Won't see another one....

The Future of the GOP

I had always wondered how someone as clearly insane as Jim Bunning could be returned to the Senate time and again. His grasp of the issues is non-existent, and along with Inhofe, is arguably the most unhinged member of either house.

Well, here's your answer...behold, his constituents. Tea Partiers to the core.

Little bit o' Kate....

The Case for Sarah Palin

A few thoughts on the USPST

A few quick items on the revision of the breast cancer screening guidelines issued this week....

Obama had nothing to do with it. The USPST is a non-partisan panel made up of primary care physicians. Their recommendations come from work that they've been compiling over a two year period. In fact, the administration explicitly disagreed with their findings.

This has nothing to do with the healthcare reform bill. In a quick visit to wingnuttia on my AM dial, it's pretty clear that Rush, et al are working feverishly to instruct their listeners that this is the first salvo from the death panels and that Obama's true nature as a socialist or something has been exposed.

The findings are based upon science. Basically, the panel recommends that women make their own decisions when it comes to this important issue. It also simply states that statistically the amount of prevention may not be meaningful. That is not to say that women's lives have not been saved by early detection or that it is not a good idea to have a mamo at the age of 40. Rather, women should continue to have mamos at whatever age they would like, knowing full well that if they decide that it may not be necessary, the science says that they are not being irresponsible.

Insurance companies are not in any way bound by this decision. Further, with the American Cancer Society, several high profile cancer hospitals, and the administration in vocal opposition, it would be hard to imagine that insurance companies will change their existing coverages. Further still, in a world with a competitive healthcare system, as envisioned by the Reid legislation, insurers would be incented to provide the most attractive options in this regard, wouldn't they?

My gut tells me that part of the reaction comes from the fact that over the past 8 years, we have been led by an administration that has cynically and amazingly ignored and distorted scientific fact. We endured a President who denied that global warming exists. We witnessed a VP candidate who is convinced that Jesus rode on a dinosaur, and we saw a Senate Majority Leader diagnose a woman in a vegetative state over the TV. It is a long way out of the hole that we've been dug into.

Lastly, do a reverse Glen Beck on the issue and look at it from the conspiratorial point of view. If the dusky hewed Kenyan socialist was intent on stripping us of our healthcare options, could he have picked a worse time to announce this? Wouldn't it have made more sense to change the coverage options after the bill was passed?

There was a time.....

RuffTuffCreamPuffs

The incoherence of the Right appears pretty consistently these days, but maybe no more starkly than in the pants pissing that is going on concerning the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The immediate and reflexive response to the Administration's decision to try KSM in our legal system proves conclusively that not only do these small minded bigots have no sense of historical perspective or understanding of our system of government, but their blinding hatred of Obama overtakes any semblance of consistency in their arguments. As Glenn Greenwald points out

the Right's reaction to yesterday's announcement -- we're too afraid to allow trials and due process in our country -- is the textbook definition of "surrendering to terrorists." It's the same fear they've been spewing for years. As always, the Right's tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers. Indeed, it's hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.

People in capitals all over the world have hosted trials of high-level terrorist suspects using their normal justice system. They didn't allow fear to drive them to build island-prisons or create special commissions to depart from their rules of justice. Spain held an open trial in Madrid for the individuals accused of that country's 2004 train bombings. The British put those accused of perpetrating the London subway bombings on trial right in their normal courthouse in London. Indonesia gave public trials using standard court procedures to the individuals who bombed a nightclub in Bali. India used a Mumbai courtroom to try the sole surviving terrorist who participated in the 2008 massacre of hundreds of residents. In Argentina, the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for his crimes.

