Month: February 2009

Your Own Devices

by digby

I wish I thought that we had learned these lessons for all time once we come out the other side of the current hellish situation. Sadly, I fear that we will have to learn lessons like this all over again a few years down the road, when the “caveat emptor” party get’s its groove back. Greed will never be repealed and that’s at the heart of this:

The Food and Drug Administration put patients’ lives at risk by halting enforcement of 30-year-old requirements that medical device makers meet federal laboratory standards prior to testing their products on humans, a watchdog group charges in a new report. The rules at issue cover studies on an array of devices, including life-saving products such as defibrillators, pacemakers, coronary stents and heart valves.The report by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight is to be released Wednesday and says several agency officials left their jobs because they were so upset over the policy to forgo enforcement of requirements that the tests adhere to Good Laboratory Practices. “At present, if a manufacturer knowingly violates the GLP regulation and falsely asserts compliance with GLP, that manufacturer is safe — safe from discovery, safe from disciplinary action by the FDA, safe from prosecution,” the report says.It calls the agency’s decision to halt lab inspections on animal studies and other early research “stunning in its contempt for the protection of patients” and its failure to comply with federal regulations.The report offers the latest harsh critique of the FDA’s regulatory performance during the Bush administration. In 2007, a group of experts from industry, academia and the government warned that the agency was understaffed and overworked, raising “incalculable risks” to the public safety.

h/t to bb.

The Day In Torture

by digby

Greenwald does the usual thorough job demolishing the fatuous arguments set forth by extremist right wing lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey to ensure that no one who ordered torture is ever held legally liable. (Perhaps if the vice president had been receiving fellatio as he ordered it, there might be a case.) He writes:

Does anyone deny that we are exactly the country that Walsh described: one where “powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office — deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence”? And what rational person could think that’s a desirable state of affairs that ought not only be preserved — but fortified still further– as we move now to immunize Bush 43 officials for their far more serious and disgraceful crimes? As the Rivkin/Casey oeuvre demonstrates, we’ve created a zone of lawlessness around our highest political leaders and either refuse to acknowledge that we’ve done that or, worse, have decided that we don’t really mind.

Yes, but one simply doesn’t hold people of good breeding liable for such unpleasantness. They suffer more than enough just by being socially embarrased by these inconvenient questions. Any punishment beyond that is completely disproportionate.On the other hand, we just know that certain other people can’t even be allowed a proper trial before we lock them up and throw away the key. Jane Mayer reports:

A number of national-security lawyers in both parties favor the creation of some new form of preventive detention. They do not believe that it is the President’s prerogative to lock “enemy combatants” up indefinitely, yet they fear that neither the criminal courts nor the military system is suited for the handling of transnational terrorists, whom they do not consider to be ordinary criminals or conventional soldiers. Instead, they suggest that Obama should work with Congress to write new laws, possibly creating a “national-security court,” which could order certain suspects to be held without a trial.

One proponent of this idea is Neal Katyal, whom Obama recently named to the powerful post of Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in the Justice Department. Katyal is best known for his victory as the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006). In his first appearance before the Supreme Court, he persuaded a majority of the Justices to declare that the Guantánamo military-commission system was illegal, arguing that Congress had not authorized the commissions. Katyal’s new job is to represent the government before the Supreme Court. Given the sensitivity of this role, Katyal declined to comment for this story. But in October he posted an article on a Web site affiliated with Georgetown Law, in which he argued, “What is needed is a serious plan to prosecute everyone we can in regular courts, and a separate system to deal with the very small handful of cases in which patently dangerous people cannot be tried.”

All I can say is, thank goodness we have such big hearted and trustworthy people deciding which people are just too dangerous to be allowed their human rights or somebody might get the idea that the rule of law doesn’t mean anything more than the paper its written on.

Read the whole thing. This is looking more and more like “don’t ask don’t try” — except this is actually much worse than the don’t ask don’t tell policy. These people are being imprisoned indefinitely, which is the ultimate Kafkaesque nightmare.

I just don’t get this. Is it really their feeling that these particular people are so much more dangerous than the many thousands of muslim extremists who are out there plotting as we speak? Are they so dangerous that it’s worth it to give those same crazies a rallying cry, further compromise what little moral authority the US has left and tie our foreign policy up in knots?

