Month: June 2007

Buy This Book

by digby

I wrote about Glenn Greenwald’s new book “A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency” over the week-end and hosted his appearance over at Firedoglake’s Book Salon. It was a very interesting discussion about a fine book from a fine writer.

Unfortunately, because Glenn hails from the scruffy blogosphere instead of the sanctioned halls of Versailles on the Potomac, it doesn’t appear that he is going to get the media support this book deserves, despite his track record as a writer and a book author. (They don’t want him coming in and trashing the place…) So, it would be nice if we could prove to the publishing world that we don’t actually need Matt Lauer and Anderson Cooper to sell books. We have millions of readers ourselves who will support our own writers.

If you were inclined to do it, it would be great if you’d buy Glenn’s book through Amazon today and help put it to number one on their list. It’s one of the ways we can support our own media — and get the word out that helping Ann Coulter sell her books in bulk to Richard Scaife is a less profitable way to sell books — because they build no real relationship with readers. We do.

Just click this link:

A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

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I Don’t Get It

by tristero

Why do people like Kurt Andersen have jobs writing for prominent outlets like New York Magazine? He’s sooooooo boring! And he’s sooooooooo wrong!

First, here’s the Dirty Fucking Hippies gambit :

The antiwar left’s conviction now that everything will be fine if we simply ship home all our troops is born of a similar impulse, a wishful naivete so convinced of its own righteousness that it refuses to imagine vast unintended consequences, let alone to anguish over them. Little thought is given to what might happen after we leave. What if, instead of 100 murdered Iraqi civilians a day, the number is in the thousands? What happens if ethnic cleansing becomes state policy? And the Saudis intervene to protect their Sunni brothers from slaughter? And Turkey invades the Kurdish provinces? What counts is the beautiful, big idea.

I don’t know anyone who supports immediate withdrawal from Iraq thinks everything would be fine. Furthermore, I don’t know anyone who supports immediate withdrawal from Iraq who thinks that means we pack up and go home the week after it’s announced. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anyone who supports immediate withdrawal from Iraq who thinks it has a chance of happening under Bush.

Contra Andersen, there’s no wishful naivete here, there’s plenty of anguish, and there’s plenty of hard-headed realism about the future. True, some of us think that with the US no longer there, a major precipitant of the violence will disappear and things could improve. But many of us have no such hopes. However, we know that Bush had no business invading, the US military presence is catastrophic, that the U.S. must withdraw as soon as possible, and that that can and will only happen once Bush is out of office and presumably sane people are in the White House again.

Anderson’s next tired cliche: The Dirty Fucking Hippies are as morally repellent as the neocons because their simplistic worldview makes it impossible for them to understand the human dimensions of war and suffering:

The neocons and the lefties have in common a shrugging callousness to the horrors their simple plans unintentionally enable in Iraq: eliminating the Baathist dictatorship uncorked a civil war, and eliminating U.S. troops may well turn it into a much bigger one- but it’s the Iraqis to blame for the chaos and murder, not us.”

Callousness to horror is a scabrous charge that is empirically false to hurl at those of us who, unlike Anderson, got Bush/Iraq correct from the beginning. Many of us opposed Saddam when Donald Rumsfeld was perfectly willing to shake his hand. Many of us worked hard to try eliminate the cruelty of the sanctions placed on Iraq in the 90’s. And all of us were sickened by the terrible, inevitable atrocities of the Kurt Andersen-supported Invasion. Finally, Clinton was booed when she suggested to liberals that it was the Iraqis’ own fault. Liberals know better to buy that bullshit. And they have no problem letting politicians know it. (Would that they would listen.)

And it’s not those advocating immediate withdrawal who are advocating simple plans. It’s Anderson’s boy, George W. Bush who’s the simpleton.

I did a little googling of Kurt Andersen’s work. He has consistently been wrong about Bush/Iraq, and his writing usually bear no relation to consensual reality, informing his readers that New Yorkers feel practically French – we don’t, actually some of us feel practically Finnish – and we’re secretly afraid that we’d have to grudgingly admit that the brutish Bush had done the right thing. (And did you notice? In this earlier article, Andersen sez we liberals are too nuanced. Here we’re too black and white. And he has the gall to ask his readers whether they are intellectually honest!)

