Mission Accomplished?

True this.

Eep:

Bush: US Is Not Headed Into Recession

This should fit in well with Bush’s other confident statements-o’-fact:

* “[Rafael Palmeiro]’s the kind of person that’s going to stand up in front of the klieg lights and say he didn’t use steroids, and I believe him. Still do.”

* “Both [Rumsfeld and Cheney] are doing fantastic jobs.”

* “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

* “We do not torture.”

* “I don’t know whether we’re going to get [bin Laden] tomorrow or a month from now or a year from now. I don’t really know. But we’re going to get him.“

* On the Democrats retaking Congress in ‘06: “That’s not going to happen.”


Hold onto your wallets, friends. This economy’s headed straight down the dumper.

The Angry White Male!

The loathsome Michael Smerconish made a big deal of this editorial today on his radio show, and you'll hear much more about it in the coming weeks. Smerconish and the other dime store Limbaughs are treating it like some Talmudic revelation, rather than the infantile babbling of a blustery moron with an overwhelming fear of women, homosexuals and anyone with darker skin than Richie Cunningham.

A snippet of this eminent widsom:

The Angry White Man owns firearms, and he’s willing to pick up a gun to defend his home and his country. He is willing to lay down his life to defend the freedom and safety of others, and the thought of killing someone who needs killing really doesn’t bother him.

The Angry White Man is not a metrosexual, a homosexual or a victim. Nobody like him drowned in Hurricane Katrina — he got his people together and got the hell out, then went back in to rescue those too helpless and stupid to help themselves, often as a police officer, a National Guard soldier or a volunteer firefighter.....

He also votes, and the Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader. It’s not that she is a woman. It’s that she is who she is. It’s the liberal victim groups she panders to, the “poor me” attitude that she represents, her inability to give a straight answer to an honest question, his tax dollars that she wants to give to people who refuse to do anything for themselves.

There are many millions of Angry White Men. Four million Angry White Men are members of the National Rifle Association, and all of them will vote against Hillary Clinton, just as the great majority of them voted for George Bush.

The obvious problem with this simplistic characterization of the Angry White Male, it seems to me is that there is a very strong possibility a few things have happened to this flattened cartoon of a man:

His son/daughter/nephew/cousin/neighbor was killed or maimed in Iraq or Afghanistan
His son/daughter/nephew/cousin/neighbor came out
His son/daughter/nephew etc. married a 'new American'
He worked for Chrysler, GM, Delphi, or Countrywide, with the operative word being "worked"
That fancy three year ARM just adjusted, and if he was smart enough not to drown in Katrina, it sure feels like he's drowning now



I'm guessing that the Angry White Male aint what he used to be, and probably never was.

WFB. Prick.

As the inevitable hagiographies of William F. Buckley roll off the presses this morning, let's pause to take a look at the man in his most honest moment, an angry, bigoted bully and liar, who exemplified the very worst of the "I've got mine, fuck you" mentality that underlies much of modern conservatism. The debate with Gore Vidal in 1968 surrounded the Chicago Police Department's violent raid of the hippie protests outside the Democratic National Convention, arguably one of the most important moments in modern American political history. Vidal, an open homosexual, atheist and famous man of letters made the point that many in the park, and throughout Europe and the world believed that the US policy towards North Vietnam was imperialist, illegal, ill fated and wrong. Buckley, of course, equated Vidal with the Nazi sympathizers of WW2, and questioned his patriotism, wondering why he supported those that were shooting at US soldiers.

Things have really changed, haven't they? Why does Obama hate America and love the terrorists, anyway?

Vidal, somewhat rudely, it must be said, noted that the only crypto-fascist that he could think of was Buckley himself, and at that point, Buckley shows the true colors. Here is the man with the pedigree, the erudition and the vocabulary, son of an oil baron, reverting to what he was at his core, a lying bigoted ass. The man who was born "with the entire tea service in his mouth" calls Vidal a queer, and tells him he'll sock him in the mouth. It made for good TV, anyway.

