Month: May 2011

Ten Years On

by digby

I don’t do the celebrating death thing, so I won’t be joining everyone in today’s party. It’s just not my thing — people who cheer outside of prisons when someone is executed always make me feel uncomfortable too. Even though I understand how they could feel that way, I just don’t.

So, when I hear this morning that people wish the president had been more joyous or more excited, I have to disagree. Killing someone, even someone who clearly deserves it, is a sober event, especially for the person who ordered the killing. At least it should be. He was entirely appropriate in my view, and I thought to myself when I heard it just how grateful I was that it was he who announced rather than George W. Bush who wouldn’t have been able to contain his bloodlust. It’s these moments when I am very glad to have “no drama” Obama rather than Mr “Feels Good!” This is serious business and it requires a serious leader.

I did have to chuckle mordantly, however, when I read Ross Douthat’s piece in the NY Times this morning called “Death of failure, how we learned to stop fearing bin Laden”:

This is a triumph for the United States of America, for our soldiers and intelligence operatives, and for the president as well. But it is not quite the triumph that it would have seemed if bin Laden had been captured a decade ago, because those 10 years have taught us that we didn’t need to fear him and his rabble as much as we did, temporarily but intensely, in the weeks when ground zero still smoked.

They’ve taught us, instead, that whatever blunders we make (and we have made many), however many advantages we squander (and there has been much squandering), and whatever quagmires we find ourselves lured into, our civilization is not fundamentally threatened by the utopian fantasy politics embodied by groups like Al Qaeda, or the mix of thugs, fools and pseudointellectuals who rally around their banner.

They can strike us, they can wound us, they can kill us. They can goad us into tactical errors and strategic blunders. But they are not, and never will be, an existential threat.

No kidding. Indeed, the people who compared this to Hitler and proclaimed al Qaeda the greatest threat the world has ever known were a bunch of bedwetting panic artists who should never be listened to again — clearly they have no grace under pressure and can’t think clearly in an emergency.

To any sentient being, a motley group of terrorists with box cutters was never an existential threat to the United States of America. It just wasn’t. It was a problem, maybe even a big one, and there was certainly the possibility that the US would be more like Europe and the rest of the world going forward and would have to deal with this particular form of violence from time to time. But existential threat? Ridiculous on its face.

And yet many of the right’s political and intellectual leadership(and yes, much of the left’s as well) basically threw up their arms and started running in circles, screaming and rending their garments, demanding that we start indiscriminately shooting at someone in order that they feel protected from the boogeyman who was coming to kill us all in our beds. Iraq was the result.

It was, in retrospect, a deeply embarrassing time for America. And, frankly, deeply disrespectful to the memories of those who died on that day, particularly the first responders who acted like the calm, responsible adults you look to in a crisis.

And they institutionalized the frenzy almost immediately. They created groups like AVOT (“Americans for Victory over Terror”) and embarked on a hysterical campaign of fear and paranoia, the remnants of which may be with us forever. Remember?

The War on Dissent Widens
Jim Lobe
March 15, 2002

A powerful group of neo-conservatives is launching a new public relations campaign in support of President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism.

At a Tuesday gathering of the National Press Club, members of the new Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT, online at www.avot.org) declared their intention to “take to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing.”

Those groups and individuals, AVOT claims, need to be resisted both here and abroad. A full-page AVOT advertisement carried in the Sunday March 10 New York Times pointed to radical Islam as “an enemy no less dangerous and no less determined than the twin menaces of fascism and communism we faced in the 20th century.” At the same time, the $128,000 ad lambasted those at home “who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate their agenda of ‘blame America first’.”

“Both [internal and external] threats,” the ad continues, “stem from either a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice.”

To expose the internal “threats,” AVOT has compiled a sample list of statements by professors, legislators, authors, and columnists that it finds objectionable. The strategy appears similar to an earlier, much-criticized effort to monitor war dissidents by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and neo-conservative Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman.

AVOT’s list of speakers it considers threatening include:

* Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who said, “Some of us, maybe foolishly, gave this president the authority to go after terrorists. We didn’t know that he, too, was going to go crazy with it.”
* President Jimmy Carter, who assailed Bush’s use of the phrase “axis of evil,” arguing that it was “overly simplistic and counter-productive.”
* Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who accused the president of “canceling, in effect, the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments” and called the war “the patriot games, the lying games, the war games of an unelected president.”
* American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner criticizing “Bush’s dismal domestic policies” and his “dubious notion of a permanent war.”
* Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, who in a recent editorial said that Washington itself has used terrorist tactics during the 1990s, including the bombing of civilian targets in Baghdad and the Balkans.

