Month: July 2007

Christian Heathens

by digby

In case anyone’s wondering what kind of appreciation Democrats can expect for publicly discussing their faith, here it is:

Liberal faith, which is to say a faith that discounts the authority of Scripture in favor of a constantly evolving, poll-tested relevancy to modern concerns — such as the environment, what kind of SUV Jesus would drive, larger government programs and other “do-good” pursuits — ultimately morphs into societal and self-improvement efforts and jettisons the life-changing message of salvation, forgiveness of sins and a transformed life.

If the newspaper story is accurate, this is where Clinton is on her faith: “In a brief quiz about her theological views, Mrs. Clinton said she believed in the resurrection of Jesus, though she described herself as less sure of the doctrine that being a Christian is the only way to salvation.”

This is a politician speaking, not a person who believes in the central tenets of Christianity.

The same book that tells of the resurrection, also quotes Jesus as saying “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6). One might ask, which the reporter did not, that if there are other ways to God than through Jesus, why did Jesus bother to come to Earth, allow himself to be crucified and suffer rejection?

About the accuracy of Scripture, Clinton serves up theological mush: “The whole Bible gives you a glimpse of God and God’s desire for a personal relationship (good, so far), but we can’t possibly understand every way God is communicating with us. I’ve always felt that people who try to shoehorn in their cultural and social understandings of the time into the Bible might be actually missing the larger point.”

That is precisely the point of liberal Christianity, to which Clinton subscribes.

According to the religio-politico industry’s liberal lobby, there are hordes of good Christians who’ve reluctantly been voting for Republicans all these years because they thought that Democrats were hostile to their faith.

Who’s hostile now?

The Christian right has actually been at war with mainline churches (like Clinton’s) for a long time, under the radar, and this argument isn’t new. They have tried to defund and decertify them by saying they aren’t legitimately Christian. Their effort continues apace. In their own sector of society they are just as ruthless, bullying and intolerant as they are in the political sphere. (In fact, you can see this playing out among the Republicans even more nastily than in this example. Why Democrats want some of that action is beyond me.)

And by the way, that’s the reason why freedom of religion and the law against religious tests were put into the constitution. The founders had seen enough of the damage created by Europe’s religious wars, and because of their foresight, the American system has been fairly free of them (in our politics anyway, if not our society at large.) It’s a mistake to change that. Political campaigns in which candidates and surrogates argue about which ones are real Christians are — unamerican.

Update: Just in case anyone thinks this is confined to the American protestants, the Pope got into the act, just today:

The Vatican set itself on a collision course with other Christian faiths Tuesday, reaffirming the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church in a corrective document which it said was designed to clear up recent “erroneous” doctrine.

The document’s central claim, that only the Catholic Church is “the one true Church of Christ”, is likely to revive a debate which has dogged the Vatican’s relationship with rival Christian denominations for decades.

Pass the communion wafers.

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Spreadin’ His Love

by digby

I just saw something so frighteningly grotesque I’m going to have nightmares for weeks — Bush babbling about health care. “We need to make people more accountable for their own health.” “Everyone should exercise more.”

MSNBC has a clever director, however, who’s got a split screen going with pictures of gravely ill patients in hospital beds, reaching out for their medication…

I think this may be the best advertisement for Universal Health Care yet. The only thing better would be to have Cheney out there speaking out against it.

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If You Have To Ask You Can’t Afford It

by digby

I don’t know why we can’t talk about this:

The boost in troop levels in Iraq has increased the cost of war there and in Afghanistan to $12 billion a month, and the total for Iraq alone is nearing a half-trillion dollars, congressional analysts say.

All told, Congress has appropriated $610 billion in war-related money since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror assaults, roughly the same as the war in Vietnam. Iraq alone has cost $450 billion.

The figures come from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which provides research and analysis to lawmakers.

For the 2007 budget year, CRS says, the $166 billion appropriated to the Pentagon represents a 40 percent increase over 2006.

The Vietnam War, after accounting for inflation, cost taxpayers $650 billion, according to separate CRS estimates.

The $12 billion a month “burn rate” includes $10 billion for Iraq and almost $2 billion for Afghanistan, plus other minor costs. That’s higher than Pentagon estimates earlier this year of $10 billion a month for both operations. Two years ago, the average monthly cost was about $8 billion.

