Lying With Impunity

by shep

Greg Sargent talks about Paul Krugman’s recent call out of the press to mention the fact that Rudy Giuliani has a bad habit of lying dissembling and wonders why the press seems so reluctant to do so when it is always oh so ready to trot out the latest GOP smear of Democrats:

Indeed. As this blog has been noting regularly, in the case of Dem candidates, your pundits will cheerfully springboard off the most trivial of anecdotes -- and in some cases, things that never happened at all -- to reach sweeping judgments about Dems' character deficits. But when it comes to Republican candidates, there is, with a few exceptions, a deep-seated reluctance to doing something so crude and impolite. This enormous double standard has been plainly obvious for years and years now. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to get anyone in the media to admit this. The denial about it runs too deep.

These days, it’s rare to hear a Republican open his mouth and not have a lie come tumbling out. For a typical Bush speech, I have to take off my shoes to count all of the lies, mischaracterizations and obfuscations (come on, we all have to find some way to get through a Bush speech and I figure this one beats drinking rat poison).

So what is it, MSM? Can you no longer discern the truth from an outright falsehood? Do you lurve you some big strong daddy Republicans? Do you just hate Democrats? Has this hypocrisy gone on so long and been so horrifically tragic for the nation that you can’t face your own duplicity and responsibility?

Do tell.

[E Pluribus Unum]

Speaking of Rats Fleeing the Sinking GOP

Friday UPDATE: 2 GIs, 22 Iraqis Killed; 15 22 Iraqis Wounded
Also, Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) are
threatening to attack Turkish pipelines
if Turkey attacks their bases.

Mel Marinez was never an easy fit for the face of the GOP, and while it looks like our friend Oliver exaggerated a bit when he said Martinez quit the GOP, Mel has stepped down as Chair of the Republican National Committee . . .

to spend more time . . .

with his . . .

(wait for it) . . .

(no, not his family, too easy . . .)

Constituents? :'-D

That's a new one. Ya think there might be some kind of trend coming? --Nya.

There's more...
Maha doesn't single out individual defectors and retirees that now seem to be running over each other to leave the GOP, but looks at the general trend of corporate types and evangelicals deserting a party that they thought they could control and through which could redraw the globe in their image -- but instead they became the party's vassal, subordinate and beholden to hacks they discovered were incompetently stupid, greedy, arrogant beyond tolerance, and are not going to be missed by the people who put them in power only to be jerked around.

But in the annals of the profoundly stupid, there's two types we usually see -- especially on shows like Keith Olbermann's Countdown: stupid Republicans and stupid criminals. TPM Muckraker scores the rare TwoFer: a really stupid Republican criminal. In fact, Duke Cunningham was so stupid, the defense contracters who were bribing him to strong-arm the Pentagon brass for those sweetheart deals Duke's benefactors were paying him to get had to literally spell out exactly what Duke was to tell the military officials. And when I say spell it out, Duke was given talking points -- which included a script.

4. I (Duke) would like you (Mr. Oliver) to take the following steps.......
5. I (Duke) would like to handle this immediately.

Rarely does one end up in jail if they didn't do something just plain stupid. Amazing that these neo-con-poops could turn the tables on anyone at all. But the story from Paul Krugman that Maha quotes does blow your mind, especially since this comes to us through a convoluted trail that started at Politico.com of all places. See, the party hacks of the GOP didn't take long to understand they didn't need to wait around to be bought by the K-Street lobbyists, but could sell their wares to the highest bidder:

According to The Politico, “many C.E.O.’s” used the term “extortion” to describe “the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.” And now that Mr. Santorum is out of office, heading the America’s Enemies program at a right-wing think tank, the faint sound you hear from K Street is that of lobbyists singing: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”

But, Sadly No. Or more accurately, MoJo alerts us that the Living Dead: Santorum, Blackwell, and Gingrich are out on the rubber chicken circiut.

It's a real horror show here at FRC's WB [The super-Christian Family Research Council's Washigton Briefing -mark]. Former senator Rick Santorum came out to slam Hillary Clinton on abortion, former Ohio secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell came out to jabber about civilization or ideas or something, and former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich came out to talk about how Americans support certain things in massive majorities (prayer in schools, the pledge of allegiance, etc.) only be see their near-consensus on these issues overruled by the courts and the elites in Washington.

Mind you, I wouldn't trade places with the Republicans for a minute. But I'm rather disgusted watching our own leadership cower before these hyperventilating outrage merchants because one of the few elected Democrats with steel instead of pudding in his spine called Bush out on his bloodlust and mentally defective priorities. It wouldn't take too many missteps for there to be outright revolt against Pelosi and Reid among the base of netroot activists, myself included.

