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.

Merry Merry

The Way it Is

Memorable quotes from the first week of the great Bush/Cheney rewrite:

"While there's room for an honest and healthy debate about the decisions I made — and there's plenty of debate — there can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe," Bush said.

"I was aware of the programme, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency, in effect, came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," he [Cheney] said.

"And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

Look, whether it is over the decision to go to war on what turned out to be a bevy of lies, the decision to inflame the hatred of a billion Muslims and turn the entire international community against us, or the explicit approval of the use of illegal and immoral torture against captured prisoners, it is important that you realize that Bush and Cheney simply do not give a shit what you think. Just get over it.

Just go.

Two short clips from the first few exit interviews with Bush perfectly illustrate just how amazingly unreflective and obtuse he is in the face of the destruction he has brought to this country, our reputation, the economy, and the lives of millions of Americans and Iraqis.

First, he comes to the conclusion that he has "abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market"



Unlike Alan Greenspan, who finally came to the conclusion that his Randian belief in a self regulating free market was an absurd and childish notion, Bush simply does not understand that his free market fundamentalism hasn't been abandoned, it has failed.

Next, he farts out his true thoughts on the disaster in Iraq. In the face of all of the information that has come forward over time, the misguided decisions made that dragged us to the place we find ourselves today, the flawed intelligence, the outright lies and the human tragedy that he has unleashed, his response is a chilling, "so what?"



Socrates said that the unreflective life was not worth living. Apparently that message didn't resonate with the cheer leading squad at Yale.

and another thing....

...that I learned from Joe Scarborough this morning:

It is very suspicious that the sitting Democratic State Senator in Illinois would support the election campaign of the Democratic candidate for Governor in 2002.

Truisms

Some things I learned from watching CNBC today

1. The auto industry is in trouble and the bailout failed because the auto workers get paid too much and wouldn't budge on negotiations regarding future wage concessions.Their problems have nothing to do with the fact that GM sells less cars than Honda but has 10x more dealerships. Furthermore, the fact that the Republicans in the Senate think it's a good idea to forcibly legislate the wages of working Americans is in tune with their belief in a free market economy.

2. The SEC failed miserably in the last decade not because they have been starved as an organization by successive Republican administrations, but because they've lacked a strong leader.

3. Nancy Pelosi is really to blame for the fact that the Treasury has poured a trillion dollars into banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms. She said that the Democratic Congress would be more frugal than the Republican one.

4. Larry Kudlow thinks that Mitt Romney should be the car czar because his father ran AMC, and he used to live in Detroit.

5. Nobody in Detroit has even lost their job, like on Wall Street. It's been like a big party out there.

6. Sen's Corker, Shelby and McConnell did a great job because they were tasked with brokering a settlement. The fact that they failed at this should not in any way get in the way of Corker being named by MNBC as a new "star". Their failure also has nothing to do with the fact that they each represent states with large non-union plants for Toyota, Mercedes, Nissan and BMW.

Meanwhile, read Joseph Stiglitz' article in Vanity Fair if you'd really like to understand how we reached this point. I'll be wrestling my neighbor for a dead squirrel in the street.

Universal Health Care, Round II

Thomas Frank lets the cat out of the bag in today's WSJ...

He points out that the GOPs visceral reaction to any proposed plan to provide universal health care is based upon two bedrock beliefs, one of which they have proven to be quite willing to cave on, namely big government spending. Conventional wisdom tells us that the GOP opposes universal health care because they can't stomach the idea of big government programs and favor the magic of the free market. This is a bit tough to swallow considering the debacle we are wading through at the moment.

The other, more critical opposition comes from a much deeper place, however. As Frank points out

Still, conservatives have always dreaded the day that Democrats discover (or rediscover) that there is a happy political synergy between delivering liberal economic reforms and building the liberal movement. The classic statement of this fear is a famous memo that Bill Kristol wrote in 1993, when he had just started out as a political strategist and the Clinton administration was preparing to propose some version of national health care.

"The plan should not be amended; it should be erased," Mr. Kristol advised the GOP. And not merely because Mr. Clinton's scheme was (in Mr. Kristol's view) bad policy, but because "it will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Historian Rick Perlstein suggests that this memo is "the skeleton key to understanding modern American politics" because it opens up a fundamental conservative anxiety: "If the Democrats succeed in redistributing economic power, we're screwed."

Frank's piece places this thought in the context of the Clinton administration's failure to realize that embracing a "liberal" approach to the issue would not only be popularly accepted, but could become a game changer for the Democratic party, but perhaps that was another time and place. At this point, it is irrefutable that the country resoundingly supports a comprehensive universal health care plan, and that the GOP understands the existential threat that such a plan may represent.

Deep thought of the day

Am I the only one that thinks it odd that Goldman and Morgan Stanley are issuing government-backed debt?

Whoa.

This, by the way, is not a parody.

ziggy

Don't forget that at one time, David Bowie ruled the pop music world like few others ever have.

Michael Lewis on the end of Wall Street

Great read.

Blowback on the Treasury..

We are really in uncharted waters in terms of reacting to the conflagration that is running through our economy and the markets, and the great fear is that opinions will swing wildly one way or t'other. Digby, who's writing I enjoy, has been at the far end of the reaction to the bailout efforts of the Treasury, basically getting the pitchforks out and lighting the torches.

I think at this point, stripping Henry Paulson of his authority to spend more cash, with Ben Bernanke thrown in for good measure, isn't an option but a duty. And Chuck Grassley's call for the newly minted oversight board to investigate conflicts of interest among all the Goldman Sachs execs serving as the ladlers of corporate cash during the bailout is absolutely warranted. However, this oversight is coming at the END of the process, not the beginning. With four trillion already passed out, it's not like putting the brakes on the giveaways is going to make much of a difference today. This is not to say we shouldn't be investigating and scrutinizing what amounts to theft, as well as building a new regulatory structure for the future (yes, listen to Eliot Spitzer on this one - setting aside his personal life he's probably the most knowledgeable person in America about what needs to be done).

I don't share the abject fear of the Goldman-led cabal that is wildly flailing about, throwing our money at the problem in any and every way that they can come up with. But I do understand the suspicion, the cynicism, and the outrage that Digby shows. In my estimation, the systemic problem facing us, the painful de-leveraging of the economy itself, is truly unprecedented, and like the 1930s requires creative and disruptive ideas and approaches. Those are by nature unsettling and scary.

What I do fault Paulson and the Treasury on is their incredible tin ear as it pertains to the process. His immediate response, in which he said: "give me the 700 billion and don't ask any questions" was an obvious non-starter in a politicized environment. His refusal to move quickly away from the flawed idea of repurchasing troubled assets from the banks rather than investing directly into the institutions themselves looked bad as well. But the appointment of Neil Kashkari really sealed his doom, I think. He could have picked from any number of smart and competent candidates to head up the TARP program, and in fact, Kashkari may be the smartest and most competent candidate. But he is 35 and he's from Goldman, and that wasn't going to play in DC.

Paulson lame ducked himself, and the fallout is ugly. He gave his opponents all the ammunition that they needed to paint him as a Wall Street guy taking care of his Wall Street buddies. He's exiting, stage left, but can't do it soon enough.