Month: September 2007

Not Another One, Please

by digby

Joe Biden slammed Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani at Wednesday night’s debate, saying he is “the most uninformed person on American foreign policy now running for president.”

I don’t know why he said that:

MR. VANDEHEI: Mayor Giuliani, this question comes from Eric Taylor (sp) from California. He wants to know, what is the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’a Muslim?

MR. GIULIANI: The difference is the descendant of Mohammed. The Sunnis believe that Mohammed’s — the caliphate should be selected, and the Shi’ites believe that it should be by descent. And then, of course, there was a slaughter of Shi’ites in the early part of the history of Islam, and it has infected a lot of the history of Islam, which is really very unfortunate.

Of course,technically, he didn’t know he was talking about foreign policy. He thought he was speaking about religious history, a subject about which he thinks he knows a great deal:

GIULIANI: I honestly think we might have gotten tougher questions during the Fox interview, but they were substantive questions. During the MSNBC situation, we got some really good questions. But we also got some of the trick questions: Shia and Sunni.

You know, do I know the difference between Shia and Sunni? I felt like I was, you know, defending my doctoral thesis. It happens that I am a student of the history of religion.

HANNITY: Sure.

GIULIANI: So I knew the answer to that.

He thinks he’s an expert:

“I have very, very strong views on religion that come about from having wanted to be a priest when I was younger, having studied theology for four years in college,” he said. “It’s an area I know really, really well academically.

And the press agre:

Chris Cillizza:…Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani looked like he might stumble when asked to explain the difference between Sunni and Shia but wound up getting it exactly right…

Anonymous: You said that Mayor Giuliani aced the Sunni/Shia question. What event in history was he referring to when he said “and then of course there was a slaughter of Shiites in the early part of the history of Islam, and it has infected a lot of the history of Islam, which is really very unfortunate”?

Chris Cillizza: I don’t claim to be an expert on the history of the Sunni and Shia. In the coverage I watched following the debate, it appeared as though Giuliani was factually correct about the differences between the two groups. That was all I was referencing. And, from a political standpoint, I think Giuliani dodged a major bullet with that question. I wonder how many of the ten men on that stage last night could have come up with something approximating a right answer on that question.

This is how we get arrogant morons for president. We really can’t afford another one.

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The Despicable John McCain

by tristero

John McCain knows this isn’t true

A recent poll found that 55 percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. What do you think?

I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation. But I say that in the broadest sense. The lady that holds her lamp beside the golden door doesn’t say, “I only welcome Christians.” We welcome the poor, the tired, the huddled masses. But when they come here they know that they are in a nation founded on Christian principles.

He’s lying. McCain has certainly read the Constitution and he knows it “established” nothing of the sort.

There is no reason to “engage” this trash with counter-arguments. McCain, in his desperate desire to pander to the absolute worst bottom-feeders in American political life, has stooped to the level of a Holocaust denier. Disgusting.

h/t Duncan

Show Me The Money

by digby

Why is this not a Democratic argument?

By year’s end, the cost for both conflicts since Sept. 11, 2001, is projected to reach more than $800 billion. Iraq alone has cost the United States more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the Gulf War and the Korean War and will probably surpass the Vietnam War by the end of next year, according to the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

From what I gather, instead of using this to persuade voters that Republicans are both economic and national security miscreants, the congress is going to pass Bush’s funding requests as fast as they can. I guess it’s unpatriotic to question the cost of the war or even ask just what in the hell they are spending on this money on. The new thinking seems to be that not only is there a prohibition about cutting the funds, they have to give the president a blank check and are not allowed to ask any questions. The Democrats are convinced that they have no say in national security matters. Or they actually agree with the Republicans.

But what’s really neat about this is that the failure of the war will be blamed on them anyway. It won’t matter that they rubber stamped every crackpot Iraq strategy and signed off on the most expensive war in history. (This week they even went on record helping Bush begin the drive to Iran!) This entire “war” has been a Vietnam mulligan from the get and the Right will very likely write this part as a slightly, shopworn sequel of the standard “how the hippies ruined everything” storyline

Rick Perlstein has written an important analysis of this phenomenon in this review of two important wing nut tomes on the Vietnam War. Although these books are in complete contradiction with one another, they are revered on the right for one reason: they posit that we would have “won” the war if only the left hadn’t ruined everything. The contradictory details in the two books are irrelevant since they come to the same conclusion.