It's only America's Right that is too scared of the Terrorists -- or which exploits the fears of their followers -- to insist that no regular trials can be held and that "the safety and security of the American people" mean that we cannot even have them in our country to give them trials. As usual, it's the weakest and most frightened among us who rely on the most flamboyant, theatrical displays of "strength" and "courage" to hide what they really are. Then again, this is the same political movement whose "leaders" -- people like John Cornyn and Pat Roberts -- cowardly insisted that we must ignore the Constitution in order to stay alive: the exact antithesis of the core value on which the nation was founded. Given that, it's hardly surprising that they exude a level of fear of Terrorists that is unmatched virtually anywhere in the world. It is, however, noteworthy that the position they advocate -- it's too scary to have normal trials in our country of Terrorists -- is as pure a surrender to the Terrorists as it gets.

And here is rightwing nutbag and coward John Shadegg (R, AZ)



The various ridiculous arguments against a trial by jury for KSM in New York are as disingenuous as they are puerile. They treat these terrorists like they have Super Powers worthy of a Marvel Comic, for chrissakes. As Greenwald says, it is a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation, and it runs through their worldview. Whether it is Beck tearfully wailing that Obama and his dusky hewed African minions are Nazis, or whether it is Lou Dobbs wailing about the brown hordes spilling over the borders, these faux tough guys appeal to their pathetic follower's fears of losing control of their white, male ascendancy. Like the Irish Question, time and generational change will roll over them like a tide rising slowly, but before this country becomes a place where a culturally diverse majority is abundantly clear, their death cries will be increasingly shrill and violent.

Joining the xenophobes and Beck's legions, of course, are the bloodthirsty ghouls of the last administration, who have a separate fear...that their misdeeds and illegal goings-on will be exposed in a court of law. As Digby says:

But the possibility is what's got the rufftuffcreampuffs on the right quaking in their booties, that American law will actually shine a light on the murderous, torturing, incompetent, insanely frightened, paranoid, corrupt, and completely out of control Bush/Cheney regime.

It is going to be quite an ugly fight, once these trials start.

Dead...

Behold the Teabaggers

As John Stewart said a while back about the teabaggers, they seem to be confusing tyranny with losing. From Crooks and Liars, a quick ten point reminder for the confused opposition:

President Obama Cut Your Taxes
The Stimulus is Working
First Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt...
...Then George W. Bush Doubled It Again
Republican States Have the Worst Health Care
Medicare is a Government Program
Barack Obama is Not a Muslim
Barack Obama was Born in the United States
70,000 Does Not Equal 2,000,000
The Economy Almost Always Does Better Under Democrats

Post 9/11

With no offense to anyone, this really sums up my thoughts on the eighth anniversary.

Shortly after (or maybe during) that day, our president at the time, a little fuckhead no one liked, handed over the reins to the most psychotic elements of his administration. In the vast national wave of jingoism, paranoia, dread, and fear that followed, he and his friends led us into an unrelated war they'd been planning beforehand, allowed the CIA to wiretap and torture anyone they liked (and encouraged the CIA to wiretap and torture even more than they were comfortable with!), and regularly insisted that our memory of that day should not be sullied with critical thinking or expressions of anything other than still-palpable fear.

and, this:

On 9/12, people in New York (and DC) did not feel as "great" as Glenn Beck. They just felt like shit. They felt scared and confused and depressed. Many of them were drunk. And only an idiot or an actual terrorist would want to always feel like it was 9/12/01. And eight years later, normal people, with brains and souls, have decided that some emotional distance from that disaster is healthier and wiser than trying to recapture the dread.

So thank fucking christ that the Commander in Chief is no longer subjecting the nation to death porn.

No, this year it's limited to a nutty little cult leader on basic cable who is encouraging his radicalized band of fanatical followers to invade the cities where the tragedy actually happened in order to shock the populace back into fear.

Glenn Beck is an actual terrorist, and the people attending his rally in DC tomorrow are al-Qaeda in America.

Glenzilla, Digby on Torture

Glenzilla takes apart Peter King, but more broadly, indicts the Right for assuming that their beliefs even have a passing familiarity with those of the founding fathers.


