Dispassionate Liberal: June 2008

6/30/08

6/29/08

6/28/08

Despite having a postponement for the Independence Day recess giving hope to freedom loving bloggers, when the Congress gets back in session the Senate will be proceeding on the FISA revisions that gives President Bush exactly what he wants, no doubt capitulating to his demand that we won't be safe and can't fight terrorists unless the Telecommunication Giants are given immunity for spying on Americans illegally.

This move was in no small part deemed a procedural requirement by the Democratic Leadership, Mr. Ried and now you Mr. Obama (yes you ... ), due to the necessity of getting other business done without more GOP obstructionism:

like Senator Dodd's housing bill (which will be vetoed) and,
the new GI bill (which will be vetoed) and,
attaching Gulf Coast and Midwest flood recovery funds to the usual off-budget War Supplemental (which will be vetoed) and,
attaching an extension of unemployment benefits to the War Supplemental (which will still be vetoed) and,
fixing Medicare so doctors don't get a pay cut (which might just become law)

We give up on FISA's repudiation of the Fourth Amendment, and in exchange the Republicans will still call us weak on terror and the GOP Congress Critters can blame President 23% for no GI Bill, no relief for flood victims, no more unemployment benefits and maybe see doctors throughout the land re-bill their Medicare patients for lost fees and up their rates to everyone else to make up the difference -- giving what's left of the Republicans in Congress (the few, the proud, the very afraid) a legitimate means of distancing themselves from Still POTUS Bush.

Feh! The Potomac Village is a place where only lies have any currency whatsoever. The powerful and their entourage trading in what can be foisted on rubes who have no clue and zero interest in their world.

You know, for all my frothing at the infuriating way Washington has been so completely ass-backwards about so much for so long, with what's coming down the pike economically it really doesn't matter what those pompous pontificators do, and it's sadly clear that Cheney's oil gambit in Iraq, the one Rupert Murdoch ventured would bring $20/barrel crude has failed, miserably.

6/27/08

[+/-]

Would He Really Have Voted Against The War?

[+/-]

Show Of Hands

[+/-]

Islamo-Smarty Pants

6/25/08

[+/-]

Democrats Cannot Filibuster Their Way Out Of A Paper Bag

[+/-]

Ain’t Nothin’ But a…

Last week on NBC or MSNBC (or possibly even CNN – they’re practically indistinguishable at this point) someone marked the moment where – one week prior, “we learned of the death of Tim Russert”.

It struck me odd. Who receives that sort of recognition in our culture? In the past, I could remember only people of immense importance and accomplishment and often only if they had died in some tragic circumstances such as a plane crash or assassination. An FDR, a JFK, a Buddy Holly or an Elvis (though we don’t know for sure he’s actually dead).

Apparently, Gene Lyons had a similar reaction [H/T Bob Somerby]:

Few events so reveal society’s unacknowledged values as a royal funeral. So it was following the untimely death of NBC newsman and “Meet the Press” moderator Tim Russert. We have no formal aristocracy in the United States, but Washington has a selfappointed media peerage. Russert was a political celebrity / courtier of exalted rank. [snip] On “Hardball,” they held an Irish wake for several days. All that was missing was a bottle of Jameson’s, and that may have been under the table.

Of course, Russert was of very modest importance or accomplishment:

To his grieving colleagues and many viewers, Russert embodied the best of TV journalism. Others think very differently about his legacy.

Lyons explains why Russert’s colleagues liked him, because of his apparently genuine warmness. My son met Russert by chance one day and confirmed that widely shared impression of him. But being a nice guy is a dubious asset when your job is to reveal the truth about the politics and the powerful that surround you.

Back to Russert and Washington journalism: In the sport of beagling, two bad faults can get a hound disqualified. One is “cold-trailing.” I had a beagle named Leon who’d hoot down scent trails so old the rabbits that left them were probably being digested by coyotes. Leon made so much noise about nothing that my pals dubbed him “The Journalist.” Then there’s “ghost-trailing.” Unable to keep up, a hound will sometimes invent a fictitious rabbit and make a great show of running it. Other dogs learn to ignore him. Washington courtier-journalists have done plenty of both recently. Russert was among the worst. Like most, he obsessed over Bill Clinton’s sexual sins, but handled the Bush administration’s Iraq war propaganda like the Baltimore Catechism: Memorize, regurgitate. Linda Hirshman nails it in The Nation: “The political leaders who did the best answering Tim Russert’s questions in the last seven years—Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell—are the authors of the most disastrous American foreign policy since the Vietnam War, and maybe since 1776. The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV.”

