little too willing to let Dubya personally off the hook and blame everything on his advisers.  Who hired the advisers?  Who made the decision to listen to them even when their advice was obviously flawed at best, insane and evil at worst?  Bush is either a monster or a chump, and history will not be kind either way.

Add comment May 28th, 2008 at 07:20am Posted by Eli

Happy Memorial Day From Bob Geiger

I think I may have actually found someone who hates Dubya more than I do - and with good reason.

Dead Troops Remembered By President Who Had Them Killed

Yes, that’s a harsh headline for this piece.

But I’ll ask you to forgive me because, as a Veteran, there isn’t a day on the calendar that causes my hatred — and I do indeed mean hatred — of George W. Bush to bubble over the top more than Memorial Day.

“On Memorial Day, we honor the heroes who have laid down their lives in the cause of freedom, resolve that they will forever be remembered by a grateful Nation, and pray that our country may always prove worthy of the sacrifices they have made,” reads Bush’s official Memorial Day proclamation, issued by the White House on Thursday.

The Chickenhawk-in Chief says a lot of things that make this Vet’s blood boil but stuff like saying that he prays “…that our country may always prove worthy of the sacrifices they have made” is almost vomit inducing.

This statement comes from the same man who himself began dishonoring the sacrifices of all Veterans in such huge ways in March of 2003, when he invaded Iraq behind a veil of lies and deceit and started spilling barrels of military and civilian blood to start a war with a country that posed no threat whatsoever to our national security. These stirring words of remembrance come from an administration that began with a stolen election in 2000, which goes entirely against what I was taught way back when I was in the U.S. Navy, which was that part of the “way of life” we were protecting was symbolized by the ability of all of our citizens to have their votes counted.

“These courageous and selfless warriors have stepped forward to protect the Nation they love, fight for America’s highest ideals, and show millions that a future of liberty is possible,” continues Bush’s proclamation. “Americans are grateful to all those who have put on our Nation’s uniform and to their families, and we will always remember their service and sacrifice for our freedoms.”

The words Bush puts forth are true — it’s him being the one to say them that I find so sickening and personally offensive.

It is positively nauseating to have George W. Bush ever talk to us about “America’s highest ideals” when his administration has started a bloody war for no reason, imprisoned those suspected of being “terrorists” without trial or benefit of legal counsel, tortured prisoners in America’s name and done everything but grab the original U.S. Constitution from the National Archives and run it through a paper shredder.

I also don’t believe for one minute that the majority of the planet now holds our country in such extreme contempt because we’re right and they don’t understand our “highest ideals.” This Veteran will go to his grave believing that the years 2000 through 2008 were a dark time in our history when much of what I believed when I served in uniform was made invalid and debased.

According to the Defense Department, we have now lost 4,082 men and women in Bush’s war of choice in Iraq and we should not allow the man who sent them needlessly to their deaths to lead our nation today in mourning their loss. Make no mistake about it, George W. Bush is as responsible for the deaths of those men and women as if he himself had fired the bullet or set the IED that ended their lives.

(…)

The least Bush can do is stay in the White House today, keep his lying mouth shut and understand deep in his craven soul that the next day the Congress should declare a national holiday is January 20, 2009, the day he leaves office and his days of dishonoring our war dead are forever done.

The thing is, Dubya - and Republicans in general - know that the troops are iconic, and held in the highest esteem by Americans in general, and conservative Americans in particular.  So he gushes about their courage and poses with them and bathes in their reflected glory every chance he gets… but he doesn’t actually give a damn about them, or about any other American making under $1,000,000 a year.

What’s amazing to me is that this isn’t obvious to everybody.

1 comment May 26th, 2008 at 01:36pm Posted by Eli

Take That, Propaganda!

Woohoo!  House passes amendment to investigate the DoD’s use of generals to spout administration talking points on teevee in the guise of “analysis”:

Tonight, the House passed an amendment introduced by Reps. Hodes, DeFazio, and DeLauro to the Defense Authorization Act for FY2009 requiring that “not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Inspector General of the Department of Defense and the Comptroller General of the United States shall each conduct a study of, and submit to the Congress a report on, the extent to which the Department of Defense has violated the prohibition on propaganda” and defines propaganda as “any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of the people of the United States in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.”

