July 2008 Archives

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Rasmussen Reports

Forty-two percent (42%) of Americans say that if Israel launches an attack against Iran, the United States should help Israel. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 46% believe the United States should do nothing while just 1% believe the U.S. should help Iran.

I have a feeling, based on nothing more than my own silly notions, that the one-percent is made up of half ethnic Iranians and the other half are people that have actually read and understand our international obligations under the UN Charter to come to the aid of member nations who are victims of an otherwise unprovoked attacked by a rogue nation acting outside of the the rule of law.

I'm not saying what we should do, although even if we just stand by and watch Israel do everybody else's dirty work when it comes to Iran's nuclear aspirational goals, it's certain that we could be counted on to veto any interference by the UN against our closest Middle Eastern ally.

However, it's interesting that less than one percent of Americans even care what the UN obligates us to do.

I've had my fair share of run-ins with wingnuts, but I was reminded of one in particular while reading Daniel De Groot's rendition of the counter-conference Malkin and company were holding to bolster their lagging self-confidence in the shadow of Netroots Nation in Austin. I was physically accosted and called a commie for supporting Reagan.

Anyone really want to make the case that conservativism is anything more than a set of shallow authoritarian personality cults to rationalize socially destructive behaviour?
All they have is Reagan. And only their posthumous fictional version of him to boot. The one in office pissed them off by making nuclear arms reduction agreements with the Soviets.

I remember the Reykjavik conference, the one Reagan ended up walking out on, leaving most of us who were against wasting more money on more missiles and more nukes slapping our skulls and wondering how a geriatric moron could ever become president. (Some things never change.)

They had a special kind of lapel bling going around then that had both the Soviet and American flags crossed, and I got a hold of some as well as some stickers with both flags together. I was in law school at the time, and involved in running the Cleveland National Model United Nations Conference.

See boys and girls, way back when before the scary Muslamonazis threatened our very existence with dime-store box cutters, there was this guy named Gorbechev who had at his disposal thousands of nuke-u-ler missiles aimed at every square mile of this land-o-plenty on hair trigger release. And what did the great Saint Ronny Ray-gun do about this monstrous threat? He sat down and held face-to-face talks with him so we wouldn't soot our missiles at them if they didn't shoot theirs at us -- and maybe they thought they might get rid of some of them since they promised not to use them anyway.

President Ronald Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev entered into an unprecedented dialogue regarding their desire to eliminate their countries' nuclear weapons. "It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons," Reagan said. Gorbachev replied, "We can do that."

That was the theory, the "aspirational goal horizon" if you will. Of course Saint Ronny thought the best way to get an agreement for fewer missiles was to build more. The usual counter-intuitive wingnut nonsense. But the idea that the two leaders would talk face-to-face, that Reagan would meet with the head of what he labeled the "Evil Empire" was music to the ears of us lefties. Together they worked to keep the peace, just as the logo symbolized with each flag's "pole" merged into the other, neither on top. Neither dominating the other.

So I was wearing one of these pins with both superpowers' flags, using it as a tie-tac actually, and handing out the stickers to anyone in our lobby who might be interested in the Model UN conference. Then this huge guy came by to rain on my parade, calling me pinko scum and assorted other nasty things having to do with my heritage and politics because he saw the USSR flag.

I asked him if he knew what the logo symbolized, tried to explain what it was about, but he literally stuck his chest in my face, hollering and refusing to let me get a word in edgewise about his hero approving the pin, that it came from out own State Department. He didn't care. He just "saw red," and chest-thumped me a couple of times, trying to get me to throw the first punch -- and I was tempted despite his six inch reach advantage.

I walked away to the taunts of liberals all being cowards and his buddies led him out of the lobby. This bully was a college grad. I know that since you have to be "educated" before accepted to law schoolm and he was indeed a fellow student. When it came flag pins and talking with our rivals he had no desire to be further educated. His mind long since closed.

No, you'll never hear from me how there's more to conservatism than belonging to a tribal culture who spit on the very idea that inspired this nation's beginning, E. Pluribus Unum -- or as Ara likes to say, we're all in this together.

My son is a huge fan of Hillary Clinton and took it pretty hard when she lost to Barack Obama. He's even threatened to vote for John McCain. Well, Saturday the DNC and Howard Dean brought their cross-country "Register for Change" bus tour to Baton Rouge. So we attended.

On the way there Miss Julie had an idea.

"Wouldn't it be cool if you got Howard Dean to make a personal appeal to Michael to vote for Barack Obama?" I laughed at the thought. But she had something there. Below is the video of what happened next:

I emailed Michael the video.

"How did you get Howard Dean to do this?" he shouted, laughing, on the phone 3 minutes later. "At first I thought it was some sort of promotion," -- imagine Dean making a series of videos naming every single name in the book like those "personalized" coffee cups and key chains you see in souvenir shops -- "but then I heard your voice."

"So," I say, "is that enough or what? You gonna vote for Obama now?"

"I'm still thinking about it, but I'm getting closer. This helps."

There's still hope.

P.S. First Rove, now Dean. Who's got the mojo, baby?

Yeah, I know it sounds either like a neo-con version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show's Time Warp, or there has been a really big shoe drop with the PrezNitWit accepting even the notion of the word "time" to be associated in any way with his Iraq War final solution.

Never fear my pretties. The administration indeed keeps faithful to it's roots in Orwellian double-speak by "agreeing" to sometime down the road, maybe, talking about negotiating an agreement in a statement so vague and meaningless it's announcement can only have one possible effect -- put an annoying speed bump in Barack Obama's triumphant sprint to the White House.

The statement, if you can call it that since usually those imply some sort of declarative sentence, speaks of inclusion of a "general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals."

Aspirational goals. Say that with me one more time.

Go ahead. No one's listening.

Aspirational goals. Not just goals. You know, things that you aspire to, but Aspirational goals.

After all these years of Bush Speak, I still marvel that they can confound and confuse me again and again. Not over what they are trying to sell us, which is the usual bar-b-qued defecation, but that I still can't figure out whether I should be resentful they treat us like children or horrified they are working at the intellectual level of a second grader.

Sometime, almost out of sight down on that horizon somewhere, maybe, hopefully, if we're all good boys and girls and click our heels together they might actually agree that the Iraqis will stand up so we can stand the fuck down. Useless bureaucratic, power-mad morons.

If we haven't kicked enough ass over there by now so that the guys we've been training for five frickin' years can at least handle the mop-up operation, they're hopeless, and so are we.

Dissatisfaction with John McCain among the GOP faithful is legion, and there is steadfast resentment among the netroots over Obama's about-face on FISA, leaving many ready to explore a third-party option.

