There may be a flag on the play...

Blogger Mike Stark tried to ask George Allen a question and was wrestled to the ground by Allen "thugs". In spite of MSM reports of a "protester" "screaming" at Allen, video seems to show it transpired as Stark claims. Says Stark:

I will be pressing charges against George Allen and his surrogates later today. George Allen, at any time, could have stopped the fray. All he had to do was say, "This is not how my campaign is run. Take your hands off that man." He could have ignored my questions. Instead he and his thugs chose violence. I spent four years in the Marine Corps. I'll be damned if I'll let my country be taken from me by thugs that are afraid of taking responsibility for themselves.

Kerry responds

John Kerry apparently misspoke himself while trying to insult GWB saying something like: if you don't do well in university, you'll get stuck in Iraq. It seems that he meant to say: "I can't overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq" in an apparent allusion to GWB's reputation for being both, not much of a student and getting us stuck in Iraq.

Kerry has since issued this statement in response to GWB and "assorted right wing nut-jobs and right wing talk show hosts desperately distorting Kerry’s comments about President Bush to divert attention from their disastrous record":

If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.

The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.

Simple Question: Do you want US to win?

I had a conversation this morning with a colleague which started out with us discussing some particular aspect of the Iraq fiasco when, all of a sudden, the enormity of the "wrong" sunk in. GWB is guilty of war crimes, of crimes against humanity. He caused the U.S. to start a war, to invade another country, the cardinal sin for nations. He lied about the "reasons" for doing so. He attacked those who argued against this action. He lied to cover-up the lies for going to war. He screwed up the occupation such that civil war is raging. Thousands of people died because of his war-of-choice. He actively resists efforts to right these wrongs because to do so would force him to acknowledge that he was so hugely "wrong" in the ethical, legal and technical meanings of the word.

I have previously used the analogy, when talking about the American invasion of Iraq, of some guy who bursts into someone else's home because he suspects (wrongly, as it turns out) that the occupants posed some sort of threat and this intruder then proceeds to smash things and people with a baseball bat. In my analogy, in the resulting chaos, the surviving occupants start fighting among themselves as well as against the intruder. In my analogy, the intruder is also connected to "you" the listener somehow e.g. he's your father, brother, son, spouse, etc. When presented this way, it's easier to understand my perplexity when someone asks: do you want him (the U.S.) to win? Your dilemma is that you know that the person you care about has done something very wrong -- that he is the "bad guy". Do you want him to win...? That's just an absurd question. I don't even know what it means.

Do I still care about him? Yes. Do I want what's best for him? Yes. Do I want to make things right? Yes. Do I feel vicariously guilty or ashamed? Yes. Do I realize that he has to stop swinging the baseball bat? Yes. Do I understand that the occupants of the home are justifiably angry? Yes. Do I understand how difficult it must be for him to realize that he is the "bad guy"? Yes. Do I understand how embarrassing it will be for him to admit that he was wrong and that those who tried to stop him were right? Yes. Do I acknowledge that he will have to be held to account? Yes. Do I understand that this (accountability) will hurt him and, because I care about him, it will hurt me too? Yes. Do I accept that living under the rule of law and accepting the consequences of one's actions is important and right even if it hurts us sometimes? Yes.

Do I encourage him to continue smashing things and people so that he won't have to stop and admit that he is the "bad guy"? No. Do I blame the victims and say that it's their fault that he burst in? No. Do I say that the occupants should stop feeling so angry at him? No. Do I say that the occupants should feel grateful that he now wants what is best for everyone? No. Do I say that the occupants should not demand why he burst in? No. Do I say that the occupants should not ask for justice (punishment) for the break-in and the destruction and injury? No. Do I say that the occupants should shut up and start cleaning up their mess? No. Do I say let's start fresh now as if none of this had ever happened? No.

In the case of both Iraq and the home-invasion analogy, the first step is to acknowledge that it is a huge problem, that there is no clear, and certainly no simple, "solution" and that nothing will "put Humpty back together again" -- that the invasion and ensuing chaos can't be undone. But the way to start dealing with the problem (the chaos that GWB has caused to occur in Iraq) is straightforward. The President (and I cannot conceive of GWB doing this) must confess to having been wrong to have invaded and occupied Iraq and then throw himself on the mercy of the courts (in this case, impeachment proceedings in Congress). New leadership must then go to the world community and say: what must we do now? We can't make it right again, but what's the best we can do to undo what we can and atone for our sins. The consensus of the world community will direct the actions of all its members including especially the aggressor nations, as to what must be done in the way of punishment, compensation and reconstruction. Nothing can undo the death, suffering and destruction. It has been done. But we can stop contributing to it and start the slow path to reconstruction and healing. We must.

Who You Gonna Call?

Digby says:

Let's say you have a problem. You have the choice of two people to solve the problem --- the one who caused the problem, refuses to admit it even is a problem and won't change anything even as the problem grows worse --- or the other one. Which do you choose?

That's the simple logic of this election.

There are, of course, many affirmative Democratic messages necessary for the future. But right now, this is it.

Digby also says:

The Republicans and the Christian Right are leading America on a backward march into the Dark Ages --- and that is stepping on our dreams. As a culture, we have always been idealistic about progress and inspired by new discoveries to improve the lot of the human race. We're about invention and reinvention. It's one of our best qualities.

These people are telling us that those days are over. We have to depend upon brute force, superstition and ancient revelation. Science is dangerous. Art is frightening. Education must be strictly circumscribed so that children aren't exposed to ideas that might lead them astray.

It's a pinched, sour, ugly vision of America. For those who believe that their time on earth is all about waiting for The Bridegroom, perhaps that doesn't mean much. But for the rest of us, things like scientific breakthroughs or artistic achievement are inspirational, soaring emotional connections with our country and our fellow man. It makes us proud. The dark-ages conservatives want to take that away from us.

This country has been divided at 50/50 for some time. That probably cannot continue much longer and a real majority will emerge before long. Tax-cuts have held together the GOP coalition up to now, but their dark vision of the future may be the thing that finally drives the suburban, educated voters to our side of the ledger for a long time to come. We're the ones with the progressive dream of the future and that's as American as a Big Mac and fries.

Generals more frank after Frank.

USAToday has an article about how the Generals are telling it more like it is now but, it would seem, that it's in order to perform a little CYA.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg said the change in tone was the result of the Bush administration trying to shift responsibility for the war onto the shoulders of the generals.

"The administration has pushed it to them," said the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who served in Iraq.

Until recently, Army leaders had played "the good soldiers," he said. "Now they're saying, 'Hey, if my name is going to be associated with this, and the good name of the United States Army's going to be associated with this ... then by God, I'm going to have a say in it.'"

The generals were attempting to insulate themselves from future criticism that they tried to sugarcoat events in Iraq, he said.

All the generals were familiar with Dereliction of Duty, the book by now-Col. H.R. McMaster that criticizes the senior military leaders of the Vietnam era for not speaking out as the country slipped into war in Southeast Asia. They are trying to avoid being written about in the same way, Kellogg said.

McCain campaigning for the Democrats

John McCain had this to say today at an event for the Republican opponent of Democrat Tammy Duckworth, the double-amputee, Iraq vet who still goes to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for follow-up treatment:

I go out to Walter Reed quite often and see these brave young [soldiers] who have served and sacrificed so much. Many of them have lost limbs, as you know. And it's a very sad thing to see. But at the same time it's very uplifting. Because these young people are so proud of what they've done...This generation of men and women who are serving in the military are the very, very, very best of us.

TPM Election Central has video.

A Uniter, not a Divider

Ah, GWB, he's such a uniter. He's out there criss-crossing the country demonstrating leadership and bringing the nation together. Here are some inspiring quotes that all Americans can take pride in while, at the same time, they can feel comforted and uplifted.

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses".

