Month: August 2007

Poor WATB

by digby

Poor Karl. So misunderstood. In his petulant, whining interview with the NY Times this morning he almost breaks into tears at how terribly he’s been misunderstood. He’s such a nice fellow and everyone thinks he’s so darned mean. It’s the Demooocrats who were the dividers when every now and then a small minority of them would raise a tepid peep against the administration’s policies.

He only has one regret, about the one time when he treated someone he works with unkindly:

“I remember having a conversation with a colleague — I want to say not only a colleague, but a very close friend — and responding out of frustration at the end of a seemingly long, continuing dialogue that turned into an argument, and saying something unkind, and it was the worst I ever felt at the White House. I later apologized to him for it.”

Karl, you see, is normally a very mild mannered fellow who brings ice cream bars to all his colleagues on Friday afternoons. His calm and kind demeanor has been well documented:

Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. “We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!” As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. “Come on in.” And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.

He told the NY Times he wasn’t even involved in that legendary smear campaign against Max Clelend:

Mr. Rove was asked whether harsh Republican attacks on the national security credentials of various Democrats in 2002, orchestrated by him, had added to the climate. Among the advertisements that year was one from the Georgia Senate race in which the Republican, Saxby Chambliss, called the Democratic incumbent, Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran soft on defense and flashed the menacing image of Osama Bin Laden.

“President Bush and the White House don’t write the ads for Senate candidates,” Mr. Rove said, calling himself “a convenient scapegoat,” and blaming Democrats for their losse

Gee, I wonder where people got the idea that he was intimately involved in that smear?

Karl Rove’s legacy in Georgia includes a 2002 U.S. Senate race remembered as one of the most negative in the country.

Republicans needed to take control of the Senate to help move President Bush’s agenda. They wanted to take out U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat. That’s where Rove came in.

First, the White House crushed the campaign of another Georgia Republican, Bob Irvin, a former leader of the state House, by announcing Bush’s support for then-U.S. Rep. Saxby Chambliss in the primary —- a race in which the White House rarely intervenes.

“This is one of those rare instances where, with all due deference to other Republicans involved, control of the Senate is so important to the president’s agenda that he will back one of the candidates,” Rove said at the time.

Chambliss easily won the nomination and set his sights on Cleland, a disabled veteran of the Vietnam war.

With the backing of the White House, Chambliss was running competitively, and late in the campaign, he dropped an advertising bomb.

In the now-famous ad, pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein appeared on the screen followed by a picture of Cleland.

Or maybe it was this:

A protégé of White House political guru Karl Rove produced the controversial Republican National Committee ad targeting Tennessee Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Harold Ford Jr., that some have called racist, CBS News has learned.

The ad, in which a white woman with blonde hair and bare shoulders looks into the camera and whispers, “Harold, call me,” and then winks, was produced by Scott Howell, the former political director for Rove’s consulting firm in Texas.

[…]

Howell is no stranger to controversy. He was media consultant for Sen. Saxby Chambliss when his campaign ran an ad showing a picture of then-Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who lost his legs in the Vietnam War, alongside Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Coincidence, I’m sure.

With all the unfair and unfounded battering he takes, at least he hasn’t lost his puckish sense of humor:

As Mr. Rove left the IHOP for his hotel here in Waco — some 20 miles from the president’s vacation ranch — it was evident the degree to which he had become a public figure. He was twice stopped by well-wishers who said they admired him.

Later, Mr. Rove sent a note: “I didn’t plant the guy at the IHOP or the woman at the hotel but it would be the subtle personal touch that the Evil Genius would do to throw you off the scent, don’t you think?”

Actually, this is vintage Rove. there’s nobody in the whole wide world who has promoted the idea of Rove-the-mastermind more than Karl Rove. In fact, his legendary jujitsu skill is pretty much all in his self-serving myth making, as he shows here. He knows there are people all over the country who are saying right now, “I’ll bet he did plant them.”

