Let McCain be McCain?

Peggy Noonan, who has been certifiably senile for years now, attempts to capture the lighthearted wit of John McCain in her bizarre commentary this weekend in the WSJ. Her column, entitled "Let McCain Be McCain", is ostensibly organized around the idea that certain forces in the McCain campaign are keeping him too reigned in, holding him back, and in doing so, hurting McCain's chances because the real John doesn't come out. Peggy wants us to understand that McCain's real personality is funny, mischievous, witty and lovable. As an example of the real McCain, she tells us

The most interesting thing about Mr. McCain has always been the delight he takes in a certain unblinkered candor. There is also the antic part of his nature, his natural wit, his tropism toward comedy. All this was captured wonderfully by Mark Leibovich last February in the New York Times. Mr. McCain had taken the lead in the primaries and had gone from being "one of the most disruptive forces in his party" to someone playing it safe. In an airplane interview he said things like, "There is a process in place that will formalize the methodology." Then he couldn't help it, he became McCain:

"[He] volunteered that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman who was seated nearby and rolling her eyes, 'has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands' and that she earned it by 'dealing drugs.' Previously, Mr. McCain had identified Ms. Buchanan as 'Pat Buchanan's illegitimate daughter,' 'bipolar,' 'a drunk,' 'someone with a lot of boyfriends,' and 'just out of Betty Ford.'"

Wow. I may be a bit old fashioned, but lovable and witty don't seem to describe that little bit of charm. That seems to veer a bit towards the insanely nasty, disjointed and vicious ramblings of an addled old man. Sounds like old Johnny may be a bit off his meds, actually. McCain's reputation as a cranky and hot tempered senior citizen has been well documented, and I'm sure that the McCain campaign knows a bit better than Peggy why they need to keep gramps under wraps.

An angry Rove....

One of the things that really appeals to me about Obama and to a lot of people, I'd guess, is his quiet confidence in the face of the Republican smear machine. Unlike Kerry, who's brow would wrinkle up, and who seemed almost apologetic in the face of the attacks, Obama seems supremely confident in his ability to deflect the mud that is and will continue to be inevitably slung his way. Obama's clear and concise support of the Boumediene vs. Bush decision was based upon his background as a constitutional lawyer and it clearly showed that he will not be swayed by the fearmongers on the right who equate anything short of outright torture of brown skinned foreigners with complete capitulation to the terra-rists. He simply pointed out that the decision is well reasoned and backed by precedent, and never shied from calling out the current administration's excesses in the face of the "Scariest Threat Evah". Kerry, who correctly noted that the logical and most effective response to the threat of Islamic extremism domestically was to beef up our law enforcement capabilities, backpedaled furiously when Rove and the right wing accused him of being a French speaking windsurfing traitor.

You can tell that Obama's confidence really irks Karl Rove, and has taken him way off his game and way off his message. Yesterday, he let this one slip:

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy," Rove said... "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

That's real seething hatred, and it shows that Rove is off his game. The problem with it is that Rove and the GOP have been working tirelessly to paint Obama as an oriental, an outsider, an exotic, and of course, a Muslim. They want their base, and whatever portion of the center that may still be listening to them to fear his "otherness", which of course is dog whistle for their thinly veiled racism. Subtle it aint. But the Rovester is off the reservation on this comment, he's lost the script, because as Greg Sargent points out, that description only fits one man:

It should also be noted, of course, that Rove took a man who actually is a country club denizen who makes "snide comments" about others -- that would be George W. Bush -- and turned him into a regular Joe. Meanwhile, the guy who would struggle for admittance to some of these exclusive enclaves -- Obama -- is now "the guy at the country club." Rovian up-is-downism at its finest.

These guys are so turned around right now that they can't even follow their own playbook. Maybe the GOP will get it together before November, and it will be an ugly summer if they do, but for now, if the Rover is that far out of synch with his own GPS, things and looking good for Old John.

John Boton's Idea of Intelligent Discourse

Of all the knuckle-draggers, vacuous ideologues, and downright evil characters who have soiled our nation's discourse and fouled the government of this country over the past eight years, perhaps none rises to the level of vileness as John Bolton, Bush's recess appointment to the United Nations, and the former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. His resume is typical of the closeted pantywaists that inhabit the Federalist Society and the American Enterprise Institute. He was intimately involved in the lies regarding Niger's production of yellowcake uranium, and throughout his disgraceful career, spun intelligence to fit his agenda, and hid intelligence from Condi Rice and Colin Powell when the facts proved inconvenient.

