Month: October 2007

Rudy Can Fail

by digby

He sounds a little nervous about this:

“The reality is, if we take a look at Bernard Kerik’s service as police commissioner, he was an excellent police commissioner. Crime went down unexpectadly under Bernard Kerik.

“Then on the other side of it, there were these problems. I take the responsibility. We should have known about them. We should have dealt with them. We didn’t. It was my mistake. I made it. I am sorry for it. I’ve learned from it. But in the balance of things, you take a look at the success that I had, it must be that I am generally picking the right people. Because I am sure not doing this by myself.”

Not to pick nits or anything, but Rudy Giuliani, the Czar of 9/11, the man whose entire campaign is based on the idea that he will keep the babies safe from the boogeyman, personally recommended Bernard Kerik to be the Director of Homeland Security.

The fact that he stood around on the sidewalks of New York giving press conferences after 9/11 can’t make up for the fact that Kerik was his business partner and one of his very closest associates whom he groomed and mentored for years. He wasn’t just some bad personnel decision at City Hall in the 1990’s. Giuliani truly believed that this crook was an appropriate choice for one of the most powerful agencies in the United States.

That’s a pretty big mistake. Huge. In fact, it’s disqualifying.

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A Real Problem

by digby

Competence

Just a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, a veteran Republican strategist remarked to me, “I am really worried about whether we can hold our majorities next year.”

He was the first person to suggest such a thing to me during the last election cycle.

“We’re supposed to be the party of competence,” this Republican professional explained. “When we look incompetent, it’s a real problem.”

Apparently it hasn’t occurred to them that nominating the Village idiot might have been their first mistake.

And they’re about to do it again:

Rudy wants you to know that he has read the brief, knows the facts, and could organize an orderly evacuation of the building if someone yelled “fire.” When voters see him in command on stage, it’s probable that they are reminded of his calm public face after the 9/11 attacks. The strong performances also help Giuliani’s argument that he can beat Hillary Clinton. She’s a polished and effective debater, too. He’s showing he can match her. But one secret to Giuliani’s debate success is that he doesn’t mind fudging all those facts he cites. In the Tuesday debate, Giuliani asserted once again that he had passed 23 tax cuts as New York mayor. This is an exaggeration. According to Factcheck.org and Politifact.com, he can rightly claim credit for about 14 of those cuts. One of the largest cuts for which he claims credit he initially opposed for five months before changing his position. He also claims to have added more cops in New York than he actually did and cherry-picks data to support inflated claims about the number of adoptions during his tenure. After the Tuesday debate, Factcheck.org found a host of new faulty claims.

I don’t think Rudy cares about facts any more than George W. Bush does, and undoubtedly doesn’t know them in the first place. After all, Bush lied repeatedly during both of his presidential campaigns, just as he’s doing now when he claims that SCHIP will allow rich people to steal from the taxpayers. (Like he thinks that’s a bad thing.) They just make things up because they don’t care to know the truth … and it doesn’t matter.

John Dickerson, who wrote the above article for Slate makes an unintentionally telling observation:

The problem for Giuliani’s opponents is that none of his exaggerations is immediately obvious, which makes it very hard to refute them. This will protect the mayor. Romney could initiate an attack, but he’s changed positions enough on high-profile issues that his opponents can make a parody ad using Romney’s own words. This gives him little standing to attack another candidate’s honesty. (Plus, Romney has whitewashed his own tax record.) Fred Thompson can’t compare executive records with Giuliani because he doesn’t have one.

I don’t suppose any of the alleged journalists present could say anything. They are, after all, just there to get in their tedious, pre-fab gotcha questions from 1978, and tell jokes. Correcting the debater on his facts on current relevant issues during the actual debate (or even after it when they are all getting as much TV face time as possible and subjecting themselves to media of all kinds) is obviously not part of their job description. And anyway, if a rival does manage to bring it up, it’s presented as “politics” and “he said/she said” unless a snotty operative can successfully turn it into some kind of “gaffe” or the right wing drags out the fainting couch and stages a ritual humiliation kabuki. Fact-checking? How droll.

In any case, the bar has been set very low for GOP presidents. Yet they seem to be able to set it lower each time. If Giuliani wins we will not only have an idiot for president we will have a dangerously unstable idiot for president who is even more arrogant and malevolent than the one we have now. I have a sneaking feeling “competence” is going to be the least of our problems.

