Hullabaloo

Monday, October 25, 2004

 
This Land Is Your Land

Ezra pointed me to this Paul Waldman piece in The Gadflyer that hits on something that's been getting me angrier and angrier during the last few years --- the constant refrain by Republicans (and accepted without comment by the mediawhores) that blue state America is somehow unamerican. It's offensive and I'm tired of it:

Fantasyland, October 25, 2004 – Today John Kerry opened up a new line of attack on President Bush, charging that his policies and positions are a product of Texas, a state whose political culture lies far outside the American mainstream. "The former governor of Texas has governed like, well, like a former governor of Texas," said Kerry to the laughs and hoots of the crowd. "He's so far out on the right wing, he fell off the plane."

Kerry also brought up Tom DeLay, the ultra-conservative congressman from the Lone Star state. "George Bush makes Tom DeLay look like a Texas moderate!"

The new line of attack came as an independent liberal group began airing a new ad in which an elderly couple says, "George Bush should take his NASCAR-loving, tobacco-chewing, trailer-park-living, redneck freak show back to Texas, where it belongs."

Of course, we've never seen a story like this one – like all Democrats, John Kerry knows that if he criticized one state or one region of the country, the press and the Republicans would come down on him like a ton of bricks, charging him with being a Northeastern elitist who doesn't want to be the president of all Americans.

But the rules are different on the other side of the aisle. In today's politics, it is acceptable for Republicans to traffic in ugly stereotypes and assert outright that people who come from some areas of America are not really American. Some might remember the ad to which I referred, aired by the conservative Club for Growth, which said, "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."

[...]

Bush is hardly the first Republican to use this attack; when the DNC decided to hold its convention in Boston, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey said, "If I were a Democrat, I suspect I'd feel a heck of a lot more comfortable in Boston than, say, America."


[...]

Why does Bush get away with this? Because the press corps buys the Republican argument that the areas of the country where there are lots of Republicans are "really" American, and the areas of the country where there are lots of Democrats aren't. So they never asked whether the fact that Bush was a "Texas conservative" would hurt him, while they constantly wonder about how damaging it is that Kerry is a "Massachusetts liberal." Disparage Texas – or Alabama, or Mississippi, or Kansas – and you're in for a heap of trouble. Throw insults at Massachusetts or California or New York, and the press will laugh right along.

If Kerry wins this election, it is highly likely it will be without the South. And maybe then people are going to realize that catering entirely to one regional culture and insulting the others may not be the way to build a permanent majority. If that happens it's not going to be us blue-staters from Taxachusetts or Hollywood who have the problem.




digby 10/25/2004 08:18:00 PM |

 
Great News!

Dick Morris just said on FAUX that Bush is "surging in the polls" and it's because of the puppies ad. In fact, he believes that ad is going to go down as one of the greatest political ads in history.

The rule of thumb for everything in life is that if Dick Morris says it, the opposite must be true. Therefore, Bush is slipping and the puppies ad is going down as the biggest political joke in history.

I feel good!




digby 10/25/2004 07:01:00 PM |

Sunday, October 24, 2004

 
What Is News?

Here's a little quiz for everyone. Which of these two stories will dominate the news tomorrow?:

To review the essential facts, prior to the war, Iraq's Al Qa Qaa bunker and weapons complex had roughly 350 tons of high explosives under IAEA seal. After the war, for whatever reason, the complex was either not guarded at all or inadequately guarded. And all those explosives (primarily RDX and HMX) were carted away.

What we're talking about here isn't just a bunch of dynamite. This encyclopedia entry says RDX "is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives." And not 350 pounds, 350 tons.

It is apparently widely believed within the US government that those looted explosives are what in many, perhaps most, cases is being used in car bombs and suicide attacks against US troops. That is, according to TPM sources and sources quoted in this evening's Nelson Report, where the story first broke.

One administration official told Nelson, "This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information."

or this one:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

FAUX News will be flogging the latter like crazy. But, the former is above the fold on the front page of the NY Times.

Anybody want to lay down a bet?




digby 10/24/2004 08:46:00 PM |

 
Now's The Time

Memo to the press corpse: In light of this new information about Junior's lies regarding Project P.U.L.L., it's now perfectly legitimate to ask that One Simple Question.

In fact, it's your job. Consider the bounty your bonus.






digby 10/24/2004 08:04:00 PM |

 
Another Pratfall

Junior isn't the most coordinated fellow in the world and he has a lot of trouble staying upright in the best of circumstances. It's probably not a good idea to put him in platform shoes. He falls down. Again:



President Bush is helped after tripping on a step after speaking at the Canton Palace Theatre about medical liability reform Friday, Oct. 22, 2004 in Canton, Ohio. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)




digby 10/24/2004 06:00:00 PM |

 
Haven't They Seen Enough Horror?

Wayne Newton Entertains Troops in Iraq

Newton, along with special guests that included actor Rob Schneider and country singer Neal McCoy, spent nearly three hours at a 1st Cavalry division camp in the capital on Tuesday.

Wasn't the mutiny in the 1st Cavalry? I'm just saying...


Via tristero




digby 10/24/2004 05:11:00 PM |

 
Up In The Air

HANNITY: “Do you or when you think of, for example, what happened in Spain prior to their last election there was an article recently that showed that you were presented with the possibility by your CIA director and others that -- I think September 15th they presented this to you - it was written up recently - that this is a potential threat here but we still have area vulnerabilities so we -- is that always going to be the case? Is that something we are always going to have to live with?

BUSH: Yes because we have to be right 100 percent of the time in disrupting any plot and they have to be right once. We’re better. Much better. As a matter of fact the 9/11 commission reports that America is safer under the course of action we’ve taken but not yet safe. Whether or not we can be ever fully safe is up -- you know, is up in the air.”

Whoopsie. I think Junior's faith based reality may have slipped a little bit there. I'd call it a gaffe except that he's also said that he doesn't care about bin laden and he doesn't think America can win the GWOT. If this guy is so iffy about our ability to deal with the terrorist threat, I'm not sure he has a rationale for his presidency. If he isn't the codpiece cowboy then what's the point?

I think it's only fair to wrap these comments around his neck so tight that he can hardly breathe. It would be downright disrespectful to treat him any differently than he would treat us --- ruthlessly and without mercy.




digby 10/24/2004 03:15:00 PM |

 
Premeditated Theft

Can someone explain to me why, when crap like this is going on, that all I'm hearing about today is alleged Democratic intimidation of Republican voters?

Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.

Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in the Nov. 2 elections.

Election officials in other swing states, from Arizona to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for similar efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over voting procedures and the anticipation of an election as close as the one in 2000.

Ohio election officials said they had never seen so large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges. They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.

Ohio Democrats were struggling to match the Republicans' move, which had been rumored for weeks. Both parties had until 4 p.m. to register people they had recruited to monitor the election. Republicans said they had enlisted 3,600 by the deadline, many in heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities. Each recruit was to be paid $100.

The Democrats, who tend to benefit more than Republicans from large turnouts, said they had registered more than 2,000 recruits to try to protect legitimate voters rather than weed out ineligible ones.

Republican officials said they had no intention of disrupting voting but were concerned about the possibility of fraud involving thousands of newly registered Democrats.

"The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters - I call them ringers - have created these problems," said James P. Trakas, a Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga County.

Both parties have waged huge campaigns in the battleground states to register millions of new voters, and the developments in Ohio provided an early glimpse of how those efforts may play out on Election Day.

Ohio election officials said that by state law, the parties' challengers would have to show "reasonable" justification for doubting the qualifications of a voter before asking a poll worker to question that person. And, the officials said, challenges could be made on four main grounds: whether the voter is a citizen, is at least 18, is a resident of the county and has lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days.

Elections officials in Ohio said they hoped the criteria would minimize the potential for disruption. But Democrats worry that the challenges will inevitably delay the process and frustrate the voters.

"Our concern is Republicans will be challenging in large numbers for the purpose of slowing down voting, because challenging takes a long time,'' said David Sullivan, the voter protection coordinator for the national Democratic Party in Ohio. "And creating long lines causes our people to leave without voting.''

[...]

Among the main swing states, only Ohio, Florida and Missouri require the parties to register poll watchers before Election Day; elsewhere, party observers can register on the day itself. In several states officials have alerted poll workers to expect a heightened interest by the parties in challenging voters. In some cases, poll workers, many of them elderly, have been given training to deal with any abusive challenging.

If anyone wonders why the Bush campaign doesn't feel the need to do much campaigning in the essential state of Ohio, you don't need to look any further than this. They haveplans in place to ensure he wins no matter what.

This tactic is based upon the same one by which they "won" the election in 2000. They are using it not so much to intimidate voters, although I'm sure they will do that also. The main purpose, as it was when the Republican "challengers" in the recount questioned many more ballots than necessary, is simply to run out the clock. And if anyone tries to hold the polls open longer to accomodate long lines as they did in St Louis last time, they will scream bloody murder about the Democrats "changing the rules" after the game has been played.

This is a big deal. If anyone can get to the swing states for election day, they should do it. Check out ACT for Victory for instructions on how you can help. The Republicans have put together an organized effort to suppress the vote. The only thing that will stop it a huge turn-out and people willing to help at the polling places and report the atrocities.


Update: Check out ISOU for some coming attractions.


digby 10/24/2004 02:17:00 PM |

 
Where To Go

Here's a very helpful service:

My Polling Place.com

It got mine and a couple of friends' right so I assume this data base is correct. On election day, if anyone you know or hear of says they don't know where they are supposed to vote, this site not only gives them an address, you can even get a map.

Pass the word.
digby 10/24/2004 11:59:00 AM |

 
Writers Are Terrorists

Talk about misdirection. I know some of the love scenes get pretty steamy, but I didn't think even John Ashcroft would conclude that a romance novelist doing research on the internet was a potential terrorist. (Via Talk Left.)

This is some scary stuff for people like bloggers who spend a lot of time poking their noses into issues that might be considered sensitive:

If you think that as women’s fiction writers, we’re immune from scrutiny under the Patriot Act, think again. Last fall, the home of a multi-published author for an RWA-recognized publisher was raided and her writing in materials confiscated. The writer, an RWA and PAN member who asked to be referred to as Dilyn, agreed to he interviewed for this column to alert RWA members of potential risks when conducting research.

SB: What type of story were you researching?

Dilyn: Mainstream women’s fiction adventure. It was set in Cambodia, all about the theft of antiquities. In my research I learned, about the atrocities that still go on there even today, much of it coming from one of the Al Qaeda-linked groups. I actually went back though my book and deleted those specific terrorist references after 9/11 and changed the ter­rorists to a rogue band of thieves because of 9/11 and terrorist sensitivity.

SB: What types of books did you buy/check out of the library?

Dilyn: I bought and checked out books on Cambodia-- its history, its present struggles, its antiquities and anything I could get my hands on concerning the terrorism going on there...landmines, in particular. And those were the kinds of Web sites I surfed too.

SB: Did you share your reasons for checking out the books with your librarian?


Dilyn: No. My library is huge and highly impersonal. I did the library book search on-line and simply went there to check them out. I also kept those books checked out for well over a year during the writing of my book. Plus, I purchased all my research books online--about six. As far as my Web surfing, I went dozens of places.

Many were for non-terrorist aspects of my book, but a few were for gathering specific terrorist information. To be honest, I was surprised to find the Al Qaeda linked to Cambodia. I was only going after the landmine atrocities because they played a huge part in my story.


SB: Did you have any reason to suspect you were being targeted for a raid, any advance notice?

Dilyn: No. Not a clue. Although, for a while prior to the raid, I thought I was being stalked. Mail was missing from my box, I caught someone searching my trash, I saw a prowler in nit yard and actually called the police. One of my neighbors saw someone watching from across the street--she wasn’t sure if it was my house or hers. She called the police, too--turns out they taking surveillance photos.


SB: When did the raid take place, how long did it last, and what items were con­fiscated? What agency conducted the raid?


Dilyn: The raid took place last fall, pre-dawn, and it lasted three hours. They banged at my front door first, damaged it coming in, displayed weapons and threat­ened to kill my dogs. After that, imagine everything you’ve seen on TV, only worse. There were six male agents. One was in the "bad cop" mode the entire time, trying to intimidate me, yelling at me, threatening me. When I had to go to the restroom, he sent an agent along to the bathroom with me. It was a multi-agency raid: Postal Inspectors (for the Web site/email end of it), FBI, and three officers who would only identify themselves as Federal Police. They took so much--com­puters, photocopier, files, books, discs, computer programs, CDs of the music by which I write, contracts, absolutely everything I had connected to the writing world. They took pictures off my walls, my office television, pens, a case of paper, postage stamps -- even now, after all these months, 1 still so to get something only to discover it missing.

SB: Have you had any success in retrieving items that were taken?

Dilvn: They brought my computers back within a couple of months--bugged. I have this great computer guy who couldn’t wait to get inside to take a look, sure enough, they had a program in there to monitor me. I got my discs back, too, all ruined. They still have everything else.

Does anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that the Justice department under John Ashcroft is completely nuts? This is a Hollywood script, notlaw enforcement. In fact, I think they got this idea from a movie called "Romancing The Stone" in which a Romance writer unwittingly gets involved in Latin American smuggling and drug running. It was a comedy.

I can understand why they might have had a conversation with the woman based upon her web surfing. A little investigation was probably warranted to find out that she was a FICTION WRITER who often researches unusual practices. But a raid of her house and seizure of her property is the mark of an out of control incipient police state.

It is the lack of common sense that has me so scared for this country --- this underreaction to real threats and the overreaction to non-threats. We can't seem to strike any balance anywhere and it's getting us further and further into trouble.

I am very curiuus as to who President Kerry will appoint as AG. It's going to be a hell of a job trying to straighten out the unholy mess that Ashcroft has made of the place.




digby 10/24/2004 10:50:00 AM |

 
Useless Eggheads

My favorite new Republican talking point is the appalled outrage that a member of Kerry's staff referred to the War on Terror as a...gasp...metaphor. Can you believe these sissified Democrats living in their pre 9/11 dreamworlds? A metaphor?

Obviously, this is just another example of the reality based community clinging to outmoded notions of the literal meaning of words. And America is weaker for it.

We will defeat terror. It shall not stand. Terror will be vanquished from the earth. Anyone who doesn't agree is a loser. Let freedom rain. And I mean that literally.




digby 10/24/2004 09:59:00 AM |

 
He Takes My Breath Away

He's strutting, he's swaggering, he's building up to a full-on Village People extravaganza during these last few days:

President Bush turned his Marine One chopper into a campaign prop Saturday and used it to drop in on huge crowds at three stadiums around Florida, at a time of concern in his campaign about his failure to gain a decisive lead in the most crucial battlegrounds.

[...]

The commander in chief landed at the ballparks to the strains of the "Top Gun" theme, his most dramatic use of a military asset since he rode a fighter jet onto an aircraft carrier 17 months ago to declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

[...]

During Bush's chopper swing, a huge banner in the outfield of City of Palms Park, in Fort Myers, showed an image of the military helicopter with the slogan "Soaring to Victory." His departing chopper flew over the crowd of 11,000, so close that the president and Laura Bush could be seen waving.

[...]

The other chopper rallies were in Lakeland and Melbourne. Bush's finale was a rally for 25,000 or more at Alltel Stadium, home of the National Football League's Jacksonville Jaguars and site of next February's Super Bowl. Bush spoke from a lectern on the 50-yard line. He arrived amid rock-concert-style smoke and departed to fireworks.

Here's why they seem to have called in Bruckheimer to stage the campaign stops (in an apparent homage to Coppolla's seminal Playboy bunny scene in Apocalypse Now):

GOP officials who talked to Bush-Cheney campaign leaders said the leaders have grown more worried about Ohio, Florida and other key states where Bush lacks a lead with just 10 days until the election. A poll by Ohio University's Scripps Survey Research Center, completed Thursday night, found Kerry leading 49 percent to 43 percent among registered voters, with a margin of error of five percentage points.

[...]

The Republican official said polling for Bush showed him in a weaker position than some published polls have indicated, both nationally and in battlegrounds. In many of the key states, the official said, Bush is below 50 percent, and he is ahead or behind within the margin of sampling error -- a statistical tie.

"There's just no place where they're polling outside the margin of error so they can say, 'We have this state,' " the official said. "And they know that an incumbent needs to be outside the margin of error."

Look for leather chaps, tight sailor bells, maybe even a great big tool belt these next two days. He's in the Danger Zone, allright.

Update: Check out The Talent Show for Bush's Halloween Surprise.




digby 10/24/2004 09:23:00 AM |

Saturday, October 23, 2004

 
They Can Dish It Out

I've never seen Lawrence O'Donnell get even slightly overwrought, but that lying, piece of shit scumbag John O'Neill with his preturnaturally calm psychopath act pushed him over the edge.

I can't tell you how many times I have stood in front of my television saying exactly those words, ineffectually waving my fist and kicking my poor oft-bruised foot into the wall. It's a real pleasure to watch someone express my personal frustration right in that lying asshole's face.

The freepers are writing nasty letters. O'Donnell could probably use some support.

viewerservices@msnbc.com
joe@msnbc.com

MSNBC TV
One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, N.J. 07094

Apparently he unloaded on Jabba The Blankley on Mclaughlin, too. He's just righteously pissed at the endless lying. I know the feeling. They aren't even trying to hide it anymore. It's like these people are spitting in your face and daring you to do something about it.




digby 10/23/2004 09:06:00 PM |

 
Political Platforms

I hear Gene Simmons is a Republican. Maybe he whispered a little something about height-enhancing footwear in Junior's ear:






digby 10/23/2004 08:26:00 PM |

 
The Youth Vote

When I was in the third grade my mother dressed me up in a bunch of Goldwater gear and sent me off to school on election day. I was the only kid in my class who wasn't dressed up for Johnson. Maybe that's the real reason I became a Democrat when my parents are hard core Republicans --- the early childhood trauma of being a political minority. (Little did I know...)

But, it does illustrate the fact that little kids "vote" like their parents when they are polled. And that has been shown to be true for years. Matt Stoller on MYDD sez that the Nickelodeon poll has some good news for us:

Kids Choose Wisely

A strong majority of American children support Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry over President George W. Bush in the election less than two weeks away, according to an online poll released Wednesday by Nickelodeon cable channel.

Children have always picked the winner since the popular channel aimed at kids began conducted the poll in 1988. In 2000, they backed Bush with 55 percent.

Some 400,000 children responded to the poll, and 57 percent backed Kerry against 43 percent for Bush.

"The `Kids' Vote' seems to work as a good barometer of the actual presidential vote because, deve­lopmentally, kids between the ages of 2 and 11 share the same opinions and outlooks as their parents," said Cyma Zarghami, president of the television channel, part of Viacom International.

I don't see any reason why children would choose Bush over Gore in 2000 and then Kerry over Bush in 2004 except that their parents' preferences have changed. It's not like Nickelodeon has gone on an anti-Bush tear.

I don't know about that, Matt. SpongeBob Squarepants is a total freak for Michael Moore.




digby 10/23/2004 07:47:00 PM |

 
The Lost Years

Does the man just reflexively lie about everything or does he have so much to hide that it's just smarter to lie first and ask questions later?

"I was working full time for an inner-city poverty program known as Project P.U.L.L.," Bush said in his 1999 autobiography, "A Charge to Keep." "My friend John White ... asked me to come help him run the program. ... I was intrigued by John's offer. ... Now I had a chance to help people."


But White's administrative assistant and others associated with P.U.L.L., speaking on the record for the first time, say Bush was not helping to run the program and White had not asked Bush to come aboard. Instead, the associates said, White told them he agreed to take Bush on as a favor to Bush's father, who was honorary co-chairman of the program at the time, and Bush was unpaid. They say White told them Bush had gotten into some kind of trouble but White never gave them specifics.


"We didn't know what kind of trouble he'd been in, only that he'd done something that required him to put in the time," said Althia Turner, White's administrative assistant.


"John said he was doing a favor for George's father because an arrangement had to be made for the son to be there," said Willie Frazier, also a former player for the Houston Oilers and a P.U.L.L. summer volunteer in 1973.


Fred Maura, a close friend of White, refers to Bush as "43," for 43rd president, and his father as "41," for the 41st president.


"John didn't say what kind of trouble 43 was in - just that he had done something and he (John) made a deal to take him in as a favor to 41 to get some funding," Maura said.


"He didn't help run the program. I was in charge of him and I wouldn't say I helped run the program, either," said David Anderson, a recreational director at P.U.L.L.

It's long been strongly suspected that he did his "volunteer" work at Operation Pull as some kind of alternative punishment, whether for criminal or familial reasons. Working with inner city kids during that irrational time in his life is so out of character it never passed the *sniff* test.

We know that his family was fit to be tied with him during that time, and for good reason:

Leaving the election-night "celebration," Allison remembers encountering George W. Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and hearing later about how he'd yelled obscenities at police officers that night. Bush left a house he'd rented in Montgomery trashed -- the furniture broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News reported in February. "He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people's possessions," Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house, told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was never paid. And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents' home in Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go "mano a mano," as has often been reported.

Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. "He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn't get past," Allison recalled. "He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too."

It's certainly possible that Dad pulled strings because he wanted to teach his miscreant son a lesson. But, it doesn't seem as if he had much control over Junior's behavior during that time, so it's a bit of a stretch to believe that he could have forced him to do this thing. After all, this was the same period that Junior was refusing to fulfill his commitment to the US government. It is much more likely that Bush had been arrested for drugs or drunk driving and that Poppy intervened --- as he continued to do for more than a decade of decadence and hedonism.

It was in 1985, around the time of his 39th birthday, George W. Bush says, that his life took a sharp turn toward salvation. At that point he was drinking, his marriage was on the rocks, his career was listless. Several accounts have emerged from those close to Bush about a faith ''intervention'' of sorts at the Kennebunkport family compound that year. Details vary, but here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach.

For all of his hectoring and lecturing about "the responsibility era" and ending the ethos of "if it feels good, do it," he has never taken even the tiniest bit of responsibility for what he did. He even lied about his "born again" experience --- not mentioning that it was the result of yet another intervention by his frustrated parents

Lying in the most craven way about this Operation PULL episode, by claiming that he "helped run the program" when it's obvious to any sentient being that he was forced to be there, is the kind of thing that continues to stoke interest in the 40 odd lost years of George W. Bush. Nobody would care if he didn't constantly behave like a man with something to hide.




digby 10/23/2004 04:46:00 PM |

Friday, October 22, 2004

 
Below The Belt

I knew the Bush campaign was ruthless and I knew they were cruel. I expected them to play dirty.

But, I never dreamed they would sink this low.







If Karl Rove is willing to play the cute puppy card, we are truly doomed...




digby 10/22/2004 03:55:00 PM |

Thursday, October 21, 2004

 
They'll Believe Anything


I thought you might enjoy this wingnut e-mail that's been going around:

Almost half of the nation's flu vaccine will not be delivered this year. Chiron, a major manufacturer of flu vaccine, will not be distributing any influenza vaccine this flu season. Chiron was to make 46-48 million doses vaccine for the United States. Chiron is a British company. Recently British health officials stopped Chiron from distributing and making the vaccine when inspectors found unsanitary conditions in the labs. Some lots of the vaccine were recalled and destroyed.Why is our vaccine made in the UK and not the US? The major pharmaceutical companies in the US provided almost 90% of the nations flu vaccine at one time. They did this despite a very low profit margin for the product. Basically, they were doing us a favor.

In the late 80's a man from North Carolina who had received the vaccine got the flu. The strain he caught was one of the strains in that years Vaccine made by a US company. What did he do? He sued and he won. He was awarded almost $5 million! After that case was appealed and lost, most US pharmaceutical companies stopped making the vaccine. The liability out weighed the profit margin. Since UK and Canadian laws prohibit such frivolous law suits UK and Canadian companies began selling the vaccine in the US.

By the way...the lawyer that represented the man in the flu shot lawsuit was a young ambulance chaser by the name of John Edwards.

Mighty decent of the Bush campaign not to use this bombshell in the last two weeks of the campaign, don't you think? John Edwards is personally responsible for the flu vaccine crisis and they refrain from using that information in ads and speeches. Wow. To think that some people say they are tough guys who will pull out all the stops to win when they are really just a bunch of softies who don't want to embarrass their rivals.

On second thought, this can't be yet another completely unbelievable lie to fool Republican morons, can it? My gawd. I hope these people aren't allowed to operate heavy machinery or drive without supervision. People that dumb are a public health hazard in and of themselves.




digby 10/21/2004 05:08:00 PM |

 
Under Pressure

One of the hallmarks of the modern Republican party has been the efficacy of its communication infrastructure and its commitment to the long term. Over time it has become a sophisticated national political machine. Now, Sinclair Advertiser Boycott has shown that our side truly has the beginnings of a strong and vital counter force if we devote ourselves to long term thinking. The battle is just beginning whether we win or lose this election.

The immediate necessity, however, is to not let up on Sinclair. They have not capitulated. They merely changed their strategy. They are committed to the extreme right wing and will continue to evangelize in various ways for the cause with no sense of fairness or journalistic ethics. This little gambit has personally cost the family more than 40 million dollars and yet they continue. It seems that they have not yet learned their lesson and perhaps they never will. But, there is an object lesson for others out there who might try something like this, so whatever happens we must take this all the way to the end.

We must not let up on the pressure until the propagandists understands that there will be a serious price to pay economically for ignoring their responsibilities to the nation as a guardian of democracy. They are allowed to use the airwaves as a public trust. If they continue to abuse that trust they should be relieved of it.

Via the Sinclair Boycott blog, I see that an unnamed Sinclair employee (and stockholder) is exhorting us to keep the pressure on the company to try to stop them from broadcasting the comedy and keep them from repeating it throughout the week-end. They have not learned their lesson:

You have today and tomorrow to prevent A POW Story from airing. Now is not the time to stop. If SBG is prevented from airing A POW Story, they will be forced to air regularly scheduled programming, and generate regularly scheduled ad revenue. This will have the effect of forcing SBG to accept money against their apparent will.

What you and others are doing here is very much like having an intervention with a drug addict. You don't give him the benefit of the doubt. You don't let him dictate terms. You don't allow yourself to be dazzled by his arguments. And you don't leave him alone so he can "go to the bathroom." You are trying to save this company from itself. The Smith brothers took actions that caused their company stock to rapidly lose $90 million in value, of which $40 million came right out of their hides, and they still didn't want to stop. There is no reason to beleive that they have come to their senses. They said what everyone wanted to hear, and now they are going to do what they wanted to do in the first place. They will do what Fox News does, and pay lip service to offering "both sides". There will be some liberal lightweight phoning in a perfomance that will make Alan Colmes seem like Kenneth Galbraith by comparison.

.... SBG may use this weekend to get this program on the air more than once. The SBG press release mentions only what affiliates will be airing on Friday night. SBG may chose to air the program any number of times on any number of their affiliates after Friday. Should they do this, the company will likely bleed money like a stuck pig. If Glickenhaus and Media Matters don't like what they see at 9 pm, what are they going to do? Wait til Monday morning to take legal action?

We are running promotional announcements for A POW Story as of today. So, my company believes this is a done deal. Prove them wrong.

Read the whole letter, it's quite interesting. Keep sending all those calls and letters folks.

According to Atrios, there is also a mass protest scheduled for 8pm on Friday night at all the Sinclair affiliates. He's got all the info.

If anyone you know lives in one of those towns, send them an e-mail and tell them to head down there at 8pm. Local news is important and if we make enough noise, Sinclair's competitors will be more than happy to report these actions. The decline of the company, the protests and the boycott, unlike "A POW Story", actually are news.




digby 10/21/2004 02:37:00 PM |

 
Trouble In Paradise?

I have to agree with the Bull Moose that Unka Karl indicating that Pat Robertson is a bald faced liar is quite the risky step to take in the waneing days of a very close election.

Now, what primarily disturbs the Moose are not the President’s comments nor does he doubt that Pat is on the Lord’s speed dial. Rather, the Moose is in a lather over the fact that Karl Rove is apparently calling Pat a liar. The Washington Post reports, “White House political adviser Karl Rove told reporters that Bush never said he did not expect casualties. "I was right there," Rove said of the president's conversation with Robertson."

My, my, is there no gratitude from Karl for all the good works that Pat has performed for the President? And surely, it is not smart to call into question the credibility of a man who has a direct line to God merely days before a national election!

Or a man who just a couple of weeks ago threatened to take his flock and form a third party if he didn't get his way:

Influential American evangelist Pat Robertson said Monday that Evangelical Christians feel so deeply about Jerusalem, that if President George W. Bush were to "touch" Jerusalem, Evangelicals would abandon their traditional Republican leanings and form a third party.

Evangelical Christians - estimated at tens of millions of Americans - overwhelmingly support Bush for his pro-Israel policies, Robertson told a Jerusalem news conference Monday.

But if Bush shifted his position toward support for Jerusalem as a capital for both Israel and a Palestinian state, his Evangelical backing would disappear, Robertson indicated.

"The President has backed away from [the road map], but if he were to touch Jerusalem, he'd lose all Evangelical support," Robertson said. "Evangelicals would form a third party" because, though people "don't know about" Gaza, Jerusalem is an entirely different matter.

The article goes on to quote him raving about Satan and Islam and all kinds of other crazy shit, but his naked threat wasn't exactly subtle.

Can this marriage be saved?




digby 10/21/2004 01:01:00 PM |

 
Oh Please

So, I see (via Atrios) that Junior is taking a day off on Saturday.

Sure he is. In the fight of his life, ten days before the election, he's taking a precious day away from the campaign trail.

How much do you want to bet he's being measured for a new military costume as we speak?

My only question is whether it will be Kabul or Baghdad.

And if the braindead press corpse handle this as anything but a cheap, taxpayer financed stunt we should raise holy hell. In fact, it wouldn't hurt to let them know now that any October Surprise like this is not a "surprise" it's an act of sheer desperation and if they don't cover this with the skepticism and derision it deserves they can never call themselves anything but whores.

It's called working the refs folks. If this thing happens, the press needs to have our take on it firmly implanted in their minds before they start their bizarre, erotic fantasizing about the manly preznit.




digby 10/21/2004 09:58:00 AM |

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

 
Obscene?





digby 10/19/2004 01:15:00 PM |

 
Cult of the Codpiece

I have been sort of half heartedly working on a piece about the Susskind article this week-end but I may just give it up since Ezra has already eloquently laid out a good part of my thesis:

And the Iraqis will greet us with flowers and shiatsu massages, the tax cuts will result in more revenue entering government coffers while stimulating the economy, the Northern Alliance will do an excellent job securing Tora Bora, we know Putin is good because his soul said so, Ariel Sharon is a "man of peace", our allies are materially unimportant because a small and maneuverable fighting force can easily carry out the mission in Iraq, simply requesting that companies consider the environment will be more effective than actual regulation...

Time and again, the Bush administration has placed their trust and crafted their policy based on a dubious or unproven assertion, and time and again they've found their faith misplaced, though not before the situation spun out of control to the country's great harm. This Administration's problem isn't that they're optimistic, it's that they're certain the world is similarly sunny. People are grabbing on to Suskind's "reality-based community" quote, as well they should. But they're missing its point. The Bush aide is arguing that the Administration operates off the idea that they shape their reality, that they are history's forces, not victims. That's why, presumably, they only plan for what they believe will happen. The parallels to New Age spirituality would be funny, if they weren't so scary, and the idea would be admirable if reality didn't keep proving it wrong.