Third Party Watch (via) notes that a Rueters poll indicating a 7 point lead by Obama over McCain at this point, when Ralph Nader and Bob Barr are added to the mix, Obama's lead jumps to 10 points, nearly all of the defectors to the protest candidates coming from McCain supporters.

The big winner is the Green Party, sort of. For the first time since 1980 (also via), the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party is not fielding a presidential candidate, but has endorsed the Green's Girl, Cynthia McKinney.

I watched C-SPAN last Sunday when they replayed an interview with Libertarian candidate Bob Barr* and covered the acceptance speeches by the Green Party vice-presidential candidate and presidential nominee McKinney. Barr is hoping to cash in on the Ron Paul Blimpies phenomenon. The Greens were quoting Kanye West**.

*Note to Bob Barr: Ayn Rand wrote fiction, not text books. (Anyone who cites Atlas Shrugged as the guiding influence on their political philosophy loses every ounce of credibility in my opinion.)

**Note to Cynthia McKinney: Double that when it comes to rappers, or any musicians not named Bob Dylan.

I have my doubts about this nation after reading a couple of seemingly unconnected stories that probably wouldn't have been written if we had a functional federal government. I have no doubt whatsoever that if a McCain administration is sworn in next January, all hope for justice in this country is lost. I'm not too sure an Obama administration will have the cojones to do the right thing either, even if John Edwards is appointed Attorney General -- but that would be a good start.

I absolutely agree with John Cole's observation that Congress is a "Joke." Their decision to put on a useless "charade" by holding impeachment hearings (or should that read, <quote> "impeachment" </quote>) while electing not to vote on any findings they may make is the epitome of "farce." That so many spineless men and women could be gathered together, all sworn to uphold the Constitution they so casually disregard on a daily basis, is simply astounding. No wonder they have such a pathetic and historically low approval rating.

To put it in perspective, with Congress at 14% the Worst President Ever is twice as popular as Congress -- with good reason. They are Teh Suck!

It's embarrassing enough that if I were Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Congressman who submitted the Articles of Impeachment against President Bush, I would withdraw them and go on a spree of of the most disruptive procedural nonsense to ever hit a legislative body since the Albanian U.N. delegation would read the complete text of "new" speeches by their fearless leader, Enver Hoxha, into the record of the General Assembly three full years after the dictator had died -- even though they didn't tell anyone.

Of course, a useless protest is simply useless, and America really doesn't care much about what Kucinich does, and expects the bizarre from him. (When the wacko right goes off the deep end, they get a good-looking guy like Rick Santorum to do it, not some twerp like Dennis the Menace, but that's another story.) Since the the White House still is a sanctuary for felons and Congress has abdicated it's moral and legal authority, as long as we wish to stay within the system we as citizens have no other recourse than the (other) last bastion against tyranny -- the courts.

Here in Ohio, the best efforts of one of our Representatives to call the administration into account having been thwarted, again, we're turning to the judiciary, with Karl Rove at the top of the list of people to indict. With cooperation from the Ohio Attorney General and John Conyer's (useless) Judiciary Committee, Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case of King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell, is proceeding with a suit and commencing "targeted discovery" to prove that the 2004 election was stolen, and they're looking for heads to role as the Ohio Attorney General took the leash off the litigators.

One of the more delightful and interesting quotes comes from Arnebeck, concerning what he expects to discover as the stay is lifted: "[W]e anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio"...

[snip]

Arnebeck said that the Attorney General's office said they were ready to begin the investigation of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, and Arnebeck said he submitted a great deal of material to them, including "Bob's [Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman's] book on what happened in Ohio, documentation of the exit poll discrepancy, [and] John Conyers' report to the Congress which was the factual basis for the challenge to the electoral votes of the Ohio vote in January of 2005."

About a month later, the Attorney General's office contacted Arnebeck and asked him, "Who do you want to indict?"

Arnebeck explained that the AG's "concept of looking at this from a criminal standpoint was not to convene a grand jury and cast the net broadly and use the grand jury process to investigate and narrow the focus into the question of who may have tampered with those votes. But rather they wanted us to come to them with a more focused case." [all emphasis mine ~ Mark]

Here's the skinny. The perjury trap being set in the civil case is one way this thing might end up nabbing these guys. it worked against Clinton. But that's too obvious. Since the Federal Office of Special Counsel is as hopelessly politicized as the rest of the Justice Department, the Inspector General is just as useless, and the harbinger of Fitzmas can only do so much at one time, it's only fitting that States and local citizenry take matters into their own hands.

State politics plays its part here as well. Ohio's new Attorney General Nancy Rogers was appointed at the end of May to replace Marc Dann, just elected in 2006 and resigned under the cloud of a sexual harassment scandal. If her office
undertook a Grand Jury investigation targeting the conspirators in the State and National GOP along with the computer companies that supplied the tainted election machines suspected of stealing the 2004 predidential election and the programmers who rigged them it would instantly devolve into a media circus and the November special election for Ohio Attorney General would become a referendum on Diebold, Ken Blackwell and Karl Rove. (We'd probably still win, but why ask for trouble.)

If some well intentioned (and funded, which I intend to look into) citizens are willing to carry the water on this through the end of the year and get the ball rolling, and the AG's office gave them the green light, they can blaze a trail though the forest of corruption. This is just as heartening as the idea that George Bush could be indicted for murder by some brave county prosecutor who follows the case laid out by Helter Skelter author Vincent Bugliosi

In The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Bugliosi presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq. Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses—a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soldiers but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children; cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight; and alienated many American allies in the Western world.

I've heard at least one prosecutor on Thom Hartmann's program promise that he would bring such charges if and when a soldier from his jurisdiction ends up in Arlington. More from the civil case as reported by Brad Blog:

Hold letters have been sent to the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, asking them to hold documents relating to their activities to use corporate money to influence the Ohio Supreme Court elections. Another hold letter was sent to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking that he advise the federal government to hold emails from Karl Rove.

Arnebeck said "We think [Rove] is an individual who has been at the center of both the use of corporate money to attack state Attorneys General and their elections and candidates for the Supreme Court and their elections in the states, and also in the manipulation of the election process.

"We expressed concern about the reports that Mr. Rove destroyed his emails and suggested that we want the duplicates that should exist [be put] under the control of the Secret Service and be sure that those are retained, as well as those on the receiving end in the Justice Department and elsewhere, that those documents are retained for purposes of this litigation, in which we anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio."

[snip]

We believe there is clear evidence of a coordinated campaign in which Mr. Rove is involved [. . .]

Now this wouldn't be a corruption investigation if there wasn't a McCain connection. At the center of the subpoena wish list, Arnebeck is going after Republican website developer and information manager Michael L. Connel, the Bush/Cheney IT guy in both 2000 and 2004, who was doing work for the State of Florida in 2000 and Ohio Sec. of St. in 2004, who also wrote the firewall for the U.S. congressional computer system. Mr. Connel is now in charge of Senator McCain's IT program (presumably showing the old codger how to log onto the Googles).