Money:

Few things are more repellent than watching the contemporary Right in America invoke the principles of the Founders -- in general -- to justify their warped and lawless authoritarianism. But nothing is more repulsive than watching them pretend that Thomas Paine -- of all people -- has anything to do with them (Glenn Beck actually wrote his most recent book based on the explicit pretense that he is the modern day Paine). Any casual reading of Paine makes clear that, today, he would be so far on what is deemed the "left" side of the spectrum that you'd be unable to find him. Paine is nothing but what Joe Klein refers to as a "crazy civil liberties absolutist" and what Rush Limbaugh similarly calls "far, fringe, lunatic kooks, far left radical lunatic fringe."
The Right today argues that condemning torture is wrong because the people who were tortured were just Terrorists -- barely human -- and they deserve no defense, not even the force of law. Thomas Paine argued as a first principle that those devoted to liberty "must guard even his enemy from oppression." Could the contrast be any more stark?

Maybe even more importantly, Digby points out that the constant "restarts" on the torture revelations are dilatory and hurtful to the ultimate goal. All of this has been revealed over and over again. Not only did we torture, we tortured innocents, we murdered and disappeared captives held without trial, and it was all approved from the highest levels. The notion that there is anything more or new to reveal is simply wrong. The Holder investigation is good news, but it is long overdue and needs to now move forward unimpeded.

The Loyal Opposition

We probably shouldn't be surprised....

As Atrios says, it won't get as much attention as Michelle Obama's shorts, or the latest insane ramblings of Sarah Palin, but it should be mentioned that the use of the threat of terror in order to affect politics or elections is, um, what terrorists do.

Good God. Can we Revisit that Secession Issue?

It beggars the mind....

Where we find ourselves...

This is where we are with regard to the wingnut right in America. Glen Beck and his guest, Michael Scheuer are openly rooting for an attack on America, to save us from ourselves and our Islamonegrophied President, who is totally into socialism and is plotting to take away all of our guns and ammo. Don't bother to try and stomach the entire clip, it's mainly two chimps throwing poo around their cage. Skip to the six minute mark for the denouement..




Keep in mind that 2.5 million people get their news from this guy.

Quit your bellyaching....

Digby shows us the true Republican approach to healthcare reform in the US.

The GOP concern trolls...

Bret Stephens has an entirely predictable opinion piece in the WSJ today, in which he voices the concern and newfound support for the Iranian populace, who have taken to the streets in an historic and inspiring fashion in order to protest the incumbent regime's handling of the recent presidential election. Leaving aside the obvious ironies of the Katherine Harris/Norm Coleman type, the concern trolls unleashed at the Journal are a bit hard to swallow, as they are the same group that until recently was insisting that it would be a swell idea to bomb the shit out of these same people. As Greenwald points out, at about the same time that Batshit Crazy John McCain was singing "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran", the Journal was running an editorial from Norman Podhoretz, the bloodthirsty ghoul who breathed life into the neocon movement, explaining that he "hopes and prays" that we bomb Iran.

The other toadies of the neocon movement, including Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and Joe Lieberman fell quickly into line, supporting pre-emptive strikes against the 70 million or so souls who live in Persia. Their recent conversion to Iranophiles may be somewhat cynically viewed by the protesters in the streets of Tehran, I'd guess.

Look, I don't know whether the election there was fairly counted or not. It seems plausible that the will of the Iranian people may well have been to return Ahmadinejad, certainly some of the polling supports that conclusion. My guess is that Stephen's bold assertion that the "election was so transparently rigged that the only serious question is whether the regime even bothered to stuff the ballot boxes", is probably a rash assertion based upon his hopes and not any familiarity with the facts on the ground or the true wishes of the Persian people. The elections in Iran probably had much more to do with the day to day lives of the citizens there than they did with what Bret Stephens, John McCain, and George Will hoped to happen there.

More to the point is the sad irony that we continue to take seriously the opinions of the Kristol's and Podhoretz' of the neocon right, who have been so transparently wrong on every question on which they have opined, and now cry crocodile tears for a people who up to a few months ago they lusted to destroy.