Amongst many of the people I know in the press, there is something more highly prized than being right and that is novelty. By these standards, Bob Herbert is a bore and Paul Krugman is predictable. Kurt Anderson, therefore, must surely come off as refreshing, railing against liberals and the antiwar left right in the midst of their natural habitat.

There’s just one problem. He’s wrong, completely wrong. And there’s a glut of these refreshingly novel – actually stale and repetitious – opinion makers. And they are working overtime, not to underrstand the issues, but to deny those of us who were right from having a place at the table Respectable Opinion. Thus, liberal interventionism – the liberal hawk position – is the New Black for moderates. Slaughter, Roger Cohen who Digby discusses below, Andersen – they’re not hippies.

Or so they say. But it is they, not us, sporting the bad tie-dyes. It is not us who ever suffered from the hallucination that Bush/Iraq was a good idea. It is not we who ever, for a moment, elevated our hopes for what the world “should” be like to such heights we couldn’t apprehend the reality of the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters. The truth is that the woo-woo crowd, the pie-in-the-sky guys, they’re George Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and Peggy Noonan and Ken Pollack and Richard Perle.

And the guys holding their joints are folks like Kurt Andersen.

Of Course He Gave The Order

by digby

If you weren’t convinced already that Cheney has been running the country (very, very badly, I might add) today’s installment of the Wapo series will put it to rest.

I keep wondering what in the hell the Decider does with his time. I guess this is about it:

I’ll never understand why they couldn’t find a front man for Dick who wasn’t a gibbering moron.

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No More Questions For You

by digby

Those who have been reading this blog from the beginning will remember that I once had a bit of an obsession with a particular member of the Bush administration’s inner circle by the name of Jim Wilkinson. He was one of the guys who put out the propaganda report “Iraq: Decade of Defiance and Deception,” without irony then served on the White House Iraq Group and later appeared unnamed in an infamous Michael Wolfe article in New York Magazine as this person:

The next person to buttonhole me was the Centcom uber-civilian, a thirty-ish Republican operative. He was more full-metal-jacket in his approach (although he was a civilian he was, inexplicably, in uniform – making him, I suppose a sort of para-military figure): “I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don’t talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning.” And: “A lot of people don’t like you.” And then: “Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.” And too: “This is fucking war, asshole.” And finally: “No more questions for you.”

I had been warned

Wilkinson faded from the spotlight after he served as the communications director for the 2004 GOP convention when he became Condi’s personal spinner at State and then moved on to become chief of staff to Hank Paulson at Treasury. (Old Jim is quite the renaissance man, isn’t he?)

Anyway, I just couldn’t resist revisiting my old pal when Jonathan at ATR alerted me to this fascinating discussion on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman featuring Josh Rushing who:

“served as a Marine spokesperson at CENTCOM in Doha as the U.S. invaded Iraq. Josh Rushing has since retired from the Marines and has started working at an unlikely outlet – the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera International Rushing became famous in the Arab world after he appeared – almost by chance – in the documentary Control Room about Al Jazeera. After the film was released, the Marines ordered Rushing to stop speaking to the press because he had begun publicly defending Al Jazeera.”