As Rick points out, this is actually a psychological necessity on the part of a right wing that screws up everything it touches and is incapable of admitting its failure:

Conservatism’s cherished fantasy of American omnipotence has died once again, this time in the sands of Iraq, and the grieving process has begun. But conservatives mourn differently from you and me. They begin with denial, anger and bargaining, just like everyone else. And that’s where they stay–forever paralyzed by a petulant refusal to acknowledge their fantasy’s passing, a simple inability to process reality.

I’m not sure how it’s going to work this time, but so far they seem to quite successful in persuading the battered Dems that if they’ll just stop provoking them, the manly man won’t be forced to beat them up anymore. You know how well that always works out.

H/T to my old pal Kevin K from catch.com who is blogging again at a new (old) blog called Rumproast.

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It Is What It Is

by digby

Everybody’s asking today, “Why are the Republican front runners skipping all the debates sponsored by racial and ethnic minorities? That just doesn’t seem smart.” I think people just don’t want to admit the obvious:

The Republicans are the party of racists.

None of the front runners are able to use the usual racial codes of being Southern good old boys, or evangelicals or even reliable “pro-life” conservatives so they are reduced to blatantly proving to the racist base of the Republican party that they are one of them by publicly snubbing blacks and Hispanics to win the nomination from the racist GOP base. They have to make explicit what others, like bush, could do obliquely by pretending to be a bubba when he was really a blue-blooded playboy. (Thompson is a good old boy, but he couldn’t be seen to be pandering to the negroes when his manly white rivals were manfully telling them to shove it.)

Mudcat said it best: “If you are a racist, go ahead and vote for the Republicans.”

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Three Random Observations

by tristero

1. Of course, Ahmanidejad should have spoken at Columbia University. But if they set up an endowed chair for him, as they did for the utterly odious Henry Kissinger back in 1977, I might have some problems with that. (Full disclosure, I’m an alumnus.)

2. One thing’s for sure. You could never accuse Limbaugh himself of being a “phony soldier”.

3. I don’t know why Clinton voted for Lieberman-Kyl. I think it’s disgraceful.

The Historic Line Of Decency

by digby

While doing research for the post below, I came across this remarkable article written in the middle of the Kosovo war in 1999:

Chicago-Sun Times ^ | May 6, 1999 | Robert Novak
Balkan failure is Clark’s Who is responsible for an air offensive that is building anti-American anger across Europe without breaking the Serbian regime’s will? The blame rests heavily on Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO supreme commander. After 40 days, U.S.-dominated NATO air strikes no longer even pretend to aim solely at military targets. Pentagon sources admit that the attacks on the city center of Belgrade are intended to so demoralize ordinary citizens that they force President Slobodan Milosevic to yield. That has not yet happened, but diplomats believe the grave damage done to American prestige in Central and Eastern Europe will outlive this vicious little war. “The problem is Wes Clark making–at least approving–the bombing decisions,” said one such diplomat, who then asked rhetorically: “How could they let a man with such a lack of judgment be [supreme allied commander of Europe]?” Through dealings with Yugoslavia that date back to 1994, Clark’s propensity for mistakes has kept him in trouble while he continued moving up the chain of command thanks to a patron in the Oval Office. In the last month’s American newspaper clippings, Clark emerges as the only heroic figure of a non-heroic war. Indeed, his resume is stirring: first in his class at West Point, Rhodes scholar, frequently wounded and highly decorated Vietnam combat veteran, White House fellow. He became a full general about as fast as possible in peacetime. But members of Congress who visited Clark at his Brussels headquarters in the early days of the attack on Yugoslavia were startled by his off-the-record comments. If the Russians are going to sail war ships into the combat zone, we should bomb them. If Milosevic is getting oil from the Hungarian pipeline, we should bomb it. NATO’s actual air strategy did not go that far, but increasingly, it has reflected Clark’s belligerence. Even the general’s defenders in the national security establishment cannot understand the targeting of empty government buildings in Belgrade, including Milosevic’s official residence. Civilian damage and casualties in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia are too widespread to be accidental. Sources inside the U.S. high command say this week’s disabling of Belgrade electrical power facilities was intended to destroy civilian morale. The Pentagon has announced NATO “area bombing” with “dumb” bombs carried by B-52s–clearly an anti-population tactic. In a highly limited war, Clark is using the methods of total war. One American diplomat with experience in the Balkans, who asked that he not be quoted by name, told me that ground forces are needed and he is appalled by the bombing of civilian targets. “It has no military significance, and it is pointless–utterly pointless,” he added. “But it has a terrible impact on us. This bombing in the heart of the Balkans is costing us.” That cost is viewed by State Department professionals as the product of Clark’s deaf ear when it comes to diplomacy. His classic gaffe came in 1994 when he went off to meet Ratko Mladic, the brutal Bosnian Serb commander now sought as a war criminal, at his redoubt in Banja Luka. Mladic concluded their meeting by saying how much he admired Clark’s three-star general cap. Impulsively, the American general exchanged hats with the notorious commander, who has been accused of ethnic cleansing, and even accepted Mladic’s service revolver with an engraved message. That escapade cost Victor Jackovich his job as U.S. ambassador to Bosnia. He was sacked partly for not exercising sufficient restraint on the mercurial Clark and for not preventing him from gallivanting off to Banja Luka. The sequel came at Belgrade a year later during the diplomacy leading to the Dayton peace conference. Milosevic, smiling broadly, humiliated Clark by returning his hat to him. That helps explain the general’s intense personal animosity for the Yugoslav president. Clark is the perfect model of a 1990s political four-star general. Clark’s rapid promotions after Dayton–winning his fourth star to head the Panama-based Southern Command and then the jewel of his European post–were both opposed by the Pentagon brass. But Clark’s fellow Arkansan in the White House named him anyway. The president and the general are collaborators in a failed strategy whose consequences cast a long shadow even if soon terminated by negotiation.

