Contemptible Media

Atrios points out for us what many (like Bob Somerby) have been saying for a long time: the people who cover politics in America are a disgrace. They are preening, sneering lightweights who care about nothing but themselves. They pleasure themselves with trivia and they have been the enablers of the wanton corruption that passes for government these days.

Quoting Charles Pierce at Altercation:

Here's what I think -- the majority of people who cover national politics believe that history is whatever happened in the MSNBC Green Room 15 minutes earlier. I believe the campaign is covered by people with a completely unjustified sense of their own superiority, since not many of them understand or ever care about most of the issues, much less the horrendous bills that are going to come due upon whichever of these poor sods winds up with the job. I believe these people care more about their reputation around the bar at the Wayfarer in Manchester than they do about the interests of the people they purportedly serve. And, were I an editor, and someone brought me a story about John Edwards' hair or Mitt Romney's skin, that person would do it once. The second time, the lazy bastard would find himself typing bowling agate on Wednesday night.

Atrios:

Reading Joe Klein lately I was reminded of something Oliver wrote recently:

A long time ago I used to believe that a lot of these people were just talking over my head, their discourse too lofty for a regular guy like myself. But that isn't true. They're just stupid.

Part of the problem we face is that too many people fail to understand this. A lot of our elite scribblers and chatters are just truly and profoundly stupid.

What's worth filibustering?

Digby, in commenting on the Senate Dems new strategy, tells us about the last thing that Republicans were willing to filibuster.

This is a good start. The American people are not aware that the Republicans are standing in the way of every piece of important legislation before the nation and the press is, as usual, failing to tell them. Indeed, the Democrats in congress are being blamed for the GOP's obstruction. The Dems need to draw them a picture and this is one way to do it.

As Rick Perlstein notes here, the last time the wingnuts felt something was so important they were willing to go to the floor and talk till they turned blue was a long, long time ago:

History buffs, and those with long memories, will recall the last time conservatives found something important enough to stand up and obstruct all night long: the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The one that outlawed discrimination in public accomodations.

We'll have to see if protecting their lame-duck loser's Iraq policy is as important to them as Jim Crow was to an earlier generation. You never know with these people, it just might be.

None of the above

Ah, yes... Good Old Mr. None-of-the-Above. This is pathetic... but funny:

From Josh Marshall:

I must say this really does make my day. "None of the Above" has surged into the lead in the new GOP primary poll out from AP/Ipsos. The only thing funnier is that this is even surprising. McCain's campaign has imploded. Giuliani's the fading pro-choice contender, which is sort of redundant. People seem to be catching on to the fact that Fred Thompson is a one-term senator and lobbyist not Reagan 2.0. And that leaves you with Mitt Romney, the avatar of transcendent phoney-baloneyism.

Okay, I'm done.

Double Gee

I've said it before. Just read Glenn Greenwald... every day.

Re: McCain's freefall:

It is not support for the Iraq war which dooms a GOP presidential candidacy, but the opposite: any real questioning of the wisdom of the war or any agitating for withdrawal or opposition to Bush's commitment would immediately and single-handedly destroy the viability of a GOP candidacy.

[...]

The war in Iraq remains popular with the GOP base. They want to stay and keep waging war. They would immediately turn against anyone who advocated withdrawal or even questioned the wisdom of staying. The Republican Party continues to be the Party of the Iraq War, and -- directly contrary to the conventional wisdom that is arising -- loyal support for the Iraq War is an absolute pre-requisite for winning the nomination.

[...]

To claim that McCain's unapologetic support of the Iraq War is what destroyed his candidacy is to misapprehend completely the nature of the Republican Party base. What they demand, first and foremost, is unwavering loyalty to the Cause, and that Cause is shaped predominantly by Middle East militarism, beginning with Iraq.

[...]

Those who want to claim -- based on "impressions" and anecdotes and "feelings" -- that the rank-and-file of the Republican Party has turned against the war must confront actual empirical evidence proving the opposite. It is hard to overstate the distance between the views of the Republican Party on George Bush and the Iraq war and the rest of the country.

From the CBS News poll (.pdf) released at the end of June (Republican responses in yellow):

Republicans overwhelmingly approve of the job Bush is doing (66-23%):

They even overwhelmingly support the way Bush is handling Iraq (59-33%):

There is a huge gap between Republicans who think the surge is working and those who think it is not working (42-5%, with 41% believing it has had no impact):

And the vast majority of Republicans favors either keeping the current troop levels in Iraq or increasing troops levels (60-32%):

Whatever else is true, the Republican Party is not a party where a candidate's pro-war, pro-Bush position will doom the candidacy. Exactly the opposite is true. The GOP remains the Party of Bush and the Party of the Iraq War.

Haircuts... again.

UPDATE II: On his Atlantic Monthly blog, Marc Ambinder makes a common argument that I find completely bewildering -- namely, that the Edwards hair story was a legitimate news story because "the centerpiece of Edwards's campaign is his anti-poverty efforts" and "[h]is credibility as a messenger comes into question when he spends money ostentatiously." I hope Ambinder or anyone else who believes this will address the following.