On passage of the amendment, Speaker Pelosi said:

In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stated that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” The Pentagon media influence program reported by the New York Times struck at the heart of this principle – not only denying citizens the knowledge they deserve but also using the media to manipulate public opinion, and as a consequence, damaging our democracy.

The President and members of his Administration led the country to war on the basis of unproven assertions, later confirmed to be false, and have continued to misrepresent the truth on the ground. The Hodes-DeFazio-DeLauro Amendment which prohibits the Department of Defense from using funds for propaganda purposes and initiates a GAO and IG investigative report into past use of propaganda, is a vital step toward restoring the public’s faith in information stemming from the Pentagon.

Rep. Hodes:

The American people were spun by Bush Administration “message multipliers.” They were fed Administration talking points, believing they were getting independent military analysis. Days after, the Pentagon suspended the program. The news outlets have been remarkably silent. The Department of Defense Inspector General has begun an internal review of the program but given the possibility as well as decision makers in this Congress were misled about the war in Iraq, I believe it is absolutely critical that a public investigation happen that is transparent to this body as well as to the American people. Congress cannot allow an Administration to manipulate the public on false propaganda on matters of war and national security.

Awesome. Be even better if the media were to report on it. I couldn’t find a story about this vote in either NYT or WaPo, so who knows if they’ll bother to write about the investigation’s results either.

2 comments May 23rd, 2008 at 07:30am Posted by Eli

Oh, This Can’t Be Good…

Sounds like Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Sistani has reached his limit:

Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible - a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad.

The edicts, or fatwas, by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani suggest he seeks to sharpen his long-held opposition to American troops and counter the populist appeal of his main rivals, firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

But - unlike al-Sadr’s anti-American broadsides - the Iranian-born al-Sistani has displayed extreme caution with anything that could imperil the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

(…)

So far, al-Sistani’s fatwas have been limited to a handful of people. They also were issued verbally and in private - rather than a blanket proclamation to the general Shiite population - according to three prominent Shiite officials in regular contact with al-Sistani as well as two followers who received the edicts in Najaf.

(…)

It is impossible to determine whether those who received the edicts acted on them. Most attacks - except some by al-Qaida in Iraq - are carried out without claims of responsibility.

It is also unknown whether al-Sistani intended the fatwas to inspire violence or simply as theological opinions on foreign occupiers….

(…)

In the past, al-Sistani has avoided answering even abstract questions on whether fighting the U.S. presence in Iraq is allowed by Islam….

The subtle shift could point to his growing impatience with the continued American presence more than five years after the U.S.-led invasion.

It also underlines possible opposition to any agreement by Baghdad to allow a long-term U.S. military foothold in Iraq - part a deal that is currently under negotiation and could be signed as early as July.

Al-Sistani’s distaste for the U.S. presence is no secret. In his public fatwas on his Web site, he blames Washington for many of Iraq’s woes.

But a more aggressive tone from the cleric could have worrisome ripples through Iraq’s Shiite majority - 65 percent of the country’s estimated 27 million population - in which many followers are swayed by his every word.

A longtime official at al-Sistani’s office in Najaf would not deny or confirm the edicts issued in private, but hinted that a publicized call for jihad may come later.

“(Al-Sistani) rejects the American presence,” he told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment to media. “He believes they (the Americans) will at the end pay a heavy price for the damage they inflicted on Iraq.”

Juan Cole, a U.S. expert on Shiites in the Middle East, speculated that “al-Sistani clearly will give a fatwa against the occupation by a year or two.” But he said it would be “premature” for the cleric to do so now.

Great, wonderful.  So even if he doesn’t openly call for violence against American forces, he’s sure as hell giving it the green light.  And if both al-Sistani and al-Sadr call for jihad at the same time, the Iraqupation is over.  And not in a good way.

(h/t gorilla’s guides by way of Siun)

Add comment May 22nd, 2008 at 09:24pm Posted by Eli

Whatever You Do, Don’t Give The Troops An Education - They Hate That.

Lindsey Graham is a strange and clueless man:

Just over an hour ago, the Senate voted overwhelmingly — a veto-proof 75-22 — to approve Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-VA) 21st Century GI Bill, which would expand educational benefits for veterans who joined the service after Sept. 11, 2001.