Here’s Rushing talking about our old pal Wilkinson:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the kind of information that was presented at CENTCOM and how you were feeling as someone in the Marines who was part of shaping that message, and how you changed along the way. JOSH RUSHING: Yeah, no. This part was really rough for me, because as a military spokesperson, you don’t talk about policy. You talk about the way you’re going to conduct an action, not why you’re going to conduct an action. So if someone were to ask me before the war, “Why are you going to invade Iraq?” — and reporters did — the only honest answer I could give is, “We’ll invade Iraq if the President orders us to. And we won’t if he doesn’t. We don’t get to pick and choose our battles.” That way, it’s left to a politician in a suit behind a podium at the White House to explain why they made that decision. But instead, what we did, we had a Republican operative who was put in charge of our office, displacing a colonel that had started doing media liaison when this Republican operative was about probably five years old. And what this guy knew how to do was run a campaign, and so we were run like a political campaign. And the first step in that political campaign was to sell the product, and that was sell the invasion. So they gave the reasons down to the young troops, guys like me, to go out to reporters and give the reasons we’re going to invade a sovereign nation. Here’s the problem: the reporters in no way had the latitude to ask someone in uniform a critical question. I mean, on MSNBC their coverage was actually packaged with a banner that said, “Our hearts are with you.” So when I’m the young troop in uniform on screen, and the viewer sees “Our hearts are with you,” do you think the reporter’s going to ask me a critical question? Of course not. But I’m out there giving political answers. I’m out there saying, “We’re going to invade Iraq” — and this was the real catch: they would ask me before I would go on air live, “Are there any messages you want to get across today?” Well, yeah. My boss comes straight from the White House, and they have the messages of the day, and so they would give it to us. So I’d say, “Sure. WMD, regime change, ties with terrorism.” And they go, “OK. Well, I’ll ask you these questions, so we can get those answers out.” And they set it all up. AMY GOODMAN: Who, in particular, would say this? JOSH RUSHING: You know, I pick on FOX a lot. FOX reporters would do it. But NBC did it, as well. Those two were probably the worst about it, because those two were the most competitive about wanting access. I think they saw this as kind of part of the game. So we would go on live. They would ask me, you know, the staged questions. They would pat me on the back and thank me for my service. And then, “Back to you, John, in New York.” And the answers I gave weren’t the way we were going to conduct an action. They were the political reasons for invading another nation. And I was just a junior officer. So it was really kind of startling the way that all went down. AMY GOODMAN: Jim Wilkinson, who is he? JOSH RUSHING: Jim Wilkinson is the Republican operative I was talking about. He’s a guy that — he’s about my age. He’s from a small town in Texas. Again, I don’t believe he’s a bad guy. I just — I disagree with what he was ordered to do, what he volunteered to do. He worked in Dick Armey’s office. He is credited with coming up with a line about Gore having invented the internet. That was Jim’s work. Then, in the 2000 elections, he was in charge of the media down in the Florida recount, where there was one point where the Dade County voting board was going to recount the ballots down there. The Republicans didn’t want them to recount it until a decision had been made by the courts, and so they stormed the office. The office had to shut down, couldn’t do the recount. It was Jim in the press — you can go back and look at the articles — who says it was just a moment where a bunch of Americans felt the voting process was being taken away from them, and so, you know, they got a little over-emotional, and that’s what happened. But if you actually look at the pictures, it’s called the “Brooks Brothers Riot” these days, because everyone in the picture, the rioters, are all in bowties and nice suits [inaudible]. They’re young, twenty-something, blond hair. And if you start to kind of circle the faces and identify them, they’re all congressional staffers, Republican congressional staffers. But if that was an organized event, it would be illegal. It would be voter intimidation. So — moving them across state lines to perform that kind of thing, because they were all out of Washington, D.C. So that’s why Jim was in the press saying, “Oh, you know, this wasn’t organized. These were just emotional people who felt the system was being taken from their grasp.” AMY GOODMAN: So it was this party operative, Republican Party operative — JOSH RUSHING: That was Jim Wilkinson. AMY GOODMAN: — that was designing — JOSH RUSHING: Yeah, designed the whole thing. AMY GOODMAN: — that was setting the scene at CENTCOM. JOSH RUSHING: Yeah. He did so well there down in Florida, the next place he pops up is September 14, 2001, right here in New York, where he hands the bullhorn to President Bush, for Bush to tell the workers at Ground Zero that “I hear you, and soon the world will hear you.” And it’s a huge media event, and that, again, was Wilkinson. Wilkinson goes from there to CENTCOM.

Read Rushing’s whole interview. He was in the belly of the beast when the war began and has a lot to say about FOX — and NBC.

I think we all know just how absurd the reporting — and, worse, the editorializing — was in the run up to the war. It was a low point for American journalism. But I have long thought that one of the reasons for this was less laziness or support for the war or even ratings and circulation (although they all played a role.) It was a very unseemly and immature desire on the part of certain journalists to go out and play war correspondent, a little wet-dream at which I’m sure the real war correspondents scoffed when they realized that these pampered, perfumed princes were going to be “embedded” with the military and then debriefed by operatives like Wilkinson.

So many of the reporters were invested in their phony Ernie Pyle acts that it’s a testament to just how gargantuan a failure this war actually was that we know anything at all today. Imagine if the cock-up had only been half as bad. We’d be building monuments to Paul Bremer.