Arnebeck's own expert on computer fraud, Stephen Spoonamore says,

"In the 2004 election, from my perspective, on any of the programs we run for any of my credit card clients, the results from the 14 counties, those are the sort of results that would instantaneously launch a credit card fraud investigation or a banking settlement investigation."

Spoonamore's reference to the "14 counties" refers to the so-called "Connelly Anomaly" in which down-ticket candidates got more votes than John Kerry. The name comes from the candidacy of C. Ellen Connelly, an African-American woman who was running for the Ohio Supreme Court in 2004. She was endorsed by pro-choice and civil rights groups, and was relatively unknown to Ohio voters, in addition to being vastly outspent by her opponent in the campaign. Yet, somehow, Connelly got scores of thousands more votes than did John Kerry at the very top of the ticket.

Arnebeck said that "if you adjust for the [Connelly] anomaly or that situation, it's enough votes to have changed the outcome of the election. So the focus of our efforts, in cooperation with the Secretary of State, would be to find out who is responsible for that."

[snip]

"Certainly if that happened at one of our banks, you could be arrested."

[snip]

"None of us [the American people] really want to confront the fact that there appears to be an extremely coordinated effort by a very small group of people to rig elections and take control of the executive branch."

"You can spend all day every day looking at this stuff and saying, 'Well that would certainly launch a fraud investigation in a bank, but it doesn't when it comes to our vote.' Why?"

You can also spend every day looking at this stuff, and it can just drive you nuts. No wonder there was more digital ink spilled last week in reaction to a cartoon than any of the latest travesties committed in our name by our government. We as a nation are just about burnt out by these crooks.

If it's any consolation, the GOP itself is burnt out -- on itself -- resorting to bribing it's members to fill time on the House floor making useless speeches to their useless selves. They can't wait for a new government either, even if they're hopelessly outnumbered.

Somehow you just know there's a monumental disconnect (and far too many hypersensitive folks out there) when the predominant meme throughout the media and blogosphere the last several days is the nature of satire.

How far can we go in mocking Obama?  Can we get away with mocking McCain more brutally or is he just running a clownish campaign?  Can we explain why McCain and Bush just aren't funny when they try (too hard, too often), but they offer a goldmine of comic material?  As Brad and Gavin try to document, the wingnuttosphere has been a study of parody itself lately.

Here's the deal folks.  McCain is a bumbling buffoon who wants to succeed a complete idiot.  It's not that we aren't allowed to make fun of Obama.  It's that he's not an asshole. 

If a mentally disabled person acted the way the leaders of the GOP do, it would be tasteless to make fun of them.  But since they act like "tards," yet insist they aren't and likewise are not cynically treating the American public like they're mentally challenged, all bets are off.

That said, I'll leave you with one I heard bar-tending the other night.  Warning: this is tasteless, includes a casual racist attitude and all sorts of other bad stuff, but I'm sharing anyway.  One of my customers said the economy is so badly "nigger-rigged," Obama is probably the only one who can fix it.

I told him to take it back, that he knew better, but even the black guy with him giggled, then groaned.

Humor is in the ear of the beholder, and so much of it depends on knowing the intent (if possible) of the person telling the so-called joke.  The joke-teller must also have a keen appreciation for audience sensibilities.  One thing that helps is not caring. 

Politicians care a great deal how they are perceived.  A comic is not so restrained, which is why George Carlin could and Carlos Mencia still does walk up to that line and dance across it.  Their attitude is of course, "screw 'em if they can't take a joke."  Their audience knows that, expects it, and everyone knows that there's room enough for everyone to be offended.

• Pres. McCain@3AM: Toles nails it again.
• Thanks for the memories: Tiger Stadium in Detroit may not survive the month.
• God's way of telling you that you have too much time on your hands: You are this guy putting lyrics to well-known movie themes. Or maybe you're just the guy watching the videos.
• One guy's an optimist and the other guy is an expert on the economy: In this Daily Show video, Bush and Bernanke appear -- simultaneously but in different parts of DC -- to say completely opposite things about the economy.
• Douchebag for Liberty: Bob Novak says McCain cannot win running a positive campaign. And this just in -- Columbus has discovered America!
• We don't even show the coffins arriving at the airbase: The entire nation of Israel shuts down as she mourns her war dead.
• McCain better rev up the nastygrams: Obama down by only three in North Carolina.
• Gore issues a challenge: Produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun, etc by 2018. And T. Boone Pickens' TV ads are running on TV, too, in Baton Rouge. Pretty soon, it'll be a movement! UPDATE: Texas OKs a massive wind power project.
• Obama pwnage: Dem nominee sucker-punches the Wall Street Journal and others who reported a puny $30 million take in June -- real number: $52 million. Ouch.

It’s hard to know what was in the head of the illustrator who drew Barack Obama as a sly-looking Muslim terrorist (with Osama bin Laden’s visage hung over the mantle) and Michelle Obama as a gun-toting, camo-clad, fist-bumping, smirking radical with the American flag roasting in the fireplace – artists are strange people – but The New Yorker’s editors must have known that to be satire, it must expose ludicrousness.

American Heritage Dictionary - sat·ire (sāt'īr') n.
1. a A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
b The branch of literature constituting such works. See Synonyms at caricature.
2. Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity.

Or, as BagNews Notes puts it more succinctly:

“…satire isn't satire if it has to be labeled as such.”

New Yorker editor David Remnick reveals his understanding of the genre:

What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama's — both Obamas' — past, and their politics. I can't speak for anyone else's interpretations, all I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama's supposed "lack of patriotism" or his being "soft on terrorism" or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers. That somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office.

The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are...

It is now, dipshit. How do you suppose that the 12% of knuckle-dragging American cretins who believe that Obama is a practicing Muslim and the prominent neoconservative bedwetters who insist that Obama was a practicing Muslim will get the satire? And what about the many Americans who are simply oblivious to the entire story? For them, these smears will not be “misinterpreted or taken out of context,” because you didn’t provide any context at all, you just repeated the smears.

Ohhhh, I get it. It’s not about Obama and the right-wing smear machine at all. It’s about the context-free, valueless “journalism” practiced by you and your colleagues in the establishment press. Too clever Mr. Remnick…by about half.

UPDATE: Speaking of knuckle-draggers, here's how G Gordon Liddy appreciated the "satire" on air: "Yeah, I don't suppose you've, by any chance, have seen the cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine, which is, you know, a huge thing. It's got Obama in his Muslim dress with a turban, and he's there with his wife. His wife has a "mad at the world" afro, circa 1968, she -- she's got bandoliers and an assault weapon, and there in their fireplace is burning the American flag. The New Yorker finally got it right."