Many on the left are praising Buckley for his intellectual honesty, notably the fact that while he embraced McCarthyite and bigoted positions, he did so openly and defended them heroically. That they see as a stark contrast to today's conservatives who opt for the dog whistle of buzzwords that signal to the fundamentalists, homophobes, racists, and crackpots that they share the same principals. Instead of Buckley's eloquent defense of his own brutal opinions, we get appeals to "the culture of life", "strict constructionist judges", and "intelligent design". I suppose there is some merit to that, and a nod to Buckley for calling out Bush on Iraq and the abandonment of any pretense of fiscal responsibility is in order, I guess.

But for me, the video tells the real tale of the man:




UPDATE: James Wolcott does a fantastic job of capturing the essence of the man.

and concludes:

To quote Ackerman again, "The decline of the right, and perhaps of America more generally, is summed up in the intellectual slouch from the heights of Buckley to the depths of Hewitt and Reynolds and Limbaugh and Coulter and Kristol and O’Reilly and Hannity and Bush," and John Cole, anticipating a bout of nausea coming on, cautions, "Watching the right-wing lunatics who destroyed conservatism wrapping themselves up in Buckley's cold, dead embrace over the next few weeks will be disgusting." Though it's already provided a dollop of comic relief.

Turning the Page

WASHINGTON -- A day after warning that potentially critical terrorism intelligence was being lost because Congress had not finished work on a controversial espionage law, the U.S. attorney general and the national intelligence director said Saturday that the government was receiving the information -- at least temporarily.

On Friday evening, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell had said in an unusually blunt letter to Congress that the nation "is now more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats" because lawmakers had not yet acted on the administration's proposal for the wiretapping law.

But within hours of sending that letter, administration officials told lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees that they had prevailed upon all of the telecommunications companies to continue cooperating with the government's requests for information while negotiations with Congress continue.

They keep playing the same hand, and of course, it's all a bad bluff. Bloodthirsty hordes of Muslofacists are massing at our porous borders, and if we don't give the simpleton in the White House the ability to read our emails, they'll come crashing over the newfangled electronic fence and wrap all of our women up in burkhas, and Sharia law will drift over the land like a dark seeping cloud....

Unless it doesn't, which is OK, too. Because to Bush and particularly to Cheney and his awful consigliere, David Addington, the real game isn't about protecting anyone, it is about control of the wheels of governance, about executive overreach, about a bald faced reversal of our constitutional history. They use fear and intimidation towards that end, question the patriotism of anyone who questions their authority (megads! where's Barak's lapel pin??), and when all else fails, just lie brazenly, as the report in the LA Times above points out. Mukasey and McConnell really define the word "tool", in all of its pejorative glory. Once again, Chuck Schumer is exposed as a fool who got played by Bush in the case of Mukasey. Schumer bought the administration's line that Mukasey represented a break with the pervasive cronyism that has been the defining hallmark of this administration, and he should be embarrassed for doing so.

The real question, it seems to me, is how we sanitize this mess going forward. A clue comes from the interview that William Leonard gave to Newsweek last month. Leonard was the poor soul who headed the National Archives and dared to challenge Dick Cheney's office regarding their flagrant disregard for the longstanding policies regarding classified information in the White House. You'll remember Cheney's absurd argument that because he could cast the tiebreaking vote in a locked Senate, he actually belonged to the legislative branch of government, and as such, actually exists in some netherworld between branches (the nebulous fourth branch of government that I don't remember studying, I guess). Leonard, a 34 year veteran of the ISOO, the branch of the National Archives that is responsible for handling the classified information from the executive branch thought that Cheney's argument was, well, insane, and challenged him on it. Cheney responded reasonably, and acceded to Leonard's request. Oh, no, he actually sicked Addington on Leonard, and attempted to have his job abolished. Leonard stepped down at the end of 2007. In the interview with Newsweek, though, he makes this point:

One of the things I've reflected on lately is that I truly believe we need to introduce a new balancing test. In the past, we've looked at it as, 'we have to balance national security against the public's right to know or whatever.' My balancing test would be national security versus national security: yes, disclosing information may cause damage, but you know what, withholding that information may even cause greater damage… And I don't think we sufficiently taken that into greater account.