This "don't worry be happy" philosophy has gotten these guys into trouble over and over and over again. I'm a Los Angeleno like Ezra so I should have made the connection to New Age spirituality before, but I didn't. Bush isn't a bible-based, messianic fundamentalist. His "crusade fer freedom" is really much more in the mode of a New Agey Kumbaaya cult leader than an Armageddonist. (Maybe Ariana could give us some insight on how this works. This is her guy, John-Roger.)

He doesn't know the bible except in the most rudimentary way. He doesn't attend church. He doesn't follow any of the most basic tenets of Christianity. He is simply the leader of the republican cult whose members believe that anything he says is the word of God --- hence the bizarre screams of orgasmic fervor when he say words that one would not usually associate with deep emotional beliefs, like "tort reform." It doesn't matter what he says, it's how he says them.

This is why he doesn't have to make any sense and this is why his followers are so blind to reality. As with all cults they are willing to give up their money and their free will and turn it over to the leader. It has nothing to do with any traditional religion.

He's the leader of the Cult of the Codpiece and as far as his followers are concerned, anything he says and does is divine.




digby 10/19/2004 01:00:00 PM |

 
Fabulous Flyboy

Paul Lukasiak has uncovered evidence that Bush was discharged from the TANG:

for failing “to possess the required military qualifications for his grade or specialty, or does not meet the mental, moral, professional or physical standards of the Air Force.”

It's likely because he was either dumb, gay, drunk, high, insubordinate or cowardly. That's what "mental, moral, professional or physical" means in military speak.

Looking across the entire landscape of his life, I'm thinking it just screams repressed gayness.

The Chippendales costumes alone...









digby 10/19/2004 11:34:00 AM |

 
Reality-Based Torture

I know that we are all obsessed at this point with the immediate needs of getting out the vote and making sure that Kerry wins two weeks from today, but I didn't want to let this article slip past without comment. The NY Times reported over the week-end that people are beginning to speak out about the torture at Guantanamo.

Many detainees at Guantánamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases.

The people, military guards, intelligence agents and others, described in interviews with The New York Times a range of procedures that included treatment they said was highly abusive occurring over a long period of time, as well as rewards for prisoners who cooperated with interrogators.

One regular procedure that was described by people who worked at Camp Delta, the main prison facility at the naval base in Cuba, was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels, said one military official who witnessed the procedure. The official said that was intended to make the detainees uncomfortable, as they were accustomed to high temperatures both in their native countries and their cells.

Such sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks, said the official, who described the treatment after being contacted by The Times.

I wrote several pieces about this a couple of months back and I remain shocked and stunned that we have done what it now appears clearly that we did. We created a high tech concentration camp in Cuba that evolved into primarily a training camp for interrogators --- the training of whom is bound to be inferior because of the suspect methods employed. This was done because of a hysterical overreaction to 9/11 combined with a truly cynical opportunism that allowed certain people in the administration to act upon some dark compulsion to "show strength" through cruelty.

Many of the prisoners had no affiliation with al Qaeda or the Taliban and those that did were very low level and useless for intelligence. Indeed, the top level al Qaeda who have been captured are being held and tortured elsewhere. The military tribunals are a joke and it is said that most of the prisoners, like Yousaf Hamdi, will be set free having served their PR purposes in a failed strategy to project US strength. Gitmo is a show prison camp.

Back in August, I summed it up like this:

Here's the nut. Prisoners in Guantanamo were taken into custody under extremely questionable circumstances and assumed to be terrorists with no further recourse. This was done (again via VF) because:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Gitmo plays not one but three vital roles in what the Pentagon calls the gwot, or global war on terror. First, it keeps terrorists "off the streets," until death if necessary. Second, it turns them into sources of intelligence. Finally, with the first special "military commission" tribunals set to begin at Gitmo early in 2004, it lets America bring the perpetrators of terrible crimes to justice-in accordance, says Rumsfeld, "with the traditions of fairness and justice under law, on which this nation was founded, the very principles that the terrorists seek to attack and destroy."

We know that in the first case, many of these people were not terrorists yet they are being subjected to horrifyingly inhumane treatment indefinitely. The three Britons being the ones most able to tell their stories to westerners, confirm this. There have been more than 60 others released back to their home countries after having been through this. We don't know how many more are still inside.

In the second case, there has been little intelligence value in their interrogations, not just because they aren't actually terrorists, but because even if they were, they've been out of the loop now for years. In fact, we know that there have been no high value terrorists ever held in Guantanamo. They are being water-boarded at discreet facilities elsewhere in the gulag.

In the third case, these sham military tribunals, the nature of which military lawyers themselves are appalled at, really mean that hundreds of innocent men could spend the rest of their lives in prison and for the forseeable future undergo mental torture that can only be described as criminal. At the least, the administration is intent upon dragging its feet for years, if necessary, to keep them from ever seeing the light of a real courtroom.

I don't know what the Kerry admnistration will do about this, but I think it's fair to say that they are going to be under tremendous pressure to appear "tough" on terrorism by the enraged firebreathers on the right who are already gearing up to engage in their own special form of political torture should they lose. Counter pressure is going to be needed.

We are going to have to be prepared to support the Kerry administration as it tries to do the right here while keeping the mediawhores from lapping up the inevitable Wurlitzer feeding frenzy with cries of treason and appeasement. This is going to be a very tough issue for a Democrat to deal with in this political environment and I think all of us need to be prepared to help the administration do what needs to be done. (Along with a million other things over which the wingnuts are going to lose their tiny little minds ...)







digby 10/19/2004 09:59:00 AM |

Monday, October 18, 2004

 
Will The Media Be Rove's Patsy Again?

Atrios has a list of potential October Surprises that we might look for and I'm wondering if he may actually try the hail mary of a trip to Iraq. I had heard some rumblings elsewhere that he might try to put on some kind of a uniform again (hopefully sparing us the codpiece this time) and drop in on the troops.

I wrote sometime back about the possibility of Bush parachuting into Baghdad on the eve of the election, but it was, you know, a joke. If he tries a stunt like that this time, I have a feeling that it will be remembered as the most desperate act an incumbent president has ever taken. The press corpse, unfortunately, would probably enjoy the theatre of the thing. They like nothing more than pretending that the lil' preznit is some kind of action hero.

They cannot be allowed at this point to go along with such a thing. If they have even the tiniest shred of self-respect left, they would have to reject such a blatant ploy. To that end, I might think of sending this hilarious link to various members of the press corpse to remind them of what dewy eyed little debutantes they were at the sight of Commander Codpiece in that oh-so-snug jumpsuit:

MATTHEWS: Let's go to this sub--what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo of in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I've got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on--onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I'm not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn't do it for me personally, especially not when he's in a suit, but he arrived there...

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: ...he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn't he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa--I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just--I can't think of any, any stunt by the White House--and I'll call it a stunt--that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It's not a stunt if it works and it's real. And I felt the faces of those guys--I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of--the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he--you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That's what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you're watching that from--say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We're coming.' Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not--we've allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it's time to tell them, you know what, `You're going to be help accountable for this.'

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

Here's how CNN reported it "straight" at the time (when they weren't featuring Kyra Phillips pretending to be TopGun herself.)They spent theentire afternoon breathlessly "reporting" the harroiwing landing and lovingly featuring the pictures of the phony flyboy on a loop:

Moments after the landing, the president, wearing a green flight suit and holding a white helmet, got off the plane, saluted those on the flight deck and shook hands with them. Above him, the tower was adorned with a big sign that read, "Mission Accomplished."

Bush said he did take a turn at piloting the craft.

"Yes, I flew it. Yeah, of course, I liked it," said Bush, who was an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard after graduating from Yale University in 1968.

"Great job," said Bush, a wide smile stretched across his face as he posed for photographs with crew members who gathered to get their pictures with the president. He draped his arms around some, slapped the backs of others and shook hands with many.

"Yes I flew it!" Liar. And the media ate up this ridiculous cartoon version of reality with a spoon. Slowly but surely,however, the absurdity of the pageant became obvious. Even Matthews later called it a stunt.

And then, as if they hadn't already been played like a violin, they fell for it yet again with the ridiculous Thanksgiving stunt. Check out Fox's bizarre interpretation of events. First he played a fighter pilot president. Then, a few months later, he pretended to be a super duper secret agent:

CRAWFORD, Texas — Under cover of night as well as baseball caps, President Bush pulled off a Thanksgiving Day bait-and-switch that James Bond would have been proud of.

The president even stunned himself with the success of his trip to Iraq Thursday to visit troops for the holiday, saying if word of the dangerous mission had leaked out, he would have turned Air Force One (search) around and headed back to Crawford to spend the day with his family.

"I was fully prepared to turn this baby around, come home," Bush said late Thursday as he returned from his two hour visit to Baghdad airport, where he served dinner to the troops and personally delivered his Thanksgiving message of appreciation to the nation's servicemen and women.

But even Bush's twin daughters and parents, who all headed to the president's ranch for the holiday, were not informed in advance of the plan, and the overwhelming secrecy helped make the plan a success.

Feigning to be an "ordinary couple," Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice snuck away from the ranch and endured the street traffic to get to the airport where Air Force One was parked. In a departure from the usual perks of being president, the unmarked motorcade had to obey all the traffic rules, stopping at lights and following the speed limit. During those pauses, Bush said he and Rice pulled their baseball caps down low so people could not see their faces.

Please. "I was fully prepared to turn this baby around." I guess we are supposed to believe he flies Air Force One in his spare time, too. (And, I don't even want to know why he kept saying "couple" about himself and Condi.)

I sincerely cannot believe that the media will let Rove and company get away with another of their cheap little cons, but it's hard to have any faith in their ability to know when they are being played. They have, after all, been duped by this phony showboat team over and over and over again.

Update: I see that DU is on to this too.




digby 10/18/2004 04:10:00 PM |

 
Inoculation Priorities

This shortage of flu vaccine is ironic in light of the fact that the vice president himself spearheaded a (luckily) failed effort to force every American to get vaccinated against smallpox which would have cost billions upon billions and killed at least a thousand people. He was said to have been messianic in his zeal to make vaccinations mandatory because of Saddam's alleged stockpile of smallpox that, needless to say, never turned up.

And, he didn't care any more about the potential deaths from the vaccine that he cares about all the deaths that have taken place in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: One of your many tasks in the administration, the point person on bioterrorism; you’ve been spending some time at the Center for Disease Control. Do you believe that all Americans should eventually be vaccinated against smallpox?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’re in the middle of improving our capability to do that. A year ago, we had enough vaccine for maybe 15 million people. We’re now well on the way to producing enough vaccine for 350 million people. There is serious consideration now being given to what kind of vaccination program we want. You go to first responders, people who have to deal with this when it first arises. Do you do a broader group than that? Do you do it on a voluntary basis for anybody who would like to have it? These are issues under active discussion, deliberation. Tommy Thompson over at HHS has been actively involved in it as well, too. It’s not a zero sum kind of proposition; that is, it’s not a cost-free operation. There are side effects and consequences for most vaccines. And you have to weigh those against the benefits that would be derived by protecting the population.

MR. RUSSERT: If you vaccinated 300 million Americans, a thousand would die from side effects.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t remember the exact numbers, but clearly there would be some people who would be harmed as a result of the vaccination.

MR. RUSSERT: But the risk may be such we may come to that.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s entirely possible.

It was only because the medical community put it's collective foot down that Cheney was stopped from forcing everybody to get innoculated against a disease that's been wiped out and to which Saddam had absolutely no access.

More than 80 hospitals from every region in the USA, including leading teaching hospitals and large, urban public hospitals, are forgoing the vaccinations. The dissenters are a tiny fraction of the 3,000 hospitals recruited by state health officials to vaccinate doctors, nurses and other hospital staff members who are most likely to care for smallpox patients.

But their numbers are growing as doctors and administrators at hospitals around the USA are concluding that the known health risks from the vaccine, which can cause illness and even death, outweigh the unquantifiable risks of smallpox being used as a terrorist weapon.

The refusal to vaccinate raises new questions about the president's plan just as the first phase is expected to begin this week. And some health care experts and government officials fear that any reluctance to participate in the first phase could lessen the willingness of others to participate in the second phase -- and undermine the administration's goal of eliminating smallpox as a viable option for terrorists.

Richard Wenzel, chairman of internal medicine at Medical College of Virginia Hospitals of Virginia Commonwealth University, finds the resistance neither surprising nor unwarranted.

"This is not an issue that should be framed in terms of patriotism," he says. "This is an issue that's medical risk-benefit. We haven't seen this disease for more than 25 years. We are reacting to a perceived threat that's not well defined."

The hospitals are reaching their decisions individually after their own in-house infectious diseasesspecialists study the Bush plan.

Almost as a rule, hospital administrators say they are reluctant to make some of their employees sick to protect them from a disease that no longer exists and would reappear only in the chance of a terrorist act.

The administration did all of this at the very same time that the public health officials were warning of a shortage of the flu vaccine.

"The thing that stops you from doing this is the complexity of the smallpox vaccine, which is not a safe vaccine," says William Schaffner, head of the preventive medicine department at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, one of the hospitals that is opting out. "There's a real disease that kills people unnecessarily: the flu. Mr. President, I would love to see you endorse a national flu vaccine campaign with the same vigor."

Cheney never did learn his lesson from that. They spent millions and millions to get a stockpile of vaccine for which there is absolutely no use and ignored the professionals who warned that the flu vaccine was in short supply. And, a pouting Dick Cheney obviously still harbors resentment about that:

Q: Are there any lessons for you in the way the smallpox vaccine program sort of ran into public opposition? Is that an example of where the public is less aware of the dangers than they ought to be?

CHENEY: Well, we — I'm trying to be careful here so I don't start another wave of concern out there about smallpox. People clearly were concerned about the side effects of the vaccine. I think there was a certain amount of complacency in terms of people not being willing to take it as seriously as we thought it should be taken. And so far we've been fortunate. Hopefully we will continue to be fortunate. It's to some extent the responsibility, though, of those of us in government to think about the what-ifs, to worry about the worst case, to look at the evidence that's out there and connect the dots.

And we were criticized, the government was criticized generally prior to 9/11 for, "you didn't connect the dots." I think we did, but that charge is made. Here you're in a situation where you clearly want to make certain that you take all the intelligence available, you look at the capabilities of your adversaries, you draw reasonable conclusions, and you act on those conclusions. And that's what we did with respect to smallpox.

And the main effort there, the focus was to try to get enough people in the medical community, first responders, inoculated, so that if we did get hit, we could move aggressively to implement a national immunization program. We're better off now than we were before we started, but clearly we fell short of what we had originally anticipated, in terms of the numbers of people we would like to have seen inoculated.

Yes. And luckily they fell short of killing about a thousand people that wouldn't have had to die because of a threat that didn't exist. Smallpox is a disease that has been eradicated. There is a very remote possibility that a small amount could escape from the controlled storage facility, but we have absolutely no evidence that it has happened. Dick Cheney tried to strongarm the CDC into demanding that every person in American be vaccinated because he was trying to scare the country into supporting a war with Iraq and as with everything else in that run-up he was willing to say anything to make that happen. It is unconscionable that he actively fought against the prevailing medical opinions that this country could deal with a real smallpox outbreak without a full scale innoculation scheme in order to advance his paranoid vision. (That it might have benefitted a certain vaccine manufacturer is something we might also ponder...)

After 9/11, the administration, Dick Cheney among the most hysterical, with their friends the lapdog media were in the throes of a delusional fit busily chasing phantom threats and science fiction scenarios instead of showing adult leadership. The disaster in Iraq and the shortage of flu vaccine of a piece. They are the result of the leadership of this country falling to pieces after 9/11 and losing sight of the nation's priorities. They have proved that they cannot be depended upon to keep their heads when all around them are losing theirs.





digby 10/18/2004 02:01:00 PM |

 
Family Tradition

Check out this little trip down memory lane on Consortiumnews. We know that the Bush family has a penchant for dirty tricks in the last month or so of a campaign, particularly when they are fighting for their lives. In 1992, they got so desperate that they tried to paint Bill Clinton as a communist agent and they used the executive branch to do it.

We laugh at Ann Coulter and think of her as a clown. But, the truth is that there are a rather large number of Americans who agree with her that Democrats/liberals are routinely traitorous. And, the Bush family is always ready to exploit that paranoid style whenever they need to.




digby 10/18/2004 01:31:00 PM |

 
Again???

I can hardly wait to see Kerry's stump speech in its entirely today on CNN, MSBNC and FOX. Certainly, since they've all been willingly bamboozled into giving Bush another free hour of television to give a "major policy speech" on terrorism that is actually his standard character attack stump speech punctuated by wild cheering and booing from his brainwashed rubes, they will feel bound by journalistic ethics to give Kerry equal time. Right?

Perhaps a little phone call might help to remind them.

CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Fox News

www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453



digby 10/18/2004 10:56:00 AM |

Sunday, October 17, 2004

 
Fox Paradox

Brit Hume and the Gang pretty much agreed this morning that "Stolen Honor" is news and that Sinclair has a right to broadcast it as long as they have at least one ineffectual Democrat on afterwards to rebut the charges (if they can find one.)

The question I have, is this. If it is news, then why isn't the news media as a whole, and FoxNews network in particular, broadcasting it?




digby 10/17/2004 09:34:00 AM |

Saturday, October 16, 2004

 
The Simple Strategy

NewDonkey.com says:

It's bizarre, to say the least: at precisely the moment when the Bush-Cheney campaign has fully committed itself to an 18-day drive to demonize John Kerry as a Massachusetts Liberal, BC04 and its conservative media echo chamber are suddenly focused on a different L-word: Lesbian, as in the sexual orientation of Mary Cheney.

Kerry's reference to the veep's daughter, in response to a debate question about each candidate's views on the nature or nurture origins of homosexuality, is now the obsessive preoccupation of the entire pro-Bush talking points network.

Their motivation is not 100% clear. In part, Bush partisans are simply trying to find something in the last debate that will change the public perception that Kerry won that one, and the whole three-game series. In part, Bushies want to dent the more positive impressions of Kerry's character by suggesting he's playing dirty politics. And finally, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that BC04 is simply freaking out at Kerry's exposure, deliberate or inadvertant, of a vulnerability in their base-first strategy, which depends heavily on piggy-backing battleground state referenda on gay marriage. Mary Cheney's father, after all, has conspicuously declined to support his boss in demanding a constitutional amendment to defend the "sanctity of marriage" against the alleged assault from those demanding gay marriage rights. This is not something conservatives want to be reminded of.

The morning news on Fox just spent half an hour talking about it and came to the conclusion that this was a bigger issue than taxes and the war in Iraq. Then one of the hideous dough boys wondered if the question had been on obesity, if it would have been appropriate for President Bush to bring up Elizabeth Edwards's "problems." I sure wish that all those moms and kids had heard that one.

I think this is simply the opportunistic opening salvo in a full-on character attack on John Kerry as a "hit below the belt" dirty campaigner. Typical GOP projection. In between will be more of the Rove patented ratfucking that they will pin on the Democrats.

At this point I don't think that Rove has anything too sophisticated up his sleeve. We are going to see simple, crude attacks on Kerry's character in the hopes that it will stimulate the neanderthals to vote and to swing a few simple minded undecideds.

And, of course, this is an innoculation against a Kerry win. They are setting it up to say he stole it.




digby 10/16/2004 06:25:00 AM |

Friday, October 15, 2004

 
Hell Froze Over

CNN.com

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: That's right. This week there was an issue that hit home with voters and forced the candidates to rethink their scripts. It even walked off with the political play of the week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) SCHNEIDER (voice-over): They're standing in line in Florida and Michigan, in New Jersey. The line goes around the block. Eager swing state residents lining up to vote? Not exactly. They're lining up for flu shots.

DR. CHARLES GONZALEZ, INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST: It's incredibly serious. We have half as much vaccine as we should have.

SCHNEIDER: How did that happen?

BUSH: We relied upon a company out of England to provide about half of the flu vaccines for the United States citizens.

SCHNEIDER: Uh-oh. Sounds like outsourcing. The president had a solution.

BUSH: We're working with Canada, hopefully they will produce a -- help us realize the vaccine necessary.

SCHNEIDER: But hasn't Bush expressed problems with drug imports from Canada?

BUSH: My worry is, it looks like it's from Canada, it might be from a third world. We have to make sure before somebody thinks they're buying a product, that it works.

SCHNEIDER: President Bush made a plea to the public.

BUSH: If you're healthy, if you're younger, don't get a flu shot this year.

SCHNEIDER: Sounds like rationing, something the president said would result from Kerry's health care plan.

BUSH: Government sponsored health care would lead to rationing.

SCHNEIDER: The government has the situation under control the president says.

BUSH: The CDC responsible for health in the United States is setting those priorities and allocating the flu vaccine accordingly.

SCHNEIDER: Isn't that government control?

BUSH: My opponent wants the government to run the health care.

SCHNEIDER: Maybe the answer is legal reform.

BUSH: Vaccine manufacturers are worried about getting sued, and so therefore they have backed off from providing this kind of vaccine.

SCHNEIDER: Kerry says the issue is the whole health care system.

KERRY: There still aren't enough flu vaccinations. What's the president's solution? He says, don't get one if you're healthy. That sounds just like his health care plan to me, hope and pray you don't get sick.

SCHNEIDER: The flu bug has infected the campaign. The side effect was the political play of the week.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCHNEIDER: What President Bush warns could happen under the Kerry health care plan, shortages, rationing, that's exactly what is happening now. So the issue is whether the Kerry health care plan would solve the problem, or as Republicans charge, make it worse.

WOODRUFF: Is there any evidence yet how this issue is playing out politically? Do we see polls? Do we pick up what people are saying?

SCHNEIDER: We don't have any direct evidence that it's having a political impact yet. We know it is a very big issue on voters' minds. They're very dissatisfied with the fact that there is a shortage and frankly many are looking for somebody to blame. When the administration is the incumbent administration, they're likely to take some hits.

WOODRUFF: You know it's serious when you read that some states will fine or jail doctors and nurses who give flu shots to people who are not at high risk.

SCHNEIDER: Right, and that sounds a lot like rationing.

digby 10/15/2004 07:30:00 PM |

 
He's Naked And We're Sick Of Looking At It

Richard Cohen does it again:

For months now I've dropped bets on the presidential election like Hansel (of "Hansel and Gretel") dropped pebbles. For honor and money, I've wagered on George Bush, not because I wanted him to win but rather because I thought he would. Now I'm changing my mind. It's not the tightening polls that have done it -- I knew that would happen -- but rather something I could not have predicted. The president is missing.


The president I have in mind is the funny, good-natured regular guy I once saw on the campaign trail -- a man of surprisingly quick wit and just plain likeability. I contrasted this man to John Kerry, who is as light and as funny as a mud wall, and I thought, "There goes the election."

Where it has mattered most -- the three debates -- Bush has been wooden, ill at ease and downright spooky. He makes bad jokes, cackles at them in the manner of a cinematic serial killer and has lacked the warmth that he not only once had but that I thought would compensate for a disastrous presidency and give him a second -- God help us -- term. In short, he could take over the Bates Motel in an instant.

The missing president must be Richard Cohen's imaginary friend because the man I saw in the debates was absolutely no different than he has ever been.

He has always been an arrogant, cold, testy little asshole. It's just that people like Cohen built some image in their minds --- probably based upon some frat house fantasy that we don't even want to think about --- and they have foisted their little wetdream on us for the last four years.

Here is one of my favorite examples of Bush's warmth and likeability that Cohen believed in so fervently. Here you see the guy who really believes that the country would be a lot better off with a dictator --- as long as he's the dictator:

The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we're going to be there for a while. I don't know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it's not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through. The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says "Join us," I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.

And when the world told him to stick it where the sun don't shine, they meant it too. Strangely, they didn't seem too impressed with his macho threats.

Go to the link and listen to the audio to get the full effect of this phony jerk lecturing the entire world about what they had to do. You'll see that the entire diatribe was spoken as if he were an angry father punishing his children. It was disgusting. And it was way back in 2001. It's not like this creepy, aggressive personality is anything new.

I don't consider myself to be any more persipicacious than others. I generally don't have superior insight into the hidden psychology of people I see on television. But, it has been clear to me and to millions of others that George W. Bush is a prick from the moment we laid eyes on him back in 2000 and nothing he has done since ever made me change my mind.

Richard Cohen, the emperor has no clothes you silly twit, and most of us have known it for a long, long time. In typical Democratic pundit fashion you waited until the very last minute to admit it. Very impressive performance as always.




digby 10/15/2004 05:00:00 PM |

 
Fighting The Narrative

Jonathan Chait has an interesting article in TNR in which he makes a good case that it's Kerry's to lose. He chalks it up to a better Democratic ground game and obvious Bush weakness.

But he says something at the end which I find kind of amusing:

The biggest mystery may be why most pundits haven't noted how bad things look for Bush right now. Maybe the reason is that he's built an aura of inevitability, starting with his 2000 victory and continuing through his legislative triumphs. The man just doesn't seem to lose very often. And his campaign firmly believes in projecting an air of confidence in the belief that it's self-fulfilling. (Remember Bush in late fall 2000, in an effort to show he was so confident that he could play for a landslide victory, devoting time and money to California?) The day before the 2000 election, a front-page headline in The Washington Times read, "Bush campaign says it's in the bag; Top strategist sees 320 votes." In retrospect, we now know that Bush's victory was not exactly inevitable. So maybe it's just hard to believe that Bush will lose, even if the data suggest he will.

Could Bush still win? Of course. I can think of three things that could intervene. First, Kerry is highly gaffe-prone. Roughly once a week he utters a statement--global test, terrorism as a nuisance--that plays right into his opponent's hands and forces him to explain himself. Any day, he could utter a gaffe big enough to change the dynamics of the campaign. Second, whenever the terrorism threat level rises, Bush's ratings go up. What are the odds we don't have an elevated threat between now and election day? Right--pretty slim. And third, a terrorist attack within the United States would probably cause a major rallying effect for Bush. On top of all that, there are limits to our predictive ability. Elections can't be forecast with perfect accuracy. It's possible that there are other important variables that we don't or can't know right now that could swing the race toward Bush. But what we do know says a lot, and what it says is that Kerry looks like a good bet to win.

With the exception of a terrorist attack, every single point that Chait makes is a result of a flaccid, ineffectual and in-the-tank news media.

Why does Bush have an "air of inevitability?" Why, it's because they have pretended in plain sight and the news media have either been too lazy or stupid to challenge it, despite the fact that in the paragraphs preceding this one, Chait just laid out a devastating case against Bush's electability. The fact that an incumbent wartime president is in this much trouble two weeks before the election is a powerful story that the media just can't be bothered to report. They are going to wake up on November 3rd scratching their heads and saying wtf because they aren't paying attention to what is really going on. And then they'll do it all again.

Furthermore, the idea that Kerry is "gaffe prone," at least in comparison to the most inarticulate president in the history of the United States, is ridiculous. It's not that Kerry is gaffe prone, it's that the media are addicted to snotty GOP talking points and the GOP is quite adept in knowing how to frame these little gaffes and scandals in ways that appeal to their puerile worldview. They play willingly into the GOP's hands by pimping stories they know very well are full of shit but thrill them in some way.

The terrorist alerts are a national joke and the mainstream media have done virtually no reporting on how this came to be. They behave as if these stupid color coded charts are some sort of third rail and as a result they have allowed the administration to manipulate the electorate over and over again. If they allow the administration to cry wolf again, they have no one to blame but themselves if it nobody pays attention and something horrible actually happens.

So, maybe it's true that it's Kerry's to lose. But he is forced to anticipate the moves of a very powerful and dishonest GOP machine (and likely controversial election result) and at the same time he has to battle the silliest and most ineffectual political media in the world in order to win. Talk about a challenge.

I think we'll do it anyway. But it's a testament to Kerry's skill as a politician, a great organization and more than half the country just getting sick and tired of this bullshit and coming out to vote. It really shouldn't be this hard.




digby 10/15/2004 03:47:00 PM |

 
The Falafel Factor

Just in case you'd like to send Bill O'Reilly a sandwich or a nice little gift.




digby 10/15/2004 02:56:00 PM |

 
Dumboys

I don't know how many of you are watching Crossfire, but Jon Stewart is on and he's making both Tuckie and Paul a tad uncomfortable.

They seem to be unaware that The Daily Show is a parody of the news and that its mission is to make fun of them. And that's because they are so insular and self-referential that they have no idea how the country really sees them.

They don't like it. Especially the Tuckster who is plainly wants to scratch his eyes out.

Stewart is trying to make the point that they are contributing to the dumbing down of the discourse by presenting this fake news, or political theatre, that they pretend is news. He isn't being funny and he isn't doing the usual celebrity circle jerk and they are finding it very discomfiting.

Good.




digby 10/15/2004 02:01:00 PM |

 
Reward The Good Guys

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thanks to reader Gail S.

digby 10/15/2004 01:41:00 PM |

 
Anybody Got A Problem With This?


Via Josh Marshall:

As we told you a few days ago, six Republican party staffers and campaign workers in South Dakota resigned over a burgeoning voter fraud scandal. Chief among them was Larry Russell, head of the South Dakota GOP's get-out-the-vote operation, the Republican Victory Program.

To date, no criminal charges have been filed. But the state Attorney General says the investigation is "continuing."

Today comes news, however, that Russell -- still under investigation in South Dakota -- has been reassigned to run President Bush's get-out-the-vote operation in Ohio. Russell will now "lead the ground operations" for Bush in Ohio, according to an internal Republican party memo obtained by the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

And Russell's bringing along with him to Ohio three of the five other GOP staffers who had to resign in South Dakota and are similarly under investigation in that state.

I can see that they are going to try to overwhelm us with dirty tricks all over the country and make it difficult to concentrate on any single thing. It's clear that they are embarking on a concentrated battleground ratfucking effort on top of full-on voter intimidation combined with misdirection about vote fraud.

Is there anything to be done about this? Perhaps e-mailing the local media with the story and asking them to keep an eye on it? Maybe it's time for some push polling on our side. "Would you be more or less inclined to vote for president Bush if you knew that his campaign brought in suspected criminals from South Dakota to run his get out the vote effort in Ohio?"






digby 10/15/2004 01:22:00 PM |

 
Semen Found On Karl Rove's Tie!

Not really, but I thought it might get the mediawhores' attention. There is some news but it doesn't have anything to do with semen so it likely won't require the Republicans to answer unwanted questions during the waning days of the presidential campaign about the president's chief political strategist being called before a grand jury to testify in the matter of exposing an undercover CIA agent.

Still, you'd think Judy Blitzer and the gang might at least mention it...

Rove Testifies in CIA Leak Investigations


WASHINGTON - President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, testified Friday before a federal grand jury trying to determine who leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer.

Rove spent more than two hours testifying before the panel, according to an administration official who spoke only on condition of anonymity because such proceedings are secret.

Before testifying, Rove was interviewed at least once by investigators probing the leak. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell also have been interviewed, though none has appeared before the grand jury.

Try to imagine this circumstance happening in the Clinton, Gore or Kerry campaigns. Close your eyes and visualize the spitting, drooling GOP talking heads like Bay "of Pigs" Buchanan and Sean "pom pom boy" Hannity. Just think of what a thrilling final two weeks we'd have...

This seems like it might just be worth the Democrats making a bit of a fuss over. Bush's brain just spent two hours in front of the grand jury in a criminal matter. Today.




digby 10/15/2004 01:10:00 PM |

 
Family Values

Apparently, the kewl kidz in the press tent all "gasped" when Kerry used the word "lesbian" the other night. And like their emotional role models, Beavis and Butthead, the mere mention of any word they associate with sex excited them a little bit. Because it did, and the Bush campaign sensed it, it's become one of those faux outrage dances that the media and the Republicans perform so well together.