Among the reasons for the higher costs is the cost of repairing and replacing equipment worn out in harsh conditions or destroyed in combat.

But the estimates call into question the Pentagon’s estimate that the increase in troop strength and intensifying pace of operations in Baghdad and Anbar province would cost only $5.6 billion through the end of September.

There’s some idea that it’s unseemly to question the vast amount of money that’s being spent on this occupation and I don’t get why. There’s nothing wrong with helping the Iraqi people, but I think it’s fair to say at this point that we aren’t actually helping anyone with this absurd burn rate of three billion dollars a week. (I suspect the Iraqis would really like it if we’d stop “helping” too.)

And that failed, spendthrift fool has the utter gall to say stuff like this:

Next week, my Administration will release a report called the Mid-Session Review, which will provide you with an update on our Nation’s progress in meeting the goal of a balanced budget. We know from experience that when we pursue policies of low taxes and spending restraint, the economy grows, tax revenues go up, and the deficit goes down.

Democratic leaders in Congress want to take our country down a different track. They are working to bring back the failed tax-and-spend policies of the past. The Democrats’ budget plan proposes $205 billion in additional domestic spending over the next five years and includes the largest tax increase in history. No nation has ever taxed and spent its way to prosperity. And I have made it clear that I will veto any attempt to take America down this road.

During the 2004 campaign there was a period when John Kerry had a line that said “if we can build firehouses in Iraq, we should be able to build firehouses in America” to huge applause. I assume that it had focus-grouped well, but during those heady days of “spreadin’ liberdee” it was subject to criticism from the otherwise thoroughly chauvinistic Republicans as being unpatriotic or “ungenerous” (which is really funny coming from them) and so he stopped.

The argument is much more straightforward now. Here’s just one example of what Bush proposed to cut even as he insists that we continue to fund this farce in Iraq:

The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans’ health care two years from now – even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.

Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012.

After an increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly – by more than 10 percent in many years – White House budget documents assume consecutive cutbacks in 2009 and 2010 and a freeze thereafter.

Americans have every right to be sick of this war, for all the reasons we discuss here and all over the country every day. But they have a right to be appalled that we are throwing this gigantic sum of money into that sinkhole too, even as we see Americans dying from …. sinkholes, and all kinds of neglected infrastructure, bad health care, environmental degradation, tainted food supply, natural disasters and a host of other ills that only the government can deal with — and isn’t. Now they are about to start with their tired mantra of “tax and spend,” and insist on cutting even more necessary programs after they’ve run up a trillion dollar debt for an unnecessary war and enriched their defense contractor owners beyond their wildest dreams.

Americans have a right to be angry and have their politicians express that anger for them. This bloody, Iraq money pit is infuriating. There’s nothing shameful about admitting that.

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Open Left Is Open

by digby

Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers and Mike Lux have a new blog called Open Left that looks to be an interesting new experiment in progressive activism as well as an interesting new term to define the modern progressive movement.

Bowers says:

First, we are an experiment, trying to bring progressive activists and professionals from “inside” and “outside” the political establishment into regular, thoughtful, and active connection with one another. There will be a wide variety of progressive people and organizations posting here, many of whom will introduce themselves as we roll out many of our soon-to-be regular features this week. We have innovative new posting protocol, epitomized by the “Right To Respond”, where, in the interests of openness and a desire to foster more conversation among progressives, any progressive individual or organization we blog about in a front-page post will have the opportunity to respond with a front page post of their own. With both Matt Stoller and myself, you can expect much of what we provided at MyDD (electoral and infrastructure analysis, mainly), only expanded into other areas. Mike Lux will be able to provide a wealth of professional political experience and an inside viewpoint rarely seen in our previous work. Also, there will be more topics we write about both for an extended period of time and in great detail, rather than relying on singular posts and off-the-cuff analysis. We will write more about legislative policy, as well as strategy on how to pass progressive policy. Further, there will also a lot of talk about progressive culture and lifestyle, since there will never be a sustainable progressive governing majority in America unless that governing majority is accurately representing a more progressive America.