Many of our nation's greatest advocates for the poor -- including Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt -- were born wealthy and lived rich lifestyles from infancy onward. Was their "credibility" as poverty advocates undermined as a result? By contrast, Edwards lived most of his early life in extreme poverty. Doesn't it stand to reason that he understands those issues and has an authentic commitment to them as a result of his own personal experiences, even if he ended up financially successful, solely as a result of his own efforts, later in life?

Beyond that, every politician claims to understand and be devoted to the plight of the "working family." Mitt Romney and George Bush, born to great wealth, certainly make those claims, even though they haven't been anywhere near "working families" since the day they were born. Ronald Reagan was endlessly held up as the fighter for "working families" despite his personal wealth. If Edwards' wealth makes him so suspect when he claims to be devoted to the poor, why doesn't the in-born, unearned wealth of Bush and Romney -- and every other non-poor politician -- make them equally suspect as advocates for "America's working families"?

Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson have made millions of dollars over the last several years. When they prattle on about America's middle-class, should we start digging into the luxury items they have purchased and the exorbitant fees they pay for a whole litany of services as proof that they are insincere?

Worse still, the claim that there is something "hypocritical" about Edwards' wealth -- now a pervasive premise of Conventional Wisdom -- is premised on a complete misunderstanding of "hypocrisy." The attribute of "hypocrisy" is one who advocates "Principle X" and then acts contrary to that principle (as in: "I believe in Traditional Marriage and I'd like you to meet my third wife," or "I believe in Traditional Marriage and I'm in a rush to make my appointment at the escort agency/to meet my young aide and mistress/to consult with my divorce lawyer").

John Edwards isn't advocating for the elimination of private property or for prohibitions on personal wealth, so his personal wealth isn't remotely "hypocritical." He is advocating for government policies designed to address the plight of America's poor. His own personal wealth -- just as was true for Robert Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt or even Lyndon Johnson -- is irrelevant and not even remotely "hypocritical" for those who understand that term.

UPDATE III: Unsurprisingly, Think Progress is able to unearth this quote from the endlessly pandering Mitt Romney, who previously responded to the Edwards haircut story by boasting that "he pays $50 for a hair cut including the tip" and then snidely added:

You know I think John Edwards was right. There are two Americas. There is the America where people pay $400 for a haircut and then there is everybody else.

Take note, Marc Ambinder: that -- Romney's scornfully mocking Edwards for paying unusually large amounts for beauty care while concealing the fact that he does so himself -- is an actual case of "hypocrisy."

Succinct

Atrios can speak volumes with only a few words:

What Was That Word?

It's quite impressive how when the minority party's name began with D regular Senate actions were described as "obstructionism" or as "filibusters," while since the minority party's name started to begin with an R all the news consuming public has learned that fact of life that every Senate action requires 60 votes.

Freak Show

Yes the Politico sucks. No I don't care how much Mitt Romney spends on makeup. Yes, all intelligent people know that politicians need to figure out how to look good on the teevee. Yes, this costs money. No it isn't news.

Expose Obstructionists

On June 29th, Robert Borosage wrote:

Americans elected a new Congress to get things done. But the conservative minority has chosen a strategy of obstruction in the Senate. They have used the threat of a filibuster to delay or block virtually every major initiative. Bills with majority support—raising the minimum wage, ethics reform, a date to remove troops from Iraq, revoking oil subsidies and putting the money into renewable energy, fulfilling the 9/11 commission recommendations on homeland security—get blocked because they can’t garner 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

In its first 40 hours, the new majority of the House of Representatives kept their promise to voters and passed legislation—increasing the minimum wage for the first time in a decade, empowering Medicare to negotiate lower prices on drugs, cutting interest rates on student loans in half, revoking big oil subsidies and using the money to invest in renewable energy—that provided a down payment for a new direction for this country.

These bills are overwhelmingly popular, and are simply common sense reforms. Yet every one of them—and many more—got held up in the U.S. Senate.

Conservatives boast about the “success” of their strategy in discrediting the new majority. As Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss., put it, “the strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it’s working for us.”

How is it working? It’s dragging the reputation of the Congress down to the level of the failed president. Conservatives lie in the road of progress and then complain that nothing is moving.

This values partisan posturing over reforms vital to the country. It must be challenged.

It’s time to take the gloves off.

The first step is to expose the obstruction to the American people. Let’s urge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to force a real filibuster. Keep the bills on the floor and force vote after vote, exposing the obstructionists. We’ll organize in states across the country to insure that their constituents know exactly who is standing in the way of progress.

On July 14th, Ian Welsh at FDL says:

What the Republicans have been doing is “filibustering” everything, then turning around and claiming that Democrats are the “do nothing Congress”. The response is to make it clear who’s holding everything up.