Who exactly is behind AVOT’s efforts? The newly formed organization is headed by a formidable array of right-wing luminaries. At the top of the list is former Secretary of Education and drug czar William Bennett, AVOT’s chairman. The group’s senior advisers include former CIA director R. James Woolsey; former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney; William P. Barr, attorney general under George Bush, Sr.; and mega-political donor Lawrence Kadish. AVOT is a project of Empower America–also co-chaired by Bennett–whose principal members include conservative political operatives Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp, Vin Weber, and William Cohen.

During the press conference, Bennett insisted that, “We do not wish to silence people,” adding that for now, AVOT plans to hold teach-ins and public education events, particularly on college campuses.

In response to AVOT’s criticism, Harper’s Lewis Lapham said Bennett is a “wrong-headed jingo and an intolerant scold.” He added that AVOT appeared to be a new “front organization for the hard neo-con (neo-conservative) right,” which has gained unprecedented influence in the Bush administration, particularly among the top political appointees in the Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s office. “This is the war-monger crowd,” he said.

Indeed, AVOT is being initially funded primarily by Lawrence Kadish, chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and a top donor to the Republican Party. Kadish, a real estate investor in New York and Florida, was cited by Mother Jones Magazine as one of the country’s top individual donors, having given $532,000 to the GOP. His RJC has long tried to build links between the Republican Party, including its Christian Right component, and American Jews.

Bennett, Gaffney, and Woolsey are all veteran members of a neo-conservative network of groups with overlapping boards of directors that have long championed rightwing governments in Israel and, among other things, urged strong U.S. action against both Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Islamic government in Iran, as well as Palestine Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Both Gaffney and Bennett, for example, were two of about three dozen mainly neo-conservative signers of an open letter sent to Bush in the name of the “Project for a New American Century” nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks. It called not only for the destruction of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, but also to extend the war to Iraq, and possibly to Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestine Authority unless those nations ceased their alleged support of terrorist groups opposed to Israel.

Woolsey, meanwhile, was sent by the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board to Britain in late September to gather evidence that could link Iraq to the Sept. 11. He has since become one of the most visible commentators in the media in favor of extending the war to Baghdad. Woolsey is also on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security, a hawkish pro-Israel group.

AVOT is also linked through many channels to Richard Perle, chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (which sent Woolsey on his Iraqi quest). Perle, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, perches full time at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neo-con think-tank that has emerged as the hub of an “axis of incitement”–a small but potent network of like-minded, ultra-hawkish officials, analysts, and opinion-makers. It appears that AVOT is the latest institutional offspring of that network, which is united by a passionate belief in the inherent goodness and redemptive mission of the United States; the moral cowardice of liberals and European elites; the existential necessity of supporting Israel in the shadow of the Holocaust and in the face of Arab hostility; and the primacy of military power.

These beliefs came through clearly at Tuesday’s press conference. Woolsey, for example, told reporters he agreed with those who are “calling the war we’re in now World War IV.” But Gaffney was the most strident of the speakers at the event, saying that we should be skeptical of our “new-found friends” in the war on terror.

“[We must] pay special attention to friends like Saudi Arabia and Egypt whose ongoing use of media are creating problems for our allies,” (implying Israel), Gaffney said. Any criticism of the administration’s conduct of the war, he added, could be “interpreted in such a way as to hurt national resolve…(and) embolden the enemy.”

These paranoid patriots were good for something: they helped bin Laden tremendously by growing his legend and creating the illusion among thousands of would-be terrorists that they had cowed the mighty US. Again, not the thoughtful actions of serious leaders.

And it did result in their fondest dream being finally realized — we now have a vaguely fascistic national security state more powerful, intrusive and secretive than ever before. Huzzah. There’s a “victory” for you.

Douthat concludes with this:

One of bin Laden’s most famous quotations (there were not many in his oeuvre) compared the United States and Al Qaeda to racing horses. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” he told his acolytes over table talk, “by nature, they will like the strong horse.”

In his cracked vision, America was the weak nag, and Al Qaeda the strong destrier.

But the last 10 years have taught us differently: In life as well as death, Osama bin Laden was always the weak horse.

If it took you ten years to figure that out, you’re weaker than you think.

The US is under threat, to be sure. But it’s the threat of a bunch of paranoid opportunists convincing an entire generation that a handful of suicidal religious fanatics are so dangerous that the most powerful nation on the planet must immediately jettison its fundamental values. If killing bin Laden could change that, I’d be celebrating too.