I don’t know what to say.

(Even aside from the frontal attack on Clark’s integrity, Novak’s bitchy back-stabbing Village gossip was crap from beginning to end.)

Here is what the smarmy John Cornyn said about the Move-On vote:

“This amendment was an opportunity for every Senator to declare with not only their voices but also with their votes that they fully support our troops and our commanding General in Iraq,” Sen. Cornyn said today.

“For MoveOn.org and their left-wing allies to brand General Petraeus a traitor and a liar crossed a historic line of decency. It was a despicable political attack by a radical left-wing interest group. I’m pleased that majority of the Senate, in a bipartisan vote, has repudiated it.

We will not tolerate the patriotism and integrity of our troops and their leaders in the field being dragged down into the swamp of Washington politics.”

Yes they won’t tolerate it unless it’s being dragged there by a properly credentialed conservative stenographer like the “decent” Robert Novak.

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Is The Village Out Of Smelling Salts Today?

by digby

Now, I don’t want to say that Republicans are lying hypocrites or anything, but really:

LIMBAUGH: Another Mike, this one in Olympia, Washington. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello. CALLER 2: Hi Rush, thanks for taking my call. LIMBAUGH: You bet. CALLER 2: I have a retort to Mike in Chicago, because I am a serving American military, in the Army. I’ve been serving for 14 years, very proudly. LIMBAUGH: Thank you, sir. CALLER 2: And, you know, I’m one of the few that joined the Army to serve my country, I’m proud to say, not for the money or anything like that. What I would like to retort to is that, if we pull — what these people don’t understand is if we pull out of Iraq right now, which is about impossible because of all the stuff that’s over there, it’d take us at least a year to pull everything back out of Iraq, then Iraq itself would collapse, and we’d have to go right back over there within a year or so. And — LIMBAUGH: There’s a lot more than that that they don’t understand. They can’t even — if — the next guy that calls here, I’m gonna ask him: Why should we pull — what is the imperative for pulling out? What’s in it for the United States to pull out? They can’t — I don’t think they have an answer for that other than, “Well, we just gotta bring the troops home.” CALLER 2: Yeah, and, you know what — LIMBAUGH: “Save the — keep the troops safe” or whatever. I — it’s not possible, intellectually, to follow these people. CALLER 2: No, it’s not, and what’s really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media. LIMBAUGH: The phony soldiers. CALLER 2: The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they’re willing to sacrifice for their country. LIMBAUGH: They joined to be in Iraq. They joined — CALLER 2: A lot of them — the new kids, yeah. LIMBAUGH: Well, you know where you’re going these days, the last four years, if you signed up. The odds are you’re going there or Afghanistan or somewhere. CALLER 2: Exactly, sir.

This isn’t the first time Limbaugh has suggested that no good soldier could possibly be a Democrat. He said Democratic congressional candidate, marine Major Paul Hackett had gone to Iraq to “pad his resume.”

His recurring disparaging name for General Wesley Clark is “Ashley Wilkes”:

RUSH: The administration is calling it a war? They don’t even think it is a war! There is no war! John Edwards has said it. Now Wesley Clark, “Ashley Wilkes,” is saying it.”

