Month: May 2004

Ooops, He Did It Again

I am reliably informed that Dana Rohrabacher is once more blaming the Clinton administration for the Taliban and al Qaeda, this time on Crossfire. Looks like it’s time to dig into the Dana files again:

Hello?

Rohrabacher’s post-Sept. 11 finger-pointing was a fraud designed to distract attention from his own ongoing meddling in the foreign-policy nightmare. Federal documents reviewed by the Weekly show that Rohrabacher maintained a cordial, behind-the-scenes relationship with Osama bin Laden’s associates in the Middle East—even while he mouthed his most severe anti-Taliban comments at public forums across the U.S. There’s worse: despite the federal Logan Act ban on unauthorized individual attempts to conduct American foreign policy, the congressman dangerously acted as a self-appointed secretary of state, constructing what foreign-affairs experts call a “dual tract” policy with the Taliban.

I mean, this is getting ridiculous. Isn’t there any “journalist” in Washington who has the cojones to call this asshole on his little “friendship” with the Taliban? What in Gawd’s name is it going to take to get these people to actually, you know, do their jobs? There are pictures, ferchristsake!

Thanks Wendel for the heads up.

Just Because You’re Paranoid, Doesn’t Mean That People Aren’t Out To Get You

Rush told his listeners this week, “There’s something going on. I mean, every day now somebody is out there trashing me and mentioning my name from someplace.These comments are two weeks old. Now they’ve even got Gore mouthing these comments

There’s something going on, all right, hop-head. You’re having to answer for the vomitous lies you’ve been spewing for the last 10 years. Nobody has to say anything bad about you. All they have to do is wrap your own words around your neck and let them hang you.

Guess what, Rush. You’re becoming a liability.

What Was Your First Clue?

The one and only time I interviewed Mr. Bush, when he was running in 2000, he called me by the wrong name several times, which was no big deal, and I didn’t correct him. But after this went on for a while, his adviser Karen Hughes, who was sitting in on the interview, finally said: “Governor, her name’s not Alison, it’s Melinda.”

“I think I know what her name is; we just had lunch last week,” Bush responded. “Your name IS still Melinda, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t changed it since last week?”

“No.”

“OK, then. Glad we got that cleared up.”

Hughes persisted, though. “Governor, you were calling her Alison.”

“I wasn’t calling HER Alison,” he said, with apparent conviction. “I was calling YOU Alison.”

At the time, I thought this was very funny. But now I’m not so sure. I keep wondering what has become of the “humble” foreign policy Bush talked about during the 2000 campaign. Yes, 9/11 has changed our president’s view of the world and given him a new sense of mission, of “crusade” as he once said. Yet it has not altered just-war theory or the rule of law—which in the absence of personal humility, or any doubts about right action, seem particularly useful guideposts.

Ya think?

So, now we find out that the intellectually deficient inbred son has always had a messianic complex, has always believed he’s omnipotent and has always insisted that those who surround him maintain his version of reality.

Remind you of anyone?

Another great catch from Kevin at Catch.com

Classic Charles Pierce:

Yesterday, prior to watching the Sox get vivisected by Oakland at Fenway last night, I was listening to The Radio Factor on my way home from work. Now, I’ve followed Bill O’Reilly’s career since he was just a baby megalomaniac on Boston TV. It would not now surprise me in the least if, one night on TV, right there during The Memo, O’Reilly declared himself to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.

Such Total Losers, Dude

If you read this article by Michael Crowley in Slate, you’ll soon realize that not only is Kerry a charisma deficient loser, but anyone he could possibly pick as his running mate is even worse.

What’s really fun about it is that it contains every single GOP talking point ever devised to insult and demean Democrats. It will make you feel all kewl ‘n stuff when you read it because then you’ll know what to say to be above it all like the totally, like, smart dudes who write for, like, totally awesome online zines.

What’s a drunken man like, fool?

Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman. One draught above heat makes him a fool, the seconds mads him, and a third drowns him.

Ezra deconstructs Hitchy’s somehow sad little defense of his great friend Ahmad so we don’t have to.

I actually thought this was rather poignant:

At our long meeting, Chalabi impressed me for three reasons. The first was that he thought the overthrow of one of the world’s foulest-ever despotisms could be accomplished. I knew enough by then to know that any Iraqi taking this position in public was risking his life and the lives of his family. I did not know Iraq very well but had visited the country several times in peace and war and met numerous Iraqis, and the second thing that impressed me was that, whenever I mentioned any name, Chalabi was able to make an exhaustive comment on him or her. (The third thing that impressed me was his astonishingly extensive knowledge of literary and political arcana, but that’s irrelevant to our purposes here.)

Isn’t that something. Ahmad greatly impressed him by “bravely” saying he thought the US could overthrow a third world dictator, he knew many names of many Iraqis and he dropped lots of political and literary references into the conversation. Imagine that. All those thing in one meeting with the Orwell worshipping, name dropping literary and political snob, Chris Hitchens. Why it was Kismet!

If I were a cynical type, I might just think that old Chris got himself conned.

Me, Me, Me

In Jack Beatty’s scathing takedown of the neocon vision in The Atlantic, the sub-head reads:

In the wake of Iraq, the term “neo-conservative” may come to mean “dangerous innocence about world realities.”

Now, I don’t mean to toot my own horn, being the incredibly modest and unassuming sort that I am, but I simply must call to everyone’s attention the fact that I have been calling the Wolfowitz claque the “starry-eyed neocons” since before I started this blog even, which was way back in oh, 2003.

You can look it up.

When You’re Wrong, You’re Wrong

Tristero’s in fine form today. Read it all. He takes on the blogospheric navel gazing about whether the war was a good idea but badly executed or whether it was just a bad idea. He’s not in the mood to take a bunch of idealistic hawks’ discredited views seriously any longer.

I especially like this:

A “great” foreign policy, like a “great” Christianity, can never depend on evangelism. You simply must strive to embody greatness in your own country (and in your soul). You can’t ram greatness down someone’s throat because, by definition then, it can’t be that great.

He seems think you can’t create a democracy by invading a country, putting a gun to the people’s heads and telling them to be free or else. How odd.

Why, that’s like telling a would-be suitor that he can’t make the girl love him by throwing her to the ground and screaming “you WILL love me!” in her face.

That always works. Women love it. What’s he going on about?

Showing Up Daddy

In reading this extremely interesting article by Robert Parry in Consortiumnews.com about how Junior should sit down with his father and have a heart to heart with dear old Dad about the real story of Iran, Iraq and Israel (wow, what a story) I was reminded of how often I heard people say in 2000 that Bush would have his father as his closest advisor. I think that this was one thing that settled people’s minds a bit about the obvious lack of qualifications and essential knowledge that Lil’ George brought to the table. Just the other day, somebody said to me, “but his father must have warned him.”

The fact is that Bush is such a callow little ass that he doesn’t talk to his father. And he is such an arrogant piece of compost that he actually believes all the Karen Hughes propaganda that’s been spewed these last few years about the size of his codpiece:

…the alleged Iranian intelligence trap could only have been sprung because key Bush advisers were inclined to believe the bogus information in the first place, since it fit their own agendas. In addition, Bush lacked the sophistication and the knowledge to bring adequate skepticism to what he was hearing, assuming that he wanted to. Though his father has that depth of understanding, the younger Bush says he hasn’t sought out his father’s counsel on Iraq. Nor is advice from his father’s top confidants welcome.

When the elder Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft weighed in on Aug. 15, 2002, with a Wall Street Journal opinion piece warning against an invasion of Iraq, the younger Bush’s NSC adviser Condoleezza Rice reportedly gave Scowcroft a tongue-lashing. He subsequently stayed out of the debate. “Neither Scowcroft nor Bush senior wanted to injure the son’s self-confidence,” wrote Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack.

