Crazy like a Fox

Eric Boehlert taps into the motherload of all schadenfreude as he points out the fact that it just isn't that fun to be Fox News any more. It's obvious that by becoming the functional megaphone not only of the Republican Party, but of the mouth-breathing right, they rose with the tide and now are floundering with the ebb. The cruelest blow of all, of course, is the implosion of the Giuliani campaign, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the more voters got to know Rudy, the more they came to despise him.

Fox adopted Rudy early and hard, because he fit the profile of the authoritarian tinpot dictator that they so long for. He was Bush on steroids, tougher talking and even more bloodthirsty. Surrounding himself with ghouls like Norman Podhoretz, who lusts for the days that our bombs rip into Tehran, Rudy was Fox's wet dream, quick to hate, prone to anger, and wrapped hard in the mantle of 9/11, Fox's finest hour. The sorry reality that this thrice married, lisping pro-gay, pro-choice mayor from the cradle of liberalism was really just a put-on never bothered Fox. Like Greg Brady, he fit in the suit.

Now Fox is stuck. Rush, Hannity and O'Reilly hate Huckabee, hate McCain, and hate Mittster. None of them have the brown-people-hatin' bona fides that Rudy had. McCain is an old enemy, Huckabee a populist, and Romney a lapsed Massachusetts governor, who was reliably pro-choice and pro-gay just years ago. Aside from that, he's a Mormon fer Chrissake.

So, sure, Fox News' ratings will plunge, because the action is all on the Dems side, and because their most reliable talking points have essentially been rendered moot. But beware the cornered Fox, who gets nasty when the chips are down. Rudy had the Swiftboat crowd behind him, and now they'll cast their bloodthirsty gaze to another target. The end of days talk regarding Fox is premature, I'd guess.

Little Monday laughs.

Dig Eddie Izzard...

Honey, I shrunk the superpower.

I agree with Bagnews that the image on the cover of the Times magazine this weekend is a striking reminder of what the Bush years have done to this country. As he ascends the podium for his last State of the Union speech, Bush does so against the backdrop of a country that has become isolated internationally, been exposed militarily, and has entered and uncertain future of war without end, I suppose. At the same time, he remains defiant in a Fox News interview, pedantically telling the reporter that he will be exonerated in the end, that his administration will not be judged as anything other than the hard medicine that the American people needed at this juncture in history.

The reality that this petty, secretive, vindictive dry drunk ignores is a legacy of executive overreach and a conscious and willful ignorance of the first principles that this country was founded upon.

Watch this evening as he rails against the 70% of the country that finds him so loathsome that they literally count the days until his departure. Somewhere in the speech, he'll stumble into a brief discussion of Iraq. He'll tout the success of the surge, although violence continues to wrack the country. He'll spin yarns about the emerging democratic state, although none exists.

In the end, his irrelevance is all that matters. He has already begun to exit the stage, while the economy, for which he never felt he got any credit, collapses around him. In the Post today, a grim reminder of the Bush team's current standing with the American public:

The scope of Bush's challenge was underscored by a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, conducted Jan. 9 to 12, which showed that the economy has overtaken the war as the key worry for voters and that Bush is receiving no credit for improving conditions in Iraq. According to the poll, 29 percent of voters now see the economy as the top issue in the 2008 elections, compared with 20 percent who cite Iraq.

Bush's overall approval rating was 32 percent, his lowest ever, with 30 percent of the public approving of his handling of Iraq. His handling of the economy rated even worse, with 28 percent approval compared with 41 percent a year ago.

It will be painful, but I'll force myself to watch.

Tough day in the markets....

Sure, it would be nice to pin the entire financial meltdown on the Bush administration, and to muse about whether their more tragic legacy will be the damage that pre-emptive war in Iraq did to our national character, our international standing, or our national security; or the cataclysmic effects of cheap money, irrational spending and corporate largess on the economic health of our country today and for years to come. But even I have to admit that the forces that were unleashed by Greenspan and nurtured by the explosion of demand in China and India, that led to cheap credit, a borrowing mania, and a dangerous bubble in the housing sector are far greater than this little man could have orchestrated. In reality, they were little more than cheerleaders for the phenomena, and surrounded themselves with economists who spouted on that things were going swimmingly, critics be damned. Cheney, in particular, seems to be intimately involved with the White House's economic strategy, such as it is, and he has surrounded himself with the most embarrassing group of cheerleaders that could ever be assembled. Brian Wesbury? Larry Kudlow? Wayne Angell? These guys are getting laughed out of the room for their unabashed bullishness right now. Larry Kudlow was exposed as a coke snorting loser when we still worked on Wall Street, Roger Ailes picked him off of the floor and turned him into a sideshow freak at CNBC. No serious economist views him as anything other than a clown. Brian Wesbury has turned his cheerleading for this administration into a nightshow act on CNBC. Nobody listens to these guys. But they've got Cheney's ear.

