Month: March 2006

You Talkin’ To Me?

by digby

John Aravosis is following this delicious Katrina feud. He writes:

Ohhhh, this infighting is really getting interesting these days. “Heckuva job Brownie” is lashing out at his former boss Chertoff. All of that GOP discipline seems to be collapsing faster than Enron.

Hah. It does show you once again that Bush’s vaunted loyalty is actually a necessity. Everytime he fires somebody the tales they tell are damning. It was particularly stupid to try to lay off the epic death and destruction of Katrina on poor little Brownie alone. They left him no choice but to try to publicly recover his reputation. He’s destroyed. If they’d have played it smart they would have fired Chertoff and a couple of others too and just said it wasn’t personal, it was a systemic failure and these people all fell on their swords because they are honorable men. They could have then been bought off with lucrative careers, no harm no foul. But they left poor little Brownie no choice. Now he is going to use every opportunity available to him to keep it in the headlines and convince a very receptive public that the fault was not his.

Rove must really be sweating this Plame thing because he has completely lost his touch.

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Wiping The Sleep From Their Tired Little Eyes

by digby

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who found this article by John Dickerson to be completely ridiculous. A former white house correspondent from TIME magazine apparently has no idea how stupid he sounds when he says he held the belief that Bush was some sort of behind the scenes mastermind until he saw the footage of the Katrina video conference. Weldon says:

So. Okay. What we have here is an experienced Washington hand who has presumably been conscious during at least some of the past five years, and is only now — and only because he saw the frickin’ video — beginning to worry that Bush may not be quite as competent as those responsible for covering his ass say he is. Didn’t it ever occur to Dickerson that executives who consistently ask good questions eventually get good answers that lead to at least an occasional good outcome? Have there been any good outcomes?

No.

I can understand why people may have intially thought that the guy just had to be smarter than he appeared in public because well.. nobody that dumb could possibly be president. It just defied reason. It wasn’t long, however, before it became clear that the Republican Party had insulted our collective intelligence beyond our wildest imaginings by using sophisticated marketing techniques and every lever of institutional power at their disposal to install an idiot manchild in the oval office. (I came to believe they did it just to prove they could.)

After it was revealed that he had ignored the terrorism threat until 9/11 and then he continued to screw up everything that came after, any sentient being should have been able to see that what you saw in public was real: an arrogant, spoiled inarticulate man who didn’t have a clue about how to run the most powerful country in the world. Regardless of how many “grown-ups” he had around him, he was the head of the organization and the organization was a reflection of him. They always are. His staff was just as inept as he was.

Bush’s entire life had consisted of trading on his father’s name and failing at everything he touched. That is the legacy of this failed presidency as well. That John Dickerson is only now beginning to realize that Bush is exactly what he appears to be is nothing short of mind boggling.

Eric Boehlert, one of the few journalists around who was as gobsmacked by the gooey Bush adulation among the press corps as the rest of us were wrote back in February of 2002, after Bob Woodward’s fellatory series called “10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet”:

Conservative pundits cheered the series, suggesting it was a Pulitzer Prize must-win. Raves from the right were understandable: “10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet” erased any suggestion of Bush as a detached as well as inexperienced leader who relies on more seasoned aides to get things done.

To say the series presented the administration, and Bush in particular, in a favorable light would be an understatement. We see Bush utterly sure of himself, operating on gut instincts, leading round-table discussions, formulating complex strategies, asking pointed questions, building international coalitions, demanding results, poring over speeches and seeking last-minute phrase changes.

The portrait was so contrary to public perception that it was reminiscent of the timeless “Saturday Night Live” sketch that ran at the height of Iran-Contra scandal. It featured an outwardly jolly and oblivious Ronald Reagan, who in private Oval Office meetings revealed himself as a mastermind of the operation’s arcane covert details, barking out orders to befuddled senior aides. In the same way, but without satire, the Post series suggested that a president often depicted as a genial delegator, who ducked the Vietnam War with a stateside post in the Texas Air National Guard, is in fact a hands-on commander in chief of the war on terror.