In this pouty interview he defends everything he ever did, blames the Democrats for everything that’s gone wrong and then puts down the one decent, pure and good thing about the Bush white house, the only member of the admnistration I truly admire: Barney. What an ass.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Thursday’s child is Sunday’s clown

By Dennis Hartley

(Please note: This week’s review is based solely on the “extended” director’s cut of the film that appears on the DVD; I have not screened the original theatrical version.)

One of the more fascinating trends to emerge in simpatico with the ever-narrowing window between the moment a first-run film leaves the multiplex and its appearance on DVD is what I like to refer to as the “auto repair cut” of box-office flops (“Okay, I think I’ve found the problem -try starting it now…”)

One recent example is George Hickenlooper’s extended cut of “Factory Girl”, which is his biopic about the pin-up girl of the 1960s underground, Andy Warhol “discovery” Edie Sedgwick. The film, plagued with production problems and prematurely rushed into theaters late last year, did marginal box office at best, and was even less enthusiastically received by some of the surviving real-life participants in the Warhol Factory scene (More sordid details here).

Edie Sedgwick was the Paris Hilton of the 1960s; a trust fund babe imbued with no real discernible native talent aside from the ability to attract the paparazzi by associating with just the right people in just the right places at just the right juncture of the pop culture zeitgeist. Despite growing up as a child of privilege, Sedgwick’s childhood was less than idyllic (two of her brothers committed suicide and her mother was institutionalized). She arrived in New York City in the mid 60s and was drawn to the downtown art scene, where she was subsequently spotted by Andy Warhol, who immediately became platonically smitten with her wide-eyed, waif-like beauty and vowed to make her a “superstar”. Warhol featured her in a number of his experimental films, and she became the iconic symbol of the “Factory”, a warehouse space where Warhol worked on his multi-media projects and played host to a revolving door co-op of avant-garde artists, musicians, actors and hangers-on. Sedgwick fell from grace with Warhol when she became strung out on various substances and was cut off financially by her family. She eventually sought treatment and cleaned up, only to tragically die of a drug overdose at the age of 28.

This is a pretty rich vein from which to mine a juicy biopic. The director is no stranger to this territory; his outstanding 2003 documentary about L.A. DJ/rock impresario Rodney Bingenheimer, “The Mayor of the Sunset Strip” basically deals with the same theme (see my review here from 5/5/07). So, is Hickenlooper up to the task? Well, yes and no.

Hickenlooper’s affection for the subject at hand is evidenced in his canny visual replication of the 1960s underground art scene; he alternates grainy, b&w film footage with highly saturated 16mm color stock and utilizes a lot of hand-held cinema verite style shots, cleverly aping the look of Warhol’s own experimental films. The fashion, the music, and the overall vibe of the era is pretty much captured in a bottle here.

Okay, so the film has a great look, but what about the narrative? Ay, there’s the rub. The director’s pastiche approach plays like the Cliff’s Notes version of Warhol and Sedgwick’s partnership. A lot of things are left unexplained; peripheral characters come and go without much exposition (it wasn’t until the credits rolled that I learned tidbits like “Oh. THAT character was supposed to be Moe Tucker from the Velvet Underground. Coulda fooled me…”). In a fictional story, you can get away with creating bit parts like “Man #2 with suitcase” or “Crazy bag lady in subway”, but when you are dramatizing a true story…well, I think you see my point. (Ironically, the 30 minute documentary extra on the DVD, featuring recollections from friends and family. serves up much more insight into what made Sedgwick tick than the full length feature does).

One cannot fault the actors. Sienna Miller gives her all in the lead role and does an admirable job portraying the full arc of Edie’s transition from an innocent pixie, fresh from her parent’s pastoral country estate, to a haggard junkie, encamped in a dingy room at the Chelsea Hotel (eerily, the very same place where, a scant decade later, a strung-out Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen would write their final chapters). The always excellent Guy Pearce completely disappears into a spooky evocation of Warhol. It’s not as easy as one might think to inhabit Warhol’s deadpan persona; several actors have made valiant efforts (David Bowie, Jared Harris and Crispin Glover) but generally end up doing little more than donning a white wig, affecting a blank stare and tossing out the rote catch phrases (“Umm, yeah. That’s great.” “Yeah, hi.”). If you’ve seen footage of the real McCoy, Warhol was, in actuality, quite the wiseacre (in his own slyly ironic fashion). Pearce perfectly captures Warhol’s calculatingly detached, bemused demeanor. Even the usually wooden Hayden Christensen registers a pulse and gets with the program, doing a passable impression of Bob Dylan. Oh, I’m sorry-did I say ‘Bob Dylan’? I meant to say, ‘Billy Quinn’ (as in “The Mighty Quinn”-get it?), referred to in the film only as a “folk singer” (even on the DVD commentary track, Hickenlooper goes to great pains to avoid invoking Dylan by name- Bob’s lawyers must be some scary motherfuckers.)