I just had the misfortune to see Mickey Kaus on Fox (playing the conservative, for once) discussing the Mary Cheney incident. He claims that Kerry and Edwards were making an "ugly" cynical outreach to homophobes. (The fact that gay people don't see it that way should be telling, but no matter.) According to Kaus it's clear that Kerry and Edwards are trying to pry the homophobes away from the Bush campaign.

This is such patent nonsense. If he outed Mary Cheney perhaps it would be worth a fuss, but the woman (who is 35 years old) has been out for years working explicitly on gay and lesbian issues. She's the third most famous lesbian in America, fergawdsake. If Kaus thinks that Kerry is hoping to pry the homophobes away from the Republican party by outing an already famous lesbian he needs to think a little bit about how that might work.

On the other hand, it is perfectly fair to out the personal hypocrisy within an admininstration that, at the behest of its bigoted base, wants to enshrine discrimination against gay people into the constitution yet are quite tolerant of homosexuality in their personal lives.

This isn't just a little game. It is a serious matter of equal rights under the constitution. And, the Cheneys' behavior can be directly compared to the type of behavior that used to be tolerated from white men like Strom Thurmond who agitated for decades for Jim Crow and discrimination against african americans while privately being quite fond of his african american daughter. That goes beyond hypocrisy. For any enlightened person, it is intellectually and emotionally incoherent.

We, as citizens, are not in a position to pass judgment on how people deal with such issues in their personal lives. But those like Thurmond and Cheney publicly promote laws that discriminate against selected people in our society and in their own families. That is such a counterintuitive concept to most Americans that it deserves to be exposed and openly discussed.

I can certainly understand that the Cheneys are uncomfortable with this situation and are trying mightily to distract public attention from the fact that they are behaving in an incomprehensible manner. In their case, it is very confusing because they not only seem to tolerate their daughter's orientation, they have welcomed her partner into the family on equal terms with other spouses and employ her in a public role in the campaign. It is not unreasonable to wonder how they square this with the Republican party's open hostility to gay people, even to the extent that the Log Cabin Republicans made a very public break with the party in this campaign. What led them, and her, to accept the ignominy of not appearing on the stage with the entire family at the GOP convention?

It's not surprising that Republicans would try to portray this as a Kerry campaign dirty trick, because it feels like that to them. The hypocrisy of the Cheneys is something they'd very much like to keep under wraps. And when they heard the gasp of arousal from the press corpse when Kerry said a "sex-word" they knew just what to do --- launch one of their faux outrage campaigns that would allow the media to talk about "dirty" things all day while expressing their shock and awe at how terrible the Democrats are for bringing it up. Republicans never lose by tickling the pre-adolescent libidos of the political media.

Cheney and his erotically imaginative better half are really the ones on the hot seat with this but have successfully spun the press these last couple of days. However, as a very stupid man once said, they can run but they can't hide. At some point, maybe not until they are on their deathbeds, they will have to face the fact that they betrayed their beloved daughter countless times by refusing to use their power for good and stand up for what they knew in their hearts to be right. It may not be on their gravestone, but that will be their true epitaph.



digby 10/15/2004 10:51:00 AM |

 
Guerilla Blogging

Check out all the Freeway Blogger pictures.

Good Work!




digby 10/15/2004 08:59:00 AM |

Thursday, October 14, 2004

 
Inner Lives

Riffle found some rather surprising similarities between O'Reilly's alleged phone porn and a hot and steamy shower scene in his hot and steamy novel:

Here are some snippets of O'Reilly's [alleged] phone sex technique from the (real) lawsuit

O'Reilly: Well, if I took you down there I'd want to take a shower with you right away, that would be the first thing Id do... yeah, we'd check into the room, and we would order some room service and uh [....]

You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I'd join you and you would have your back to me and I would take that little loofa thing and kinda' soap up your back.. rub it all over you, get you to relax, hot water [....]

[....] and then with my other hand I would start to massage your boobs, get your nipples really hard ... 'cuz I like that and you have really spectacular boobs....

So anyway I'd be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda kissing your neck from behind ....

And here's a bit from O'Reilly's novel, Those Who Trespass:

The spray felt great against her skin as she ducked her head underneath the nozzle. Closing her eyes she concentrated on the tingling sensation of water flowing against her body. Suddenly another sensation entered, Ashley felt two large hands wrap themselves around her breasts and hot breathe on the back of her neck. She opened her eyes wide and giggled, "I thought you drowned out there snorkel man."

Tommy O'Malley was naked and at attention. "Drowning is not an option", he said, "unless of course you beg me to perform unnatural acts – right here in this shower."

Who knew that Big Bill was so obsessed with erotic fantasy? (And, furthermore, who ever wanted to?)

Speaking of bodice ripping soft core fiction, considering the events of today, perhaps it's time to revisit Lynne Cheney's 1981 paeon to the love that dare not speak its name:

The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage -- no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naiveté, but she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave.

The young woman was heavily powdered, but quite attractive, a curvesome creature, rounded at bosom and cheek. When she smiled, even her teeth seemed puffed and rounded, like tiny ivory pillows.

Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.

You can understand why a younger, lubricious Lynne would have fantasized about getting away from the "anger and imperatives of men" and write adolescent novels about lovely young women. She was, after all, married to Dick Cheney. Sadly, she seems to have lost that adventurous turn of mind and decided to become an angry hypocrite instead. Too bad. She might have been worth knowing once.




digby 10/14/2004 07:56:00 PM |

 
Mud Wrestler

Well now. Just as I was basking in the glow of three successful debates and a nice sense of momentum, I finally got to read this seminal article about Karl Rove in The Atlantic, by Joshua Green and I realized that I was being far too complacent. I urge you to read the whole piece. Rove is not a magician and he is not omnipotent. But he is ruthless, particularly when he's in a corner.

First of all, Rove's history in tight races is very instructive. He will play very, very dirty, particularly in the last couple of weeks, and he will use some tactics that are extremely difficult to counter in a short period of time.

One of his favorites seems to be to smear his own candidate in order to make his opponent look like a dirty trickster. This is, of course, where the Rove/CBS memo theory comes from. But, Rove usually does this sort of thing very late in the game, so I would suspect that we will see something new in the next week or so if it's going to happen.

The most instructive anecdote in the article is the one in which the race was so close that Rove insisted on a recount. It would sound very familiar except that in this case, his client was the challenger. This is likely to be a primer for what will happen if Kerry wins narrowly. Hooper was Rove's Republican client. Hornsby was the Democrat:

Judicial races that no one had expected to be competitive suddenly narrowed, and media attention—especially to Hooper's race after the "dialing for dollars" ad—became widespread. Then Rove turned up the heat. "There was a whole barrage of negative attacks that came in the last two weeks of our campaign," says Joe Perkins, who managed Hornsby's campaign along with those of the other Democrats Rove was working against. "In our polling I sensed a movement and warned our clients."

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James's upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove's client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby's campaign declared victory.

Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. "Karl called the next morning," says a former Rove staffer. "He said, 'We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We've got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'" Rove explained how this was to be done. "Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper's election," the staffer continued, "and then to undermine the other side's support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that." (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.

As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, "We have endured lies in this campaign, but I'll be damned if I will accept outright thievery." The recount stretched on, and Hooper's campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby's lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes.

The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby's campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren't notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. "The last marching order we had from Karl," says a former employee, "was 'Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we're going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'"

Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters' intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had "substantially complied" with the law. Hooper's lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, "They steal elections they don't like." Public opinion began tilting toward him.

The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby's legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.

When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove's closest race. "On the afternoon of October the nineteenth," Hooper recalled, "I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife's garden, and she hollered out the back door, 'Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you're the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'" In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. "That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow," he said.

I had read a bit about this race, but until now it really hadn't hit home that Karl Rove had single handedly orchestrated the Bush recount strategy in 2000.

This is going to be a very, very difficult couple of weeks and if we don't win decisively, it's likely to continue for quite a while. We cannot count on Republican shame to keep them from requesting hand counts or trying to block absentee ballots or behaving in any other hypocritical manner based upon their arguments in 2000. They have no shame and hypocrisy means nothing to them. So, we will have to be prepared to slug it out.

In the meantime, the blogosphere is going to have to help the media see what is happening when Rove launches his next slime attack. I suspect that the Mary Cheney brouhaha may be the first shot --- it doesn't make a lot of sense by itself, but perhaps as an introduction to a new character smear it might. Whatever it's going to be it has something to do with Kerry being cruel and unfeeling.

Keep your eyes and ears open for signs in the next few days. When the going gets tough --- and the going is certainly tough --- Rove always resorts to ratfucking. As Josh Marshall says,

It'll be like a 'where's Waldo' thing: Karl Rove Dirty Trick's Watch. (For examples, see the Green piece.) Who will be able to spot Karl's dirty tricks first? Who has the sharpest eye? Sit back in your seat. Get out the popcorn.

digby 10/14/2004 07:15:00 PM |

 
Boyz Klub

Blitzer is framing the O'Reilly story as a brave man fighting back against a greedy employee. Guess those guys have to stick together.

Still, I'm looking forward to hearing about the kicking and biting among the networks for first dibs on the tapes. Solidarity amongs millionaire TV stars only goes so far. Nothing personal, Billy boy. It's strictly business.




digby 10/14/2004 02:49:00 PM |

 
Live Long And Prosper

When did Mary Matalin decide to reveal herself as a Vulcan?


digby 10/14/2004 02:35:00 PM |

 
Slow Learner

James Wolcott gets to the nub of Bush's problem:

Now that the three debates belong to history, furnishing boring anecdotes from Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin for years to come, I'm struck by a single defining element that permeated each encounter: Bush's cavalier lack of preparation. Forget the cosmetics for a moment: the menagerie of mannerisms Bush displayed. He simply didn't come loaded with ammo. I assumed that he'd have some killer line at the ready, some surprise dug up from Kerry's record to spring, a practiced bit of eloquence that would lift the debate at a dramatic moment out of the recitation of facts and figures. He not only didn't have the eloquence, he barely had the facts and figures. For some bizarre reason best left to future psychologists, Bush doesn't seem to have approached these debates seriously. He refused to acknowledge he couldn't get by with simply rehashing his stump speech. When I saw on the news that Bush has prepared for this final debate by rehearsing during his spare moments on the campaign trail in Air Force One and the limo drives, I thought: that's now true preparation, that's lazy last-minute cramming.

Read the rest here.

And what's really galling is that he was not any better prepared in the debates in 2000, it's just that the giggling schoolgirls in the media were so delighted with the political wedgie they were collectively administering to Al Gore that they overwhelmed the coverage and created an alternate reality (that Gore unfortunately acted upon instead of ignored.)

The problem for Bush is that he's never really studied and in order to learn it is said that he prefers that concepts and ideas be presented to him because he doesn't like to read. On top of that he's an egomaniac who doesn't LIKE to be told what to do:

There is to be no scowling this time, George Bush's counselors told him, even if John Kerry attacks your mom. Campaign officials say it took Karen Hughes a good while to convince the Commander in Chief after the first presidential debate that he had looked irritated. "I was not irritated," he told her, irritated. "Sir, you were," she said. Hughes is one of the few who can tell the President what he might not want to hear and show him what he might not be able to see for himself.

If there is any further question as to why we are in a mess in Iraq, I think that should put it to rest. He doesn't study on his own, he learns by listening but refuses to hear bad news.




digby 10/14/2004 01:40:00 PM |

 
Memorizing Their Lines

The indispensible Eric Boehlert writes in Salon:

The media reaction: Ho-hum, just a Kerry sweep

For Kerry, it's a rather startling and completely unforeseen achievement, considering Bush entered the final stretch season with an unblemished career debate record and had been given high marks by the press for his debate message discipline and ability to connect with voters. Yet he went O for 3.

Despite the consistent polling results, most of the assembled television pundits Wednesday night considered the debate to be a draw and suggested it would, in the end, have little impact on Election Day. Again, it's hard to imagine that the media response would have been so reserved if it were Bush completing a debate sweep.

Ain't it the truth. When you think about it, it's an amazing achievement that Kerry has been able to sidestep the simpleminded media narrative that had the triumphant King Junior astride his destrier riding to a devastating victory over the weak and silly Democrat. Kerry refused to play along and the American people haven't been foolish enough to swallow it, thank Gawd.

But, the punditocrisy and the press corpse have not been willing to shake their preferred storyline, even in the face of an obvious digression to a totally new plot. Sadly, I don't think that even a Kerry victory is going to change this derisive, condescending attitude toward Democrats until we confront the media with it head on and force them to see us differently.

This campaign, with the emergence of a rugged indefatigable candidate and a large, active grassroots with a mighty fundraising arm may just be the first step in proving to these insular elites that Democrats are fed up with this phony characterization of us and we're going to be fighting it from now on. The media are going to have to face themselves, at least in part, because their audience is no longer a shouting mob on one side and an incredulous group of onlookers on the other. We are now engaged. And while we may believe in the virtues of tolerance and diversity and cooperation, it is a grave mistake to assume that makes us weak or passive.

We're schooling them in this election about that and we'll keep on doing it until they wake up to the fact that they've been duped by the Mighty Wurlitzer into writing a work of fiction that fewer and fewer people are willing to accept as fact.




digby 10/14/2004 01:25:00 PM |

 
Losin' It

As I'm watching the mini frenzy over the trumped up "Mary Cheney" controversy, I am struck by how much the GOP is off its game.

Think about it. The morning after the final debate, they trotted out the wife of the vice president to attack John Kerry for being too mean ---- about their gay daughter. What's the plan? Are they trying to make a mad dash to the middle by portraying the "most liberal member of the senate" as being intolerant toward gays? Or is this supposed to enrage and energize the base --- all of whom think that we should actually change the constitution to permanently discriminate against gay people. It's weird and unfocused. It's very hard for me to believe that they want to spend the day with the words "vice president's gay daughter" being repeated over and over again on television.

Meanwhile, while Lynn Cheney is performing the role of rabid attack dog, the only sight we've seen of Commander Codpiece the Warrior King (looking even more dazed and confused than ever) was a brief uncomfortable interview on Air Force One where John McCain gave his best streetwalker impression and some woman (didn't catch who she is) brought up Bush's worst moment in the debate in which he said that the answer to those who had lost their jobs was to improve elementary school standards. "That's just common sense" she said.

These guys are way off message.




digby 10/14/2004 10:35:00 AM |

 
Right Wing Victimization Watch

Lynn Cheney is all over the TV saying "as a mom" that Kerry used a "cheap and tawdry political trick" by mentioning her gay daughter. "He's not a good man," she says.

Suburban Guerilla reminds us of another politician using Cheney's daughter as a --- cheap and tawdry political trick:

"Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue that our family is very familiar with. ... With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be able to free -- ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to."

Remember Schieffer's question?

Both of you are opposed to gay marriage. But to understand how you have come to that conclusion, I want to ask you a more basic question. Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?

Shocking for Kerry to bring up Cheney's daughter in that context, eh? As Andrew Sullivan says this morning:

I keep getting emails asserting that Kerry's mentioning of Mary Cheney is somehow offensive or gratuitous or a "low blow". Huh? Mary Cheney is out of the closet and a member, with her partner, of the vice-president's family. That's a public fact. No one's privacy is being invaded by mentioning this. When Kerry cites Bush's wife or daughters, no one says it's a "low blow." The double standards are entirely a function of people's lingering prejudice against gay people. And by mentioning it, Kerry showed something important. This issue is not an abstract one. It's a concrete, human and real one. It affects many families, and Bush has decided to use this cynically as a divisive weapon in an election campaign. He deserves to be held to account for this - and how much more effective than showing a real person whose relationship and dignity he has attacked and minimized? Does this makes Bush's base uncomfortable? Well, good. It's about time they were made uncomfortable in their acquiescence to discrimination. Does it make Bush uncomfortable? Even better. His decision to bar gay couples from having any protections for their relationships in the constitution is not just a direct attack on the family member of the vice-president. It's an attack on all families with gay members - and on the family as an institution. That's a central issue in this campaign, a key indictment of Bush's record and more than relevant to any debate. For four years, this president has tried to make gay people invisible, to avoid any mention of us, to pretend we don't exist. Well, we do. Right in front of him.

digby 10/14/2004 08:33:00 AM |

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

 
The General And The Sissy

I don't know if anyone saw Wes Clark "interviewed" by Sean Hannity just now, but it almost came to blows. Riveting exchange as Clark called Bush a cheerleader and Hannity said Kerry was a war criminal.

Hannity tried to say that Kerry voted against all the weapons systems and that Saddam would still be a threat if he had been president and all the usual blather and Clark was having none of it. Hannity was all red faced and stomping his tiny feet and on the verge of tears.

The control room had to step in and cut it off. Brilliant. I love Wes Clark.




digby 10/13/2004 08:44:00 PM |

 
Zen Master

Kos called Kerry that tonight and I think it's true. The guy just has a sense of inner confidence and centeredness that is very reassuring. He is a mature, fully realized human being. I think that peopole had forgotten that this is something we can expect in our leaders. It's with a strong sense of relief that I watch him in action and see him prevail.

I would bet that by Friday the conventional wisdom will be that Kerry won all three debates. And the CW, for once, will be right.

The next two weeks are going to be a wild ride, but the wind is at our backs.

I think it's time for Democrats to start giving our man Kerry a little bit of credit. He's a very impressive politician and a very impressive man. Cool under fire, smart as a whip and hard as nails. Some months back I wrote that Kerry has been fighting the right since he was a very young man and may be the best qualified man in America for these times. I think I was right. He's the right man at the right time to set this country back on course. I'm proud to be voting for him.

For the first time since 9/11, I am feeling a little bit zenlike myself. We're going to win.


Update: The soundbite and clip is Bush saying he doesn't care about catching bin Laden. It couldn't be better for us.




digby 10/13/2004 08:25:00 PM |

 
He was, I think, on the side, maybe with his pompoms?

No, he had a great big megaphone:



And cheerleading was serious business for Junior. It's the one thing he is trained for and the only thing he's ever been good at:









digby 10/13/2004 05:24:00 PM |

 
Paging William Bennett. Outrage Is Dyin' Over Here

We stand for a culture of responsibility in America. This culture of our country is changing from one that has said, if it feels good do it, and if you've got a problem blame somebody else, to a culture in which each of understands we're responsible for the decisions we make in life. George W. Bush August 10, 2004


A middle aged Democrat had a consensual affair with a young female employee.

A middle aged Republican crudely groped and humiliated numerous women for over twenty years on movie sets.

A middle aged radio superstar Republican bought hard drugs on the black market and threatened his housekeeper if she fails to help him score.

A middle aged TV gasbag Republican grossly sexually harrassed an employee and theatened her with terrible retaliation if she spoke up.


Which of these middle aged men was vilified, derided and degraded as an immoral misogynist who had soiled the very fabric of America?


Man, is this a great country to be a Republican or what? Par-tay down, Dough Boyz! Anything Goes!!! IOKYAR, baby!!!




digby 10/13/2004 04:56:00 PM |

 
Accidental Radical

Nicolas Lemann's article about Bush in this week's New Yorker is a must read for any number of reasons. (No More Mister Nice Blog highlights perfect illustrations of his adolescent bloodlust and his perfidious backstabbing, just to name two.)

I thought what was most interesting, however, is that Lemann seems to have concluded that Bush himself was a radical who persuaded Cheney and the other "grown-ups" that he was serious about governing in the most ideological way possible:

Clay Johnson ... [said] Bush had begun the Vice-Presidential selection process by offering the nomination to Cheney. "The now Vice-President declined the option, but did agree to head up the search committee," Johnson said. "And then came back some months later and said that in fact he’d changed his mind and he would be willing to run --- to be the President’s running mate." Johnson said he had a hunch about what had changed: "Lynne Cheney told some mutual friends of ours that she and Dick decided that in fact they did want to join the Bush ticket, because they came to really like George and Laura, and the Vice-President came to realize that the President wanted to come up here to really make a difference. He was not going to try to play it safe. Not try to extend an easy, moderately successful four years into an easy, moderately successful eight years. He was going to try to come up here and make dramatic changes to the issues he thought needed to be addressed. And the Vice-President got very, very energized and excited about doing that. And so now we have Dick Cheney as Vice-President."

In other words, the team that most people thought of as being made up of a moderate, conciliatory, relatively unambitious Presidential candidate and his bland, self-effacing, government technician of a running mate had thrown in together on the basis of a mutual decision to govern in pursuit of radical change. And they have done that.

Lemann goes on to predict that if Bush wins there is absolutely no reason to believe that he will be cowed by his failures or the impending disasters that await at every turn, but rather will use his power to enact the most sweeping revolutionary agenda in modern history --- including the privatization of social security. He shows that in this way, Bush is predictable. When it comes to the most radical elements of the conservative agenda --- creating a permanent GOP powerbase, foreign policy neoconservatism, tax cuts for the wealthy and starving the entitlement programs out of existence, he is perfectly serious. Bush has moved to the middle only as a feint to either buy time, appease certain constituencies or to placate a powerful insider like Powell (or maybe his father's inner circle.) But, at heart, he is as rigidly ideological as a Norquist or Gingrich and even more determined to follow through.

Lemann knows all these people and has met Bush, so it's probably wrong to second guess his interpretation. However, I find it very hard to believe that anecdote Clay Johnson tells about Lynn and Dick joining up to aid the cause, at least with respect to one important detail. I don't doubt that Cheney didn't particularly want to be involved in Bush II. Bush I was an ignominious failure for the true believers and he had no reason to believe that the sequel would be any better. But, I can't help but be a little bit skeptical that the Cheneys were so impressed by Junior's grand strategic vision and ideological committment to the cause that they couldn't help but sign on.

What they realized was that Junior was easily manipulated with flattery and appeals to his manly prowess in contrast to his father and they could successfully push him to enact their grand strategic vision. Seriously, George W. Bush was barely a fully formed adult in 2000 --- it is simply not believable that he was merely pretending to be this amiable doofus while hiding his secret plans to change American politics and the world.

None of that makes any difference in the results, however. They were able to persuade Bush to adopt their radical agenda without missing even a beat. Their most difficult challenge was dealing with institutional resistence from much of the governement (and even the GOP establishment) which was weak and ineffectual but still managed to muddy Bush's image as a CEO manager over time. And, of course, the abject failure of policies that have Bush in a perilous re-election fight that should have been easy after the gift (a trifecta!) of 9/11.

Like Atrios, I believe that there is absolutely no reason to buy the nonsense that the "good" Republicans are going to step up in the next term and make sure that Junior's little cabal is stripped of its power. They couldn't if they wanted to and I'm not sure they do. Junior has never shown even the slightest indication that he's displeased with his radical "achievments." Indeed, if he wins, he will perceive it as a sweeping mandate and validation of all he's done. That's how he thinks.

Let's hope that John Kerry will be able to penetrate Bush's folksy facade one more time tonight and reveal the abstruse radicalism of his powerful advisory cabal's true agenda. On these domestic issues, if people knew what they were truly planning, Bush would drop in the polls like a stone.







digby 10/13/2004 02:28:00 PM |

 
Brave Men

I don't know if everybody has seen this ad, but it's devastating. I was with a group of people when it came on a few minutes ago and it silenced the room.

Here's the rundown from Salon:

It's the obvious political ad that has just been waiting to be made -- a young Iraq war veteran, missing a body part, talking simply and directly to the camera about the sacrifice he made in the service of official lies. The idea didn't come from the Democratic Party, or MoveOn.org, or the Kerry campaign.

The new ad is the creation of a group of Iraq war veterans, most in their 20s, operating on a shoestring budget. Their organization, Operation Truth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group of 150 members, is dedicated to elevating the perspective of soldiers and holding elected officials accountable for their policy decisions.

"I was called to serve in Iraq because the government said there were weapons of mass destruction -- but they weren't there," Spc. Robert Acosta, 21, who was an ammunitions specialist with the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, says in the thought-provoking ad. "They said Iraq had something to do with 9/11 -- but the connection wasn't there ... So when people ask me where my arm went, I try to find the words, but they're not there." The ad ends with a shot of Acosta removing his prosthesis, revealing a stub where his right hand should be.

If you have any left, send these guys some money. They are the bravest group of young people in America --- for what they are facing physically and for having the cojones to speak out politically. It's never easy for soldiers to face the truth when their government lies to them.

Bravo.




digby 10/13/2004 01:12:00 PM |

 
Sherwood Like To See Some Results

Kevin at Catch the earliest muckraker on the "Stolen Honor" ratfuck way last summer, notes a delicious little tid-bit on Carlton Sherwood, the king of protester-porno.

Everyone knows by now that he was tapped to run the government web-site firstresponder.com. What's interesting is that it is now seven months behind schedule. Maybe Carlton needs to concentrate on his day job for a while and put a hold on his dirty tricks fantasy life. Millions are being wasted. As Kevin says:

Apologies to the first responders (read: heros) for the delay (homeland security can wait, you whiners)

I know it's not as important as "travelgate," when Brit Hume and his pals fell into the vapors for months proclaiming that cronyism in the white house travel office was just short of satanic, but this still might deserve a tiny bit of attention.

Take a look at the web site. These are your tax dollars at work, folks.




digby 10/13/2004 11:23:00 AM |

 
I Won't Be Ignoooored, Charlie

According to Wolf Blitzer, that bastard John Kerry was "really, really nasty" to poor little Junior in last week's debate which is why he was so "anxious to respond."

Media Matters reports that Blitzer asked Schieffer what he planned to do if Kerry pulled such a stunt again.

Here's the really, really nasty debate exchange:

KERRY: Now, I'm going to add 40,000 active-duty forces to the military, and I'm going to make people feel good about being safe in our military, and not overextended, because I'm going to run a foreign policy that actually does what President Reagan did, President Eisenhower did, and others. We're going to build alliances. We're not going to go unilaterally. We're not going to go alone like this president did.

GIBSON: Mr. President, let's extend for a minute --

BUSH: Let me just -- I've got to answer this.

GIBSON: Exactly. And with reservists being held on duty --

[crosstalk]

BUSH: Let me answer what he just said, about around the world.

GIBSON: Well, I want to get into the issue of the back-door draft --

BUSH: You tell Tony Blair we're going alone. Tell Tony Blair we're going alone. Tell Silvio Berlusconi we're going alone. Tell Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland we're going alone. There are 30 countries there. It denigrates an alliance to say we're going alone, to discount their sacrifices. You cannot lead an alliance if you say, you know, you're going alone. And people listen. They're sacrificing with us.

My goodness, the Cheerleader in Chief is awfully sensitive if he thinks that saying he "went it alone" is "really, really nasty." This, from John Edwards on The Tonight Show last night ought to send him into a complete tizzy:

"I run, I played a little football when I was in school. And the president, I think, was there at those football games too. He was, I think, on the side, maybe with his pompoms? Can you run fast with those cheerleading outfits on?"

Bada Bing.

As this piece in Rolling Stone pointed out, somebody has a very thin skin and somebody else is fully aware of it.




digby 10/13/2004 10:23:00 AM |

 
Talking In His Sleep?

Haaretz reports, "high-level terrorism suspects are being held in a top-secret detention facility in Jordan." Bush had been so concerned about keeping their location a secret, he told the CIA not to tell him where they were.

No wonder he doesn't know what's going on. Evidently, he can't trust himself not to blurt out top secret information.

Via The Progress Report




digby 10/13/2004 09:47:00 AM |

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

 
The Question No Reporter Dares Ask

Racicot, Mehlman, Eskew, Dyke, Bartlett:
We've always said it was going to be a close race.

Reporter With Balls:
Why is that, Mark, Tucker, Jim? President Bush had a ninety percent approval rating just a year and a half ago and you say the country still favors his policies. The president can't think of any decisions he might have made differently. Yet, today he is fighting for his political life. What happened? Why did the president fall so far in the polls and why is he having such a hard time putting this one away?




digby 10/12/2004 02:16:00 PM |

 
All In The Family

Via Atrios I see that Raw Story found another connection between Sinclair and the Bush administration --- a neat little company named Jadoo, that makes fuel cells and recently got a nice contract in the WOT.

It turns out that Jadoo has a close connection with another of Bush's close coporate friends --- Enron:

It wasn't long ago that Jadoo—which gets its name from the Hindi word for magic—was doing business in a three-car garage next to a chicken coop outside Sacramento. Jadoo's president, Larry Bawden, 45, learned about fuel-cell technology at Aerojet, based in Sacramento, where he worked as director of fuel-cell products. In 1995, Aerojet sold off his unit, and Bawden left with a golden parachute. Embarking on an around-the-world boat trip with his wife, he got as far as Australia before some former colleagues called. They persuaded him to return to become a vice president at a fuel-cell company they were starting called PowerTek. They'd soon lined up a huge customer—the energy giant Enron—but unfortunately it was about to collapse.

Good timing is everything in business. And fortunately for Bawden and two other colleagues at PowerTek, their point person at Enron, Jon [sic] Berger, was ready for a career move. They recruited him to join them in launching Jadoo in November 2001, just as he was starting at Harvard. After helping them write a business plan, Berger asked a classmate to critique it. The student was impressed enough to invest $200,000. The co-founders and four other employees put in more than $100,000. In the meantime Berger began approaching East Coast investors.

It didn't take long for Jadoo to attract interest from some major players. Among them was Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns 62 local news stations in the U.S.; it was the lead investor in a $5 million round of financing last year. But Jadoo's biggest coup came after President George W. Bush touted hydrogen as an alternative to foreign oil in his State of the Union speech last January. Jadoo, which had just released its first product—a long-lasting battery for the surveillance industry—was one of 22 fuel-cell companies invited to Washington to make a presentation to the White House. The others included giants like Ford and Motorola. Afterward, Jadoo was one of only seven firms invited to give one-on-one presentations to the President. The startup got some unexpected free publicity when Bush held a TV camera using one of Jadoo's lightweight fuel cells on his shoulder as media photographers captured the moment. Jadoo plans to begin selling such batteries to the broadcast market early next year.

Unexpected free publicity huh? Right.

And that fresh-faced kid Berger, the partner from Enron? Get a load of this:

Mr. Berger has over eight years of experience in the energy industry, during which he managed energy trading books for Enron Corporation and initiated development of the new Enron Premium Power Division. As a Manager, he made the previously unprofitable southeast short term trading operation for the Enron East Power Trading Division profitable by approximately $30 million over a two year period. Under his management, the southeast short term trading operation successfully administered the largest long-term customer deal in the industry, and increased the average daily volume in the southeast trading hub by ten times the former volume. Mr. Berger also managed the Enron Hourly Trading Desk, and operated a utility system in the southeastern United States. At Enron Energy Services he led and developed Enron's corporate strategy for new energy technologies and energy reliability financial products. In addition, Mr. Berger spearheaded development, investment, and partnership opportunities in fuel cell technologies.

During 2002 and 2003, Mr. Berger served as an advisor to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission where he drafted governance guidelines for the Regional Transmission Organizations and served as an advisor to the drafters of the Standard Market Design regulatory document that is currently before the United States Congress. He also advised the Commission on distributed generation, demand response, information gathering and application issues, investigations, and trade clearing/credit issues in the North American energy markets.

He's one of the assholes who worked in the "screwing Aunt Millie" Enron business, albeit in the southeast. And they immediately hired him to work on the FERC. Unbelievable.

He's quite the operator. When he was a Harvard, and also an executive with Jadoo, he organized the first Harvard Business School Energy Symposium. And waddaya know, guess who he invited?

Speaker Name: Larry Bawden
Speaker Title: CEO
Affiliation: Jadoo Power Systems


As the legend grew, Berger's "business plan" for Jadoo so impressed an unnamed classmate that he and some of his friends invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the company. (If the business plan said that one of the principles was an insider Bushie on the FERC and they could guarantee five million coming from a staunch Bush supporter plus a personal audience with the president, I'd take that bet too.) And the next thing you know, Bush is on television personally demonstrating the product and they have a nice fat contract with the DOD. Sweet.