Russert’s colleagues are of course free to mourn the death of their friend - I’d bet Russert is about as good as it gets in their world – let’s just not get carried away about his “journalism”. Tim Russert was no Elvis.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

[+/-]

It's Concert Season

6/24/08

[+/-]

You Shall Know Them by Their Fruitcake

It takes a wingnut to take someone else’s words, say they mean something completely different from what they are saying and then castigate the person for that twisted, unstated meaning. John McCain, having nothing to offer in public policy (he's a Republican) – other than perpetual war in the Middle East (and who knows where else) and short term, ineffective gimmicks – has been running his campaign on just those sort of distortions about what Barack Obama “is saying” when he is saying nothing of the kind.

But it takes a special kind of evangelical whackjob of a wingnut to attack someone by saying essentially the same thing they are.

Evangelical whackjob James Dobson says that, “[Barack] Obama should not be referencing antiquated dietary codes and passages from the Old Testament that are no longer relevant to the teachings of the New Testament,” in response to Obama saying exactly that:

"Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?" Obama asked in the speech. "Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?"

Dobson’s Focus on the Family spokesman, Tom Minnery, gets it exactly backward when he claims, "Many people have called [Sharpton] a black racist, and [Obama] is somehow equating [Dobson] with that and racial bigotry." Actually, Obama had contrasted not equated Sharpton and Dobson:

"Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?"

Dobson himself claimed that it is "lowest common denominator of morality," and that it is a "fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution," for Obama to say:

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values. It requires their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason."

Dobson can claim that reason, argument and universal values are immoral and pretend that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution doesn’t exist but that makes it pretty hard to argue that the other guy is the one who is nuts.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

[+/-]

The Editors Nails The Zeitgeist

6/23/08

[+/-]

G.e.o.r, G.e, O.r, G.e, O.r...

[+/-]

McGimmick Of The Day

[+/-]

You Know It's A Brave New World When

I'm on the same side as well known GOP douchebag Dick Armey and opposing Chris Dodd on an issue.

Hidden deep in Senator Christopher Dodd's 630-page Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision that affects the privacy and operation of nearly all of America’s small businesses.The provision, which was added by the bill's managers without debate this week, would require the nation's payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government.

They want to know every damn thing according to the former House GOP Leader's new toy, FreedomWorks. Every Credit Card transaction, every online checkout system like eBay, PayPal, Amazon and Google Checkout are included. Everything and anything you buy or sell online or though any electronic means is now official government business. (HT: BBB and Shakes)

John Berlau at The Wall Street Journal wants to know where the outrage is since he and Tom Hartman have been talking about this since May when Berlau alerted us to the requirement that all loan originators submit their fingerprints to a national database, including the FBI and any other government agency they deem appropriate. Mortgage lenders, brokers, even clerical or part-time employees of real estate firms are included in this.

Pal, we've just got started on the outrage front. There's enough angst out here in Blogtopia (y!sctp!) over the FISA Telecom Immunity capitulation that this is just the thing that could serve as a new cause de jure as we await what our champions of liberty in the Senate do with FISA as well as this.

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are co-sponsors of original version of this bill which also included (but also buried) the fingerprint provision. This should be an interesting week as Obama makes clear just what he means by "fighting" the Telecom Amnesty provisions of FISA and if he or Dodd or Hillary get the memo that we're all quite disillusioned, rather pissed in fact, and this latest abomination just might seal the deal.

Jesus, I'm beginning to think that John Edwards got out of the way of "History" just in time for it to steamroll over us all.

The WSJ also reports that the SEC and the FED are going to do what they can to tighten up some of the regulation that lead to the crisis in the financial markets, a clear signal that there is tacit acknowledgment in Washington and Wall Street that the unfettered deregulation schemes that have been the hallmark of conservative dogma these last 30 years are directly responsible for our current economic meltdowns.

Quick on the heels of the scramble to close the barn door, Barack Obama is making positive noises about fixing the Enron Loophole in a wholly rational, non-gimmicky step towards an immediate solution to the rising cost of fuel by taking the speculators and other pirates out of the market.

Infuriatingly enough, John McCain called Obama a copycat for his initiative and blamed Clinton for the loophole without so much at a blink, knowing that his "econ brain," Phil Graham wrote the Enron Loophole, tagging it's 262 pages to an essential, eleventh hour, eleven thousand page government reauthorization bill signed by Bill Clinton a few weeks before "W" was sworn in.

In the early evening of Friday, December 15, 2000, with Christmas break only hours away, the U.S. Senate rushed to pass an essential, 11,000-page government reauthorization bill. In what one legal textbook would later call "a stunning departure from normal legislative practice," the Senate tacked on a complex, 262-page amendment at the urging of Texas Sen. Phil Gramm.
There was little debate on the floor. According to the Congressional Record, Gramm promised that the amendment--also known as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act--along with other landmark legislation he had authored, would usher in a new era for the U.S. financial services industry.