Before the vote, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who introduced his own watered-down, paltry version of the GI bill, exhorted President Bush to veto the measure, as he has indicated he will. Graham also insisted that his Republican colleagues would “get rewarded in the next election” if they vote against GI benefits:

This is a defining moment for the Senate, for the Republicans, and this war. I can tell you if we leave the generals alone and support our troops, they will win this war. And to my Republican colleagues, if we’ll stand firm for a fair procedure and a sensible solution to the veterans’ problems, we will get rewarded in the next election, not punished. If we give into this, we don’t deserve to be here.

So apparently, not offering the troops a college education is supporting them, but offering them one is not.

Out of the 22 Republicans who voted against the bill (even Lieberman voted in favor!), it looks like Jeff Sessions (AL), Mitch McConnell (KY), Thad Cochran (MS), Lamar Alexander (TN), John Cornyn (TX), John Barrasso & Mike Enzi (WY), and, of course, Graham, are the only ones actually running for election this year, and McConnell and Cornyn are probably the only two whose seats are not comfortably safe.

Also worth noting that McCain is virulently opposed to Webb’s version of the GI Bill and prefers Graham’s lame one, but he couldn’t be bothered to actually show up for the vote (he was off fundraising in CA).

I’m a big believer in holding Republican incumbents accountable for their most heinous votes, but it doesn’t look like this one is going to have a huge impact on the 2008 Senate elections - and I don’t know if it’ll still be fair game in 2010.

On the positive side, it could be a big millstone for McCain’s presidential campaign, and the Democrats essentially used the Republicans’ own support-the-troops narrative to shame and scare the most embattled ones to vote for something good for the troops. (No, I do not believe that voting to extend the war indefinitely counts as “supporting the troops,” but obviously I’m just a crazy person.)

I think we’ll see more votes like this over the next five months, as Republicans try to distance themselves from the Dubyatross to save their electoral skins.  Hopefully voters’ memories will go back far enough to remember the seven years when those same Republicans enthusiastically gave Dubya everything he wanted.

Oh, and when Liddy Dole either loses her seat or gets fired as NRSC Chair, can the Republicans name Graham as her replacement?  Pleeeeeaaaase???

Add comment May 22nd, 2008 at 07:22pm Posted by Eli

Welcome To The 2008 Campaign Metanarrative

I think the #1 story - and deciding factor - of the 2008 campaign is going to be the efforts of McCain and downticket Republican candidates to distance themselves from the unpopular awfulness of the Bush/Cheney administration and position themselves as Reasonable Pragmatic Moderates.

Dick Morris thinks it’s doable, at least for Straight-Talking Maverick McCain:

McCain needs to not run as a traditional Republican, which is easy, since he’s not one. After all, how did an anti-torture, anti-tobacco, pro-campaign finance reform, anti-pork, pro-alternative-energy Republican ever emerge from the primaries alive?

I wasn’t aware that one did.

…McCain can win by running to the center.

His base will be there for him; indeed, it will turn out in massive numbers. Wright has become the honorary chairman of McCain’s get-out-the-vote efforts. It would be nice to think that race isn’t a factor in American politics anymore, but it is. The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.

So McCain doesn’t have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.

(…)

Earlier in the race, Iraq might have been a deal-breaker. But a kinder, gentler war has emerged. U.S. combat deaths are way down, and the de facto U.S. alliance with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province against al-Qaeda in Iraq seems to have dramatically improved the security situation. Still, most Americans don’t like the war, and McCain must deal with their opposition if he wants to win.

(…)

….Unlikely as it sounds, the soon-to-be former president needs to get out of the White House, reenter the political arena (much as it will pain him) and go around the country telling us two things: First, we are winning in Iraq; second, the economy is not as bad as most people think….

Right, because Dubya hasn’t been doing that at all for the past four years.

Bush can help McCain, but that doesn’t mean that McCain should support Bush. As Bush makes the case for himself, McCain must put distance between them. A lot of distance. Once, McCain ran against Bush. But since then, he has basked in the glow of Bush’s warm welcome back to the mainstream of the party. Now McCain needs to free himself of Bush’s spell, go out again into the cold and show the country the difference between his agenda and Bush’s.