H/T to bb

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Turkey

by tristero

Excellent discussion of all the…hullabaloo in Turkey. The NY Times has said twice, without acknowledging the source of the opinion, that it is unlikely the Turks will actually enter Iraq. This analysis doesn’t discuss that one way or the other, but does give an indication of how incredibly complex the situation is.

Stay tuned.

Congratulations, Al Gore

by tristero

You earned it, and in so many different ways.

Thinking about Al Gore’s career and his character – abundantly on display, for example, in the fall of 2000 and then again in 2002, and then once more in his prominent role in environmental causes – I remember that there really are times when a prominent public figure truly can serve as a great example for kids on how to live a meaningful life. And for grown-ups, too.

Congratulations again, sir.

Thank You

by digby

… Paul Krugman.

My hero.

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The Prince of Amway

by digby

One of the things that really fries me about these Blackwater people is that they are such smirking, snotty jackasses:

The colonel was furious. “Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers.” He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company. Asked to address this and other allegations in this story, Blackwater spokesperson Anne Tyrrell said, “This type of gossip has led to many soap operas in the press.”

And it comes from the very top:

It turns out that the Prince of Amway may have lied to congress in that testimony up there:

Prince said that the employee, later identified as Andrew Moonen, had been fined and fired. But on Friday House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman released a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recounting evidence that Moonen was able to return to Iraq and worked there for another company. Moonen’s attorney, Stewart Riley, told NEWSWEEK his client denies wrongdoing and is not facing criminal charges. Blackwater is no doubt in for further fire fights.

Let’s hope so. Somebody needs to wipe that smirk off Prince’s face.

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Post Modern Serfdom

by digby

Today, Amy Ridenour of Townhall is touting the idea that Michele Malkin has the right to dig into every private detail of your life if you take any money from the government. Watch out social security recipients. Watch out veterans. She’s going to be putting all your personal information on the internet if you open your mouth in a way she doesn’t approve. You give up your right to privacy — even from shrieking harpy bloggers — if you receive any money from the taxpayers. In fact, Amy Ridenour and Michele Malkin personally own you.

(In their typical creepy fashion, Townhall have put the name and picture of a kid wearing stickers saying that he’s a “health care voter” up next to the article. It makes it more convenient for the freaks to hunt him down, I suppose.)

Ridenour’s post (among others) reminds me of a well-off acquaintance of mine who agreed to give an aging relative a hundred dollars a month. He made sure that everyone knew how generous he was and then he would regale us all with stories about how he would go over to the old fellow’s house once a month and inspect it to make sure he wasn’t doing anything “bad” with the money. After all, he gave him a hundred bucks a month. He forced the old guy to stop buying cheap beer and made him quit smoking a pipe and pored over his bills to make sure he wasn’t overusing the utilities. He had a right, you see. The man was taking his money.

The question to me when he would tell me this stuff was why this very well-off man (a Republican, by the way) took such pride at controlling the behavior of one sad old man through a meager offering of a hundred dollars a month. I could only conclude that it was because his sadistic joy at making someone else miserable was coupled with his inflated belief in his own goodness and pride in his superiority. He was allowed to deny this man his freedom in the name of helping him. The authoritarian’s path to heaven.

And this impulse (which is not confined to the right although they’re the ones who seem to make a fetish of it — at least since the temperance movement ran out of gas) is why government programs were developed in enlightened, modern Western societies in the first place. Charity robs the recipient of the dignity and personal liberty to which all people have a claim, rich, poor or in the middle. Using government to act as the safety net instead of the good will (or good mood) of those of means allows that. Citizen pays in, and someday, god forbid, if he needs some help, he won’t have to kiss the ass of some rich busybody or self-righteous hypocrite who thinks he or she has a right to dictate his behavior on the basis of a couple of bucks. (And considering the moral example set by both the private and public scolds these days, that concept is even more distasteful than it used to be.)

The old guy finally told his nephew to bugger off, by the way. Nobody needs a hundred bucks that much. But what if he had?

Update: Tom Tomorrow says it so much better.

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Some Day This War’s Gonna End

by tristero

I was reminded of that famous line from Apocalypse Now when I read this:

Contrary to popular belief, the events of 9/11–which are perceived as an isolated incident–did not fundamentally change our nation. They merely interrupted an ongoing trend toward the decay of nationalism and the devaluation of heroism.

Man, I wish that was true. No way.