UPDATE: Leave it to TBogg to play the Pam Geller card. Read the whole post, it's priceless.

All I do is keep the beat....

happy friday.

Long Weekend

Here's yer music:





Jay Farrar and the boys. I actually caught a few minutes of Jeff Tweedy and Wilco at Jazzfest, walking out after a full day of New Orleans sun. James Taylor and Erykah Badu were playing at the same time. Erykah has no competition for best 'fro in the business.

Funny Stuff.

Let's just get this straight. Wanda Sykes silly joke about Rush Limbaugh, the gasbag that routinely calls our President Osama, who spits bile and racist lies on a daily basis to 20 million mouth breathing subhumans, and who when challenged on his hateful discourse hides behind the excuse that he is "just an entertainer", was not not particularly funny. The feigned outrage of hypocritical torture supporters and fear mongering embittered old men like William Bennett are truly pathetic. But tasteless? Over the line? Outrageously insensitive and truly offensive. You want offensive humor at the White House Correspondents Dinner? That I've got:





Give me a break.

Best thing you'll see today

Impromptu jam session by a couple at the Mayo Clinic..

Here's what we got....

And just so we're clear on exactly what we were able to "get" for all of our torture porn, the Senate Armed Services Committee report issued yesterday makes it pretty clear. Jane Hamsher spells it out:

Serial sadists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the psychologists who were the first to rationalize and implement torture, were not members of the CIA and are not covered under Obama's immunity blanket. They violated their ethics as health professionals, and should lose their licenses and face criminal prosecution.

• Jessen and Mitchell modeled their torture program on methods used by the North Koreans to extract false confessions.

• Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney "demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration," despite the fact that the CIA told them repeatedly that no such collaboration existed. So, extracting false confessions was the goal.

• The Bybee Memo justified the use of waterboarding on enemy combatants because it had been deemed safe for use by US military in a program (SERE) to train soldiers at high risk of capture about what they might expect to encounter. It's sort of like saying it's okay to throw someone out of a plane because you pushed them off the porch and they were fine.

• The doctor whose memo Yoo/Bybee relied upon for assurances that waterboarding was safe, Dr. Jerald Ogrisseg, said that "he was surprised when he found out later that Lt Col Baumgartner had forwarded his memo to the General Counsel’s office." Dr. Ogrisseg testified that when Lt Col Baungartner asked about waterboarding in the real world, he told him that "aside from being illegal, it was a completely different arena that we in the Survival School didn’t know anything about." (h/t Valtin)

• So, Yoo/Bybee based their legal justification for waterboarding on assurances of safety they got from a memo that was talking about something else entirely, and which the author of the memo had expressly said did not apply in the situation.

Rumsfeld and Cheney worked backwards from a survival guide that the army used to prepare their men for torture techniques used by the Chinese and North Koreans. That torture was specifically designed to elicit false testimony. Either the two of them were psychopaths or morons, and probably a health dose of both. Bybee and Yoo gave them all of the legal cover that they requested and required to proceed. The ultimate goal was certainly to force the confession of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.

Cheney continues to belch bile....

Couple of things about Cheney's whine this weekend concerning the release of the torture memos, in which he said:

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

First, at this point, Dick Cheney has no more authority to ask the CIA to do anything than I do. It's getting a bit embarrassing, actually. He's probably ordering his neighbors around, and screaming at his secret service agent to bring him some fresh pudding.

Secondly, my guess is that if we had to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, the information we got from him wasn't so super at all. I'd admit to being Ethel Merman after the first dunk, and by number 183, I can't imagine what I'd cop to.

Happy Teabagging Day!

Tomorrow is the big day for the rightwingers, the spontaneous and entirely grass roots "teabagging" movement will take to the streets. Enjoy!