Unless we’ve been teaching these people to make nuclear weapons down in Gitmo, the idea that they are too dangerous to take a chance on a trial is absurd. In fact, it’s so absurd that one can’t help but suspect that they don’t want to try these people because to do so would expose some of the horrors that have been perpetrated by the US government — which leads us right back to where we started.

.

Triumph Of The Will

by dday

George Will resurrected a zombie lie yesterday. In fact, he literally resurrected it – Brad Johnson compared and contrasted his misinformation yesterday with a column from April 2006.

“Let Cooler Heads Prevail,” 4/2/2006

While worrying about Montana’s receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.” Science Digest (February 1973) reported that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor (”Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect,” Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers “have begun to advance,” “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.” Newsweek agreed (”The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975) that meteorologists “are almost unanimous” that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said “may mark the return to another ice age.” The Times (May 21, 1975) also said “a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable” now that it is “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”

“Dark Green Doomsayers,” 2/15/2009

In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of “ominous signs” that “the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” meteorologists were “almost unanimous” that “the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, “The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was “cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool,” glaciers had “begun to advance” and “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

He shuffled around the quotes a bit, but they are basically the same ones. Which are, of course, wrong. And it’s amusing how they’re wrong, because Will values the fact that Newsweek and other pop-science publications wrote mass-market articles about global cooling over, you know, science, and the breadth of scientific opinion at the time. In other words, Will believes that anything in a Villager text reflects the collected wisdom of the entire world. The Village community presumes to speak for the scientific community.

But that’s not all that Will was wrong about. He skimmed data about Arctic sea ice off a 45 day-old blog post from Jim Inhofe’s climate denialist shop, which was quickly slapped down by, well, a scientist. And he wrote “[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade,” which is practically the opposite of the truth.

Will could have done the world a favor by reading his own paper’s news coverage and maybe canceling his column for the day.

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel’s 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of “feedback loops” that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.

True, that was the result of a scientific study and not what old Newsweeks were printing to sell copies through counter-intuition 30 years ago. But you know, it’s a perspective.

Predictably yet somewhat hilariously, Will and his editor Fred Hiatt are ducking accountability on this tripe.

Mum’s the word for George Will and the Washington Post when it comes to explaining how misinformation on global warming got into Will’s most recent column.

Yesterday morning we called Will to ask him about the misrepresentations in his Sunday column. We also called Fred Hiatt, the editor of the paper’s editorial page, to ask about the editing process that the Post’s editorial page employs. Neither chose to answer our questions […]

Will’s assistant told us that Will might get back to us later in the day to talk about the column. And Hiatt said he was too busy to talk about it just then, but that he’d try to respond to emailed questions. So we emailed him yesterday’s post, with several questions about the editing process, then followed up with another email late yesterday afternoon.

But still nothing from either of them, over twenty-four hours after the first contact was made. Nor has the online version of Will’s column been updated, even to reflect the fact that the ACRC has utterly disavowed the claim Will attributes to it.

I get the impression that opinion columns in Big Media papers aren’t rigorously fact-checked, with the excuse being that they are, well, “opinion.” In practice, this becomes a license for Villagers to use the credibility they’ve assumed for themselves to lie. And if they make a mistake that actually filters through the roadblocks and reaches their editors, they face no consequence. In fact, they frequently fail upward. So they reprint the same nonsense the next week or the next month or the next year. And they are feted at cocktail parties through the next millennium.

Somebody convene a blogger ethics panel.

..Jonathan Schwarz has this awesome story about Will from Noam Chomsky. The persistent lying and lack of accountability may sound familiar to you.

CHOMSKY: [A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek “Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971″—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.

.

Nothing Left To Lose

by digby

Everybody’s speculating about whether this reported ill feeling between Cheney and Bush over Scooter’s non-pardon will result in some sort of permanent falling out. They seem to think that the danger is that one or the other will let fly in their memoirs.

But I don’t think that’s the real issue. Doesn’t it seem more likely that the danger lies between Cheney and Scooter? If Cheney was this frantic, one supposes that he may have been trying to fulfill a “promise” he made to the loyal soldier who took all the heat and destroyed his career for him. Now that Scooter has nothing to lose, he may very well decide that he needs to “set the record straight” with a juicy book deal, don’t you think?

.