What a cozy little circle jerk.


Update: Sid's Fishbowl has the same story.

digby 10/12/2004 01:36:00 PM |

 
Dial It In

Kos has created a great database of Sinclair affiliate information so that you can conveniently call and write your local station and its advertisers. It's best is you are actually a local to make an impact on local businesses. Kos also has a convenient list of natinal advertisers for all of us to contact.

I would suggest calling instead of writing, although a snail mail letter is very powerful too. To that end I've prepared a couple of introductory talking points to get you started if you aren't comfortable with doing stuff like this.

First, don't get mad. These people are very far away from the corporate decision and it serves no purpose to take out our anger on them. Tell them what you think and what you plan to do. Don't get bogged down in talking about your feelings or how upset you are by this. Make sure you mention that you will not buy their product or patronize their business if they support this thing and tell them that you are planning to talk about this with others to spread the word.

Calling the station managers and telling them that you are going to call advertisers is a good first step. I imagine that they are no longer talking calls today, but you can leave a message. Then call your local advertisers and tell them what you think. Use words like "controversy", "cheating", "unfair","unbusinesslike", "scam", "fraud" --- words with which businesses don't like to be associated.

Stay calm and make your case. These businesses don't want to deal with this crap and there's no reason to preemptively punish them for the acts of Sinclair. Speak more in sorrow than in anger "that it's come to this."

Here are a few phrases you might find will help you get started. Write in more in the comments section if you think of them and I'll pick the best ones and put them up too.

Sales managers:

Broadcast television stations have a unique responsibility to be guardians of the democratic process. You will not watch, nor will you patronize businesses that do not respect the rules and the law when it comes to fairness in elections.

You are going to call local advertisers and tell them that as long as they support this station's controversial intention of showing a political advertisement as news, you are not going to buy their product or patronize their business. Sinclair is cheating and you don't think that's fair. This is too important.

Corporate headquarters coming in and telling local news departments what they have to call news is just wrong. You are going to tell the local advertisers how you feel about that too. Local communities should have a say in what is shown on their own television stations. This is a scam on the good people of ____.

Local advertisers:

You don't care who somebody plans to vote for, but you think it's cheating for stations to run controversial political advertisements for one candidate and call it news.

You won't be able to support businesses that fund this kind of fraudulent and unbalanced partisanship.

After 2000, you realize that every vote counts and you think that elections are important enough to get involved with. You have a lot of friends who think the same way. This is something you feel strongly enough about to change your shopping habits over. This is unbusinesslike behavior and you don't think you can trust people who are so partisan.

You think that local communities letting corporations from out of state come in and tell local stations what they have to run us just wrong and you can't support that.


Josh Marshall says that station affiliates are asking callers to call Sinclair headquarters instead of advertisers.

Nice try, but we're not Republicans.


digby 10/12/2004 11:39:00 AM |

 
Pouty Press Tarts

Atrios has posted an excerpt from this article in which McCurry discusses Bush's obvious insecurity, an observation with which I concur. Everything about the man oozes insecurity and immaturity, always has.

This same article contains an interesting observation about the press corpse which I also think deserves some analysis:

In late september, i spent a week on the Kerry plane. Unlike the 2000 Bush plane, which became notorious for its party atmosphere -- margaritas flowed at the end of the day and affairs among the press corps were widely rumored -- the feeling on the Kerry plane is professional and businesslike. It soon became apparent that many members of Kerry's traveling press make no attempt to hide their open dislike of the candidate. The morning after Kerry had addressed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gala on the evening of September 15th, two members of the press corps were talking on a campaign bus. "That event was stupid," one said, referring to the previous night's occasion -- one of the largest Hispanic galas of its type. "A waste of time," the other said.

Other reporters were just as dismissive. Kerry had gotten a series of impassioned standing ovations during his speech. But when Elisabeth Bumiller described the event in the New York Times, she said, referring to a moment when Kerry spoke an entire paragraph in flawless Spanish, "Kerry's audience . . . listened in startled silence, then broke out into cheers and applause when he made his way through [the paragraph]."

But to report on these events accurately would mean you had to say something unqualified and positive about Kerry. This is something his traveling press corps has been -- and still is -- loath to do. On the evening of September 21st, outside an auditorium in Orlando, where inside more than 7,500 people were screaming wildly as Kerry spoke, Candy Crowley stood next to the venue and reported on CNN that Kerry was "trying . . . to rev up the crowd." The implication was unmistakable: Kerry's supporters in Florida were resistant, even standoffish. Just to make sure Crowley was able to get away with downplaying the event as she was, CNN never showed a wide shot of the large, cheering crowd.

As a result of the media bias against Kerry, there is an unmistakable disconnect between what you see on the trail when you travel with him and the way he is depicted in the media. On Mike McCurry's first trips on the plane, the Thursday and Friday after Labor Day, he immediately identified the animosity that existed between Kerry and the press corps. Specifically, the traveling press were mad because Kerry had not given a press conference since August 9th, five days into the SBVT controversy. McCurry realized he needed to fix the problem at once.

But, that can't be it. Bush never gives press conferences and he treats reporters like shit, yet the press has been fawning toward him since 2000. Why is it that the press corpse persists in treating Democratic candidates this way?

I don't think it's political. I think it's an institutional habit of mind that they are too lazy or too self-absorbed to challenge. "The Democrat" is an object of derision and mistrust, no matter who he or she is. Like so many others in this country, the media have absorbed and internalized the right wing propaganda about the Democratic Party and their subconscious attitudes and behaviors are a reflection of that. It's not an ideological or even a political bias. It's a personal bias born of right wing cant. Reporters need to take a good hard look at themselves and recognize that they've been spun in the worst way possible and they need to unwind themselves from the bullshit.

It is quite a testament to Kerry's political acumen and Bush's ineptitude that we have managed to stay so close in the last two elections considering this pervasive media bias against Democratic politicians.

Kos discusses today the necessity of keeping up the fight even after we win this November --- it's a long slog, as Rummy memorably said. Trying to unspin the press from their toxic habits of mind is part of that process.






digby 10/12/2004 11:02:00 AM |

 
Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni

Via First Draft and Hesiod, here are the Sinclair online polls. Take just a moment to stop impending fascism, won't you folks?


Las Vegas
Minneapolis
Flint
Buffalo
Las Vegas (second station)
Milwaukee
Oklahoma City
Pittsburgh
Raleigh
Rochester
Tampa


Update: Check out this post by Josh Marshall if you haven't already. Airing your complaints to the local advertisers is a powerful way to put pressure on these stations.


digby 10/12/2004 09:09:00 AM |

Monday, October 11, 2004

 
Not Into Nuisances

Ezra wonders Why Does George W. Bush Hate Brent Scowcroft?

He must hate lil' Davy Horowitz's favorite tin soldier, Ralph Peters too:

The security environment will improve as Saddam, Osama and their most virulent supporters are killed. Eliminating terrorist operatives, masterminds and supportive dictators brings vital results. But we will never reduce Islamic terrorism to nuisance level unless we address the greater evil behind the deadly strikes.

This respected Fox News terrorism analyst has similar heretical ideas.

Why on earth would anyone ever think that the tactic of terrorism could be reduced to nuisance levels when it is the ultimate battle between good 'n evul? My God, there has never been a threat as grave as this in the entire history of the world. It cannot just be reduced, we must kill all the bad guys and spread freedom and goodness and puppies and ice cream! Don't these people know anything?




digby 10/11/2004 09:52:00 PM |

 
Rocking Chair Babies

Of all modern popular culture touchstones, I have to say that the South Park phenomenon interests me about the least. I find Stone and Parker's alleged iconoclasm pretty boring. That's just me.

This morning I watched an exchange on Fox News between two vacuous talking heads, though, that made me realize that they really are a couple of useful idiots for the right. The gasbags were going on and on about how silly it was for Sean Penn to get angry about a purported message in their new puppet movie in which they tell young people not to vote. It sounded like typical FOX blather, and I assumed that Penn was being his usual wingnut bait. But, the gasbags then took the South Park silliness and applied it to an indictment of Rock the Vote and other youth outreach groups in general by condemning the youth vote in general as uninformed, mostly by using liberal arguments as examples. It became apparent that there is a subtle GOP youth suppression campaign going on, for reasons that are obvious.

Here's Parker and Stone's response to Sean Penn's letter in today's Salon.

According to Stone, "when you read it, the letter comes from such a high place of arrogance, you know, [deep, serious voice] 'You guys are young guys! If you don't have children, you can't say anything about anything!' And the whole voting thing. All we ever said was that we thought that uninformed people should not vote -- on either side of the political spectrum. It doesn't matter who you're gonna vote for. If you really don't know who you're gonna vote for, or are uninformed, or haven't really thought about it? Just stay home. Don't let people fucking shame you into going to the polls."

Added Parker: "If you have absolutely no idea, fuck it."

"If you really don't know or you're just going to vote for George Bush because he's already in office, or you're gonna vote for John Kerry because he's on the cover of Rolling Stone, don't do that," Stone said. "That's lame. Just stay home. That's all we ever said."

An irreverent attitude that one might expect from ones so young. That 44 year old asshole Sean Penn is being a mean old man.

But, Parker is 35 and Stone is 33. Getting a little long in tooth to be protesting on the basis of their youthful impudence, don't you think?




digby 10/11/2004 05:10:00 PM |

 
Et tu Russert?

Chris Bowers has a number of helpful links in this post on MYDD, if you would like to protest the Sinclair nonsense. I would imagine that Sinclair, since it is openly and proudly partisan, actually believes that this is good for their cause. (They may just be surprised to find that their stations start screaming bloody murder, however, if they are harrassed day after day over this thing.)

I suspect that this will ultimately be decided by lawyers as Steve Soto and ex-commissioner Reed Hundt indicate. It may also be interesting to see what the FCC has to say about it in a general sense, although I have no hope that they would necessarily step in for the common good.

There is another avenue, to which Soto alludes in his post, that may be worth pursuing. Sinclair is insisting that this be shown as a "news" program and is offering Kerry some free airtime to respond on a panel or a call-in show in order to satisfy the McCain-Feingold law. They apparently believe that they can simply tell their stations to "call it news" without any sort of repurcussions from the news divisions of these stations or, more importantly, the network news divisions that air their nightly programs on those stations. Why is that?

This is an advertisement that is done in vitually the same format as the Swift Boat ads and even featuring many of the same sad old men who are stuck in a time warp. The local news divisions of those stations should scream bloody murder, but there are so few notions of journalistic integrity in local news left that I wouldn't expect much. (It may be worth trying to cause dissension in those newsrooms, however, by writing some letters and calling the stations and asking the news managers and reporters about their journalistic ethics.) But, this is beyond those local stations. By insisting that this program be aired as news, Sinclair is also implicating the national news networks in their act.

ABC, CBS and NBC have a stake in this. This isn't a local story; it involves a national election and it will be aired on a large number of their affiliate channels that also air the national news shows that are identified with those stations. It will likely be seen as having their impramatur even if they have nothing to do with it.

Will what is left of the national broadcast news media step up and use their clout to protest the corporate owners of their affiliate stations using their network's hard won news credibility to pass off a George W. Bush campaign commercial as a news event? They really should because if they sit back and say nothing, the last shred of their independence and journalistic integrity will have been tossed into the garbage can.

It's been a rough year for the mainstream news organizations. Maybe it's time they spoke up for what's right and redeemed a little bit of their honor. Unless they like being nothing but lackeys and whores, this may be one of their last chances to stand up for journalistic integrity. They won't have too many more chances.




digby 10/11/2004 02:59:00 PM |

 
Partisan Gamers

Campaign Desk prints a warning from one of its readers about the Iowa Electronic markets that I think should be flooded to any news organization that decides it would be fun to write about its miraculous predictive powers in past elections:

"Once you get past the lack of acuity [of] markets ... in general, there are simply too many additional problems with these minute exchanges" such as the Iowa Electronics Markets. "They are too small, have too little money at stake, and are therefore readily susceptible to undue 'influence'" by mischief makers.

The fact is that in past elections nobody paid attention to them so there wasn't the likelihood that anyone would think they would be worth gaming as they are this year.

Therefore, the IEM is best seen now as an unscientific online poll. The money is pretty inconsequential so it's not very risky to make the numbers move and that's exactly what's happening.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this. One is to attempt to educate the media, as this piece does, about how easy it is to manipulate such a small market. The other is to fight fire with fire and put our own cash on the barrelhead.

I'm not sure how effective the first option would be since it's never worked before. But, it might just be worth opening an account to trade in these last couple of weeks. Maybe it's not a big enough deal to worry about, though. Still, for those with a lot of disposable income, this might be a place to wager a couple of bucks.




digby 10/11/2004 10:52:00 AM |

 
R.I.P. Christopher Reeve

He was a good guy who inspired us all when his previously charmed life threw him a terrible curveball. One would think that Americans, no matter the political party or religion, would all mourn a man who showed such courage and determination in the face of adversity and spoke so eloquently for others with similar disabilities. It seems almost inhuman that some people can't feel any empathy for someone who had been a celebrated movie superhero one moment and in the next became a fragile corporeal being facing the most fundamental and difficult challenges a person can face --- and who then became an inspiration and spokeman for others with the catastrophic disability he lived with from that moment on. But there are such people.

Evidently, over on Free Republic quite a few people got out of hand and made some ugly remarks about Reeve and the moderator had to remove the threads. Here are some examples of the perfectly acceptable ones that remain:

Wouldn't rule out that Kerry might have spoke with Reeve before the last debate. Reeve might have had an idea the end was near for him and told Kerry to play up the emotional angle with stem cell research and Reeve's own paralyzed circumstance.

Wonder if Hell is handicapped accessible..

The willingness to sacrifice another life to save his own was not worthy of the Man of Steel.

I'm sorry, but I have no compassion for this man. He suffered a terrible injury through his own fault and, instead of accepting it, he lashes out in anger against Bush.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Kerry got the news of Reeve's death. Did he hang up and shout "YES!"? Did he dance a little jig? Did he excitedly phone McAuliffe with the news? Noone but Mama T knows...

Reeve? Is this the guy who, his picture-perfect Hollywood life having been tragically altered by an accident, spent the remainder of his life advocating the killing of unborn children so that he might walk again?

He was a 3rd-rate actor (Ever see him in any movie besides Superman? When playing a real human being, he was dreadful!). When injured living a life of luxury and leisure, he fought for vain, desperate hopes for what might keep him alive, even if it caused the deaths of millions. Contrary to mythology, he sunk into bitter, violent anger, pouring every ounce of derision he possibly could on Christianity and America. And then he simply died.

I'm sorry for Reeve's family...his wife has stood by him for several tragic years. However, to have liberals (Ron Reagan will probably be leading the charge) milk this is disgusting. And let's be honest...Christopher Reeve WAS doing something that was very dangerous when he broke his neck. A lot of us common folks are living with situations that just happened...beyond our control and not our fault. That's what life is about, and we don't have wealthy friends helping support an extravagant lifestyle.

I have a feeling that Kerry was tipped off about Reeve's condition prior to the 2nd debate, which is why he mentioned him along with Michael J. Fox. You can bet Kerry will again mention Reeve at the 3rd debate. It is this crude, blatant exploitation of the disabled and afflicted, which make the Dems so despicable. They provide false hope in order to win debating points and votes. The implication will be that GWB caused the death of Reeve.

You could make an argument that the first implemention of "Political Correctness" was the custom of speaking better about someone after their death than while they were living. But I won't try to make that argument here. I will say this: if it were demonstrated that Reeve, knowing the seriousness of his condition, actually made an explicit request that his possible death be used to help the Kerry campaign, all subsequent scorn would be deserved.

Oh, this is going to be disgusting. Bitter twst of fate that Reeve is mentioned by Kerry and then he dies. Or perhaps did Kerry know in advance Reeve was ill/on his deathbed?

Is there no level of filth to which these Dems won't sink?

The main gist of the dem line is: we need to keep legal the ability to take growing humans and detroy them through abortion so we can use their body parts to help other people like Chris Reeve (potentially) live better. The bloodlust is positively demonic.
I am just not happy hearing about this this AM.

Ahh... reminds me of the Paul Wellstone rally err memorial service. Always trying to work in a political advantage over a death, aren't they.

You think you're cynical? I am wondering if Clark Kent would possibly pull the plug on himself in a desperate attempt to "matyrize" the stem-cell issue and help Kerry?

Reeve seemed like a nice chap until he got involved with the pro-death wing of the democrat party. We can't always get what we want, but we often get what we deserve.

The fact is, Mr. Reeve spent his last days using his fame and access to champion the murder of unborn children.

The fact is, Mr. Reeve took very clear and very selfish political stands and used his medical condition to gin up sympathy for murder.

My point is that some people spend their entire lives breaking down traditional morality and then when they die they are eulogized as if they did as much for the world as Mother Theresa.

Reeves spent his last few years advocating the destruction of human life in order to find a cure for what ailed HIM. It may have seemed selfless to some, but in reality and objectively, it was selfish. He was looking for a cure and if it meant the destruction of unborn children to acheive that end, then too bad for them. He was not willing to let a fetus stand between him and his goalpost.

Sure hope he was a saved man. Otherwise right now he is roasting in hell.

I shudder to think what the deleted threads contained...

Reeve was a better man on his worst day in Hollywood than these solipsistic little morons could ever hope to be.







digby 10/11/2004 10:08:00 AM |

Sunday, October 10, 2004

 
Speaking Of Unseemly Bulges

As we watch the distressing spectacle of the cable shows shilling for Junior in these last three weeks, I think it might be helpful to take a trip down memory lane. It was once much, much worse. There was a time not so long ago when the boys and girls in the press were panting and moaning and fidgeting in their seats at the mere mention of the TopGun in his Chippendale's costume.

May 3, 2003:

MATTHEWS: Let's go to this sub--what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo of in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I've got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on--onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I'm not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn't do it for me personally, especially not when he's in a suit, but he arrived there...

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: ...he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn't he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa--I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just--I can't think of any, any stunt by the White House--and I'll call it a stunt--that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It's not a stunt if it works and it's real. And I felt the faces of those guys--I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of--the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he--you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That's what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you're watching that from--say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We're coming.' Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not--we've allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it's time to tell them, you know what, `You're going to be help accountable for this.'

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

After the segment, Chris handed out cigarettes and ice cold bottles of evian to the panel. But they had rolled over and gone to sleep.

If there has ever been a more embarrassing display of repressed erotic longing on national television, I haven't seen it. Oh, wait:

From May 13, 2003, Via The Daily Howler:

MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?

LIDDY: Well, I-- in the first place, I think it's envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man [Official Naomi Wolf Spin-Point]. And here comes George Bush. You know, he's in his flight suit, he's striding across the deck, and he's wearing his parachute harness, you know --- and I've worn those because I parachute --- and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman's vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn't count --- they're all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.

"You know, it's funny. I shouldn't talk about ratings," he [Matthews] said, also gazing at Bush's crotch. "But last night was a riot because ... these pictures were showing last night, and everybody's tuning in to see these pictures again."

I plan to make it my life's work to remind Chris Matthews of these little exchanges. It was the day that Matthews revealed that he and the other mediawhores were not just shilling for the GOP for professional reasons, but that they actually had a barely contained (and inexplicable) sexual attraction to George W. Bush. It explained so very much. Today, when you see him and Mrs Greenspan rushing to proclaim Cheney a big winner,for instance, perhaps it is best understood as a way of distancing themselves from an unrequited love while leaving the door open in case there is still a chance for a passionate encounter, for old time's sake.

If there is one question that I would love to see somebody ask any member of the Bush administration, it is how come they are fighting for their lives when less than eighteen short months ago they not only had a 90% approval rating, they had the entire US press corpse on its knees, quivering and drooling in anticipation of a mere taste of the manly presidential life force. Seems to me that's the real story of this election. How in the hell did they fall so far, so fast?




digby 10/10/2004 02:20:00 PM |

 
As Ye Sew...

It appears that the the latest presidential bulge pictures --- the one in the middle of his back, this time --- are making their way into the major news media. And the White House has no decent explanation for them. Indeed, they seem to be in a bit of a tizzy.

First they said that pictures showing the bulge might have been doctored. But then, when the bulge turned out to be clearly visible in the television footage of the evening, they offered a different explanation.

"There was nothing under his suit jacket," said Nicolle Devenish, a campaign spokeswoman.

"It was most likely a rumpling of that portion of his suit jacket, or a wrinkle in the fabric."

Ms. Devenish could not say why the "rumpling" was rectangular.

Nor was the bulge from a bulletproof vest, according to campaign and White House officials; they said Mr. Bush was not wearing one.

This article on the BBC web-site, hilariously headlined "Bush's bulge stirs media rumours" is equally skeptical of the explanations, but they go the extra mile and interview the president's tailor, who says that it was simply a pucker. A perfectly rectangular pucker.

I believe that the identity of Hopalong Bushie's tailor ... a man profiled here on Hillnews.com named Georges de Paris, provides the answer to the mystery of the bulge:

Georges de Paris — that’s his real name — is a household name at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., where he is regularly summoned these days from his cluttered shop two blocks away to measure and fit President Bush, just as he did his father and every other president of the last 40 years.

[...]

de Paris, who became a U.S. citizen in 1969, met the current president while altering slacks for his father. Shortly after the younger Bush was declared the winner of the contested 2000 election, the White House called again.

[...]

Since then, de Paris has made numerous visits to the White House, often on a crash basis, to add a suit or sport coat to the president’s wardrobe or to measure and fit aides like Chief of Staff Andrew Card for custom-made suits that cost between $2,000 and $3,000.

Oooh la la. Monsieur de Paris charges quite the pretty penny for his creations, doesn't he?

I hate to say it, but of I were a NASCAR dad or a security mom, I'd be more than a little bit concerned that this french "tailor" may have put that perfectly rectangular bulge in the preznit's suit to spy for Chirac. It's just the kind of thing those old Europeans do...

And just what in the heck is our manly preznit doing letting some man named Georges, ("Zhorzh — that’s what everyone, including the president, calls him") touch his bulges in a time of war, anyway? Couldn't they find a tailor from one of the allied countries like Uzbekhistan or Poland?

At the very least, it is more than a little unwise to allow nefarious french tailors to undermine the president's credibility by placing suspicious rectangular "puckers" in his clothing. Georges de Paris is obviously an unlawful combatant. Send him to Gitmo and force him to wear one of those horrid bright orange jumpsuits. We'll find out the truth soon enough.




digby 10/10/2004 01:39:00 PM |

 
Hello?

My ISP was mysteriously offline for the past day due to a "network problem" so I've been off-line as well.

I'm pretty sure it was Clinton's fault.




digby 10/10/2004 11:53:00 AM |

Saturday, October 09, 2004

 
America's Ex-husband

Angry, hectoring, condescending and loud. Very loud. He yelled at John Kerry, he yelled at Charlie Gibson, he even yelled at at the questioners. He yelled in short, punctuated bursts as if he thought he needed to spell out simple concepts. (He looked like he wanted to walk up to a couple of the questioners and jab a finger in their chests as he lectured them like children.) But then, he's always slightly pissed.

From James Wolcott's "The Bush Bunch," Vanity Fair July 2004:

Over Christmas in 2000, on the eve of W's joining his father and brother Jeb in Florida for a fishing trip (a bit of R&R after the protracted recount battle), Jenna suffered stomach troubles and was rushed to the hospital. She required an emergency appendectomy. Her mother slept at the hospital; her father wasn't present for the surgery and, never one to miss a vacation, didn't let it delay his exit. Gerhart picks up the rest of the story in THE PERFECT WIFE:

"The next day, he went on vacation to Florida just as he had planned. As he boarded the plane, reporters inquired about Jenna's condition. 'Maybe she'll be able to join us in Florida,' the president-elect said. 'If not, she can clean her room.' The reporters stared at him, stunned. 'I couldn't believe it,' one of those present later said. 'First of all, I'm a father, and I cannot imagine a scenario in which my daughter would have major surgery and I would just leave on vacation. And then he just seemed so snarly about it, like he was pissed at her.'"

Why would a father be "pissed" at his daughter for falling ill? An emergency appendectomy isn't some little sniffle. Notice how, despite his reputed ease with strong women, Bush can't resist the domestic stereotype when the safely catch comes off his mouth. When the usually punctual Karen Hughes is late for a meeting after being stuck in traffic (she recounts in TEN MINUTES FROM NORMAL), Bush, "a man who hates to wait," greets her by asking, "Did you have fun shopping?" Laura he has sweeping the porch back in Crawford like some pioneer woman. And Jenna he sentences to stay home during the family vacation and clean her room, as if she were being punished.

He's the dad who is always mad. Surly, unpredictable, spoiled. You know the type. "I'm the commander in chief, see. I don't need to explain ... Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

Last night, the only mistake he admitted to making was appointing some unnamed officials at whom he was obviously peeved. He said it in the same tone in which he said that Jenna could stay and clean her room.

This is a man who treats women like servants and men like lackeys. And last night he angrily yelled at America as if we were his long suffering, abused wife.

I think it's time for divorce.



Update: Michael Tomasky had a similar impression.



digby 10/09/2004 05:42:00 AM |

Friday, October 08, 2004

 
Here They Go Again

Ok. So, they're reduced to "liberal liberal liberal." Like every other election since 1968. Yawn.

Is that enough this time?

C'Mon. For any thinking person, Kerry won this debate. But, since Bush didn't completely act like a blithering fool, shills like Pat Buchanan are out there to spin him as a great winner. He just said he was impressed that Bush managed to control himself.

The whores are out in force and they have their marching orders. But the fact is that Kerry was statesmanlike, in control and strong. They can try to make their bubble boy look like a winner, but it's a hard sell.

Call the networks. Let them know what you think. Here are the numbers:

ABC News

www.abcnews.com

47 W. 66th St
New York, NY 10023
Phone: (212) 456-7477, 456-3796
Fax: (212) 456-4866, 456-2795


World News Tonight with Peter Jennings

Phone: (212) 456-4040
peterjennings@worldnewstonight.abcnews.com
Fax: (212) 456-2771


CBS News

www.cbsnews.com
542 W. 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

News Desk:
Phone: (212) 975-4321, 975-3691
Fax: (212) 975-1893


CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Fox News

www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453


NBC News

www.nbc.com

30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Phone: (212) 664-5900
Fax: (212) 664-2914


NPR

www.npr.org

635 Mass Ave
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: (202) 414-2323
Fax: (202) 414-3324


PBS

www.pbs.org

PO BOX 50880
Washington, DC 20091
Phone: (800) 356-2626




digby 10/08/2004 09:30:00 PM |

 
Guilt By Association

So, they have Ann "Nazi Bitch" Coulter on combatting Crossfire host Paul Begala and Dick Gephardt.

Ann's most recent comments a just today are:

"I noticed the Democrats go crazy when it is pointed out, you know, I think the terrorists would prefer for the Democrats to win this one. You know, they don't argue that's not true. What they say is, "That argument is out of bounds." But of course it is. Surely Osama [bin Laden] -- well, I think Osama's dead -- but you know Al Qaeda terrorists must have some relative preference for one presidential candidate over another. Why can't it be stated? Of course they prefer the Democrats because the Democrats will never think it's the right war at the right time." [Radio America, Battle Line with Alan Nathan, 10/7]

One good way to outrage the enemy [Democrats] is to defend the United States of America. ... It drives them crazy. [KVI Talk Radio 570, the Kirby Wilbur show, 10/7]

The liberals already lost Vietnam for us. The Swift Boat Vets just aren't going to let them lose another war for us. [KVI Talk Radio 570, the Kirby Wilbur show, 10/7]

Democrats are good Bolsheviks. No matter, I mean, their guy could fall flat on his face, as I think [Senator John] Edwards did, and they will all rush to the TV cameras and say, "Oh, Edwards won the debate." And so you end up with a consensus position, even when the Republican beat the Democrat about the head, as [Vice President Dick] Cheney did with Edwards. [Radio America, Battle Line with Alan Nathan, 10/7]

[Responding to a caller who asked, "When are we going to stop misusing the word 'liberal' and start calling Democrats 'socialists,' which they really are?"] That's funny you say that. I mean they [Democrats] are socialists, but I hear liberal, and I think that's a worse epithet than socialist. ... I have pretty negative associations with it. [Radio America, Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily RadioActive, 10/6]

Their [Democrats'] response to a principled argument, you know, on taxes or on the war in Iraq, is to investigate your personal life to find out if you're into S and M. [KVI Talk Radio 570, the Kirby Wilbur show, 10/7]

[Responding to host John Moore, who asked, "You have very little patience with liberals, but that's half the population of your country essentially. ... So, I mean, you don't hate half the population of the United States, do you?"] No, I hold them [liberals] in contempt and I give them a Midol [medication for premenstrual syndrome]. That seems to calm them down. [NEWSTALK 1010 CFRB, the John Moore show, 10/7]

Paul Begala and Dick Gephardt and every single Democrat should REFUSE to appear against this fucking Nazi whore on television. It is a travesty that this insane harpy is part of any decent commentary on broadcast television.

Please spare me any more whining and weeping about Michael Moore in the future. This heinous douchebag makes Moore look like Winston Churchill. If she's giving that pathetic old fuck Larry King bj's that's her business, but the Democratic party really should draw the line at appearing on television with the GOP Paris Hilton version of Benito Mussolini as if she's a rational person. What will we tell the children?







digby 10/08/2004 08:58:00 PM |

 
A Grown-up Is In Charge?

Have we ever had such an angry, privileged, snotty, immature president in the history of this country?

Bush can still not give even one example of a mistake he's made --- except appointing certain people he appointed that he won't name. (It must be Paul O'Neill and Larry Lindsay because they are the only ones he fired.)

As he has always been, he remains, a piece of shit.




digby 10/08/2004 07:33:00 PM |

 
Which One Will We See Tonight?



Before the debate I wanted to reprise the following post in case anybody has any lingering doubt that George W. Bush has two faces. One Public, One Private. One Phony, One Real:

Over the last week or so we have seen an edgy, enigmatic black and white image of George W. Bush appear on web-sites and blogs. At first people thought that sites had been hacked, as Eschaton and Kos and Democratic Underground spontaneously erupted with the black and white figure only to have it disappear and randomly return. Within days it linked to a mysterious DNC web-site with cryptic material that only slowly came into focus. Clearly something was up.

This image is disconcerting and it evokes strong reactions because it symbolizes the cognitive dissonance so many of us have been living with for the last four years as we’ve watched the man who lost the election but won the office drive us to distraction with the contradictions of his character. And nothing has been more frustrating than the fact that so many in the media and in the public at large seemed to see something entirely different than we did.

I believe that this happened because after 9/11, the media cast Bush in the role of strong, resolute leader, perhaps because the nation needed him to be that, at least for a little while. And the people gratefully laid that mantle on him and he took it because the office demanded no less. The narrative of the nation at war required a warrior leader and George W. Bush was all we had. Karl Rove and others understood that they could use this veil to soothe the American people and flatter the president to take actions that no prudent, thoughtful leader would have taken after our initial successes in Afghanistan. This “man with the bullhorn” image of Bush crystallized in the minds of many Americans and has not been revisited until now.

That phony image took us from a sense of national unity to a misguided war with Iraq; it excused his failure to effectively manage the economy and fomented partisan warfare by portraying dissent as unpatriotic; it allowed people to overlook his obvious failure to take the threat of al Qaeda seriously before 9/11 (and even after) and created a hagiography based on wishful thinking and emotional need rather than any realistic appraisal of his leadership.