-- GWB, 31/10/2006

Read it and weep

Brad DeLong:

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now. Not after the election. Not after the situation deteriorates further. Impeach George W. Bush for failing to faithfully execute the laws. Impeach George W. Bush now for what he has done to Iraq. Impeach George W. Bush now so that we can have a chance of fixing this total disaster:

Evidence of Marie Colvin
Evidence of Anthony Shadid
Evidence of Steven D.
Evidence of Fareed Zakaria

On Going to Hell

Amy Sullivan:

By condemning and mocking that doctrine, O'Donnell managed an impressive feat. He took Robertson, a figure widely disliked and discredited throughout the evangelical community, and found a way to criticize him that would also insult and alienate evangelicals. Congratulations, Lawrence O'Donnell--you're the new poster-boy for secular liberal intolerance.

Matthew Yglesias:

Now Amy's right. It would be useful, for the purposes of electoral politics, for liberals in the media to avoid expressing the view that the belief -- adhered to by millions of Americans -- that failure to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior will result in eternal damnation is daft. On the other hand, the evangelical view of this matter is, in fact, completely absurd. And not just absurd in a virgin birth, water-into-wine, I-believe-an-angel-watches-over-me kind of way. On this view, a person who led an entirely exemplary life in terms of his impact on the world (would an example help? Gandhi, maybe?) but who didn't accept Jesus as his personal savior would be subjected to a life of eternal torment after his death and we're supposed to understand that as a right and just outcome. That, I think, is seriously messed up.

But I shouldn't say so!

UPDATE: Since this post got Atrios'd, let me say that I don't especially think Amy merits a Two Minute Hate here and I agree with her point in the article that what Sam Rosenfeld called "theocracy hype" (for example) is both analytically wrong and tactically misguided. But I think there's a real dilemma here -- some things that are impolitic to say are also true.

Shred-it!

It would appear that "Dead-Eye" Dick Cheney may think that some people who are not card-carrying members of the Rubber Stamp Congress make be getting subpoena powers in the near future. Wonkette has a photo of a truck heading towards the Cheney's:

Spotted on 10/19, by an eagle-eyed Wonkette reader: The Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services truck making its way up to the Cheney compound at the Naval Observatory.

Fun fact: Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services has been contracted by the Secret Service for our Executive Branch’s record-not-keeping needs.

The present contractor providing Pickup & Destruction of Sensitive Waste Material services is Mid Atlantic Shredding Services and the current rate is $0.095 cents per lbs.

You better get crackin’, Dick — that evidence won’t destroy itself!

Send out the Clowns

Joe Galloway in Military.com:

The president declared himself confident that Republicans would sweep to victory and maintain their stranglehold on both houses of a Congress that's done nothing but rubberstamp Bush's war policies and Republican efforts to enrich their fat-cat donors and themselves, of course.

If he's right and that's the result of the Nov. 7 elections, then the American people will finally have fulfilled H.L. Mencken's prophecy that we'd continue choosing the lowest common denominator until, in the end, we get precisely the government we deserve.

Meantime, Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed that some of the senior al-Qaeda terrorists in our custody have been subjected to "water-boarding," a torture that brings the victim within a hair of drowning and suffocation. Cheney declared that it was a "no-brainer." My thoughts exactly: Only people with no brains opt to torture a captive in violation of domestic and international law.

This unseemly circus and its clowns in Congress can't go away fast enough and with enough dishonor and disgrace to suit the circumstances. Their place in America's history is secure: They will go down as the worst administration and the worst Congress we've ever had. Period.

They deserve to lose both the House and the Senate on Nov. 7, and the White House in 2008. They bullied their way into a war that they thought would be a slam-dunk and then so bungled things that the only superpower left in the world has been humbled and hobbled in a world that they've made more dangerous for us.

Thanks, guys. You've done a heckuva job. We won't forget it.

History Lesson

It's difficult to make a persuasive argument when others just make stuff up. And when one's audience is made up of people who know so little, remember so little, analyze so little and aren't curious enough to learn anything, it's difficult to convince them otherwise. Barbara O'Brien gives us yet another example of how people with access to the media can make historically false claims with impunity. It's like those Soviet 5-Year plans... pure revisionist history. I'm grateful for Barbara's attempt to put the matter straight.

David Kirkpatrick in yesterday’s New York Times:

Democrats have spent three decades trying to exorcise the ghost of Senator George S. McGovern, whose losing 1972 presidential campaign calling for a withdrawal from Vietnam crystallized his party’s image as soft on national defense.

Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog:

George McGovern did not lose the 1972 presidential election because he called for withdrawal from Vietnam. I repeat, George McGovern did not lose the 1972 presidential election because he called for withdrawal from Vietnam.

How do I know this? Simple. In 1972, both bleeping major party candidates — Republican Nixon and Democrat McGovern — were calling for a bleeping withdrawal from bleeping Vietnam.

The Vietnam issue in 1972 was not at all parallel to the pro-war and anti-war positions people are taking now. In 1972, a substantial majority of the electorate recognized the course was unstayable and wanted it to end. And in 1972, President Richard bleeping Nixon and his Secretary of State, the motherbleeping Henry Kissinger, tried frantically to end the war before the 1972 elections. The Nixon-Kissinger “October surprise” was the announcement of a peace settlement with North Vietnam (which fell through after the elections).

Prescience

One of my favourite complaints has to do with the lack of accountability to which the pundit class is held when they get stuff wrong. This injustice is usually compounded by the fact that those who did get it right are not getting any credit for having done so. This bugs Glenn Greenwald too and he provides us with yet another example of someone who did get it right -- in real time. This time it's Jim Webb (who just might unseat Republican incumbent George Allen in Virginia) who wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in September 2002 warning against the invasion of Iraq. Talk about getting it right.

Glenn:

Each and every one of the dangers about which Webb warned has come to fruition. But thoughtful, sophisticated, rational and -- as it turns out -- prescient analysis like this was haughtily dismissed away by the tough-guy political and pundit classes as unserious and wimpy, even when coming from combat heroes. Instead, those who were deemed to be the serious, responsible, and strong national security leaders -- and who still are deemed as such -- were the ones shrilly warning about Iraqi mushroom clouds over our cities [...] and making predictions about Iraq which the most basic working knowledge of that country should have precluded.

And such individuals, rather than hiding in shame or expressing remorse for their grave errors, continue to prance around pompously as the Foreign Policy Experts and Serious National Security Adults.

Jim Webb in Sept 2002:

Meanwhile, American military leaders have been trying to bring a wider focus to the band of neoconservatives that began beating the war drums on Iraq before the dust had even settled on the World Trade Center. Despite the efforts of the neocons to shut them up or to dismiss them as unqualified to deal in policy issues, these leaders, both active-duty and retired, have been nearly unanimous in their concerns.

Is there an absolutely vital national interest that should lead us from containment to unilateral war and a long-term occupation of Iraq? And would such a war and its aftermath actually increase our ability to win the war against international terrorism? On this second point, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs vice chairman, mentioned in a news conference last week that the scope for potential anti-terrorist action included -- at a minimum -- Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Georgia, Colombia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and North Korea.

America's best military leaders know that they are accountable to history not only for how they fight wars, but also for how they prevent them. The greatest military victory of our time -- bringing an expansionist Soviet Union in from the cold while averting a nuclear holocaust -- was accomplished not by an invasion but through decades of intense maneuvering and continuous operations. With respect to the situation in Iraq, they are conscious of two realities that seem to have been lost in the narrow debate about Saddam Hussein himself.

The first reality is that wars often have unintended consequences -- ask the Germans, who in World War I were convinced that they would defeat the French in exactly 42 days. The second is that a long-term occupation of Iraq would beyond doubt require an adjustment of force levels elsewhere, and could eventually diminish American influence in other parts of the world.

Other than the flippant criticisms of our "failure" to take Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, one sees little discussion of an occupation of Iraq, but it is the key element of the current debate. The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years. Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade and stay. . . .

The Iraqis are a multiethnic people filled with competing factions who in many cases would view a U.S. occupation as infidels invading the cradle of Islam. Indeed, this very bitterness provided Osama bin Laden the grist for his recruitment efforts in Saudi Arabia when the United States kept bases on Saudi soil after the Gulf War.