"The work of this Congress will be seen as a watershed where we turned away from an outmoded Depression-era approach to financial regulation and adopted a framework that will position our financial services industry to be world leaders into the new century," Gramm said.

As Senator Blutarsky's wife's gynecologist said, we fucked up, we trusted him.

6/22/08

[+/-]

Ayee Pee Documents The Atrocities ... by McCain!

Balance? Guilt? Blind squirrels getting lucky? I dunno, but Media Matt points to (but won't quote) an article by AP Special Correspondent, David Espo that follows the remarkable number of goofs, gaffes and fumbles by John McCain just in the last week.

So, giving credit where credit is due, let's paraphrase the plagiarism:

Tuesday: McCain criticized Obama on windfall profits tax despite saying he would consider the same thing earlier. (YouTube has the goods on his reversal, and Politico quoted AP's Mr. Espo's own reporting on the Confuserator so I don't have to.)

Wednesday: McCain called out at a closed meeting of Hispanic leaders for saying one thing to them and another to white Republicans. (More about the pandering at Boston Globe and Baltimore Sun, a remarkable song and dance.)

Thursday: McCain get's upstaged by President Bush's visit to Iowa, but Espo didn't mention (although the Boston Globe noted) that McCain opposed federal spending on flood prevention programs, and also forgot to talk about Obama upstaging McCain by actually helping out, filling sandbags, and avoiding the areas McCain toured at the request of State officials. I guess McCain didn't get the memo to stay out of the way. (Actually McCain simply ignored the Governor's request not to distract relief efforts.)

Friday: The Canada fiasco -- cross-border political attacks, foreigners illegally contributing (sort of) to McCain's campaign -- but no mention that the host of the fundraising event, our Ambassador to Canada, was in direct violation of the Hatch Act as a government representative engaging in purely political activity -- but since I read the Washington Post, I knew about this.

Espo's conclusion? No. Big. Deal.

A bona fide flip-flop on windfall profits (a Reagan, not a Carter program), an outright pander on immigration, interference with ongoing flood relief efforts for a fly-by photo-op, illegal foreign fundraising while airing our laundry in the neighbor's yard.

Just the ordinary, no-harm-no-foul gaffes we should ignore, at least according to the AP. All is forgiven since through all of it McCain didn't blow his cool in a temperamental breakdown.

Low bar indeed.

Ooooh Look! Obama's got a new shiny seal! All the substance out the window for what AP deems the Play of the Day -- a pretty picture. Yikes.

Hey Associated Press, here's a better one courtesy of our friend Ara at E. Pluribus Unum.

[+/-]

I Write Letters

The following was in response to this Op/Ed by Jack Kelly, a columnist for The Toledo Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Beyond the absurdity of the premise Mr. Kelly advances that not only can Senator John McCain win the upcoming election, it could be a landslide as every single indicator of the public's preferences indicate that all momentum favors the Democrats this year -- as any objective political analyst who values his integrity would acknowledge -- why does Mr. Kelly feel it necessary to mischaracterize Barack Obama's position on nuclear power?

Mr. Kelly says. "Mr. McCain also supports building more nuclear power plants, which Mr. Obama opposes." This is inaccurate at best. Indeed, according to OnTheIssues.org, much to the chagrin of liberal and environmental activists, Senator Obama believes "Nuclear power ok if we safeguard against waste terrorism. (Sep 2007)" and that we should, "Explore nuclear power as part of alternative energy mix. (Jul 2007)"

Noting that Mr. Kelly relies on an analysis of Senator McCain's energy proposals from noted neoconservative John Podhoretz speaks volumes by itself, they both conflate what is in candidate McCain's best interest -- what he should do to win -- with what is in the nation's best interest. While not necessarily mutually exclusive, those two ideas require separate and often conflicting rationales.

His Op/Ed also gratuitously throws out Senator Chris Dodd's name, a recent rival of Obama for the Democratic nomination, as a transparent way to mingle the subprime mortgage crisis with Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular, failing to note that Senator McCain's principle economic advisor, financial industry lobbyist and former Senator, Phil Graham, practically created the current troubles in the financial markets single-handed by pushing through deregulation of lending institutions, allowing them to engage in the high risk investments that have fallen under their own weight.

It's one thing to try and fix the mess in a controversial way, like bailing out Countrywide, or to have even gotten favorable loan terms from them -- and paid the loans back in full. Quite another to have been responsible for it in the first place, which cannot be laid at Chris Dodd's or Barack Obama's feet.

Mr. Kelly is clever, but his goal obvious. Now that I know his game I intend to be more vigilant in monitoring his writing and alert others to it as well.