It was ridiculous, laughable, absurd and yet they actually succeeded in convincing am large number of Americans that they weren’t seeing what they thought they were seeing:

You know, I’m asked all the time — I’ll ask myself a question. (Laughter.) How do I respond to — it’s an old trick — (laughter) — how do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am — like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we’ve go to do a better job of making our case. We’ve got to do a better job of explaining to the people in the Middle East, for example, that we don’t fight a war against Islam or Muslims. We don’t hold any religion accountable. We’re fighting evil. And these murderers have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their evil deeds. And we cannot let it stand

Jesus H. Christ.

Now, like John Dickerson,Howard Fineman, (one of the gushiest Bush hagiographers) seems to have just discovered that the emperor has no clothes as well:

The man-of-few-words approach has its virtues, and they matched the moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and, for the most part, since. Bush’s deep belief in his vision of global democratization, coupled with the eloquence of speeches crafted for state occasions by Michael Gerson, carried the day. Dazed and confused and searching for old verities after the terrorist attacks, I think most Americans found some comfort in Bush the Growling Cowboy.

I know it’s a shock to Republicans but the president’s primary job is not to provide comfort in an emergency, it’s to deal effectively with the emergency. In that, he has always failed. There was, apparently, a massive need among the media (and perhaps the public) to believe that the puerile drivel that Bush spouted after 9/11 was an effective way to deal with Islamic terrorism. In fact, it was precisely the opposite.

Feinman has an epiphany:

That time has passed, though. The main reason of course, is that the simple, black-and-white solutions that the president sketched for us in the “war on terror” haven’t materialized. Most Americans now consider the war in Iraq to have been a mistake, one that has made us less secure here in what is now called “the homeland.” They see his Manichaean clarity not as a comfort, but as a danger — because it underestimates the complexity of the real world. There are many more moving parts to consider in the world than the simple clockwork Bush had described.

No kidding. But then it was always bullshit and a good many of us knew it at the time. The “Manichean clarity” was fairy dust that any high school kid should have seen through. Yet Fineman was desperately in love with Cowboy Bush, as were so many of the elite press corps (for reasons that only their psychologists or spouses can understand) that he wrote:

So who are the Bushes, really? Well, they’re the people who produced the fellow who sat with me and my Newsweek colleague, Martha Brant, for his first interview since 9/11. We saw, among other things, a leader who is utterly comfortable in his role. Bush envelops himself in the trappings of office. Maybe that’s because he’s seen it from the inside since his dad served as Reagan’s vice president in the ’80s. The presidency is a family business.

Dubyah loves to wear the uniform — whatever the correct one happens to be for a particular moment. I counted no fewer than four changes of attire during the day trip we took to Fort Campbell in Kentucky and back. He arrived for our interview in a dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. When he greeted the members of Congress on board, he wore an open-necked shirt. When he had lunch with the troops, he wore a blue blazer. And when he addressed the troops, it was in the flight jacket of the 101st Airborne. He’s a boomer product of the ’60s — but doesn’t mind ermine robes.

And now he has the nerve to say that wearing costumes and talking like a cartoon character “underestimates the complexity of the real world. There are many more moving parts to consider in the world than the simple clockwork Bush had described.” No shit.

I blame the press as much as I blame the Republicans for this nonsense. If they hadn’t gotten a schoolkid crush on Bush after 9/11 and had maintained even a modicum of professionalism, we might not have had to endure this horrible failure for a second term. They built him up so high, and kept him there so long, that it was impossible for the public to fully comprehend what a miserable failure he was until it was too late. Now we are stuck with this bozo for another three years because these alleged journalists took five years to realize what was evident to anyone with eyes to see: George W. Bush was unqualified by brains, temperament or experience to be president, and the party he represents treated their country with tremendous disrespect by anointing such a man for such an important job. They have failed as much as he has and they have a lot to answer for.

Update:

There were some earlier reports about Bush’s behavior in meetings, but nobody wanted to deal with the reality that we had a child in the oval office.

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Lazy, Good-For-Nothin N … agin

by digby

I don’t know if I heard this right, but I think Chris Matthews just said something like this:

This is probably going to bug some people, but the first time I saw Nagin I saw this slow acting, slow talking guy…or do all people talk that way down there? I didn’t see any New Yorker type A get the job done … is this lazy, “it’s a hot day” kind of thinking?

Now why do you suppose he thought that would bug some people?

