They be hatin'

I'm feeling pretty good about myself today, I actually sat through about 20 minutes of the Republican debate last night. I feel like I did my level best to get my head fair and balanced.

God, what an awful group of human beings.

They wasted no time in getting the red meat out on the floor, with the first few questions about immigration reform. Rudy and Mitt jumped right on it, each trying to out hate the other one, accusing one another of gross improprieties: (You were the mayor of a sanctuary city! You hired illegals to clean your mansion!). Poor John McCain tried to back down some of the demagoguing, and Fred Thompson rolled over and barked a little bit of bile into the conversation now and again. Ten minutes into the debate, it was a battle to see who could prove that they were the number one hater of brown folks, and not surprisingly, Tom Tancredo flashed his bona fides and won that match. Sheesh.

The YouTube crowd was a comforting cross section of Republican America. From the Weekly Standard:

So, a good night for for the lowest denominator, a bad night for the GOP. America got to see a vaguely threatening parade of gun fetishists, flat worlders, Mars Explorers, Confederate flag lovers and zombie-eyed-Bible-wavers as well as various one issue activists hammering their pet causes.

I actually started to understand why Huckabee is polling so well. He speaks clearly and slow, uses small words and bromides, and makes a point of telling everybody that he's the holiest one of the bunch. With Rudy and Fred up there, that aint sayin' much, but I hear it's playing well in Des Moines.

Needless to say, after 20 minutes, I finished up my nightcap and headed up to bed. If the Dems actually find a way to lose this election, they don't deserve a party.

UPDATE: Here's a classic.

So easy to make fun.

James Wolcott linked to this screech of anguish from a blog called "view from the right". . It gives you a good sense of what keeps these folks up at night:

How our culture portrays relations between the sexes

Late last night I turned on the tv (which I do for five minutes once every month or so--literally), and this is what I saw. I saw 60 seconds of some show, in which a young man in a hospital room is embarrassedly complaining that he doesn't want to shave a male patient's "curly," his pubic hair (one imagines in preparation for surgery), and a very young, very pretty blond woman standing on the other side of the patient's bed tells the young man in a bossy, down-putting, drill-sergeant tone that he'd better do it or he will get a bad report from her, and that he should count his lucky stars that she's only telling him to shave the man's groin. He is abashed by this lecture, and in a defeated manner accepts the razor from her as she walks out of the room.

Some readers will feel that my proposal to limit the franchise is extreme, pointless, and a distraction from more pressing issues. But the tv scene I've just recounted demonstrates the ultimate end of a thoroughgoing sexual equality--not equality between the sexes, but a perverted female supremacism over the male.

For some reason, I'm not quite as threatened when I watch reruns of Scrubs.

Joe Klein is a hack

Certainly, Joe Klein, Time's political columnist and glorified talking head is a hack, but his hackitude points to a larger issue about the power of blogs, the internet and distributed networks. Glen Greenwald takes apart Klein's embarrassingly lazy and dangerous work on the latest FISA legislation here.

The part that really grabbed my attention is where Klein, after being called on his factually incorrect and intellectually slovenly work, admits:

I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right

But of course, many others, including Greenwald do have that background and the time to figure out the factual substance of the bill and do have the wherewithal to offer a reasoned opinion on the merits of said bill. The question, then, becomes why Time offers a platform to a man who admittedly cannot and will not do the work to understand the issue about which he writes. The dangerous part is that Time represents a far larger megaphone than the internet (right now) and that many many voters receive their information from that source. So when Klein smears House Democrats for supporting a bill that

"would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court" and thus "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans"

many many voters take that as a fact, rather than an easily disproved falsehood.

UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune reprinted a large part of Klein's original article, even though he has distanced himself from the clear falsehoods in the article. Behold the power of the traditional media.

Fear the Clintons!

Digby raises two very interesting points in this excellent post on Bush/Cheney and Clinton/Clinton today. First and most obviously, the idea that the Clinton's would represent some sort of threat to our Constitution because a President would be at risk of sharing power with a powerful alter ego is absurd in the face of the Cheney reign as the most powerful Vice in our nation's history. Every time that I come close to dismissing the tin foil hat notion that Cheney is really pulling the strings behind the administration's bald grab for executive power, and is responsible for the almost shockingly radical assault on the liberties and rights that we've fought for since the establishment of the republic, the facts get in the way and the tin foil conspiracy theories are found to be substantiated. The Frontline expose was about as shocking and disturbing a thing as you'll ever see on television, and it proves that the audacity and hubris of Cheney truly knows no bounds. He is a bloodthirsty old man, unconcerned with the niggling restrictions that we refer to as the balance of power. To wit:

I think it really meant that no one knew whether the national security adviser was playing her traditional role as the coordinator of all the different agencies involved in the national security process, or whether the vice president's office had slipped into that role. Remember, there were a lot of questions about who was going to be chairing the meetings, if the vice president was going to be regularly attending principals committee meetings? And there were a lot of uncertainties as to who was really running the show.