The global struggle that we're engaged in today is more than anything else is an ideological struggle. And in my mind….that calls for greater transparency, not less transparency. We're in a situation where we're attempting to win over the hearts and minds of the world's population. And yet, we seem to have a habit—when we restrict information, we're often times find ourselves in a position where we're ceding the playing field to the other side. We allow ourselves to be almost reduced to a caricature by taking positions on certain issues, oh , we simply can't talk about that.

And I think that's where the Obama Presidency needs to begin. They need to state firmly that transparency, openness, engagement and diplomacy are critical in winning the struggle against the ideology of islamic fundamentalism. They need to restore us to our role as a beacon and and example, rather than a petulant bully. It's important, and it will work.

Digby thinks that we also need to prosecute all of the bad actors who dragged us into our current state by breaking the laws, and that may be true as well. She says:

The intelligence leadership has been caught in an enormous lie, making false claims about lost surveillance gathering for purely political reasons. This cannot possibly be an isolated incident. Of coure, we KNOW it's not an isolated incident. And indeed, many of the employees in the civil service who directed these lies and misstatements, not those at the top but the functionaries, will still be working in their same posts under a potential Democratic Administration. It needs to be extremely clear from the very beginning that they must be rooted out, expunged and turned over to the legal system for a determination. It should be a key part of the Democratic nominee's platform. Only then can we truly "turn the page," as our front-runner is likely to say.

In the interim, it has to be clearly stated: the Bush Administration overtly and admittedly lied about lost intelligence to bully the House into expanding executive power. This is a memorable episode.

St. John

Remember, as with Clinton/Lewinski, it isn't all about the sex, it's about the lying.

and the hypocrisy.

The gist of the Times Article was really that McCain can't get out of his own way when it comes to his sanctimonious position on lobbyists and special favors. He is surrounded by lobbyists in his campaign, takes corporate perks left and right, and then denies it. His friends are forced to intervene in a vain attempt to keep him from torpedoing his own reputation time and again. As Josh Marshall points out, he has an amazing propensity to deny and lie blatantly:

Let's step back for a moment from this particular 'misrecollection'. Watching McCain over the last couple days particularly and in general over many years, the guy really has a problem with making blanket and obviously false denials. In fact, the obviousness is often so extreme that it can't be a matter of strategy, at least not in a very thought out sense. In this case, he makes a blanket statement and there's a written record of McCain himself contradicting his statement. You'll notice also yesterday he grandly stated that he'd never spoken with the Times about the story. Then about 30 seconds later a reporter brought up the pretty obvious point that, well ... the article discusses McCain's talk with Bill Keller. And of course McCain quickly backtracks, since clearly what he had just said was completely ridiculous.

You'll also notice, though I'm not sure anyone has really made this point that clearly, that he also claimed that he and his office hadn't tried to prevent the Times from publishing the story. Well, pulling out all the stops and having all these conversations with the Times and hiring Bob Bennett to go toe to toe with them probably counts as trying to stop the story.

His self-destructive personality is more Clintonesque than Clinton's, in many ways. He's now on the record deliberately misrepresenting something that he admitted to in 2002, which is just the sort of stuff that gets magnified and played endlessly in an election cycle. He's boxed himself in with his own campaign finance law, and the loan that he took to resuscitate his campaign in November is being investigated by the FEC. He's going to be nearly out of money with seven months to go, and if I figure correctly, you are going to see some very unhinged behavior by this man by the time the summer rolls around.

Fear the Obama

Eventually, the mouth breathers on the right will coalesce around some coherent talking point in order to slam Obama, but for now, just watching them cast about for anything is good fun. He's black, of course, that's a problem, and clearly he's mixed race and inexperienced, a lefty, even a communist, and his wife is a Nazi. Glen Beck had a segment on "Obamanomics" last night, with Stephen Moore of the WSJ, in which they lamented the fact that because of his proposed policies for tax reapportionment, we are inexorably bound for the dark days of the 70s, and stagflation. Neither pundit thought it material to point out that Obama has not yet been elected, nor have his collectivist tax policies been imposed upon the Republic quite yet.