Stoller writes:

At OpenLeft.com, we are going to explore these new dynamics. We don’t believe the internet changes everything, or that older institutions are irrelevant. Far from it. We think that any institution can succeed in building the new America we see unfolding in sketches on the internet. We see the internet and the Open Left as a sort of operating system for a new political system, where groups can plug in and form coalitions more easily and effective on the left, and we see a strong set of dynamics pulling us into this new coalition-focused direction. We hope to host many of these groups, serving as a forum for strategic discussion of goals and tactics.

Lux says:

Even more important than the immediate results in the elections and the impeachment fight, the Open Left movement had been born. Wes and Joan taught us all the power of grassroots organizing over the internet, and politics has been changing ever since as result, giving a voice and power to people outside of establishment politics.

Finally, it taught an old insider like me: don’t ever worry when the establishment Dems get too freaked out. Never hesitate to challenge the conventional wisdom and the passive, cautious politics of too many Democrats. It was a good lesson, one that has been proven right many times since. When warned by Dem insiders in the summer of 2002 that it was still too early to attack Bush because his approval ratings were too high (no one had yet run an ad going after him on any issue since 9-11), I said to hell with it and did an ad attacking him on corporate scandals and helped drop his approval ratings 15 points in a month. When told by a top party staffer in 2005 to stop getting people’s hopes up about our ability to win back Congress, I said to hell with it and kept fanning the flames of hope. And when we as a progressive movement were told by establishment Dems to back off on an aggressive message on the war because it might hurt our candidates, we said to hell with it knowing that it was just such a message that would carry the day- and we were proven right.

I’ve already read a few things over there that should spark some serious debate in ye olde blogosphere, so head on over and join the fray if you’re of a mind to spar. This should be fun.

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Rattling The Cage

by digby

TALLAHASSEE – Internal city memos show the issue of Republican “vote caging” efforts in Jacksonville’s African-American neighborhoods was discussed in the weeks before the 2004 election, contradicting recent claims by former Duval County Republican leader Mike Hightower – the Bush-Cheney campaign’s local chairman at the time.

“Caging” is a longtime voter suppression practice by which political parties collect undeliverable or unreturned mail and use it to develop “challenge lists” on Election Day.

The contradiction comes to light as the U.S. Justice Department continues to consider a June 18 request from two U.S. senators for an investigation into potential illegal voter suppression tactics in Duval County three years ago. A department spokeswoman said last week that the request is still being reviewed.

Hightower, in a Times-Union interview last month, said the controversial voter suppression tactic of “caging” was never raised in daily meetings hosted by former Duval County Supervisor of Elections Bill Scheu, and he had never heard “of that expression or that practice.” Hightower said last week he stands by those recollections.

City officials have disputed that, saying Scheu’s daily pre-election meetings with local Republicans, Democrats and African-American community leaders repeatedly included the topic. The city also released attendance records showing Hightower was present.

[…]

“Vote caging” has a long history in politics. In one such procedure, a campaign will send out postcards to a particular group of addresses with instructions to return the mail. The campaign then creates a database of addresses that did not return the postcards and challenges the right of anyone registered at those addresses who attempts to vote on Election Day. The effect often dissuades turnout. The tactic is legal, but not if voters are targeted by race.

The 3-year-old allegation of caging in Jacksonville gained new life last month, when the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee received testimony indicating the GOP may have used the tactic in 2004.

In case you all have forgotten how close this gets to the White House and the US Attorney scandal, this will remind you:

Karl Rove-protege Tim Griffin recently stepped down as U.S. attorney in Arkansas, realizing that his nomination would almost certainly be rejected by the Senate.

Griffin’s tenure was especially controversial because as former Research Director for the Republican National Committee in 2004, he allegedly engaged in the voter suppression of African-American servicemembers through a tactic known as “caging,” which is both illegal under the federal Voting Rights Act and unconstitutional.

At a speech at the University of Arkansas this week, a teary-eyed Tim Griffin defended his record. Like former Justice official Monica Goodling — who called caging just “a direct-mail term” — Griffin attempted to dismiss the allegations.