All in all, “Factory Girl” is perhaps not quite as dismal as many have led you to believe, but it is still not as good as one might have hoped (I guess we can call this a ‘mixed review’, no?) Worth a peek on a slow night; it actually might be a more enhanced experience if you pair it up with one of my recommendations below. Ciao!

Andy’s Chest: Ciao Manhattan, Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (originally shown on PBS as a two part “American Experience” presentation-highly recommended!), The Life & Times of Andy Warhol – Superstar, I Shot Andy Warhol, Basquiat, The Doors (only mentioned here because of Crispin Glover’s cameo).

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Tripping On Crazy

by digby

Atrios has posted a YouTube of Tom Friedman from 2003 saying we needed to unleash hell on the first convenient middle eastern country to teach those bastards a lesson. It’s a perfect display of the rampant lunacy that overtook most of the punditocrisy after 9/11, and Friedman in particular. I recall talking to liberals at the time who were persuaded that if Friedman thought we needed to kick arab ass, maybe that’s what we needed to do. He was a Very Serious Expert on the middle east. He speaks arabic!

Atrios posted this vid in response to another post from Democracy Arsenal attempting to mitigate such — let’s say it, fascistic — comments by saying that Tom Friedman isn’t a bad person for saying such things. I might buy it if he just made a comment like that once or twice in passing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. But he didn’t just say this in conversation. He wrote it in his column in the most influential paper in the country. And he wrote it as “even the liberal Tom Friedman says” perspective, which gave it the veneer of bi-partisanship that helped to paralyze the Democratic party (and the country.).

He wrote this one three months after 9/11, long after it was acceptable for anyone sane to rant like this:

Reading Europe’s press, it is really reassuring to see how warmly Europeans have embraced President Bush’s formulation that an ”axis of evil” threatens world peace. There’s only one small problem. President Bush thinks the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and the Europeans think it’s Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice.

I’m not kidding. Chris Patten, the European Union’s foreign policy czar, told The Guardian that the Bush axis-of-evil idea was dangerously ”absolutist and simplistic,” not ”thought through” and ”unhelpful,” and that the Europeans needed to stop Washington before it went into ”unilateralist overdrive.”

So what do I think? I think these critics are right that the countries Mr. Bush identified as an axis of evil are not really an ”axis,” and we shouldn’t drive them together. And the critics are right that each of these countries poses a different kind of threat and requires a different, nuanced response. And the critics are right that America can’t fight everywhere alone. And the critics are right that America needs to launch a serious effort to end Israeli-Palestinian violence, because it’s undermining any hope of U.S.-Arab cooperation.

The critics are right on all these counts — but I’m still glad President Bush said what he said.

Because the critics are missing the larger point, which is this: Sept. 11 happened because America had lost its deterrent capability. We lost it because for 20 years we never retaliated against, or brought to justice, those who murdered Americans. From the first suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, to the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut airport a few months later, to the T.W.A. hijacking, to the attack on U.S. troops at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, to the suicide bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, innocent Americans were killed and we did nothing.

So our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened. Indeed, they became so emboldened that a group of individuals — think about that for a second: not a state but a group of individuals — attacked America in its own backyard. Why not? The terrorists and the states that harbor them thought we were soft, and they were right. They thought that they could always ”out-crazy” us, and they were right. They thought we would always listen to the Europeans and opt for ”constructive engagement” with rogues, not a fist in the face, and they were right.