Leave it to Lisa Schiffrin of the National Review to mix the whole noxious stew together, however. Until we decide just what calamity Obama represents, this will have to do:

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)

I don't know how Barak Obama's parents met. But the Kincaid article referenced above makes a very convincing case that Obama's family, later, (mid 1970s) in Hawaii, had close relations with a known black Communist intellectual. And, according to what Obama wrote in his first autobiography, the man in question — Frank Marshall Davis — appears to have been Barack's own mentor, and even a father figure. Of course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it's an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer.

Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama's mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let's recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm's distance.

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

Indeed... (scratching my chin).

And the spectacularly unfunny comic Chris Muir, who clearly has significant sexual repression issues attempts to bring his sad idea of levity to the wingnut attack:



I know it doesn't make any sense.

Straight Talk Express....

You'll definitely want to cobble together a buck fifty for today's WSJ, just to get the double whammy on the editorial pages, Karl Rove on "Obama's New Vulnerability", and Judith Miller on "Journalism on Trial". Is there any other discredited Bushie that Rupert Murdoch can jam into that fish wrap? Maybe John Bolton on "The Democrats Lack of Diplomacy"? Abu Gonzales on "Hillary and the Separation of Powers"?

Rove's piece trots out this well crafted paragraph:

Mr. McCain, too, raised questions about Mr. Obama's fitness to be commander in chief. Mr. McCain pointed to Mr. Obama's unnecessary saber-rattling at an ally (Pakistan) while appeasing our adversaries (Iran and Syria). Mr. McCain also made it clear that reining in spending, which is a McCain strength and an Obama weakness, would be a key issue.

Karl obviously missed the memo on the runaway spending and record deficits that McCain, Bush and the Republican Party have foisted upon the country over the past eight years, but leave that aside. The absurd idea that Obama's quite rational statement regarding taking out targets within Pakistan if the Musharraf government refused to act against them was somehow naive, or "unnecessary sabre rattling", is best refuted by McCain and Rove's best buddy, Little Lord Fauntleroy himself

A look ahead..

There is a great deal of enthusiasm and optimism around the Democratic primaries, and rightly so. The choice of either Hillary or Obama as standard bearer for the progressive movement is a wonderful choice, as either candidate offers competence, intelligence and a belief in the positive nature of government in stark contrast to the idiot dauphin who will stalk the halls of the White House for the next 10 months.

However, not to throw a turd in the punchbowl, but we've got a long way to go before November, and the party that occupies the executive branch will not necessarily go quietly into that dark night. Rather, with W's approval rating bottoming out at a brand new low of 19%, the smart money will be placed on more cynicism and scaremongering, more stubborn obfuscation around their bald grab for broad executive powers, and more mouth breathing fury from the right as they see their world fall apart. To wit, Bill O'Reilly gives us a taste of the good things we can expect from him as the campaign heats up:

I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels -- that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever -- then that's legit. We'll track it down.

and the putative Republican nominee won't be left behind when it comes to placing "Islamofascism" into its appropriate historical perspective:

Arizona Sen. John McCain played it cautiously Monday night, barely mentioning his Democratic rivals for the presidency, hailing past and present Republican presidents and underscoring that his focus as president would be waging war against "radical Islamic extremism."

Speaking to about 500 party faithful at the Outagamie County Lincoln Day Dinner, McCain said the war in Iraq was part of the fight against Islamic extremism, "the greatest evil, probably, that this nation has ever faced."

As my six year old says, "Seriously?"

Blue Texan at Firedoglake runs it down:

Nazi Germany took over one continent and a good chunk of another, executed 12,000,000 men, women, and children in the name of racial purity, and started a war that killed 70,000,000 people worldwide. The Japanese slaughtered 35,000,000 Chinese, including 300,000 mostly for the hell of it at Nanking. And of course there's Stalin, who killed 20,000,000 of his own people and Mao, who probably wiped out 2-3 million for being disloyal.

Someone who ranks Osama and the war in Iraq above World War II and Hitler and Stalin and Mao just should not be taken seriously about anything. It should be automatic grounds for a complete loss of all credibility, especially on national security issues. Period. It's ridiculous.

KO

Take nine minutes of your life and listen to Keith Olbermann.