Meanwhile, McCain should highlight his credentials as a reformer and a maverick to attract Democrats and independents who worry about Obama. Forget about the base. It will be there. Obama’s liberalism, his pro-tax agenda and his proposed weakening of the USA Patriot Act — as well as fears that he would appoint to office people such as Rev. Wright and William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground — will all assure the full mobilization of the right. Immigration reform and McCain’s other acts of apostasy will be forgiven for the sake of beating Obama. So McCain needs to go after the swing voters:

[Laundry list of things that McCain will mostly never do, but might conceivably pretend to have intentions of doing]

(…)

Meanwhile, the right wing will carry the attack against Obama. McCain is not a mudslinging politician by nature, but he doesn’t need to be. The collected quotes of Rev. Wright will be a bestseller this summer. Obama once had to prove to us that he was not a Muslim; now he must convince us that he never really went to church much….

Wow, Dick really has put all his eggs into the racism/Reverend Wright basket, hasn’t he?  And he obviously wants us to believe that McCain really is as honorable and independent as he pretends to be.

Frank Rich doesn’t think it’ll work:

The G.O.P.’s best hope would be for both the president and Dick Cheney to lock themselves in a closet until the morning after Election Day.

Republicans finally recognized the gravity of their situation three days after Jenna Bush took her vows in Crawford. As Hillary Clinton romped in West Virginia, voters in Mississippi elected a Democrat [by eight points] in a Congressional district that went for Bush-Cheney by 25 percentage points just four years ago. It’s the third “safe” Republican House seat to fall in a special election since March.

(…)

The vice president’s visit was last Monday, the centerpiece of a get-out-the-vote rally in DeSoto County, a G.O.P. stronghold. “We’ll put our shoulders to the wheel for John McCain,” the vice president promised as he bestowed his benediction on Mr. Davis. Well, he got out the vote all right. In the election results the next day, the Childers total in DeSoto County increased 142 percent, while the Davis count went up only 47 percent.

(…)

The McCain campaign is hoping that… showy, if tardy, departures from Bush-Cheney doctrine will constitute a galaxy of Sister Souljah moments, each with headlines reading “McCain Breaks With Bush on…” and the usual knee-jerk press references to Mr. McCain as a “maverick.” Enough of these, you see, and those much-needed independent voters might be flimflammed into believing that the G.O.P. candidate bears no responsibility for the administration’s toxically unpopular policies.

(…)

But are independents suckers? They’d have to be to fall for the pitch that Mr. McCain is an apostate in his own party in 2008. He has been an outspoken Bush defender since helping him sell the Iraq war in 2002 and barnstorming for him in 2004. Despite Mr. McCain’s campaign claims to the contrary, he never publicly called for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. He is still one of the president’s most stalwart supporters in Congress, even signing on to the president’s wildly unpopular veto of an expansion of children’s health insurance.

(…)

Hard as it is for Mr. McCain to run from the Bush policies he supports, it will be far harder to escape from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves. When Mr. McCain accepted Mr. Bush’s endorsement at the White House in March, he referred three times to the president’s “busy schedule,” as if wishing aloud that the lame-duck incumbent would have no time to appear at, say, get-out-the-vote rallies. Alas, Mr. Bush and company are not going gently into retirement.

Just look at Mr. Rove. Some Democrats are outraged that he is now employed as a pundit by Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal as well as Fox News. Instead of complaining, they should be thrilled that Mr. Rove keeps inviting Republican complacency by constantly locating silver linings in the party’s bad news. His ubiquitous TV presence as a thinly veiled McCain surrogate has the added virtue of wrapping the Republican ticket in a daily and suffocating Bush bearhug, since Mr. Rove is far more synonymous with his former boss than Mr. Obama is with his former pastor.

And what of the loyal base that Dick Morris doesn’t think the Republicans have to worry about?  Check out the comments on this NRCC blog post where Tom Cole hypes the rollout of a kinder, gentler Republican Party.  They uniformly bemoan the sellout big-government liberalism and vow to stop contributing and stay home on Election Day.

So this is the dilemma that McCain and the Republicans face: How do they thread the needle between pretending that they have absolutely nothing in common with Dubya, nope, never heard of him, and pissing off the die-hard conservative base that is completely unaccustomed to not being pandered to? Even with the corporate media’s unstinting assistance, I don’t think it can be done - not if American voters still have functioning memories.