Nations such as China can only view the prospect of an American military consumed for the next generation by the turmoil of the Middle East as a glorious windfall. Indeed, if one gives the Chinese credit for having a long-term strategy -- and those who love to quote Sun Tzu might consider his nationality -- it lends credence to their insistent cultivation of the Muslim world. . . An "American war" with the Muslims, occupying the very seat of their civilization, would allow the Chinese to isolate the United States diplomatically as they furthered their own ambitions in South and Southeast Asia.

These concerns, and others like them, are the reasons that many with long experience in U.S. national security issues remain unconvinced by the arguments for a unilateral invasion of Iraq. Unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and a long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation's existence is clearly at stake.

It is true that Saddam Hussein might try to assist international terrorist organizations in their desire to attack America. It is also true that if we invade and occupy Iraq without broad-based international support, others in the Muslim world might be encouraged to intensify the same sort of efforts. And it is crucial that our national leaders consider the impact of this proposed action on our long-term ability to deter aggression elsewhere.

George W. Bizarro speaks

I wrote about GWB's recent press conference where, in typically incoherent way, GWB revealed that America was in Iraq forever. While perhaps not so bizarre as the "we've never been 'stay the course'" claim, there many very bizarre aspects to this presser and another of his group hugs with conservative journalists earlier this week.

Dan Froomkin points us to:

"Absolutely, we're winning," Bush said. "As a matter of fact, my view is the only way we lose in Iraq is if we leave before the job is done."

With the body counts soaring, the country descending deeper into civil war and the central government consistently unable to assert itself, how can he call this winning?

The answer: It's becoming increasingly clear that Bush sees the war in Iraq in very simple terms. As he himself said, he believes that the only way to lose is to leave. Therefore anything else is winning -- anything else at all.

Even if no progress is being made -- even if things are getting worse, rather than better -- simply staying is winning.

So we're winning.

Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog shares:

The only defeat is leaving. As long as we’re still there, we’re winning. Got that?

And I really like the part about “If we leave, they will follow us here.” I do remember jokes we told back in the day — If we pull out of Vietnam, the Vietnamese navy will attack Los Angeles. Nobody believed that, of course; it was just a way to underline how absurd the war was.

But does anyone really believe “if we leave, they will follow us here”? Why would that be true? We don’t exactly have al Qaeda pinned down over there.

I mean, we weren’t in Iraq on September 11, were we?

Sorry; I couldn’t resist.

From the transcript of that by-invitation-only meeting, we have GWB trotting out this old canard.

I believe when you get attacked and somebody declares war on you, you fight back. And that’s what we’re doing.

I'm just trying to remember when it was exactly that Iraq attacked the U.S. I mean... this is just nuts!

And how about this?

And you talk to — admittedly, my focus groups are not broad, but people always say to me, thank you for protecting us.

Do you think Bubble-Boy sneaked out? Focus groups not broad? That sounds almost like... something that someone in the reality-based community might say!

"He Said/She Said" B.S.

Digby has written a great post about, not so much this disgraceful business regarding Rush Limbaugh's comments about Michael J. Fox, as the media's behaviour in legitimizing it as something worthy of debate.

First of all, this is not actually a "controversy" in any legitimate sense. It was ginned up by Rush and the right wing noise machine to try to discredit a powerful spokesman for this issue, which is a very dangerous one for the Republican party.

[...]

Katie Couric becomes part of the problem when she validates these ginned up controversies or gives credence to accusations for which there is no evidence. She knows very well that nobody can really doubt Fox's sincerity. He's raised tens of millions of dollars for the cause and it's evident to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he's got this horrible disease. He should not have to prove that he's not faking his symptoms and it's unconscionable that the media is allowing the issue to be framed that way.

If it was necessary to refute Limbaugh's ridiculous claims, she should have had a leading expert in Parkinson's come on to discuss the symptoms and then interview Fox about the issue itself. Instead she presented it like a "he said/she said" by interrogating Michael J. Fox about whether it was proper for him to go ahead with the shoot when it appeared that he was going to look like a Parkinson's sufferer on camera. In doing so she validated the accusation that he might have been faking it when the only "evidence" was Limbaugh's noxious ravings.

If I don't like the outcome, the process must have been flawed.

That subject line is a pet snark of mine because there are so many people who, when faced with an outcome that they don't like and who then cry foul, cannot answer the question "what principle has been violated?". Glenn Greenwald, in his usual exemplary fashion (see below), addresses this topic in a post about the recent New Jersey Supreme Court decision entitled Rank ignorance posing as expertise.

... it is always so ironic -- and more than a little contempt-inspiring -- when people who proclaim to oppose "judicial activism" condemn a judicial decision based not on what the relevant constitutional law requires, but instead based on their personal opinion of the policy outcomes (or based on some informal "belief" about what courts should and shouldn't be "involved in," independent of what the Constitution requires). Such individuals are engaged in the very crux of the crime of judicial activism which they claim to despise (that is, deciding legal questions based not on law and precedent but on their own personal preferences).

[...]

It is impossible -- at least without falling into total recklessness -- to simply look at the result of a court case, decide whether or not you like it, and then pronounce it as either judicially sound or judicially irresponsible. Yet that is what virtually all of these commenters are doing who are condemning the New Jersey Supreme Court for "judicial activism." They do not even purport to have even a casual familiarity with any of the issues one would need to know about in order to form a responsible opinion. They really have no idea what they are talking about.

Note:
I read several blogs every day and I find it very difficult not to quote from Glenn Greenwald's every day too. I've become a big fan of his -- as a quick perusal of the Diagnarfl archives shows. In April I wrote: "Glenn Greenwald possesses two qualities which I delight in every day -- he is a really good writer and he has lots of worthwhile stuff to say on subjects that interest me." In May I wrote: "I think I cite Glenn Greenwald more than any other source. He's so knowledgeable, reasoned and articulate that he's always a treat to read." In October I wrote: "My goodness, but Glenn Greenwald is good -- articulate, knowledgeable, reasonable, principled and patient."

Let's hear it for Democracy promotion

From the WaPo we get yet another story chronicling the "success" being achieved on the "democracy front" in Iraq. Yes, so successful that citizens of neighbouring dictatorships are saying: no thanks. Yeah, that's a ringing endorsement: if that's what democracy is, we'd rather our dictatorship.

Horror at the bloodshed accompanying the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Iraq has accomplished what human rights activists, analysts and others say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been unable to do by himself: silence public demands for democratic reforms here.

The idea of the government as a bulwark of stability and security has long been the watchword of Syrian bureaucrats and village elders. But since Iraq's descent into sectarian and ethnic war -- and after Israel's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, on the other side of Syria -- even Syrian activists concede that the country's feeble rights movement is moribund.

Advocates of democracy are equated now with supporters of America, even "traitors," said Maan Abdul Salam, 36, a Damascus publisher who has coordinated conferences on women's rights and similar topics.

"Now, talking about democracy and freedom has become very difficult and sensitive," Salam said. "The people are not believing these thoughts anymore. When the U.S. came to Iraq, it came in the name of democracy and freedom. But all we see are bodies, bodies, bodies."

Ordinary people in Syria are hunkering down, and probably rightly so, said Omar Amiralay, a well-known Syrian filmmaker whose documentaries are quietly critical of Assad's one-family rule.

"If democracy brings such chaos in the region, and especially the destruction of society, as it did in Iraq and in Lebanon, it's absolutely normal, and I think it's absolutely a wise position from the people to be afraid to imagine how it would be in Syria," Amiralay said. "I think that people at the end said, 'Well, it is better to keep this government. We know them, and we don't want to go to this civil war, and to live this apocalyptic image of change, with civil war and sectarianism and blood.' "

In 2003, a few people in Damascus were bold enough to raise their glasses in cafes to toast the American tanks then rolling into Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They were dreaming of the changes that might happen next here, in the only remaining government led by the Baath Party, a prominent writer in the capital said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of being jailed a second time.