There is one thing, though, that you can pin on this administration, and in many ways, it is worse than the meltdown in the markets, the writedowns at Merrill and Citi, and the bursting of the housing bubble. And that is because the government has a role as a safety net for those that need help, those in our society that are falling behind, and those that are in the greatest need. And these guys passed the Bankruptcy Bill in 2005 and they ripped that net to pieces. Don't for a minute think that they did it for any other reason than ideological spite, in order to align the bankruptcy laws with their bizarre woldview that tells them that the safety net is nothing more than a government handout, and that self made men like George W. Bush don't require handouts and neither should you.

Kevin Drum wrote a piece on the Bankruptcy Bill back in 05 that reminds us of it's nefarious nature today.

Bottom line: you don't need to understand all the intricacies of bankruptcy law to know what to think of this bill. Through their actions, its sponsors have made it abundantly plain that abuse of the system isn't their real aim: protection of major campaign contributors is. The poor get shafted, the very real crisis of medical bankruptcy is ignored, the rich are allowed loopholes that let them off the hook, and credit card companies can continue on their merry way knowing they won't have to pay the price for their own folly.

Welcome to America.

Look, you can't blame the systematic destruction of the financial system on Bush, but you can sure see his spiteful hand in the awful Bankruptcy Bill. That alone should haunt him through his days.

Ugh. TGIF

I see the Klan has a rally planned for Jena for Monday, no doubt in honor of Dr. King. Meanwhile, the debate over the confederate flag has taken center stage in the South Carolina primary. The publisher of Golf Week magazine was fired for placing a picture of a noose on the cover of the magazine, in reference to a slip of the tongue uttered by a sports anchor at the Golf Channel. He was apparently surprised by the extremely negative reaction to the noose.

We need some tunes....but first, the Doughy Pantload, Neo-conservatism's idiot son, Jonah Goldberg, is eviscerated by John Stewart.

Where's Junior?

I'm actually surprised at just how resoundingly irrelevant Junior has become. Lame duckism in our political system is powerful and emerges quickly, don't it?

Apparently he's been in the Middle East begging the Saudis to lower oil prices.

Cunning plan.

Straits of Hormuz/Gulf of Tonkin

For the love of Pete, are these knuckleheads completely incapable of telling the truth?

The list of those who are less than fully confident in the Pentagon’s video/audio mashup of aggressive maneuvers by Iranian boats near American warships in the Strait of Hormuz now includes the Pentagon itself.

Unnamed Pentagon officials said on Wednesday that the threatening voice heard in the audio clip, which was released on Monday night with a disclaimer that it was recorded separately from the video images and merged with them later, is not directly traceable to the Iranian military.

That undercuts one of the most menacing elements from the Pentagon’s assertion that Iranian forces threatened the Navy ships: The voice on the radio saying, “I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes.”

Unfortunately, W was off like a shot:

President Bush called the incident "a provocative act" and "dangerous situation." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued to play up the Iranian threat. "The United States is going to defend its interests, it's going to defend the interests of its allies," she said defensively. "Iran is the single most important, greatest threat to the kind of Middle East we all want to see. It's a supporter of terrorism in Iraq, in Lebanon, in the Palestinian territories. It has nuclear ambitions."

When I was a teacher, I worked in the maintenance shed at the school in the summer. My teaching partner, let's call him Louie, worked with me, and while he had much more skill as a carpenter/painter/electrician/roofer than I, neither one of us were exactly Bob Vila. Whenever we ran into a problem, whether it was fixing a window, hanging a cabinet, starting a tractor, or fixing the bus, we'd always come up with the same solution.

"hit it with a hammer".

We were hung over school teachers, pretending to be maintenance men, working on old machinery. Fast forward twenty years, and we now have that type of guy in the White House. Every challenge that he faces all along the spectrum of issues that a President faces, he comes up with the same solution.