Make them physically filibuster. Choose a very popular bill (say drug reimportation from Canada), put it up straight with nothing else attached, and make them go 24/7. The news cycle will be dominated by the filibuster. Nobody will be talking about anything else but how Republicans are filibustering to make old people pay more for drugs (or whatever other “mom and apple pie” issue you choose.) I would personally put film in the can of old folks talking about how they have to eat dog food to pay for their meds, and start running ads which juxtapose “Old folk in horrible distress” then ask “And what does Senator McCain think of this” and show 15 seconds of him reading from a phone book. Note that you get ready to do ad buys not just because it hammers the message home, but because you know that media coverage may be unfavorable to you and you are prepared to get around the filter - you are not putting yourself at the mercy of other actors - including actors in the media.

There are two ways to deal with bad faith actors; to dealing with people who understand only force. One is to decide you’re willing to let them have what they want because you won’t pay the cost of opposing them. If they say “I’m going to hit you if you don’t give me your wallet” you can say “ok”. The second is to escalate. In the words of the Untouchables - if they bring a knife, you bring a gun; if they put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue. When people understand only force, you must respond with maximum force. Anything else is taken as weakness and they will walk all over you.

Republicans walk all over Democrats because they can - because they know Democrats, at the end of the day, will fold nine times out of ten. It’s a good odds play. If Democrats want it to stop, they need to make the cost unbearable. Civility will return only when the costs of what amount to political violence have become to great for both sides to bear.

It would appear that Sen. Harry Reid listened and apparently so did Sen. Kent Conrad.

From Chris Bowers at OpenLeft:

In an interview with the Young Turks on Friday, Senator Kent Conrad indicated that there was "growing consensus" in the Democratic Senate caucus to actually make Republicans stand in the well of the Senate and filibuster popular Democratic legislation.

Transcipt:

Cenk: Exactly, that's a perfect situation. We're actually going to make you physically filibuster it. Go ahead and give speeches for 24 hours a day. We're removing the rule that out of politeness and courtesy that we don't make you do that anymore. We're going to have you go and read the phone book, and tell us how much you're against stem cells or the minimum wage, or for rest for the troops.

Senator Kent Conrad: Yeah, I think there's a growing consensus that we ought to do that...I think that we could do a better job making our points, and one part of that is to let the American people see just how obstructionist this Republican minority is being. The leader has had to file cloture now over 40 times already this year. And cloture, as you know, is a special procedure to stop debate, to stop filibusters, in order to reach conclusion on legislation. I had a Republican colleague tell me it is the Republican strategy to try to prevent any accomplishment of the Democratic Congress. That is set in their caucus openly and directly that they don't intend to allow Democrats to have any legislative successes, and they intend to do it by repeated filibuster.

Finally...!

Can it be...? Have the formerly spineless, aimless Democratic Senators finally grown some balls?

From Think Progress:

Moments ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that in response to conservative obstructionism, he plans to force war supporters to physically remain in the Senate and filibuster Iraq withdrawal legislation.

Reid accused conservatives of “protecting the President rather than protecting our troops” by “denying us an up or down vote on the most important issue our country faces.” He said that if a vote on the Reed/Levin Iraq legislation is not allowed today or tomorrow, he will keep the Senate in session “straight through the night on Tuesday” and force a filibuster. From Reid’s speech:

Republicans are using a filibuster to block us from even voting on an amendment that could bring the war to a responsible end. They are protecting the President rather than protecting our troops.

They are denying us an up or down — yes or no — vote on the most important issue our country faces.

I would like to inform the Republican leadership and all my colleagues that we have no intention of backing down.

If Republicans do not allow a vote on Levin/Reed today or tomorrow, we will work straight through the night on Tuesday.

The American people deserve an open and honest debate on this war, and they deserve an up or down vote on this amendment to end it.

UPDATE: Watch the video:

OpenLeft, Firedoglake and others have also called for Congress to call the conservatives’ bluff and force them to filibuster the Levin-Reed Iraq bill.

Josh Marshall agrees:

It's about time on the Iraq filibuster. But it's a very good move. There has been little if any press attention to the fact that senate Republicans are filibustering practically every piece of legislation to come before the senate. But Iraq is the sui generis issue. And the Democrats need to make it clear that the Republicans won't allow anything on Iraq to even come to the floor.

The Republicans have every right to filibuster. But it should be clear that that's what they're doing.

Filibusters and fools

I don't get it. I don't get why the Dems are such cowards. I don't get why they're so inept. Why don't they make the Republicans actually filibuster? Make them go on the record actually arguing against sanity and for insanity. Why do the Dems let them off the hook so often?

This unwillingness to do the right thing, makes it easier for the MSM to misrepresent what's happening on the rare occasions when they actually have the vote on cloture.

And then I realize that, once again, this is another example of What Digby Said, even to the point about having been away.

You may have noticed that I've been posting less than usual the last few days...

[...]

First, as I wondered earlier in the week, is there some reason that the Democrats didn't force the Republicans to actually filibuster the Webb legislation the old fashioned way and force them to publicly justify why they don't think the troops in Iraq should be allowed to spend some time at home before being redeployed? I still can't figure that one out --- it seemed like a no-brainer to me. Let Huckelberry Graham and Holy Joe explain why the president's prerogatives are more important than the troops and their families. I still don't get it.

Digby goes on to talk about the Liebermann amendment to Defense Spending Bill and makes the important point that the answer to why the Dems are behaving so incomprehensibly better not be because they're trusting the Republicans to be honorable.

I cannot believe that the Democrats voted for this en masses on the merits. It had to be a deal of some sort, or some kind of assurance from the powers that be or something that I'm just not getting. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out the kabuki of these inexplicable legislative actions but in this case, I'm stumped.

It makes no sense at all for the Democrats to empower this administration in any way, shape or form to do anything with respect to Iran. Nada. It certainly doesn't make political sense -- nobody in the country wants war with Iran and nobody will suffer at the polls for failing to sign off on the president and Lieberman's crazy schemes. The idea that Democrats need to be scared of seeming soft on Iran is ludicrous. And even if it did, all they had to do was scuttle the amendment anyway ---they didn't have to call for a vote. I just can't find any political benefit to this at all, and tons of serious, substantive risk.

(It's possible that their little friend Lieberman is blackmailing them, but if that's the case they should just turn the Senate over to the Republicans, return their pay to the taxpayers and go home. Let the war with Iran commence without their compliance.)

On the substance, it's just plain nuts. If they think they can depend on the military to hold Bush and Cheney back, I hope they talked to the air force, because the flyboys have to be chomping at the bit to get in on the action. There have been few medals and promotions for them in the GWOT so far --- they sure could use a good bombing campaign. (And if the Dems believed any assurances from Bush, they should be the ones who are impeached.)

Like I said, I've been busy and so perhaps didn't catch all the nuance. But between the flummoxed Dem response to the Bush officials' three stooges-style committee testimony and defiance of subpoenas, to the inability to force the Republicans to take responsibility for their obstruction to this sloppy wet kiss-up to Joe Lieberman, I don't understand what the hell is going on with the congress at all.

Seriously, do they really think that these lawless Republicans are going to comply with some quaint rules or live up to their "word"? That they will see the light and come over from the dark side? The GOP is looking down the barrel of an electoral defeat so extreme they may never recover. The party is falling apart under the leadership of a misfit and a certified lunatic and more than a quarter century of political philosophy has just been proven to be complete rubbish. They are cornered animals.

And anyway, the Republican Party has not acted with restraint for more than a decade, using whatever institutional power they had without regard to consequences, precedent or effect on the constitution --- a partisan impeachment by a reckless Republican majority in the congress, a stolen election by a ruthless political machine in Florida in concert with a blatantly partisan Supreme Court majority --- and now the lawless rule of the Republican executive branch under Bush and Cheney. The wholesale corruption and decadence of their rule should be more obvious to them than it is to us. There is not one political act of the last decade that should give anyone the least bit of assurance that the Republicans are acting in good faith.

This isn't really about Bush and it isn't really about Cheney. It is about the malignant political aberration that calls itself the modern Republican Party.

I don't know what kind of "strategy" the Democrats think is in play when they sign off on a bizarre statement about Iran that opens up all kinds of avenues for the president to start another war, but they are engaging in a very dangerous game. Arming the Republicans with any excuse to shoot the moon right now is political malpractice. On their best days, the Republicans are reckless and delusional. Now that they're desperate, anything could happen. Why did the Dems just hand them a loaded gun? I don't get it.

Life is a beach...

I've been away... just like last year -- a week at the beach with no Internet access. I know that I've got lots of catching up to do but, right now, I'm feeling relaxed. I'll get to it as I slowly get back up to speed.

Clarification please...

Christy at FDL shares with us Judge Walton's comments on the implications of the commuting of Libby's sentence:

In case you were wondering how truly unusual it is for a President to swiftly commute the prison term of a loyal minion (via NYTimes) in an effort to continue to obstruct justice, wonder no more (via Sentencing Law blog):

On July 2, 2007, the President of the United States commuted the term of incarceration imposed on the defendant by the Court, “leaving intact and in effect the two-year term of supervised release, with all its conditions, and all other components of the sentence.” Grant of Executive Clemancy at 1. It has been brought to the Court’s attention that the United States Probation Office for the District of Columbia intends to contact the defendant imminantly to require him to begin his term of supervised release. Strictly construed, the statute authorizing the imposition of supervised release indicates that such release should occur only after the defendant has already served a term of imprisonment. 18 USC Sec. 3583(a) (stating that the defendant “[may] be placed on a term of supervised release after imprisonment”) (emphasis added). That is, despite the President’s direction that the defendant’s prison sentence be commuted and his term of supervised release remain intact…Sec. 3583 does not appear to contemplate a situation in which the defendant may be placed under supervised release without first completing a term of incarceration.

In other words, Reggie has taken the President and his bumfuzzled legal advisors to the statutory woodshed for their sloppy reading of the law. And this President, who has grown so used to doing as he pleases without anyone questioning his authority, has just been given a small lesson in “strict construction” by a conservative jurist who holds the rule of law to actually mean something beyond an inconvience that the President can disregard at will.

It is the footnote on page two of the opinion that really brings this home:

If either party believes that it would be helpful to solicit clarification from the White House regarding the President’s position on the proper interpretation of Sec. 3583 in light of his Grant of Executive Clemancy, they are encouraged to do so.

Shorter Judge Walton: clean up your own damned mess, George, because I’m not covering for you.

[...]

The one good thing that may come from this entire mess is that we have needed to have a discussion about the sentencing guidelines for a long time — that President Bush opened the door to that discussion with blatant favoritism for a political crony as a reward for his obstruction of justice is appalling. That Judge Walton is doing his part to make certain that the President and his legal toadies understand that they don’t get to construct the laws they want out of thin air, cobwebs, and Presidential edict is a good start.

That dog won't hunt

Josh Marshall makes an excellent point here in debunking claims that partisan politics played a role in the Libby case.

The case had profound political overtones. And certainly there are no end of people in the country who became deeply invested in this case who normally wouldn't get overly bent out of shape about a run-of-the-mill perjury and obstruction case -- which, at least narrowly speaking, this is.

But Libby never found his fate in one of those people's hands. Not once. There's just no getting around that point.

Go down the list.

1. Attorney General John Ashcroft. Decided a special prosecutor was needed and then recused himself from the decision because of his proximity to the probable targets of the investigation.

2. James Comey. Yes, he's the darling of the Dems now because he spilled the beans about the hospital stand-off. But Comey is, dare we say it, a REPUBLICAN. And not just any Republican but a pretty tough law-and-order type who only months earlier had been appointed Deputy Attorney General by President Bush. He had it in for Scooter? He let his partisanship get in the way?

3. Patrick Fitzgerald. Again, a darling of the Dems now for obvious reasons. But anyone who knows the guy's history knows that while this registered independent may not lean ideologically right (in the way movement whacks might recognize) he certainly doesn't lean to the left. It's no accident that his appointments have come under Republicans.

4. Judge Reggie Walton. Let's start with this: He was appointed by George W. Bush. And if that doesn't do it for you, he was appointed to previous judicial appointments by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

A mere calling of the roll like this puts into a razor-sharp relief just how silly these claims are. At every step in the process Libby's fate was in the hands of someone who was either himself a staunch Republican or had been repeatedly appointed by staunch Republicans. The only thing is that no one ever passed him off into the hands a Bush loyalist. And that's the key. Alberto Gonzales never got the hand-off. Whatever else you can claim about this case, it's about as clear as it can be that partisan politics played no role in Libby's fate. [emphasis is mine --bill]

Except, that is, in the commuting of Libby's sentence by GWB. Now that was partisan politics rearing its ugly head.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush...

K.O. knocks another one out of the park. Crooks & Liars has the video here.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of you becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

Speaking of Bush/Cheney, Keith says:

You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday.

Which one of you chose the route, no longer matters.

Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant.

But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.

It is nearly July 4th, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a King who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them — or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them — we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms.

Answers in Genesis

ah... driftglass.... brilliance and eloquence shine out of his keyboard. Here is his take on Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis "museum" to creationism. Calling a spade a spade, drifty tells us that stupidity is a prerequisite for GOP "baseness". I've written before about the GOP problem of getting people to vote for them. Very few intelligent and informed people will do so, so... let's make some more. Bring on the fear and lies...

Driftglass imagines that "Future historians" digging up Ham's paean to willful ignorance may conclude that...

Clearly the Americans, being a generous and noble people, had found a wise and humane was of dealing with the residuum of mentally stunted halfwits that every society will inevitably produce. Those few angrily underclocked child-men who cannot cope with the rigors of math or science or conjunctions or hitting the bowl when they pee.

Like Colonial Williamsburg or South Dakota, Americans had manufactured another wholly fake community for some socially intriguing reason that our descendants (or the descendants of the people we speak to when we call the 800-number on the back of our major appliances when they flake out) will theorize cleverly about.

That rather than efficiently generically engineering the incapacitating disease of conservative fundamentalism out of our blood, we humanely gave them their own s-l-o-w children’s camp. It was a dim-but-cheery place with its own, comforting fake history of the planet, its own cartoon God, and even its own news network that told the stupid people that God loved them better than anyone else. That they didn’t need sense enough to pound sand or as much compassion as God gave a Pitcher plant, as long as they were “Saved”.

Note: I really was going to excerpt just the good parts but... it's all so good * sigh *

And anyway, they weren’t really stupid.

The “elites” were stupid.

And maybe these “Flowers For AlgernonLand” designers even had a few chuckles at the expense of their devolved fellow citizens; perhaps once in a while laughing themselves to tears as the dense denizens of the place scared themselves over and over again scampering down “The dimly lit Corruption galleries, by comparison, will feature videos of pain and suffering, noxious odors and the heat, literally, turned up.”

Dumbing down by several orders of magnitude a complex allegory about the inherency of pain and loss in a dualistic Universe within the field of Time…into God’s own a Pull-My-Finger joke.

At least I hope that’s the tale they’ll tell themselves, because the truth is so much simpler and sadder.

The truth is that for all of its think tanks, fake media and Small Gummint bluster, the Republican Party would evaporate tomorrow like dew in a firestorm if it were not kept lavishly stocked with bigots and idiots. Without its bumper crop of racists yielded from the Southern Strategy, its millions of fanatically anti-Enlightenment Christopaths and the millions of garden variety stupids, the GOP would be one dead fucking parrot…and the people running the Party like a Long Con damned well know it.

Which is why every strategy is aimed at creating more stupid people.

Because the more logic-intolerant the base, the easier everything gets.

For example, imagine how much less you have to spend on marketing when you no longer have to worry about making a well-reasoned argument…about anything.

Piss in their hair and when they start to notice something is wrong, all you need to do is flash a picture of two men kissing and they’ll charge obediently off of whatever cliff they’re led.

Take a massive dump in their mouths and when the start to gag on it, and all need to do is scream “Ted Kennedy!” at them as loud as possible and they’re swallow your excrement like baby birds and beg for more.

Lie them into a ruinous war, send their kids off to die for the greater glory of Exxon, and when they verge dangerously on the edge of beginning to add two and two together correctly, all you need is (HT to the irreplaceable Billmon at the Whiskey Bar for his brilliant post from which I nicked this)…

The programmes of the Two Minute Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teachings.

George Orwell
1984
1948

However, in the end the stupids already have buildings -- constitutionally inviolate buildings -- in which they can enact their own, ridiculous creation mythology over and over again to their widdle heart’s content.

They’re called “churches”, so why do they need a museum?

Because this is about the distinction between form and function.

Deep, deep down these people suspect they’re morons, which is why they need the constant reassurance of their Leaders and their God that they are not. They’re a mob, and a mob can always provoke fear, but in the end they crave the one thing they do not, and never will have: respect.

Respect, and the matriculation into the halls of wisdom of their idiotic ideas.

And since that’s never, ever going to happen, they need an alternative. One that their leaders are happy to provide.

Because part of the tragic deficiency of these people is that they cannot comprehend the difference between an Idea and a Representation Object. A pathetic fact they prove over and over again.

This is what every American Flag Burning debate boils down to: the rage of people who reflexively choose to value a Symbol over the Constitutional Ideal for which that symbol is a proxy.

This is what every Confederate Flag Worship debate boils down to: the rage of people who demand that the fake, manufactured history of their hate rag efface its actual history as a calculated symbol of segregation, lynching and Southern terrorism for much of the 20th century.

This is what every Fundamentalist punch-up comes down to: the rage people who furiously fetishize the literality and inerrancy of a book which is neither, and demand that their Idol trump both the Constitution and genuine religious scholarship.

These are the people to whom the GOP panders because these are the people on whom every one of their victories depends. And to that end they are they are cultivated, fertilized and praised to rafters.

And since they cannot comprehend the distinction between a Building and the Academy, WTF? Animate a few dinos frolicking with Adam and Eve, call it a Museum and Bingo!

Instant parity with actual Science!

Sure it’s every bit as childish and ridiculous as me putting a pair of Eisenhower’s underpants on my head and claiming that I'm the co-architect of the D-Day invasion.

But of course, I’m not the GOP’s target demographic.

(Oh and one correction to the actual article. Ms. Anderson explains the several words and phrases at the end of the article under the heading of "Terms of debate".

She is mistaken.

There is no debate.)

The Power and The Glory

... of driftglass. Drifty tosses off gems like the following as he savages his favourite foil, David Brooks, who has written another execrable column in the NYTimes, this time praising GWB for commuting Libby's sentence as "exactly right".

Which, first and foremost, considering that Brooks is not so much a boil on the ass of journalism, but an ingrown zit just inside the rim of journalism’s right nostril, is terribly, terribly funny.

Because this pathetic little fraction of a journalist has one and only one schtick: Defender of the Faith.

[...]

Over every fake protestation they want to register over how terrible the partisanship has become, Conservative Kingmaker Grover Glenn “bipartisanship is just another word for date rape” Norquist looms.

Rumbling just below the surface of every reckless demand for “More War!” when we have no more troops to send anywhere is the conspicuous absence of Republican cowards ages 18-45 that are staying away from the war they demanded in their millions.

And ringing in the air are voices of millions of Dirty Hippies. Those who have spent the last 30 years begging, pleading, warning and lecturing the Party of God not to please-please-please not tear down our vital institutions and erect a labyrinth of barbed wire, nitroglycerine and hate.

That the day would come when you may actually need to solve genuine problems, and the machinery you are giddily smashing today for narrow, short-term, partisan gain is the very machinery you will need to solve those problems tomorrow.

Well, that day has now come.

What was foretold has come to pass, and the very best regime dead-enders like Bobo can do now is mill around, take the occasional potshot at a Clinton, and every so often freak out at their confinement and beat their faces against the invisible bars of this prison of their own making.

[...]

Those who think poorly of a White House willing to sanction burning an undercover agent as part of a larger, pre-cooked plot to panic America into the war Neocons wanted all along are full of "fevered vapors and gleeful rage”.

The Plame Story “pretended to be about the outing of an undercover C.I.A. agent.”

Anyone in the media who wss genuinely pissed at how far into the cesspit the Bush Regime had sunk was merely “artificially appalled”. Fitzgerald was “throwing journalists in jail” and the whole of it was “like watching a city of Ahabs getting deliriously close to the great white whale.”


Libby was “the only normal person in the asylum.” “People who knew him thought him discreet, honest and admirable.”

Translation: I knew him. We had lunch, and he paid for his own salmon! And such a sweet-sweet smell of English Leather coming off of that man! This is not some swarthy cutpurse; Libby is a friend to inbred D.C. establishmentarians, and a dog-loyal thrall to his demon master. What higher virtues can there be?

Then:

“Fitzgerald, having lost all perspective, demanded Libby get a harsh sentence as punishment for crimes he had not been convicted of. The judge, casting himself as David against Goliath, demonstrated an impressive capacity for talking about himself.”

Translation: The Republican-appointed prosecutor asked the Republican-appointed judge to use the Republican-approved sentencing guidelines to determine the amount of time Libby would do in Club Fed. But jail is for little people, brown people and Democrats.

And those who are outraged are simple acting out their “assigned posture in this drama.”

So let’s cut through the fog and the moss and the carnival mirrors, and to the marrow.

As sure as the shitty Greek place that goes up in a convenient fireball one night, what happened to gin up a war with Iraq is case of arson.

A case of something destroyed by bad men for criminal ends, that has now leaped far past the original boundaries envisioned by the match-flicking, gas-spreading Neocon sociopaths.

Something that has grown from an insurance scam to a Dresden, but however complex the story, it is still a group of conspirators acting in secret to the detriment of society. Still a crime to be solved.

And if the crime of lying the nation into a war and discrediting anyone who stood in the way is arson, Patrick Fitzgerald’s team are the firemen,


trying first to put the conflagration out, then trying to sift the crime scene for evidence of who did this and why.

Libby, then, was the faithful rat, in charge of blocking the hydrants


and slitting the hoses so that the firemen could not do their jobs.

And what appalls Bobo is the simple fact that Libby -- a loyal “Cheney’s Cheney” Conservative -- was actually tried, convicted and sentenced in open court.

The terrifying reality that, however weakly, oversight has returned, and the reckless, arrogant, treasonous activities of his friends and sponsors in this Administration may now actually start coming with price-tags that cannot be ducked, dodged, draft-deferred or bribed away. (Pardoned and commuted, yes.)

And the worst nightmare of members of the Party of Personal Responsibility is actually being held personally responsible for anything they say or do.

Transparency

Josh Marshall reflects on the latest GWB lie.

There are just too many ways to pick apart the hollowness, the transparency of President Bush's fear-based commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence. Thirty months was apparently 'excessive', despite the fact that this is what the federal sentencing guidelines recommend and numerous people are thus today sitting in prison under a similarly excessive term.

But, okay, let's say it's excessive. What would be appropriate? One year? Six months? A month? Can anyone really say that the prosecution was legitimate (which the president does) and that the verdict was legitimate (which the president does) and that probation with no jail time is the appropriate penalty?

Paris Hilton did more time than Scooter Libby.

The whole thing is just too transparent. To borrow the Army phrase, President Bush wasn't willing to let Libby make first contact with the federal prison system. There's only one argument that makes sense of this decision: no jail time. That's the argument. Scooter's price. Otherwise, he might have been tempted to go the Fitzgerald route to reduce his sentence.

The key dividing line is who's telling the truth

Josh Marshall wants to make one thing perfectly clear... "What Wilson said was true".

Here on the Times Oped page you'll see David Brooks column claiming that the information Joe Wilson brought before the public four years ago turned out to all be a crock, a bunch of lies. And we'll let Brooks' scribble be a stand-in for what you will hear universally today from the right -- namely, that just as Scooter Libby was charged with perjury and not the underlying crime of burning an American spy, the deeper underlying offense, the lie about uranium from Africa, didn't even exist -- that at the end of the day it was revealed that Wilson's claims, which started the whole train down the tracks, were discredited as lies.

You'll even hear softer versions of this claim from mainstream media outlets not normally considered part of the rump of American conservatism.

There aren't many subjects on which I claim expertise. But this is one of them. I think I know the details of this one -- both the underlying story of the forgeries and their provenance and the epi-story of Wilson and Plame -- as well as any journalist who's written about the story. The Fitzgerald investigation is probably the part of it I know the least about, comparatively. (It is also incumbent on me to say that in the course of reporting on this story over these years I've gotten to know Joe Wilson fairly well. And I consider him a friend.)

And with that knowledge, I have to say that the claim that Wilson's charges have been discredited, disproved or even meaningfully challenged is simply false. What he said on day one is all true. It's really as simple as that.