Heckuva job, Remmy.

[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]

Yeah, you heard that right: “a satire of a misperception.” I heard someone this evening give that pretty nuanced explanation of the (now infamous) political cartoon on the cover of this week's New Yorker magazine. And I "get" it -- the cartoon is clever, smart and biting.

But for the 30% of Americans who tell pollsters that they believe that Obama is an angry, unpatriotic, secret black Panther Muslim terrorist sympathizer, it's quite a bit more straightforward: it simply confirms their belief that he's just no good.

After all, if even his friends are talking about it, there must be some truth to it.

Lastly, of course, it also confirms the view of the traditional media that Obama has a fundamental problem with white working class Americans. Or, as Stephen Colbert is wont to say after he shows (yet again) the video of Rev. Wright: "Why won't this story die?"

Speaking of Stephen Colbert, he is also a work of art that satirizes the misperceptions of the moonbat-class. As is Dave Chapelle (but not, when you get right down to it, Don Imus). Should we be unhappy with them as well? I can tell you that I heard Chapelle once say that he quit television because he realized much of his audience didn't get the nuance and was simply laughing at his caricatures of black people. He felt that he was somehow contributing to their ignorance. Colbert, too, has had some awkward moments with his audience but he hung in there and now it's pretty clear what the joke is all about when he goes on the air every night -- and that doesn't make his satire any less biting or on-point.

But the bottom line is this: there's a lot more at stake in the case of Obama. We've been through this in the last two election cycles and we'd like to avoid this kind of nonsense.

UPDATE: Then again, maybe I'm taking this personally and it's just business. Gary Kamiya has a point.

...some day I'll look back on these times and will be unable to remember them.

Not to be outdone by the wisecracking McJokester McCain and his McReference to killing all Iranians via lethal injection of Marlboros, Still President Bush is again indulging in his morbid brand of humor upon leaving the G8 summit.

"Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter." He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Where's the Daily Show when you need them? Oh, right here, mocking Bush's decision not to do a damn thing about the environment.

I can understand that. They've got six months left; why would they want to screw up a perfect score of zero for 3,726 in siding with citizens over corporate buddies? That would just be stupid.

Look, George Bush knows his baseball. So, he knows that when you've got this kind of a streak going, you don't make any changes to your routine.

They may be on vacation, but they still have access to their blog, thank goodness.

Some time ago I made the mistake of signing up for the Wingnut newsletter from Human Events, mainly to keep track of what crap Ann Coultergeist was spewing and to document the fall of her book prices to a buck.  Long since relegated to my junk mail spam filters, I checked it out today and saw Pat Buchanan's latest column being promoted.

There's always been something peculiar about dear old Pat's xenophobic world-view, and when he's doing his thing live as a regular at MSNBC, he can appear quite rational, albeit bellicose if you're not paying attention.  But in print, he's really something to behold.

Today, Buchanan makes the case that Britain and Poland were responsible for the horrors of World War II and the Soviet gulags.  No really:

On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in its dispute with Germany over Danzig, a town of 350,000 Germans. Should war come, Britain would fight on Poland's side.

Poland refused to negotiate, Adolf Hitler attacked, and Britain declared war. After six years, the British Empire collapsed. Germany was burnt to ashes. Poland entered the slave quarters of Joseph Stalin's empire.

Really Pat?  Are you really blaming Poland for WWII?

Pat's trying to make the case that we've given a similar "blank check" to Israel!  His proof?  They blew up a suspected nuclear facility in Syria last year and practiced come military exercises that could be interpreted as a dry run on Iran's nuke sites.  From this he concludes in a feat of illogical paranoia only the truly self-absorbed could manage that we would defend Israel from becoming a victim of a war they started themselves with or without our approval.

I know . . . crazy.  The problem is, that pretty close to reality.

Pat's worried that Israel might suck us into a war we don't want with Iran and that they need to be told not to start something we would have to finish.  Leave alone the fact that we don't have a mutual defense pact with Israel like the one that sucked Germany into Austria's war on Serbia which precipitated WW One, or made the specific commitments Britain gave Poland just prior to the beginning to WWII -- given as a deterrent that unfortunately failed.  The only recent US official who said an attack on Israel would be met with a devastating US response was candidate Hillary Clinton, and what Pat's considering is just the reverse, an attack by Israel on Iran just like the one's it made on Syria last year and Iraq over a decade ago.

And of course Buchanan presumes that unlike the previous surgical strikes that did not bring about a regional conflagration, this one would.

Sure, no doubt the white House green lighted Israel's moves against its neighbors in those prior incidents, and presumably would do so again.  And whether or not we approve of a move by Israel on Iran in the future, if they do it we'll be blamed.  That, and everybody knows Clinton was stating highly UN-official policy, yet accurately nonetheless.

So my question to Pat is, what frickin' difference would it make if we publicly told the Israelis "in unequivocal terms that the United States opposes any Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran, and will not assist but denounce any such
attack."  They  don't necessarily have to listen to us, and we might be saying something completely different in private -- and no one will believe us anyway if the shit hits the fan.  Besides, we already set the precedent for "preventive" war when we conquered Iraq.

Geez, half the administration is Jonesin' for another fight before they're thrown out of Washington.  Cheney and his minions make it clear they want to attack Iran sooner rather than later.  Oliver North on Fox Noise made the case it would be a cake-walk, that an attack on Iran would be welcomed by their Sunni neighbors in Jordon, Saudi Arabia and throughout the region -- and not turn it into an erupting nightmare.  North didn't even mention they would automatically close the Straights of Hormuz before the first plane returned to base, sending gas upwards of $20.00 a gallon in a day.   Just another walk on the beach, that's what the neo-con propaganda machine wants you to believe.

Remember "bomb, bomb, bomb" McCain?  He's cracking more so-called jokes about killing all the Iranians with cigarettes ... idiot. 

Of course we would be blamed, and of course we would have to act.  Who on earth would believe for one minute that if Israel started a fight with Iran it wasn't a joint effort whether we were in cahoots or not.  And would it matter?  If the Persian Gulf spigot were shut down, we'd be going to war anyway, no matter who provoked the conflict. 

It's not that we gave Israel any sort of "blank check" to hold our foreign policy captive.  It's that our entire world's economy is so tied up in the free flow of that black sludge, we would have no choice but to get involved.  As much as we love our Israeli friends, our ridiculously huge military exists to protect the American way of life, and that means being able to count on filling up the family wagon without taking our a second mortgage.

We're not hostage to Israel.  We're hostage to light sweet crude.