6/21/08

[+/-]

A Saner Head On FISA

I'm not sure I agree with Neil the "Werewolf" on this one, but it's nice that he's trying to console us. I do feel a bit better, but I'm not buying into this statement:

This bill is basically the same kind of garden-variety corruption one expects from Congress -- protecting wealthy interests at the expense of ordinary folk. That's why it's a bad piece of legislation. But Congress passes junk like that all the time (the farm bill, lots of defense appropriations, not bargaining hard with Big Pharma, etc) and it's not the end of the world. And that's why I'm writing this post -- I don't want people to lose perspective and think that this is too much more than just another garden-variety bit of corporate corruption. It's a lot closer to the tax breaks for ceiling fan importers that it is to torture.

It's a bit more troubling than all that Neil, a few more basic principles and American freedoms are at stake here, don't you think?

And the problem is broader than Neil paints with his singular focus on the imperative that we must replace George Bush and his entire criminal enterprise from the executive branch -- and of course than requires that anyone with an "R" after their name is no longer welcome at any White House Bar-B-Q's. (No, seriously. Forget about the post-partisan crap about retaining someone like Gates at DoD or any similar "enlightened" nonsense. They ALL have to go.)

Neil begins with the simple premis that , "This is a legislative precedent that emerged because Steny Hoyer decided that it would be good business to sell the telcos the immunity they wanted in exchange for campaign contributions." But that doesn't reveal the whole picture. Hoyer would never have been placed in such an untenable position, knowing he would be labeled as a bought and paid for hack by even well-meaning analysts like Neil if the Democrats in the House weren't hamstrung by the turncoat Blue-Dogs who vote with the GOP on damn near everything that matters, and thus as loyal to Bush as John McCain.

Now I don't know if these DINO's will have an epiphany when Barack Obama takes the oath of office, or will have some enlightenment shoved down their throats. But I do know that haveing the equivalent of 40 or so Joe Liebermans filling space in the Democratic Caucus and marching in lock-step with the remnants of Tom DeLay's outfit is THE principle reason Congress as an institution is despised more than anything, ever.

So thanks Neil, I do feel a bit better, but I'm looking for more than merely an inauguration ushering a new era. I'm looking for a purge.

Sadly, I'll probably be disappointed on both counts. But in the true spirit of a Cleveland sports fan and apostle of St. Wiley E. Coyote and the Church of Never Say Die, that certainly doesn't mean I'll accept the notion that the Perfect is the enemy of the Good.

[+/-]

AP Annoys, McCain Baffles, Breaks Laws From Foreign Soil

I believe I'm on record being pissed enough with the Ass Press for the documented bias (especially Liz Sidoti) on behalf of John McSame, or at least their slip-shod ~~reporting~~ transcription of Republican Party talking points (a feat they no doubt learned in the run-up to the Iraq War), well before the latest flap over blogger's fair use of their copyrighted materials.

The drum-beat goes on.

Parroting the conventional wisdom, AP's Liz Sidoti wrote an "analysis" today slamming Obama's decision to forsake public campaign financing. It's quite sanctimonious. But guess what Ms. Sidoti failed to include? John McCain's campaign finance criminality. You'd think that an AP reporter writing an analysis about campaign finance might mention the fact that John McCain's illegal attempt to remove himself from the campaign finance system, after financially benefiting from it, is punishable by five years in jail. But you'd be wrong. Now, there was an AP article about McCain's campaign finance scandal just two days ago. Someone at AP knew about it. But, the facts might interfere with Sidoti's analysis.

And he's at it again. This is the baffling part. McCain was campaigning in Canada today.

It's one thing to spend most of the week in Texas fundraising, where he at least can try and sore up his edge in winning the Longhorn State's electoral votes and putting the squeeze on the rest of the Gulf Coast with some offshore drilling bamboozlement.

On a side note, why is Mean Jean Schmidt so damn wrong about this, and hows-a-come the AmericaBlog braintrust has all the good linkage tonight?

Florida CFO on drilling: "shortsighted approach to put our economy at risk"

Meanwhile, back in the Great White North, following the lead of the Procrastinator In Chief, Johnny "Ace" to a swing at Barack Obama on trade, ignoring the old saw that politics stops at the water's edge, even if that water is the Great Lakes.

Not content to engage in the unseemly airing of America's dirty laundry in front of the neighbors (and this is the good part), he probably was in violation of the Hatch Act on top of his thwarting of campaign finance laws since the affair was hosted by the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, something he's forbidden to do under Federal Law.

Note that all this reporting we lowly bloggers pass on was freely obtainable via the Edmonton Sun and the Globe and Mail exposing of McSame skating some of the basic ethical and legal behavior required of public servants, yet no mention whatsoever in the self-important Associated Press.