Glen Beck, Historian

It's funny, I remember clearly learning the difference between fascism and communism, within the broad definition of totalitarianism in eighth grade in Mrs. Griffith's history class. We studied the continuum of political beliefs and systems (oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, democracy, etc) and discussed how no pure system would really work, including a pure democracy, which would dissolve into mob rule or anarchy.

And when Jonah Goldberg published "Liberal Fascism" last year, it was easy to shrug it off as the meanderings of a third rate conservative slob, because any sentient eighth grader would immediately recognize that liberalism and fascism were and are in diametric opposition.

Interesting to note, then, that one of the highest rated cable news shows, Glen Beck's, continues to promote the notion that the Obama administration is somehow leading us down the road to fascism, and that the policies that we are pursuing to pull ourselves out of the mire that eight years of the Bush administration left us in are somehow akin to those of the Nazi party in Germany. Of course, when I was in Mrs. Griffith's history class, we'd also have recognized Beck as nothing more than a madman screaming at people on the street corner, so perhaps this is all part of a general rise in the stupidity level of Americans.

Anyway, Beck's particular thesis, if it can be dignified with that term, is shredded to pieces by Orcinus, here.

It makes for great reading.

Kudlowmania!

Larry Kudlow denies his interest in Chris Dodd's Senate seat, in a way that makes it clear that all he wants if for a few more people to ask him to run and he'll do it.



Yes, Larry, please run. You are clearly what the GOP needs right now, another thinly closeted, thrice married, apostate recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict.

Yikes, a plan....

Unfortunately for all of us, Krugman is probably right.

The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks’ books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn’t be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

The banks would be crazy to begin to sell their troubled portfolios of assets while Geithner continues to promise them that at some point somebody will overpay for them. First it was 'the market', then it was 'the hedge funds' and now it is a combination of private capital with an explicit guarantee from you and I.

As Krugman points out, this is looking weirder by the day:

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there’s something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they’re doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

There are any number of other plans out there that do not rest upon the idea that these assets need to be purchased in such a way that the banks are saved. Temporary nationalization is just one. Why this administration remains fixated on the Goldman Sachs Recovery Plan is now looking very odd.

Round em up..

When I started this blog 360 posts ago, I began with a comment about Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, basically noting that at the core of the Bush Administration's dark heart there were lawyers that were willing to justify imperious and illegal activities in order to support the franchise and curry favor with the fearmongers and "Mayberry Machiavellis" in the White House.

Brad Delong brings us up to speed on how the tide is turning against the actions of Yoo and the Office of Legal Council (OLC). The legal fraternity is slowly warming up to the idea that was clear to so many all along, that Yoo's work was an aggressive and conscious attempt to undermine our Constitution and he, Gonzales and men like David Addington were quite willing to shred 300 years of precedent to further their hateful agenda.

He quotes Brian Tamanaha, who belatedly arrives at this conclusion:

But the recent release by the OLC of several of the relevant memos removes any doubt: these memos were elaborate exercises in manipulative legal argument.... OLC lawyers were faced with a big hurdle: the applicable law was directly contrary to what the Administration wanted to do. (That’s the thing about law—it can get in the way.) Rather than concede that the actions were illegal and could not be done, however, the lawyers constructed a covering legal analysis which arrived at the desired ends. The soundness of their legal argument did not matter. What mattered was that OLC has the power to issue legal opinions that are authoritative for immediate purposes (within the executive branch) and the mere issuance of the opinion supplied the first part of the “good faith” excuse described above (providing a defense to those who directly engaged in the illegal conduct).

Tamanaha highlights on representative conclusion of an OLC memo penned by Yoo:

The courts have observed that even the use of deadly force is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment if used in self-defense or to protect others. Here, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the right to self-defense is not that of an individual, but that of the nation and of its citizens. If the government’s heightened interest in self defense justifies the use of deadly force, then it would certainly also justify warrantless searches.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, quoth Barry Goldwater.


I guess you had to be something other than a lawyer to see that the intent was pure evil all along.