From Kevin at American Street:

We are being robbed of our liberties. And Obama and McCain are equals in that theft. Both deserve to lose for their failure to defend the very essence of our country.

Well, yes, but … tomorrow is another day.

In other words liberty, and the fight for it, is an ongoing process. Soon, the ACLU will sue to overturn the legislation and it will wind it’s way through the courts. Maybe we’ll luck out and the SCOTUS will strike it down. Stranger things have happened — even with this version of the court.

Better yet: Obama will (hopefully) win and the next Congress may have an opportunity to reverse the legislation as well.

Then there’s the prospect of Atty Gen. Edwards prosecuting every single one of the telcos on criminal charges.

So it’s never “over.”

One thing for sure: FIRST, you need to win the freaking election, or most of what I just said is flushed down the toilet.

...and this is true:

U.S. Sens. David Vitter, R-La., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, have signed on as co-sponsors of a proposed Marriage Protection Act.

I kid you not.

Jim Brown posted a diary over at Daily Kingfish wherein he lays out the case that Bobby Jindal's chances for the VP spot are alive and well.

That might be, but I think that's bad news for the Republicans. Here's why:

First of all, Jim: please provide the link to the article in The Nation that you mention. I'd like to read what qualifies as "accolades" for Jindal in that venerable magazine.

Next, Jindal helps McCain in Ohio vs. Obama-Strickland? Yawn. Refresh my memory -- did the poll occur before or after Strickland removed himself from consideration? Does it matter? How about Obama-Edwards? or any number of other non-Ohio politicians? How does the match-up look then?

Third, Jindal is largely unknown and undefined throughout the country. Once he steps on to the national stage, will he be able to survive the withering gaze of the traditional media? [cough -- exorcist -- cough]

Fourth, any VP candidate of McCain's is going to be viewed in a unique way because -- in the back of everyone's mind -- the specter of McCain's age (translation: death in office) is pretty stark. In other words, people will evaluate McCain's VP as the next president of the United States. Can Jindal survive the scrutiny?

Fifth, politics is 70% how you look, 20% how you sound, 10% what you say. That said...ever watch Jindal on TV with the sound off? Try it some time. We're used to him here. Around the country? Not so much.

Sixth, did I mention we'd be electing a future president who participated in at least one exorcism? Right. And you thought Rev. Wright was a scourge.

Seventh, Jindal makes McCain look even older, if such a thing is possible. If, as Jim says, "older people love youth in others," doesn't that hurt McCain?

Eighth, conservatives love him? That's reason enough to destroy his chances right there. Reaganism: been there, done that. Why are we listening to anything Newt Gingrich has to say on the matter. Next thing you know, Phil Gramm will be pulling the strings in the McCain campaign. Oh, wait...

I could go on and on.

Bottom line: I welcome a Jindal candidacy. His tenure in the governor's mansion is so short that he is vulnerable to having the highlights skipped over rather quickly. Then it's on to all sorts of gut-wrenching stuff.

Listen up: issues do NOT move voters. Emotions move voters. And when it comes to Bobby Jindal there's plenty there to scare the bejeesus out of people. Sorry to have to put it that way, but it is what it is.

This is a significant day in the campaign, but we go on. Mark has a great post below and there are also lots of good posts around blogville today. I just got done reading Kevin's post over at American Street and he, too, makes a good case for why we should be disgusted with the Democrats and their nominee.

I was struck by Mark's mention of the founding fathers and of Voltaire; Franklin in particular held him in high regard -- no surprise there. I also note Mark's mention of John Adams who, as President, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law, a heinous blot on constitutional history (part of which was still legal in 2008). Despite that, we remember Adams as a giant of the American Revolution, easily Jefferson's equal. That Adams could be both things -- a genius and yet a seriously flawed politician -- should give us some insight into the quandaries (and temptations) of leadership in the American system of governance.

So here's the thing: those of you who want to quit the game at this point are ceding the field to others who take comfort in our disunity. We'll survive yesterday's vote -- one of many to come -- in the Senate. But only if we don't break apart. Tomorrow the sun will come up again and for many days to come. We'll get another chance to get it right.

Attention should be paid to Russ Feingold, a champion of civil liberties but also a politician:

Maddow: With this vote, voters have to be asking if there is any meaningful difference between the parties on executive power, between the Democratic vision of executive power and the GOP. Certainly your vision of executive power is different than the president's. But can you say the same for your party?

Feingold: I'm very concerned about it. People have a great right to be disappointed and to look at the 2006 election both rigard to Iraq and say, "What are they doing?" But having a Democratic president, in particular Barack Obama, should allow us to greatly change this mistake.

Barack Obama believes in the Constitution, he's a Constitutional scholar. I believe he will have a better chance to look at these powers that have been given to the Executive branch. And even though he'll be running the Executive branch, I think he will understand and help take the lead in fixing some of the worst provisions.

So this is a huge setback. It would have been better for Democrats to stand together and not let it happen in the first place because it is much harder to change it after the fact. But I do believe that Barack Obama is well-positioned in terms of his knowledge and his background and his beliefs to correct this. So I do think the people have a right be disappointed, but they also have a right to hope for change on this issue particularly, starting in January.

As Franklin said, we must all hang together or we will surely hang separately.

It was early July of an election year when a bona fide liberal, a staunch defender of the progressive cause was facing a contentious election against an entrenched conservative Senator who would pull out all the stops; painting his less experienced challenger as weak on the tough-guy stuff of national security, a pussy when it came to fighting and killing the evil-doing muslamonazi terror.

Despite being nearly incomprehensible on the stump and surrounded by corrupt and incompetent cronies, the Conservative Senator knew he could count on his legion of lobbyists to fund his campaign of fear and lies. The insurgent challenger correctly judged the temperament of an electorate that was sick to death of GOP rule, but leery as always of something unfamiliar. But he also knew that the only hope for his cause was to beat the Conservative. That was job one.

And politics being what it is, the liberal challenger was put in a box with few good options. He was in the House of Representatives at the time and the day came when the abomination known as the Military Commissions Act came up for a vote, complete with the despicable abolition of habeas corpus clauses and hideous codification of torture. A law so egregiously contrary to what this nation stands for, not even a Supreme Court more to the right than the day it selected Bush as the 43rd Resident could find a way to make it Constitutional, and has knocked it down at every turn.

Sherrod Brown (D-OH) turned his back on his principles and voted for the MCA, a decision he lived to regret but pledged to make up for that mistake. His vote against FISA is one step in that direction.

Barack Obama made just as profound a mistake by not doing all in his power to stop the legislative pardon just handed to the telecom giants and the criminal cover-up by the White House for committing over 30 consecutive felonies by reauthorizing their illegal surveillance. Obama was in a similar box, with bigger stakes and fewer options than Brown in July of 2006.