Who needs 'em.

6/20/08

[+/-]

If You Are Looking To Call Anyone A Crook

And yes, I mean you and you, and anyone else who tries the Chicago Mobster, MuslamoNazi, Terrorist-Jab, linking Obama to someone who knew-a-guy who knows-a-guy whose aunt's babysitter's cousin once dated a lesbian abortion doctor that donated $50 bucks to a charity run by someone who was mentioned in someone else's grand jury testimony -- or so they say -- who didn't wear a lapel pin . . .

There's only one presidential candidate who has broken the campaign finance laws and continues to run his campaign in violation of the law -- and that "crook" bears the same name as the law he's breaking. (In fact, if convicted, the Straight Talker could go straight to jail for five years.)

John Cole lays it out...

I want to return to this subject though because this is not hyperbole or some throw away line. He’s really doing it. McCain opting into public financing, accepted the spending limits and then profited from that opt-in by securing a campaign saving loan. And then he used some clever, but not clever enough lawyering, to opt back out. And the person charged with saying what flies and what doesn’t—the Republican head of the FEC —said he’s not allowed to do that. He can’t opt out unilaterally unless the FEC says he can.

Oh, and as for all those so-called "fiscal conservatives" who deplore unnecessary government spending calling Barack some kind of hypocrite (that's rich) for reneging on a promise he never made (since he only promised to try and reach an agreement with McCain over rules McCain won't honor to this day -- but there was no actual agreement to break contrary to what McCain or the bastards at AP, ABC News and USA Today say) -- bite me.

In other news, Chris Matthews, still a wanker, but no more so than Jake Tapper at ABC who's ridiculous headline that Obama broke a promise he never made started this whole thing. What really is fun is to take a Reichwinger's own words, and interpret them in, you know ... plain English as a means of proving they're wrong. Take Newsbuster's own graphic here.

Even a third grader recognizes a conditional sentence when they see one, even if they don't know what it's called. McCain has clearly not lived up to the conditions Obama laid out in this statement. McCain is NOT abiding by the public financing laws. McCain is in clear violation of McCain Feingold as I write this, and has been for months. Obama is under no obligation to play a fools game, and for not calling McCain a crook who took illegal loans in violation of the law to fund his floundering excuse for a national campaign, Obama also shows what a gentleman he can be ... and keeps his powder dry for the next round of bullcrap.

And one more piece of friendly advice to our friends in Wingnuttistan. If you write for Redstate, and you start out a piece by saying, "If I were a supporter of Barack Obama . . ." just stop. You're not, never will be. You just don't get it, and are mentally incapable of empathy of that sort due to the inundation of authoritarian psychopathology you've been brainwashed with all these years.

Unless you were in the Friday Funnies competition today, in that case, well done. You certainly had me fooled.

[+/-]

Today's Number: Three

[+/-]

Thank You Democrats

At least the 105 128 of you (thanks Larry), including my representative Marcy Kaptur, who stood firm against the lawless imperialism of the Bush administration and voted no on giving the Telecoms immunity in the FISA bill. (The yeas and nays are here, HT Hilzoy.)

Thanks as well to the sole republican brave enough to buck his party and vote against this travesty as well, Timothy V. Johnson (R-Illinios-15).

This vote effectively split the Democrats in half, 105 128 patriots who stood up for the rule of law against 128 105 capitulators, including the leadership, Pelosi, Hoyer, Emannuel. Those 105 128 are going to need all the help they can get. I'm not sure the Act Blue idea of punishing those who followed the leadership's cue is as important as supporting those who did the right thing -- cuz they're going to need it.

Or maybe they're just in safe enough seats they can afford to hold the liberal line. I know that the core Northern Ohio progressives, (Kaptur, Kucinich, Tubbs-Jones) are in no real danger of losing their seats, and Blue Dogs like Zack Space, a Democrat in a very conservative district, was never going to go along with anything that even hinted he was "soft" on terrists. None of this should be a surprise.

The reason is simple. other than the bumper-sticker mentality that has been mastered by the fear-mongering GOP, this issue simply doesn't resonate with the public at large. They don't know, like you should, why FISA matters so much.

Since all signs still point towards another wave election, and possibly a '32 type realignment, funding the liberal wing of the party may not be all that productive right now, but it's advance thinking (as the blogosphere always seems to do), putting in place a new framework to push for new leadership, or at least a new direction for 2010, and remaking the very sole of this nation by 2012.

Maybe that's even too short-sighted. The GOP spent 40 years institutionalizing the politics of fear and loathing.