"The Americans came to Iraq to make it an example to the other countries to ask for change," the writer said. "But what happened was the opposite. Now everyone is saying we do not want to be like Iraq."

Olbermann smacks down Limbaugh

In a post I titled Sleazy, it told you about right-wing radio's hate-monger, Rush Limbaugh smearing Michael J. Fox. The incomparable Keith Olbermann took Limbaugh to task rather effectively (and, as usual, Crooks and Liars has the video) and shows just how reprehensible Limbaugh is. Olbermann pointedly gets in the line:

... should we not be deferring to Rush Limbaugh on this because he knows so much more about prescripton drugs than the rest of the nation combined, because, in fact, this may be his only area of expertise?

Manufacturing Chaos in Iraq

John Robb at Global Guerrillas:

TIME's Aparisim Ghosh reports that General Peter Pace belatedly has convened a group of young officers to answer the question: Why are there almost as many U.S. troops in Iraq now as there were two years ago when, in the interim, more than 300,000 Iraqi security forces have been recruited and trained?

I provided one answer to this question two years ago, when I wrote about loyalist paramilitaries (October 2004). The answer involved two elements. The first was outsourcing security, particularly in the British controlled south and Baghdad to "loyalist" paramilitaries. The second was incorporating paramilitary members into the new Iraqi security forces, particularly since they were more willing to fight than the general population. In classic US fashion (a reflection of the paucity of strategic thinking in our general staff), training to the numbers (quantity) and the early effectiveness of the unit in a fire fight (expediency) was deemed more important than loyalty of the unit to the government. The long term implications were not considered.

The result is that over the last two years the US military has actually created an environment that is conducive to a bloody and chaotic civil war. By partnering with paramilitaries, we accelerated the development of those forces that would take the war to the Sunnis.

What can we do? Nothing but leave. We can neither expect the leadership of US military to develop sound strategies for mitigating the damage done, nor can we reverse drivers of chaos that have been initiated over the last three years. This chaotic system is now running smoothly under the power of its own internal dynamics and continued intervention will only continue to worsen it. Withdrawal is the only option. The faster the better.

Iraq : the most Hellish place on Earth

Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, presents a damning indictment of the invasion and occupation of Iraq: "Armies claiming to bring prosperity have instead brought a misery worse than under the cruellest of modern dictators".

US and UK policy in Iraq is now entering its retreat phrase. Where there is no hope of victory, the necessity for victory must be asserted ever more strongly. This was the theme of yesterday's unreal US press conference in Baghdad, identical in substance to one I attended there three years ago. There is talk of staying the course, of sticking by friends and of not cutting and running. Every day some general or diplomat hints at ultimatums, timelines and even failure - as did the British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, on Monday. But officially denial is all. For retreat to be tolerable it must be called victory.

The US and British are covering their retreat. Operation Together Forward II has been an attempt, now failed, to pacify Baghdad during Ramadan. In Basra, Britain is pursuing Operation Sinbad to win hearts and minds that it contrives constantly to lose. This may be an advance on Kissinger's bombing of Laos to cover defeat in Vietnam and Reagan's shelling of the Shouf mountains to cover his 1984 Beirut "redeployment" (two days after he had pledged not to cut and run). But retreat is retreat, even if it is called redeployment. Every exit strategy is unhappy in its own way.

Over Iraq the spin doctors are already at work. They are telling the world that the occupation will have failed only through the ingratitude and uselessness of the Iraqis themselves. The rubbishing of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has begun in Washington, coupled with much talk of lowered ambitions and seeking out that foreign policy paradigm, "a new strongman". In May, Maliki signalled to Iraq's governors, commanders and militia leaders the need to sort out local differences and take control of their provincial destinies. This has failed. Maliki is only as strong as the militias he can control, which is precious few. He does not rule Baghdad, let alone Iraq. As for the militias, they are the natural outcome of the lawlessness caused by foreign occupation. They represent Iraqis desperately defending themselves from anarchy. It is now they who will decide Iraq's fate.

[...]

Keeping foreign troops in Iraq will not "prevent civil war", as if they were doing that now. They are largely preoccupied with defending their fortress bases, their presence offering target practice for insurgents and undermining any emergent civil authority in Baghdad or the provinces. American and British troops may be in occupation but they are not in power. They have not cut and run, but rather cut and stayed.

The wretched Iraqis must wait as their cities endure civil chaos until one warlord or another comes out on top. In the Sunni region it is conceivable that a neo-Ba'athist secularism might gain the ascendancy. In the bitterly contested Shia areas, a fierce fundamentalism is the likely outcome. As for Baghdad, it faces the awful prospect of being another Beirut.

This country has been turned by two of the most powerful and civilised nations on Earth into the most hellish place on Earth. Armies claiming to bring democracy and prosperity have brought bloodshed and a misery worse than under the most ruthless modern dictator. This must be the stupidest paradox in modern history. Neither America nor Britain has the guts to rule Iraq properly, yet they lack the guts to leave.

Blair speaks of staying until the job is finished. What job? The only job he can mean is his own.

Even if you're afraid in public, you can still do the right thing in the voting booth.

Driftglass sends a message to that "one out of ten", that fraction of the BushCo-enablers who "are softly sickened by what [they] have done".

We both know you don’t dare admit that the collection of liars and loser and war criminals and thugs who run this country is your Party. Not the exception.

We both know that drowned cities, blasted countries, looted treasuries and War Forever are not the accidental side effects of your ideology.

They ARE your ideology.

They are what 12 years of Conservativism Ascendant looks like.

You did this. Not Fat Ted Kennedy or Crazy Nancy Pelosi or some little Liberal blog full of big words.

You did it and you damned well know it, and by my estimation about one in ten of you are softly sickened by what you have done.

But being a Conservative, you’re weak: standing deep within the mob and screaming slogans for twenty years isn’t exactly an Iron Man training regimen for the courage muscle.

And courage is a muscle. One you have let atrophy almost beyond recognition by letting it loaf on the sofa, lazily suckling the Received Wisdom of Rush and mocking the poor and the weak and the different. Because we both know damned well that if your good good friends ever heard the slightest note of doubt or introspection in your voice, you’d be out.

You would suddenly become the fag. The freak. The Liberal. You would be exiled from you local Kool Kids Klub so fucking quick your head would spin fast enough to split atoms.

So fine, go ahead and call people me feminazi to your friends, but know the days of people like me tolerantly turning the other cheek are over (Letting the pig people get away with taking pride in being ignorant hateful assholes is sooo 20th century)

If it helps you puff up in front of the losers your run with, call me a fag.

Or a n*gger lover.

Or a tree hugger.

In public, make all the noisy protestations of Wingnut Faith you feel you have to make to keep your bigot street cred up inside your Rovian daisy chain.

In public.

But in private, Jesus, have a little pride. Salvage some small portion of your God Given dignity before it suffocates completely under two decades of knee-jerk dumbass flab.

Even though you can no longer bench press more than a kitten’s-worth of honor with it, at least take your courage muscle out for a short walk.

Just a brisk stroll down to the polling place on November 7th.

Because while you may feel you have to go along with the Archie Bunkers of the world in public, remember that in private you are still free to act like a man and take a a man’s responsibility for the mess your public self has made.

And privacy is why they put curtains on voting booths.

The Culture of Corruption

The Culture of Corruption (a.k.a the Republican Party) wants your vote on November 7th as an affirmation of its accomplishments and what it stands for. Unfortunately, Michael Petrelis has complied a list - sort of a rogues gallery of Republicans - that might make you want to reconsider.

Check it out here.

"Stay the course" ad

Crooks and Liars has the Democrats' latest "Stay the course" ad here. Pretty simple and effective... but only for those who recognize hypocrisy and are offended by it.

UPDATE: Keith Olbermann did a lovely put down of While House attempting to cut and run from their stay the course policy. Good old Crooks and Liars has this video too.