He agitated for his true love Rudy to take over the for weeks. I thought he was just yearning for another hot codpiece moment but apparently he also thought them slow actin’ N’Olahns boys jess didn’t know nothin’ bout no hurricanes.

What in the hell is wrong with him? Is this unusual form of Tourette’s Syndrome?

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Lying Low

by digby

I’ve linked many times to this astonishing article by Michael Ledeen in which he agitates for an attack on France and Germany for their failure to support the Iraq invasion. Most recently, I used it as an example of right wingers assailing our traditional European allies while the administration cozies up to undependable allies like the UAE in this port deal. Alert reader Kurtis noticed something in the piece that I didn’t:

Both countries have been totally deaf to suggestions that the West take stern measures against the tyrannical terrorist sponsors in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. Instead, they do everything in their power to undermine American-sponsored trade embargoes or more limited sanctions, and it is an open secret that they have been supplying Saddam with military technology through the corrupt ports of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid’s little playground in Dubai, often through Iranian middlemen.

It turns out he’s written a whole lot of things like this over the years. Here’s another one:

Those who care to know such things have long been aware that the two most murderous leaders of the Islamic Republic, Rafsanjani and Rafiqdust, spend considerable time in Dubai, from which Iranians run weapons shipments throughout the region, smuggle Iraqi oil to market, and transfer billions of dollars to their overseas operatives (as well as to their private financial empires in Western Europe, North Africa, and elsewhere in the Middle East). There are more than 40 flights per day between Dubai and Iran, in addition to the countless voyages of ships of the sort captured by Israeli forces.

Strange then that the only thing I can find from Ledeen on the matter since the controversy arose is this entry on the Corner:

There is a clean way to handle things such as the port operations, and it still astonishes me that it wasn’t done properly. It’s been done thusly for many years, actually many decades:

1. Create an American company to handle the matter (if foreigners wish to buy in, or even buy it, that’s ok);
2. Wall off the foreign investors/owners. They are silent partners. They have no say in the actual operation;
3. Create a “classified Board” composed of people with security clearances and experience in sensitive matters;
4. Appoint a CEO and other top executives with experience and clearances.

We do this all the time with, say, foreigners who want to buy companies that manufacture parts for weapons sytems, etc. It seems the obvious solution here. Dubai would get prestige and whatever profits are generated. Americans run the thing and guarantee, so far as is possible, security. Looks like a win/win solution. For that matter, we should have done the same sort of thing with the British owners, and we should do the same thing with the Chinese and others who now have access to all kinds of potentially dangerous information thanks to their buy-ins.

Funny, no fulminating about playboy sheiks from Dubai doing business with Iran or selling arms to the Palestinians or anything else. He just writes a very dry analysis about how Dubai can get out of this sticky wicket. This from the guy who has been the number one believer in the “real men go to Tehran” school of delusional neocon thinking.

How odd.

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Poll Tacks

by digby

All the polls are showing Bush and the Republicans in freefall, but there are a couple of things in this Quinnipiac poll that I found to be quite intriguing:

They separated results by blue, red and purple states, the latter of which are “13 purple states — 12 in which there was a margin of five points or less in the 2004 popular vote between Bush and Kerry, plus Missouri, historically considered the nation’s most accurate barometer of presidential voting. These states have 153 of the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the presidency.” They are Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oregon, Wisconsin.

Bush has a worse approval rating in those states than in the blue states. They also favor Democrats over Republicans in the 06 race by a a slightly larger margin than the blue states. In general, people in swing states have turned on Bush and the Republicans, big time.

But more startling than that is the huge gender gap. Across the board, women are much more critical of the Bush administration and the Republicans than men. The number on terrorism is particularly startling. Men still approve of Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism by 51 to 45 percent. Women disapprove of his handling of terrorism by
59 to 35 percent.

It can’t all be explained by Iraq. There is a substantial gender gap there also (men disapprove 57-41 while women disapprove 63-31) but it’s not nearly as large.

I made a flippant observation the other day on this subject about women seeing Bush as a disgusting old boyfriend, but I’m now seriously curious about why this huge gender gap on terrorism exists. I suspect his performance on Katrina made an impression, but maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?

Update: Here’s another interesting item, this time from the GW-Battleground Poll:

Of all the Washington leaders examined, only Senator John McCain (65% favorable/18% unfavorable) has chiseled out a positive “bi-partisan� image with the American electorate.