America’s enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid a huge price for that. There is an old bedouin legend that goes like this: An elderly Bedouin leader thought that by eating turkey he could restore his virility. So he bought a turkey, kept it by his tent and stuffed it with food every day. One day someone stole his turkey. The Bedouin elder called his sons together and told them: ”Boys, we are in great danger. Someone has stolen my turkey.” ”Father,” the sons answered, ”what do you need a turkey for?”

”Never mind,” he answered, ”just get me back my turkey.” But the sons ignored him and a month later someone stole the old man’s camel. ”What should we do?” the sons asked. ”Find my turkey,” said the father. But the sons did nothing, and a few weeks later the man’s daughter was raped. The father said to his sons: ”It is all because of the turkey. When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”

America is that Bedouin elder, and for 20 years people have been taking our turkey. The Europeans don’t favor any military action against Iraq, Iran or North Korea. Neither do I. But what is their alternative? To wait until Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday, who’s even a bigger psychopath than his father, has bio-weapons and missiles that can hit Paris?

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through — but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: ”We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld — he’s even crazier than you are.”

There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.

That attitude showed bad judgment all right. The whole thing screams facile neoconservative cant that makes even Norman Podhoretz’s ravings about WWIV look tame. But it showed something more —- a sick kind of bloodlust that I think really calls Friedman’s morals into question. This was the kind of hysterical crap you would expect dittoheads to spout, not hugely influential liberal intellectuals. It was bizarre and freakish and it lent crediblity to the kind of cowboy hero-worship that gave Bush the support he needed to make the greatest strategic blunder in American history.

He was a 9/11 junkie, addled by war porn and sentimental nationalism:

I have a confession to make. Right after 9/11, I was given a CD by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which included its rendition of ”The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I put it in my car’s CD player and played that song over and over, often singing along as I drove. It wasn’t only the patriotism it evoked that stirred me, but the sense of national unity. That song was what the choir sang at the close of the memorial service at the National Cathedral right after 9/11. Even though that was such a wrenching moment for our nation, I look back on it now with a certain longing and nostalgia. For it was such a moment of American solidarity, with people rallying to people and everyone rallying to the president.

They say you don’t find out what you’re made of until you come under pressure. I would say that for an intellectual like Friedman, the test came when he was called upon by vast numbers of influential politicians and ordinary people to make sense of what was happening in the Middle East and he responded like a simpleton.

I’m sure he is very nice to people he knows and I’m sure he’s a great friend and all that. But he called for this country’s leadership to be “crazy” and he cheered the idea that we should invade a country, any country — necessarily killing vast numbers of innocent people as wars always do and behaving like invading Mongol hordes — to show that we can’t be trifled with.

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?

Well, Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We couldn’t hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Oh sure, he twisted his white hankie about whether the Bush administration was going to follow through on all its grand proclamations about creating a full service democracy mall once we’d “pacified” the barbarians. But his main theme through that whole period was that the US needed to kill a bunch of Arabs to show that we weren’t a bunch of wimps. Just listen to the passion in his voice when he says this horrible thing. It’s chilling.

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The Big Carnival

by digby

Jane flagged this post by Arianna yesterday, in which she calls out the media for giving that glory hound wingnut Bob Murray a stage for the past week and a half instead of doing their jobs and reporting the story objectively:

Here’s a question for the media: Since when do the owners of mines — especially owners who have been fined millions of dollars for numerous safety violations — set the news agenda? So here we are, 12 days after the first collapse, with three heroic rescuers dead, six others injured, and the original six trapped miners almost certainly lost forever. And, finally, we have Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman suggesting we “focus like never before on workplace safety” (the Governor had better be prepared for the wrath of Murray: when Hillary Clinton made a similar statement months ago about the importance of workplace safety, Murray attacked her as “anti-American.”) So why wasn’t the focus on workplace safety the focus of the media from Day One?

What a good question. But we know the answer. As Jane points out:

All along, Murray called the shots and he wrote the media’s script for them.