Reid is especially bothersome as we end the week. You simply don't make nice with the likes of Limbaugh, and you certainly don't undermine one of your own, especially when he's doing the right thing despite running for President. But don't worry Harry, I guess nobody but us bloggers give a damn.

If Chris Dodd puts a hold on the Telecom immunity bill and everyone ignores it, did it really happen?

Nope, especially when even the leader of your caucus blows you off.

Hey GOPers! Any room on that raft of yours? This ship of state is almost too full of holes to save.

A Distinction Without a Difference

by shep

Reading Daily Kos this morning, a came across this peculiar claim by DHinMI in a long essay about Blackwater and the GOP:

“But the main reason why it’s wrong to refer to Bush authoritarianism as fascist is, simply, that it’s not fascist. Fascism exalted the state as the most powerful force, more powerful than any other institutions, including business.”

My reply is: you’re making a distinction where there is no difference, in both fascism and the Republican model of government.

The most perfect illustration of that is the current purchase of immunity for cooperating in illegal domestic spying for telecom companies by former political officials (in both parties) now employed by the telecoms and lobbying by current government officials, such as intelligence director Mike McConnell, who were formerly (directly) employed by the telecoms.



I’ll let Glenn Greenwald describe another dimension to the lack of distinction between “the state” and business:

”The top telecom officials are devoting substantial amounts of their energy to working on highly classified telecom projects with the Bush administration, including projects to develop whole new joint networks and ensure unfettered governmental access to those networks. Before joining the administration as its Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell spearheaded the efforts on behalf of telecoms to massively increase the cooperation between the Federal Government and the telecom industry.

The private/public distinction here has eroded almost completely. There is no governmental oversight or regulation of these companies. Quite the contrary, they work in secret and in tandem -- as one consortium -- with no oversight at all.”

Strangely, DHinMI’s thesis is based in large measure on Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine which contains no such denial of Republican fascism:

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.”

From Wikipedia on “corporatism”:

“Political scientists may also use the term corporatism to describe a practice whereby an authoritarian state, through the process of licensing and regulating officially-incorporated social, religious, economic, or popular organizations, effectively co-opts their leadership or circumscribes their ability to challenge state authority by establishing the state as the source of their legitimacy, as well as sometimes running them, either directly or indirectly through shill corporations.”

From Wikipedia on fascism:

”Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote "superior" individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism. Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."

And from the self-proclaimed “founder” of fascism himself:

”The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.” (p. 41).
—Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.

Any way you slice it, fascism is about the alignment of all institutions of state power, especially corporate power, against the interests of democratic representation, populist policy and individual liberty, i.e., liberalism. It seeks not to enhance the state relative to business but to remove the barrier between corporate interests and the interests of state entirely. Meanwhile, fascism seeks to suppress or coerce any remaining conflicts with those interests as determined by its elites in both business and government, because they are the same people and the same interests.

From the corruption of the democratic process in the Supreme Court sanctioned Republican coup of 2000 and political prosecutions and voter suppression by Republican government officials, to restructuring the tax system to favor wealth rather than work, to outsourcing the writing of US law to corporations, to privatizing entire government functions like protecting US government officials overseas, to the militarization of society through fear mongering, to colluding between government and corporations to violate the law to spy on the lawful activities American citizens, this Republican government cannot be distinguished from US corporate interests and their combined interest in monopolizing the country’s wealth and power and undermining the liberty and self rule of average citizens. That is fascism by every meaning of the word.


[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Timing is Everything

by shep

It’s almost here. For everyone other than the 25% of authoritarian (Bush) followers who are just fine with a Republican criminal enterprise running out of the Oval Office and the beltway elites who can’t stomach looking at the blood on their own hands, the argument is over. There is only one question remaining:

"Where are the real confrontations needed to vindicate the rule of law and restore constitutional order? No reasonable person can dispute that in the absence of genuine compulsion (and perhaps even then), the administration will continue to treat "the law" as something optional, and their power as absolute. Their wrongdoing is extreme, and only equally extreme corrective measures will suffice."
--Glenn Greenwald

Or, really, when will enough true patriots rise up and insist upon it?

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Fearing and Loathing Fred Thompson

Just a sample:

He's Fred Thompson. You're nothing.

IMAO: Frank Facts About Fred Thompson: "AWESOME FACTS ABOUT FRED THOMPSON

* Fred Thompson has on multiple occasions pronounced 'nuclear' correctly.

* Fred Thompson has blasted more people in the face with a shotgun than even Dick Cheney."