His handlers wisely kept him under wraps, allowing him face time on television only in the company of world leaders or to give stirring speeches written by his gifted speechwriter, Mark Gerson. He rarely held press conferences and when he took questions, he was aggressively unresponsive, choosing instead to offer canned sound bites and slogans and daring the press corps to call him on it. Few did. The mask stayed in place and he remained a symbol instead of a president --- the symbol of American strength, resilience and fortitude. He was, in many people’s minds, the president they wished they had.

On Thursday night sixty-one million people watched George W. Bush for the first time since 9/11 not as that symbol, but as a man. And for those who had not reassessed their belief in his personal leadership since 9/11, it was quite a shock. Their strong leader was inarticulate, arrogant, confused and immature. They must be wondering who that man was.

The truth is that since George W. Bush entered politics he has always had two faces. In fact, virtually everything you know about his public persona is the opposite of the real person.

He claims to be a compassionate, caring man, often admonishing people to "love your neighbor like you loved to be loved yourself." Yet, going all the way back to Yale, he is quoted as saying he disapproved of his fellow students as "people who felt guilty about their lot in life because others were suffering." His business school professor remembers him saying that poor people are poor because they are lazy. This from a man who was born rich into one of America's leading families and relied on those connections for everything he ever achieved.

He lectures on responsibility, saying that he's going to end the era of "if it feels good do it" and yet he failed to live up to his responsibility as a young man in the crucible of his generation, the Vietnam war. In fact, if it felt good, he did it and did it with relish --- for forty years of his fifty eight year life. He has never fully owned up to what he did during those years spent in excess and hedonism, relying on a convenient claim of being “born again” to expiate him of his sins. Would that everyone had it so easy.

He ostentatiously calls himself a committed Christian and yet he rarely attends church unless it’s a campaign stop or a national occasion. The man who claims that Christ is his favorite political philosopher famously and cruelly mocked a condemned prisoner begging for her life. He portrays himself as a man of rectitude yet he pumped his fist and said "feels good!" in the moment before he announced that the Iraq war had begun. (One would have thought that if there was ever a time to utter a prayer it was then.) How many funerals of the fallen has he attended? How many widows has he personally comforted?

He portrays himself as a salt of the earth "hard working" rancher, clearing brush on his land in an artfully sweaty Calvin Klein-style t-shirt. Yet in the first 8 months of his presidency leading up to 9/11, he spent 42% of his time on vacation. His "ranching" didn't begin until he bought his million dollar property just before he ran for president in 1999. He has lived in suburbs and cities since a brief period in his childhood in the 50’s, when he lived in the medium sized boom town of Midland before going to Andover.

He actively promotes the notion that he is a man of action yet in the single most important moment of his life he froze in front of school kids, continuing on with a script prepared before the national psyche was blown to bits. He didn’t take charge. He didn’t react. He was paralyzed at the moment of the nation’s worst peril.

He claims to be a strong leader and yet he is skillfully manipulated by his staff, who learned early that the only thing they needed to do to convince him of the rightness of their recommended course was to flatter him by saying it was the "brave" or "bold" thing to do. His self-image as a resolute leader is actually a lack of self confidence that is ripe for exploitation by competing advisors who use it to convince this him to do their bidding. This explains why he seems to believe that he is acting with resolve when he has just affected an abrupt about-face. His advisors had persuaded him to change course simply by telling him he was being resolute.

George W. Bush is a man with two faces--- a public image of manly strength and a private reality of childish weakness. His verbal miscues and malapropisms are the natural consequence of a man struggling with internal contradictions and a lack of self-knowledge. He can’t keep track of what he is supposed to think and say in public.

There is no doubt that whether it's a cowboy hat or a crotch hugging flightsuit , George W. Bush enjoys wearing the mantle of American archetypal warriors. But when he goes behind the curtain and sheds the costume, a flinty, thin-skinned, immature man who has never taken responsibility for his mistakes emerges. The strong compassionate leader is revealed as a flimsy paper tiger.

On Thursday night, the president forgot himself. After years of being protected from anyone who doesn't flatter and cajole, he let his mask slip when confronted with someone who didn't fear his childish retribution or need anything from him. Many members of the public got a good sharp look at him for the first time in two years and they were stunned. Like that black and white image, the dichotomy of the real Bush vs. the phony Bush is profoundly discomfiting.

Luckily for America and the world, a fully synthesized, mature man stood on the other side of that stage ready to assume the mantle of leadership, not as a theatrical costume but as an adult responsibility for which he is prepared by a lifetime of service, study and dedication. I would imagine that many voters felt a strong sense of relief that he was there.





digby 10/08/2004 04:28:00 PM |

 
Live Blogging

Thanks to Chris Bowers over at MYDD, the following are helpful debate resources for tonight:

Here is a list of polls to stuff tonight, and here is a list of emails for people and institutions you can contact. Here is a group fact-checking project for rapid response, and here is another collective, fact-checking, rapid response project..

I just heard Joe Trippi announce that the Kos project will have 200,000 Americans doing fact checking tonight. Matthews snorted derisively. Putz.

Remember to use those night minutes and call them to let them know what you think:

ABC News

www.abcnews.com

47 W. 66th St
New York, NY 10023
Phone: (212) 456-7477, 456-3796
Fax: (212) 456-4866, 456-2795


World News Tonight with Peter Jennings

Phone: (212) 456-4040
peterjennings@worldnewstonight.abcnews.com
Fax: (212) 456-2771


CBS News

www.cbsnews.com
542 W. 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

News Desk:
Phone: (212) 975-4321, 975-3691
Fax: (212) 975-1893


CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Fox News

www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453


NBC News

www.nbc.com

30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Phone: (212) 664-5900
Fax: (212) 664-2914


NPR

www.npr.org

635 Mass Ave
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: (202) 414-2323
Fax: (202) 414-3324


PBS

www.pbs.org

PO BOX 50880
Washington, DC 20091
Phone: (800) 356-2626





digby 10/08/2004 04:10:00 PM |

 
What's Wrong With This Picture?

Hardball panel:

Chris Matthews, Norah O'Donnell, David Gregory, Howard Fineman and ... Ben Ginsberg.

The consensus in this fair and balanced panel is that Bush is going to unleash hell on Kerry tonight by pounding him as a liberalsissywimpflipfloppingloser. Which, of course, he is. Really, the only reason Bush is having problems at all is because the TV screens are showing that the country has gone to hell. Nothing he can't handle.




digby 10/08/2004 04:06:00 PM |

 
Bubble Boy

Some critics and supporters of US President George W. Bush agree on an intriguing explanation for his poor showing in his first debate with Democratic rival John Kerry: Blame it on the White House "bubble."

[...]

Even allowing for heightened protection around him in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush has taken unusual pains to insulate himself from hard questions from those who disagree with him.


He has held fewer press conferences than any modern president -- including his father, former president George Bush -- and aides who disagreed publicly with him have generally recanted swiftly and humbly or left the administration.

[...]

Bush on Wednesday blamed his facial expressions on what he said were Kerry's constantly shifting or even contradictory views on Iraq saying: "You hear all that and you can understand why somebody would make a face."

But the president rarely hears a discouraging word, as he is largely isolated from critics, reporters, bad news, and a public deeply divided over the March 2003 Iraq invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.


One of his reelection campaign's staple events is dubbed "Ask President Bush," a session in which he takes questions from friendly audiences of campaign aides and carefully screened supporters with nary a heckler in sight.

The first question at one such event on October 4 was a good example of the feedback he typically gets: "Mr President, first, we just want to tell you that we pray for you every night as our President."

Bush has repeatedly declared that he mostly ignores newspaper coverage, telling Fox News television in September 2003 that he prefers to "get briefed by people who probably read the news themselves."

This would be interesting except for the fact that evidence is that Junior has always been an ass. He's extremely spoiled and while the power of the presidency has undoubtedly magnified that characteristic, it's fundamental to his character. There's a reason why he's called "smirk."

Here's a great illustration from the 2000 election. Via TNR, this is from the November 2000 issue of Newsweek:

Aboard Bush's plane, [John] McCain's chief strategist, John Weaver, had--without thinking--pulled a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich off the snack cart and eaten it. Bush came aboard the plane and asked the flight attendant for his PB&J. She had to tell him it was gone. "It's gone?" Bush said, disbelieving and suddenly angry. "Who ate my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich?" After a minute Weaver impishly raised his hand. "I did," he said. "Fine," said Bush. "Don't eat any more of his food," McCain cracked, sotto voce. A few people chuckled, and Bush returned to his seat to pout.

Observers have known about his childish imperiousness forever and and it has been easily discerned by those in the public who care to see, in his press conferences andpublic appearances. He is a petty tyrant.

Bob Woodward showed it very well in his hagiography of the post 9/11 Little Caesar version of Junior:

"I'm the commander in chief, see, I don't need to explain, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting part about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

Not even the American people, apparently.

Or let's go back even further to my personal favorite from The Dallas Morning News, Feb. 25, 1990:

"I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

Isn't that nice? Others were dying in a war he supported, he didn't feel like "shooting out his eardrum" so he nobly decided to "better himself" by learning to fly airplanes on the taxpayers dime and then quitting for reasons about which we can only speculate.

Was he in a bubble when he made those selfish choices? Was he in a bubble when he made that statement twenty years later?

Here's a telling one:

Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. "He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn't get past," Allison recalled. "He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too."

Bush mocking Karla Faye Tucker may be the most emblematic of his lack of empathy and immaturity, but there are hundreds of documented incidents of Bush's mask slipping, both when he was younger and more recently in his Rove-created adult persona. At heart, he is a snotty little smart ass who has no respect for anything.

The presidential bubble may have made it impossible for his handlers to stop him from being his cocky self instead of hiding behind Rove's carefully crafted facade of the regular Joe. After last Thursday's debacle I assume that someone has tried to put the mask firmly back in place.

Then again, maybe not. The man behind the mask is the real Bush and last Thursday I got the sense that he was yearning to breathe free. Judging from his smirking and preening on the stage two days ago when he delivered his "major" speech, he didn't seem to have learned his lesson. The men behind the curtain may have lost control of their creation.

We'll see tonight if he can keep his two selves integrated or if the inner Bush emerges once more.







digby 10/08/2004 10:45:00 AM |

 
Sanctioned Liar

The vice president said he found other parts of the report "more intriguing," including the finding that Saddam's main goal was the removal of international sanctions.

"As soon as the sanctions were lifted, he had every intention of going back" to his weapons program, Cheney said "...the sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams. Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars."

November, 2000

Millions of dollars of US oil business with Iraq are being channelled discreetly through European and other companies, in a practice that has highlighted the double standards now dominating relations between Baghdad and Washington after a decade of crippling sanctions.

Though legal, leading US oil service companies such as Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger, Flowserve, Fisher-Rosemount and others, have used subsidiaries and joint venture companies for this lucrative business, so as to avoid straining relations with Washington and jeopardising their ties with President Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad.

Halliburton, the largest US oil services company, is among a significant number of US companies that have sold oil industry equipment to Iraq since the UN relaxed sanctions two years ago.

Oopsie. It appears that Saddam was making those perverted billions with the help of Unka Dickie himself.

And, waddaya know. It looks like old Dick, Iraq and Iran were the real axis of evil. All three of them wanted badly to get rid of sanctions and get down to the business of making big bucks and lethal weapons.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who has called Iran "the world's leading exporter of terror," pushed to lift U.S. trade sanctions against Tehran while chairman of Halliburton Co. in the 1990s.

[...]

Cheney argued then that sanctions did not work and punished American companies. The former defense secretary complained in a 1998 speech that U.S. companies were "cut out of the action" in Iran because of the sanctions.

It sure was lucky for Unka Dick that Saddam was willing to "pervert" the oil for food program so that Halliburton could launder its involvement through European countries and avoid being "cut out of the action." Too bad Tehran didn't have such a convenient method to funnell money to its good friends. It forced Dick to have to lobby for lifiting the sanctions, making him look bad.

We've come full circle. They have so lost touch with reality that Cheney is now implicating himself in Saddam's WMD programs and he doesn't even realize it.




digby 10/08/2004 10:20:00 AM |

Thursday, October 07, 2004

 
Gimme Them Hearts 'N Minds

Sympathy for al-Zarqawi grows among Iraqis amid U.S. airstrikes




digby 10/07/2004 08:57:00 PM |

 
Correction:

I wrote in a post below that the administration had never given a definitive and believable reason for the need to invade Iraq (and play into Osama bin Ladens' hands by creating a fertile recruiting ground in the heart of the middle east.) I hereby stand corrected. Today the president announced that we had to invade because Saddam was abusing the oil for food program in a bid to convince countries and companies to lift the sanctions and if we had then lifted the sanctions he might have gotten materials that could have resulted in his possibly being able to create a weapon of mass destruction that might have been given to terrorists at some later date. Certainly, that was a grave and gathering danger that could not be allowed to stand for one day beyond March 18th, 2003.

Please excuse the error.





digby 10/07/2004 03:07:00 PM |

 
"Bush lost his momentum"

The AP-Ipsos Public Affairs poll, completed on the eve of the second presidential debate, showed a reversal from early September, when the Republican incumbent had the momentum and a minuscule lead. With bloodshed increasing in Iraq, Kerry sharpened his attacks, and Bush stumbled in their initial debate.


Among 944 likely voters, the Kerry-Edwards ticket led Bush-Cheney 50 percent to 46 percent. The Oct. 4-6 survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.


The race was tied 47-47 percent among all registered voters, with a 2.5 point margin of error. Other polls show the race just as tight.


Nearly three-fourths of likely voters who were surveyed said they had watched or listened to the first presidential debate last week. Some 39 percent said they came away with a more favorable view of Kerry, while just 8 percent felt better about Bush.


[...]

Nearly six in 10 of all the people questioned - likely voters or not - said the country was headed on the wrong track, reflecting a gloomy national mood that could jeopardize Bush's re-election bid. His overall approval rating among likely voters, 46 percent, was at its lowest point since June - down from 54 percent in late September.


[...]

Dowd and his fellow Republicans have also said Bush would prevail because he's considered the strongest leader in a time of war. That is now open to debate.

On the question of who would protect the country, Bush led Kerry 51 percent to 45 percent among likely voters - down from the 20-point lead that Bush held in a Sept. 7-9 poll by AP-Ipsos.

Bush's approval rating on handling foreign policy and the war on terror was 49 percent - down from 55 percent in a Sept. 20-22 poll by AP-Ipsos.

Forty-four percent of likely voters approve of the commander in chief's handling of the war in Iraq, down from 51 percent in the late-September poll. It was 49-46 Bush on the question of who is best suited to handle Iraq, within the poll's margin of error.

On the eve of Friday's debate, Bush was forced by a critical new report to concede that Iraq did not have the stockpiles of banned weapons he had warned of before the 2003 invasion. Still, he insisted Thursday, "we were right to take action" against Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). Kerry renewed his assertion that Bush had misled voters and mismanaged the war.

Virtually across the board, Bush's approval ratings were as low as they have been since June. Kerry gained among women, opening a 12-point lead while slashing the president's advantage with men.

Less than half of likely voters, 47 percent, approve of Bush's performance on the economy and just 43 percent give him good marks for other domestic policies.

Bush and Kerry are considered equally likable, after Bush's ratings went down and Kerry's went up for an 11-point swing.

Slightly more voters consider Kerry honest, a reversal from last month. Far more voters consider Bush decisive (73 percent) than Kerry (43 percent), but the gap closed by 8 points.

Kerry widened his lead on the question of who would create jobs, with 54 percent favoring him and 40 percent Bush.

digby 10/07/2004 02:25:00 PM |

 
Permanent War

Via Kevin at Catch, I see that Matt Taibbi infiltrated another campaign, this time the Republicans.

Here's an interesting observation:

The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.

But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.

Once you grasp this fact, you're a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.

This tracks with my pet theory, "The Action Is The Juice."

These people aren't really about politics, ideology, faith or winning. They are about fighting. Losing this election will not shut them up --- indeed, they will be invigorated by the loss, reassured in their view that they are a victimized minority.

This fight, sadly, will not end after we win on November 2nd. In many ways it will just be beginning. But at least the reins of power will no longer be exclusively theirs and we can begin to reverse the damage.

I actually think that lefty bloggers and their readers will be more important after the election than before. Unless the election is a complete landslide, in which case the other side will be knocked back on its heels for a short time, we will have to be prepared to continue the battle within days. Remember, the Republicans have had an entire machine in mothballs for the past four years that is in the exclusive business of destroying a Democratic presidency. They like being on the offensive and they make a tidy profit at it. Many of these people don't mind Junior losing one damn bit.

corrected for grammatical boo-boo



digby 10/07/2004 01:54:00 PM |

 
Blind Man's Bluff

Via Kevin Drum I see that the Duelfer reports says that Saddam was willfully mysterious about his weapons capability because he was obsessed with the threat of Iran:

Hussein often denied U.S. assertions that he possessed banned weapons in defiance of U.N. resolutions, but for years he also persisted in making cryptic public statements to perpetuate the myth that he actually did have them. The Iraq Survey Group believes that he continued making those statements long after he had secretly ordered the destruction of his stockpiles.

Based on the interrogations, it appears that Hussein underestimated how seriously the United States took the weapons issue, and he believed it was vital to his own survival that the outside world — especially Iran — think he still had them.

It was a strategy, Hussein has told his FBI interrogators during the last 10 months, that was aimed primarily at bluffing Iraq's neighbor to the east.

"The Iranian threat was very, very, palpable to him, and he didn't want to be second to Iran, and he felt he had to deter them. So he wanted to create the impression that he had more than he did," Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group head, told members of the Senate on Wednesday.

If I may take a little bit of credit here, I posited a version of that theory back in July of '03, not specifically highlighting Iran, but saying that it was likely a bluff to boost his prestige and deterrent in the region and within his own regime:

Saddam was a strongman dictator who maintained his power, both within the country and in the region, through fear and violence. Kowtowing to the UN and especially to the US would have substantially weakened his reputation as a ruthless tyrant who was willing to do anything to stay in power. If a totalitarian shows weakness, the whole house of cards can come tumbling down. It’s possible that he felt he had to bluff or lose his grip on power from within and encourage aggression from his neighbors.

In light of another revelation in the Duelfer report, I think that the other point in that paragraph --- that Saddam was afraid of losing power from within --- also turns out to be probable.

Shortly before the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq last year, Saddam Hussein gathered his top generals together to share what came to them as astonishing news: The weapons that the United States was launching a war to remove did not exist.

"There was plenty of surprise when Saddam said, 'Sorry guys, we don't have any' " weapons of mass destruction to use against the invading forces, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.

[...]

The new accounts contradict many U.S. assumptions about relations between Hussein and his senior aides, as well as American views on what Hussein was doing and how he saw the outside world before the invasion.

For example, many in the U.S. intelligence community had believed that Hussein's sycophantic generals kept him in the dark about the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs — that is, that the dictator was misled by associates who told him what he wanted to hear.

Far from being misinformed, the report says, Hussein was micromanaging Iraq's weapons policy himself and kept even his most loyal aides from gaining a clear picture of what was going on — and, more important, not going on — with the program.

"Saddam's centrality to the regime's political structure meant that he was the hub of Iraqi WMD policy and intent," the report concluded.

Back when I wrote that earlier post, in light of the fact that Saddam was likely only bluffing, I went on to wonder whether our new doctine of preventive war was such a good idea:

The big question, however, is whether it is reasonable to believe that the most powerful country in the world bought this 3rd rate dictator's gamesmanship and if it did, whether it is reasonable to have a doctrine of preventive war if our top flight, super sophisticated intelligence services are so easily duped.

If the clumsy posturing of a not-too-bright tyrant is now the only evidence we need to launch an invasion then we are in for a very bumpy ride. (And, I would like to propose that we simply start flushing thousand dollar bills down the toilet rather than continue to fund a defense and intelligence apparatus that is incapable of verifying whether or not these claims have any basis in reality.)

In truth, the hyping of the evidence speaks for itself ...If Saddam bluffed and we knew he was bluffing (or certainly should have known) then somebody needs to ask what purpose was served for the people of the United States and Britain for their governments to call that bluff.

I still wonder why nobody asks why, if they actually believed that Saddam had WMD, they felt the need to overhype the threat so grandly and why they felt so comfortable putting 140,000 American troops in the direct line of fire. I have always thought they knew he was a paper tiger.

Clearly, they had other reasons for invading and none of those reasons have ever been publicly acknowleged. (The crap about "liberation" is, of course, utter nonsense. Bush and Cheney have never given a moment's thought to someone else's freedom in their entire life.) Everybody has their theory, from establishing military dominance in the middle east and seizing the oilfields to a primitive racist need to punish some arabs for 9/11 to revenge for the attempted assasination of Bush Sr.

That we still have no definitive reason for this invasion --- good or bad, right or wrong --- says everything.




digby 10/07/2004 11:42:00 AM |

 
Losing It

Andrew Sullivan posted a very disturbing letter yesterday which seemed to indicate that the US might be in danger of losing control of Baghdad. If US forces can't control the Green Zone, then they can't control anything:

From: "Baghdad, USConsul"
To: "Baghdad, USConsul"
Subject: Warden Message
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 14:36:13 +0000

Warden Message - Increased Security Awareness within the International Zone

On October 5, 2004, at approximately 1 pm, U.S. Embassy security personnel discovered an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) at the Green Zone Café. A U.S. Military Explosive Ordnance Detachment safely disarmed the IED.
American citizens living or working in the International Zone are strongly encouraged to take the following security precautions:

* Limit non-essential movement within the International Zone, especially at night.
* Travel in groups of two or more.
* Carry several means of communication.
* Avoid the Green Zone Café, the Chinese Restaurants, the Lone Star restaurant and Vendor Alley.
* Conduct physical fitness training within a compound perimeter.
* Notify office personnel or friends of your travel plans in the International Zone.
**** Conduct a thorough search of your vehicle prior to entering it.

Consular Section
US Embassy Baghdad

Today, the insurgents launched an attack on the Sheraton hotel, where the journalists stay, and naturally CNN is obsessing on it. These pictures are not helpful.

The Republicans are going to start howling that the Kerry campaign is gleeful that things are going badly in Iraq as they point out the endless numbers of Bush failures. But, I have news for them. If Bush and Cheney weren't running on the "you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes" platform, they would not be so vulnerable on this issue. Their unwillingness to face reality is what's dragging them down more than the situation itself.

Maybe if Junior took a little more interest in history and a little less interest in believing his own hype, he might just have learned something from a president in his own lifetime --- Lyndon Johnson. Sadly for him, he won't even have a signature issue like the "Voting Rights Act" or the comfort of a landslide election to comfort him in his dotage. He's a loser in every sense of the word.




digby 10/07/2004 10:43:00 AM |

 
Tricksters

The next time you hear one of the cable gasbags going on about Democratic voter fraud or the fact that they Florida is outstripping Democrats in registration keep this in mind:

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating 1,500 voter registration forms received by the Leon County elections office that apparently were altered to register local students as Republicans.

[..]

In St. Petersburg, former Mayor Charles Schuh received a letter saying he was ineligible to vote in the Aug. 31 primary because his registration application wasn't received on time. He later learned that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now had turned in a registration form with his correct name, address and phone number, but the wrong date of birth, final four digests of his Social Security number and gender.

[...]

He was allowed to vote after showing elections officials his voter registration card and telling them the incorrect registration application wasn't submitted by him. Schuh said the registration form with his name was turned over to the state attorney's office along with 14 others that appear fraudulent.

State Attorney Bernie McCabe said all appeared to be turned in by ACORN.

"It does not appear right now that it can result in any impact on the election because the phony people aren't going to be voting, but it certainly creates a lot of work for everybody," McCabe said. "The supervisors of elections have enough on their plates than worrying about people turning in phony cards."

While he said ACORN is willing to help investigators, he said the problem appears to be caused by paid workers falsifying forms in order to make quotas.

The interesting thing about this is that Florida ACORN is a liberal group, dedicated to a living wage and oppostion to the Bush tax cuts, yet it appears to have some paid workers registering students as Republicans. That seems a bit odd, don't you think?

If I were a suspicious person, I might think that some enterprising GOP dirty tricksters were infiltrating liberal voter registration groups.




digby 10/07/2004 08:57:00 AM |

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

 
Go Where They Need You

Since California is in the bag, I decided sometime back to make the supreme sacrifice and go to Las Vegas and help them GOTV. (Hey, Nevada is an important swing state...)

I noticed that Josh Marshall linked to America Coming Together so that people can volunteer to help out where it's close and I realized that I should plug them again, too. They are very good at helping you plan on whatever budget you can can come up with.

If you are near one of those swing states or can get there sometime in the next month, particularly on election day, sign up.

It's also worth noting that even if people don't apply for an absentee ballot, in many states you can vote early, which is what I plan to do. You just go down to the designated polling place in your town and vote like it was election day. (I didn't know you could do this until this election.) We can start turning out the vote early. It may be just a matter of giving people a lift to the polls or gathering a group of friends.




digby 10/06/2004 09:36:00 PM |

 
You Can't Stretch

As we all know, 9/11 changed everything, most especially the GOP's zealous regard for absolute truth telling in debates.

From Just My 2, here's an interesting compilation of wacky Republican quotes from back in the year 2000 --- when Al Gore mendaciously lied about who he accompanied on a trip to Texas.

Here's my favorite:

BUSH: If there's pattern of just exaggeration and stretches to try to win votes, it says something about leadership as far as I'm concerned, because once you're the president, you can't stretch.

digby 10/06/2004 07:23:00 PM |

 
Stop The Presses

Media Matters exposes the fact that Tim Russert is a whore. Seems he forgot to mention last night that he knew that Cheney had met Edwards before.

KATIE COURIC (Today co-host):... the vice president said he had never met John Edwards until tonight, talking about pretty much being an absentee senator, but you say that's not true.

RUSSERT: No, it's not true. In fact, on April 8th of 2001, they were on Meet the Press together. Dick Cheney first, and then John Edwards after him.

COURIC: Well, why did he say that?

RUSSERT: And they stopped and shook hands. They were at a prayer meeting together. I think what he was trying to -- maybe he didn't remember -- but he clearly is trying to give the impression that John Edwards is a young ambitious man in a hurry who just doesn't stop by the Senate and do his job in a serious way, but is out campaigning and politicking, suggesting it's all politics. I was surprised that --

COURIC: On the other hand, if you -- if you misspeak like that and -- and are dishonest about it, that can backfire, right?

RUSSERT: Sure. I wish -- I thought that John Edwards would call him on it right at that very moment. I still don't know why. I think it goes to your point, he was always trying to find a -- a bigger issue to take on.

Of course Little Russ forgot to mention any of that in the immediate aftermath of the debate when people were watching. This does not surprise me. But, since when did Katie Couric, like, totally turn into Malibu Barbie?

"It was interesting how they didn't really respond to each other's criticisms. Oftentimes they would -- somebody would make a point, and then they wouldn't be responsive, they would just say another point against that candidate.

No duh. It's so wierd when they do that. It's like they're trying to change the conversation or something. It's kewl that Katie totally noticed that too. And she's only been in journalism for, like, 25 years. Awesome.




digby 10/06/2004 07:08:00 PM |

 
So It Goes

South Knox Bubba, one of my favorite bloggers, is being accused by a local wingnut of somehow inciting his followers to fire shots at the local GOP headquarters in the middle of the night.

Tim Mcveigh blew up a building killing hundreds and the wingnuts howled indignantly at the mere suggestion that the violent anti-government rhetoric spewing forth from every crazed talk show and right wing militia group at the time might have given old Tim the wrong idea about politics. Now this frail little fellow is fretting like a little old lady and accusing a very civil liberal blogger of "contributing to a potentially catastrophic atmosphere" with his allegedly "hateful tripe." Hypocrisy doesn't even come close to explaining this crap. They are living in another dimension.

SK Bubba's blog is hardly a fiery leftist rant page. He links to non-liberal locals and rarely enters into the seriously profane (as I do.) A fair number of Republicans come over and spar in a reasonably friendly way in his comments section but there is no "hateful tripe," as any sentient human would perceive it, anywhere near it.

He also lives in and writes about politics in Bush country in the age of Ashcroft and the Patriot Act. This kind of thing could get him into trouble.


And by the way --- nobody knows who the hell shot into the building. As far as I'm concerned, the most likely suspect is this desperate little GOP attention seeker himself --- probably drunk and a little too clever for his own good.

Update: Thanks to The Donkey in the comments, I have been forwarded Bubba's hateful manifesto. Chilling.




digby 10/06/2004 04:48:00 PM |

 
Rewriting History

In his debate with John Edwards, Dick Cheney had a brand-new version of the events that led to war.

With virtually all of the administration’s original case for war in Iraq in tatters, Vice President Dick Cheney provided shifting and sometimes misleading arguments in last night’s debate with John Edwards about Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorists and his access to weapons of mass destruction.

Cheney, responding to moderator Gwen Ifill’s first question, said that “concern” about Iraq before the war had “specifically focused” on the fact that Saddam’s regime had been listed for years by the U.S. government as a “state sponsor of terror,” that Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal operated out of Baghdad, that Saddam paid $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and that he had an “established relationship” with Al Qaeda.

But except for the allegation about Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda—a claim that is now more in question than ever—the other examples cited by Cheney in Tuesday night’s debate never have been previously emphasized by Bush administration officials, and for good reasons.

More here

I'm thinking that, as with his attitude toward deficits, Cheney has adopted the credo of "Reagan proved just making stuff up doesn't matter."

Reading all the lies and corrections around the web today, I believe we might save ourselves some time if we just compiled all the things that Cheney said last night that were true.

Here goes:

Gwen, I want to thank you, and I want to thank the folks here at Case Western Reserve for hosting this tonight. It's a very important event, and they've done a superb job of putting it together.

And the president, his first legislative priority was the No Child Left Behind Act. It was the first piece of legislation we introduced.

There's a fundamental philosophical difference here between the president and myself.

The fact of the matter is, the president and I will go forward to make the tax cuts permanent

Yesterday, the president signed an extension of middle- class tax cuts.

Traditionally, that's been an issue for the states. States have regulated marriage, if you will.

I've worked for four presidents and watched two others up close, and I know that there's no such thing as a routine day in the Oval Office.

We saw on 9/11 that the next president -- next decision a president has to make can affect the lives of all of us.

First of all, I'm not familiar with his cases.

Gwen, we think lawsuit abuse is a serious problem in this country.

Well, this is a great tragedy, Gwen, when you think about the enormous cost here in the United States and around the world of the AIDS epidemic -- pandemic, really. Millions of lives lost, millions more infected and facing a very bleak future

Well, I think the important thing in picking a vice president probably varies from president to president. Different presidents approach it in different ways.

Well, I clearly believe that George W. Bush would be a better commander in chief.

That's it. And, if you read the whole transcript you'll see that I'm not really exaggerating.




digby 10/06/2004 04:03:00 PM |

 
Who's MIA?

This morning, footage of Lynn Cheney is all over cable responding to the fact that there are pictures of Cheney and Edwards elbow to elbow at a three hour prayer breakfast by saying "I think we can all agree that going to prayer breakfasts is a good thing. But, don't you think he should have gone to the senate once in a while?"

Clever minx, isn't she? But, it may not be the best line of her storied literary career. As it turns out, there's a good reason why Cheney would never have run into Edwards in the Senate. He only meets with Republicans:

As Cheney takes on high profile, Democrats can't seem to find him

October 2, 2002:

As the Senate prepares to act on a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Republicans say Dick Cheney has assumed an increasingly visible role on Capitol Hill.