Iraq Forever

Well, it appears that GWB's distancing himself... from himself, was short-lived. At his press conference he, rather incoherently, told us all that America would be in Iraq forever i.e. until the job is done (whatever that means). So, the flip-flop from "stay the course" 24/7 for three years became "we were never stay the course" and has now (at least temporarily) become "Stay the Course on Goals, Cut and Run on Methods". I can't make sense of it and, quite frankly, I don't think that there is sense to be made. I still think that it's stay the course soley to save face for GWB. Glenn Greenwald is equally sure that America is in Iraq forever and that GWB doesn't make any sense:

The President's Press Conference, devoted almost exclusively to Iraq, just concluded, and the internal contradictions and incoherent claims are literally too numerous to chronicle. But there really are only a few points worth making:

First, the President repeatedly defined "losing" as "leaving before the job is done" -- "the job" being the creation of a stable, unified Iraqi government that can defend itself. And we're not leaving before the job is done, which means that we are staying forever -- or at least as far as the eye can see into the future (or until the President leaves office).

[...]

Second, the President's remarks illustrated more vividly than ever before the towering incoherence at the heart of this whole project. According to the President, the reason that it is so important that we "win" -- meaning creating a stable Iraqi government -- is because American security depends upon the creation of an Iraq that is a "partner of the U.S. in the war on terror." But there is a complete disconnect -- and there always has been -- between stabilizing the Iraqi government and having a "partner of the U.S. in the war on terror."

The only "partner" this Iraqi government is going to have in the "war on terror" is Iran, not the U.S. (especially if we ever actually left), and the fact that it relies for its very survival on the lawless Shiite militias and death squads which are supposedly the Enemy -- and that they expressly refuse to disband them (because they can't and don't want to) -- reveals just how absurd is the idea that our security will be enhanced by entrenching this Iran-loving, Shiite fundamentalist, death-squad-deploying government. And why would the Iraqi government risk everything it would need to risk in order to expel Al Qaeda from operating within its borders? Isn't far more likely that, especially given its other vulnerabilities, they would reach some sort of accord of co-existence?

Put another way, even if stabilizing this Government were something other than a sad and transparent pipe dream -- even if we could achieve that goal by spending hundreds of billions of dollars more and squandering thousands and thousands of more lives -- we will have nothing to show for it other than having replaced a regime that hated Iran and Al Qaeda with a regime that is Iran's strongest ally and quite possibly tolerant of Al Qaeda (or worse).

That's the most tragic part of what we have done -- we can't possibly achieve the goals we ostensibly have. And if we ever did manage to do so, the situation we will have created will likely be worse than it was before the invasion. That might be the very definition of a strategic disaster -- starting a discretionary war in which you can't possibly achieve your goals and, even if you did achieve them (i.e., best case scenario), you create a situation making matters worse for yourselves (while generating unprecedented resentment in most of the world).

Terrorist propaganda, courtesy of the RNC

Keith Olbermann launches another powerful diatribe against BushCo, this time because they hypocritically broadcast terrorist propaganda while decrying CNN showing a film of what's happening in Iraq, claiming that it aids the terrorists. Crooks and Liars has the video and transcript here. As SilentPatriot says: "Keith issued arguably his most powerful Special Comment yet tonight". Listen to the whole thing.

Excerpts:

You have adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen for the Republican National Committee.

‘To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear'

By this definition, the people who put these videos together: first, the terrorists and then, the administration, whose shared goal is to scare you into panicking instead of thinking, they are the ones terrorizing you.

By this definition, the leading terrorist group in this world right now is al Qaeda, but the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party.

Eleven presidents ago, the chief executive reassured us that ‘we have nothing to fear, but fear itself.' His distant successor has wasted his administration, insisting there is nothing we can have but fear itself.

[...]

This administration has derived benefit and power from terrorizing the very people it claims to be protecting from terror. It may be the oldest trick in the political book: scare people into believing they are in danger and only you can save them. Lyndon Johnson used it to bury Barry Goldwater. Joe McCarthy leaped from obscurity on its back. And now the legacy has come to President George W. Bush.

[...]

Setting aside the fact that your government has done nothing else for those five years but pat itself on the back about terror, while waging pointless war on the wrong enemy in Iraq and waging war on the cherished freedoms in America, just on this subject of counter-terrorism, sir, yours is the least competent government in time of crisis in this country's history.

These are the stakes indeed, Mr. President. You do not know what you are doing. And the commercial, the one about which Zawahiri might say, "hey, pretty good, we love your choice of font style," all that further needs to be said about that is to add three words to Shakespeare. Mr. President, you and that advertisement of terror are full of sound and fury, signifying–and competent at–nothing.

"The Economy" Versus Your Money

Matthew Yglesias wonders about "typical people's perceptions" about financial things.

An astoundingly blinkered New York Times article on why Republican candidates aren't getting more of a boost from "glowing economic statistics" takes an astounding thirty paragraphs (admittedly, many of them short) to consider the possibility that "Rather than celebrate the stock market’s gains and the overall growth of the economy, many voters are worried about the wages of ordinary workers, which have just started to improve after several years of falling short or barely keeping up with inflation."

Yes, yes, shocking but true -- typical people's perceptions of the economy are driven more by the well-being of typical people than on aggregate macroeconomic indicators. Who'd a thunk it?

Sleazy

Right-wingers keep establishing new lows in their desperation as the campaign draws to a close link a noose around their necks.

ThinkProgress tells us about drug-abuse expert, Rush Limbaugh, attacking Michael J. Fox:

Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly attacked actor Michael J. Fox for appearing in television campaign ads promoting stem cell research. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, appears “visibly racked by tremors” in the ads.

“He is exaggerating the effects of the disease,” Limbaugh told listeners yesterday. “He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act. … This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.”

According to the National Parkinson’s Foundation, Limbaugh has no idea what he’s talking about. The Washington Post reports:

[I]n an interview in Ladies Home Journal’s September edition, Fox said he was taking a medication that causes jerking, fidgeting and other abnormal involuntary movements, known as dyskinesia. Fox said he was taking another medication to lessen those side affects.

An official of the National Parkinson Foundation said movements like those exhibited by Fox are the result of taking medication to treat the disease, which would otherwise result in rigidity.

“When you see someone with those movements, it’s not because they have not taken medication but because they probably have taken medication for some time,” the official said. “If you don’t take the medication, then you freeze.”

Limbaugh continued the assault today, calling Fox’s video “an attack ad” that is “filled with disinformation about embryonic stem cell research.”

From A.P. we see a report about what might be called a threatened "bitch-slap".

Thomas Rankin, the Libertarian running for Wyoming's lone U.S. House seat, said Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo., threatened to slap him after a televised debate.

During a debate Sunday that also included Democrat Gary Trauner, Cubin and Rankin had a testy exchange over campaign contributions Cubin received from former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas.

Rankin, who has multiple sclerosis and uses an electric wheelchair, said Monday night in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that the confrontation occurred immediately after the debate.

"My aide and I were packing up to leave the debate, and Barbara walked over to me and said, 'If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you across the face.' That's quote-unquote," Rankin said.

Digby:

I knew the Republicans would react like animals if they ever found themselves on the losing end of an election. I knew they would engage in rampant lying, race baiting and sexist stereotyping. I was a tiny bit surprised that they would support 52-year-old-man on teenager sex, but it didn't shock me.

But I honestly didn't think they'd go after the physically disabled. First Tammy Duckworth's opponent accuses the multi amputee Iraq veteran of "cutting and running." Then Rush takes a shot at Michael J. Fox. Now the GOP congresswoman who holds Dick Cheney's old seat says to her opponent, a wheelchair bound MS sufferer, "If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you across the face."

I shouldn't be shocked, now that I think about it. They had no problem questioning severely wounded war hero Max Cleland's courage back in 2002. (In 2004, the ever so lovely Ann Coulter even claimed he had wounded himself in combat.)

These guys engage in gutter politics even when they don't have to so it's not surprising that they would turn into barbaric political terrorists in the face of serious losses. We'll see if they can stroke the nation's id and eke out a victory in these close races one more time.