Posted without much comment

Apparently, the GOP doesn't think that Obama's first month in office has been a smashing success.


if only he'd been a bit more bipartisan, I guess.

Obama in a nutshell...

Here are the last eight minutes of so of Obama's speech on Lincoln yesterday, delivered in Springfield, IL. (The first part of the speech is also available at YouTube). If you want to get a sense of the governing philosophy of this administration, and understand the stark differences between Obama's belief in the role of government and that of the GOP, this is a tremendous illustration. Aside from the stunning oratory and the succinct and well designed historical context, this speech brings into high relief the differences between the Luddites who have placed themselves into opposition to the President and this administration, which is founded upon the fundamental belief that the government has a vital and irreplaceable role to play in making this country work for all of its citizens, particularly in troubled times such as today.

This speech highlights the difference between those who would spend a trillion dollars on a pointless and unnecessary war and then advocate broad-based tax cuts in order to starve the government of any ability to act when the inevitable bills came due, and a party who believes that our government has a vital role in providing services and infrastructure for its citizens so that as a polity we are a better thing. It is the same argument that surrounded the fundamental optimism and pessimism of Locke and Hobbes, and if we haven't been living in the ultimate manifestation of a Hobbesian nightmare for the past eight years, I'm not sure what we would call it.

Make Them Stop

Watching functional morons like Mitch McConnell rail against the stimulus plan as pork laden tax and spend liberal policies, rather than just about the only thing we can do to stave off a complete economic collapse, begs the obvious question as to why we would listen to the the very individuals who are responsible for this mess. Krugman points out that the approaches to the current crisis really reflect the fundamental world views of the parties, rather than some sort of true economic debate.

You see, this isn’t a brainstorming session — it’s a collision of fundamentally incompatible world views. If one thing is clear from the stimulus debate, it’s that the two parties have utterly different economic doctrines. Democrats believe in something more or less like standard textbook macroeconomics; Republicans believe in a doctrine under which tax cuts are the universal elixir, and government spending is almost always bad.

Listening to McConnell, Shelby and the like try to wrap their parochial world view around the crisis at hand is more than maddening, it can only be compared to listening to Cheney and Bush criticizing the new administration for not continuing the absurd policy of poking the hornet's nest that they relentlessly bashed for the past eight years. At what point will the American people stop listening to the folks who are directly responsible for our current mess? More importantly, can the Obama administration call these jokers out for the charlatans and blockheads that they are?

Digby calls out the Dems for their approach. She's right.

Your Republican Party....

When they aren't blaming our current economic woes on immigrants and scolding Obama for being a tax and spend liberal (stimulus? bailout? what-evah), the loyal opposition is getting down to serious business:

When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber — will be their featured guest. This group is an organization of conservative Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart GOP strategy for the week.

Wurzelbacher, who became a household name during the presidential election, will be focusing his talk on the proposed stimulus package. He's apparently not a fan of the economic rescue package, according to members of the group.

If nothing else, GOP aides are using the appearance to get staffers to attend the 9 a.m meeting.

“In case you weren’t planning to attend CWG tomorrow morning, you might want to reconsider because Joe the Plumber will be joining us!” Kimberly Wallner, an aide to South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, wrote in a message to her e-mail list this afternoon.

Yesterday

Where many saw yesterday as a wonderful affirmation of the audacity of hope and reveled in the soaring rhetoric and the grandeur of our functioning republic, I had a hard time getting by the day as the most powerful condemnation of the colossal failure of the Idiot Prince, a resounding repudiation of the epic disaster that he represents. Obama's words, his powerful renouncement of torture, fearmongering, unilateralism, xenophobia, unbridled executive power, obstinance and boastfulness and his embrace of the democratic and constitutional ideals that have been fouled by the outgoing administration was as brazen and shocking a takedown of a sitting historical figure as you may ever see. It was all well deserved, and not a word of it was exaggerated, but I found it startling none the less.