By contrast, the Democrats report that they see little of the vice president. Cheney, a key advisor to President Bush on foreign policy issues, has become a frequent guest at the Senate Republicans’ Tuesday policy lunches, where he briefs them and answers questions. As a former White House chief of staff, secretary of defense and member of Congress, he has acquired an unusual amount of clout among GOP senators.

Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), the chief Republican deputy whip, said Cheney’s counsel “is taken very seriously. It was before this situation, but I think right now, his counsel is sought out more and it’s given much greater depth and credibility.”

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking member on the Select Intelligence Committee, said senators “naturally look to Vice President Cheney as a seasoned, experienced person who knows the issues regarding national security, [and] has been in the forefront of it.”

However, Assistant Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he hasn’t seen Cheney “in months.”

Other Democrats, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Patty Murray (Wash.), Bill Nelson (Fla.) and Jean Carnahan (D-Mo.) also said they haven’t had much contact with Cheney since the Iraq issue began heating up earlier this year.

Asked why Cheney hasn’t reached out to Democrats, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, replied, “You’d have to ask him – if you can find him.”

Thanks to deborah for the tip.





digby 10/06/2004 01:00:00 PM |

 
Junior's Love Slaves

Eric Boehlert once again earns his money:

It looks like the White House pulled a fast one on the 24-hour news channels this morning as President Bush grabbed 50 minutes of free, uninterrupted TV airtime one month before Election Day. News outlets were told in advance Bush would give a substantive speech addressing key policy issues, which is why they agreed to carry it. (They're not in the habit of running stump speeches in their entirety.) Days ago, the speech was billed as an address on medical liability reform. Then on Monday, White House aides announced the speech would address the "war on terror" and the economy. And that's how the cable outlets dutifully hyped it this morning:

-- "President Bush heads to [Pennsylvania] for what is billed as a major speech." -- MSNBC

-- "President Bush heading to Pennsylvania for what's called a significant speech on the economy and the war on terror." -- CNN

-- "President Bush is making what's being called a significant speech on Iraq and the economy." -- Fox News

Instead, the address, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., was nothing more than a raucous Bush pep rally as the president unleashed his most sustained and personal attacks on Sen. John Kerry to date, portraying him as an out of touch liberal who cannot be trusted to defend America, while Republican loyalists in the crowd booed and jeered each mention of Kerry's name.

[...]

The question is, why did all three news channels cover the attack speech for nearly an hour? In the past, they have occasionally cut away to both candidates' stump speeches for five or ten minutes, but certainly never for 50 minutes. When it became apparent that Bush's policy speech was not going to be as advertised, but was instead a tirade against Kerry, did that still constitute news? And the more pressing question for the cable outlets is: When are they going to give Kerry nearly an hour of uninterrupted time to ridicule and mock Bush's record?

[...]

Reached for comment, an MSNBC spokesperson said, "We look to cover events from both campaigns. We felt [the speech today] was compelling enough and interesting enough to merit" the coverage. The spokesperson noted, "Should the Kerry campaign give a speech where he rebuts what the president said today," it too, would be covered. Asked specifically whether Kerry would get 50 minutes to respond, the spokesperson answered, "We look to be fair with our campaign coverage of both candidates."

Yeah sure. This was just bullshit. The cult members in the audience were so worked up they were practically speaking in tongues.

Do It:

CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Fox News

www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453




digby 10/06/2004 12:31:00 PM |

 
Downhill Side

I have long said that if the Democrats wanted to kill the snake, they had to cut off the head. In the case of the modern GOP, it was a three headed hydra --- Gingrich, DeLay and Limbaugh.

Gingrich is gone, beaten by his own hubris, reduced from being the most powerful politician in the Republican party to an obscure AEI post and some occasional gigs on FOX News. And right now, Monsieur DeLay and Rush Limbaugh are looking at some extremely serious legal problems that may finally take both of them down.

This is important. It's true that there are always movement conservative freakazoiods running around like Comrade Norquist and Paul Weyrich. And the infrastructure exists to continue on forever. But, these guys were the strategic vision, the power base and the voice and when they go down it is a clear sign that the conservative revolution has lost its mojo.




digby 10/06/2004 12:20:00 PM |

 
Why He Won

As one would expect, James Wolcott's thoughts on the debate are great and he brings up something that I think may be the most important aspect of Edwards's performance.

Like Bush last week, Cheney only fed the beast of the Republican "base." He did nothing, less than nothing, to reach out to undecideds or swing voters or anyone who wasn't already committed to the ticket. Edwards did. That's why, despite some moments of shakiness and repetition and phony tough-guyism, Edwards won.

I listened to a few minutes of the debate on the radio live and then saw the whole thing later. One of the things that struck me in both instances was that Edwards consciously spoke to individual American's everyday, real life concerns. Those things may not be particularly important at this point to the base of either party, but I think it may be very important to undecided voters.

You have to ask yourself why a voter is undecided at this point. If it were a matter of abstract political philosophy or "gut" feelings about character, there would be nothing to decide. The contrast between these two tickets is stark. What I think may be driving these undecideds is that they are looking for someone to speak to their personal concerns, show that they understand the way life is lived in America --- to translate policy into real life solutions that they can wrap their arms around.

John Edwards is the only guy in the race with an easy, natural gift for speaking to that and I think he may have succeeded in bringing some of those people into the fold.

Wolcott also had the misfortune of seeing Dennis Miller embarrass himself on Jay Leno last night.

Afterwards, I watched Jay Leno, whose first guest was Dennis Miller, whose soul has sprouted tumors. He belted out the name of Bush's campaign website, and said he was voting for the guy because Bush, man, he begins each day with one thing on his mind. He hops outta bed, "his two feet hit the floor, he scratches his balls, and says, 'Let's kill some fuckin' terrorists.'" Dennis Miller not only sounds like Michael Savage, he's beginning to look like him too, an oily stain possessing the power of speech.

And a vivid biker fantasy life, apparently. The "it's hard work" boy wakes up every morning with his arms around his favorite pilly and screams for a cup 'o cocoa.

You have to feel a little bit sorry for the cretin. He made a bad career move, casting his lot with the wingnuts because he got big laughs by making fun of Clinton and misinterpreted it as a shift in the cultural zeitgest. Big mistake. He's stuck with bully insult humor and that has a very short shelf life. The former hipster is going to be forced to socialize for the rest of his life with nothing but boring, flaccid reactionaries who's idea of fun is calling him "girlie-man" and saying he needs a haircut. That's just sad.




digby 10/06/2004 11:42:00 AM |

 
Sick Pieces 'O Work

On one of the blond succubi shows on FOXnews this morning (featuring Linda Vester and Ann Coulter) they cut away to a pouty lipped banshee who gleefully announced that Martha Stewart will be reporting to jail and that "she'll be treated exactly like every other prisoner ... including a strip search."

I have little doubt that Coulter and Vester got visions of Abu Ghraib sugar plums dancing in their heads at the mere thought of the possibilities. This is the mentality that created Lyndie Englund and all her little friends. Sadistic, power mad freaks. They don't get it from porno sites or even frat boy "hijinx." It's mainstream fun on right wing media.




digby 10/06/2004 10:42:00 AM |

 
Cheney's Pants Spontaneously Immolated

Edwards was excellent as I knew he would be. Articulate, engaging and smart. If anybody had the mistaken idea that they could Quayle this guy, he certainly proved them wrong tonight.

But I think Cheney may have set a record for how many times a candidate can outright, baldfacedly lie in an hour and a half on national television. And that's saying something. He and Junior really are living in some sort of dreamworld where they apparently don't have to worry that their every previous public statement is noted and available for the whole world to see. Here on planet earth we have google and lexis-nexis and we can dig up all the examples of when they said things they claim they didn't say.

The most obvious is Dick's continued insistence that he's never said there was a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam. Fergawd's sake. But the debate was riddled with an amazing array of outright lies by Cheney from small ones like "I'd never met him before tonight" to huge ones like suggesting that there has been a drop in suicide bombings in Israel because Saddam isn't paying a bounty. This article captures a few, but there are many more that will be fleshed out over the next few days.

I predict that once the full scope of the lies Cheney told tonight are artfully dribbled out by the Democrats over the next couple of days, Cheney's respectable "draw" will turn into a rout. This isn't 2000 and the Democrats are not going to stand for this shit this time.

As for the whores, I have to give extra special kudos to Joe Scarborough for the biggest slurpy Cheney blowjobs of the night, although it was difficult to choose from among his colleagues. But apparently, somebody put a horses head in Joey's bed after his little "mistake" in calling the debate for Kerry last week because he really went the extra mile tonight.

Eric Boehlert wonders if the entire MSNBC crew even saw the same debate as the rest of us did:

The Cheney group hug began before Edwards had even exited the debate stage in Cleveland, with NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell declaring, "Dick Cheney did awfully well in putting John Edwards in his place." MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, who didn't flinch in naming Sen. John Kerry the debate winner last week, declared, "There's no doubt about it, Edwards got obliterated by Dick Cheney." (Perhaps he was trying to appease his right-wing fans who, he later remarked, flayed him alive for giving the debate to Kerry last week.) Newsweek's managing editor Jon Meachem chimed in that Edwards seemed like "Kerry-lite," while host Matthews skewered Edwards in a strangely personal way, reminiscent of the way Matthews hounded President Bill Clinton throughout the impeachment process.

"I don't think this well-rehearsed and well-briefed senator from North Carolina was ready for the assault," said Matthews, who insisted, "Dick Cheney was loaded for bear tonight. He went looking for squirrel and he found squirrel" in the form of Edwards. He later suggested Edwards often looked stunned, as if he'd been "slapped" by Cheney's devastating debating technique. Matthews also demanded to know if the "liberal press" would admit "Cheney won."

Yet nowhere else on the television landscape -- not even on Fox News -- was Cheney crowned the winner. Most pundits saw the debate as an obvious draw:

-- ABC News political director Mark Halperin told PBS's Charlie Rose the debate was a "nonevent because it didn't change the dynamic."

-- Surveying fellow journalists covering the debate, CNN's Judy Woodruff, host of "Inside Politics," reported, "Their opinion is this debate was close to a draw." She added, "If Dick Cheney was hoping to put away John Edwards, he didn't do that tonight."

-- David Gergen, who has counseled both Democratic and Republican administrations, agreed that the debate was a standoff, telling CNN's Larry King that "it ran out of electricity about halfway through. It began to drag."

-- Fox News' Bill Kristol said, "Cheney clearly won the first half on national security. I think Edwards won the second half" on domestic issues. Kristol argued the first half was more important.

-- "I can imagine Democratic living rooms, cheering every time Edwards punched. And Republican living rooms when Cheney punched," said ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. "But I don't think either candidate did much to sway voters on the fence."

ABC News' instant poll found more viewers thought Cheney won the debate, by a margin of 43 to 35. But as ABC anchor Peter Jennings noted, the poll was weighted heavily toward Republican respondents because the network found more Republicans watched the debate.

CBS ran a scientific survey of 200 uncommitted voters nationwide, which found Edwards won the debate by a clear margin, 41-29. The CBS survey found Cheney suffered a dramatic gender gap among women voters.

None of that seemed to matter inside the MSNBC echo chamber. Matthews and his crew had their story line -- Cheney won big! -- and they were sticking with it, with Matthews even wondering out loud if the choice of Edwards for V.P. "casts doubt on the judgment of John Kerry," and whether Edwards may "not be ready to be vice president of the United States."

Which again raises the question: What debate was Matthews watching, and what did Edwards ever do to him?

Well gosh, nobody could expect Tweety and crew to not call this debate for Cheney. They had some big time ass to kiss after last week. They just hate getting nasty e-mails from angry Republicans. (I wonder how they are going to like getting erudite e-mails from angry Democrats?)


The biggest loser was Gwen Ifil. What an unmitigated disaster. But then, that's no surprise. She has single handedly turned the previously great Washington Week In Review into DiGrassi Junior High, so I wasn't particularly optimistic that she could moderate a debate. And she was probably up late last night talking to Condi, her best friend, about Condi's unrequited love affair with you know who, so she was probably exhausted.

I predict a slight uptick in the polls as the undecideds start to make their move now that both Kerry and Edwards have passed the leadership threshhold. Friday could put it away.




digby 10/06/2004 01:06:00 AM |

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

 
Edwards!

Sadly, I will not be able to blog during or immediately after the debate tonight. I will watch it late and give my impressions in time for your morning coffee (or mimosa...)

To tide you over until debate time, I'd recommend you read this great, great speech by John Edwards from June of 2003 and remind yourself why John Kerry picked this talented, exceptional guy to be his running mate.

John Edwards is the man who George W. Bush is pretending to be.

I will eagerly look for your impressions in this thread as well as impressions of the media spin. I'd be grateful for any documented mediawhore outrages.

But, don't wait for me. Here are the numbers. If they are out of hand, or out of line, don't hesitate to let your fingers do the dialing. (If they are unbiased and objective, then it would be nice to let them know that as well.)

Contact Information:

ABC News

www.abcnews.com

47 W. 66th St
New York, NY 10023
Phone: (212) 456-7477, 456-3796
Fax: (212) 456-4866, 456-2795


World News Tonight with Peter Jennings

Phone: (212) 456-4040
peterjennings@worldnewstonight.abcnews.com
Fax: (212) 456-2771


CBS News

www.cbsnews.com
542 W. 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

News Desk:
Phone: (212) 975-4321, 975-3691
Fax: (212) 975-1893


CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Fox News

www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453


NBC News

www.nbc.com

30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Phone: (212) 664-5900
Fax: (212) 664-2914


NPR

www.npr.org

635 Mass Ave
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: (202) 414-2323
Fax: (202) 414-3324


PBS

www.pbs.org

PO BOX 50880
Washington, DC 20091
Phone: (800) 356-2626





digby 10/05/2004 02:22:00 PM |

 
Human Scum

Somebody needs to ask why Alan Colmes and Charlie Gibson, (one of the approved debate moderators) interviewed this shrieking harpy at all. And then, they should be asked whether they would have smiled and joked with a male Nazi terrorist (which is what this hideous dickhead is) at the end of the interview.

Coulter on former Democratic Senator Max Cleland (D-GA):

COULTER: As soon as he became the [Democrats'] designated hysteric [on President George W. Bush's National Guard service], liberals were lying about how he lost limbs in Vietnam. It was not in combat. He did not win a Purple Heart. But suddenly, Democrats who thought a draft-dodging pot smoker would make an excellent commander in chief just eight years ago, now demand military service. They've all become jock-sniffers for war veterans. [ABC, Good Morning America, 10/5/04]

Cleland lost three limbs in a grenade explosion in Vietnam. He did not receive a Purple Heart because the wounds were not a result of enemy engagement. Cleland did receive "the Bronze Star for meritorious service and Silver Star for gallantry in action" for his service in Vietnam.

Coulter on Senator John Kerry:

CHARLIE GIBSON (co-host of Good Morning America): In going through the book, John Kerry, you refer to him as a gigolo, the male Anna Nicole Smith.

COULTER: Right.

[...]

COULTER: I don't wanna hear him talk about a middle class tax cut when he has made his living, living off of rich women. I mean, it is simply a fact that he has married two heiresses, his specialty in life. I mean, if he has an economic plan, I think the one I'd like to hear about is how to snooker millionairesses into marrying me and living off them. I mean, that is not a trivial point. [ABC, Good Morning America, 10/5/04]

"They [Democrats] seem to think Kerry won the [September 30 presidential] debate because he had a better tan, he had a nice manicure." [FOX News Channel, Hannity & Colmes, 10/4/04]

Coulter on Democrats:

COULTER: They never want to fight a war to defend America. They certainly wouldn't have fought World War II. I mean, screaming about all the casualties in battle after battle, and Hitler was being contained. I mean, what is the right war at the right time? There will never be one." [FOX News Channel, Hannity & Colmes, 10/1/04]

Coulter on the widows of the September 11 terror attacks:

GIBSON: And you also refer to some of those who lost their husbands in 9-11 as McWidows.

COULTER: Right. [ABC, Good Morning America, 10/5/04]

Coulter on Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe:

GIBSON: Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic Party, you call him a slimy weasel.

COULTER: Right. [ABC, Good Morning America, 10/5/04]

Coulter on Muslims:

Two days after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Coulter wrote about Muslims: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" (as Media Matters for America has noted). On Hannity & Colmes, Coulter reinforced those sentiments, claiming, as she does in her new book, that they are true "[n]ow more than ever":

ALAN COLMES (co-host of Hannity & Colmes): [R]ight after September 11, you said, and you know where I'm going with this, I'm often asked if I still think we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, convert them to Christianity. You say the same thing Nixon said in 1972: "Now more than ever."

COULTER: Now more than ever.

[...]

COULTER: By Friday of 9/11, we had accomplished point one and point two. Invade their countries, killed their leaders.

[...]

COLMES: Would you like to convert these people all to Christianity?

COULTER: The ones that we haven't killed, yes.

COLMES: So no one should be Muslim. They should all be Christian?

COULTER: That would be a good start, yes.

[...]

COLMES: But you're talking about a group of extremists who misuse Islam and aren't practicing true Islam. But would you like to convert all of these countries to Christianity. Should they all become Christian nations? Because that's what your ...

COULTER: Yes, that would be terrific.

COLMES: ... remarks suggest.

COULTER: That would be terrific, yes. [FOX News Channel, Hannity & Colmes, 10/4/04]

digby 10/05/2004 02:08:00 PM |

 
Nobody Told Her?

New York Times:

Ms. Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack, said it was not her job to question intelligence reports or "to referee disputes in the intelligence community."

Whitehouse.gov

Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs: Condoleezza Rice

Job Description: The National Security Advisor advises and assists the President on national security and foreign policies, and coordinates these policies among various government agencies.

digby 10/05/2004 01:08:00 PM |

 
Another GOP Victim

Rita Bianco, Parent: "Children should know their president and their first lady!"

Parents expressing outrage after a teacher is kicked out of her public school for hanging a picture of President Bush next to pictures of other presidents in her classroom.

Shiba Pillai-Diaz, Teacher: "It happened on a small bulletin board near the American flag and also with a poster of the Declaration of Independence."

This is Crossroads South Middle School in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey. On Thursday, there was a back-to-school night for parents of students. Veteran English teacher Shiba Pillai-Diaz says she was shocked when three parents confronted her. The three, insisting the teacher either add John Kerry's photo to the montage of presidents or remove the Bush photo. When Pillai-Diaz refused, she says the school's vice-principal threatened her job which is an act that has parents here fuming.

Paula Sjolund, Parent: "She didn't do anything wrong, and I think that it should have stayed up there."

Pillai-Diaz ultimately removed the entire bulletin board and says School Principal Jim Warfel told her she disrupted the school with her "inflammatory politics". She says he then ordered her out of the building. While she says she is a Bush supporter in her personal life, Pillai-Diaz says she keeps politics out of the classroom.

Shiba Pillai-Diaz, Teacher: "There was no political intent, nor was there any political content in that photograph nor on the bulletin board."

How awful. As much as I dislike Bush, I don't think it's wrong to have a simple picture of the president and his dog on a junior high school bulletin board.

Oh wait...

Recently, the school administration began receiving complaints from students and parents that Ms. Pillai-Diaz was using her position, classroom and teaching time to engage in partisan politics. Students reported that she had made statements which denigrated one party over the other. The conversations included Ms. Pillai-Diaz telling some students who offered opinions contrary to her statements, that she was "glad they were not old enough to vote." Other comments to students, including such statements as, "you should be ashamed to be a Democrat" have been verified through student interviews.

[...]

Following receipt of complaints from parents, the Assistant Principal met with Ms. Pillai-Diaz and cautioned her not to engage in partisan political discussions in her Language Arts classes. He did not initially ask her to remove the picture of the President. As the issue grew in intensity, the teacher herself chose to remove the stuffed elephant because of student comments. In the ensuing days, parents expressed increasing concern about the teacher's classroom behavior, the misuse of classroom instructional time and the personal bulletin board. The level of concern resulted in a classroom confrontation between some parents and Ms. Pillai-Diaz at the Back-to-School night program. It was at this point that the school administration decided to intervene again.

On Friday morning, October 1, Ms. Pillai-Diaz was directed by the Assistant Principal to remove bulletin board materials because they were being viewed as contributing to an ongoing disruption of the teaching-learning environment. She refused. She then met with the Principal who repeated the directive. At this point, Ms. Pillai-Diaz abruptly left the building, abandoning her post of duty and her classroom responsibilities.

At no time was she told to leave, asked to leave or given authorization to leave. School was still in session. At no time was she told she was suspended or fired. With professional responsibilities of a classroom teacher waiting, Ms. Pillai-Diaz chose, of her own volition, to walk out of the school, contact various media sources and claim she had been fired.

[...]

The South Brunswick School community is enormously respectful of the Office of the President of the United States, President Bush and the democratic process for choosing our President. Anyone trying to suggest the contrary has the worst of intentions. Under other circumstances, the display of a picture of the President would have been viewed as completely appropriate and uncontroversial. It is important to note that pictures of President Bush are openly displayed in all of the South Brunswick Schools. The teacher’s own actions here, however, took it out of the realm of education and made the presentation appear partisan to many of our students and parents. Under these circumstances, our actions in directing the removal of the display were singularly appropriate

A Republican intimidating twelve year old kids and then whining to the media about being victimized when the parents complain? How utterly ... predictable.

The Moderate Voice has the whole story.




digby 10/05/2004 11:19:00 AM |

 
The Poorman says:


digby 10/05/2004 08:44:00 AM |

 
CYA Files

And so it begins...

L. Paul Bremer III, former head of the U.S.-led occupation authority in Iraq, said Monday that the United States did not deploy enough troops and then failed to contain violence and looting immediately after the ouster of President Saddam Hussein.

Bremer, administrator for the Coalition Provisional Authority until the hand-over of political power June 28, said that he still supported the decision to intervene in Iraq but that a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on.


"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," he told an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "We never had enough troops on the ground."

Bremer's comments echoed contentions of other critics of the Bush administration, including Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, who say the U.S. government failed to plan adequately to maintain security in Iraq after the invasion.

On Sept. 17 at DePauw University, Bremer said, "The single most important change --- the one thing that would have improved the situation --- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation, according to the Banner-Graphic in Greencastle, Ind

[...]

"I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said in an e-mailed statement. He said all references in recent speeches to troop levels applied to the situation when he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003 "and when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."

(Hahaha! Yes, If only we'd had more Iraqi security forces available to address the looting. Surprisingly, they thought we an invading army at the time and didn't rush to help. Particularly since they would have been shot.)

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded Monday that U.S. intelligence was wrong in its conclusions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and appeared to back off earlier statements suggesting former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had links to al Qaeda.

"Why the intelligence proved wrong (on WMDs), I'm not in a position to say," Rumsfeld said in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "I simply don't know."

When asked about any connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, Rumsfeld said, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."

But a short time later, Rumsfeld released a statement: "A question I answered today at an appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations regarding ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq regrettably was misunderstood.

"I have acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

When the handwriting is on the wall, it's prudent to get your "true" position on the record before anyone thinks you were responsible for the failure.




digby 10/05/2004 08:16:00 AM |

Monday, October 04, 2004

 
No Samaritan

Matthews just interviewed Joe Lockhart and mentioned the new zogby poll question "If your car was broken down on the side of the road, who do you think would stop and help you?" Shockingly, 32% said John Kerry and 40% said Junior.

Unbelievable. It is indisputable that John Kerry saved Jim Rassman's life in Vietnam, which should be enough to prove that Kerry not only will stop and help you fix your car, he will rush across 6 lanes of traffic to do it. (Our swift boat pals have so successfully lied and schemed that this image of Kerry has been forever tainted, to their enternal damnation.)

However, Rassman wasn't the only life that Kerry famously saved. How about this one:

Former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht of Nevada is a staunch Republican, but he thanks his lucky stars for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.

Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the hallway.

Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht's side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver -- four times.

The lifesaving incident made international news, and Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the maneuver in 1974, called Hecht to say that had Kerry intervened just 30 seconds later Hecht might have been in a vegetative state for life.

"This man gave me my life," the 75-year-old Hecht said Thursday.

Hecht said he was amazed that Kerry acted so quickly -- some people were assuming that he was having a heart attack.

"He knew exactly what to do," he said. "But a lot of people know what to do. They just don't size up the situation immediately."

The story has a twist of irony: Hecht was up for re-election that year, and Kerry, who was serving as the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, had pegged Hecht as one of the most vulnerable Republican seats.

Indeed, the Democratic nominee for Hecht's seat, then-Gov. Richard Bryan, beat Hecht, who served just one term in office.

"Only in America can this happen, where he's working against me to get me defeated and then saves my life," Hecht said.

Hecht, who prides himself on having one of the most conservative records on the books during his six years in the Senate, said he and his wife, Gail, see politics as "a secondary issue" when it comes to Kerry.

"We've had a wonderful life, and it would have all been down the tubes," said Hecht, who is about to celebrate his 45th wedding anniversary with his wife.

Every year the Hechts call Kerry's longtime personal secretary, who tracks down Kerry wherever he is.

Then they recount some of their experiences in the last year. Hecht and his wife thank Kerry for thinking so quickly in the Senate halls that day. And Kerry tells them that their phone call is one of his favorites of the year.

"He's so nice and appreciative," Hecht said.

Ther Daily Show did a spoof of this and I suspect that many people thought it was a joke. But it's actually true. Kerry stepped off the elevator, immediately assessed the situation and then saved the guys life while a bunch of others stood around dithering. (Compare this to Bush frozen in a little boys chair reading 'The Pet Goat" after Andy Card said, "We are under attack.")

Is there even one example of George W. Bush doing a personal good deed ever in his life? I honestly can't think of one.

In fact, even aside from all of his cruel policy decisions (like approving the use of TORTURE for instance) there are many small indications that this guy is totally lacking compassion for his fellow man --- even his own family.

Remember James Byrd's family in Jasper texas begging him to help them pass hate crimes legislation?

"I went in there pleading to him," Mullins says. "I said that if he helped me move it along I would feel that he hadn't died in vain ... [Rep.] Thompson said, 'Gov. Bush, what Renee's trying to say is, Would you help her pass the bill?' And he said, 'No.' Just like that."

"He had a nonchalant attitude, like he wanted to hurry up and get out of there," Mullins says. "It was cold in that room."

Remember when his daughter had an emergency appendectomy?

As he boarded the plane, reporters inquired about Jenna's condition. 'Maybe she'll be able to join us in Florida,' the president-elect said. 'If not, she can clean her room.' The reporters stared at him, stunned. 'I couldn't believe it,' one of those present later said. 'First of all, I'm a father, and I cannot imagine a scenario in which my daughter would have major surgery and I would just leave on vacation. And then he just seemed so snarly about it, like he was pissed at her.'"

Not only wouldn't he stop to help you at the side of the road, he's the type who'd slow down and stare at you, then laugh uproariously and hit the gas, spraying gravel in your face as he sped away.










digby 10/04/2004 05:16:00 PM |

 
The Mediawhore Doctrine

Goddamn it. Wolf Blitzer just asked William Cohen about the so-called "Kerry Doctrine" and then defined it exactly as the Bush campaign is in its talking points --- you know, the nonsense about about giving foreign countries veto power over our security yada, yada, yada.

Cohen gave a nice scholorly response that glazed the eyes of every listener before they realized that he was obliquely saying that the spin was full of shit.

Time to blast Wolfie, folks. Call if you can. This "Kerry Doctrine" thing is being pushed by the wingnuts with everything they have, and the whores are eating it with a spoon. Blitzer knows very well that Kerry did not actually say that he would allow other nations to veto America's right to preemptive self defense. He challenged Condi Rice on that subject just yesterday by showing the entire clip from the debate and explaining it quite lucidly. He knows that it is bullshit yet he continues to "ask" people about it as if there really was some controversy about what Kerry said.

And he is spreading this meme "The Kerry Doctrine" a phrase that Kerry has never used, mainly because what he was talking about already had a name --- the Pre-emption Doctrine and we've been living under it for more than fifty years.

Blitzer's CNN Complaints Form

CNN

1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784





digby 10/04/2004 02:27:00 PM |

 
Justice

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice.

BLITZER: To justice? The guy has been -- Khan has been freed. He's been pardoned by President Musharraf... Khan himself lives in a villa. And the IAEA would like to question him, and the Pakistani government doesn't even allow that to happen.

RICE: I think we all know that A.Q. Khan was a particular kind of figure in Pakistani lore, a national hero... if you don't think that his national humiliation is justice for what he did, I think it is. He's nationally humiliated.

FYI:

Earlier this year, Khan's underground nuclear bazaar--dubbed the "nuclear Wal-Mart" by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei--was uncloaked, solving the mystery of how North Korea, Iran and Libya acquired so much nuclear technology so fast. The answer: Khan's network sold it to them.

In other news:

Martha Stewart will do her time for lying about a stock sale at a remote West Virginia prison camp where inmates sleep in bunk beds and rise at 6 a.m. to do menial labor for pennies an hour.

The millionaire celebrity homemaker confirmed Wednesday that she had been assigned to the minimum-security prison at Alderson, but noted that she had hoped to be sent to a facility closer to her family and attorneys.

Stewart, convicted in March of lying to investigators about a stock sale, had asked to serve her five-month prison term in Danbury, Conn., close to her 90-year-old mother and her own home in Westport.

But a source familiar with the government's decision, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that Alderson was selected because it was more remote and less accessible to the media than Danbury or Stewart's second choice of Coleman, Fla

digby 10/04/2004 01:36:00 PM |

Sunday, October 03, 2004

 
Two Faces. One Public, One Private. One Phony, One Real.

Over the last week or so we have seen an edgy, enigmatic black and white image of George W. Bush appear on web-sites and blogs. At first people thought that sites had been hacked, as Eschaton and Kos and Democratic Underground spontaneously erupted with the black and white figure only to have it disappear and randomly return. Within days it linked to a mysterious DNC web-site with cryptic material that only slowly came into focus. Clearly something was up.

This image is disconcerting and it evokes strong reactions because it symbolizes the cognitive dissonance so many of us have been living with for the last four years as we’ve watched the man who lost the election but won the office drive us to distraction with the contradictions of his character. And nothing has been more frustrating than the fact that so many in the media and in the public at large seemed to see something entirely different than we did.

I believe that this happened because after 9/11, the media cast Bush in the role of strong, resolute leader, perhaps because the nation needed him to be that, at least for a little while. And the people gratefully laid that mantle on him and he took it because the office demanded no less. The narrative of the nation at war required a warrior leader and George W. Bush was all we had. Karl Rove and others understood that they could use this veil to soothe the American people and flatter the president to take actions that no prudent, thoughtful leader would have taken after our initial successes in Afghanistan. This “man with the bullhorn” image of Bush crystallized in the minds of many Americans and has not been revisited until now.

That phony image took us from a sense of national unity to a misguided war with Iraq; it excused his failure to effectively manage the economy and fomented partisan warfare by portraying dissent as unpatriotic; it allowed people to overlook his obvious failure to take the threat of al Qaeda seriously before 9/11 (and even after) and created a hagiography based on wishful thinking and emotional need rather than any realistic appraisal of his leadership.

His handlers wisely kept him under wraps, allowing him face time on television only in the company of world leaders or to give stirring speeches written by his gifted speechwriter, Mark Gerson. He rarely held press conferences and when he took questions, he was aggressively unresponsive, choosing instead to offer canned sound bites and slogans and daring the press corps to call him on it. Few did. The mask stayed in place and he remained a symbol instead of a president --- the symbol of American strength, resilience and fortitude. He was, in many people’s minds, the president they wished they had.

On Thursday night sixty-one million people watched George W. Bush for the first time since 9/11 not as that symbol, but as a man. And for those who had not reassessed their belief in his personal leadership since 9/11, it was quite a shock. Their strong leader was inarticulate, arrogant, confused and immature. They must be wondering who that man was.