Reality has a well-known liberal bias

Anyone who reads my blog already knows that I am a big fan of Glenn Greenwald for one set of reasons and of Stephen Colbert for another. Today, Glenn quotes Stephen in an excellent post about the right-wing commentators and pundits (themselves part of a shrinking minority) who keep asserting that the anti-Bush majority are the fringe. I have written about this before here and here but, as usual, Glenn does a better job here.

The people who proclaim that The Terrorists pose an imminent an existential threat to our Republic and that the "war" we are waging against them is of unparalleled historical importance are wildly overrepresented on television, in newspapers and in the blogosphere. That is, unquestionably, a fringe view, as is the notion that staying in Iraq until we achieve "victory" is some moral and strategic imperative. Those are the views of extremists, of people who constitute a small and shrinking minority of the country. The more exposure their views get, the more they are rejected.

[...]

And those who strut around as defenders of mainstream American values and beliefs -- and who baselessly claim the mantle of serious foreign policy thinkers whom Americans exclusively trust -- have been exposed as fringe and radical figures who represent a shrinking minority. Regardless of whether Democrats take over the Congress in a couple of weeks, we are clearly witnessing the collapse not just of the Bush presidency -- that has been a fait accompli for some time -- but also the wholesale rejection of the defining premises on which it has been based.

[...]

There is really no other way to describe this mindset other than by quoting Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Bush followers present a real challenge to satirists like Colbert because -- as shown by this intended satire, which is actually an almost verbatim recitation of Hewitt's claim, they are often beyond satire, particularly when it comes to their reality-denying abilities.

The Tool Man

GWB is the Tool Man in so many ways. I mean... what a tool! I know that this is immature of me... but, My Gawd, this man is a disgrace. Remember Peeance and Freeance and the The Internets, well now we have The Google, thanks to ThinkProgress:

Transcript:

HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

Discovery

Glenn Greenwald, reminiscing about his days as a litigator, tells us that the discovery phase was the part he liked best and he (don't we all?) looks forward to the time when the clear light of day may shine into the dark recesses of BushCo's record and their wrong-doing might be exposed for even the 39% to see. I feel like Donny Ray's mother in John Grisham's Rainmaker when she answers the question: what do you want to get out of the verdict? Her answer is something to the effect that it's not the money. Money won't bring Donny Ray back (nor will impeachment bring any dead innocents back to life). She wants the insurance company to be exposed as being wrong. Public shaming, powerful stuff.

... the discovery process almost always uncovers critical, hidden facts that reveal what really happened, and it is virtually always the case that there are documents or testimony even more incriminating than can be predicted. People resist, and lie under oath, and try to conceal things even in the face of disclosure obligations, but compelled disclosure has a way -- sometimes slowly and incrementally, but inexorably -- of uncovering the truth and exposing wrongdoing.

In my view, more than anything else, this will be the value of a Democratic takeover of at least one of the houses of Congress. As much wrongdoing as we have learned about on the part of Bush administration already, it is almost certainly the case that there is much, much more that we don't know about, but ought to.

[...]

It is difficult to overstate how crucial that is for exposing what the Republican Party has become and undermining those who control it. The administration has been able to ward off even the most incriminating accusations and disclosures because they control the primary sources of information. They can deny anything, selectively release misleading exculpatory information, and operate in the darkest shadows and behind the highest walls of secrecy. As a result, disclosures about what they have done are always piecemeal and easily obscured. But full-fledged hearings will shine a bright light on what the administration has really been doing, and that will enable the public to get a full picture of the true state of affairs.

[...]

They [BushCo] know that their conduct cannot withstand the scrutiny of truth-finding processes and that is why the stakes in this election are so high for them. Nobody thinks that a Democratic takeover of Congress is going to result in fundamental legislative changes or policy over the next two years, but what it will do is enable Americans to learn the truth about what the administration and its allies have really been doing for five years, and that will have a far greater and more constructive impact than any single policy change or bill.

GWB: Colossal Failure

I think we've all known people (or, worse still, have been people) who refuse to admit the truth that they've screwed up horribly, because to do so would be so embarrassing. So, they just keep denying it, lying about it, so as to avoid (they hope) or postpone (they fear) the consequences of their failure. Most of us have learned that it's best to come clean early. We get the unpleasant part over with sooner and we avoid living in fear of exposure for our failure but, more importantly, we avoid being found out to have been a liar too, which is often worse than the original misdeed. Indeed, people are more apt to forgive penitents who admit their failures than they are to forgive those who have lied to them.

That being said, it's one thing when the costs of these human failings are borne by the culprit but it's quite another when it's an innocent party that bears the costs. Which brings me to GWB's pathological incapacity to admit what virtually everyone else already knows; that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a colossally bad idea and a total FUBAR. What is so reprehensible about his unwillingness (so typical of his personal history of business failures) to take responsibility for his failures is that it's resulting in people's lives being lost and ruined on an ever increasing scale. This is despicable beyond forgiveness. He's causing people to die in the hopes that he can avoid or at least postpone his embarrassment. Let that sink in and you will probably find yourself, like me, damn near speechless.

Josh Marshall understands and has this to say:

Stay the course. We never said 'stay the course'. Our Iraq policy is stupid. No, sorry, I didn't mean that. I don't know what I was thinking. As we watch what, in the Star Trek universe, they might refer to as the 'synaptic breakdown' of the president's Iraq policy, it's worth remembering why President Bush, short of being forced kicking and screaming, will never and can never withdraw American forces from Iraq.

Fundamentally, it doesn't have to do with military strategy or ideology. It has to do with coming to grips with the monumental failure he has wrought, which of course he can never do.

Setting aside the vast costs in human life, national treasure and regional stability, I see President Bush's adventure as a failed business venture, a start-up that went bad -- an analogy that, come to think of it, he could probably relate to.

A failed company can lose money for a very long time before it makes money and becomes a success. It only really fails when the investors decide that the problems aren't transient but terminal. They decide to stop throwing good money after bad. And then that's it.

If we look at the matter in those icy terms, that moment of reckoning came at least two years ago, certainly before the 2004 election. By then it was depressingly clear the whole matter was never going to come to a good end. But President Bush got the country to reinvest and the country has kept on doing so since then with some factor of lives, money and time.

As long as that's the case President Bush and his supporters can keep up the increasingly ludicrous pretense that Iraq isn't a horrendous failure but simply a work in progress that hasn't been given the necessary time to work.

In fact, I think if you look back over the last two years, President Bush has been engaged in what amounts to a cynical game of chicken with his fellow Americans.

Think of the president as a failed or deadbeat entrepreneur (again, not such a stretch) who's already lost his investors a ton of money. He goes back to them and says, 'Okay, fine. You think I'm a moron and a screw-up who lost you guys a ton of money. Fine. But do you really want to finally, totally, conclusively kiss that $300 billion goodbye. You wanna just totally call it quits? Admit it's a total loss? What about giving me just another $10 billion and maybe somehow I'll actually pull this off? Or, since that's just not gonna happen, a mere $10 billion to put off for six months having to write the whole thing off as a loss, having to come to grips once and for all with the fact that all the money's gone and the whole thing's a bust?'

That's really what this is about. And I think we all know it pretty much across the political spectrum. In this way, paradoxically, the very magnitude of the president's failure has become his tacit ally. It's just such a big thing to come to grips with. And reinvesting in the president's folly, even after any hope of recouping the money is gone, carries the critical fringe benefit of sustaining our own collective and increasingly threadbare denial.

But President Bush's interests are not the same as the country's. He's maxed out, in for 100%. If Iraq is a failure, a mistake, then the same words will be written right after his name in the history books. A country, though, can take missteps and mistakes, course corrections and dead ends, and move on. We've done it before and we'll do it again.

But President Bush can't and won't withdraw from Iraq because when he does, under the current conditions, he'll sign the epitaph, the historical death warrant for his presidency. Unlike in the past there are no family friends to pawn the failure off on and let them take the loss. It's all his. So he'll keep kicking the can down the road forever.