Whenever there’s even a chance that this country would start behaving sensibly, there’s always someone like Bobby Kaplan, who is more than willing to tell impressionable young kids all about the manly manliness of having your balls shot off in the service of some rich assholes’ war.

Let me make this clear. Soldiers have a difficult job and deserve tremendous respect. It’s jerks like Kaplan who merit none.

Cue The Ride of the Valkyries, boys, and get into the chopper. There’s glory to earn, my dear American Achilles!

MSM On The Frosts

by digby

TIME magazine picked up the Foster story and got the story pretty much right, as far as it went. What it didn’t get into was how the entire right wing noise machine cranked up the swiftboats to get it going. The article seems to imply that this story was confined to the blogosphere (without the requisite distinction between who did what) and neglects to properly indict the worst perpetrators. Still, it’s not bad compared to this:

CNN’s John Roberts reported: “Some of the accusations [against the Frosts] may be exaggerated or false. But did the Democrats make a tactical error in holding up Graeme as their poster child?” A CNN political analyst then placed the blame squarely on the Democrats’ shoulders:

I think in this instance what happened was the Democrats didn’t do as much of a vetting as they could have done on this young man, his situation, his

family. […]

More and more, Congress is acting less like a deliberative legislative body, and more like a political campaign. We’ve been seeing the politicization of every aspect of government.

Right. It’s the fault of the Democrats, of course, who according to John Roberts didn’t “vet” this family. Except, of course, they did, as has been incessantly disseminated by the progressive blogosphere and the mainstream media over the course of four days.

So whydid Roberts say that the family hadn’t been properly vetted?

ABC News reported earlier in the week that an e-mail sent to reporters by “a Senate Republican leadership aide” in McConnell’s office suggested that “GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about the Frosts.” A McConnell spokesman refused to deny the office’s involvement in the affair. ThinkProgress has obtained an email that congressional sources tell us was sent to reporters by Sen. McConnell’s communications director Don Stewart. On Monday morning, Don Stewart sent an email with the following text to reporters:

Seen the latest blogswarm? Apparently, there’s more to the story on the kid (Graeme Frost) that did the Dems’ radio response on SCHIP. Bloggers have done a little digging and turned up that the Dad owns his own business (and the building it’s in), seems to have some commercial rental income and Graeme and a sister go to a private school that, according to its website, costs about $20k a year ‹for each kid‹ despite the news profiles reporting a family income of only $45k for the Frosts. Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?

In the email, Stewart attacks Democrats for allegedly doing a bad job “vetting this family.” That effort to blame Democrats for the smear campaign seems to have swayed some reporters, as CNN this morning claimed that the real story is that “the Democrats didn’t do as much of a vetting as they could have done.”

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Roberts used exactly the same language and then chalks it up to some sort of tepid “they all do it” sort of thing.

Aside from the almost comic illustration of journalistic malpractice this shows, it also proves what many of us have been saying for years: the press parrots right wing talking points, in this case verbatim. It’s rare that we actually can see a copy of the memos they send out,because the press “protects its sources” but it’s right there in this case. Does anyone think this is unique? I suspect that if it hadn’t been for liberal bloggers relentlessly speaking out in horror over the course of many days, this nasty little smear would have been passed along by everyone else exactly as John Roberts passed it along, implying that the Frosts were con artists.

Nice work CNN. How much are you paying this guy?

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Building Buddhas

by digby

The riff raff is getting on her nerves:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in a determinedly good mood when she sat down to lunch with reporters yesterday. She entered the room beaming and, over the course of an hour, smiled no fewer than 31 times and got off at least 23 laughs.

But her spirits soured instantly when somebody asked about the anger of the Democratic “base” over her failure to end the war in Iraq.

“Look,” she said, the chicken breast on her plate untouched. “I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things — Buddhas? I don’t know what they were — couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk.”

Unsmilingly, she continued: “If they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have ‘Impeach Bush’ across their chest, it’s the First Amendment.”

Though opposed to the war herself, Pelosi has for months been a target of an antiwar movement that believes she hasn’t done enough. Cindy Sheehan has announced a symbolic challenge to Pelosi in California’s 8th Congressional District. And the speaker is seething.

“We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow,” Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor. Though crediting activists for their “passion,” Pelosi called it “a waste of time” for them to target Democrats. “They are advocates,” she said. “We are leaders.”

Uhm, not exactly, Nance. They’re citizens. And you work for them. That inconvenient first amendment was put in the constitution so you wouldn’t forget that.

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