There were only four sides to the box
.
1. Don't show like McCain.

2. Vote for FISA like he did, reluctantly while on record endorsing the defeated amendments that would have stripped the bill of the telecom immunity clauses.

Or . . . Fight the bill which leaves two possible results.

3. This junior Senator cashes in his political capital before even accepting the nomination of his party for President, leading his slim majority from the back bench and convincing enough Republican Senators to honor his filibuster, thus handing the Presumptive Democratic Party Nominee the legislative coup of the millennium, confirming that he is indeed the second coming.

4. Obama leads a doomed filibuster attempt, a futile gesture that confirms the next month's Fox News talking points that the Democrats are in disarray, will not support Obama, and that he is a feckless and naive politician who has a lot to learn about leadership and the realities of Washington D.C.

He picked number 2. It was clearly the best of bad choices from his perspective. Your mileage may vary, and your Quixotic instincts are noble indeed if you believe he should have gone for 3 or 4. Would that it were true that following through on all good intentions were rewarded or even possible in Versailles on the Potomac.

It would have been the right move, but not a winning move, and America rewards winners, not philosophers. Ask George McGovern, John Kerry and Al Gore, or even Ted Kennedy about how hard it is running for President when you're a liberal, despite knowing in your heart of hearts that you are on the right side of history and have a vision of what this nation can truly become if it listens to its better angels.

Sherrod Brown has to live with stories like this, as he washes the blood from his hands:

. . . Huzaifa Parhat, a member of China's Uighur ethnic group, a Muslim people who are subject to continued oppression by the Chinese government. Parhat had fled China to Afghanistan, which he in turn left when his refugee camps was bombed by the Americans, fleeing this time to Pakistan, where he was turned over to U.S. forces for a bounty payment.

He has been held as an enemy combatant for over six years without charges. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has now ruled that absent some proof of his enemy combatant status he must be released. Interestingly, the government while continuing to press his enemy combatant status, has evidently cleared him for release -- unfortunately there is no country to which to return him. Such is the state of justice in this country seven years into the term of a president who has shamed us in so many ways that they are hard to enumerate.

I don't relish the thought of being an Obama apologist. He has more than enough of those, and chief amongst those should be the Senator himself -- with an act of atonement by President Obama, fixing this miserable FISA law and punishing those who abused their powers these last seven years again and again and again under cover of executive fiat.

However, at least Obama doesn't have detainees like Huzaifa Parhat on his conscience, or record. In fact, his extraordinary speech against the MCA was probably the highlight of his first year in the Senate.

When you are sitting in the Oval Office, or don't have to face reelection for another six years in the Senate, you can afford to be a statesman. When the election day is quickly arriving, however, it's all about politics, not principle. That's just the way it is, and Barack Obama always knew that.

One of the reasons I believe the FISA bill got rammed through now is because Obama and Harry Reid didn't want this to hang over the election like the MCA did in September of '06, when the Senate finally got around to approving what the House had done in July. He didn't want to make another speech like this, 9/28/06:

"I may have only been in this body for a short while, but I am not naive to the political considerations that go along with many of the decisions we make here.

I realize that soon, we will adjourn for the fall, and the campaigning will begin in earnest. And there will be 30-second attack ads and negative mail pieces, and we will be criticized as caring more about the rights of terrorists than the protection of Americans. And I know that the vote before us was specifically designed and timed to add more fuel to that fire.

[snip]

Politics Won Today

But politics won today. Politics won. The Administration got its vote, and now it will have its victory lap, and now they will be able to go out on the campaign trail and tell the American people that they were the ones who were tough on the terrorists.

And yet, we have a bill that gives the terrorist mastermind of 9/11 his day in court, but not the innocent people we may have accidentally rounded up and mistaken for terrorists - people who may stay in prison for the rest of their lives.

So folks, all I have left to say is that you better put on your big boy or girl panties and suck it up. This ain't bean-ball we're playing and we've got people dying out there from war and poverty and sickness, people that will keep dying if the GOP can keep a hold of the White house and keep a strangle-hold on Congress. We've got innocent folks being tortured, kid being blown up for no damn reason on the streets of who knows where, and a corporate kleptocracy raping our resources and stealing our future -- and you're all pissy about Bush bugging your phone.

Get over it. The conservatives have been fighting us liberals as if we were the real enemy in a real war. It's about time to wake up and realize we're in a war and fight back, which included tactical retreats like we witnessed this week. We got bigger fish to fry right now. We can fix FISA the same day we close down Gitmo and indict Cheney and Rove.

From MoveOn.Org, that is a nice pretty shade of blue that even matches my car.

It says "Obama '08," and it was free!

Dartboard or car?  Dartboard or car?

Quandary.

(BTW, nice move Hillary.)

My less than heartfelt answer is continued support for Barack Obama, and I'll slap the dart-hole free sticker on the car.

Why? 

Step one, rid the bureaucracy of the neo-cons.

Step two . . . (something about underwear gnomes, I forget)

Step Three, profit? Happiness? Utopia? I dunno, but we gotta do Step One.

I just keep going back to the saying, never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

That was Voltaire, who also said, "Love truth, but pardon error."

We can make bumper stickers out of Voltaire's best sayings and be even prouder of our bumper-bling.  He would still be considered a progressive today, and recognize that many of society's ills he abhorred are in full force despite a couple of centuries of revolution and "democratic" institutions.

Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static force useful only as a counterbalance since its "religious tax" or the tithe helped to create a strong backing for revolutionaries.

Reading Voltaire reaffirms my commitment to refer to the "Inside-the-Beltway" crowd as more than simply, "The Village" but "Versailles on the Potomac Villagers."  We've come so far to fight the same battles.   Fortunately, we're better armed for having men like Voltaire, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Hamilton gone before us -- leaving us a framework to fight these battles against a foe too full of itself or too ignorant to even know or care who Voltaire is, and why these are words to live by:

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

As for FISA, Like his contemporary, the "conservative" Edmund Burke who said that "Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny." Voltaire tells us that, "If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones."

We have the technology.  We can make our laws better than they are. 

That will never happen with John McCain in the White House.

...and a black eye for the Democratic Party.

[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]

Fox News continues to gun for Michelle Obama:

This is possibly why someone in the Obama campaign thought it might be a good idea to put the Obamas on mainstream celebrity-crush TV.

Maybe it's just a slow news day. Maybe Access Hollywood's audience really needed to see Michelle and Barack's family. Maybe Malia and Sasha are just the excuse you need to smile.

Part one of the interview was on last night (with three other parts slated for the rest of this week) and already there's an ongoing debate about the weeMichelles. For example, check out what O'Reilly says -- you might be surprised. There are those who wonder if it's good for the kids to be exposed to the media like this (I'm talking to you Michelle Malkin).