Darlin' Kate

Nancy and the Blue Dogs

The awful FISA bill, passed yesterday by the Senate, which grants the president broad powers to spy on US citizens, and provides retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that cooperated with the administration to break the law is now being supported by a group of Blue Dog Democrats in the house, who have sent Speaker Pelosi a letter asking her to introduce the same version of the Senate bill so that W can snoop through your emails and phone calls in gross violation of the Fourth Amendment in order to track down the IMs and funny emails you've been sending to Osama in his cave in Tora Bora.

At almost the same moment, Al Wynn (D), an eight term Congressman from Prince George County, a reliable Bush supporter, emblematic of the acquiescent Democrats in Congress over the past eight years, was soundly throttled by a progressive upstart, Donna Edwards, who tacked to the traditional Democratic (even liberal) position in this strongly Democratic district:

Wynn, who had served in the 4th District for eight terms, had been targeted by an aggressive advertisement campaign, funded in part with hundreds of thousands of dollars from national labor groups and liberal organizations. The effort apparently convinced voters that Wynn had fallen out of step with his overwhelmingly Democratic district during his 15 years in Congress.

What the beltway insiders do not realize is that the winds have shifted enormously. The WSJ predictably lauded the FISA bill, noting that the Republican party can use Obama's vote against the bill against him in the fall. They believe that Obama has made a political misstep by giving this discredited, loathed and loathsome administration the right to tear the Constitution to shreds. That's not the zeitgeist that seems to be in play in Prince George's county, and Nancy Pelosi ought to realize that.

In a bold example of leadership and resolve, Hillary decided to skip the vote.

Happy Warrantless Wiretapping Day

Glen Greenwald runs down the whole sorry story of the Dems caving to the discredited and reviled Bush administration on warrantless wiretapping of US citizens and retroactive immunity for the administration and the telecom companies that abetted this illegal activity.

It is a shameful thing.

It's worth taking a step back and recalling that all of this is the result of the December, 2005 story by the New York Times which first reported that the Bush administration was illegally spying on Americans for many years without warrants of any kind. All sorts of "controversy" erupted from that story. Democrats everywhere expressed dramatic, unbridled outrage, vowing that this would not stand. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for exposing this serious lawbreaking. All sorts of Committees were formed, papers written, speeches given, conferences convened, and editorials published to denounce this extreme abuse of presidential power. This was illegality and corruption at the highest level of government, on the grandest scale, and of the most transparent strain.

What was the outcome of all of that sturm und drang? What were the consequences for the President for having broken the law so deliberately and transparently? Absolutely nothing. To the contrary, the Senate is about to enact a bill which has two simple purposes: (1) to render retroactively legal the President's illegal spying program by legalizing its crux: warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and (2) to stifle forever the sole remaining avenue for finding out what the Government did and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its legality: namely, the lawsuits brought against the co-conspiring telecoms. In other words, the only steps taken by our political class upon exposure by the NYT of this profound lawbreaking is to endorse it all and then suppress any and all efforts to investigate it and subject it to the rule of law.

To be sure, achieving this took some time. When Bill Frist was running the Senate and Pat Roberts was in charge of the Intelligence Committee, Bush and Cheney couldn't get this done (the same FISA and amnesty bill that the Senate will pass today stalled in the 2006 Senate). They had to wait until the Senate belonged (nominally) to Harry Reid and, more importantly, Jay Rockefeller was installed as Committee Chairman, and then -- and only then -- were they able to push the Senate to bequeath to them and their lawbreaking allies full-scale protection from investigation and immunity from the consequences of their lawbreaking.

That's really the most extraordinary aspect of all of this, if one really thinks about it -- it isn't merely that the Democratic Senate failed to investigate or bring about accountability for the clearest and more brazen acts of lawbreaking in the Bush administration, although that is true. Far beyond that, once in power, they are eagerly and aggressively taking affirmative steps -- extraordinary steps -- to protect Bush officials. While still knowing virtually nothing about what they did, they are acting to legalize Bush's illegal spying programs and put an end to all pending investigations and efforts to uncover what happened.