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Free Speech

by digby

So the Supremes took a strong stand for the First Amendment today and stood up for the right of little guy corporations, aggrieved rich guys and voiceless conservative special interests to influence elections with misleading advertising. The first amendment is sacred and shouldn’t be tampered with for any reason. God bless America.

Well, not exactly. The words “bong hits for Jesus” aren’t covered because they could be construed as promoting something that some people think is bad. (At least if you are under eighteen years old.) I’m awfully impressed with the intellectual consistency of the Roberts Court so far, how about you?

I think we need to start thinking about how to deal with the new era of wingnut judicial activism. If anyone actually thought the Warren Court was activist for trying to right long standing social inequality, they haven’t seen anything until they see what John, Clarence, Nino, Sammy and Tony do to expand the rights of rich people and corporations while turning back the clock on everything else. It’s going to be a generational battle. I hope everyone realizes this.

I will never forgive Joe Lieberman, Huckelberry, St John and the the rest of the milquetoast losers of that gang of 14. This is on their heads.

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The Oldest Profession

by digby

A reader brought this astonishing story from Bill Moyer’s Journal to my attention a day or so ago which is worth discussing as we consider what is wrong with our political system. The article in Harper’s on which it’s based is online here.

I knew lobbyists were whores and this article spells out in detail just how low they will go. But what is surprising to me is the extent to which journalists are complicit in the trade. Here’s the basic set-up of the story:

How is it that regimes widely acknowledged to be the world’s most oppressive nevertheless continually win favors in Washington? In part, it is because they often have something highly desired by the United States that can be leveraged to their advantage, be it natural resources, vast markets for trade and investment, or general geostrategic importance. But even the best-endowed regimes need help navigating the shoals of Washington, and it is their great fortune that, for the right price, countless lobbyists are willing to steer even the foulest of ships. American lobbyists have worked for dictators since at least the 1930s, when the Nazi government used a proxy firm called the German Dye Trust to retain the public-relations specialist Ivy Lee. Exposure of Lee’s deal led Congress to pass the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which required foreign lobbyists to register their contracts with the Justice Department. The idea seemed to be that with disclosure, lobbyists would be too embarrassed to take on immoral or corrupt clients, but this assumption predictably proved to be naive. Edward J. von Kloberg III, now deceased, for years made quite a comfortable living by representing men such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq (whose government’s gassing of its Kurdish population he sought to justify) and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (for whose notoriously crooked regime he helped win American foreign aid). Two other von Kloberg contracts—for Nicolae Ceaus¸escu of Romania and Samuel Doe of Liberia—were terminated, quite literally, when each was murdered by his own citizens. In the 1990s, after Burma’s military government arrested the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and cracked down on the pro-democracy movement she led, the firm of Jefferson Waterman International signed on to freshen up the Burmese image. Although there are distinct limits to what they can achieve, lobbyists are the crucial conduit through which pariah regimes advance their interests in Washington. “It’s like the secret handshake that gets you into the lodge,” as one former lobbyist told me.

[…]

Exactly what sorts of promises do these firms make to foreign governments? What kind of scrutiny, if any, do they apply to potential clients? How do they orchestrate support for their clients? And how much of their work is visible to Congress and the public, and hence subject to oversight? To shed light on these questions, I decided to approach some top Washington lobbying firms myself, as a potential client, to see whether they would be willing to burnish the public image of a particularly reprehensible regime.

The lobbying firms had no problem at all representing a homicidal dictator, which isn’t exactly a shock. But here’s the part I found most amazing:

The second element of the strategy was a “media campaign.” In a slide entitled “Core Media Relations Activities,” APCO promised to “create news items and news outflow,” organize media events, and identify and work with “key reporters.” As this was her field of expertise, Dyck presented this slide. The media would be receptive to stories about Turkmenistan with the change of government, she said, plus “energy security is an additional hook. We can also bring things like Internet cafés to their attention.” In addition to influencing news reports, Downen added, the firm could drum up positive op-eds in newspapers. “We can utilize some of the think-tank experts who would say, ‘On the one hand this and the other hand that,’ and we place it as a guest editorial.” Indeed, Schumacher said, APCO had someone on staff who “does nothing but that” and had succeeded in placing thousands of opinion pieces.