Meanwhile, as Bush slunk off to his faux ranch in his faux home state of Texas, the former Andover and Yale cheerleader surrounded himself with an ever smaller and ever more pathetic circle of sycophants who whine that if only we had his moral compass, we'd see the triumph of the Bush legacy.




A hearty fuck you, W.

The Mighty WSJ

Wall Street Journal Editorial, Jan 16, 2009:

By his own standard, Mr. Bush achieved the one big thing he and all Americans demanded of his Administration. Not a single man, woman or child has been killed by terrorists on U.S. soil since the morning of September 11. Al Qaeda was flushed from safe havens in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and its terrorist network put under siege around the world. All subsequent terror attacks hit soft targets and used primitive means. No one seriously predicted such an outcome at the time.

Pesky reality:

The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, also known as Amerithrax from its Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) case name, occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others.

Of course, that's leaving aside the fact that the Bush administration is responsible for allowing the most devastating terrorist attacks on our shores in our history and the greatest failure do defend these shores since the War of Canadian Aggression in 1812. I suppose what his supporters want credit for is that we didn't suffer a second cataclysmic attack after 2001. Somewhere along the line, the original goals of capturing OBL or isolating Islamic fundamentalism fell by the wayside and the triumphant success became the avoidance of a second 9/11.

Getting Everything Wrong

To follow right up on my last post, Juan Cole has a stunning and succinct takedown of Perle, Feist, Kristol and the rest of the neocon movement in Salon. I don't know that I've read a better summation of the criminal wrongheadedness that brought us to this point. Maybe most alarming is that the current situation in Gaza is an afterthought to the end of the tragic Bush era, mainly due to the fact that our own economy dominates our thoughts and headlines.

Cole's conclusion:

The neoconservatives had prided themselves on their macho swagger, their rejection of namby-pamby Clintonian multilateralism, and on their bold vision for reshaping the Middle East so that the Israeli and American right would not have to deal with existing reality. In the cold light of day, they look merely petulant and arrogant. The ancient Greek poet Bion said that boys cast stones at frogs in sport, but the frogs die in earnest. The neoconservatives were the boys, and the people of Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon have been their frogs. The biggest danger facing the United States is that there will be no true "Clean Break" -- that the neoconservatives will somehow find a way to survive the Bush administration, and continue to influence American foreign policy.

Frogs die in earnest. Indeed.

Read the whole thing, it's illuminating.

Of course, the brutal war in Gaza had become convenient fodder for the Hannity/Beck/NRO wing of Muslim haters, which should not come as a surprise. Lost amidst their bloodthirst is the simple truth that war is all hell, and that the tragedy of Gaza will not be transformed by the wonton loss of Palestinian life.

These guys gotta get their story straight

An integral piece of the Bush Legacy Project is the hard work of polishing the turd that W made in Iraq, and Rove, Bush and Cheney have been been blathering on in one after another "exit interviews" with the absurd notion that the Iraq War is justified/going well/successful. Case in point is of course the shoe-thrower, who Bush famously used as an example of the burgeoning democracy that is breaking out all over Mesopotamia. Aside from the fact that the guy was tortured and jailed without a trial, I suppose he has a point.

But Richard Perle and the neo-cons are reading from a different script, in which he belches:

I am described as an “architect,” and often as “the architect,” of the Iraq War. I certainly supported and argued publicly for the decision to remove Saddam, as I do in what follows. But had I been the architect of that war, our policy would have been very different. […]

But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

ThinkProgress does a great job of pointing out the absurdity of Perle's brazen lie, but the more troubling thing is the inconsistency that the formerly buttoned down Bush foreign policy team displays as they race for the exits from the drunken bash they've thrown themselves. Either the mess-o-potamia was and is a ringing success (Bush/Rove/Cheney) or it wasn't (Perle/Kristol/Feith), but it can't be both.

Lazy Blogging

Frank Rich with a great paragraph on the tragic Bush legacy

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.