How far we've come -- really: disgracefully tumbled -- from the days of the Church Committee, which aggressively uncovered surveillance abuses and then drafted legislation to outlaw them and prevent them from ever occurring again. It is, of course, precisely those post-Watergate laws which the Bush administration and their telecom conspirators purposely violated, and for which they are about to receive permanent, lawless protection.

As he points out, it isn't really Republican vs. Democrat any more. It's those who are inside of the beltway and find this brazen activity understandable and tolerable, and those that are on the outside looking in at what passes for our nation's business in Washington and see something they neither recognize or understand.

The Walk Away President

From W's bizarre interview with Chris Wallace at faux news comes this little gem:

WALLACE: So why do you think he's (Obama) gotten this far if people don't know what he stands for?

BUSH: You're the pundit. I'm just a simple president.

WALLACE: And you've done this a little bit, let's project ahead to November, the Republican nominee whoever it ends up being is going to have to carry along and deal with a faltering economy.

BUSH: How do you know that?

WALLACE: Well it is as of this moment.

BUSH: You said November.

WALLACE: All right, you can see that we will -- it won't, but at this point, he would be weighed down by a faltering economy, an unpopular war, at least according to the polls and forgive me running (INAUDIBLE) unpopular president. How does he overcome all of that and...

BUSH: Because there's two big issues. One is, who's going to keep your taxes low? Most Americans feel overtaxed and I promise you the Democrat party is going to field a candidate who says I'm going to raise your tax.

If they're going to say, oh, we're only going to tax the rich people, but most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes and the middle class gets stuck.

We've had -- we've been through this drill before. We're only going to tax the rich and all you have to do is look at the history of that kind of language and see who gets stuck with the bill.

Does anyone know what the hell he's talking about? He seems to be saying that we shouldn't raise taxes on the rich because they'll avoid paying them and the burden will fall to the middle class anyway. So does that mean that we should just go ahead and tax the middle and lower classes and get it over with? Or, should we just forget about taxes altogether, because it's only play money, after all? This guy has been ranting and raging about making his tax cuts permanent because the economy will be destroyed if taxes are increased and then he throws this bon mot in there?

The Journal had an article about the "walk-away" people currently plaguing the mortgage market in these dark days. They are the folks who have mortgages that are economically upside down, a 400K mortgage on a house now worth 350, who refuse to honor the contract and walk away. The functional equivalent is Bush, who drops the budget on his desk, showing a $400b deficit, and shirks off into the private sector, leaving the house trashed, the military bogged down for years, and the bank account empty. He's the Walk-Away President, acting like a high school senior in his last semester, free of any cares, going through the motions. Wallace asks him about the next election and he spits out one non-sequitur after another, not really caring, because school is almost out.

Mourning in America

I think of all the things that this rotten administration has done to us over the past eight years, the one that bothers me the most is the blatant fearmongering that they have undertaken in order to press their own authoritarian agenda. It almost seems like tinfoil-hat paranoia to state that our President and his administration have cynically exaggerated threats from shadowy terrorist groups in order to push their laughable theory of the unitary executive, but as Glen Greenwald points out, it is undeniably true:

Back in August, when the Bush administration wanted to pressure Congress into passing "The Protect America Act" -- which vested in the President vast, new warrantless eavesdropping powers to spy on Americans -- they sent out Mike McConnell days before the August recess to tell everyone in Congress that they better pass the bill before they leave or The Terrorists would kill us all and the blood would be on the hands of Congress for failing to give the President what he wanted

He goes on to use Mike McConnell's quotes to illustrate that at the critical moment the administration needed to get Congressional approval for broad wiretapping and eavesdropping powers, they trumped up an immediate threat of a terrorist attack on our homeland. And..

After scaring everyone with the latest Al-Qaeda-is-Coming warnings, the CIA also admitted for the first time that it waterboarded detainees in its custody, but what's a little water up the nose -- or a little presidential omnipotence -- when Al Qaeda is coming to get us in our Homeland?

I mean it really is hard to pick and choose which of the outrages of the past two terms have been the most egregious, but to me, the idea that our own government would use these threats cynically and politically is beyond belief. I suppose if your faith in the principles of the Constitution, in the bedrock of representative democracy and the balance of powers is so weak that you literally feel that it is a moral imperative to lie to the republic in order to "protect" them, then you can see how these cretins got to this point.