* Every night before going to sleep, Osama bin Laden checks under his bed for Fred Thompson.

* Fred Thompson took over what was Al Gore's Senate seat, thereby dramatically reducing the Senate's carbon footprint. Fred Thompson then created carbon offset offsets by wastefully burning hippies.

* The Fremen consider "Fred Thompson" a killing word.

* Only two things can kill Superman: Kryptonite and Fred Thompson.

There's a whole lot more...

Feel free to add your own in the comments, like:

• Fred Thompson is so macho he doesn't need to ask ... he can tell.


• Fred Thompson only drinks Tennessee Sour Mash, either Jack Daniel's or George Dickel, straight, no ice. And he can drink more than you.


• Fred Thompson will never violate the law ... he IS the Law (and Order).


• Fred Thompson has no fear of Muslims, he thinks they're funny.


• Fred Thompson won't doesn't need body guards or secret service protection. Bullets bounce off his chest.


• Fred Thompson can kick Chuck Norris' ass.
  


• Men and women both want to be him -- and be with him.


• Good children love him and bad children fear him, (and it is rumored that Fred Thompson gets final approval of Santa Clause's list).


• Fred Thompson will end global warming with mind control alone.
  

Ann Coulter's Not Paranoid

The Coultergeist isn't unreasonably paranoid -- because we ARE coming to get them.

SHOOTING ELEPHANTS IN A BARREL: "Lewis Libby has now been found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice for lies that had absolutely no legal consequence."

[snip]

As a result, Libby is now a convicted felon for having a faulty memory of the person who first told him that Joe Wilson (news, bio, voting record) was a delusional boob who lied about his wife sending him to Niger.

This makes it official: It's illegal to be Republican.

In her latest report from fantasy land, Mitt Romney's BFF catalogues a laundry list of cases where a Republican crook was hounded by the legal system they scoffed at, while Democrats go scott free.

There's more...

She gives us not one, but two gratuitious Kennedy references (a family I admit has a genetic defect when it comes to driving) used as a counterwight to Rush Limbaugh being unfairly subject to a criminal investigation for doctor shopping -- who it seems was only targeted because he is a Republican.

What a shame there's only so much room to be had in a syndicated column. Apparently a fair representation of the facts is just so much fluff when up against a deadline, right Annie? She just didn't have room to remind us that Rush still has to pee in a cup at random intervals and wrote a check for thirty grand as part of his deal with prosecutors -- who might have offered that off the bat had El Rushbo agreed to open up his records instead of playing the martyr and cluttering up the appeals courts.

Rush did have a point when it comes to his 4th amendment privacy rights, but I'm not all that sympathetic, mainly because of his prior hypocrisy about how all druggies should be locked up.

MSNBC: Before his own problems became public, Limbaugh had decried drug use and abuse and mocked President Clinton for saying he had not inhaled when he tried marijuana. He often made the case that drug crimes deserve punishment.

“Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. ... And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up,” Limbaugh said on his short-lived television show on Oct. 5, 1995.

During the same show, he commented that statistics that show blacks go to prison more often than whites for the same drug offenses only illustrate that “too many whites are getting away with drug use.

Just makes you want to cry for the guy, doesn't it.

The Coultergeist treads around very dangerous ground by even mentioning the name Clinton with regard to irresponsible use of the legal system for political games, especially in the context of a perjury case. But much to my relief, she was only referring to some Clinton contributor who was accused of statutory rape and apparently reached a deal with a Palm Beach prosecutor to plead down to solicitation of prostitution.

You don't think she has a gripe with Florida law enforcement folks, do you?

Annie ... baby. ...flies and honey girlfriend -- not Lies and Money. You're just daring them to throw the book at you for voter fraud. Here's a clue. Don't challenge prosecutors who have nothing to lose and publicity to gain. How do you think Giuliani got where he is today.

Coulter has refused to cooperate with investigators. Dumb, just dumb. That's not how the Kennedys kept their driver's licenses.

And here I sense the pattern. Perhaps there's something about the conservative movement mindset about being free, what "liberty" really means to them. It may be similar to the civil disobedience talked about by Henry David Thoreau, a hero of anachists and protesting hippies for generations.

Wiki, Civil Disobedience: The American author Henry David Thoreau pioneered the modern theory behind this practice in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience (Wikisource Text), originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government". The driving idea behind the essay was that of self-reliance, and how one is in morally good standing as long as one can "get off another man's back"; so one doesn't have to physically fight the government, but one must not support it or have it support one (if one is against it).