The truth is that since George W. Bush entered politics he has always had two faces. In fact, virtually everything you know about his public persona is the opposite of the real person.

He claims to be a compassionate, caring man, often admonishing people to "love your neighbor like you loved to be loved yourself." Yet, going all the way back to Yale, he is quoted as saying he disapproved of his fellow students as "people who felt guilty about their lot in life because others were suffering." His business school professor remembers him saying that poor people are poor because they are lazy. This from a man who was born rich into one of America's leading families and relied on those connections for everything he ever achieved.

He lectures on responsibility, saying that he's going to end the era of "if it feels good do it" and yet he failed to live up to his responsibility as a young man in the crucible of his generation, the Vietnam war. In fact, if it felt good, he did it and did it with relish --- for forty years of his fifty eight year life. He has never fully owned up to what he did during those years spent in excess and hedonism, relying on a convenient claim of being “born again” to expiate him of his sins. Would that everyone had it so easy.

He ostentatiously calls himself a committed Christian and yet he rarely attends church unless it’s a campaign stop or a national occasion. The man who claims that Christ is his favorite political philosopher famously and cruelly mocked a condemned prisoner begging for her life. He portrays himself as a man of rectitude yet he pumped his fist and said "feels good!" in the moment before he announced that the Iraq war had begun. (One would have thought that if there was ever a time to utter a prayer it was then.) How many funerals of the fallen has he attended? How many widows has he personally comforted?

He portrays himself as a salt of the earth "hard working" rancher, clearing brush on his land in an artfully sweaty Calvin Klein-style t-shirt. Yet in the first 8 months of his presidency leading up to 9/11, he spent 42% of his time on vacation. His "ranching" didn't begin until he bought his million dollar property just before he ran for president in 1999. He has lived in suburbs and cities since a brief period in his childhood in the 50’s, when he lived in the medium sized boom town of Midland before going to Andover.

He actively promotes the notion that he is a man of action yet in the single most important moment of his life he froze in front of school kids, continuing on with a script prepared before the national psyche was blown to bits. He didn’t take charge. He didn’t react. He was paralyzed at the moment of the nation’s worst peril.

He claims to be a strong leader and yet he is skillfully manipulated by his staff, who learned early that the only thing they needed to do to convince him of the rightness of their recommended course was to flatter him by saying it was the "brave" or "bold" thing to do. His self-image as a resolute leader is actually a lack of self confidence that is ripe for exploitation by competing advisors who use it to convince this him to do their bidding. This explains why he seems to believe that he is acting with resolve when he has just affected an abrupt about-face. His advisors had persuaded him to change course simply by telling him he was being resolute.

George W. Bush is a man with two faces--- a public image of manly strength and a private reality of childish weakness. His verbal miscues and malapropisms are the natural consequence of a man struggling with internal contradictions and a lack of self-knowledge. He can’t keep track of what he is supposed to think and say in public.

There is no doubt that whether it's a cowboy hat or a crotch hugging flightsuit , George W. Bush enjoys wearing the mantle of American archetypal warriors. But when he goes behind the curtain and sheds the costume, a flinty, thin-skinned, immature man who has never taken responsibility for his mistakes emerges. The strong compassionate leader is revealed as a flimsy paper tiger.

On Thursday night, the president forgot himself. After years of being protected from anyone who doesn't flatter and cajole, he let his mask slip when confronted with someone who didn't fear his childish retribution or need anything from him. Many members of the public got a good sharp look at him for the first time in two years and they were stunned. Like that black and white image, the dichotomy of the real Bush vs. the phony Bush is profoundly discomfiting.

Luckily for America and the world, a fully synthesized, mature man stood on the other side of that stage ready to assume the mantle of leadership, not as a theatrical costume but as an adult responsibility for which he is prepared by a lifetime of service, study and dedication. I would imagine that many voters felt a strong sense of relief that he was there.







digby 10/03/2004 08:18:00 PM |

 
Too Funny

AMERICAblog does it again:

Drudge outdoes himself today with a post claiming Kerry came to the debate podium and allegedly takes a sheet of paper out of his breast pocket. The debate rules apparently say that you can bring NOTHING to the podium not even paper or pencil, and that all the materials will be placed for you on the podium.

Oh, but only as Drudge can do, the video Drudge posts as "proof" on his site bites Bush in the ass. If you zoom the video to full screen (right click on it while it's running and click "zoom" and then "full screen") you can see Bush unfolding a piece of paper and laying it down on his podium!

Here's the link.

And it's fairly clear to me that Kerry was taking a pen out of his pocket, probably out of habit, which does mean that he broke the debate rules. Clearly, that's the sort of lawless behavior that undecided voters won't stand for. Remember, it's not about the pen. It's about the rule 'o law.

Once again the fighting hellmice of the 101st keyboarders speak truth to power!




digby 10/03/2004 05:08:00 PM |

 
No Joke

The wonderful Meteor Blades over at kos comments on the George P Bush quote from spin alley in the NY Times today in which he says:

"I think his main objective, apart from not falling on the ground on the stage, which he didn't do tonight, was to say, look, here are my positions, and talk directly to the voters."

The Times characterizes this a setting the bar low and Meteor Blades generously says:

I wish I could be certain that hunky George P. merely succumbed to a bit of nervous levity after the stress of watching his uncle send months of meticulous image manipulation down the toilet in 90 minutes. Just a joke to take the edge off.

Or maybe not. We all know the President has fallen down on the job for the past four years. But we didn't mean it literally.

Frankly, I think he meant it literally. After all, George W. Bush falls flat on his face quite frequently, for reasons that nobody can adequately explain.








digby 10/03/2004 04:07:00 PM |

 
Little Voices

TalkLeft mentioned during the debate how wierd it was for Bush to say "let me finish" when nobody had interrupted him. I noticed it too and thought he had just had a bit of a brain lapse and fell into an intimidation tactic that often works to restrain the press but was clearly inappropriate in the present circumstances. (See the infamous Carole Coleman interview for a perfect example of how he employs it.) I even commented that I could only imagine what they would have said about the "delusional" Al Gore if he'd done such a bizarre thing in one of the debates.

I see, however, that some think that this is actually an indication that Bush uses an earpiece, which would explain why he oddly appeared to be speaking to someone who wasn't present during the debate.

I can't remember where I saw it, but there have been pictures of Bush published on the internet that show a strange outline in the back of his jacket when he's standing at the podium. And if I'm not mistaken, one of the debate rules was that they could not shoot either candidate from the back.

The right-wing blogosphere has a very good defense for this charge, however. If Bush was using an earpiece you have to assume that the person who was feeding him his lines at this debate was very drunk or very dumb because his answers were just awful.

On the other hand, that would definitely explain why, in front of 61 million people, he finally had to say something even though it made him look like he was speaking to an imaginary friend. He was desperate for Karen to shut the hell up.

Update:

Here's a picture from the actual debate posted on Raw Story. This truly is strange.



Thanks to Hepzipah for the tip




digby 10/03/2004 03:37:00 PM |

 
Better Red Than Dead

Jesse and Atrios both rightly take Press The Meat to task for their unbalanced panel of bloviators this morning, although I disagree that Brownstein leans Republican. I think he is one the last of the real journalists in the business. Kate O'beirne can only be correctly balanced by someone like Robert Sheer or Katerina Vandnheuvel (maybe even the ghost of Joseph Stalin) but they never have them on.

However, I think both of the guys miss the truly egregious crime perpetrated by Lil' Russ these last couple of weeks.

He's featuring a stultifying series of Senate debates for most of the hour and he's done something quite appalling by only focusing on senate races in conservative states where the Democrat is forced to repudiate John Kerry at every turn in order to eke out a win --- South Dakota and Oklahoma. And he glories in putting this Democrat on the defensive by making him publicly disagree with Kerry while the other guy backs his strong reolute "leader" to the hilt. Unfortunately, the people voting in both of these contests are rather small compared to the national audience that is led to believe that Democrats don't like Kerry or are useless wimps.

Will we be seeing a debate between Specter and Hoeffel do you think? How about Boxer and Jones? It's only fair that we watch some blue state Republican twist in the wind a little bit, too.




digby 10/03/2004 01:07:00 PM |

Saturday, October 02, 2004

 
The Two Faces of Bush






digby 10/02/2004 06:36:00 AM |

Friday, October 01, 2004

 
Good Instincts

LiberalOasis, as usual, has a very cogent take on why Kerry pulled it off last night and I agree with him.

In serious times, people are unsurprisingly anxious for a serious, substantive discussion of serious issues. Kerry's calm, cool temperament and his mastery of the facts made people feel confident that he could handle the job:

How did Kerry make this happen?

Part of it what was LiberalOasis discussed yesterday, the Bushies blew the expectations game, setting Kerry's bar very low.

Part of it was Bush's own defensive and irritated demeanor.

(The guy has never had to debate with a controversial record to explain, and he's not naturally good at it.)

But the other part of it was Kerry's own instincts.

He chose not to panic at the polls, not to feel the need to force a KO punch.

He made the decision to be himself, which is, to be a statesman (a good contrast with Dubya).

And to not dumb down the issues, but treat the voters -- who are looking for answers in an uncertain, anxious time -- as adults.

Surrogate Rudy Guiliani's main spin point (heard on NBC and The Daily Show at least) was Kerry was "lecturing" people.

Nice try.

Rudy and the GOP message masters may think people are stupid, but Kerry doesn't.

By delving into the issues, Kerry's the one treating the voters with respect, not you.

The media should take note of this.

Kerry is is a sixty year old man who is prepared to be president in every sense of the word. But, he also has great political instincts and they should not be underrated. By showing his serious, authoritative personality in direct contrast to the impatient, hot-headed president, he may have turned this race at exactly the right moment.




digby 10/01/2004 01:42:00 PM |

 
Fierce Partisans

The Political Animal is somewhat, shall we say, dismayed that the blogosphere is actively disseminating talking points for either side, seeing as we're supposed to be so independent and stuff.

It's not surprising that the campaigns are reaching out to bloggers, of course, but as near as I can tell both sides are eating this up. Bloggers everywhere are basking in the illusion that they're sophisticated media operatives, actively collaborating to figure out the best spin for their guy. Emails are flying around from all parties pleading with fellow bloggers to stay on message.

This is insane. It's bad enough when the mainstream media spends too much time lazily regurgitating talking points, but doesn't the blogosphere supposedly pride itself on being fiercely independent, a small band of brave truthtellers immune to the spin and cant of professional politicos?

I'm afraid if anyone believed that last, they were the ones who were insane. Fiercely independent? Most bloggers are openly political and we always have been. We don't identify with the flaccid he said/she said psuedo objectivity of the mainstram media; we are a blatently partisan media and proud of it. I imagine that many of us took up blogging in the first place because of what we saw as a necessary counterbalance to the Mighty Wurlitzer of talk radio, cable news and think tank talking heads that the right has built up over the last 25 years.

We are in the midst of a close fought presidential campaign and I am a devoted liberal who wants to do everything I can to see Kerry elected and to keep the modern Republican party from holding too much power. I recognise that spinning the media (which is what this is all about)is part of that effort and I will happily do whatever tiny little thing I can do. I never held myself up as objective or "independent" in this sense and I'm proud to help the campaign spread its message. To me it's the same thing as volunteering to phone bank or walk the precinct.

I don't have any particularly strong belief that the blogosphere is meaningful to this effort (yet), but it certainly costs me nothing to try to spread the word about something I believe in. If I can provide a little inspiration to my fellow travelers, then I feel that I've made a small contribution to the cause.


Update:

Blogs will continue to offer personal views and independent analysis. But, after all the talking we've done over these past few months about Lakoff's framing and the right's information infrastructure, I thought it was obvious to everyone that one of the the things that must be done to cut through the white noise of contemporary media culture is repetition of key phrases, marketing penetration of message and speaking with one voice to hone our ideas and drum them into the public's psyche.

If Democratic partisans don't help with this, then the left blogosphere will be a nice little collection of individual iconoclasts who speak to each other while the right blogosphere becomes an internet message behemoth. No thanks.

I can write all I want about anything I want and I'll continue to do so. Honing the message goes both ways. But, in the final stretch of the most importan political campaign in my lifetime I don't think it's too much for us to try to help work the refs a little bit on behalf of our candidate.

And in the long term, we'd better get our shit together or the Republicans will own every last piece of political media while we're out here singing kumbaya. This is serious and Democrats had better get serious about it.




digby 10/01/2004 01:15:00 PM |

 
Petulant And Out Of Touch

The DNC has this video up that's quite amusing and quite revealing. Bush looks petulant, immature, arrogant, out of touch, unfocused and annoyed. We'll have to wait for Saturday Night Live and Jay Leno to tell us whether this will take on a life of its own, but he certainly didn't look presidential in any way shape or form with his puerile fidgeting.

Blitzer appeared to be shocked at that suggestion when it was brought up this morning, however, because the president simply can't look unpresidential in his book. Sorry, Wolfie, the president is routinely not only unpresidential he is an embarrassment. Here's some footage (real player) of him spitting out a wad of gum before he signed a major treaty with Russia back in 2002.

We know that Junior has always believed that a dictatorship would be easier as long as he's the dictator, but that's too bad. It's a shame that a president has to go through all this election unpleasantness, but it's part of the "hard work" of democracy. His highness behaved last night as if he shouldn't have to stand on the same stage and debate a man who he believes is his lesser.

He's quite the regular guy, our ill-mannered boy King.







digby 10/01/2004 11:08:00 AM |

 
A Tie?

It appears to me as I'm watching the gasbags this morning that there is consensus emerging that the debate was a tie but that Kerry helped himself by energizing the Democratic base that pretty much hates him.

If anyone feels like writing a letter or making a call and reminding the networks that last night they clearly believed that Kerry won, as did most of the editorial boards and polls, here's the info.


The following links are to articles and transcripts of the post debate analysis:


Larry King Live Post Debate Spin

MSNBC - Kerry, a clear winner

Russert

PBS-Shields and Brooks

ABC's The Note (calling it a tie)

CNN Post Debate Analysis

CBS

Contact Information:

ABC News

www.abcnews.com

47 W. 66th St
New York, NY 10023
Phone: (212) 456-7477, 456-3796
Fax: (212) 456-4866, 456-2795


World News Tonight with Peter Jennings

Phone: (212) 456-4040
peterjennings@worldnewstonight.abcnews.com
Fax: (212) 456-2771


CBS News

www.cbsnews.com
542 W. 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

News Desk:
Phone: (212) 975-4321, 975-3691
Fax: (212) 975-1893


CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Fox News

www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453


NBC News

www.nbc.com

30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Phone: (212) 664-5900
Fax: (212) 664-2914


NPR

www.npr.org

635 Mass Ave
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: (202) 414-2323
Fax: (202) 414-3324


PBS

www.pbs.org

PO BOX 50880
Washington, DC 20091
Phone: (800) 356-2626











digby 10/01/2004 10:45:00 AM |

 
Never Mind

As I watch Schneider, Blitzer and Rothenberg do the post mortem of the debate this morning, I can't help but laugh at the fact that today they all seem to believe that the debates don't really mean much in the long run and that nothing really changes because of just one performance no matter how much the public believes one or the other won or lost.

Gosh. It seems like just yesterday that they were saying that last night's debate was make or break for John Kerry and that if he didn't pull it off his campaign was in deep deep trouble. Today, all the polls and editorial pages are saying he won. But, it doesn't really matter.

Rothenberg did allow that Kerry might have helped himself with his base which Blitzer said had been in terrible malaise. So, perhaps winning the debate by two to one may have helped poor old Kerry just a little bit. Maybe.

They also discussed how often the first impressions of who won a debate later change "once people have a few days to think about it" and then named a list of first debate winners --- Mondale, Dukakis, Perot and Gore --- who went on to lose the election.

I came away with the clear impression that winning the first debate is the kiss of death.







digby 10/01/2004 10:17:00 AM |

 
Won On A Hemmer

The General finds that CNN's Bill Hemmer had a GOP ringer in his group of "undecided's"

Early in the program, Mr. Hemmer interviewed three undecided Florida voters about their hopes for last night's debate. The fact that at least two of the three seemed to be fairly intelligent made me wonder just how undecided they really were--after all, you'd have to be a complete idiot to be unable to choose between one of the candidates by now.

I found it more than a bit curious that one of undecideds, Edward Martos, is a graduate student in public administration at the University of Miami. Public administration? You'd think that he'd certainly be a bit more informed about politics and public policy that the average guy. How could he still be undecided?

After a little googling, I learned that Mr. Martos seems to be leading a double life. While claiming to be the politically independent president of a non-partisan campus group called the Council for Democracy, he is also very involved with the College Republicans, having served on committees to draft the UMCR constitution and organize a veterans memorial committee. He has also served as the Assistant Editor in Chief for the CR newsletter, Eye On Politics.

"Perhaps," I thought, "there are two Edward Martoses attending UM," but then I learned that the College Republican Edward Martos promoted Council for Democracy events at College Republican meetings. Certainly, it's the same guy.

The picture sealed it for me. The College Republican Edward Martos is the guy I saw on CNN. He's supposed to be on again this morning. Watch it and see for yourself.

Here's the CNN form to make comments to Bill Hemmer.




digby 10/01/2004 09:44:00 AM |

Thursday, September 30, 2004

 
Get Ready

Scarborough is saying that the Bush campaign is going to put up an ad showing that Kerry flip flopped in the debates tonight on building alliances (something to do with Australia) and Matthews was excited at the prospect.

Tomorrow is where the action is folks. Tonight, the consensus is that Kerry won the debate and he did. Tomorrow, the push back begins.

Get your phone numbers in hand. Get ready to write e-mails. They will not go down without a fight. We will have to fight them back with their own words.

I will post tonight's various transcripts of the immediate responses tomorrow and we should be prepared to shove the mediawhores' impressions down their own throats.

Tomorrow is the day in which we will crystalize Kerry's win in this debate. Everybody needs to help. I'll have all the contact info for you --- all you need to do is write some e-mails and make a few phone calls. The campaign could be seriously helped by this effort. Let's do it.




digby 9/30/2004 08:36:00 PM |

 
Constriction

Martini Republic captures the meme:

As John Kerry elucidated on Administration error after Administration error on the war in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, George W. Bush repeated meaningless mantras wholly composed of his own rectitude, not so much in debate, nor even in defense, but as a refrain a child hums when scared of thunder.

Kerry's demeanor was the demeanor of someone the public can trust, and he scarcely seemed the flipflopper the Bush campaign presents him as; the President's demeanor, conversely, could only be termed as trustworthy by the most partisan Republicans. Kerry delivered with honesty, smoothness and strength; the President, conversely, stumbled many times--once, amazingly, saying that our troops were fighting "vociferously", another time calling the Senator "Bush" (?), was full of blinks and stammers, and began, probably to the horror of Karl Rove, explaining himself. Three times he asked for more time from the moderator to clarify not a Kerry charge but his own position.

Being resolutely wrong is hard to defend.

LOSER




digby 9/30/2004 08:29:00 PM |

 
Spinning Like Tops

Kondrake just said that Kerry looked like a commander in chief.

Barnes feels that Kerry helped himself with his base.

Kristol said that this race now a real race.

Brokaw said that Kerry renergized the base and gave undecided voters a good reason to vote for him.

Russert said John Kerry was the candidate that Democrats thought they were nominating in Iowa.

Matthews said Bush elected to recieve instead of taking it to his opponent.




digby 9/30/2004 08:04:00 PM |

 
Winner

We just saw the next president of the United States and his name isn't George W. Bush.

George W. Bush behaved like a petulant child. He smirked, he rolled his eyes and he behaved very immaturely. His bearing was not presidential. Kerry didn't lose his cool. He stayed on message. He looked like a president.

John Kerry won this debate folks, because he was right on substance and he was right in attitude. Even the mediawhores are taking Bush to task.

Scarborough on MSNBC said it was Kerry's best showing in a debate ever.

Andrea Mitchell said that Bush misbehaved with his smirking and annoyance.

I'm going back to the spin room. I'll be back in a minute.








digby 9/30/2004 07:48:00 PM |

 
Loose Nukes

Prior to 9/11, the Bush administration sought to slash funding for the Nunn-Lugar initiative, calling it a waste of money. Since 9/11, the administration has prudently reversed that posture, but despite his claim of a close personal relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, it's hard to find any evidence that Bush has made nuclear threat reduction a particularly high priority in U.S.-Russia relations. After the last Bush-Putin summit, the subject wasn't even mentioned in the two leaders' public declarations. Meanwhile, the administration's vaunted homeland security effort has placed an equally low priority on ensuring systematic inspection of cargos entering our country via sea, land, or air for nuclear materials.

As it happens, Bush's rival, Sen. John Kerry, who has a strong record on proliferation issues, has made aggressive international action on nuclear nonproliferation the centerpiece of his plan for a new collective security system to meet 21st century threats to America and world peace and order. Aside from promising to make the "loose nuke" threat in the former Soviet Union the top item on the agenda in every discussion with Russia, Kerry has called for repealing the loophole in international nonproliferation treaties that allows countries to obtain and process nuclear materials for "peaceful energy uses." That's the guise under which North Korea has created its nuclear weapons program, and the excuse Iran is using to explain its equally aggressive drive to obtain nuclear materials and build enrichment and reprocessing plants. Kerry wants to offer such states and others a simple deal: We will give you the nuclear fuel you need for energy use so long as you agree to let us recapture the spent fuel so it cannot be redirected to a secret weapons program. He has also called for steps to make prevention of nuclear terrorism a central preoccupation of every federal agency involved in national security or international diplomacy.

digby 9/30/2004 07:28:00 PM |

 
We Are Bogged Down In Iraq

...and any sentient person knows it. He took the pressure off of al Queda and let bin Laden escape in Tora Bora.

This is indisputable. Iraq was not an imminent danger, but al Qaeda was. Bush took his eye off the ball because a bunch of starry eyed neocons were looking for an excuse to take out their old, dotty nemesis Saddam Hussein.

It is indisputable that the post war planning for Iraq was left in the hand of a group of nepostic know-bothings like Ari Fleisher's brother and people are now dying. On average, U.S. forces are now being attacked well over 60 times per day. This is a 20% increase from the three months before the transfer of sovereignty.

Bush keeps saying that changing position on Iraq is a sign of weakness. But, anyone can understand that when things are hurtling out of control you should change direction. Bush is incapable of doing this because he has staked his presidency on a war he wanted to fight instead of the war we needed to fight.








digby 9/30/2004 07:06:00 PM |

 
Hard Work


Have you heard that it's hard work?

It's hard work.




digby 9/30/2004 06:51:00 PM |

 
Let 'Em Have It

If the post debate spin tonight is as unfair and absurd as it has been in the past, it would be helpful if people would call the networks in large numbers and complain. It usually takes a few days to gel and it might be possible to turn an incorrect spin if we make an issue of it. If they don't hear from us, they don't realize that they are living in their own little media echo chamber.

Don't jump to conclusions. Wait and watch for a while to see how it plays out. The press corpse might just see the obvious, for once, and realize that Bush's canned, robotic responses are not persuasive and that the public really needs to hear something more than bumper sticker slogans. Bush's cockiness and arrogance may just go too far this time and even the media may be put off by it. We know that Kerry is by far more intellectually prepared to answer questions and win in a fair debate. Perhaps the media will finally wipe the stardust from their eyes and recognise that outtakes from "Bonanza" are simply not adequate answers to serious questions.

But, if they immediately say that Kerry lost then call and complain. Tell them that you thought Kerry did great and that what you saw was the next president of the United States. Don't accuse them of bias. Tell them you wonder if they watched the same debate you did.

If Bush spin grows tomorrow, call again. (Use those free nightime minutes. They aren't good for anything else.) Let the media know that we are watching and listening and that they will hear from us.

My reader jake in the comment below says:

This tactic was at the backbone of the right's onslaught on the media for the last 20 years. This phenomenon didn't happen overnight. Straightening it out won't happen quickly either. But it's gotta start NOW.


And don't email. That gets no attention. You have to call. You have to express yourself verbally and forcefully. You have to be clear, strong and organized. Don't engage in twit-speak about your "feelings." You also have to write letters...Paper ones, delivered in the mail (gasp! horrors!). As I said, I know because I've been in the belly of the beast forever.

ABC News

www.abcnews.com

47 W. 66th St
New York, NY 10023
Phone: (212) 456-7477, 456-3796
Fax: (212) 456-4866, 456-2795


World News Tonight with Peter Jennings

Phone: (212) 456-4040
peterjennings@worldnewstonight.abcnews.com
Fax: (212) 456-2771


CBS News

www.cbsnews.com
542 W. 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

News Desk:
Phone: (212) 975-4321, 975-3691
Fax: (212) 975-1893


CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Fox News

www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453


NBC News

www.nbc.com

30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Phone: (212) 664-5900
Fax: (212) 664-2914


NPR

www.npr.org

635 Mass Ave
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: (202) 414-2323
Fax: (202) 414-3324


PBS

www.pbs.org

PO BOX 50880
Washington, DC 20091
Phone: (800) 356-2626

Get your phone in hand. Listen to the democratic voices in the spin room and make note of their key words and phrases. Read your regular blogs after the debate.

Then get on the phone and make some calls. Tonight. If they fuck this up, the media need to hear from us.




digby 9/30/2004 04:55:00 PM |

 
"The Situation"

Everyone needs to read this. George W. Bush is living in a fantasyland of spin, pretending that things are getting better. George W. Bush has turned a potential threat into an active threat.

Here is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Reporter's E-mail:

It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.

Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.

We did not need to fight this particular war. We had a real war to fight and we did a half assed job of it in Afghanistan because certain members of the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to go after an old enemy who was not an imminent threat. Invading Iraq played into our real enemy's hands and gave their cause new life and many, many recruits. It lost us friends and allies throughout the world. We are less safe than we would have been if George W. Bush had fought the war we needed to fight instead of the war he wanted to fight.

The American people do not want to believe that our government could make a mistake of such epic proportions. But it did and the man at the top needs to be fired. He is not willing to change course and fix his mistakes, so the American people are going to have to do it for him.

Read the entire piece. Send it to the media and ask them why they are covering this election as if it were a sporting event when it is a matter of life and death. "The situation" is lethal and Americans may have to pay a very heavy price if we don't take this war out of Bush's hands while we have the chance. He and his comrades have shown that they cannot be trusted to wage the war correctly.









digby 9/30/2004 03:03:00 PM |

 
Pool Coverage

I wrote yesterday that Fox would be in control of the feed of the debate tonight and therefore could not be trusted to show Kerry in a fair light. As it turns out, each network will have a choice of various shots.

Fox News is running the "pool" coverage, feeding multiple streams of video to the other networks -- and also feeding suspicion in the liberal blogosphere that somehow the choice of images shown would be biased toward Bush -- but it's up to each control room what shots to show.

In the past, the feed that went out was the feed that everybody saw. I guess that's changed. So, if they play games with the reaction shots, it's the fault of the particular network, not necessarily FOX.

That's something we should complain about as well. Keep those phone numbers handy. Work those refs.










digby 9/30/2004 02:16:00 PM |

 
Who Cares What Grieving Moms Think?

Apparently, the Dan Rather debacle has the quaking mediaswhores completely cowed. None of them are going to talk about anything "controversial" going forward.

So far in this campaign, the surest way for political advocacy groups to grab some TV exposure is to create commercials (the more emotional the better), buy airtime in a handful of swing states and then hold a press conference to announce the spots. The first Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad that argued Sen. John Kerry lied about his war medals won free airtime for weeks on cable television. More recently, an anti-Kerry ad mixing a grainy picture of Kerry in among notorious Islamic terrorists was dutifully noted by most major news organizations.

The latest ad buy entry came yesterday when families of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce two new emotional anti-Bush ads that are set to run in the crucial swing states of Florida, New Mexico and Nevada. Calling themselves RealVoices.org, the mothers of slain soldiers appear in the two ads, often in tears as they describe their loss and their anger over the war in Iraq.

Sounds like some pretty gripping stuff, right? Apparently not to TV news outlets. So far they've been overwhelmingly MIA on the story. Here's an up-to-the-minute tally of the mentions that RealVoices.org has received so far:

CNBC: 0
CNN: 0
CNN Headline News: 0
Fox News: 0
MSNBC: 1
ABC: 0
CBS: 0
NBC: 0

*Sigh*

Write some e-mails folks. Work those cowardly refs. This is a powerful ad campaign and the goddamned gasbags ought to give it just as much coverage as they gave those swift boat bozos.

Here's the CNN feedback page
or:
feedback@CNN.com
Crossfire@CNN.com

MSNBC:
hardball@msbnc.com
countdown@msnbc.com
joe@msnbc.com


FoxNews:
Fuggedaboudit








digby 9/30/2004 01:17:00 PM |

 
Rhymes With Wee-Ahtch

Spare me, dear readers, any more chastisement for making a very vague passing remark about Lynn Cheney's backside. The nasty witch doesn't seem to have a problem with mocking other people's looks:

During a campaign stop in Minnesota yesterday, Mrs Cheney joined in the ridiculing of Mr Kerry.

As a group of volunteers moved into a crowd with microphones for a question-and-answer period, the vice-president told supporters to look for the people with dark orange shirts.

When Cheney paused as if searching to describe the shade of orange, his wife said: “How about John Kerry’s suntan?”

Live by Drudge, die by Drudge. If you want to be treated respectfully, you should probably behave respectfully --- particularly if you have an ass the size of a love seat.




digby 9/30/2004 01:10:00 PM |

 
FYI

Wes Clark and Rudy Giuliani will be doing the live debate coverage with Jon Stewart tonight on The Daily Show: The place where the smart people go for their fake news.




digby 9/30/2004 10:20:00 AM |

 
When Will Bush Face The Grim Reality In Iraq?

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Three bombs exploded at a neighborhood celebration Thursday in western Baghdad, killing 35 children and seven adults, officials said. Hours earlier, a suicide car bomb killed a U.S. soldier and two Iraqis on the capital's outskirts.

The bombs in Baghdad's al-Amel neighborhood caused the largest death toll of children in any insurgent attack since the conflict in Iraq (news - web sites) began 17 months ago. The children, who were still on school vacation, said they had been drawn to the scene by American soldiers handing out candy.

[...]

"The Americans called us, they told us, 'Come here, come here,' asking us if we wanted sweets. We went beside them, then a car exploded," said 12-year-old Abdel Rahman Dawoud, lying naked in a hospital bed with shrapnel embedded all over his body.


The day of violence, including insurgent attacks and U.S. airstrikes in Fallujah, left a total of 46 people dead and 208 wounded

[...]

Also Thursday, the Arab news network Al-Jazeera showed video of 10 new hostages seized in Iraq by militants. Al-Jazeera said the 10 — six Iraqis, two Lebanese and two Indonesian women — were taken by The Islamic Army in Iraq. The group has claimed responsibility for seizing two French journalists last month.

[...]

Hours earlier, a suicide car bomber struck in the Abu Ghraib area outside of Baghdad, killing the American soldier and at least two Iraqis, and wounding 60, Iraqi and U.S. officials said.


That bomb targeted a compound housing the mayor's office, a police station and other buildings, police 1st Lt. Ahmed Jawad said. A U.S. Bradley fighting vehicle parked in front of the compound was hit, Hutton said.


"I saw people flying in the air and falling on the ground," said Saad Mohsin, who was in front of the mayor's office and was struck by shrapnel.

[...]

American jets, tanks and artillery units repeatedly have targeted al-Zarqawi's network in Fallujah in recent weeks as U.S.-led forces seek to assert control over insurgent enclaves ahead of elections slated for January. The military says the attacks have inflicted significant damage on the network, which has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings, kidnappings and other attacks.