That's why this throwaway line from Dan Henninger's editorial in today's WSJ jumped out at me. In discussing why the Republican's should eventually come to their senses and support McCain, he says:

Conservatives, for whom any glass is always half full, have sold themselves short.

This line of thinking goes back to the Reagan era, of course, to one speech, the "morning in America" speech, which supposedly pointed to a new time in America, a beacon of hope leading us out of the dark Carter years. Reagan was the eternal optimist, full of faith in the markets and the industry of the individual. Small government movement Conservatism writ large. It was a fetid crock of shit, we all know, and that band of criminals resorted to the type of double-dealing that gave rise to good American supporters like Osama bin Laden. But that's a story for another day. What strikes me is that Henninger looks at his party today and still feels that that sort of optimism remains.

The Republican Right that I see represents the most fearful, backward-looking xenophobic, homophobic group of sissies that I can imagine. They long for authoritarian tough-guys, like Rudy and W, faux cowboys and an actor like Fredrick of Hollywood. They lump Arabs and Persians, Sunnis and Shia, illegal immigrants from Mexico and Islamic Americans into a big pot and call them Islamofacsists. They're happy to tear up the Constitution and the rule of law in exchange for a strong executive that will save them from the outside world, from an ascendant China and India, from the shoe bomber next door, who always looked a little Islamic after all......Do optimists build fences around a country to keep people out? Do optimists put up signs that demand that their patrons speak fluent English? Do optimists advocate the use of torture on prisoners that have been denied the basic prerogative right of habeas corpus? Fear is a powerful tool, no doubt.

BTW, Mitt's kids got sick of him blowing through their inheritance and got him out of the race, I hear.

UPDATE: If you don't think that this administration is rising to new heights (sinking to new lows?) of audacity in asserting their own agenda above the rule of law or the constitutional principles that underly our republic, wrap your head around this circuitous logic.

game, set and match....

What Digby Sez...

Digby points out that while the current optimism about the end of Bush's days and the creation of a new political reality is one thing, the sad fact is that it will take a great deal of time and hard work to roll back the damage that has been done to our country, from the obvious standpoint of our international standing, but also with regard to the corrosive effects of our collective abandonment of some of the principles of our foundation as a country and as an ideal.

And we should be optimistic, for the Democratic nominee for President will either be a woman or a black American, and there is a very likely chance that he or she will be our next President. Consider that. If we could get Barney Frank onto the ticket as VP, we'd have the collective joy of watching Rush, Glen Beck and Hugh Hewitt seize up like old Buicks.

But, as Digby points out, the sad spectacle of Michael Mukasey testifying before Congress this week, sacrificing his life's work, his good name, and his soul to the defense of our country's right to torture is emblematic of the pervasive rot that Bush and Cheney have wrought.

Democrats may very well win the election. And they may have a large working majority. Hopefully they will get some good things done for the country. But if they do not run on and then act on these constitutional abuses, they will be used again the next time a Republican is in office (if not sooner) and we will have to fight this battle all over again, having lost a tremendous amount of territory in the meantime. What we will have lost in terms of morality and decency is uncountable.

Chuck Schumer went to bat for this guy. Incredibly, he took the administration at their word that Mukasey was impartial, not a bought man. Incredibly, against all the available evidence, the Senate consented to Mukasey's appointment with the understanding that Bush had nominated a fiercely independent Attorney General, and not another in a long string of stooges and lackeys who had sold their souls in order to get the appointment. And this is what he gets for his acquiescence. As a former colleague of Mukasey observes:

Watching Mukasey was a painful experience. . . .The Senate Judiciary Committee put Michael Mukasey to the test yesterday. And he left the hearing room as an embarrassment to those who have known and worked with him over the last twenty years, and who mistakenly touted his independence and commitment to do the right thing, come what may.

Justifying torture. These are words that were unthinkable for this nation not too long ago. It is a powerful reminder of how far we as a nation have sunk, and a reminder of how difficult it will be to walk back into the light.