Script is exactly right. Ever since I saw Murray doing his manic Wilfred Brimley impression on that first day, I’ve been struck by how much the whole media approach to this mine accident was eerily like the cynical Billy Wilder flick from 1951 called “Ace In The Hole” (also known as “The Big Carnival.”) As it happens, I just watched it for the first time in decades on Turner Classic Movies after Dennis Hartley recommended it here in one of his reviews a few months back. Let’s just say that Wilder didn’t have a high opinion of the media: Dennis wrote:

[I]t is arguably the most cynical noir ever made, and IMHO Wilder’s best film.

Kirk Douglas is brilliant as Charles Tatum, a washed up, alcoholic former big-city newspaperman yearning for a comeback (not unlike the Robert Downey Jr. character in “Zodiac”). He swears off the booze and sweet-talks his way into a job at a small-town newspaper in New Mexico, hoping that the Big Story will somehow fall into his lap.

He gets his wish when he happens across a “man trapped in a cave-in” incident. What begins as a “human interest story” turns into a major media circus, with the opportunistic Tatum pulling the strings as its ringmaster. Prescient, hard-hitting, and required viewing.

Drilling through the top of the cave to reach the trapped miner as opposed to rescuing him through the mine even features heavily in the plot. Certainly, pimping out a showy clown like Murray for days on end to boost ratings, would have fit perfectly with the theme. Like I said, it’s eery.

Tragically, a whole bunch of people have died and others are injured but so far, we’ve heard almost nothing about this “star’s” background in pushing unsafe mining techniques and anti-union policies and neither have we heard anything about the fact that the man Bush named to be the “mine safety czar” was such a bad choice for the job that he had to give him a recess appointment with a Republican congress. It’s difficult to know if that being public knowledge would have led to a more prudent rescue attempt. But it certainly would have spared the miners’ families having to put up with the “face of the rescue” being the same man whose anti-regulatory, anti-labor policies may very well have led to their loved ones’ deaths.

Here’s another mining movie recommendation: Harlan County USA. It’s a film conservative exploiters like Murray don’t want anybody to see. It might make working men and women in this country realize that voting for Republican jackasses who answer to pricks like him, might not be the best idea in the world.

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Hatching The Plot

by digby

When Karl resigned earlier this week, I mused that if he was about to go down, I thought it might be because of the most prosaic crime of all: violation of the Hatch act.

Here’s more from McClatchy tonight on just what a slick political operation they had:

Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.

Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings — all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether the White House’s political briefings to at least 15 agencies, including to the Justice Department, the General Services Administration and the State Department, violated a ban on the use of government resources for campaign activities.

Under the Hatch Act, Cabinet members are permitted to attend political briefings and appear with members of Congress. But Cabinet members and other political appointees aren’t permitted to spend taxpayer money with the aim of benefiting candidates.

[…]

As part of the probe, committee investigators found that White House drug czar John Walters took 20 trips at taxpayers’ expense in 2006 to appear with Republican congressional candidates.

In a separate investigation, the independent Office of Special Counsel concluded that GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan violated the Hatch Act, which limits the political activities of government employees. Witnesses told investigators that Doan asked at the end of one political briefing in January 2007 what her agency could do to help GOP candidates. Doan has said she doesn’t recall that remark.

[…]

In the months leading up to the 2002 election, then-Commerce Secretary Don Evans, Bush’s former campaign finance chairman, made eight appearances or announcements with Republican incumbents in districts deemed by White House aides either as competitive districts or battleground presidential states.

During the stops, he doled out millions of dollars in grants, including in two public announcements with Rep. Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican in a competitive district.

Republicans ultimately regained control of the Senate and expanded their majority in the House of Representatives in the 2002 elections.

[…]

In 2006, Evans’ successor, Carlos Gutierrez, and his aides also made public announcements with several Republican congressional incumbents, including in the battleground states of Missouri, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Weeks before the 2006 election, Gutierrez and Congresswoman Wilson announced $3.45 million in grants for Albuquerque organizations. Also in the weeks before the election, a deputy secretary and Republican Sen. Rick Santorum announced that the department would be investing $2.25 million in Philadelphia.

The same year, then-Treasury Secretary John Snow and Santorum announced an award of millions in tax credits to Pennsylvania organizations. Santorum later lost his seat.