I probably am conditioned by the loathing to loath sending up challengers against every Democrat who won't toe our progressive line as Glenzilla and the Kossacks advocate. My reflexes are even more attuned against dis'ing the party's nominee for his silence -- since just six months ago my rallying cry was Silence Is Betrayal.

John Edwards, recalling MLK's message of resistance to war:

As he put it then, there comes a time when silence is a betrayal -- not only of one's personal convictions, or even of one's country alone, but also of our deeper obligations to one another and to the brotherhood of man.

That's the thing I find the most important about the sermon Dr. King delivered here that day. He did not direct his demands to the government of the United States, which was escalating the war. He issued a direct appeal to the people of the United States, calling on us to break our own silence, and to take responsibility for bringing about what he called a revolution of values.

A revolution whose starting point is personal responsibility, of course, but whose animating force is the belief that we cannot stand idly by and wait for others to right the wrongs of the world.

And this, in my view, is at the heart of what we should remember and celebrate on this day. This is the dream we must commit ourselves to realizing.

To quote words even more familiar, while the Democrats struggle to gain a true majority, one both filibuster and veto proof, before they can solidify their gains, while they are still vulnerable enough not to take the progressives for granted . . .

If not us, who? If not now, when? ~RFK

Support the 105 128, and fight the capitulators. You want to send a message? This is how.

[+/-]

We Have Met The Enemy

6/19/08

[+/-]

Habeas For Peasants

6/18/08

[+/-]

FLOHPA!!! Bitches!!!

[+/-]

September 10th Thinking

6/17/08

[+/-]

OH!!! Bama

6/15/08

[+/-]

McShame

[+/-]

What Thers Said...

6/14/08

[+/-]

Hundreds Of Taliban Escape Prison Assault

[+/-]

Shut Up

6/13/08

[+/-]

Cheney Leaves White House

6/11/08

[+/-]

Obama Baby Mama -- Fox News

[+/-]

Fourteen To One

[+/-]

AP Officially In The Tank For McCain

"When the AP starts taking sides and starts reading like The Washington Times, or The Nation, we're all in a lot of trouble."
Keith Olbermann, awarding the "Bronze" for Worst Person for calling Sen. Barack Obama "inexperienced in foreign affairs."

That was June 5th. Today, AP's Tim Talley traveled to the hamlet of Norman, Oklahoma to find that one Bush-Dog Democratic Congressman (the only Democrat from OK) who finds nothing suspicious that every time a Democrat runs for the presidency he mysteriously is discovered to be THE most liberal man in Washington D.C. Representative Dan Boren (D) claims he can't endorse Obama because he's the "most liberal Senator."

Okay, Talley didn't actually do the leg work involved by getting in a car and driving to Norman OK. He phoned it in, literally, in a phone interview. Nevertheless, the usual suspects in Wingnuttistan predictably love this story and are all over it, rejoicing in finding opposition to Obama within the Democratic family.

What the story does not note is that if the AP's reporter had actually gone down to Norman, OK, he'd have been just a stone's throw from Dallas, Texas, where he could have done a similar story about a Republican Congressman who refuses to endorse John McCain.

In fact, this particular Republican Congressman is still running against McCain for the Republican nomination. He's raised more money than McCain, is going to the Republican convention to fight McCain, and has his own campaign blimp.

Unlike the much more interesting, and damaging Ron Paul, Boren isn't fighting Obama's nomination, or his candidacy for president. In fact, despite his district voting 66% for Clinton, Boren is planning on voting for him at the convention and again in November. He just isn't going to balk the desires of his constituency by endorsing someone they didn't vote for. That would be insulting to the voters.

Once again the wingnuttosphere, without logic, reason or shame, takes an inconsequential factoid and blows it completely out of proportion -- deliberately missing the point to promote their alternate reality, one in which their putrid fecal matter emits no aroma.

[+/-]

Religion of the Marketplace

6/10/08

[+/-]

Attention Righties, A Mirror Image Is Backwards

[+/-]

Carter Take Two? No Duh!

[+/-]

Phase Two, Wherein They Get Nailed For Lying.

Okay, let's "man up" then. ALL of the Republicans voted for the fucking
war. "Some" of the Democrats did. Some voted against it, and some,
though not members of Congress at the time took a very public stand
against the tide of popular opinion at the time and came out against
it.

If he or she has an "R" after their name, they were for it. Not so
much if it was a "D." Your gal Hillary and boy McSame were on the wrong
side of that issue, as were my guys Kerry and Edwards.

Obama, not so much, along with Dodd, Durbin, Byrd and Kennedy and
some more we could look up. You don't have to look up any GOPers. They
were ALL for it.