But the other notion that Digby alludes to is the conscious "disappearing" of Bush. Clearly the strategists on the right are working to grind into the electorate's mind that a Hillary presidency would be a continuation of the Clinton dynasty, as if the last eight years had never occurred. Not only does this ignore the reality of the true dynastic nature of the Bush family and its various extensions, but it ignores the pervasive damage that has been done to our nation since 2000. But it works very clearly to ignore the fact that Bush's approval ratings are roughly equivalent to John Wayne Gacy's, and that the real fear that we all face is the continuation of the nightmare epoch of that power mad harpie and her lecherous husband. It's clever stuff.

Grover Norquist got the ball rolling last week when he said:

“It will be ridiculous to have Mr President and Madam President in the White House,” he said. “We’re the United States of America. How can we say to President Mubarak [of Egypt], ‘You can’t hand off the presidency to your son, it’s got to be your wife’ or, ‘Hey Syria and North Korea, you’ve got to knock this stuff off and be like us’.”

Bush Hatred

There is an emerging meme on the right that basically boils down to the notion that there is an irrational hatred of Bush that is so far over the line that the left is actually crumbling in incoherence because the hatred is dominating all discerning reason. Underlying this thought is the idea that Bush's failures are ones that any man could have made, and that this administration, while not perfect, has done its level best to keep America safe and secure. Bill O'Reilly launched a tirade against Mark Cuban for funding Brian DePalma's new movie, "Redacted", which deals with the true story of the rape and murder of a fourteen year old Iraqi teen at the hands of American soldiers. In his tirade, he pins Cuban's treasonous behavior on an irrational hatred of Bush. You can see the entire clip of BillO in all his unhinged glory here.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Peter Berkowitz, a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, has an almost incoherent piece entitled "The Insanity of Bush Hatred", which I suppose is trying to make the case that Bush hatred is irrational because it reduces arguments to black and white, and that the traditional hallmarks of progressivism and liberalism are therefore betrayed.

I actually think that the era of real Bush hatred has ebbed, and that in his twilight months, progressive and liberal opinions have morphed into a resigned ambivalence towards the man. I think liberals have moved on from the train wreck of this Presidency towards a harrowing acknowledgment that this man was elected twice. The Bush loathing has become a kind of self-loathing, or at least doubt, wondering how our electorate could have gone so wrong, not to immediately recognize what is now so patently obvious.

If anyone wants to seriously discuss irrational hatred and destructive and insane venom, look no further than the continuing jihad against all things Clinton. Even after eight years of a true assault on our Constitution, an approach to governing that can only be called dangerously radical, one that threatens the fabric of our rights and liberties, the far right continues to view Bill Clinton's sexual indiscretions as a sin so grievous that the very mention of his wife's name sends them into paroxysms of horror. Tbogg takes them all to pieces here.

But what Kathryn Jean is actually talking about is the looming threat of a Hillary Clinton presidency that will somehow bring to the surface all of those deeply repressed memories of a period in American life when people (and by people I mean people like Kathryn Jean Lopez) were consumed with that slab of hillbilly ham hock that nestles snugly, but restlessly, in Clinton Crotch Holler. If you were expecting a detailed analysis of The Darkness 1993-2001 (the forced abortions, the all-gay military, the Other Great Depression, Jerry Maguire) , you will be sorely disappointed since it appears that all of woes somehow flowed from the massive manmeat of Cockmaster Bill:

I’ve lived through the blue dress and all the other details. We all lived through that. And while the impeachment was about important public issues — perjury and abuse of power — it all stemmed from, and fed into, that drama that is the Clintons.

Now that's irrational.

The mind of the right

Here's Deroy Murdock, fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Scripps Howard news correspondent, explaining why George Bush ought to embrace waterboarding, as he says, proudly:

Meanwhile, President Bush is deeply deluded if he thinks opposing waterboarding will buy him any goodwill among the domestic and international Left, who hate him immeasurably. More quickly than the average Capitol Hill flip flop, Democrats who scream against waterboarding today will skin Bush alive if, God forbid, there is another major terror attack here on his watch.

“He didn’t keep us safe,” they will moan. “Why didn’t he stop this?” they will bellow. Instantly forgotten will be Bush’s very dangerous concessions to his domestic critics. His approval of the CIA’s 2006 request to ban waterboarding will give Bush absolutely zero protection if today’s soft-on-terror Democrats become tomorrow’s post-terror hawks. They will pick him apart like a hummingbird.

This is all the more reason for President Bush to reinstate waterboarding, proudly and publicly, so America can get the information we need to prevent Muslim-fanatic mass murder and win the Global War on Terror.

Some articles speak for themselves.

Look back in bewilderment..

In these dark hours, it really helps to go back to a much more horrible time, when Bill Clinton rocked the nation to its very core because he, ummm....got a blow job. This article, from Washington doyenne Sally Quinn, really captures the essence of that time, when our constitution hung in the balance. Even though a large majority of the country thought the whole idea of censure or impeachment was an absurd over-reaction to a personal matter, and that the panty-sniffing of ideologues like Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich were way beyond the pale, the real aggrieved parties were the insiders in the Beltway, who were so offended by the crass outsider who had, after all, spoiled their party:

Muffie Cabot, who as Muffie Brandon served as social secretary to President and Nancy Reagan, regards the scene with despair. "This is a demoralized little village," she says. "People have come from all over the country to serve a higher calling and look what happened. They're so disillusioned. The emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn't quite as sordid as this."

and of course, Saint Joe needs to weigh in:

"This is our town," says Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Democrat to forcefully condemn the president's behavior. "We spend our lives involved in talking about, dealing with, working in government. It has reminded everybody what matters to them. You are embarrassed about what Bill Clinton's behavior says about the White House, the presidency, the government in general."

and the most famous quote of them all, from the biggest 'villager' of them all:

"He came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."