Snow and his aides also made appearances in 2006 with Republican incumbents or doled out grants in Virginia, Iowa and Ohio, states seen as crucial to the GOP retaining control of Congress.

Bush’s first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, stuck mainly to giving speeches praising President Bush’s economic policies rather than appearing with candidates. O’Neill was unceremoniously dumped after disagreeing repeatedly with the White House.

[…]

Commerce Department spokesman Dan Nelson described the meetings as merely “informational.”

“They were not a call to action,” he said.

From the LA Times article I quoted in my earlier Rove post:

Interior Department employees describe regular visits from Rove’s staff during Bush’s first term. On one occasion, Rove visited a retreat for the 50 top Interior Department managers. The lights dimmed in an agency conference room as Rove went through a PowerPoint presentation showing battleground races in the 2002 midterm election, and occasionally made oblique but clearly understood references to Interior Department decisions that could affect these races. By stopping short of explicitly calling on the Interior Department officials to take action, Rove stayed within the rules against exerting improper political influence.

[…]

“These visits are a reminder of what’s important,” said one agency manager who attended one of the sessions. “They didn’t need to say anything explicitly. We already knew what to do.”

But, you know, it isn’t just the power point parades or the pep rallies or the largesse being doled out to GOP candidates in trouble that’s being investigated for Hatch Act violations. There’s this, and if it has traction, it could open up a very interesting avenue into the big crimes:

…fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias revealed key new details about the Office of Special Counsel’s (OSC) probe into Karl Rove and other White House officials reported today by the Los Angeles Times.

Iglesias said that on April 3, he filed a Hatch Act complaint with the OSC, charging that Karl Rove and others may have violated the law by firing him over his failure to initiate partisan-motivated prosecutions.

These Hatch act investigations may end up being more potent than anybody realizes. Remember, Watergate started out as a third rate burglary.

Ranch Dressing

by digby

When I read that Bush was upset about a fashion article about him, I was actually prepared to defend him. I mean if it suggested that he had calculated that wearing pants really tight in the crotch would show what a manly man he was or something, or even if they said he’d taken up earth tones to make himself more “accessible,” I would have stood up for his right to bitch. These fashion articles are very annoying.

But I read it and I can’t figure out what his beef was. It’s an extremely dull article discussing what he wears at the ranch, like anybody gives a damn. There’s one silly quote from a consultant who says he’s being more statesmanlike (by dressing like Walker Texas Ranger!) than he was early in the term, and implies that it’s because he’s unpopular. I can’t even figure out what that means. But that’s not even close to the ridiculous stuff they said about Gore or the nasty innuendos out there about Edwards and his haircuts right now. (The piece even took a gratuitous knock on Bill Clinton, fergawdsake, what does he want?)

It ends by saying, “In his Western duds, Bush easily could model for Ralph Lauren. But if his popularity is still low through the end of his presidency, he could always try Wrangler.” Is that supposed to be a low blow? A few weeks ago the whole town was accusing Hillary Clinton of flashing her ta-tas on the floor of the senate to “humanize” herself. Saying he could be a Ralph Lauren model is hardly a slam. (Unless, of course, Mr “Prance-around-in-a-skin-tight-jumpsuit-like-a-Chippendale’s-dancer” thought that made him sound effeminate.)

Typical Bush. He actually went out of his way to complain about an article that isn’t even critical. And it may be the only article in the last six months that isn’t. Weird.

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Throwing The Brick

by digby

A friend recently told me that his daughter had given him a “bad call brick” — a sponge that looks like a brick that you throw at the TV when an umpire makes a bad call. (This was done, I assume, to stop more dangerous projectiles from being hurled, like a shoe — or the family dog.) I really need one of those, especially when I hear John McCain appearing before a liberal audience and getting cacophonous applause for saying:

JM: Well, let me just tell you. I’d close Guantanamo Bay and I’d declare we never torture another person in American custody.

Uh uh. You’d think he would feel that way because he’d been tortured and understood what an immoral and counterproductive way it is to get intelligence or create propaganda. He’s been there. But sadly, John McCain sold his soul last year when he helped the Bush administration pass that legislative abortion known as the Military Commissions act which actually legalized torture and withdrew habeas corpus protections from anyone that the president decides doesn’t deserve them.