GRIFFIN: Obviously, I’ve seen the Internet stuff about caging. First of all, the allegations that are on the Internet and have spread through the tabloids are completely and absolutely false, number one. And ridiculous. Caging, as you may know, I had it looked up, is a direct-mail term for basically organizing returned mail. Now I know that it has been defined (inaudible) on the Internet as some sort of purging voters, suppressing voters, caging voters, vote caging. All these different thing go back to one guy, who’s name I won’t mention, who wrote something about me when I came in control of the U.S. attorney (inaudible). It’s completely untrue. It’s not even, there’s not even a scintilla of proof. And I’ll just say that it’s so untrue, I don’t know exactly what you want me to say. I didn’t do any of the stuff he alleges, and of course if I didn’t do it, I don’t know of any Karl Rove impact (inaudible). This is all made up and faux pas. I didn’t cage votes, I didn’t cage mail, I didn’t cage animals, I’m not a zookeeper.

Griffin is now working for Fred Thompson

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The Line

by digby

I’m very glad to see Sean Wilentz writing in today’s NY Times about Cheney’s minority report in the Iran Contra investigations. (I wrote about this too, last week.)

Wilentz writes:

The Iran-contra joint committee majority in 1987, including some Senate Republican members, charged that the minority report, with tortuous illogic, reduced Congress’s foreign policy role to nearly nothing. Senator Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican and vice chairman of the Senate side of the investigating committee, paraphrased Adlai Stevenson and quipped that the minority report had separated the wheat from the chaff and left in the chaff.

His comments did not lead Mr. Cheney to alter course, as Mr. Cheney’s actions as vice president demonstrate. Asked by a reporter in 2005 to explain his expansive views about presidential power, Mr. Cheney replied, “If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-contra committee.”

“Nobody has ever read them,” he said, but they “are very good in laying out a robust view of the president’s prerogatives with respect to the conduct of especially foreign policy and national security matters.”

In truth, as Mr. Cheney has also remarked, the struggle for him began much earlier, during the Nixon administration. A business partner says that Mr. Cheney told him that Watergate was merely “a political ploy by the president’s enemies.” [Interesting that he holds exactly the same view in exactly the same words as his hero Tricky Dick — ed] For Mr. Cheney, the scandal was not Richard Nixon’s design for an imperial presidency but the Democrats’ drive for an imperial Congress.

Still, Mr. Cheney’s quest to accumulate unaccountable executive power — a quest that has received much attention of late — took a major turn 20 years ago. And part of Iran-contra’s legacy has now become a legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration.

It’s actually a straight line from the Watergate pardon to Iran-Contra (and its pardons) to impeachment to the stolen election of 2000 to the unitary executive abuses of the Bush presidency and the Iraq war. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Dick Cheney’s alleged theory of executive power, since he employs it only when he’s defending a lawless Republican administration. (I don’t exactly recall old Dick standing up and complaining loudly about the imperial congress spending eight years harassing the executive when the executive was a Democrat, do you?)

Cheney and his boys escalate whenever and wherever they have institutional control. He doesn’t actually believe in a powerful executive. He believes in a powerful Republican Party and so do all of his lock-step brethren — by any means necessary.

Here’s the latest on the Cheney impeachment train. Brave New Films made this great short, which was #1 on YouTube this week-end:

Here’s the petition.

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History For Hacks

by digby

From Mary at The Left Coaster I see that the Nixon Library is going to try to become something other than a carnival sideshow since the GOP congress decided to trust them with the Nixon papers. (Gee, I sure hope nothing important disappears or anything … )

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office.

Venturing into that room, visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a “coup” engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit accused Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — without evidence — of “offering bribes” to further their famous coverage.

Most conspicuous was a heavily edited, innocent-seeming version of the “smoking gun” tape of June 23, 1972, the resignation-clinching piece of evidence in which Nixon and his top aide are heard conspiring to thwart the FBI probe of Watergate.

This was history as Nixon wanted it remembered, a monument to his decades-long campaign to refurbish his name. Nixon himself approved the exhibit before the library’s 1990 opening.