More Troops For The Graveyard Of Empires

by dday

President Obama campaigned on the need for more attention and troops in Afghanistan and now he’s announcing it. There was no big surprise here, except that the commitment is a bit smaller than the expected 30,000. But this is pending a strategy review which may further increase the numbers.

President Barack Obama signed an order boosting U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan by 17,000 combat and support personnel.

Obama said in a statement released by the White House that he approved a request for the additional soldiers and Marines made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and military commanders.

“This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires,” Obama said in the statement.

The full statement is here. My hope is that the strategic review narrows our goals enough, away from stabilizing democracy and toward preventing terrorist safe havens that can project force globally, that we can realistically assess the impact of this increased footprint on the Afghan population.

I hear a lot of people talking about how more troops are necessary because, until now, airstrikes have papered over the lack of boots on the ground and led to an uncomfortable increase in the civilian death toll, which is unsustainable. The first response to this is that 17,000 extra troops and personnel in a country the size of Texas isn’t likely to change that, especially when the airstrike targets are often in inaccessible areas. The second is to look back at recent history. We “surged” in Iraq with an increase in forces and airstrikes surged, mainly to protect the new influx of boots on the ground, which American policymakers see as more precious resources than Afghans or Iraqis. It is not consistent to suggest that more troops=less airstrikes. That never happens. Escalation is escalation.

Here’s Tom Andrews on today’s news:

Clearly, U.S. policy in Afghanistan has failed, as numerous reports point to security conditions that have gone from bad to worse. That is why we applaud the president’s decision to conduct a fundamental review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. But it is also why we are concerned that the deployment of additional combat troops is being announced at the outset of the review process and not at its conclusion.

The risks are significant–particularly in light of the warnings of several analysts that the presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important driving force in the resurgence of the Taliban. Reducing our military footprint could, therefore, be one of the most effective measures that can be taken to weaken the armed opposition.

The first principle for someone who finds himself in a hole is to stop digging. The US policy ‘hole’ in Afghanistan is not of the new administration’s making. But it is important for the president to consider if adding new U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan, without a new and comprehensive plan for U.S. policy there, might be digging an even bigger hole.

This is a very dangerous deployment for a number of reasons, not the least of which is how war can erode popular support at home and constrain a President’s initiatives. The Vice President has said to expect greater casualties from Afghanistan in the coming year. What we should expect is an actual strategy before committing sons and daughters to an uneasy and perhaps unwinnable conflict.

.

Up Or Down Trainwreck

by digby

I’m sorry to once again loudly beat the drum that so many of you hate hearing, but this social security “reform” nonsense is imminent and people really need to pay attention. Jane Hamsher writes:

Next up on Obama’s plate is a February 23 “fiscal responsibility summit,” which will be led by Jim Cooper, Judd Gregg, Kent Conrad and other “entitlement reform” fetishists. On February 24, he’s due to give a “state of the union” style speech before Congress, and according to James Capretta today, he’ll deliver a budget two days later. The focus is on cost control:

Speaking Friday to business leaders at the White House, the president defended the surge of spending in the stimulus plan, but he made sure to add: “It’s important for us to think in the midterm and long term. And over that midterm and long term, we’re going to have to have fiscal discipline. We are not going to be able to perpetually finance the levels of debt that the federal government is currently carrying.”

Capretta says that given the tight time constraints, Peter Orszag — Director of the Office of Management and Budget — is in the driver’s seat:

There has been no time to run an elaborate consensus-building process, with full engagement from every office of government. With such tight deadlines, the only way to get the job done is to give OMB the authority to pull together the data and options for a decision-making process tightly controlled by a few key White House aides. It also doesn’t hurt OMB’s relative power position that the new Director, Peter Orszag, is seen as a health policy expert in his own right. During his two-year tenure at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), he devoted much of his time to researching and commenting on the reasons for rapidly rising health-care costs.

As we reported the other day, Orszag is co-author of the Diamond-Orszag plan for reforming Social Security, which calls for raising the retirement age and cutting benefits — which the White House has been presenting as the foundation of their plan.