The Democrats need to start thinking about this right now. McCain is going to run against Bush’s Iraq policy by saying he never committed enough troops and that’s why we lost it.

Friday, April 16, 2004

The Pentagon should have known it needed more troops in Iraq and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have overruled his generals on the matter, Sen. John McCain said Thursday night.

“I was there last August. I came back after talking with many, many people, and I was convinced we didn’t have enough boots on the ground,” said the senator from Arizona and decorated Vietnam War veteran.

And he’s king of the “reformers,” too, at a time when corruption is the single most important domestic issue. They’d better be thinking about how to deal with this guy. Everybody assumes that the GOP base won’t support him, but I have serious doubts about that. He is, after all, the guy that Bush was pretending to be.

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Cards On The Table

by digby

If more of these people would admit what they really believe we could have an honest debate in this country:

West Jordan Republican Sen. Chris Buttars scoffed at McCoy’s suggestion that the legislation might force teens to other states for abortions or into their bathrooms to attempt the procedure on themselves.

“Abortion isn’t about women’s rights. The rights they had were when they made the decision to have sex,” Buttars said. “This is the consequences. The consequence is they should have to talk to their parents.”

Too bad if her father is the one who impregnated her:

Current Utah law – which was adopted in 1974 – requires doctors to notify a girl’s parents before ending her pregnancy. HB85, sponsored by Ogden Republican Rep. Kerry Gibson and Peterson, would change state code to require doctors to get at least one parent’s permission 24 hours before the procedure. Doctors could proceed without consent in medical emergencies or to protect the health of the mother.

The bill would allow girls to ask a judge to bypass the parental consent requirement if she fears abuse or is pregnant as a result of incest. At the same time, the legislation still would require a doctor to notify a girl’s parents of the abortion, effectively nullifying the judicial bypass.

Salt Lake City Democratic Sen. Scott McCoy tried to amend the bill Monday to grant an exception to the notification requirement in “very narrow situations” where a girl’s father also is the father of her baby.

Peterson argued that parental notification “hasn’t been a problem” for 30 years. Why would notification after a judicial bypass be a problem? “What we’re trying to do is allow a parent a say in what happens in this youth’s life,” he said.

But Sen. Patrice Arent said Peterson was closing his eyes to the “real world.” The Murray Democrat said Utah lawmakers are setting up a situation where a girl who has been raped by her father would go to court to avoid telling her parents of her abortion. But the doctor still would notify one or both of those parents who could be complicit in the incest.

I find this refreshing. These Republicans admit that women give up their rights when they have sex. Good to know. And they believe a child molesting father’s parental rights are more important than the daughter he impregnated. Also good to know.

Our equally religious Muslim fundamentalist friends take this argument to its logical conclusion:

A large number of women in Afghanistan continue to be imprisoned for committing so-called “zina” crimes. A female can be detained and prosecuted for adultery, running away from home or having consensual sex outside marriage, which are all referred to as zina crimes. The major factor preventing victims of rape complaining to the authorities is the fear that instead of being treated as a victim, they themselves will be prosecuted for unlawful sexual activity.

During its recent visit, AI found that a large number of female inmates in prisons across Afghanistan are incarcerated for the crime of “running away” and for adultery, as well as for engaging in unlawful sexual activity. Amongst many judges and judicial officials, there was a prevailing lack of knowledge about the application of zina law.

In many instances, there was a lack of basic legal skills among legal professionals interviewed. In addition, in relation to many offences, sentencing is left to judges’ unfettered discretion and they often had down arbitrary sentences to women. A majority of imprisoned women have been charged or are imprisoned for transgressing social norms and mores.

Utah girls should realize how lucky they are. They are just as guilty of having sex as their muslim sisters and yet their leaders are generous and only seek to punish them with the forced childbirth of their own siblings and the offspring of their rapists. That’s because America is civilized.

One of these fine leaders puts it this way:

“There is a life inside of this life. And how that life is taken care of is very important to me,” said Sen. Darin Peterson, R-Nephi.

How the life it’s inside of is taken care of — not so much. That life apparently gave up any claim to being cared for when she allowed her father to rape her.