Sadly, there is a lazy segment of the public, ever content with the relativistic sop that "they all do it. They'll equalize the bad acts of the criminals they've supported as no worse than the other side's leaders. Since some Democrats voted for the war, the whole party owns the war just as much as the GOP, and voting to give Bush the power to wage war is equivalent to Bush knowingly deceiving them into a bad decision under duress. They discount the coercive spin and some outright lies by the Administration to get that result.

It's "okay" that Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff built and institutionalized a vote buying consortium that made a sham of the democratic process because some Louisiana Democrat amateurishly got caught with bribe money in his freezer.

It's "okay" that Bush ignored the law and is tapping the phones of everybody, because you won't get into trouble if you did nothing wrong, you damn dirty hippy. It's "okay" that he has locked people up for years without even being charged; tortured, rendered to other countries that treat them even worse or thrown into secret prisons, effectively "dissappeared" because the Democrat FDR rounded up Japanese-Americans 70 yerars ago.

The latest is that it's "okay" the President and his henchmen never told us all they knew about the threat from Iraq. They overinflated the evidence for war, proudly used scare tactics and ignored or minimized considerable evidence that pointed away from the war they schemed to invent from the day they took office. And in many cases, they just flat out lied about the need to go to war.

In the most serious decision a nation can make, committing the lives and fortunes of two nations on a path of destruction whose cost can only be guessed, the Administration withheld the facts needed for us to make an informed decision. That was the conclusion of Rockefeller Commission report known as Phase Two on the misuse of intelligence in the lead-up to the war.

But folks like Fox Noise's Fred Hiatt, and the dead-enders who would rather grasp at straws Fred provides that basically amounts to the excuse that since Bush/Cheney et al. didn't lie about everything before (and after) the invasion, the lies they did tell are "okay."

Much like the administration whose boots Fred licks, he leaves out important caveats, the "BUT" in the report's conclusions. It's truly deja vu all over again. Once again we get everything that supports the criminals at the White House, and nothing about what indicts them. Maybe Republicans have a reading/comprehension disorder and everything should be rephrase so the bad news is put first since they can't understand subordinate clauses.

Hopefully this will help. Instead of saying, "The president's statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates," which is where Hiatt stops reading, leaving out, "BUT did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community. Rockefeller should have written that Bush didn't tell us about the substantial disagreements the intel community had about this "slam dunk" of theirs even though his statements were generally substantiated. He should have written that that Dick Cheney sometimes just made shit up, even though a lot of what he said had the ring of truthiness. maybe then someone like Fred would get it. But I doubt it.

Now, as for that Bush cheerleading embarrassment Hiatt and those clinging to any light at the end of the tunnel that indicates Bush and everyone who supports him don't deserve to go straight to fucking Hell, or jail, or worse, READ THE FUCKING REPORT FOR YOURSELF. (pdf, Part 2b here.)

Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more
than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for
food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein
has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass
destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a --
nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one
Bush at UN, 9/12/2002

The Iraqi regime has violated all of those
obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons.
It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to
terrorism, and practices terror against its own people.
Bush in Cincinatti, 10/7/02

The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting
its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings
with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear
mujahideen" -- his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal
that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its
nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase
high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas
centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
Bush in Cincinatti, 10/7/02

Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the
threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot
wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the
form of a mushroom cloud.
Bush in Cincinatti, 10/7/02

The report is methodical, breaking down five speeches important speeches from the Administration (Cheney in Tennessee, Bush at the UN, in Cincinatti, and the SOTUA, and Powell at the UN) as representative of how they sold the war and applies each speech to the separate questions of what they told us about Iraq and: *nuclear weapons, *biological weapons, * chemical weapons, *WMD's in general, *ties to terrorists, and *the possible consequences. Then on each question, they provide additional statements from the administration, including mendacious sales pitches from Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld.

On page 12 of the 178 page Phase 2(a) report, just on this issue of what Bush said about nukes, they concluded:

The majority view of the NIE assessed that Iraq would be able to produce a nuclear weapon in five to seven years, and posited a "much less likely
scenario" in which production time could be shortened to three to five
years. The majority view also assessed that if Iraq acquired fissile
material from an outside source that production time could be "within
several months to a year", but noted that Iraq did not appear to have a
"systematic effort to acquire foreign fissile materials from Russia
[or] other sources." State/INR said that it could not predict when Iraq
might acquire a nuclear weapon, since it lacked persuasive evidence of
a reconstituted nuclear program.

It came down to the tubes. State and the Energy Department said the tubes were "poorly suited" to use in enriching uranium. Since they didn't believe there was even an attempt at an ongoing nuke program, they declined to hazard a guess which century Iraq might get the bomb.
CIA and Doug Feith were Jonesing for war though, and so were Bush/Cheney. NSA went along for the ride and made the "iffy" a majority opinion -- whose conclusions were released to Congress, while the minority at State and Energy who said there was no fucking way the
evidence supports Bush's claims were buried.