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The Death OF Bin Laden

by tristero

Congratulations to the women and men, both in this country and elsewhere, who worked for over ten years to find and capture/kill Osama bin Laden. The details are still very sketchy and there are many questions, but this was undoubtedly an incredibly difficult task, and a frustrating one. But they succeeded, finally, and I feel they deserve our thanks.

I agree with much of Digby’s post below. I, too, would have preferred to have had Bin Laden captured, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment. But that is yesterday. Today, we deal with the aftermath of his death.

If there has been any change in the level of threat from radical Islamists, it probably will not be in the direction we all hope for. Bin Laden is now, officially, a martyr, murdered at the hands of the infidels, the Great Satan, blah blah blah. The problem with that is that martyrs often provoke vengeance.

It is only a matter of time, and my guess is that it will not be too much time, before there is another direct attempt on the lives of Americans within the United States. Bin Laden’s death at the hands of the US has been anticipated by everyone. Surely, al Qaeda has been waiting for this moment – or possibly, waiting for the heightened security of this moment to abate – in order to strike. As far as I understand, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is considered the operational brains behind Al Qaeda, is still around. Furthermore, the associated Al Qaeda groups, and new groups dedicated to avenging Bin Laden’s defeat and now death are certainly gearing up. I can only hope that the Obama administration understands this. The next few years will be especially difficult.

From Republicans, we can expect the following (I haven’t yet read what they have to say; it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’ve already started):

1.Bin Laden’s death is unimportant – No, it will not end anything, but this is a deeply significant event, both here and around the world, especially in Islamic countries.

2. Outrage that Obama “hogged all the credit” in his speech and failed to thank Bush by name – This will deflect the story away from bin Laden’s death and onto the “character” of Obama. Nevermind that Bush failed not only to catch him, but failed to protect us from bin Laden in the first place: they will try to make Obama’s “uppitiness” the story (but of course, except maybe in the south, they won’t use that word).

3. From now on, any attack on the US that succeeds will be blamed on Obama for somehow “botching” the killing the of Bin Laden, or the disposal of his body. And make no mistake, the right will comb over whatever is published about the attack looking for problems and evidence of cover-up.

4. The more lunatic members of the GOP – ie, the teabaggers, the leadership, and Fox News – will raise suspicions about whether bin Laden was, in fact, actually killed. The mainstream press will report this garbage “objectively.”

In other words, Obama may plead as loud as he can for the country to come together over this death. It isn’t going to happen.

One final, thought; It’s a very cynical thought, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless: If ever there was a time that Obama could be persuaded to pursue even a moderately liberal agenda – as opposed to a (roughly) centrist/right one – that time is now. It is likely he will never be more popular. If progressive politicians haven’t anticipated this moment, and if they’re not prepared to make a full court press for those policies that matter to us, they will have failed us and there should be hell to pay. Opportunities this good are very, very rare, and very, very fleeting.

But I don’t want to end on such a jaded note. The death of bin Laden is astonishing news, amazing news, incredible. He achieved the martyrdom he so dearly sought, and which so much of America also dearly sought to provide him. Obama’s task now is to negotiate a post-Osama world, a world just as dangerous as the one before, if not more so, but without the conveniently charismatic bogeyman “other” Osama’s persona and legend provided.

We live in terribly interesting times.

“I’m not that concerned about him”

by digby

So Bin Laden is dead. I’m a big opponent of the death penalty, so I would have preferred to see him him tried before the world court, but I honestly can’t say I’ll lose any sleep over his death. His video after the the 9/11 attack, in which he was so pleased that they were able to kill so many, was validation of his sickness.

But as I watch the news media behave as if the entire trajectory of Western Civilization has been altered by this one act, I’m reminded of President Bush’s statement on March of 2002:

“We haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is,” Bush said during the 2002 news conference. “I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run.

“I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country,” Bush continued. “I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban. But once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became — we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his Al Qaeda killers anymore.”

There’s more than a little bit of irony in this being announced on the day of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech. Turns out they were both living in mansions.

Obviously, there is symbolic value in killing him and there are many people, particularly in NYC and DC, who are very relieved and happy tonight. And it was the greatest manhunt in history so you have to give the intelligence and military people credit. But I’m fairly sure that the death of bin Laden, however satisfying, has not actually changed the threat from yesterday to today.

This business of having “the body” is reminds me of the ancient practice of putting heads on a pike to prove the death of the enemy. I suppose that’s human on some level. Still, it’s macabre.