So, no. He gets no credit for being against torture. If he were against torture he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be used like Dick Cheney’s blow up doll in passing that piece of garbage.

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Chickens Roosting In The WSJ

by digby

Oh man, Ward Churchill is at it again, blaming Americans for the rise of Islamic terrorism, just like he did in that famous essay where he wrote:

To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions…

You’d think he’d have learned that attacking his fellow Americans only gets him out of town on a rail, no matter what he actually meant by it, even if you’re an academic with lifetime tenure. But he’s at it again, saying that Americans’ materialism and obsession with money is causing terrorism. And now he’s not just blaming the financial wizards he took issue with after 9/11. Now he’s blaming the whole culture:

…all modern young people come from two environments. The first is the immediate family, which is human and therefore by definition imperfect, sometimes to a serious and destructive degree. The other is the broader culture in which we all live, and which includes everything from schools to the neighborhood to the media. It’s not a new thing to say but it’s still true that the latter, which is more powerful than ever, is wholly devoted to the material. People are money winners or luxury item enjoyers. They just want stuff. It is soulless.

The view we show of life to ourselves, and to whatever lost young men are watching, is not broad and inspiriting. It is limited and dispiriting. It is every man for himself.

We make it too easy for those who want to hate us to hate us. We make ourselves look bad in our media, which helps future jihadists think that they must, by hating us, be good. They hit their figurative garbage bin lids on the ground, and smirk, and promise to make a racket, and then more than a racket, a boom.

Oh wait, I’m sorry. That’s Peggy Noonan in the pages of the Wall Street Journal today. (You can see why I made the error — the turgid prose is quite similar.)

This has actually become a new rightwing theme: America asked for it. I think everyone can be pardoned for the extreme cognitive dissonance this new theme is causing after the last five years of “we’re good ‘n they’re evil” and chanting about saving western civilization. It turns out the Islamofascists aren’t all wrong, after all.

The last I heard Churchill was out of work. Maybe Regnery should give him a call.

h/t to Steve Benen

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Destructive Creativity

by digby

I don’t now about you, but I’m getting a little bit freaked out by these bridge and mine accidents. You get the feeling that the country is coming apart at the seams.

It’s very important to recognize that this isn’t just a series of unrelated accidents or bad luck. This is the result of the great conservative experiment in deregulating everything back to the 19th century and starving the treasury by demagoguing government.

Rick Perlstein points out in this epic e.Coli Conservative post that this experiment once even had a delightfully obfuscatory name: The Creative Society:

Coal mining fatalities had been declining since 1926: yes, the last time mine safety was this bad the Charleston was all the rage. Then, in 2006, the most coalminers died than had in any one year in a decade. We’re up to the largest percentage increase in 107 years.

Why? How? By formula. They use corporate contributions to weaken government regulations, and to help cripple unions. They wage fierce anti-union jihads to keep workers and their advocates powerless. They violate even existing anemic safety rules, while pushing the mineral seams beyond all earthly limits to squeeze forth just a teensy bit more precious profit.

Then they call the result a “mine accident.”

When Ronald Reagan ran for governor of 1966 he proposed what he called the “creative society”—government mobilizing the energies of the people” and “helping them organize their own solutions to these problems” by hiring business “experts” instead of civil servants. For example, since state hospitals and mental institutions were “in a sense, hotel operations,” an expert committee of hotel operators could oversee them instead of “government planners.” read on…

The conservatives have sold this country on a free lunch for decades now. Who needs government? Taxes are evil, no matter what they’re used for. Government bureaucrats are incompetent by definition — corporate bureaucrats, on the other hand, are creative, entrepreneurial geniuses who can solve all problems without it costing you anything! Don’t worry, be happy.

How’s that working out everybody? Are we feeling pretty happy?