Doctors say scores of civilians have been killed and wounded in the strikes.

Jesus H. Christ.

Are the American people going to fall for the same old tired tropes tonight about freedom and democracy and being resolute or are they going to demand to know why our president has us stuck in a living goddamned nightmare from which we cannot awake in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11?

If you want more of this, America, vote for George W. Bush. He'll stay the goddamned course come hell or high water:







digby 9/30/2004 10:07:00 AM |

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

 
"Bush lied, my son died"

In a TV commercial released Wednesday, Cindy Sheehan, a 47-year-old woman from Vacaville, Calif., whose 24-year-old son was killed in Sadr City in April, speaks directly to George W. Bush.

Shot in black-and-white, her soft voice cracking, she says, "I imagined it would hurt if one of my kids was killed, but I never thought it would hurt this bad, especially someone so honest and brave as Casey, my son. When you haven't been honest with us, when you and your advisors rushed us into this war. How do you think we felt when we heard the Senate report that said there was no link between Iraq and 9/11?"

This is one of four new ads featuring relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq, produced by a new political action committee called RealVoices.org. At a time when soldiers' parents have been arrested at Bush rallies and thrown out of the Republican National Convention for trying to make themselves heard, Real Voices was formed to broadcast the excruciating messages of those who feel that their loved ones' lives were wasted in Iraq.

Real Voices is spending $200,000 on its initial ad buy while trying to raise more money. Each one of the spots is bitter and searing. In one, Raphael Zappala, whose 30-year-old brother was killed in Baghdad while searching a warehouse for weapons of mass destruction, says, "My brother died trying to make an honest man out of George W. Bush, needlessly. He was betrayed by the lies of his commander in chief. And the troops still in Iraq are being betrayed." Another features a California mother named Jane Bright, who remains livid about Bush's rash "Bring 'em on!" challenge. "Mr. Bush," she says, "I have no way of knowing whether the insurgent who killed my son ever heard your foolish taunt. But thanks to you, Mr. President, I have the rest of my life to wonder about it."

[...]

One might think that Sheehan's sacrifice would protect her from assaults by the right-wing patriotism police, but one would be wrong. Since she started speaking out, she's been attacked as a political opportunist and accused of treason.

"I have had people tell me that what I'm doing is supporting terrorists and that my son would be ashamed of me," she says. "I was on a radio call-in show on Sunday morning, and I had a lot of people call me a traitor."

This group is raising money to run these ads in swing states. If you have any left to spare, this is a good place to put it.

Real Voices






digby 9/29/2004 08:28:00 PM |

 
Brat Boy Debater

In case anyone's wondering why Bush and company negotiated hard for the networks not to show cut-away or reaction shots in the debate, this little passage from "When George meets John" by James Fallows explains it:

The debate was held in a tiny basement room on the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso. The candidates' families and a few local officials sat on metal folding chairs in the room; everyone else, including reporters, watched TV monitors elsewhere. Laura Bush sat a few feet away from Mauro's children, whom she knew but (according to Mauro) did not speak to or acknowledge. According to the rules of this debate, insisted on by Bush's team, the screen had to show only whichever candidate was speaking—that is, no cutaway or reaction shots were allowed

Therefore no one outside the room saw the miniature drama inside. Bush was halfway toward his presidential style, speaking more slowly and less gracefully than four years earlier, and with a more dismissive air toward his opponent. While Mauro was speaking, Bush would sigh, grimace, and send body-language messages of boredom or contempt. "It was incredible," Mauro told me recently. "I almost can't believe it in retelling it. Because the press was upstairs, they didn't realize how aggressive he was on the stage—pulling the sleeve of the moderator, staring or winking at Laura in the crowd." The moderator of the debate, Bob Moore, of the El Paso Times, told me that Bush actually grabbed him just before the debate: "In the hallway, Bush did grab me by the lapels, pull me close to his face, and say, 'Bobby, you clean up real good.' Typical Bush." When Bush was on stage but off camera, Moore said, "there was that Bush smirk, rolling his eyes, all of which Bush is very good at."

Now, supposedly the networks are not going to follow the negotiated restrictions:

And the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which is not a party to the agreement, said it could not be expected to enforce strictures on network coverage of the four debates.

At issue are rules that bar the networks from airing "cutaway" shots of either Republican President Bush or Democratic challenger John Kerry while they are waiting their turn to speak during the debates.

[...]

Fox News Channel, whose turn it is under a rotation system to operate the "pool" cameras for all the networks in the first debate on Thursday in Coral Gables, Florida, said it would follow its own editorial judgment in operating its cameras.

"They don't want reaction shots," said Fox News spokesman Paul Schur told Reuters. "We're not going to bow to outside pressure. We're not going to follow these restrictions."

Yeah, sure.

This is a problem. FoxNews has a very bad track record of signalling GOP propaganda in debates. In the January 22 Democratic primary debate, they cut to their panel for immediate spinning by William Bennett before the debate was over.

Fox News is going to follow it's own editorial rules all right. And, I think we know what they are, don't we?




digby 9/29/2004 04:54:00 PM |

 
Dick's Big Flop.


Most of you have undoubtedly seen this Campaign Extra post featuring an interview with Dick Cheney in 1992 via Atrios, but it's worth thinking about a little bit.

Here's what he said back then:

We stopped when we did, and it was a unanimous recommendation on the part of the President's advisors, civilian and military, we stopped when we did because we had achieved our objectives. We had said from the outset that our purpose was to liberate Kuwait and destroy Saddam Hussein's capacity to threaten his neighbors, his offensive military capability, we did that. We destroyed about two-thirds of his army in that portion that he sent in to Kuwait and Iraq, and stripped him of most of his weapons of mass destruction.

We could have gone on. There is no doubt in my mind, from a military standpoint we could have sent forces on down the road to Baghdad, captured Baghdad, but I would expect in terms of trying to get rid of Saddam Hussein that it would not have been an easy task. I don't think it was the kind of situation where we could have pulled up with a paddywagon in front of the Presidential Palace and said, "Come on Saddam, you're going to the slammer." I think we would have had to run him to ground, and doing that in Baghdad or in a nation as large as Iraq would have involved a lot of US forces.

Once we rounded up Saddam, then the question is what do you do? You're going to put a government in his place. Presumably, you're not just going to turn your back and walk away. You have to put some kind of a government in its place. And then the question comes is it going to be a Shi'a government or a Kurdish government, or maybe a Sunni government, or maybe it ought to be based on the old Baathist Party regime, or some combination thereof.

How long is that government to be able to stay in power without US military support to keep it there? How long can we maintain the coalition?

Remember we entered into this activity with the support of 30 other nations. A very important part of that support was the support of other Arab nations who took up arms against a brother Arab state, who allowed us to operate military forces from their territory, who sent combat forces to fight alongside our people in Kuwait.

How long could we have maintained that coalition of Arab states if we had been involved in the long-range occupation by the US in Iraq? I would guess if we had gone on to Baghdad I would still have forces in Iraq today. I don't know how we would have let go of that tar baby once we had grabbed hold of it.

A final point that I think is very important. Everybody is fond of looking back at Desert Storm and saying that it was, in fact, a low cost conflict because we didn't suffer very many casualties. But for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it was not a cheap or a low cost conflict. The question, to my mind, in terms of this notion that we should have gone on and occupied Iraq is how many additional American casualties would we have had to suffer? How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer I would give is not very damn many.

Not very damn many...

Now, the harpies will screech at the top of their lungs, "But, 9/11 changed everything OHMYGODTHEYARETRYINGTOKILLUS!!!!!"

But, you know, it didn't change the fact that Saddam had not reconstituted his WMD, that he had no ties to al Qaeda and that all we needed to do was to get weapons inspectors back into the country to harrass him and keep him in line. An invasion and occupation simply wasn't necessary for our safety or the safety of those in the region.

Junior will wax on about liberating the Iraqi people and freeeeedom and demaaahcracy and loving yer neighbor like you just love to love yerself. But, if that's why we did it --- because we're so good --- then Unka Dick sure has some splaining to do. How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer I would give is not very damn many. Yup.

It's funny to me how differently I see the events of 9/11 changing "everything" than these people do. To me, it meant that we could not go gallivanting around the world "liberating" people if it meant that we would exacerbate the terrorist threat without any tangible benefit in security. Until this period of radicalism is brought under control or ends through other means, wars of liberation in the mid-east and the Indian subcontinent anyway, are just too dangerous. 9/11 turned me, a dyed in the wool liberal, from something of a Wilsonian internationalist into much more of a realist.

And, as I have written about many times before, we are much less safe today that we were before we let the entire world know that our vaunted intelligence services couldn't find a weapon of mass destruction if it fell out of the sky and landed on the White House lawn. And now we've also let everybody know that we have a thinly stretched part-time military and a government that can't get it together enough to plan an occupation properly.

A little mystery about the super powers of a super power is a very powerful thing. We are now looking pretty damned weak compared to what the world thought of us in January of 2002.

Weirdly, I think that Dick Cheney, of all people, would have agreed with me back in 1992. Sometime between then and now he drank the neocon fire water and it packs a punch. What did Lady MacMyleroie put in that stuff, anyway?




digby 9/29/2004 03:13:00 PM |

 
Good News

Over the past 30 days, more than 2,300 attacks by insurgents have been directed against civilians and military targets in Iraq, in a pattern that sprawls over nearly every major population center outside the Kurdish north, according to comprehensive data compiled by a private security company with access to military intelligence reports and its own network of Iraqi informants.

What is good about that, you ask?

military officers argue that despite the rise in bloody attacks during the past 30 days, the insurgents have yet to win a single battle.

"We have had zero tactical losses; we have lost no battles," said one senior American military officer. "The insurgency has had zero tactical victories.

See, the ragtag insurgency in Iraq has not "won" a "battle" against the mightiest military the world has ever known so they aren't accomplishing anything.

In other news, death by a thousand cuts was declared illegal by the Ashcroft torture division of the Justice Department.







digby 9/29/2004 02:31:00 PM |

 
Dancing For Democracy

MSNBC just had a professor from Syracuse University on telling us that body language and gestures are what matter to voters in debates and it occurred to me that it is a mistake for Bush to agree to debates at all. He should insist that the candidates instead do an interpretive dance for the citizens and let them decide strictly on the basis of physical expression.

Karl Rove always says that politics is TV with the sound turned off and Preznit Gibberish has proved it time and again. He wears costumes and mimes being a flyboy, a cowboy and a good ole boy so well that he's downright french about it. As a presidential interpretive dancer, Dubya's the best there's ever been. He'd be unbeatable if he never had to open his mouth.




digby 9/29/2004 10:37:00 AM |

 
Fortune Telling

Atrios has a good post up about the polls and mentions that Matt Yglesias takes Texeira and others to task for focusing on the Gallup poll's obvious bias. Matt says:

The reality is that after a few days of what looked to me like a comeback, the Kerry campaign has once again lost its momentum.

You know, I hate to bring this up, but perhaps it's time to issue a reminder here about political prognostication and instincts. It seems like it was only a few months ago --- and, by gosh it was --- that we heard this:

Do note that, much as Dean's nomination is inevitable, it is also inevitable that at some point in the not-too-distant future, his nomination will cease to look inevitable. Nevertheless, it will still be inevitable as has been clear for some time. When you combine the most impassioned supporters with what's obviously the best-run campaign, and the most money, you're looking at a winner.

As you can see, prognostication is a dangerous game.

The reality is that this race is close. It is NOT clear that Kerry has lost momentum. It is simply unknowable from the polls who has momentum, if anyone, and whether Kerry is ahead by a few points or behind by a few points --- because the race is close. These divergent polls are likely the result of the impact of technology on polling methods finally coming to fruition, a shifting undecided electorate as they finally tune in heavily and some very bad polling methods that don't matter a lot when the race is a blowout. We simply don't know anything more than that the race is within spitting distance for both candidates at this point.

As for political instincts, one of the purposes of calling the damn polls into question is to try to work the refs a little bit. The polls are all over the place and some of it is obviously due to this ridiculous sampling of extra Republican.
Just now Blitzer had Frank Newport on and, needless to say, Blitzer stood up for Gallup and even said he would "vouch" for the poll. But by even airing this controversy it shakes at least some people's faith in the poll and puts Gallup on the defensive. That's how the game is played, folks.




digby 9/29/2004 09:42:00 AM |

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

 
Swimming In The Tank

Media Matters has a run down on debate expectations and clearly, the media have high expectations of George W. Bush in this debate. Across the board they are assuming that he will win with his two-faced, phony folksy ways. After all, they are the ones who decide such things. So, don't get your hopes up for John Kerry to "win" this debate even if he wins it. The press is in the tank.

On the other hand, I have a feeling that undecideds may be looking for more substance this year than robotic, on-message non-sequitors and they might just find the president's slouchy, casual style a little bit disconcerting in a time of serious challenges. It's easy for him to appear in charge and in control when he's all by himself on a stage. But, when you see him next to someone who has command of the issues and looks straight in the camera and challenges his unresponsive bumper sticker mantras, they may just be surprised. Anything's possible.

By the way, has anybody noticed that Bush is sounding a little bit spacey on the stump these last couple of days? Maybe he hasn't been getting enough sleep or enough coffee. His eyes are very puffy. I don't know what it is, but he doesn't seem to be himself. Wierd.







digby 9/28/2004 02:54:00 PM |

 
Meow

Kitty's Number One

Here's a fun little tid-bit from page 492, just to whet your appetite:

Barbara Bush was more determined than ever to see her daughter re-marry. She believed that only through marriage could Doro and her children find their safest haven. To that end Barbara encouraged Doro to date.

"We spent a weekend up at Camp David with the Bushes....They had two dogs up there at the time and the divorced daughter," recalled one congressional wife. "Barbara told me she was concerned because Doro had dated Representative David Dreier for a year and he never touched her... 'Never laid a hand on her,' said Barbara... I think Doro had better luck when she started dating a democrat."

There's more --- much, much more.

Thanks to Sekmet and Pandora on BCF




digby 9/28/2004 01:37:00 PM |

 
Pink Slip

Taking Bob Novak at face value (always a dicey proposition) I think we have to conclude that our vaunted resolute, CEO president doesn't listen to anyone and can't manage his way out of a bag of pork rinds.

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff. Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam. This was not from a CIA retiree but an active senior official. (Pillar, no covert operative, is listed openly in the Federal Staff Directory.)

For President Bush to publicly write off a CIA paper as just guessing is without precedent. For the agency to go semi-public is not only unprecedented but shocking. George Tenet's retirement as director of Central Intelligence removed the buffer between president and agency. As the new DCI, Porter Goss inherits an extraordinarily sensitive situation.

What a good idea it is to re-elect a president who is at war with his own State department and CIA in the middle of a national security crisis. This alleged great leader makes enemies of practically everyone he comes in contact with, particularly those who have expertise and knowledge he desperately needs. Harvard Business School must teach some odd management techniques.

For a man who coasted on his daddy's name until he was fifty four, antagonizing all of America's allies and half the US government is quite an achievement in just three short years. His family must be so proud. Four More Years!




digby 9/28/2004 06:43:00 AM |

 
Inevitablity Dance

Sunday's Washington Post made me suspect that the Bush campaign really does think things are going poorly right now. Why? Because Republicans are starting to make preposterously overconfident predictions of a Bush landslide.

[...]

It's well-known that Karl Rove believes that swing voters like to vote for the winner. Therefore, one of the central political strategies for Bush has been to create an "aura of inevitability" that, theoretically, will bring people to his side. If everyone believes you're a political juggernaut, the theory goes, then you will become a political juggernaut.

[...]

The worse things get for Bush, the more likely his aides are to declare that he is invincible. The Bushies are starting to sound like Baghdad Bob, trumpeting a decisive victory for Saddam Hussein as the American military zooms into Iraq's capital city. Whenever Bush is in trouble, someone—usually Rove—declares that things are going just swimmingly. The most memorable example of this was Bush's 2000 campaign trip to California to make it look like his election was going to be a walk even though polls showed that the race was a toss-up. Bush also took a day off from campaigning as a sign of confidence in his impending landslide. On Election Day, of course, Al Gore won more votes than Bush did, and eventually Bush won the presidency with only one more electoral vote than he needed to take office.

And, if one were to make the obvious comparison of their political campaign to their military campaign, then we can see this exact same dynamic at work with the war in Iraq. Lots of happy talk about "winning" and "mission accomplished" when the results are anything bit clear.

Let's keep this in mind as we go forward this next month. Whatever they say is happy horseshit spin from here on out. And the news media is unlikely to help out much. On Inside Politics yesterday, wide-eyed Judy Woodruff was extremely confused when Tad Devine pointed out that her poll was stacked with Republicans. The cable press corpse ranks only slightly above undecided voters and FoxNews viewers for sheer ignorance of current events.







digby 9/28/2004 06:19:00 AM |

Monday, September 27, 2004

 
The Big Fix

Jeffrey Rosen writes in TNR today:

It's November 2, and the presidential election looks close in Ohio. An army of lawyers are dispatched by the Bush and Kerry campaigns to scour all 11,614 precincts in the state for any hint of voting irregularities. Within hours, both sides have filed competing suits in state courts challenging the standards for counting provisional, absentee, and military ballots, as well as for the use of different voting machines. Within days, Laurence Tribe and James Baker are filing petitions to the Supreme Court, arguing that Bush v. Gore--the case that decided the 2000 election--compels the justices to intervene. The justices, who once confidently predicted that Bush v. Gore would have no effect on future elections, are horrified. Even the Bush v. Gore dissenters are shocked at the mess the decision has created. After all, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Bush v. Gore a "one-of-a-kind case" as recently as February 2003 in a speech to San Diego law students, adding optimistically, "I doubt it will ever be cited as precedent by the court on anything."

[...]


Unfortunately, the hopes that Bush v. Gore would fade from memory like an embarrassing dinner guest have proved to be wildly mistaken. And, if the election is close, the nightmare scenario described above seems all too likely to come to pass. During the four years since Bush v. Gore, the case has emboldened political candidates to file a tangle of litigation challenging election procedures in federal and state races--from the recall of Governor Gray Davis in California to the replacement of Senator Robert Torricelli in New Jersey. Moreover, in response to the legalization of politics that has followed Bush v. Gore, Democratic and Republican legal swat teams have been assembled to challenge the results of the 2004 presidential election if the vote in any state proves close enough to provide the margin of victory in the electoral college. And, even if the presidential election is not close, Bush v. Gore will continue to haunt congressional and local elections in November and beyond. "You could have dozens or even hundreds of cases filed on the Wednesday morning after the election," says Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School. "Given the litigation opportunities in Bush v. Gore, you could have real, real uncertainty for many weeks and months, not only about national elections but about local elections. And it's likely to get worse."

If this came from anyone but Rosen I would think it was another of those Greenfield-esque parlor games in which they sit around on CNN for hours at a time in stultifying discussion of bizarre election scenarios that will never happen. But we'd be fools to ignore the fact that Bush vs Gore is a cancer that has the potential to metastisize very rapidly if this election is as close as we expect it to be.

If you haven't had a chance to read the fascinating in-depth article in Vanity Fair this month about the Florida debacle in 2000, here are the (pdf) links to it--- Part one and Part two. It opens with a conversation between two of the Supreme court clerks who seem to have had the exact same opinion that I forcefully espoused at a dinner party during the recount drama (as I imagine many others did throughout the country.)

Shortly after the presidential vote in November 2000, two law clerks at the United States Supreme Court were joking about the photo finish in Florida. Wouldn't it be funny, one mused, if the matter landed before them? And how, if it did, the Court would split five to four, as it so often did in big cases, with the conservative majority installing George W. Bush in the White House? The two just laughed. It all seemed too preposterous. Sure, friends and relatives predicted that the case would eventually land in their laps, but that was ignorant, naïve talk -- typical of people without sophisticated legal backgrounds.

A majority of the justices were conservatives, but they weren't partisan; mindful of the Court's fragile authority, the justices had always steered clear of messy political spats. Moreover, the very jurists who'd normally side with Bush were the ones most solicitous of states' rights, most deferential to state courts, most devoted to the Constitution's "original intent" and the Founding Fathers had specifically provided that the Congress, not the judiciary, would resolve close elections. To top it off, the Court rarely took cases before they were ripe, and the political process in Florida was still unfolding. "It was just inconceivable to us that the Court would want to lose its credibility in such a patently political way," one of the clerks recalls. "That would be the end of the Court."

Boy, was I ever wrong. And as you read the article the sheer partisan nature of the court's involvement becomes even more obvious than we have previously known. The article goes on to show how Anthony Kennedy, widely considered dumb as a post and obsessed with his own grandeur, had been staffed by the right wing with a cadre of federalist society Hitler Youth who "guided" him the partisan direction Big Tony and the Chief wanted him to go. (Our gal Sandy, it turns out, was in the tank from the get-go.)

The Bush's petition for certiorari - that is, for the Court to take the case?went initially to Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose task it was to consider all emergency motions from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. For Kennedy, then 64, a man known to relish the pomp and circumstance of the Supreme Court and his own, often crucial role in close cases, weighing such a momentous matter must have been glorious indeed. Batting aside a Thanksgiving Day plea from the Gore campaign to pass on the case, Kennedy urged his colleagues to take it on, suggesting that the Court was absolutely the essential arbiter of such weighty matters. He conceded, though, that Bush faced an uphill struggle on the law. When Kennedy's memo circulated, one flabbergasted clerk had to track down Justice John Paul Stevens on the golf course in Florida and read it to him over the phone. Under the Court's rules, Kennedy needed only three votes beside his own for the Court to hear the matter. Quickly, the four others who make up the Court's conservative block signed on: Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Sandra Day O'Connor.

[...]


As was customary, the Court did not detail how many justices had voted to hear the case, or who they were, and Gore's lawyers didn't really want to know. At that point, they felt a certain faith in the institution and in the law: it was inconceivable to them that the court would intercede, much less decide the presidency by a vote of five to four.

As you continue through this article you see that this was the problem for the Democrats throughout the recount period. It wasn't cowardice, it was a naive faith in the rule of law. It was the last vestige of true, internalized belief that the American legal system was immune from naked, opportunistic partisanship.

Desperate for legal advice, Klain reached out to prominent firms in the capital of Tallahassee. He found little help. "All the establishment firms knew they couldn't
cross Governor Bush and do business in Florida," recalls Klain. And so he improvised,
pulling together a team headed by former secretary of state Warren Christopher, now a Los Angeles-based lawyer in private practice. Christopher, Gore felt,would imbue the team with an image of decorous, law-abiding, above-the-fray respectability.

[...]

Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in "mischief." Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. "We're getting killed on "count all the votes," he told his team. "Who the hell could be against that?"

Baker saw his chance that Thursday, November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for a manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a county-by-county basis or wait until the election was certifed to pursue a statewide recount. The requests had to be based on perceived errors, not just the candidate's wish to see recounts done. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. But he chose them because that's where the problems were.

Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrats?strategy gave Baker the sound bite he'd been seeking: Gore was just cherrypicking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought its strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.

Foolishly, Gore thought that being modest and fair still meant something. He was not prepared for a streetfight. And, looking back I realize that I wasn't either. Like a green youth I didn't believe they'd actually go that far. Even after the impeachment sideshow, an event that solidified my belief in the lethal, fascistic nature of the modern Republican party, I was not fully prepared for the no holds barred approach they would take in this situation.

It is what led me to the point at which I am able to say without any sense of restraint or caution that I would put NOTHING past them --- even a staged terrorist attack. This is because every time I think they have some limits, they prove me wrong. As the old saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...won't get fooled again....

Gore and his team knew that the Republicans would fight with everything they had, but they still maintained some faith in the legal system to require basic fairness in something this important. And, even the most cynical of us thought that the egos of the Supreme Court justices would never allow them to make a purely partisan decision because history would remember them as whores.

If I had any political idealism left it died on the day that Antonin Scalia stopped judges from counting votes in Florida.

This article shows that fix was in from the beginning. Had Gore audaciously requested a statewide recount he would have been accused of not following the strict laws that required him to show problems in each precinct. It was always headed to the Supremes and once they took the case, the interviews with the Supreme court clerks show that there was never any question about who would win. It was always a decision in search of a rationale.

If Jeffrey Rosen is correct and dozens of lawsuits await filing in close races out there, all based on this ill-considered opinion, then we are likely to see a repeat. After all, the same five vote majority still sits on the court today. And like all the others who voted for this irresponsible, unqualified, incompetent boob in 2000, they are not likely to admit their mistake and vote otherwise this time out.

This time, we must operate on that assumption and prepare for a knife fight --- in the courts and in the realm of public opinion. There are no rules other than winning.

I urge you to read the entire article. There is much more about the disenfranchisement of the black community and the shocking actions they've taken since then to supposedly update the voting system. (Kevin Drum has more on this latest.) With fine fellows like "Buckhead" working on the wing nut Voter Integrity Project, and Ashcrofts new intimidation tactics, this election could be very, very ugly.

Update: Via Suburban Guerilla, here is more on the suppression of black voters Jeb has planned for 2004.







digby 9/27/2004 07:00:00 PM |

 
The Billionaires Are In The House!

I love these guys...




digby 9/27/2004 05:08:00 PM |

 
Now We're Talking Some Real $$$

If you have the nerve, it's now worth more than $8,000 to ask the Preznit One Simple Question




digby 9/27/2004 02:05:00 PM |

 
He's Simple


One of my readers, who works at the UN, noticed something unique about George W. Bush's speech last week.

Evidently, the official UN transcript is the exact speech that Bush read off the teleprompter. My reader says that nobody who works there can ever remember a leader having to have words phonetically spelled out before, as it is here (pdf):

In the last year alone, terrorists have attacked police stations, and banks, and commuter trains, and synagogues ... and a school filled with children. This month in Beslan [bez-LAN] we saw, once again, how the terrorists measure their success in the death of the innocent, and in the pain of grieving families. Svetlana Dzebisov [day-BEES-off] was held hostage along with her son and her nephew and her nephew did not survive.

This is the best the so-called greatest nation on earth can do?




digby 9/27/2004 01:16:00 PM |

 
Embolden This




Matthew Yglesias makes an interesting observation about this new charge of "emboldening" the enemy by criticising the war in Iraq. As he notes:

Does anyone really believe, after all, that our enemies currently lack for boldness of all things? One can say accurately various nasty things about Osama, his hardened core of terrorists-cum-special-forces, his more conventional guerilla fighters, Zarqawi, al-Sadr, their followers, etc., but one thing they certainly aren't is some kind of chickenshit force that would be really scary if only they got bolder.

[...]

The notion that the USA could possibly impress these guys with grand displays of machismo is silly. The bad guys here are hard core and that's just the way it is. A strategy to beat them has to be smart and has to use the many advantages America really does have. Worrying about the other side's boldness isn't going to get us anywhere.

And anyway, doesn't it seem a bit, well...girlie-manish...for our swaggering Crusdader Codpiece to be tremulously waving his hands and shushing his opponents because it might make the nasty terrorists even bolder than they already are? Surely, superheroes such as he are much too strong and manly to care whether the bad guys are emboldened by talk of any kind. Real men say "bring it on," right?

Clearly, people who are willing to blow themselves up aren't suffering from a lack of physical courage. That is not the problem. Indeed, until we create a corps of suicide bombers they have the advantage in willing human cannon fodder material. Our military superiority isn't supposed to be our "courage" and "boldness" it is our international leadership, advanced technology and smart strategy, none of which Junior has employed worth a busted fuck.

This has been part of the fallacy driving Junior's misbegotten strategy from day one. While it's obvious that a fair amount of his ridiculous Hopalong Cassidy bullshit was calculated to thrill the rubes here at home, there is ample evidence that many of the starry-eyed neocons truly believed that a thrilling show of Big American Power would snap some of those Ay-rabs out of their little dreamworld and bring them around right quick to the knowledge that they can never win against us, the Ubermenschen.

As Richard Perle memorably said back in October of 2001:

Having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed Saddam's regime, the message to the others is, "You're next." Two words. Very efficient diplomacy. " You're next, and if you don't shut down the terrorist networks on your territory, we'll take you down, too. Is it worth it?" Of course it isn't worth it. It isn't worth it for any of them.

You can almost smell the testosterone, can't you? These guys really believed this Neverneverland nonsense. I'm afraid our Boy King still does.

He's just being his typical two-faced self bellowing "bring 'em on" one day and then falling over with the vapors the next because Kerry's words might make the badguys mad. Nothing new there.




digby 9/27/2004 10:52:00 AM |

Sunday, September 26, 2004

 
You can't build alliances if you criticize the efforts of those who are working side by side with you.




The President:

President Musharraf is a friend of our country, who helped us capture Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner behind the 9/11 attacks. Today, because we are working with Pakistani leaders, Pakistan is an ally in the war on terror, and the American people are safer.

The Ally

ZAHN: Is the world a safer place because of the war in Iraq?

MUSHARRAF: No. It's more dangerous. It's not safer, certainly not.

ZAHN: How so?

MUSHARRAF: Well, because it has aroused actions of the Muslims more. It's aroused certain sentiments of the Muslim world, and then the responses, the latest phenomena of explosives, more frequent for bombs and suicide bombings. This phenomenon is extremely dangerous.

ZAHN: Was it a mistake to have gone to war with Iraq?

MUSHARRAF: Well, I would say that it has ended up bringing more trouble to the world....

ZAHN: Has that happened in Iraq?

MUSHARRAF: Well, there are difficulties. One can't predict. Maybe the difficulties are surmounted and then it ends up with a victory, with a success. But, at the moment, we are bogged down, yes, yes indeed....

ZAHN: Do you think that the war in Iraq has undermined the overall war on terror?

MUSHARRAF: It has complicated it, certainly. I wouldn't say undermined. It has further complicated it. It has made the job more difficult.

The Vice President:

America does not create terrorists. But under President Bush, we will defeat them. (Applause.) And we will defeat them where they live and plot and plan so that we do not have to fight them on the streets of our own cities. (Applause.)

Senator Kerry

The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy, al-Qaida, there's just no question about it. The president's misjudgment, miscalculation and mismanagement of the war in Iraq all make the war on terror harder to win.

Uh Oh.

This is the kind of thing that gives Lil' Crusader Codpiece a headache and makes him want to drink some choco-milk, eat a PB&J, grab his favorite pilly and go to bed early.




digby 9/26/2004 04:22:00 PM |

 
Do You Believe In Fairies?

I didn't have a chance to see Bush's speech before the UN last week but I recorded it so I could watch it this week-end. It May have been a litle bit optimistic, but for the life of me I can't figure out why John Kerry keeps saying Junior is living in fantasyland:

Here's a transcript:

Terrorists and their allies believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Bill of Rights and every charter of liberty ever written are lies to be burned and destroyed and forgotten.

They believe that suicide and torture and murder are fully justified to serve any goal they declare. And they act on their beliefs.

We're determined to destroy terror networks wherever they operate, and the United States is grateful to every nation that is helping to seize terrorist assets, track down their operatives and disrupt their plans.

Defending our ideals is vital, but it is not enough. Our broader mission as U.N. members is to apply these ideals to the great issues of our time.

Our wider goal is to promote hope and progress as the alternatives to hatred and violence. Our great purpose is to build a better world beyond the war on terror.

Because, it's a world of laughter, a world of tears, it's a world of hopes and a world of fears. There's so much that we share, it is time we're aware. It's a small small world.

It's a small world after all, it's a small world after all. There's so much that we share. It is time we're aware. It's a small small world.

There is just one moon and a golden sun. And a smile means friendship to everyone,
Though the mountains divide,and the oceans ar