It's all kind of quaint, in a way. But these were also Bush's enablers, the same pundits and politicians who were wowed by the bullhorn, the flight suit, and the faux machismo. These are the same people who bought the fact that a cheerleader from Yale could pretend to be a cowboy from Crawford, and rallied behind his lies and looked past his incompetence. Now, the country has turned against the man and his disastrous war, and the pundits are ready to move on, because the war was only fun when we were winning, wasn't it?

Torture and Its Aftermath...

Here is the smoking gun CIA memo that ties Colin Powell's testimony linking Al Queda and Saddam to a confession made by a captured terrorist that was basically buried alive for 17 hours.

But now, hearing how the information was obtained, the CIA was soon to retract all this intelligence. A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a "foreign government service" (Egypt) that: "the next topic was al-Qa'ida's connections with Iraq...This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story."

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then "placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches]." He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to "tell the truth." When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that "he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back." Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then "was punched for 15 minutes." (Sourced to CIA cable, Feb. 5, 2004).

Here was a cable then that informed Washington that one of the key pieces of evidence for the Iraq war -- the al Qaeda/Iraq link -- was not only false but extracted by effectively burying a prisoner alive.

This really cuts to the core of where we've gone off the tracks. The amazing thing is that this news has been out in the public domain for over a year, and that more has not been made of it. I guess we've been a bit too preoccupied with Brittany and Lindsay to focus on the fact that our government caused the torture of a captive and acted upon coerced information that they knew was wrong. The use of the confession has unequivocally harmed our national interest. The use of the confession has led to the death of our soldiers and thousands of innocent civilians, exposed the limits of our military strength, and inflamed the entire Islamic world. It has led us to cede the moral high ground that we occupied for the better part of our history and established us as a pariah. We have squandered our treasure and our blood upon these lies.

And the Democrats, facing a nation in which 50% of the population strongly disapprove of the job that the President is doing refuse to stand up to this administration for fear of appearing 'weak' on terrorism. How can they not see the results of eight years of an administration that is 'strong' on terror?

Pictures say more than words?

Picture gallery of Iran.

Mukasey and the Cheney Cabal

Sidney Blumenthal at Salon distills the essence of the Mukasey evasions and points out what is evident to any sentient being at this point, that Mukasey has destroyed his reputation and integrity at the hands of a White House that continues to disregard the rule of law. At the heart of the matter stands one of the most loathsome of the Bush loyalists, David Addington.

In his confirmation hearings, Mukasey has proved he will dance as the strings are pulled. His positions on waterboarding express precisely the relationship between the Bush White House and its Justice Department. Mukasey's testimony telegraphs that the White House will continue to call the shots. He has already ceded the essence of his power even before assuming it. His vaunted integrity and independence have been crushed, short work for Addington.

Blumenthal then ties Addington's work back to Iran contra and the cabal that surrounded the ghoulish director of the CIA, William Casey and the ranking member of the subcommittee that investigated Iran contra, Dick Cheney. Their work at the time should seem familiar to us today:

"These guys don't like the mainstream CIA. In fact, they hate it," the CIA official explained. "They don't like information unless it fits what they want to hear. They hate the CIA because the CIA tells them what they don't want to hear. They want assessments that prove ideological points. They are looking for simplistic answers to complicated issues. They inhabit a make-believe world of moving up into perceived areas of expertise. It's the same guys; they all resurface when Republicans are back in power. It's the same group. It's a system. The similarities are amazing in all these wars we've been dragged into.

and it all comes around to destroy Mukasey:

Cheney's defense of Casey's actions as written by Addington in the minority report became the core of the Bush doctrine: The president as commander in chief can do whatever he wants regardless of Congress. There must be no checks and balances, no accountability. There must be no disclosure to other branches of government, whether legislative or judicial. Oral findings, or, if necessary, secret memos, make the illegal legal merely by saying they are legal in the name of presidential authority. The operational need to know determines who knows.

Now Mukasey, who was supposed to restore credibility to the Justice Department, has been transformed overnight into a cog in the machine, another servant to his masters, Addington's apologist. His brief tragedy is just one small outcome of a long history. The almost instantaneous tainting of his reputation should have been understood from the start as inevitable.

It's pretty clear to me that nobody of any character would ever accept an appointment in this administration, and Chuck Schumer's character reference notwithstanding, Mukasey and anyone who does so should be looked at with a jaundiced eye. In the last months of a lame duck presidency, where the executive is despised by a higher number of citizens than any man who has sat in the oval office, a decision to board this listing vessel should be cause for more than a head scratch.