Tommy Gun

I SEE ALL THE INNOCENTS, THE HUMAN SACRIFICE
AND IF DEATH COMES SO CHEAP
THEN THE SAME GOES FOR LIFE!

Scottie comes clean.

I always thought that Scottie looked a little peaked at the daily presser, particularly as time went on. He had a brother, Mark, who was head of the FDA, and also headed Medicaid, and was generally considered a true wonk in DC. As such, Scottie was a bit of the younger idiot, who was forced to justify the obvious bullshit that came out of the administration on a daily basis, and truth be told, he looked pained doing it. My most vivid memories of McClellan were of a pasty white and sweaty man, pretending to be in control, but actually quite unsure of himself, a bit of a chickenshit, truth be told.

Certainly, in contrast to Ari Fleischer, he looked like he was going through the motions, particularly as the lies became so transparent that the proud 28% became the only folks left even pretending to follow the storyline. Fleischer, who possesses no conscience, had no such qualms.

Tony Snow, who followed Scottie, was a Fox anchor, and therefore was and is bereft of any soul, so he pulled the gig off just fine.

So it shouldn't be too surprising that Scottie is out with a breathless tell all, in which he lets us know that

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

The chickens continue to come home to roost, but on this Memorial Day weekend, it should not be forgotten that the blood of 4000 of the best that we could ever offer is on these ghouls' hands, and no confessional could wipe it clean.

little teeny president.....

Remember that big speech that W gave in the Knesset oh so many days ago? You know, the one warning countries against negotiations with terrorist supporting nations, equating diplomacy with appeasement?

Ummmm. Somebody wasn't listening:

May 21 (Bloomberg) -- Israel and Syria have had indirect
talks for more than a year that are being mediated by Turkey and
are aimed at reaching a peace agreement, their governments said.

See. Nobody cares.

William the Bloody, Crayon in hand.

Oh, and by the way, Bill Kristol continues to be an idiot, and the NYT continues to embarrass themselves by publishing him.

Given Kristol’s recent history of obvious factual errors in his printed columns, did it not occur to the Times to consider fact-checking his pieces before they go to print? Kristol has already had to run two corrections, and this should prompt a third. How many more chances does this guy get?

Mad Laughs from Huckleberry

Isn't this hilarious? Mike Huckabee making a joke to an NRA rally about Barack Obama dodging someone "aiming a gun at him".


Let's make sure the Republicans add this insane bible humping lunatic to the ticket. That way our kids can learn that Jesus rode on a dinosaur, the earth is flat, and that providing desperately poor countries with medicines to prevent STDs is immoral.

You want funny, Huck? How about your photo as First Family of Arkansas?

MoDo and the Feminization of the Left

Digby has written on this topic many times, but you won't get a much starker example of the Republican's strategy of feminizing the Democrats as this:

Obama and Edwards make an attractive picture -- Ultra Brite coverboys of youth and glamour united against old men (and women) who worship the status quo. Fraternal twins of yin and yang, one is the healer, the other a fighter. Obama -- the man who makes Chris Matthews feel a thrill up his leg -- wants to "do the Lord's work," lately pictured in front of a Christian cross illuminated with vanity lights on a flier aimed at Kentucky voters, while Edwards wants to roll out the catapults and nuke the Coliseum.

And on and on. The gold standard for this crude attack on the manliness of Republicans and the lack thereof on the Democratic side is of course Maureen Dowd, who continues to inexplicably foul the pages of the Paper of Record each week with her meaningless ramblings on the zeitgeist of politics, I suppose. It was MoDo who referred to Obama as an "anorexic starlet" and wrote a cheap shot piece on Obama that Media Matters took apart here.

Her approach to politics is pathological, snide, gossipy, completely unsupported by facts, and almost mad in its obsession. Her obsessions have drifted from Clinton to Gore, to Clinton and now onto Obama, and I suppose all we can do is sit by and watch. Whether she is focusing on Bill's sex life, Gore's boringness, or Hil's conjugal state, her overriding theme is that the party of the right is virile and strong and the party of the left is effeminate, sissified and downright gay. The Hillary corollary, of course, is that she is butch, bitchy and obsessed, a sci-fi monster who will stop at nothing to destroy Obama and the party. Really? That's what this is all about?

Far be it from me that the Republicans have moved towards the nomination of a 72 year old with questionable health, a Vesuvian temper, a self-confessed ignorance of economics, and little or no knowledge of the most pressing foreign policy issues of the moment. Leave aside the fact that his flip flops, panders, and bald political lies have jumped into high gear, and count that as the unavoidable collateral damage of an election year. I'd still venture to say that there is a column in there for MoDo, but I'm just not sure she'll get around to writing it.

KO

KO absolutely lays out W in his special comment from last night.

Talk about speaking truth to power.

Red State Upstate

This is beautiful....

kate nash goodness.

Big Day at the White House

Dana Milbank simply needs to transcribe the ridiculousness that passes for a day in the life of the Idiot Prince, now that senior year is almost out..

7:58 a.m.: By e-mail, the White House Communications Office sends out its "Morning Update." It lists two events on Bush's schedule for the entire day: a "Social Dinner in Honor of Cinco de Mayo" and, an hour later, post-dinner entertainment. To react to the main news of the day -- thousands of deaths from the cyclone in Burma -- Bush sends his wife out to make a statement. She criticizes the Burmese government for its failure "to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm's path" and "to meet its people's basic needs." Reporters, too tactful to draw parallels to New Orleans, quiz her instead about daughter Jenna's wedding, and the names of future grandchildren. "George and Georgia, Georgina, Georgette," the first lady says.

The tragedy of this is that the mess that he leaves behind is real and horrible, and it wasn't pleasant and fresh and fantastic in Baghdad yesterday. While the Dauphin counts the minutes until school is out and Senior Week begins, the best we have are dying in the sands of Mesopotamia. And that, he must wear on whatever conscience he has until he shuffles from this earth.

Rover Gets Confused....

Jon Chait at the New Republic makes a good catch in parsing the silly editorial that Karl Rove wrote for the WSJ yesterday. Aside from the fact that Rove was nowhere identified as working directly for the McCain campaign (which he is), the editorial included this passage:

Another McCain story, somewhat better known, is about the Vietnamese practice of torturing him by tying his head between his ankles with his arms behind him, and then leaving him for hours. The torture so badly busted up his shoulders that to this day Mr. McCain can't raise his arms over his head.

Now to be fair, because Rove himself did not vote for the Military Commissions Act, he's technically not being hypocritical in defining the use of stress positions on John McCain as "torture". But....McCain voted for the Act, which gives our military the right to use just these tactics, and says that this is not torture. He'd better watch that on the campaign trail.

The sad truth is that these guys have wrapped themselves in circles that they can't get out of in terms of the rules that they've written defending their illegal, barbarous and un-American behavior. The only logic that they follow is that they've decided that they can do whatever the fuck they'd like to, and that anyone who disagrees with them is a terrorist-loving treasonous liberal. No Constitution, no Geneva Conventions, and certainly no legacy of American high minded ideals could persuade them to consider that what they claimed as theirs was not. The only thing that could ever stop them was the clock running out.