Me? It seems pretty obvious that the Obamas are simply being proactive and introducing their family to the country in a way that best suits them both -- the country AND the Obamas. In other words, why risk seeing your kids hounded by the papparazzi when you can bring them in front of the cameras yourself and on your own terms?

UPDATE: Obama now says it was a mistake to do it and it won't be happening again. Come to think of it, he looked pretty queasy sitting there...

While our bankrupt Congress delays its most recent bi-partisan sellout of the people’s right to be secure in their persons and effects so as to protect their corporate benefactors – whom they obviously consider to be their primary constituency - so that they may attend the funeral of an unapologetic southern white racist, race-baiter and homophobe, we take stock that their approval rating of just 18% as of one year ago has now been cut in half.

Just like American industry and the corporate press, they are reviled by their customers because it is quite obvious to them that none of America’s elites give a rat’s ass about public concerns, except as a means to protect and enrich themselves and their cronies.

So, what are you going to do about it?

The indispensable John Amato at Crooks and Liars has the video:

JOHN MCCAIN: “Now we’ve got the cables. We’ve got talk radio. We’ve got the bloggers. I hate the bloggers. We’ve got all kinds of sources of information.”

Shocking that the new titular leader of the Republican Party doesn't just find bloggers annoying or challenging, but actually detests the most dynamic and truly democratic forum mankind has ever devised.

Shocking.

Not really.

From the terrific HBO miniseries John Adams, the scene wherein the Continental Congress approves the Declaration of Independence and the document is read aloud on the steps of Independence Hall. The filmmakers intercut that with John Adams' daughter reading it from her sickbed at home which adds a touch of sweetness to the event.

You really cannot "get" the Declaration of Independence until you've heard it read aloud. After all, it isn't called the Statement of Independence, right?

Mark makes some pretty good points below. This one jogged my memory:

We won't stay home, know better than to get burned by the Nader protest vote again in this lifetime, and don't have enough clout to bring about real change.

Ah, Nader. Let me ask you a question, Mark: Why did Al Gore not gain the White House in 2000? Was it that Bush stole Florida?

Or was it that Gore did not talk more about (for example) climate change, thereby drawing the Nader vote more decisively?

Or was Gore's problem something else: that he lost Tennessee, his own home state, because the voters there thought he was too liberal?

When you have the answers to these questions, then we can talk some more about Obama's conduct in this campaign.

In the meantime, I don't have any easy answers here. At best, I guess I could say that things would have been different had Gore v. Bush been run in the context of today's Blogville. So maybe we have more power now than we think.

On the other hand, campaigns are always about winning elections, not leading movements. The time to lead a movement is after you get elected -- otherwise it ends up meaning a whole lot less than we all hoped it would.

UPDATE: If you choose "Other" below, be aware that you can (and should) enter some explanatory text in the text box directly below the radio button.

It's next to impossible this Independence Day not to be reminded how far we still have to go in building this "more perfect union" when the leader of the more liberal political party, uhm . . . evolves his positions almost immediately upon securing the nomination -- something he accomplished in no small part due to the support of the most ardent progressives and the liberal online community.

And he's walking it back, all those things we "hoped" he would be, but really never was.

What really is mystifying, or rather simply infuriating is how easily and predictably we are again left at the alter. McCain, the "Maverick" has done somersaults moving to appease his extreme right base, and the Democrats tag along for the drift to the right as well, despite clear evidence that this of all years, such a "safe" move is unnecessary.

What the politicians don't see, because there is no contrary evidence to convince them, is that the "safe" move to the right is actually dangerous, if not to the nation then to their ambition. There are no consequences for the progressive movement being ignored. We simply aren't perceived as offering the same credible threat of backlash as do evangelicals or obsessive tax-cutters and militarists. Our attention to detail, engagement and enthusiasm present a different dynamic. We won't stay home, know better than to get burned by the Nader protest vote again in this lifetime, and don't have enough clout to bring about real change.

Today the blogosphere is abuzz with Barack Obama's online address on the FISA issue. This is promising, but not heartwarming.

Yes, he used our medium to talk directly to those of us who are most vocal in our opposition to his support of this obviously flawed position. But since he didn't change his stance, Glenn Greenwald thinks the statement was "worthless," Paul Rosenberg at Open Left doesn't think Obama's statement will fool any of us that are paying attention, and Marcy Wheeler doesn't think Obama knows what he's talking about.

I agree with them all, but unsaid is that Obama knows exactly who he's talking to, and it ain't you my dear over-informed blog reader. He's talking to the under-informed, as usual. This time he's just not doing it through the usual media filter. He added a step. But his target, ally and nemesis is always the Versailles Villagers on the Potomac -- or does Digby have to spell it out for you again?

And this is because our political narratives are written by corporate conservatives and disseminated by their rich celebrity employees who actually seem to believe their "values" are shared by Real Americans. One of the most brilliant narratives was the notion that "the left" is unpatriotic. After all, suppressing dissent on that topic has kept the bipartisan Military Industrial Complex gravy train rolling for more than 50 years. It's perfectly natural that the new Surveillance State would be folded into that at the first opportunity, and the corporations that provide all the technology would necessarily want a piece of that action. There's huge money to be made in government contracts and the idea that any corporation would do something to endanger such possibilities over something so trivial as the constitution is naive. They agreed to work together for very good reasons and they do not want any interference.

But it isn't just about money it's also about political power. The effect of this decades long propaganda program has been to inculcate the idea among many Americans that liberalism itself is unserious. It's become so reflexive that any Democratic politician is automatically granted respect from the political establishment for the mere act of defying his own voters. It is considered a sign of courage and gravitas and a necessary right of passage.

What Obama considers important is winning. Not your petty concerns about the rule of law or following the Constitution. It's not like he sat down and took on commenters in a free-for-all exchange at a site like Daily Kos -- and he would have been foolish to do so. He doesn't need to. What he does need to do is have the corporate media report that he engaged us laptop hippies, was nice enough to stoop to our level for which we should be duly impressed, and still supports the "adult" position. NAFTA, Iraq, the list of rightward tacking grows daily.

In a day and age when all of the collective members of the media informed the world exactly when and where the race for the Democratic nomination was over -- because the saintly Tim Russert said it was so -- the progressive online community has a long way to go to be more than a curiosity or a prop in their play.

The lesson is, we just have to keep plugging away.

There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance

A planet of play things
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
'The stars aren't aligned
Or the gods are malign...'
Blame is better to give than receive

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill
Rush ~ Freewill

A tautology for the ages from the master of Teh Stupid:

A lot of poor commentary has framed the Iraq war as a conflict of "choice" rather than of "necessity." In fact, President George W. Bush chose to remove Saddam Hussein from power because he concluded that doing so was necessary.