"hit it with a hammer".

You don't think so? Dig this:

Mr Bush also visited Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Looking at aerial photographs taken by US aircraft of Auschwitz, the most notorious death camp, he declared that America had been wrong not to bomb it to stop the mass-extermination taking place there.

Wonderful idea, bombing Auschwitz. That would've worked well.

Next Gen Taliban?

The article in the Sunday NYTime's magazine on the radicalization of the younger Islamic fanatics in Pakistan is a case study in how quickly unintended consequences can overwhelm a simplistic American foreign policy. The 'established' radicals inability to reign in the younger, more militant and bloody "next gen taliban" is a truly frightening and harrowing development. A great deal of their fervor is directly attributable to our blunders in the Middle East and in Western Asia as a whole. The most radical groups, which are mainly Pashtun, and therefore not truly Al Qaeda, fear that Musharraf is a tool of the Bush administration, but were probably also directly responsible for the murder of Bhutto. They regard the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as a broad US move towards destroying Islam throughout the region. Cheney and Bush's predictable response, to step up covert US efforts in the tribal areas of Baluchistan and Warzistan will only incite more violence and suspicion, and will go a long way towards working against our national interests, but that is that legacy of the fool's errand in Iraq.

The question, then, is this: Where does Pakistan stand in the cycle right now? Do they represent a country sliding towards the chaos and tribal hatreds evident in the sectarian violence we see in Iraq? Will the inevitable removal of Musharraf lead to the same sort of power vacuum and civil war that we see in Baghdad and Anbar? Or, does Pakistan today represent Iraq's future? Is the eventual outcome in Iraq the Pakistan that we see today, with the only functioning institution being the corrupt and power mad military, armed to the teeth, with seething ethnic, tribal and religious hatreds bubbling just below the surface?

Either or both may be true, and the only thing that we can be certain of is that we don't possess much in the way of options in dealing with this. Our influence on the ground is weak, our military limitations have been exposed, and the reality is that we will be forced to sit by and watch, hoping for an outcome over which we cannot predict.

Little righteous indignation from Eddie Vedder

and here's to the government of Dick Cheney,
with criminals posing as advisors to the crown,
and they hope that no one sees the sites and that no one hears the sounds,
cause the speeches of our president are the ravings of a clown
here's to the land you've torn out the heart of,
Dick Cheney find yourself another country to be part of

here's to the churches of Pat Robertson,
oh the cross once made of silver now is turned to rust,
and the sunday morning services preach in fear of men in love,
and God only knows in heaven they must trust

here's to the land you've torn out the heart of,
Pat Robertson find yourself another country to be part of

here's to the laws of Alberto Gonzalez,
congress will pass an act in the panic of the day,
and the Constitution's drowning in an ocean of decay,
and freedom of speech is dangerous we've even heard them say,

here's to the land you've torn out the heart of,
Gonzalez find yourself another country to be part of

think Phil Ochs wrote it.

Pakistan at another Crossroads

Here is the best rundown on the politics and shifting pieces surrounding the assassination of Benazir Bhutto that I've found. Aside from the historical perspective and fascinating picture it paints, the overriding takeaway from a piece like this is concern. The thought of facing a potential crisis of this magnitude with a man so totally beyond his depth is truly frightening. A snippet:

But what recent events demonstrate even more clearly is that the Bush administration's policy of relying on a personal relationship with a megalomaniac manipulator like Musharraf to fight al-Qaida has strengthened that organization immeasurably and perhaps fatally damaged the U.S.'s ability to form the coalition it needs to isolate and destroy that organization.

Many, probably most or nearly all, Pakistanis don't see the "War on Terror" as struggle of "moderates" against "extremists." They see it as a slogan to legitimate the military's authoritarian control . Through the classic psychological mechanism of reducing cognitive dissonance, it is only a short jump from believing that the threat of al-Qaida is being manipulated to strengthen authoritarian rule, to believing that the threat of al-Qaida is a hoax perpetrated to strengthen authoritarian rule. A similar mechanism of reducing cognitive dissonance has led many Americans to accept propaganda that the "anti-American" Saddam Hussein and the "anti-American" Islamic Republic of Iran" must be allied with the "anti-American" al-Qaida.