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Wedgie A La Carte

by digby

I’m with Kevin on this. I’ve never thought that a la carte cable was all that because I know that I’ll probably end up paying the same for fewer channels. It’s just the way these things work. But if Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell are against it, I’m for it. These hucksters prey on lonely dupes in their homes, take their money and then use it to support corporate Republican politics.

Nothing would make me happier than to cancel all the religious programming from my cable line-up. And I would particularly like to tell ABC Family that I am cancelling their channel specifically because it carries the 700 Club.

I suspect that the religious programmers understand something that a lot of people in the media do not. What people say they want and what they will do are different things. Americans like to say they are religious, but many more want their MTV than want the 700 club.

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Curmudgeon Of The Moment

by digby

Can someone tell my why Jack Cafferty doesn’t have his own show on CNN? They should put him up against O’Reilly. He’s the guy who’s riding the zeitgeist right now. Between him and Lou “I’m having an aneuryism” Dobbs, CNN could siphon off some of the FoxNews “Dad who is always mad” audience they’ve coveted for so long.

GOP and Bush worship is so 2004. Fox’s ratings are falling…

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Take This Survey And Win A Million Bucks

Not really.

But, Blogads is doing a survey and the results are always interesting. If you’d like to take it and you want to put this blog on line #23, use the word Hullabaloo.

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Neocon Pipedreams

by digby

Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, said the October 2003 study was part of a “steady stream” of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.

“Frankly, senior officials simply weren’t ready to pay attention to analysis that didn’t conform to their own optimistic scenarios,” Hutchings said in a telephone interview.

[…]

In Congress on Tuesday, Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified that the insurgency “remains strong, and resilient.”

Maples said that while Iraqi terrorists and foreign fighters conduct some of the most spectacular attacks, disaffected Iraqi Sunnis make up the insurgency’s core. “So long as Sunni Arabs are denied access to resources and lack a meaningful presence in government, they will continue to resort to violence,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That view contrasts with what the administration said as the insurgency began in the months following the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and gained traction in the fall. Bush and his aides portrayed it as the work primarily of foreign terrorists crossing Iraq’s borders, disenfranchised former officials of Saddam’s deposed regime and criminals.

[…]

As recently as May 2005, Cheney told a television interviewer: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

White, who worked at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said of the administration: “They’ve gone through various excuse phases.”

Now, he said, “The levels of resistance are pretty much as high as they were a year ago.”

Hutchings, now diplomat in residence at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, said intelligence specialists repeatedly ran up against policymakers’ rosy predictions.

“The mindset downtown was that people were willing to accept that things were pretty bad, but not that they were going to get worse, so our analyses tended to get dismissed as `nay-saying and hand-wringing,’ to quote the president’s press spokesman,” he said.

The result, he said, was that top political and military officials focused on ways of dealing with foreign jihadists and disaffected Saddam loyalists, rather than with other pressing problems, such as growing Iraqi anger at the U.S.-led occupation and the deteriorating economic and security situation.

This certainly put the lie to one of the (many) excuses as to why they screwed up on WMD: that they had underestimated Saddam’s capabilities before the Gulf War and were being prudently skeptical of those who said he wasn’t close to having nuclear weapons in 2002. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that they just don’t believe anything they don’t want to believe. In this case the intelligence was “too pessimistic.” And here they’ve been saying that 9/11 changed everything and you can’t be too careful.

I have long said that the neocons have always been wrong about everything, and this is but another example. They have always refused to accept things that don’t fit their preconceived notions. This goes back to the 70’s and Team B and the missile gap. Rummy was up to his neck in that too and was just as wrong then as he is now. They were still fighting the cold war as late as 1992.

This has gone on long enough. Any “liberal hawk” who goes along with these nuts in the future should be required to prove, on his own, with no data from them, that his position is correct. Never again should the political establishment take these people at their word for anything — and their data should be independently checked more than once. The old birds in the GOP defense establishment used to know this and they kept these nutballs at a distance. After all, if they’d have had their way during the cold war they would have launched a pre-emptive nuclear war. They have shown themselves willing to do anything and believe anything that comports with their worldview even if it has no basis in fact. They think they can change reality by sheer will — or politics. They can’t.

Update: Clearly, their propaganda arm is still with the program.

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