Hung up on sex

Have you noticed that Republicans are really hung up on sex? They certainly don't give much weight to competence or even honesty -- you can be awfully incompetent and corrupt and not make a Republican blink but, man will they twist their knickers into a knot and obsess over anything remotely involving sex. Of course, the media loves to cooperate with them in this as the media loves to titilate as they tut-tut.

Much has been written about the RNC decision to empty its $100 million war chest to flood the airwaves with smutty personal attacks on Democrats and the accusations (as Billmon shows below) don't have to be true as long as they're sordid. As I said before about the Foley business, it got the attention it did because it involved sex (period).

Pathetic. But more pathetic still if it proves successful.

Billmon:

The name of the end game, it seems, is "localizing" the races by smearing Democratic challengers with the products of the Republican oppo research extravaganza, backed up by that $100 million the Emperor Karl was taking about. This clearly was part of the plan all along, but what's striking is the degree to which the reptiles have scoured the closets for any hint of sexual misconduct (or just plain conduct) on the part of their intended targets. And so we get:

• A state GOP commercial in Wisconsin's 8th Congressional District that tries to link Democrat Steve Kagen to a child rapist. (They were represented by the same lawyer in two different cases -- a bill collection suit in Kagen's case.)

• In the neighboring Wisconsin 3rd, the GOP candidate has recycled an ad first used North Carolina wing nut Vernon Robertson, accusing his opponent of voting to fund studies of Vietnamese prostitutes and the mastubatory practices of old men (few and far between, I could have told them.)

• I'll let the LA Times tell the next one: "[Tennessee GOP Senate candidate Bob] Corker, in a rare move, on Friday publicly urged the Republican National Committee to withdraw a new ad that features a blond white woman -- presumably an actress -- cooing into the camera that she met [Democrat Harold Ford Jr.] at a party sponsored by Playboy magazine. (Did we forget to mention that she was a white woman?)

• And then there's my favorite: In New York's 24th district, lizard central (a.ka. the National Republican Congressional Committee) has an ad up accusing the Democratic candidate of billing the taxpayers for a telephone sex chat -- apparently because he dialed a wrong number.

Those are the just the ones I've heard about this weekend. I imagine there are more out there hitting the airwaves in closely contested districts -- or will before Nov. 7 rolls around. And then there are the purely gratuitous sexual attacks on non-candidates such as Cindy Sheehan.

[...]

But right now, for the Rovian machine, it simply means picking up whatever sexual mud happens to be at hand and throwing it against the wall to see if it will stick. Will it work? Probably not -- at least, not well enough to hold back the Democratic wave. As the Clinton impeachment saga showed, aiming directly at your opponent's personal sex life is dicey. It can make voters uneasy about their own hidden habits.

Still, I have to laugh when I see or hear media analysts -- even earnest liberal ones -- warning that some particularly nasty sexual ad may backfire, even as they help publicize it. In some specific cases that may be true, as for example, with the ridiculous sex phone claim cited above. But more generally they're simply helping disseminate the message that all politicians -- and politics in general -- are sexually sleazy. And at this point that's probably the best the Rovians can hope for.

[...]

Update 6:40 PM ET: I'm imagining an epitaph: "Here lies the American republic, victim of modern communications technology and its own sexual puritanism."

Hell And Back

TPM Reader DK tells us about a column by Chris Rose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about the continuing Katrina aftermath which, as DK says "breaks your heart. But it also makes me mad as hell". Read it here.

Katrina has become a post-apocalyptic American nightmare for those living in the disaster zone, or dying there, or neither living nor dying but stumbling through the carnage like zombies.

Chris Rose is a columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. His columns since Katrina and the ensuing flood of New Orleans have been an unblinking look at what passes for life in the Crescent City. At times angry, bitter, and despondent, yet still mustering occassional hopefulness, Rose, through his column, has been a lifeline for those who want to know what is really happening in the city beyond the narrow frame of TV cameras.

The personal toll on those covering the storm and its aftermath has been too little documented. The Times-Pic, whose main office was flooded in the storm, forcing its temporary evacuation, has faced challenges that no modern American newspaper has ever endured. A few weeks ago, one its photographers attempted suicide by cop. Fortunately for all involved, he was well-known and respected by the police, and they showed a level of restraint that was heroic, even as he tried to provoke them into killing him by using his car as a weapon.

Today, Chris Rose has a column that describes in agonizing detail his own descent into depression last fall as the days after the storm turned to weeks and months. Like most of us would, he resisted entreaties from his family and co-workers to get help. He went a year without treatment, 360 straight days of crying. It is, as such things are, a very personal tale. One man. One family. One city.

It breaks your heart. But it also makes me mad as hell. Mad that this slow-motion disaster of broken levees and shattered lives happened in the first place. Mad that the disaster is still happening, a feckless governmental response dragging out the misery and the suffering just as if the fetid water were still pouring through the levee breaches. Mad that in the face of this overwhelming catastrophe at home we are spending by some estimates $246 million a day to create a catastrophe in Iraq. Mad that in light of all of this ineptitude and indifference the party in power has a chance, a very real chance, of retaining some or even all of its power in the first national election since Katrina.

But Chris Rose did not intend for his column today to be a springboard to a political rant. It is just his personal story. You ought to go read it.

The First Lemming Over A Cliff Is No Leader

I like this "over the cliff" metaphor whether it's in a car (here) or just running lemming-like into the void the way Tristero uses it here when debunking Frank Rich's notion that GWB is a leader.

Say whatever you want about George W. Bush, but he is a leader only in the same way that the 9/11 hijackers were brave.

When the term is used in modern American political discourse, "leader" does not have the standard generalized meaning of "a person in authority" regardless of whether they are good or bad. When Americans use the term "leader" in reference to their own politics, they are not talking about Kim Jong Il or Vladimir Lenin. Americans are invoking the imagery of great American political and cultural leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Coltrane.

First and foremost, a leader persuades others, by proposing sensible ideas in an honest and convincing rhetorical voice.

A leader is NOT someone who doesn't care "if half the country despised him along the way." A leader is NOT someone who hides a tyrannical agenda under the skirts of priests and behind cheesy bromides like "compassionate conservatism." A leader is NOT someone who does exactly as s/he pleases.

Bush does not persuade, he does what he wants, and if anybody stands in the way, he ignores or blackmails them. His ideas are not sensible, but nuts. He is thoroughly dishonest and his inability to articulate even the simplest ideas is a national embarassment.

In addition, a leader recognizes when a given course of action, especially one that he himself endorsed, is failing. A leader takes responisiblity for failures as well as successes. Bush, of course, is notorious both for following his delusions until they lead into total fiasco and for simply refusing to recognize that he ever made a single mistake.

In American public discourse, rightly or wrongly, words like "leader" and "brave" are typically descriptive of people with positive virtues. Mahatma Gandhi was a leader. Idi Amin was not. The students in Tiananmen Square were brave, the man who assasinated Rabin was not.

By drawing a direct comparison between Bush and the 9/11 hijackers, am I saying that Bush is a religious fanatic in the grip of dangerous narcissistic delusions of grandeur and who has no regard for the death of innocents?

You bet I am. And that is not what Americans mean by a leader, Mr. Rich.

GWB distances himself from... GWB

ThinkProgress:

During an interview today on ABC’s This Week, President Bush tried to distance himself from what has been his core strategy in Iraq for the last three years. George Stephanopoulos asked about James Baker’s plan to develop a strategy for Iraq that is “between ’stay the course’ and ‘cut and run.’”

Bush responded, "We’ve never been stay the course, George!"

ThinkProgress has the video here but, unfortunately for BushCo, they also have the transcripts of a sampling of what GWB has been saying for the last three years and it's pretty clear that the Flip-flopper-in-Chief is at it again.

BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]

BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. [8/4/05]

BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03]

BUSH: And my message today to those in Iraq is: We’ll stay the course. [4/13/04]

BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in Iraq. And that’s why when we say something in Iraq, we’re going to do it. [4/16/04]

BUSH: And so we’ve got tough action in Iraq. But we will stay the course. [4/5/04]

UPDATE: Billmon has many more quotes from the Liar-in-Chief here:

So wrong about so much for so long

I've written before that those pundits who turned out to have been "so wrong about so much for so long" shouldn't be listened to, or at least, they should be treated with skepticism, if not outright contempt. Well, Bill Maher rips into think tanks (think tanks, pundits, what's the diff) in such a delightful manner that I thought I'd share it with you. Crooks and Liars has the video here.

Sample:

Maher: And finally, new rule in two parts: (A) You can't call yourself a think tank if all your ideas are stupid; and (B) If you're someone from one of these think tanks that dreamed up the Iraq War and who predicted that we'd be greeted as liberators, and that we wouldn't need a lot of troops, and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, that the WMD's would be found, that the looting wasn't problematic, that the mission was accomplished, that the insurgency was in its last throes, that things would get better after the people voted, after the government was formed, after we got Saddam, after we got his kids, after we got Zarqawi, and that whole bloody mess wouldn't turn into a civil war, you have to stop making predictions.

Blogger's eating my posts!

I'm going to give up posting until tomorrow. I've already lost one. This is the first time I've been able to get a "Create Post" window in hours and I'm not sure I'll be able to publish it. Wish me luck. See you tomorrow...

From TPM Reader RR's comments on Iraq ( I like the metaphor):

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were in the front seat.

They drove the Iraq car off a cliff.

Then they turned to the Dems in the back seat.

And said the Dems couldn’t complain unless they could come up with a plan of their own.

The tragedy is that there is no rational hope for a plan (any plan) that will work well. When you’ve driven the car off the cliff, your range of options is quite limited. We’re in the hands of gravity at this point.

Your words are lies, Sir.

Another Olbermann gem -- this time on the travesty that is the Military Commissions Act. Crooks and Liars has the video and a transcript. Check it out here:

Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

[...]

But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.

You, sir, have now befouled that spring.

You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.

You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.

For the most vital… the most urgent… the most inescapable of reasons.

And — again, Mr. Bush — all of them, wrong.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere — anywhere — but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.

And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria… ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.

And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" — exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?

[...]

Your words are lies, Sir.

They are lies, that imperil us all.

McCain Watch - 5

Lots of people have written about McCain's latest nonsense about Iraq on Hardball with Chris Matthews this week. McCain said that we needed 100,000 more troops in Iraq (without instituting a draft) when it seems that everyone else knows the U.S. can't sustainably keep the 140,000 they already have there. He's delusional... and dangerous!

As Digby says:

John McCain is a bigger warmonger than George W. Bush, always has been. The only difference is that he doesn't believe, as the administration does, that it can be done without a national mobilization. (Like most nationalists he feels that such a mobilization is good for the national character.) The change in policy will involve spending more money and putting more young people in battle, not less.

Bush's warmaking desires have been restrained by his unwillingness to put the country on a real war footing or create a coherent military strategy. McCain will have no such restraint and may very well be the man who sets this country on a militaristic binge the likes of which we haven't seen before.

Glenn Greenwald has this to say about "the very serious, responsible, straight-talking national security guardian, John McCain":

So, to recap McCain's position: (1) in order to win in Iraq, we need to expand our military by 100,000 more troops; (2) we don't have anywhere near 100,000 troops to send to Iraq, and nobody suggests that we do; (3) a draft is absolutely unnecessary.

I don't think McCain even knows what to say about Iraq at this point -- the Straight Talker refuses admit that it was wrong because he was one of the loudest cheerleaders for it, but there are also plainly no viable options to change what is occurring -- so all he does is babble incoherently about it. As best I can tell, his position is that we need 100,000 more troops to win, and that young Americans one day are going to realize this and there will be a spontaneous and massive wave of volunteers eager to go to Iraq and fight in combat there because they will realize -- like McCain and the President do -- just how Very Important it is that we win.

[...]

McCain complained that Matthews' line of questioning meant that his "bias is starting to show." Apparently, if one demonstrates that McCain's Plan for Victory is based on absurd fantasy, that is "biased." A reporter should only sit by and heap praise on McCain as the responsible, serious Leader that he is.

[...]

Advocating this war because one believed -- mistakenly -- that it would produce certain positive results imposes a certain level of culpability for what has happened. But continuing to advocate this war while knowing -- as McCain and so many like him do -- that (a) it is achieving nothing positive and (b) there are no viable and realistic options for achieving anything positive, places one in a different moral universe entirely.

John McCain's insistence that we're going to win in Iraq because the additional troops that we need to win are going to magically and spontaneously appear in a sudden outpouring of patriotic courage is a disgusting joke, but, as Americans have largely realized, that is what the Iraq war has become. Only the national media and the hardest-core Bush followers continue to cling to the fantasy that the people who brought us this disaster and continue to justify it with incoherence and fiction of this sort are the serious, responsible foreign policy leaders. Their foreign policy views are adolescent and completely incoherent - the very opposite of responsible and serious.

[...]

Regardless of the numbers, McCain is clearly a proponent of adding additional troops to Iraq, but never says where we will get those troops either, what they will do, or how many we need (if, in fact, he isn't claiming -- as Matthews (and I) understood him to be -- that we need 100,000 troops in Iraq). Unveiling a plan for Victory in a disastrous war where nobody has any idea what you're actually advocating is not the behavior of a responsible or serious leader.

Short Takes

Digby makes good points about "values and morality":

As I look at all these issues that have come to the forefront in the last few years, I'm struck by how dumb it is to let the Republicans claim the mantle of values and morality. People who believe that torture is ok or that it's better to let blastocysts be thrown away rather than use them to save living breathing human beings are immoral. If they want to play politics on that field, I say bring it on.

And about BushCo and the religious right:

Rove is a cynical political operative and Bush is an idiot whose only religious commitment is to the idea that he was anointed by God to follow his "instincts" (which amounts to running the country by coin flipping.) I honestly don't know anyone who thinks the big money boys of the Republican Party give a damn about religion except to the extent it brings them votes.

What we did believe is that the religious right wants to build a theocracy and that seems indisputable to me. Of course they do. And because they are an enormously valuable consituency they are managing to incrementally blur the lines between church and state and pass laws of a theocratic nature or that conflict with progressive values.

And about the Republican campaign message:

The argument seems to be, "yes we've fucked up, and we've fucked up so badly that there are no good choices. Do you want to take a chance that the Democrats will fuck it up too?"

ThinkProgress shares some reasons to be outraged:

Just last month, the Senate Intelligence Committee — chaired by Bush-ally Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) — concluded that there was absolutely no relationship between Saddam Hussein and the late al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Nevertheless, in an interview with a South Bend, Indiana television station yesterday, Vice President Cheney falsely asserted that Zarqawi was proof of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. Watch it:
-----
Iraq’s Prime Minister had ordered the country’s health ministry to “stop providing mortality figures to the United Nations, jeopardizing a key source of information on the number of civilian war dead in Iraq.”
-----
President Bush recess-appointed former coal industry executive Richard Stickler to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration. The Senate had twice refused to confirm him “because of his troubling mine safety record — the mines he managed from 1989 to 1996 incurred injury rates double the national average.”
-----
“Moving quickly to implement” the new Military Commissions Act, the Bush administration “has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.”
-----
This week, on the request of Rep. Ray LaHood (R-IL), Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) suspended a Democratic staffer’s access to classified information. Hoekstra said the suspension would remain in place pending a review to determine if that staffer leaked a classified National Intelligence Estimate to the New York Times.

Today on Fox News, LaHood said, “I’ll tell you why I did it. The reason I did it was because Jane Harman released the Duke Cunningham — who sat on our Intelligence committee — report.” That report, which detailed the misconduct of Cunningham, who is now serving a jail term, was not classified.

A Fox anchor asked, “So, it’s payback?” LaHood responded, “There are some of us on the other side who can equally play politics, and I’m not afraid to do it.”

Do you think that this might explain why it has been leaked that Harman is under DOJ investigation?