The McCain Fantasy

The rebound in the McCain campaign is really best explained as a strong anti-Hillary movement, I'd say. Clinton, perhaps appropriately, is viewed by those on the right and on the left as opportunistic and slick, and as we get closer and closer to actually pulling levers, a creeping suspicion of Clintonism seems to be rising. McCain seems to represent a change for those who can't stomach Clintonism, can't support the radical religiosity of Huckabee, and can't quite get their heads around the clear insanity of Giuliani. His supporters gloss over the fact that he has been spectacularly wrong about Iraq for years, and focus instead on the notion that he is a strong and independent politician. The truth about McCain, as opposed to the hagiography that has always surrounded him, however, doesn't really stand up, though. The media has always slavishly towed the line on the 'maverick McCain' story, and never looked to the facts of the matter, which, bluntly stated, have McCain voting with the administration 90% of the time. He is a reliable Republican who talks tough but rarely challenges the status quo, which is why he is the prohibitive favorite of "the Village", the inside the beltway tribe that craves bipartisanship and moderation, and fears nothing more than outsiders who challenge their incestuous game.

David Brock breaks down the media's failure to cut thorough the Maverick story here.

McCain's reputation as a "straight talker" is linked to the perception that he is a "maverick" -- a Republican politician willing to oppose the president and the party on major issues. On the May 14 broadcast of NBC's Meet the Press, Wall Street Journal national political editor John Harwood, speaking of McCain, declared: "[W]hen you have taken on a president of your party on taxes, torture, and campaign finance reform, your street cred as a maverick is pretty solid." As Media Matters noted at the time, Harwood did not explain how, or if, his assessment of McCain's "street cred as a maverick" was affected by McCain's February vote to extend Bush's 2003 tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, which McCain had long opposed, saying they exacerbated the budget deficit. Even the conservative editorial board of Harwood's own paper saw it as a politically expedient flip-flop. Harwood also ignored the fact that, after an initial rebuke, McCain has been silent on Bush's unprecedented issuance of "signing statements" declaring his authority to bypass laws passed by Congress -- including the anti-torture amendment McCain added to a defense authorization bill.

There is plenty more.

McCain has used this all to his advantage, of course. He has been reliably pro-war, supporting the President's folly more wholeheartedly than any other candidate, but has cherry picked the execution of that war as a hammer with which to beat the administration when the time was right. He has come out strongly against the use of torture by the administration, but refuses to challenge Bush's clear refusal to follow the laws opposing torture. He and Lieberman have feinted at talking tough, but have done more to undermine an honest assessment of our Iraqi fiasco, which has needlessly squandered treasure and lives and in no way advanced the security or stature of our nation.

Think Progress has more:

McCain appropriately criticizes the administration for painting an unrealistic picture of the situation in Iraq, but he conveniently neglects to mention his own rosy assessments as he was cheerleading the nation to war. While McCain hopes the public will see this as another example of his “straight talk,” here are some quotes that McCain wants you to forget:

Hardball, 3/12/03:

MATTHEWS: Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the post-war scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq or at least a large number of them will treat us as liberators?

MCCAIN: Absolutely. Absolutely.

MATTHEWS: And you think the Arab world will come to a grudging recognition that what we did was necessary? I mean by that the modern Arab leaders, the people that we have to deal with.

MCCAIN: Not only that, they’ll be relieved that he’s not in the neighborhood because he has invaded his neighbors on several occasions.

Hardball, 3/24/03:

MATTHEWS: Do you think it’s working? Do you think we’ll shake them — shake them to the roots so they will give up eventually and avoid a huge bloodbath of people?

MCCAIN: I don’t know how long they’ll hang out. It doesn’t take a large number of people to cause difficulties in house to house fighting we’ve just seen that in southern Iraq. But there’s no doubt in my mind that we will prevail and there’s no doubt in my mind, once these people are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators. These guys are the real bad guys and they’re telling everybody, we’re going to shoot you and so, of course, we’re not being welcomed cause they’ve got people that will kill them if they do. Once that’s done, I’m confident.

McCain represents the status quo, not some sort of independent outsider. That much should be clear. If you want to sustain the legacy of the past eight years, he's your man. If you are a Republican interested in change, I'd suggest Rudy or Huck, two true mavericks.

UPDATE: Oh, and by the way, the legend that McCain is a strong opponent of K Street money and a man willing to turn his back on the deep pocketed strong arms of the Republican machine? That's all a crock too.