When questioned about getting his father’s advice, the younger George Bush sounds almost petulant. “I can’t remember a moment where I said to myself, maybe he can help me make the decision,” Bush told Woodward.

Bush said he couldn’t remember any specifics about conversations he may have had with his father about the conflict. “I’m not trying to be evasive,” Bush said. “I don’t remember. I could ask him and see if he remembers something. But how do you ask a person, What does it feel like to send somebody in and them lose life? Remember, I’ve already done so, for starters, in Afghanistan. “

He’s not only an incompetent president. He’s an ungrateful, backstabbing son to the man for whom he owes EVERYTHING he ever got. Why anyone would want to have a beer with this supercilious little shit is beyond me.

Punchin’ Judy

USA Today actually names names in this column about the Judith Miller debacle. The thesis of the piece, though, is that when The New York Times runs unskeptical articles on page one, it affects the political process more strongly than if another paper does it. In this case, when they breathlessly reported that Saddam was about to launch a nuclear missile (or close to it) it cowed many Democrats into thinking that the administration might just be right.

I suspect that this is true. And it is another example of liberals internalizing right wing cant. The “liberal” New York Times spent eight years trying to run the Democratic president out of town, both on its news pages and on the editorial pages. They assigned an openly hostile reporter to cover the Gore campaign and sent a fawning acolyte to report on Bush’s every manly move. They have been fed all kinds of propaganda and lies by GOP political operatives for years and people knew this early on. Trudy Lieberman wrote an amazing expose in the Columbia Journalism Review of the Whitewater disinformation campaign by David Bossie’s Citizens United all the way back in 1994:

Francis Shane, publisher of Citizens United’s newsletter, ClintonWatch, hesitates to say exactly whom they’ve worked with — “We don’t particularly like to pinpoint people” — but he does say, “We have worked closer with The New York Times than The Washington Times.” Jeff Gerth, The New York Times’s chief reporter on Whitewater, hesitated to talk on the record. He did say, “If Citizens United has some document that’s relevant, I take it. I check it out like anything else.”

Uh huh. Sometimes I think the Washington Times exists solely to provide a phony kind of balance so that Democrats will find the the NY Times more credible just by the contrast. Besides, The Times is “liberal,” right? Everybody knows that. They wouldn’t peddle phony stories about Democrats.

From the USA Today article:

Martin Kaplan, dean of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, says that “for people who are serious and thoughtful, the Times is a gatekeeper of quality in terms of what’s credible and believable. When it published those pieces, it sent signals which legitimized our going to war and calmed people’s fears that we were rushing. It turns out that the Times was hoodwinked just like the rest of the country.”

See? “Serious and thoughtful” people know that The Times is credible and believable. This in spite of the fact that they almost single handedly took down a presidency based upon proven false information provided by political operatives and then proceeded to believe many of the same people when they said that the United States was in mortal danger from Saddam Hussein.

But, they are the liberal New York Times! They can’t possibly not have our liberal best interests at heart.

Luckily there are some “realists” left:

… for anyone to suggest that the Times reports led us to war is “absurd,” says Stephanopoulos. The former Clinton administration communications chief says the newspaper’s influence is sometimes exaggerated. “In this Internet age, there is so much information. … No single newspaper has that much power or influence. People aren’t waiting for a single newspaper to hit their doorstep at 6 a.m. to set the agenda.”

Quite the little whore isn’t he? Setting aside the fact that the New York Times most definitely sets the news agenda and that Democrats are more likely to believe something if it’s in the Times, Stephanopoulos of all people knows what the New York Times is capable of unleashing. But, he’s now in the full time business of self promotion so he’s keeping his options open. Besides, This Weak is a miserable failure so he’s probably looking for work. It wouldn’t pay to tell the truth.