Excuse me, but what time constraints? ( I’m not trying to be hostile to the administration, but really, wtf?) They don’t have to ram this one through immediately to save the economy. If they absolutely have to do it, it certainbly can be thoughtfully planned and fully vetted before presented. Why in the world are we looking at this thing next week?
They reportedly gave Cooper and the blue boys this “summit” in exchange for their cooperation on the stimulus. (And then they didn’t vote for the stimulus). And now we’re hearing they have approved some “up or down vote” plan for an “entitlement reform” package that has been put together in haste inside the white house without any input from the rest of the government because they ostensibly have to move fast. Why? (Again, if they think this is some sneaky way to get to universal health care, I think they are vastly, vastly over estimating their political skills.) Obama has been vague on social security since the campaign. I never got his decision to put it on the menu back in Iowa except as some sort of strange appeal to older voters that didn’t make any sense. His use of universal health care sabaoteur Jim Cooper as a health care spokesman sounded many alarms. But he has also made many assurances that he has no intention of breaking the compact on social security and medicare, so I’ve never known quite where he was. If there’s some kabuki in all this, it’s really hard to see the point. They must be thinking that they can either buy cooperation from wingnuts (a losing proposition) or that they need to appease certain moneyed interests, which is just frightening. (I honestly don’t want to think that this some sort of shock doctrine quick hit while people are confused, but you have to consider it. ) I almost think they are just still in campaign mode and haven’t thought this through. This social security nonsense is a relic of villager conventional wisdom of yeteryear, ca 2007:

RUSSERT (11/5/07): If you’re going to make tough decisions as a president, you have to answer tough questions. What are you going to do? Show us how you’re going the lead us. Everyone knows Social Security, as it’s constructed, is not going to be in the same place it’s going to be for the next generation [sic]. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives.

MATTHEWS: It’s a bad Ponzi scheme, at this point.

RUSSERT: Yes.

I have written before that he may have calculated that that this is a brave Nixon goes to China moment, but he’s got to know that at this point liberals (and a lot of others) aren’t going to sit still for this, no matter what the Politico says. This will crack up his coalition. The only way he can pass this is NAFTA style, with mostly Republicans and Blue Dogs. Doing that on this issue during a serious economic downturn could be politically catastrophic.
If they think anything short of serious degradation of the safety net is going to appease the fiscal scolds, they are dreaming. But if they want to panic millions of people and delay an economic recovery they’ll give the impression that they have to pay for all this stimulus spending by cutting social security and medicare. It’s a mistake.

.

Gut Plays

by digby

I’m all for leaders being willing to change their minds, so this article about Geithner’s late change of heart about his toxic asset plan doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is the fact that they didn’t see that a half-assed presentation would likely be worse than postponing things until they had their plan together. (The whole thing seemed very odd anyway, happening as it did right in the middle of the stimulus debate. What was up with that?)

I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that the whole point of appointing Geithner, who is hardly an electrifying figure and has quite a few other problems, was that he had the confidence of the markets. I always thought that was supposed to be one of the most important parts of his job description. Judging from the stock market reaction and the commentary, his presentation failed to do that in a pretty major way. The WaPo article suggests that this was done because they needed a vague amorphous plan in order to woo congress, but if that’s true, they are putting the cart before the horse. Geithner needs to create a fix for this problem that will work and then woo congress, not the other way around. (And after his performance the other day, I would suggest that they might not want to depend upon Geithner for political persuasion at all. Let him deal with his pals on Wall Street and leave the politicking to the president.)

Anyway, I’m fairly over my head with this on the substance, but I do think it was a political mistake to roll out that vague plan and I’m also suspicious, as Brian Buetler writes here, that the administration is depending on gut plays this late in the game.

The proof will be known before too long, and I’m sincerely hoping that these guys are able to construct some kind of plan that will put the financial system back on its feet without giving away the store to the very people who put us in this position. But from this layperson’s perspective, this story doesn’t inspire confidence. Maybe the Galtian Masters of the Universe see it differently.

You should all set Your TiVOs for Frontline tonight if you want to see what’s purported to be an excellent tick-tock of the unfolding financial crisis called “Inside the Meltdown” (9 p.m. on PBS, check local listings). This is from Heather Havrilesky’s review in Salon:

By piecing together a colorful series of first-person accounts, “Frontline” does a nice job of capturing the sheer disbelief that arose the day that Bear Stearns’ stock started falling precipitously, without warning. Author Bill Bamber called the day’s events “nothing short of surreal.” Desperate to set the record straight, the company’s CEO, Alan Schwartz, sat down with CNBC anchor David Faber, only to have Faber suggest that Goldman Sachs, Bear’s most important client, might stop working with them. As Bear Stearns’ stock sank further, Geithner, then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, examined the firm’s books and realized that allowing the company to go under would set off a chain reaction of other bank failures. Geithner called his boss, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, at 4 in the morning. Soon, Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson were scrambling to find a way to keep Bear Stearns from falling and taking a bunch of other banks with it.