He reputation as blunt and unforgiving is, as any schoolyard bully shows, probably best explained by his own insecurities and lack of intelligence. In a disgraceful interview with the almost subhuman John Gibson on Fox yesterday, Bolton solidifies his bona fides as a complete cretin by barfing out the following:

GIBSON: The Obama team is going back to some of the old complaints about the war and the war on terror…that the left has been articulating for a long time now, and not really coming up with anything new.

BOLTON: Yeah I think honestly that’s an optimistic view of it, that it will simply be a replay of the Clinton administration. It will simply have more embassy bombings, more bombings of our warships like the Cole, more World Trade Center attacks. That would be the best outcome from that perspective.

Imagine.

Leave aside the fact that 9/11 occurred on Bush's watch. This man, who furiously pleasures himself to the notion of bombing 75 million Iranians into oblivion, who looks at the horror of the needless destruction throughout the cradle of civilization and smiles, and who wears his bloodthirsty lust as a badge of honor was deemed by the Idiot Dauphin an appropriate appointment as Ambassador to the United Nations. Cheney and Bush's utter contempt for this country was never manifested so clearly as in his appointment.

The Vulgarity of the Neocons

TBogg lays into the vile Michael Gerson, who finds Al Franken, and not the handiwork he helped to create in Mesopotamia "vulgar". It may be heavy handed to lay the responsibility for the needless death and dismemberment of thousands of young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis at the door of a small group of people who ginned up this ridiculous war, but as McClatchy points out today, the decision to abrogate our nations laws and ignore two hundred years of precedent with regard to the treatment of detainees was essentially hatched and executed by five lawyers:

The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

And so it went with the run up to Iraq. PNAC was a small group, made up of a handful of neocons like Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Gerson and William Kristol, a group convinced of their rightness who refuse to this day to admit that the decision to launch this disastrous war was anything but correct. Their astounding arrogance and hubris knows absolutely no bounds, and their academic enablers, the Kagan family, continue to defend them and their work in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Like the five lawyers who squandered our good name and forever sullied the principles upon which our international reputation was built, these men should be considered War Criminals. They should be shunned by men of good will, left alone to be tortured by the screams of the Iraqi children who they are directly responsible for butchering. Instead, they sit comfortably in leather chairs on Fox News, smugly asserting their omniscience. Until we decide that they should be shunned and ignored, they will remain supremely confident in their rightness, and urge us on to greater folly in Iran.

To assume that these ghouls would have the conscience to admit their own errors is the highest folly indeed.

Republican Recidivism

What Digby says.

Read the whole post. It will make you a better informed person.

The Idiot Prince

In (Former Commander of the US Forces in Iraq) General Ricardo Sanchez' new autobiography, he recounts a profoundly disturbing and confused "pep talk" that Bush gave the Joint Chiefs in a teleconference call. Tom Tomorrow recounts:

According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly,” the general reports him saying. “There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” (And indeed, by the end of April, parts of Fallujah would be in ruins, as, by August, would expanses of the oldest parts of the holy Shiite city of Najaf. Sadr himself would, however, escape to fight another day; and, in order to declare Powell’s “total victory,” the U.S. military would have to return to Fallujah that November, after the U.S. presidential election, and reduce three-quarters of it to virtual rubble.) Bush then turned to the subject of al-Sadr: “At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone,” he insisted to his top advisors. “At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out.”

Not long after that, the President “launched” what an evidently bewildered Sanchez politely describes as “a kind of confused pep talk regarding both Fallujah and our upcoming southern campaign [against the Mahdi Army]”…

“Kick ass!” [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell’s tough talk. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

“There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

Stay strong. Stay the course. Kill them.

It reminded me of this cartoon



It's just sad.

The Unbearable Seriousness of Doug Feith

Peggy Noonan, village idiot of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, reads Scott McClellan's astonishing book on the lies of Rove and Libby and the mendacity of the Bush administration in selling this disastrous war and concludes:

What's needed now? More memoirs, more data, more information, more testimony. More serious books, like Doug Feith's. More "this is what I saw" and "this is what is true." Feed history.

That would be Doug Feith, famously referred to as the "stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet" by Tommy Franks, one of the architects of this war, who oversaw the Office of Special Plans, a shadow intelligence organization which took as its mandate the very straightforward goal of linking terrorist organizations to state sponsors, and which came to the none too startling conclusion that Iraq was a key sponsor of Al Queda, a conclusion that was unfortunately completely unsupported by any facts. Here he is feebly defending the main tenets and conclusions in his very "serious" book: