Billmon is great

I added an update to an earlier post referring to GWB's idiotic comments about the death toll in Iraq. Billmon shares his reaction as only Billmon can:

And yet, in his own deluded and inarticulate way, Shrub is starting to sound downright Leninist in his willingness to break eggs (or at least see them get broken) if that's what it takes to keep his liberation fantasy -- which is really a personal power fantasy -- alive. And so we get bizarre statements like this one:

I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they'’re willing to -- you know, that there'’s a level of violence that they tolerate.

I'm not exactly sure what Shrub meant by that (he probably doesn't either) but it didn't exactly reflect a great deal of ethical sensitivity to, or concern about, the enormous blood price of his decision to invade -- and all the foolish decisions that followed. (And yes, I'm using absurd understatement as an ironic device here.)

The moral of the story, I guess, is that you don't need to be an inhuman monster to cause an inhuman amount of death, destruction and suffering. You don't even need evil -- ignorance and arrogance and incompetence can manage the job quite nicely. But, as I've said before, it does require a rare combination of those qualities to take a situation like Saddam's Iraq and make it worse.

Here are some other Billmon gems from today:

In a post called Dumb and Dumber on Wonkette criticizing Newsweek:

Now this is a pretty ironic complaint considering that Wonkette isn't exactly the Foreign Affairs of the blogosphere -- that is, not unless the Council on Foreign Relations suddenly develops an obsessive interest in talking about anal sex.

But he/she is obviously right: the difference between the international and domestic editions of Newsweek (as well as its crosstown rival, Time) is like the difference between the mind of an international business executive wizzing across the Atlantic at 35,000 feet and that of a retarded chimpanzee thrashing around in own feces at the zoo -- except I think even the domestic edition of Newsweek is probably a little highbrow for Bush.

In a post called Fiasco, Billmon is in rare form dumping on book reviews by the execrable Victor Davis Hanson who, Billmon says, "is dictating straight from his rectum again"

I haven't read Cobra II, and the last one of Woodward's books I even glanced at was Veil (If I want light fiction, I'd rather read John Grisham). But I have been reading Tom Ricks' Fiasco (definitely no air quotes) and I can testify that Hanson's assertion is a libelous lie. The book is brick solid -- with extensive named sources and backed by ample documentary evidence, including classified Pentagon memos, Centcom and ORHA pre-war "planning" (I use the term loosely) materials and the bureacratic detritus left behind by the Coalition Provisional Authority (a.k.a. the GOP branch office on the Tigris).

[...]

Needless to say, these aren't the kind of shortcomings that are likely to concern Victor Davis Hanson. My suspicion is that he's much more ticked off by the things Ricks got right -- such as his unusually blunt and honest (for a Washington Post reporter) analysis of the role played by the neocons and their Pentagon moles, and his withering account of White House haplessness, especially once it became obvious in the fall of 2003 that Iraq was going South in a hurry.

Small wonder Hanson is reduced to sniffing about anonymous sources. He's just following the old lawyer's advice: If you've got the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you've got the law, pound the law. If you don't have the facts or the law on your side, pound the table.

It may seem odd that I'm defending Ricks, given some of the harsh things I've written about his reporting from Iraq. But I guess my attitude is that if Tom Ricks is going to be criticized, it bloody well should be from the left -- not by some pompous neocon windbag who thinks he's the reincarnation of Thucydides.

There's more truth about the war in Iraq in the worst paragraph Tom Ricks ever wrote, on his worst day as a reporter, than there is in all the deluded crap that Victor Davis Hanson has churned out over the past three and half years, at the National Review and elsewhere. I haven't read any of Hanson's books, so I'm not qualified to pass judgment on the quality of his footnotes, but if he's supposed to be the example of a "real" historian, then I guess Henry Ford was right: history is bunk.

Cross-Blog pollination

I have commented before on the criticism of author of Fiasco and Wapo reporter, Tom Ricks. Ttoday I find this in the Comments section on Brad DeLong's blog. Billmon has posted a comment about criticism of his bashing of Ricks. (For examples of what we're talking about see Billmon and Brad.) I delight in these guys.

Tom Ricks: "I asked one officer, 'Why are you talking to me about these things?' And he looked down at his hands, and he said, 'Because I have the blood of American troops on my hands.'"

Ricks, and his newspaper, do too -- only they won't admit it.

"The Brad and Billmon approach has been to remind the reformed of their past misdeads. This does not creat useful incentives"

Speaking only for myself, I'm not out to create incentives. I'm out to expose these people for the fools and shills they really are. And the fact that Ricks has now written a book admitting his 2003 and early 2004 reporting was almost completely wrong definitely is hardly proof to the contrary. Sixty percent of the American people already KNOW the war is a fiasco, and you don't get brownie points for wanting to be on the side that's winning.

I don't want to reform Ricks and the Post. I want to discredit them, to the extent that a puny blogger can. If I could I would destroy them -- fire the entire staff, break up the presses and sell them for scrap. It would be putting them to much better use.

Like the New York Times, the Post is now simply a house organ of the War Party (lady's auxiliary.) Why would I want to "incentivize" that?

Posted by: billmon | August 10, 2006 at 12:25 PM

Billmon on the polls

The incomparable Billmon has his own take on the recent poll results. In a post called Crash & Burn, Billmon analyzes the results which (for Republicans) go from bad , to worse, to worse still and then concludes:

What can you say? Sex sells.

Update 7:05 PM ET: Apparently, every freaking polling organization in the world decided to release a freaking poll today. For the Republicans, it's like getting lab results back from four different oncology clinics -- all of them regretting to inform you that you're a terminal case:

CBS/New York Times

USA Today/Gallup

Washington Post /ABC

CNN/ Opinion Research

Billmon commemorates the 9/11 anniversary... his way

Paint it black. Billmon is at his bleakest here but, sadly, he's probably being prescient too. Let's agree to check back in ten years and see how his Brave New World is doing. But right now, read the article and answer this question: what does he get wrong? What reasons can you put forward that would make a rational person conclude that things will turn out much rosier?

Billmon:

You can learn a lot about a country in five years.

What I've learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration's insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media -- plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of "reality management") is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at an amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think, security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.

I could happily go on, but I imagine you get my point. It's hard to think of a major American institution, tradition or cultural value that has not, at some point over the past five years, been shown to be a.) totally out of touch, b.) criminally negligent, c.) hopelessly corrupt, d.) insanely hypocritical or e.) all of the above.

It's getting hard to see how these trends can be reversed. Maybe they can't (which would explain why all empires, at least so far, have eventually declined and fallen.)

[...]

This is not, I know, the most inspiring way to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the event that essentially kicked off the new American century -- which at this point seems unlikely to last even a decade. If you want the standard patriotic rhetoric (hallowed ground, blessings of democracy, forward strategy for freedom, etc.) you'll have no trouble finding it elsewhere. There's no shortage of the stuff today (whitehouse.gov is a good place to start). But I personally don't think the record of the past half decade (or the current condition of Ground Zero) really justifies that kind of self-serving, self-justifying pablum.

Do you?

A Different Kind of Cluelessness

Billmon speaks, I listen. On a day when he admits that he agrees with Rush Limbaugh, Billmon references an article in the WaPo which opens with"blatant, obscene lie"

For the past month the United States has worked urgently to end the violence that Hezbollah and its sponsors have imposed on the people of Lebanon and Israel.

Billmon, a giant in the eyes of this blogosfan, offers a gem of a post today called A Different Kind of Cluelessness, Part II. Normally I try to quote selectively, but sometimes I get so overwhelmed by his wise word-smitherey that I feel compelled to quote his work in its entirety. So here goes... read it and be educated.

In which George Will demonstrates that he's more out of touch than the neocons he criticizes:

The [administration] official is correct that it is wrong "to think that somehow we are responsible -- that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies." But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere think like that.

Note the straw man Will uses to try to knock down the straw man set up by his anonymous neocon. This is intended to distinguish himself from those who do think U.S. policies are, at least in large part, responsible for the rise of the jihadis. He's turned us into the functional equivalent of Ward Churchill and sentenced us to wander for eternity in the "fog of paranoia."

I think we can best describe this as the "pseudo-realist" approach to foreign relations. Will wants us to understand that he's a hardheaded guy and doesn't buy into Shrub's democracy illusion. But that doesn't mean he's willing to let go of his illusion, which is that the United States has been a beneficient force in the Middle East, virtuously upholding "stability" for the benefit of all -- the proverbial cop on the beat.

The truth, of course, is quite different. The United States has tried to enforce stability in the Middle East because until Commander Codpiece came along foreign policy elites and American presidents alike viewed it as inherently in our interests to do so -- to protect the flow of oil, keep the Soviets out of the region, open markets to Western capital, and keep the Arab-Israeli conflict from getting out of hand.

However, this most emphatically was not done for the benefit of the people of the Middle East. It was for our benefit, and, secondarily, for the benefit of the colonized elites who transferred their loyalties -- or at least their services -- to America after the old colonial powers exited the region.

You can argue (imperialists almost always do) that the masses benefited from this stability because it created security, promoted economic growth and improved living standards. The British crown tried that same argument on the American colonists in the 1770s with a notable lack of success -- and they were all Englishmen. But there is some validity to it.

However, our stability fetish (and our commercial interests) also required us to do business with brutal dictators and/or prop up corrupt feudal elites -- many of them little more than rent-seeking parasites perched on oil fields disguised as countries. Where authentic or semi-authentic nationalist movements appeared -- in Egypt, for example -- we either tried to crush them or buy them off, and usually managed to do one or the other.

We also encouraged our "friends" in the region to Westernize themselves, to abandon or at least dilute their Islamic identities and become part of the globalized culture of capitalism (not that they needed much encouraging). As the energy importance of the region increased and the penetration of Western capital and culture deepened, so did the level of U.S. intervention -- always in the interests of that precious stability.

It may sound like I'm just reciting the plot from Syriana. But these were real policies, deliberately pursued over many years. And they were, by and large, extremely successful -- both for us and for our clients in the region. They were, however, abhorrent to the fundamentalist, anti-colonial Islamic movements (like the Muslim Brotherhood) that had existed in the region since the days of the British and the French. And they became increasingly abhorrent as our political and military presence in the region expanded and our alliance with Israel became increasingly open-ended. Abhorrence turned to rage as our campaign to contain Saddam degenerated into a long, grinding seige of Iraq (with the Iraqi people trapped inside) and the CIA and the Pentagon helped our Egyptian puppets crush the Islamist revolt on the upper Nile.

Did these policies "justify" the rise of the jihadist movement? Ah, that's a moral argument and Will should know that realists -- real realists, unlike his pseudo variety -- don't do morality. All that's necessary is to recognize that the jihadis regard themselves as fully justified, and are acting on that belief. Like all policies, our relentless promotion of stability in the Middle East had a price, and now we're paying it.

In that sense, if no other, America is "responsible" for the rise of what Shrub likes to call Islamofascism. His own rhetoric about democratization (a.k.a. the "forward strategy of freedom") implicitly recognizes this. It's an effort, albeit a hopelessly naive and contradictory one, to address a problem that Will has decided simply doesn't exist -- that is, outside the blogosphere's "fog of paranoia."

So who's the realist and who's the fool here? Or rather, who's the bigger fool?

Kosola exposed!

Billmon gets it! Gawd, I love it when he puts his mind to something. There has been much written lately about this business... the smears, the defenses, rinse, repeat, but what Billmon writes here is the best analysis and explanation of what's happening that I have read. Interestingly, I remember writing something like that on a different topic in December of 2003: "the most insightful article I've read about the role the neo-conservatives play inside the Bush administration".

Billmon nails one... again. Go read the whole thing...

Teaser:

In other words, he frequently uses words like "fuck" and "shit" and sometimes calls his opponents stupid wankers, or whatever. The rabble manning the barricades at Daily Kos can be even more, uh, direct at times. Of course, anyone who's ever poked a stick in the open sewers of Right Blogistan could spear some far worse scatalogical examples. But it's still pretty strong stuff for the delicate blossoms who inhabit the TNR's editorial offices. I can only shudder to think what would happen if they were ever exposed to the Rude Pundit (or vice versa.) Think of the analyst bills.

But the sweet young things of the TNR have their friends -- at the Times, Newsweek and wherever else Ivy Leaguers with mediocre intellects but good networking skills obtain journalistic employment. And so it didn't take long for Kos and his friends (i.e. the liberal blogger mafia) to make some highly venomous enemies among the lambs of the neoliberal punditocracy.

But none of this seething animosity would have mattered, or made it into print, if Kos hadn't committed the mortal sin of becoming too big and too visible to ignore. When you combine the relatively successful launch of his book -- which took a sawed off shotgun to the leeches attached to the Democratic Party's flabby underbelly -- the huge media coverage of this month's Yearly Kos convention, and (last but hardly least) the role of the netroots in boosting Ned Lamont's primary challenge to the TNR's pride and joy, it's clear that Kos has turned into a much more formidable opponent than the Dino* Democrats bargained for.

[* Democrats In Name Only -- bill]

Billmon

It's good to see Billmon back writing regularly and at length. He's knowledgeable, articulate, darkly funny but also a little world-weary, almost as if the passion that burned so hot and for so long has scarred him. I'm not quite calling him jaded but... let's just say that he's not brimming with hope. However, he's wise and is always a good read. Check out Munich for a quintessential Billmon history lesson and Rummy Punch for his assessment of "Field Marshal Von" Rumsfeld's staying power.

Mutually Assured Dementia

Madness, I tell you... madness!

Billmon takes up the Nukes for Iran story which has all-too familiar parallels with the Iraq fiasco in an article called Mutually Assured Dementia. Digby has this to say about Billmon's piece:

I don't think I'm a panic artist. At least I never have been. But after the last few years I have to say that Billmon's dark prediction sounds entirely believable to me. This Iran thing scares the hell out of me, and I'm not sure what anyone can do about it.

This president has asserted a doctrine of presidential infallibility. He does not believe that he can be stopped. And the way things are going I think he may think he has nothing to lose. There has been a sense of craziness in the air ever since 9/11, but it's just taken a very, very surreal turn.

Bilmon begins with...

Maybe it's just me, but I've been at least a little bit surprised by the relatively muted reaction to the news that the Cheney Administration and its Pentagon underlings are racing to put the finishing touches on plans for attacking Iran – plans which may include the first wartime use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki.

I mean, what exactly does it take to get a rise out of the media industrial complex these days? A nuclear first strike against a major Middle Eastern oil producer doesn't ring the bell? Must every story have a missing white woman in it before the cable news guys will start taking it seriously?

I suppose I could understand it if all we had was Sy Hersh's word that the administration is planning another "pre-emptive" war in the Middle East. After all, we're talking about the same reporter who peddled all those crazy, unsubstantiated allegations about torture at Abu Ghraib prison. You can't be too careful with a journalistic loose cannon like that.

But now that Sy's Iranian nightmare – including the nuclear aspect of it – has been confirmed by the semi-official media, you'd think we could expect a little more ruckus about it

Bilmon's dark speculation about what the day after would be like is depressingly believable. Go read it all here. I give the final word to my buddy, Digby:

This is deja vu all over again. But Bush no longer has the option of bluffing even if he wants to. He tossed that in the toilet along with America's integrity and reputation back in the summer and fall of 2002. After the Iraq debacle, bellicose saber rattling has the perverse effect of bringing about the event it's designed to avert.

There can be no doubt that Iran believes we are planning a strike and there is every reason to fear that Bush's threats will push them to make decisions that will force the US into the corner that Fallows predicts. The only question is, as Sy Hersh reports, whether the military will go along this time.

After five years of disasterous foreign policy, the Bush administration has left this country with almost none of the tools it used to have to shape world events. He pushed arrogant military unilateralism for years and now he's stuck with it as his only option. We are weaker as a world power, we have no moral authority and nobody trusts this government's intentions. The US now exists in a universe of vastly reduced maneuverability because of what he's done and not just because of our stretched military. Our credibility is in shreds.

Kevin says that World Wars have started over less than this and that's absolutely true. Bush may have pushed this country to the point where the only option it has is military force because nobody believes a word our government says. This may be the scariest moment we've faced since 9/11.


Update: Just to scare everybody witless even more on a Tuesday morning, Josh Marshall writes:

It is also not too early to point out that the evidence is there for the confluence of two destructive and disastrous forces -- hawks in the administration's Cheney faction whose instinctive bellicosity is only matched by their actual incompetence (a fatal mixture if there ever was one), and the president's chief political aides who see the build up to an Iran confrontation as the most promising way to contest the mid-term elections. Both those groups are strongly motivated for war. And who is naive enough to imagine a contrary force within the administration strong enough to put on the brakes?

Not me. These people are like cornered animals desperate to recapture that bullhorn moment and redeem their failed ideology. It's a very, very dangerous combo.

Oh and is everyone aware that Dick Cheney's daughter is "freedom agenda co-ordinator" and "democracy czar" in charge of the Iran propaganda group at the State Department? She is. I knew that would make you feel better.


Did I hear something about Cheney accusing Joe and Valerie Wilson of nepotism? I didn't think so.

Billmon on A Bipartisan Scandal

Billmon makes a rare appearance to provide an historical context into which to evaluate the pathetically ridiculous assertion by Bush that "[Abramoff] was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties."

Without saying a word, Billmon piles up the evidence that speaks volumes.

Billmon and Jim Webb are "now on the roughly same side on the big issues of the day"

If that's true then, as Billmon writes, "it tells you something has fundamentally changed in American politics".

... instead, nearly two decades later, Webb's now the newly elected Senator from my native state (a stronghold of the Confederacy and the national "right-to-work" movement) who's lined up shoulder to shoulder with Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and is writing op eds for the Wall Street Journal explicitly calling for what the Republican chattering classes sneeringly condemn as "class warfare":

[...]

That's beautiful stuff. Paul Wellstone could have written it. So could Bernie Sanders, although Bernie actually might find it a little too radical for his tastes. But the last person -- well, almost the last person -- on earth I would expect to emerge as a tribune of good old-fashioned New Deal populism (or, dare I say it, democratic socialism) is fightin' Jim Webb, Ronald Reagan's favorite Marine.

Not only that, but Webb's now against the war -- just like us unreconstructed '60s (or, in my case, '70s) radicals. I just hope he doesn't mind being tarred as a stabber of backs or a spitter on the troops by the modern-day equivalents of the old Jim Webb. It kind of goes with the territory.

If this is the new Democratic "conservatism" the Washington punditburo keeps bleating about, then all I can say is three cheers for conservatism. But Webb's op ed definitely left me with a profound case of political vertigo. My sense of direction (this way is left; that way is right) is getting pretty scrambled. Former Reagan cabinet officers now sound like Abby Hoffman. Connecticut Senators who started out trying to impeach Richard Nixon now sound like John Mitchell. Where's it going to end?

I don't know. But if Jim Webb and I are now on the roughly same side on the big issues of the day -- the war, globalization, corporate power, economic fairness, social justice -- it tells you something has fundamentally changed in American politics. It may not be a realignment (a political system this polluted and decrepit may not be capable of such a thing) but when Senators from Virginia start talking like Walter Reuther, it sure the hell isn't business as usual.

Billmon

I have been a big fan of Billmon for several years as you can tell from my many links to his posts in my short time as a blogger. In fact, he was the first blogger I sent money to support. It now seems that he has finally acted on what he said he might do and that was, pack it in. His blog is gone (though most the text is archived here, thanks to Miguel de Icaza).

I once wrote that he had his own special style and, with a worldly-wise, big-picture view, he paints us a picture which is striking both for its realism and for its darkness. He had a way of telling it like it is -- raw, honest to the point of making us uncomfortable (and why shouldn't we be uncomfortable?) and filled with a certain hopelessness but so good that you have no right not to read it.

His departure reminds me of something allegedly written on a gravestone: "I always knew this was going to happen". I'm going to miss his funny, articulate, sardonic wisdom.

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."

Whopper

Billmon is bad!

Maf54: (8:08:31 PM) get a ruler and measure it for me.

Boy: (8:08:38 PM): ive already told you that.

Maf54:(8:08:47 PM): tell me again.

I don't think so, George.

(hat tip to Daily Kos)

Billmon is very bad!

This one's too good not to share.

Hastert: I want a good, thorough probe.

Jeff Gannon: OK. That'll cost you $250.

(courtesy of Bernhard at Moon of Alabama)

Money quotes

Billmon on the Dow Jones index reaching an all-time high:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high today: 11,727 -- four points higher than the previous record, set January 14, 2000. So if you invested $1,000 in the 30 companies in the Dow six years and almost nine months ago, you'd have $1000.34 today! [...] taking almost 7 years to get back to where you started isn't exactly something to brag about.

Billmon on the extensive coverage of the Amish schoolgirl shootings:

It's a horrible story, and as a father my heart goes out to the families involved, but I feel compelled to point out that if this were Baghdad, a day with only five dead children and five wounded ones would be considered the dawn of a new era of peace, and Tony Snow would be bragging about how much progress we're making in Iraq.

Not that the corporate media has noticed the discrepancy. Iraqi deaths (at least 52 today alone...) rate a couple of paragraphs in an AP story, if that.

If it bleeds, it leads -- as long as it's American blood, that is.

Poputonian on the contents of the letter captured during the raid which killed Abu Musab Zarqawi, allegedly from a member of al-Qaeda which said "prolonging the war is in our interest".

Who gave these instructions, Karl Rove or al Qaeda?

keninny at DownwithTryanny says:

I don't think Mark Foley is a "pedophile" but still think he deserves everything he's getting. [...] The power relationship is simply too unequal for society to smile and look the other way.

I don't think this hypothetical congressperson of ours is a pedophile. But I have no problem describing him or her as a sexual predator. "Predatory" seems to me quite an apt description for such behavior.

Is sexual predation enough to cost a nonhypothetical congressman his career? Well, why on earth not?

Glenn Greenwald on the the Foley scandal:

It is not a coincidence that the GOP was harboring someone like Mark Foley within its highest ranks while their most powerful political officials purposely looked the other way and even actively helped to conceal what he was up to, thereby enabling him to continue. After all, even now that this conduct has been exposed, their instinct -- all the way to the highest levels -- is to excuse and defend those leaders and offer up the most disgusting defenses -- all because preservation of their political power depends on it. This is not some bizarre aberration. This is how they operate and it is what they are. And the Mark Foley scandal is making it virutally impossible for anyone to convincingly deny it any longer.

Glenn Greenwald on the Fordham resignation:

If you were a person rooting for this scandal to bring down the GOP House Leadership (and I'm not saying such a person exists; I'm speaking hypothetically), and you had the power to create one event to happen today, the Fordham resignation, followed by his subsequent accusations, would have to be very high on the list, if not right at the very top.

Josh Marshall on the implications of the Fordham resignation:

Now, one of key figures in the scandal, Kirk Fordham, who was Foley's longtime Chief of Staff and until today Rep. Tom Reynolds' chief of staff, has been fired. And he's come out and said, no, the whole leadership story is a lie. Fordham says he repeatedly told Hastert's then-Chief of Staff Scott Palmer as far back as 2003 that there was a problem with Foley and the pages. And nothing was ever done.

So, two years before the date everyone's been focusing on back in 2005. We're not at parsing little details.

They staked everything on a story. And the story was apparently pure fiction.

Unless Hastert and Co. can thoroughly discredit Fordham in the next few hours (and oh are they going to try) I'd figure Hastert is gone by this time tomorrow if not sooner. And just as a capital ship generates a giant whirlpool as it founders and disappears into the sea, I'm sure he'll be taking several with him.

Brad DeLong on Matt Yglesias' comment that "the NRO gang, they're about three hundred times as intellectually honest as the average conservative broadcast media outlet":

Sorry Matt, 300 times the intellectual honesty quotient of Hugh Hewitt still leaves them 99 44/100 % hack.

Mullah Omar Come Home: All is Forgiven

The incomparable Billmon is back ("Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit blogging") with a post entitled "Mullah Omar Come Home: All is Forgiven" in which he comments on Sen. Bill Frist's bizarre statement about welcoming the Taliban into the Afghan government. Billmon starts with one of his trademark "couplets" of juxtaposed quotes:

"Out of the black smoke and ashes of that terrible day, America stood up strong, united, and determined. After careful deliberation, we answered back. We toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda had trained."

Sen. Bill Frist
Press Release: Frist Denounces Democrats' Plan to Cut and Run
June 30, 2006

_____________________

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government. The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means.

Associated Press
U.S. Senate majority leader calls for efforts
to bring Taliban into Afghan government
October 2, 2006

Even by Dr. Frist's standards, this is quite an Orwellian volte face: From Islamofascist menace to potential "democratic" partner in just two months.

Goebbels: Hah. I did it overnight!

Hmmm. First the Pakistanis cut a truce deal with Al Qaeda and its tribal allies in the frontier territories, and now Frist and his sidekick Mel Martinez fly to Kabul and float this trial balloon.

Something big is up. Who knows? Maybe Dr. K doing his Nixon-goes-to-China thing.

But it's awfully hard to believe the Rovians are actually going to try to sell a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and/or Al Qaeda to the American public -- not even after the election and certainly not as some sort of October surprise/political miracle weapon.

What would come next? A state visit from Bin Laden?

[...]

Update 6:56 PM ET: And now the Brits . . .

British troops battling the Taliban are to withdraw from one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan after agreeing a secret deal with the local people . . . It has now been agreed the troops will quietly pull out of Musa Qala in return for the Taliban doing the same.

My, this seems to be quite the day for cutting and running.

Dog Bites Man

"Dog Bites Man" is headline shorthand for a news story that isn't new and the recently resurfaced Billmon uses it as the title of his most recent post commenting on the WaPo story about the plan for the Republicans to play dirty this election. Like, I mean... d'uh!

In a Pivotal Year, GOP Plans to Get Personal
Millions to Go to Digging Up Dirt on Democrats

By Jim VandeHei and Chris Cillizza
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 10, 2006

Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.

Billmon does make some intersting observations about this otherwise non-newsy report that link nicely with one of my earlier posts on the topic of campaign tactics that might prove successful.

I think it was P.T. Barnum who said that nobody ever went broke underestimating (or in Shrub's case, misunderestimating) the intelligence of the American people. That's not entirely fair: Americans can be very smart, even brilliant, about some things [unfortunately, these things are not usually] politics and current affairs.

[...]

All this helps create the sea of political ignorance and apathy on which Rovian admirals (and their less competent Democratic opponents) launch their attack vessels, armed with sales techniques borrowed from the advertising industry and the social psychology departments of the major research universities.

A diarist at Daily Kos relays this exceedingly cynical primer, allegedly written by an anonymous Madison Avenue executive, explaining how the battles are fought:

Understand that you are dealing with a target audience that doesn't care enough, or simply refuses to devote the time to learn the real facts regarding the real issues. Instead, their perception has BECOME the facts! . . .

Do not try to change this reality. Work with it. The perception you create IS the reality! Take heart! If they perceive something despite obvious evidence to the contrary, you will be able to make them perceive any number of things!

If this sounds eerily familiar, it's probably because you read Ron Suskind's 2004 pre-election interview with an anonymous White House official:

'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. While you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."

There are many things you can call that point of view and the style of politics it supports. Democracy isn't one of them.

Billmon waxes historical on Two Americas

It's such a treat that Billmon is back with such regularity. He's always worth reading. Check out A House Divided. Here are a couple of excerpts but check out what he thinks is a better comparison of the situation today than the old Civil War division. I think that you'll find it surprising, apt and troubling. I know I did... and in that order.

If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology) libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government.

[...]

But this too puts a premium on hot button politics -- in order to pull what would otherwise be a diverse collection of individuals with diverse interests and opinions (conservative on gun control, for example, or liberal on the environment) into one politico-cultural camp or the other. I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the biggest political success stories for the traditionalists lately has been the rise of the megachurches, which often draw from a broad cross section of suburban society, generally offer an extremely generic brand of Protestantism, but indoctrinate their members in a very specific brand of conservative politics, usually built around abortion, homophobia and hyper-patriotism.

The result of all this is a political conflict that grows steadily more vituperative, uncivil and tinged with overtones of violence -- a dynamic which, given the emotional and philosophical tendencies of the two camps, definitely favors the authoritarian right (i.e. the traditionalists.)

Billmon piles on

I could have posted this as an update on the previous post but it's just too funny to tack on the end of a post... not just Billmon's comments, but the claims by David Horowich that precipitated them.