Heh. Nice word play. Lemme see if I can do as well.

How about this: "In fact, President George W. Bush chose to conclude that it was necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power." See? Easy and I used fewer words too!

After all this time, they're still offering up bullcrap arguments to justify the worst decision in American history. This ain't flying at all, and BooMan does an admirable job of explaining why.

Feith pushes a false narrative on us, but it's a familiar one. We had no reliable intelligence in 2001 that suggested that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons programs. His armed forces were weak, disloyal, ill-paid, ill-equipped, and totally unable to project force towards any of his neighbors. Insofar as the Intelligence Community worked on the issue of Iraq, they were mainly concerned with an international disinformation campaign to heighten the threat from Saddam in order to maintain support for a crumbling sanctions regime. Belief in Iraq's WMD's was nothing more than a convenient case of believing our own hype. How many times did the Bush administration point to misinformation put out by the Clinton administration to bolster their case for war (and to justify their decision after the fact)?

But there is a key difference between the lies of the Clinton administration and the lies of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) of Douglas Feith. Clinton administration lies were intended to keep Saddam Hussein from rearming and/or slaughtering internal dissidents. Bush administration lies were intended to justify actions that have now cost over 4,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives, created over 2 million refugees, and cost a trillion dollars.

That was a choice that George W. Bush made. He chose to lie in the service of a policy that created all this tragedy and waste. And to think that Feith would quote Rumsfeld's concern about the loss of a single pilot as justification for the necessity of doing this! No wonder General Tommy Franks said of Feith, "I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day."

As for Karl "The Math" Rove, well . . . other than still being worshiped by the likes of one of the most self-deluded bloggers in Reich Wing Blogistan, he not only fails completely of offer any analysis in his long-winded and tiresome essay other than how McCain and Obama are spending their money -- cuz it's all about the cash of course -- he can't even get the simple facts right about who's spending what, when.

Honestly I don't know if this is a deliberate fake-out, willfully ignoring the dynamic shifts in the electorate as a direct backlash against the dismal failures of Rove's former boss's administration because of their complete politicalization of public policy due mainly to Rove's own advice and advancement within the White House.

That or maybe Rove is just stupid too.

I wonder if the Village Gasbags will be able to figure out who is demeaning whose service?

“I can't speak for them, but we all know that General Clark, as high-ranking as he is, his record in his last command I think was somewhat less than stellar."
-- Orson Swindle, John McCain Campaign

Just in case there’s still some question what actually demeaning a war veteran’s service looks like:

Louis Letson: "I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury."

Van O'Dell: "John Kerry lied to get his bronze star...I know, I was there, I saw what happened."

Jack Chenoweth: "His account of what happened and what actually happened are the difference between night and day."

Admiral Roy Hoffman: "John Kerry has not been honest."

Adrian Lonsdale: "And he lacks the capacity to lead."

Larry Thurlow: "When he chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry."

Bob Elder: "John Kerry is no war hero."

Grant Hibbard: "He betrayed all his shipmates...he lied before the Senate."

Joe Ponder: "He dishonored his country...he most certainly did."

Bob Hildreth: "I served with John Kerry...John Kerry cannot be trusted."

The plain fact is, the Gasbags have no moral or rational authority to judge the matter, they relinquished their credibility and responsibility to do so four years ago.

[Cross-posted at Dispassionate Liberal]

I like Chuck Todd (and his posse of deputies Mark Murray and Domenico Montanaro) but I think they're off in the tall grass on this:

[...[D]oes this entire episode remind anyone else of John Kerry’s botched joke before the 2006 midterms -- when Kerry’s mangled swipe at President Bush got twisted into a slap at US troops?

That's a misreading of what's happening here because Clark's point was made with far more intelligence and articulation than Kerry's (despite Obama calling it "inartful" but that's another story).

Here's how I see it:

McCain, trailing badly by most meaningful metrics, wants the Obama camp to hit him hard. Why? Three reasons:

1. So that he can get as much free media as possible, but more importantly...
2. So he can play the aggrieved victim, which leads to...
3. Drawing the Republican base closer to him (McCain) in his defense.

That's it. So how's he doing? Not so good.

Obama is not the candidate that will lash out at his opponents. McCain should know this by now -- Obama is preternaturally cool (for a national politician) -- it is McCain who is the hothead. Instead of lashing out, Obama has repeatedly stated how much he honors McCain's sacrifice, but...that isn't enough to qualify McCain to be president. The longer McCain strikes back, the weaker and more petty he looks.

I think I know what McCain is trying to do: he (consciously or otherwise) is trying to take a page out of Richard Nixon's campaign playbook circa 1967. Back then, Nixon was perceived as a has-been, a loser that no one in their right mind would listen to. But Nixon figured out that if he could goad LBJ into lashing out at him personally, he could elevate his stature to that of the sitting president. And (more importantly) he could paint himself as a victim/outsider being picked on by the bully/insider. Nixon understood the simmering resentment against Johnson and knew that as soon as Johnson struck back it would draw the Republican base closer to him. It worked for Nixon back then.

But it won't work for McCain today because Obama isn't a bully and McCain isn't an outsider. Oh, he'll draw the Republican base closer to him because these are the same people that give Bush a 60% approval rating and they'll believe just about anything. But as far as getting the independents and disaffected Democrats...not so much.

Furthermore, the free media thing isn't working out so well either. For one thing, Wesley Clark has made his point with clarity ... and humility: Clark honors McCain's sacrifice, but will not concede that it automatically makes McCain the superior candidate for president. In my book, this makes him a decent candidate for Secretary of Defense or Chariman of the Armed Services Committee ... but not Chief Executive of the United States. Of course, McCain's camp simply won't accept that and continues to play the "sacrifice card" and the "military experience" card. But that misses the point and gives Clark yet another chance to repeat his point.

And you know what? Every day that this story stays alive cuts against McCain by allowing Clark's argument to be discussed in greater detail. It gives Sen. Webb a chance to weigh in. It gives McCain another opportunity to screw up by bringing in the bad actors from the Swiftboats for Slime -- the guys who trashed Kerry by trashing his military career.

Bad move Senator McCain: now YOU look like the bully. Can't you see? No one is trashing your military career. Not Clark, not Webb, not Obama. They are simply making a simple case: Being a hero yesterday does not punch your ticket to the Presidency...tomorrow.

Everyday that this issue is discussed AGAIN is another day where we get to consider whether we elect a president based on his judgment instead of his sacrifice. Hillary tried to frame her fight with Obama in a similar way -- experience versus judgment. She lost. If McCain wants to fight that battle again, he's going to lose just like Hillary did.

Elections are about the future, not the past. If McCain doesn't know that by now, he's doomed.