I’m looking forward to watching the Republicans alienate both the independents and the base for a truly epic implosion.  And if Bob Barr really does end up running to siphon off the crazy base vote, McCain will have absolutely zero chance.

(h/t dakine, Mike Stark, & Julia)

2 comments May 18th, 2008 at 02:13pm Posted by Eli

Quotes Of The Day

Just some things that made me smile today.

Hans von Spakovsky:

Dear President Bush:

It is with great regret that I write to request that you withdraw my nomination to be a Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission.  My nomination has been pending for almost two and one half years in the Senate without any resolution.  This process has been extremely hard on my family, and quite frankly, we do not have the financial resources to continue to wait until this matter is resolved.  I also agree with my former colleague Robert Lenhard, who recently withdrew his nomination, that it was past time that the FEC was reconstituted - the agency that is tasked with policing our campaign finance system needs to be operational during a presidential election year.  Ths opposition to my nomination (however unfair) is preventing that from happening.

He actually makes a very commendable point at the end there (aside from the “however unfair” part), so it appears that he does feel some rudimentary sense of civic responsibility then again, his vision of what the FEC should be doing during a presidential election year is very different from ours.

In case you’ve forgotten why he’s a total bastard who should never have been allowed within 3000 miles of the FEC, check out the roundup at the end of this TPMMuck post.

John Conyers:

We’re closing in on Rove. Someone’s got to kick his ass.

Tom Davis, by way of Peggy Noonan:

The party, Mr. Davis told me, is “an airplane flying right into a mountain.” Analyses of its predicament reflect an “investment in the Bush presidency,” but ‘the public has just moved so far past that.” “Our leaders go up to the second floor of the White House and they get a case of White House-itis.” Mr. Bush has left the party at a disadvantage in terms of communications: “He can’t articulate. The only asset we have now is the big microphone, and he swallowed it.”

Jay Leno:

Huge political fireworks today after President Bush went to Israel and he talked about American politicians who might want to talk with Hamas or other leaders. Politicians who would sit down and appease terrorists. He said he would not do it. He would not put up with it. He would never talk to terrorists. And then he flew to Saudi Arabia to spend a couple of days with the Saudi royal family.

Jon Stewart (while showing footage of Dubya biking, fishing, and dancing):

You know what?  Pictures matter.  Image is everything.  And when you ask military families to sacrifice so much — through stop-loss, or multiple tours without proper stateside rest, or refusing to fund a proper GI Bill, the least you can do is not force them to see you dicking around like you don’t have a care in the world.

Awesome.

(h/t All-Seeing Eye Of Froomkin)

Add comment May 16th, 2008 at 08:23pm Posted by Eli

Republicans Supporting Our Troops, Episode CXLVII

Well, let’s see.  There was voting against updating the GI Bill to give troops a college education…

And then there was the VA’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder program coordinator sending an e-mail to VA staff recommending that they not diagnose PTSD if they can possibly avoid it, and that they should diagnose “Adjustment Disorder” instead.  Because too many troops had been seeking compensation.

It also appears that the military is calling troops with mental ailments “malingerers” and giving them a General Discharge that disqualifies them from collecting on their GI Bill payments. They can’t even recover the money that they had to invest in the GI Bill fund.

Yep, Republicans sure do love our troops, and spare no effort or expense to make sure they’re treated well and rewarded for their sacrificed.

Add comment May 16th, 2008 at 07:27am Posted by Eli

Co-Wanker Of The Day, Part II

Ah, memories…

Our Selfless Leader:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth it anymore to do.’”

It is so touching to see how Dubya appreciates the importance of sacrifice like that.

Add comment May 13th, 2008 at 09:20pm Posted by Eli

All The Iraqis Tell Me So, But What Do All The Iraqis Know?

It’s the Battle Of The Unscientific Polls!

On CNN’s American Morning earlier today, Kyra Phillips reported that during a recent trip to Baghdad “dozens of Iraqi soldiers and dozens of students at Baghdad university” told her that they “don’t want to see a Republican president.” “Out of every single one that I talked to, one person said they supported John McCain,” said Phillips.