This evening I had an extremely weird e-mail conversation with David Horowitz -- yes that David Horowitz -- stemming from a trivial comment I left on his latest screeching rant about the Cheney-Rumsfeld vacation home flap.

Horowitz (on his blog): The fact that Rumsfeld responded to the Times request to take the pictures means what? What else could he say?

Me: How about "no"?

Horowitz killed the comment (or at least, I don't see it displayed on his blog) but he e-mailed me a rambling response that began by pointing to his proposed explanation for why Rumsfeld muscled under to those street toughs at the Times: "If Rumsfeld had said 'no' . . . that would merely have confirmed their view of this administration as secretive and repressive" (again, that's from Horowitz's blog, not his e-mail.)

So in what parallel universe has "confirming that the administration is secretive and repressive" ever stopped Rummy before?

[...]

I mean the notion that the New York Times could use the threat of bad publicity to literally extort the Secretary of Defense into letting them publish a picture of his house is just falling down, can't breathe, snot-spurting-out-of-your-nose funny. Hell, in the real world, Rummy would just have Dick come over and shoot the Times photographer in the face with his shotgun. Problem solved.

The point is, nobody in their right mind could possibly believe what Horowitz wrote. And judging by the rest of his email, plus the two others he sent me in quick succession, Horowitz is every bit as loony as people keep telling me he is -- a real meshuggeneh, to borrow that fine Yiddish phrase.

[...]

he apparently can't even let a silly three-word comment from a minor-league lefty blogger go unanswered. I would have thought David would have more important things to do with his time: running his rat lines into the Middle East Studies Association, tracing the sinister links between Harry Belafonte and Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman -- above all, figuring out new and nasty ways to draw media attention to himself.

But apparently not. I guess even the slander business has its slow nights.

All clear for the White House?

First, Billmon trumpets the good news:

Fantastic news for the White House today -- yet another top presidential aide was not indicted for perjury or obstruction of justice. Boy, those guys are really on a roll!

Then he discusses the significance of Rove's bullet ballet is classic Billmon style:

So did Karl dodge the bullet, or did the bullet dodge Karl?

I'm as disappointed as anyone to hear that Pat Fitzgerald won't be serving Rove's porcine head up on a platter

[...]

In any case, I have a hard time believing Fitzgerald backed off because he's decided Rover wasn't such a naughty little piggie after all. That "Official A" label stamped on Karl's balding pate by the Libby indictment was the prosecutorial equivalent of the kiss of death, and based on his track record, Fitz is about as likely to show clemency as your average Mafia hit man, and probably less so.

[...]

This leaves two possibilities. Fitzgerald may have decided that getting a conviction against Rove was going to be tough -- too tough to justify the investment and the potential negative blowback on the Libby case. Or, Karl may have decided that it's far better to be a rat than an imprisoned ratfucker, and turned state's evidence.

[...]

If I had to make a guess, It would probably be that Fitz is indeed putting all his chips on Libby, and has good reason to believe Rove's testimony will help him hit the jackpot. I don't get the sense that Fitzgerald is spoiling for a constitutional death match, which is what he (and we) would get if the not-so-special prosecutor went after Big Time on conspiracy or obstruction or false statement charges.

It almost makes me nostalgic for the glory days of Ken Starr, the kind of special prosector who really would ask a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich -- or, in Rove's case, a rancid slab of bacon. But that's just the way it goes: The other side got the crooked arrow and we got the straight one. Somehow I doubt this is much comfort to Scooter Libby. Crooked arrows tend to miss their targets, as Starr missed his. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, appears to be lining up for a bull's eye, even if it's not on the guy I would most like to see skewered.

Throwing Rummy from the train?

Larry Johnson has an article up over at the TPMCafé wherein he predicts that:

"Don Rumsfeld may want to stick it out, but stick a fork in him. His goose is cooked and his reign will soon be over."

Johnson seems to think that the Six Generals constitute the tipping point. Contrast this assessment with Billmon's:

But I'm afraid the Field Marshal is too heavily armored even for your rounds.

Either way, we'll see. But with Bush's penchant for not firing anyone for incompetence and sticking together with his cronies, my money's on Billmon's view.