Of course, Limbaugh has a long history of disparaging General Clark:

Blast from the past, in 2003, when Wesley Clark was mulling a run for the presidency, Rush accused him of conduct unbecoming an officer (El Rushbo baselessly charged that Clark “had to beg Bill Clinton for his fourth star. Military people think that he didn’t earn it–that he hasn’t deserved it–that Clinton gave it to him anyway”).

What makes this more interesting was that Rush got this from a Lowell Ponte article from Front Page Magazine which is run by David Horowitz who is still subject to charges of violation of the Espionage Act.

The entire Village staged a hissy kabuki over one advertisement in the New York Times. Yet this blowhard chickenhawk, who hosts the president and vice president of the United States on his show, is feted like the prodigal son when he enters the Village.

When the GOP won control of Congress in 1994, one of the first acts by many freshmen (calling themselves the “Dittohead Caucus”) was to award Limbaugh the title of “honorary member of Congress” in recognition of his support of their efforts during this period

He appears on Armed Forces Radio in Iraq.

And when he got into trouble for saying that the events at Abu Ghraib were nothing more than a fraternity prank and the boys were just letting of a little steam, Republicans came out of the woodwork to defend him. Here’s Mary Matalin calling in just to tell him she loves him:

[Y]ou inspired me this morning. There’s no reason that I have to do that. I’m — and at least I think I do, but when I listen to you, I get all the information I need, and I — and I — it is — I have a confidence in the President, in the policies, in the goals. I have — I know his conviction. I know he’s right and I know he has the leadership to do it. What I don’t have, and what I can only get from you, is the cheerfulness of your confidence —

Here’s Kate O’Beirne in the National Review:

Now comes a well-financed media campaign against Rush Limbaugh in a fruitless attempt to discredit him as a forthright apologist for the detainee abuse. Conservatives should take heart. First, the un-listenable (in every sense) Air America squanders buckets of liberal cash and now the Left is generously funding David Brock as their utterly implausible media watchdog. His first big target is Rush. The Left has always regarded the most-successful radio-talk-show host in history as a malevolent propagandist, and their acolytes in the White House press corps eagerly embraced the Brock smear and badgered Scott McClellan to repudiate the phony charge. They were sensibly blown off. But, a partisan parasite finding eager hosts among White House reporters is a depressing spectacle. And, just as calls for Don Rumsfeld’s resignation are aimed at President Bush, the attack on Rush is designed to discredit conservatives.

[…]

Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.

The conservative Claremont Institute awarded him the Statesmanship award at its annual Churchill dinner, twice. (Well, sort of. The first year he couldn’t make it because he was in rehab for opiate addiction but he came the next year to accept it in person.) Donald Rumsfeld had to wait for his.

Lest anyone has been spared his non-stop bragging about the fact, Limbaugh has the highest ratings of any talk show host in America:

As of 2005, Arbitron ratings indicate that the Rush Limbaugh Show has a minimum weekly audience of 13.5 million listeners, making it the largest radio talk show audience in the United States. Such high ratings have been a consistent hallmark of his show

And yesterday, the most influential radio commentator in the country said that military people who spoke out against the war were “phony soldiers.”

Like these:

On August 19, The New York Times published an op-ed by seven members of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division. They ended their assessment of the situation in Iraq with the following passage:

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.” In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal. Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities. We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

On September 12, The New York Times noted: “Two of the soldiers who wrote of their pessimism about the war in an Op-Ed article that appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 19 were killed in Baghdad on Monday.”

I have little doubt we’ll soon be hearing an outcry from the Village speech police about the fact that Limbaugh called those soldiers “phony” yesterday. Senate and House resolutions condemning his words are surely being prepared as we speak. Right?

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Someone Had To

by tristero

I’m just glad it wasn’t me.

Weigh In

by digby

If you have a minute, take this poll.

Blue America wants to hear from you.

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Hit Me Baby One More Time

by digby

From TPM Muckraker:

As I reported yesterday, the Senate Rules Committee met this morning about the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky to the Federal Elections Commission. This morning’s result: faced with the defection of a Democrat on the committee, later revealed to be Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) chose to agree to send all four nominees, two Democrats and two Republicans, to the floor without recommendation. In other words, the committee did not vote to approve von Spakovsky, but he got through nonetheless. Next up is a vote before the full Senate, and how that vote will occur will be determined by negotiations between the Democratic and Republican leadership. Republicans are likely to seek a vote on all four nominees at once and have threatened to spike all the Democratic nominees if Democrats seek to block von Spakovsky.

Gee, I wonder what’s going to happen. I’m breathless with anticipation.

But hey, why should the Democrats want to stop a professional Republican vote stealer from being on the FEC?

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