Sounds like good old-fashioned American values, go-getters standing up to an unjust government. Unfortunately, in practice this can lead to anarchy -- especially when you aren't just fighting the government, but you are the government. For the last six years, the party that controlled all three branches of government was actively working to undermine that same government because of their allegience to Thoreau's creed. It sounds absurd, but it sure does explain how so much could go wrong under their watch and why Grover Norquist wants to shrink the government to the point where he can drown it in a bathtub.

Again, I repeat the notion that all the fiascos we see daily being explained away in Washington D.C., are features, not bugs. It's the logical result of their ideology.

The purity of their intentions, the righteousness of their cause is not open for debate or supervision. Nobody is going to tell them what to do because their arrogance will not permit enough doubt or introspection to allow them to admit error. Sound familiar, like maybe a certain Commander in Chief?

So, convinced of their infalliability or worried that an admission of human error will unravel their entire public facade, the very idea that they would cooperate with law enforcement or Congressional investigations is inconceivable. Since they believe they can do no wrong, any inquiry must be a witch-hunt.

That's how you end up with cover-ups instead of sunshine. That's why you get people convicted of lying about illegal wars getting pardoned and returning to work in the White House. (No, not Scooter -- or did you forget about Elliot Abrams?)

Do you see the pattern? Nixon's administration stonewalls investigators, and ten of them went to jail for lying either to investigators or Congress. Ford pardoned unindicted co-conspirator Nixon, but his Chief of Staff (some guy named Richard Cheney) didn't pull any strings to get the others released. Reagan's administration boasted convictions of Poindexter and North for lying to Congress (which they did, but their convictions were overturned on appeal as 5th amendment violations of their immunity agreements) and President G.H.W. Bush pardoned Weinberger and current Oval Office advisor Abrams for the Same. Damn. Thing.

Poor Scooter. How unjust it is to be convicted for behaving like so many other administration officials who thought they could get away with lying under oath. You don't have to refer to blue dresses to make the point here people.

It's not that we're going after Republicans just because they are Republicans. Tom DeLay isn't being unjustly persecuted as Coulter would have her readers believe. There's a lot of cash that went through a lot of his associates' hands (many of whom are now doing time), cash that is regulated and hands that can be corrupted because they hold the public's trust -- and with so many people around him going to jail something seems fishy enough to warrant an investigation of one of the nation's most powerful public employees.

You don't compare Tom DeLay with William "The Refridgerator" Jefferson. You compare the common bribery cases of Duke Cunninghame and Bob Ney with Jefferson. Tom DeLay's greed was for the power to fundamentally transform this nation into something none of us would recognize, not cash.

Typically, Tom didn't open up his books and show the world that there's no "there" there. He's taking his chances, playing the martyr card they have perfected to an art form, and daring the cops to make their case. Folks, that isn't how politicians earn our respect, unless you too want to grow up to be a Mafia Don.

No, these people are not innocent victims of an out-of-control judicial system or rogue prosecutors. They are not "innocent until they confess," even though Coulter and the repugnant Kate O'Beirne would have us grant so little respect for the jury system we should believe trials and verdicts are simply tools wielded by those evil "activist" judges Tom DeLay and his ilk would abolish.

It's truly pathological. It's come to the point that it's impossible for them to learn the error of their ways even when something worst than jail happens. They lost their congressional majority in no small part because they tried to cover-up for a pedophile hitting on congressional pages. Dennis Haster or those close to him felt, like Thoreau taught them, that their cause was so important it justified ignoring the laws they themselves write. Even if the GOP still had lost the House (which they certainly would), without the Foley scandal Hastert would have remained the Minority Leader.

No remorse. You've yet to see an act of contrition from Oliver North, Abrams or Negroponte for waging war behind our backs. A war people! You won't see any remorse from them about leaking the identity of covert operatives either. They truly believe they are above the law, more important and answering to a higher calling than the law and content to obfuscate with the technical rather than answer for the inherent lawlessness they promote. That's why Robert Novak can call for Libby to be set free with no sense of irony.

Get. A. Clue.

They pay the price for trying to hide the truth again and again. But in the long run, with truth forever obscured by these poor hounded "patriots," America itself pays the price as the lights of that shining city on the hill grow dimmer due to low-hanging clouds.


(Romney and Coulter in a strategy planning session.)

Tuck This One Away

Depending on how the GOP field shakes out, this description of Governor Mitt Romney's various stances on abortion could come in handy.

He had moved back and forth on the choice issue. I said he isn't pro-choice or anti-choice. He's multiple choice. ~~Ted Kennedy

What a nasty thing to say about a Mormon.