Another firm offered this:

Also, The Maldon Group should not underestimate the value of arranging a trip to Turkmenistan for journalists and think-tank analysts, which was something Dolan said he had done for the Valdai International Discussion Club, a group funded by Russian interests that offers all-expenses-paid trips to Russia. Amid the general pampering, the Western academics and reporters who attend are granted audiences with senior Russian political figures. During the meeting, Dolan simply described it as a way to give people “firsthand information” and mentioned that past attendees had included Ariel Cohen of The Heritage Foundation, Marshall Goldman of Harvard, and Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post. A similar program might work for Turkmenistan, he suggested.

If that doesn’t work, you can just buy them outright:

Another option, he explained, would be to pay Roll Call and The Economist to host a Turkmenistan event. It would be costlier than the think-tank route, perhaps around $25,000, but in compensation we would have tighter control over the proceedings, plus gain “the imprimatur of a respected third party.” In order that the event not seem like paid advertising, the title for the event should be “bigger than your theme,” Schumacher explained, even as it would be put together in a way “that you get your message across.” So we wouldn’t call it “Turkmenistan Day”? I asked. No, Schumacher replied. “Energy Security” would be a better theme.

They evidently had no reason to believe that either Roll Call or The Economist would find anything objectionable about any of this or feel the need to reveal that their party was all part of a PR scheme to soften up the reputation of the thuggish Turkmenistan regime

The whole sordid operation is awful and some of it is just standard PR. But they are not just trying to “tell the other side of the story” in the media, which in the case of Turkmenistan is deplorable in itself, they are feting journalists with trips and perks and paying big bucks to use the reputations of respected magazines and newspapers to sell their tripe. This goes beyond sending out press releases and offering up experts to journalists.

I don’t know who these “key journalists” they promise to deliver might be, but it’s not hard to guess. (The only one they mention by name is Jim Hoagland.) This is a corrupt practice and it is shameful that the media plays along especially since they are so damned proud of their alleged professionalism. But then prostitution is a profession too, isn’t it?

Update: If you read the article in its entirety, you will find this utterly amazing.

H/t to RB.

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They’ll Love Us Someday

by digby

There is a lot of chatter this morning about Roger Cohen’s ignorant proposition today in the NY Times that while the Iraq invasion may have resulted in chaos and carnage it was a good idea anyway because things might turn out ok someday. It is a thoroughly reprehensible argument, but he isn’t the first to make it. In fact, this has been one of the cornerstone rationales of certain elite pundits and powerful politicians for some time.

I was first exposed to it by David Ignatius when he wrote this piece of unctuous trash:

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn’t so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn’t be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn’t provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Sickening. I wrote at the time:

Similar logic would have one believe that because Czechoslovakia is now a thriving democracy, the invasion of Hitler in 1938 was all for the best. And hey what’s 30 years of human suffering? Eventually things will probably get better — as long as the “national identity” survives.

This argument reveals something very fundamental about the way that the war hawks see this as a game of Risk rather than a catastrophic upheaval in which actual human beings are being killed and maimed and in which the everyday lives of those who live on that piece of land are affected in the most consequential ways possible. Who but the most arrogant, spoiled, pampered, elitist American could write such a thing?

[…]

This Ignatius logic is becoming more prevalent among war supporters as we see that our lame attempt at neocon nation building (which was based, as are all their “plans” upon idealistic fantasies and crossing their fingers) has failed. Therefore, they are now going to take the “long view” in which victory will be prematurely hailed because as one Bush supporter puts it: “All that matters in the long run is the liberalization Bush and Blair have unleashed.”

And this convenient otion isn’t confined to elite pundits. It goes all the way to the top, where the Secretary of State refers to the middle east in chaos as “birth pangs” and the president is reported to sleep well at night knowing that someday the middle east will be peaceful.

I’m a believer in looking beyond the next quarter or the next election when making decisions. But this is ridiculous. The idea that if things turn out ok in decades to come, the US will be vindicated is sophistry.

I’m sorry that Cohen is depressed that “liberal interventionism” has gotten a bad name because of the invasion of Iraq, but I don’t see why he’s blaming the liberals for it. Liberals have been pragmatic about the idea of humanitarian intervention from the beginning, knowing full well the limits of military power to achieve such results and only backing it where the odds were very high that it would do more good than harm. And that meant more good than harm immediately — not in the next fifty or a hundred years. Iraq was never one of those cases as anyone above the age of 12 should have realized.