Asked to respond, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who is an ardent supporter of McCain, dismissed what the Iraqis told Phillips as an “unscientific poll.” He claimed that on all the visits he’s made to Iraq, “the Iraqi people on the street, the Iraqi military, the Iraqi government that I’ve talked to, don’t want us to just pick up and leave.”

Lieberman then noted that the Iraqis don’t want the U.S. “to stay there forever,” which he claimed was consistent with McCain’s position on Iraq.

The Iraqi people on the street, the Iraqi military, the Iraqi government that I’ve talked to, don’t want us to just pick up and leave, which is what Sen. Obama, Sen. Clinton have been advocating. They want us, obviously, not to stay there forever. Sen. McCain wants the war to stop and to have us pull back into bases and be on a path, a reasonable path of withdrawal.

As Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) told ThinkProgress last year, congressional trips like Lieberman’s are shrouded in a “Green Zone fog” that makes it hard to get a real sense of the reality on the ground. But, as Phillips noted during her March report from Baghdad, she didn’t have a public affairs official present when she interviewed the soldiers and students, which she says allowed for an “uncensored” and “candid” two-hour discussion.

Additionally, in making the claim that like the Iraqis, McCain doesn’t want us “to stay there forever,” Lieberman completely ignores the fact that McCain has said it is “fine” with him for the U.S. to stay in Iraq for 100 years, which would essentially be forever. Also, while the Iraqi people have rejected permanent U.S. bases in the country, McCain has said they may be “necessary.”

Lieberman isn’t even on the same planet as reality.  Hell, even Ellen Tauscher says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Add comment May 12th, 2008 at 10:16pm Posted by Eli

Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Syria…

Just to give you an idea of who has McCain’s ear these days…

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK:…John McCain has been assembling his team, and in his foreign policy team are some very interesting figures. First and foremost, James Woolsey, former head of the CIA. And then a man named Randy Schoenberg, who with Woolsey helped constitute something called the Committee on the Present Danger, co-chaired by Senators Kyl and Lieberman, who pushed the resolution declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as terrorist. And the Committee on the Present Danger is quite dedicated to regime change in Iran and Syria, and the fundamental thesis of the Project for a New American Century document, which is the projection of American military might to reshape the world.

[FORMER REPUBLICAN AND MORE-OR-LESS SANE PERSON] ERIC MARGOLIS, ANALYST, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK: Well, I’ve met Woolsey on a number of occasions, been on TV programs with him in Washington, and I would be very nervous to have this man anywhere in a high-level government position. The reason is that he’s one of the point men for the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. They’re almost so far right wing you can hear goose-stepping. They want a very militaristic foreign policy. They want to use American power to destroy all of Israel’s perceived enemies.

JAY: Eric, in that respect, let me show you a piece of video. This is a clip of James Woolsey speaking during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and this is Woolsey calling for what he thinks should be the American approach at that moment towards Syria.

[COMPLETELY BATSHIT INSANE REPUBLICAN] JIM WOOLSEY, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: …I think Iran is the puppet master, and Syria and Hezbollah and Hamas to varying degrees are the puppets. This is really about Iran versus the US, and Israel is in the way.

INTERVIEWER: Woolsey, are you saying that we should be hitting Syria, we should be hitting the airport, we should be hitting Bashar Assad’s office?

WOOLSEY: Yes. The last thing we ought to do now, I think—.

INTERVIEWER: Well, you mean we the United States, not Israel.

WOOLSEY: Yes. Yes. I think the last thing we ought to do now is to start talking about ceasefires. This is a very serious challenge from Iran, and we need to weaken them badly, and undermining the Syrian government with air strikes would help weaken them badly.

INTERVIEWER: If undermining Syria, if taking Syria down a peg or two by actually hitting them with air strikes would be effective, why not hit something in Iran?

WOOLSEY: Well, you know, one has to take things to some degree by steps.

Alrighty then.  Bomb Syria first, then work your way up to Iran.  Very sensible, very Serious.  I’m sure there couldn’t possibly be any kind of unintended consequences whatsoever.  Do you really want this bloodthirsty nutjob whispering in the ear of the President Of The United States?  Do you really want a president who makes Dubya look reasonable and moderate?

(h/t David Goldstein)