“Everybody who visited it, who knew the first thing about history, thought it was a joke,” one Nixon scholar, David Greenberg, said of the Watergate gallery. “You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

I’m sure you must be wondering what kind of low-life historical hack would allow himself or herself to be associated with such an affront to truth and decency:

When the $21-million library opened with private funds in July 1990, amid trumpets and a crowd of 50,000 that included Nixon and three other presidents, one biographer called the occasion “a symbolic redemption” for the president who had resigned in disgrace in 1974.

Yet from the start, the library had trouble being taken seriously. Its first director, Hugh Hewitt, announced that researchers deemed unfriendly would be banned from the archives, singling out the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward as a candidate for exclusion. Scholars cried foul; Hewitt revoked the plan.

What’s more, the library possessed only Nixon’s pre- and post-presidential papers. In 1974, Congress mandated that his White House materials be kept in the Washington area, amid fears that Watergate-related documents would be destroyed.

For years, the library enjoyed a reputation less as a sanctuary for scholars than as a roadside attraction, a place Nixon scholar Stanley Kutler derided as “another Southern California theme park,” adding: “Its level of reality is only slightly better than Disneyland.”

When scholar Greenberg visited the Yorba Linda library to research his book “Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image,” he found the staff in the reading room professional and helpful. But when he ventured into the exhibits depicting Nixon’s career, he found “an incredibly distorted, biased, pro-Nixon view of his presidency that distorted facts about Watergate.”

Yep, that Hugh Hewitt.

Now he is a pampered right wing blogger, talk radio host, author and wingnut welfare recipient.

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Sunday Short Takes

by digby

• I suppose most of you have already heard about Billo’s latest Fox freakshow, but I missed it. Dave Niewert at Orcinus has the whole bizarre story of Billo’s obsession with “a ‘national underground network’ of pink pistol-packing lesbians is terrorizing America.” I kid you not.

• Pastordan caught another example of the press simply rewriting oppo research, this time against a Republican. I’m happy to see Mitt Romney being kicked to the curb by the religious right, but not so happy to see the AP regurgitating articles from Focus On The Family, no matter who it’s about. This is exactly the kind of thing that drives me crazy about these journalistic conventions. Sure the “facts” presented may be true. But after reading it, I have no idea what the truth is. It’s maddening.

• Rod Dreher reads “All Quiet on The Western front” and discovers that war is hell. Perhaps we are making a mistake in requiring high school students read the book and would do better to have members of congress and the elite media all read it — and write a book report — before the next insane march to an unnecessary war takes place. (*And along the same lines, I remember that about two years ago Lucian Truscott IV wondered in an email exchange with me, “where is the great Iraq novel?” Where the hell is it?)

• David Halberstam (in what I think was his last piece) writes about the Bushies new obsession with “history,” one of my favorite topics. I particularly enjoyed this:
  

  Ironically, it is the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before, he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually he does this in the broadest—and vaguest—sense: History teaches us … We know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee, or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to read his Gibbon

Haha. It reminds of an early-ish Bush campaign speech in which he quoted Pericles and I just about fell off my chair laughing. You just knew they’d had to tell him how to pronounce the name…

• Finally, here is a wonderful Hendrik Herzberg piece about Dick Cheney. It reads like a bill of impeachment. Beautiful.

Enjoy!

H/T’s to all the usual suspects.

Embracing The Wackos

by digby

MYDD’s Melissa Ryan has a good suggestion:

NARAL’s website has a section devoted to the 2008 Presidential candidates and their views on a woman’s right to choose. This will come as no surprise, but only one Republican candidate, Rep. Tancredo, responded to NARAL’s request for a statement.

[…]

Birth Control is a good issue for Democrats. It’s a women’s issue, a health care issue, an economic issue. Virtually every American makes choices about family planning over the course of their lifetime…I propose developing a standard list of questions to ask about access to birth control. It could first be sent out to Presidential candidates, and then used by those wishing to question candidates running for Congress and their State Assemblies in 2008.

I came up with these questions, but I’d love to get feedback from others on the wording, and any topics I might have forgotten. Over the next couple of weeks I can take that feedback and create a final set of questions to send out.