That's why it was so important to put yellowcake in Saddam's hands which brought down the timetable from seven years to seven months, and why they went after Wilson/Plame with such a heavy hand.

And then there's Condi.

We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance -- into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.

That was a fucking lie, and she knew better. That was Rice on CNN September 8, 2002. The same day Powell was on Fox, Cheney was on Meet The Press, both trying to sell the idea that Saddam was going full bore on a nuke program, but neither of them would go as far as Condi. Then again, she was THE National Security Adviser and was a more credible source and
had more access to the intel than a mere VP or Sec.State.

But Cheney doesn't play second fiddle to anyone and two weeks later said, "We now have irrefutable evidence that he has once again set up and reconstituted his program to take
uranium, to enrich it to sufficiently high grade, so that it will function as the base material as a nuclear weapon."

That was a fucking lie, and he knew better.

Here's the deal with Fucknut Fred. He leaves out the important part of the sentences in the conclusions that begin with the word, "But."

The president's statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates."BUT did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community.

On Chem and bio agents, the Intel folks who relied on Chalbi's pal Curveball really dropped the ball. The guy just made things up and the warnings that his crap was crap never made it up the chain of command. Tenant thought he had good stuff there on the mobile labs and
stockpiles. So Bush wins one here. But anthrax and mustard gas don't form mushroom clouds.

Score: Bush is a liar - 1 / Bush is a dope - 2.

Postwar assessments showed that although he could have reconstituted his bio or chemical weapons programs, Saddam did not possess any such weapons and was not trying to make them.

Fred did forget another "BUT" when it came to chemical weapons productions, where the report nails both Bush and Cheney for lying again.

Conclusion 4: Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.

The intelligence community assessed that Saddam Hussein wanted to have chemical weapons production capability and that Iraq was seeking to hide such capability in its dual use chemical industry. Intelligence assessments, especially prior to the October 2002 NIE, clearly stated that analysis could not confirm that production was ongoing.

I'm calling this a push since Rumsfeld was the one who talked out his ass the most on this item. That is unless the word Cheney used, "amassing" WMD's is the same as making them, putting them into production, that kind of thing. Cuz if it is, then when Dick said there was "no doubt" Saddam was "amassing" WMD's to use against us and our friends, he lied -- cuz there was considerable doubt that he had made anything new -- just left-over stuff from the Iran/Iraq war. (He didn't have any, but the intel folks said he did.)

Unless you count the finding the AUMF legally required Bush to make before the invasion, that "The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

Bush and Fred wouldn't call that a lie, just one of them there "eggs-agger-A-tions." Me, I call it a lie, under oath, on a material issue of fact Bush affirmed to Congress. A bit worse than lying about blow jobs, no?

They really nail Rummy for just making shit up about underground WMD facilities. That was pure fantasy. I don't know if it has any bearing on the decision to go to war, just that it was part of the argument that we couldn't just do this from the air and had to send in the Army and Marines. This was utter bullshit.

Oh, Fred was right, Iraq had scud missiles. (No duh!) But he again doesn't finish the conclusions which where that since Iraq had acquired some mapping software, they were going to target the US with model airplanes. Does not pass the smell test but the administration didn't let anyone get a whiff of the dissenting views -- again.

Like the nuke stuff, it was pure deception to say "this is what they're doing" instead of the more realistic, "maybe -- when pig fly." Come on. they bought maps. Puh-leeze.

The report also concludes that the intel did NOT support the, "Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida has a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training."

They also were called out for deliberately leaving the impression that contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida were much, much more than they actually were.

And Cheney just flat out lied about Muhammad Atta meeting with Iraqi intelligence in Prague.

Cheney and Bush, according to the Report, also flat out lied about Saddam being prepared to give WMD's to terrorists, mainly since he didn't have any. They also lied about the war's probably aftermath, about which the intel folks accurately warned them about -- yet they lied and did nothing about it anyway. Greeted as liberators, cost below $100 million, done in six weeks, paid for itself with Iraqi oil.

Antiwar.com Original

What Mark"s Reading

Proud Realist

Facebook Badge

Contributors

Contact Me

Followers

My Blogroll

OHIO BLOGS

TOLEDO BLOGS

BLOGS I RECOMMEND

American Streeters

6/30/08

6/29/08

6/28/08

6/27/08

6/25/08

6/24/08

6/23/08

6/22/08

6/21/08

6/20/08

6/19/08

6/18/08

6/17/08

6/15/08

6/14/08

6/13/08

6/11/08

6/10/08

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

RealClearPolitics

Pollster.com

Blog Archive

Older Archives