There's a tendency, even among too many people of good faith and good politics, to shy away from asserting and admitting this simple fact because Wilson has either gone on too many TV shows or preened too much in some photo shoot. But that is disreputable and shameful. The entire record of this story has been under a systematic, unfettered and, sadly, largely unresisted attack from the right for four years. Key facts have been buried under an avalanche of misinformation. The then-chairman of the senate intelligence committee made his committee an appendage of the White House and himself the president's bawd and issued a report built on intentional falsehood and misdirection.

No one is perfect. The key dividing line is who's telling the truth and who's lying. Wilson is on the former side, his critics the latter. Everything else is triviality.

From day one this story has been about official lies -- corrupt power buttressed by fraud. Along the way it became a story about the president's hireling commentators who lost their honor by becoming part of the fraud. What Wilson said was true. His attackers are all parties to the same lie. Don't forget that.

George Bush Obstructs Justice

I'm not surprised but I'm still outraged. It's so blatantly corrupt...

Marcy says:

Well, George did it. Made sure that Scooter wouldn't flip rather than do jail time. He commuted Libby's sentence, guaranteeing not only that Libby wouldn't talk, but retaining Libby's right to invoke the Fifth.

This amounts to nothing less than obstruction of justice.

Digby says:

So Bush did it. The bastard commuted little Scooter's sentence, leaving the conviction in place. I'm not a lawyer, but I have to assume that this means he can still appeal --- which means he can still take the fifth if the congress calls him to to testify. Very convenient.

Fitzgerald says:

We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.

We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as “excessive.” The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.

Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.

Jane says:

As Marcy points out, the idea that the President who is currently pushing to restore minimum sentencing guidelines would give a happy hootie about an “excessive” sentence for Scooter Libby or anyone else is laughable. (He is, after all, the man who openly mocked Karla Faye Tucker before putting her to death.) By commuting Libby’s sentence rather than pardoning him, Bush insures that Scooter will remain silent and be able to invoke the fifth before before Congress and not risk being cited for contempt. This president’s contempt for the rule of law is thorough and complete.

Fitzgerald is an honest prosecutor who worked like a dog for this conviction and got mocked by pissy members of the beltway entitlement set for his efforts. Now his work gets swept away by the chief crook seeking to obstruct justice. I’m gonna guess he’s righteously pissed. I know I am.

Josh says:

Many others will note this but I feel obliged to do so for the record. The real offense here is not so much or not simply that the president has spared Scooter Libby the punishment that anyone else would have gotten for this crime (for what it's worth, I actually find the commutation more outrageous than a full pardon). The deeper offense is that the president has used his pardon power to shortcircuit the investigation of a crime to which he himself was quite likely a party, and to which, his vice president, who controls him, certainly was.

The president's power to pardon is full and unchecked, one of the few such powers given the president in the constitution. Yet here the president has used it to further obstruct justice. In a sense, perhaps we should thank the president for bringing the matter full circle. Began with criminality, ends with it.

A nation gone mad with amnesia

Digby has this to say about the SCOTUS

My personal feeling is that this court is going to practice a form of radical right wing judicial activism that will transform our country over the next generation. (Remember, everything the right accuses the left of doing is what they actually are doing.) Democrats will spend a major amount of time when they are in power trying to find legislative and executive remedies for the dramatic judicial tilt toward big business, fundamentalist religion and racist, discriminatory outcomes --- which will have been made in service to the Republican party and its donors. (After Bush vs. Gore I think we can finally dispense with any notion that the justices are non-partisan.)But we knew that didn't we, when the gang of 14 decided they needed to keep their powder dry for a rainy day?

Roberts is a particularly unctuous character, with his sunny smile and youthful energy, while he dishonestly passes off wingnut bumper stickers like “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” as judicial reasoning. (I can hardly wait for him to read his decision on gun rights where he says "guns don't kill people, people kill people")

Rick Perlstein nails him to the wall with this passionate post about Roberts' other fatuous punchline: "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin."

If I were a high school teacher and young Johnny Roberts wrote this on an exam on civil rights history, I would give him an "F." The idea that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could cough up such a ludicrous hairball is evidence of a nation gone mad with amnesia. Or, if you prefer, a conservative intellectual class that knows the history full well, and has simply let itself lie.

Do educated people really need this explained to them? It wasn't merely "before Brown" that "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on their color of their skin." It was long, long after the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka - for the next seventeen years at least.

[...]

Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act had provided that no segregated public institution could get federal funds, this was, finally, a chance to punish the vast, vast majority of Southern school districts who - read this carefully, Justice Roberts - eleven years after Brown outlawed telling schoolchildren where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.

By that point only 6 percent of Southern schoolchildren attended classes with kids of another race. How did we know? Because the federal government counted.

The decision last week said that counting --- the mechanism that showed that school districts were simply refusing to adhere to the law --- is now illegal. Neat, huh? And in perfect inverted GOPtalk, Roberts smugly claims that he's actually advancing the cause of school integration. He's doing his mentors proud.

It is clear that the major legacy of the Bush administration will be this court. But then, the man became president in the first place due to a blatantly partisan Supreme Court decision, so I suppose there's some symmetry in that.