1. Do you support the right to use contraception?
2. Would you support legislations that requires pharmacies to both stock and fill prescriptions for birth control pills including Plan B emergency contraception?
3. As President (Senator/Congresswoman) would you support continued funding of Title X, which provides contraception and related reproductive health care services to low-income women?
4. Would you support legislation that require hospitals to offer information and prescriptions of emergency contraception to victims of sexual assault?
5. Would you support legislation requiring schools to include information about contraception as part of any sex ed curriculum?
6. Would you support legislation requiring health insurance providers to cover oral contraceptives in their prescription plans?

She wants these questions asked of Democratic candidates and I think that’s a good idea. But I would really like to see them asked of Republican candidates during this primary season when they are all tripping over themselves to get the neanderthal nomination. I doubt very seriously that the mainstream of America knows just how nutty those people are on the subject. Locking these men into the extreme stance required to placate the kooks early would be very smart.

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Dumb As Hell

by digby

Thompson, now preparing a bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, won fame in 1973 for asking a committee witness the bombshell question that revealed Nixon had installed hidden listening devices and taping equipment in the Oval Office.

Those tapes show Thompson played a behind-the-scenes role that was very different from his public image three decades ago. He comes across as a partisan willing to cooperate with the Nixon White House’s effort to discredit the committee’s star witness.

It was Thompson who tipped off the White House that the Senate committee knew about the tapes. They eventually cinched Nixon’s downfall in the scandal resulting from the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington and the subsequent White House cover-up.

Thompson, then 30, was appointed counsel by his political mentor, Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, the top Republican on the Senate investigative committee. Thompson had been an assistant U.S. attorney in Nashville, Tenn., and had managed Baker’s re-election campaign. Thompson later was a senator himself.

Nixon was disappointed with the selection of Thompson, whom he called “dumb as hell.” The president did not think Thompson was skilled enough to interrogate unfriendly witnesses and would be outsmarted by the committee’s Democratic counsel.

This assessment comes from audio tapes of White House conversations recently reviewed by The Associated Press at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and transcripts of those discussions that are published in “Abuse of Power: The New Watergate Tapes,” by historian Stanley Kutler.

“Oh s—, that kid,” Nixon said when told by his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, of Thompson’s appointment on Feb. 22, 1973.

“Well, we’re stuck with him,” Haldeman said.

In a meeting later that day in the Old Executive Office Building, Baker assured Nixon that Thompson was up to the task. “He’s tough. He’s six feet five inches, a big mean fella,” the senator told Nixon.

Publicly, Baker and Thompson presented themselves as dedicated to uncovering the truth. But Baker had secret meetings and conversations with Nixon and his top aides, while Thompson worked cooperatively with the White House and accepted coaching from Nixon’s lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt, the tapes and transcripts show.

[…]

Nixon expressed concern that Thompson was not “very smart.”

“Not extremely so,” Buzhardt agreed.

“But he’s friendly,” Nixon said.

“But he’s friendly,” Buzhardt agreed. “We are hoping, though, to work with Thompson and prepare him, if Dean does appear next week, to do a very thorough cross-examination.”

Five days later, Buzhardt reported to Nixon that he had primed Thompson for the Dean cross-examination.

“I found Thompson most cooperative, feeling more Republican every day,” Buzhardt said. “Uh, perfectly prepared to assist in really doing a cross-examination.”

Later in the same conversation, Buzhardt said Thompson was “willing to go, you know, pretty much the distance now. And he said he realized his responsibility was going to have be as a Republican increasingly.”

Here’s how Thompson described it in his book:

Thompson, in his 1975 memoir, wrote that he believed “there would be nothing incriminating” about Nixon on the tapes, a theory he said “proved totally wrong.”

“In retrospect it is apparent that I was subconsciously looking for a way to justify my faith in the leader of my country and my party, a man who was undergoing a violent attack from the news media, which I thought had never given him fair treatment in the past,” Thompson wrote. “I was looking for a reason to believe that Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, was not a crook.”

He was just “feeling Republican.”

Tricky really should have burned those tapes. Clearly, Thompson would have gladly jumped in the fire to make sure there was nothing left of them.

He must have known for years now that he’s featured on them. Why he went out on a limb to defend Scooter, knowing that, is beyond comprehension. It would be an amazing irony if they ended up taking him down too.

He is dumb as hell.

H/T to BB

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