This argument makes me angry. The promoters of this war with Iraq clearly don’t give a damn about democracy or freedom in the middle east. They don’t even believe in freedom and democracy in the United States. They have sullied these ideals with their cynical invasion and made the whole world roll its eyes when any American dares to speak those phrases. For so-called liberals to jump on this bandwagon and whine that other liberals are betraying liberalism by failing to clap our hands and wish for ponies is just offensive.

As Matt Yglesias wrote:

The Iraq adventure was, among other things, massively costly both in dollars and in American lives. Once you start thinking about whether or not we should engage in massive expenditures for humanitarian purposes it makes sense to hold ourselves to a higher standard — we might ask, for example, that our massive humanitarian expenditures have some clear benefits and not result in large-scale death and destruction.

No kidding. To blithely wave away the current horror on the ground and say that the death and destruction in Iraq will someday be seen as “worth it” and rest easy believing that future generations will thank us for our generous decision to invade their country and unleash hell is morally repugnant. I would say it is far more likely that they will never forgive us.

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White House Can Help Faith Porkers Snarf Up Your Tax Dollars

Smell the bacon:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that ordinary taxpayers cannot challenge a White House initiative that helps religious charities get a share of federal money.

The 5-4 decision blocks a lawsuit by a group of atheists and agnostics against eight Bush administration officials including the head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

The taxpayers’ group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation Inc., objected to government conferences in which administration officials encourage religious charities to apply for federal grants.

Any questions why the next president can’t be a Republican, boys and girls?

Definitions

by tristero

Liberals! They’re always such literalists. Consider the liberal blogosphere’s cynical objection to the modern usage of the term “Al Qaeda,” as if it should still be restricted merely to “followers of bin Laden” when clearly times, and al Qaeda, have changed. Only liberals are stuck in the past.

Look people, war is a complicated business. And this war, which we all know is unlike any other in history, is the most complex war ever. And sure enough, if you examine this war through a typically liberal microscope, it’s hopeless! No wonder that nobody can figure out what the hell we’re doing there, because nobody can figure out who the enemy is. There are Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, insurgents, rebels, warlords, street gangs, terrorists who are existential threats, terrorists who were once existential threats but who are now American allies, and heaven knows what else. And what purpose is served by such obsessive discrimination? They’re all Arabs after all, no different than the Iranis – or is it Iranians? Hell, who can remember such stuff?

And that is what’s behind the latest media policy, which finesses all unnecessary liberal distinctions without a real difference. As Glenn Greenwald correctly notes, this simplifies…no, clarifies the situation for maximum comprehension by an American audience:

…anyone we fight is automatically designated “Al Qaeda”

However, Greenwald’s definition still isn’t broad enough, in my opinion. Back in ’02 or ’03, Glenn Reynolds averred that those who opposed the Iraq war from the start were “ojectively pro-Saddam.” Today, all we need to do is to generalize Reynolds’ important principle. Then, we apply it to the media’s commendable effort to tell the story of the GWOT straight, no chaser, ie, in the simplest clearest terms possible. Therefore:

To oppose Bush’s “surge” means you objectively support al Qaeda’s efforts in Iraq.

Even clearer:

To oppose the Bush surge essentially means you’re a member of al Qaeda.

And for purists who want the clearest possible message, just eliminate “essentially.”

Hillaryious

by digby

I understand that it must be difficult to speak on TV, especially when you are facing Chris Matthews’ bizarre, wild-eyed questions. But this is a really dumb comment coming from the managing editor of TIME magazine about Hillary:

STENGEL: That’s why she has to be so strict about the war, because it’s like Nixon can go to China, the woman has to seem like she’s more militaristic even than the men. And that’s a part of what she’s got.

No, it’s nothing like Nixon can go to China. Nothing at all. Nixon could go to China because he wouldn’t be red-baited by Nixon for doing it. Another example of that cliche is that Bill Clinton, who was perceived as a liberal friend to the African American community, was supposedly able to enact welfare reform because he wouldn’t be called a racist by liberals.

In this election, the military paradigm would fit John McCain, for instance, if he were running to end the war. Only he could carry that message without being called a coward by John McCain. I think everyone knows how this works, don’t you?

Maybe he was just tired. I hope so. Because if he really is confused about the “only Nixon could go to China” trope then the state of the media is even worse than I thought.

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