But Bear Stearns was just the beginning of a series of disasters encountered over the next several months by Paulson, a free-market Republican forced to contemplate an unthinkable financial black hole. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, behemoths that held $5 trillion in mortgages, quickly lost 60 percent of their stock value. Bernanke and Paulson moved to nationalize Fannie and Freddie, only to see Lehman Brothers stumble the next day. At this point, Jon Hilsenrath of the Wall Street Journal explains to the “Frontline” cameras, Paulson “started to show signs of bailout exhaustion.”

It sounds fascinating.

.

(dday’s busy chronicling California’s nuclear meltdown, so I’m cross-posting this from his blog — digby)

We’re Making Them Filibuster

by dday

.

The Tattered Banner Of Common Sense

by digby

Am I the only one who finds it interesting that partisanship is back in fashion now that the Republicans are acting like political kamikazees? After overdosing for months on the cotton candy dreams of post-partisan comity, gasbags everywhere are suddenly hailing ruthless obstructionism as completely natural and a sign of a healthy, principled democracy.

Here’s Richard Cohen blithely discussing it as if he’s been making the argument for years:

Gregg’s turnabout was supposedly an embarrassment for the new Obama administration — and I suppose it was. But it also was a moment of realism, of clarity, of an antidotal repudiation to all the gauzy talk about partisanship — about how it is always pernicious and usually silly: games for the sake of games. What Gregg showed was that ideology matters, ideas count, beliefs divide — and legitimately so — and that he could go only so far and no further. He decided to be true to himself.

Something of the same has prevailed since the inauguration. Congressional Republicans have made a stand on the stimulus package, just as they did on the original bank bailout when they refused to accommodate a president of their own party, George W. Bush. These Republicans are as wrong as wrong can be, and history, I am sure, will mock them, but they were not elected by history, and they are impervious to mockery from the likes of me. They come from conservative districts, and they are voting as their people want them to. That’s partisanship. It is also democracy.

The desire to think that political differences are manufactured and can be sweet-smiled into consensus is touching but unrealistic.

I don’t actually disagree with that, but I am just a teensy bit skeptical of these villagers’ sudden embrace of political warfare. After all, how many years have we been listening to these very same people lecture us about the virtues of “civility” and consensus in columns like this:

[S]ome of us cherish moderation, recoil from conspiracy theories and would like, if possible, to stick to the facts. We may dislike Bush’s policies, but we do not vitriolically hate the man, think he stole the election or blame our own country for the crimes of Sept. 11. We are the proud Purples — once the royal color, now the tattered banner of common sense.

But now that the rump Republicans are out of power and have called for jihad against the Democratic agenda during a time of crisis, hysterical partisanship is actually principled opposition and is to be celebrated. How convenient. I guess as long as they don’t call Obama a bad word, it’s all good.

By the way, Cohen has other ideas about Democrats sticking to principles, as you might have guessed. Like all villagers, his principles only derive from his own personal experience. Therefore (because he has a gay sister), he sees gay rights as a principle worth fighting for. Abortion, not so much. (Somerby amusingly characterized him as an aging roue who’s changed his position because he can no longer get college girls pregnant. If you read the silly column, you’ll understand why. Oy.)

.

“We All Hate The Same Things”

by digby

If you get a chance to see the HBO Alexandra Pelosi documentary about the McCain campaign called Right America: Feeling Wronged, do it. If you ever doubted that this is actually two countries, and that there is a very real divide that is unbreachable by any single politician, you won’t doubt it after you see these people. I have been hearing various versions of this crap my whole life. They never change. And their most distinguishing characteristic is that they never, ever back down.

These folks were already convinced that the election of Obama ushered in the end of western civilization and all that follows will be seen as a result of that. The inept George W. Bush never existed. (Except he saved us from the boogeyman.) I’m sure these people aren’t representative of all conservatives and the film doesn’t claim they are. But they sure as hell are representative of the dittoheads who pull the strings of what’s left of the Republican party.

Here’s an interview in Salon with Alexandra Pelosi. She blames blogs.

.