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It Didn’t Change Things Enough

by digby

There has been a lot of chatter on TV and online in the last week about this video of Dick Cheney saying back in 1993 that invading Iraq would lead to a quagmire. It’s a great piece of video, but it’s not something we haven’t been aware of from the beginning of the Iraq war. Not that the press bothered to ask the administration about it at the time, of course. But even if they had, they would have come up with this standard reply, which Cheney was giving as recently as 2007:

Q Back in 1991, you talked about how military action in Iraq would be the classic definition of a quagmire. Have you been disturbed to see how right you were? Or people certainly said that you were exactly on target in your analysis back in 1991 of what would happen if the U.S. tried to go in —

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I stand by what I said in ’91. But look what’s happened since then — we had 9/11. We’ve found ourselves in a situation where what was going on in that part of the globe and the growth and development of the extremists, the al Qaeda types that are prepared to strike the United States demonstrated that we weren’t safe and secure behind our own borders. We weren’t in Iraq when we got hit on 9/11. But we got hit in ’93 at the World Trade Center, in ’96 at Khobar Towers, or ’98 in the East Africa embassy bombings, 2000, the USS Cole. And of course, finally 9/11 right here at home. They continued to hit us because we didn’t respond effectively, because they believed we were weak. They believed if they killed enough Americans, they could change our policy because they did on a number of occasions. That day has passed. That all ended with 9/11.

9/11 changed everything. We’ve heard it a thousand times. And maybe it’s true. But when it comes to Iraq, it was always gibberish. If anything, 9/11 made all of Cheney’s earlier admonitions against invading Iraq more true, not less. But the neocons had been agitating for war with Iraq for some years by that time and they weren’t going to stop and reevaluate their crusade in light of those terrorist attacks. They were just going to barrel ahead using the attacks as an excuse to do what they had wanted to do for years. It’s not that 9/11 changed everything. It’s that it didn’t change things enough.

I don’t know why I’m beating this drum at this late date, but it’s always driven me absolutely nuts that they never get called on this. If invading Iraq was too risky in 1991, when the world was more stable than it had been in more than a hundred years and our great rivals of the 20th century had been rendered impotent, then why in the world did anyone think it was a good idea to rush headlong into an invasion after 9/11 when the the risk of upending the stability of the region in a time of Islamic extremism was a hundred times worse?

It’s not that some sort of military response to 9/11 was out of the question, no matter what. If someone is attacked they have a right to respond out of self defense. If Saddam actually had been involved, then there would at least have been a case for what they wanted to do, even though 9/11 made the likely response even more risky and destabilizing than it would have been before the attacks. But he wasn’t, and everyone knew it. In fact, what everyone also knew was that while he was a very bad actor, he kept Islamic fundamentalism off the table in one of the biggest countries in the middle east. It’s not Kissingerian realism to simply acknowledge that invading Iraq during a period of rising Islamic fundamentalism and violence was far more risky than it had been before 9/11. (Certainly, we could have waited until the smoke cleared before stomping into the region and deposing one of the tyrants who was keeping the whole thing together. Getting the lay of the land is usually considered first before you just charge into the clearing.)

But the neocons had been agitating for Saddam’s overthrow, with the intention of installing their pal Ahamad Chalabi, their George Washington of Mesopotamia, for years as part of their larger Pax Americana wet dream. They saw 9/11 as an excuse to do what they’d always wanted to do and they didn’t consider that the world was a very different place than it had been before 9/11. That was the fundamental error.

Al Gore said recently:

This was the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States and now we as a nation have to find a way, in George Mitchell’s words—”to manage a disaster.” but—I would urge the president not to try to separate out the personal issues of being blamed in history for this mistake and instead recognize it’s not about him. It’s about our country and we all have to find a way to get our troops home and to prevent a regional conflagration there.

Bush and Cheney will never recognize this. The question is if the next president will either — or if he or she does, whether they will have the political will to confront it instead of building failed myth upon failed myth as unimaginative leaders often do. And in any case, I’m not sure avoiding a regional conflagration is possible. (I certainly don’t believe it’s possible with the Americans sitting right in the middle of everything recruiting enemies at a hundred times the pace they are killing them.) The Bush administration let the genie out of the bottle at the very worst time you could possibly do it. It’s going to be nearly impossible now to make him go back in.

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