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What The Donald Really Thinks

by digby

Must read piece by Johann Hari today on the Trump phenomenon. His rundown of Trump’s positions, something I haven’t seen anywhere else, is very revealing:

Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: “I would go in and take the oil… I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff.” On Iraq, he says: “We stay there, and we take the oil… In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours.” It is a view that the world is essentially America’s property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to “stop what’s going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength.” The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.

The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn’t born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody “ever comes forward” to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he’d “heard” the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: “I’m very proud of myself.”

The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He’s not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.

Johnston says that in fact most of Trump’s apparent fortune comes from “stiffing his creditors” and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur “of genius”.

Honestly, I think if he were a little bit more down home and he didn’t have that ridiculous hair, he could win the nomination. He is the very definition of a modern Republican winner.

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A Choice Not A Crisis

by digby

There were those who knew it was a set-up at the time — you didn’t have to be a genius to see the pattern. For decades the Republicans demagogued debt and demonized the “tax and spend” liberals even as they borrowed and spent the country into oblivion themselves. The Democrats (so ashamed and embarrassed by the mean names they were called that they even changed the name of their ideology in a desperate attempt to “re-brand”) tried to prove that they were indeed as frugal and fiscally responsible as any good Republican by cutting services to the poor, balancing the budget and leaving a surplus. Naturally, the Republicans took power at that moment and immediately gave the savings to the wealthy and ran up unprecedented debt with tax cuts and wars until the economy was a burning wreck. The Democrats were hired to clean up the mess and suddenly everyone insisted that deficits were a priority and that average people would have to sacrifice their financial security to put things right.

And so it goes. The party that allegedly believes in fiscal responsibility is reckless and profligate and the party that allegedly believes in taxing and spending is perpetually paying the price. Either way, the rich always seem to get a bigger and bigger share of the wealth and the people are less and less financially secure.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think the whole thing was rigged, wouldn’t you?

Here it is, all laid out, plain as day in the Washington Post:

In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.

Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds. “In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.

Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.

Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

Big-ticket spending initiated by the Bush administration accounts for 12 percent of the shift. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have added $1.3 trillion in new borrowing. A new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients contributed another $272 billion. The Troubled Assets Relief Program bank bailout, which infuriated voters and led to the defeat of several legislators in 2010, added just $16 billion — and TARP may eventually cost nothing as financial institutions repay the Treasury.

Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, a favorite target of Republicans who blame Democrats for the mounting debt, has added $719 billion — 6 percent of the total shift, according to the new analysis of CBO data by the nonprofit Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate.

I’ll never forget the wise Oracle of Greenspan talking about the surpluses in 2001.I knew that if this didn’t tip people off to the “deficit” scam, nothing would:

Greenspan went to the Hill on Thursday to testify before the Senate Budget Committee with Washington and Wall Street listening not for clues about next Tuesday’s FOMC meeting — “I want to emphasize that I speak for myself and not necessarily for the Federal Reserve,” Greenspan reminded the senators at the start — but for Father Greenback’s word on whether or not Bush’s $1.3 trillion tax cut is a good idea.

What Bush got was a relatively hearty endorsement along with Greenspan’s terms. Because the Fed chairman, it seems, has not only accepted the existence of the ballooning budget surpluses — fueled, he said, by the increases in productivity growth and taxable incomes that have changed the fiscal landscape — but has begun to wonder if debt reduction is actually happening too fast.

Not that a shrinking federal debt doesn’t remain a good thing. “The rapid capital deepening that has occurred in the U.S. economy in recent years is a testament to those benefits.” (That’s Greenspan for “I told you so” after corralling Clinton into that 1993 deficit reduction plan.) But, the Fed head said, “the most recent projections, granted their tentativeness, nonetheless make clear that the highly desirable goal of paying off the federal debt is in reach before the end of the decade.”

And that could be a bad thing.

Running surpluses without a debt, Greenspan warned, would result in the “longer-term fiscal policy issue” of a government paying off its debt, particularly long-term Treasury bonds, before the bonds mature — costing it extra money by buying back those securities from private investors before they mature. Which is very expensive — better to buy back only matured bonds, which won’t be possible until at least 2011.

Now, we know how Greenspan feels about reducing surpluses via additional spending — he doesn’t like it. And that leaves tax cuts, which by halfway through the speech were an integral part of a budget strategy “that is consistent with a preemptive smoothing of the glide path to zero federal debt” and aimed at “making the on-budget surplus economically inconsequential when the debt is effectively paid off.”

Uh huh. They made very sure that wouldn’t happen.

It’s all working out great. Democrats are now voting for tax cuts for billionaires and everyone’s on the same page about slashing spending — it’s just a matter of what to cut. And when the people’s programs have been degraded as much as possible and the economy continues to be anemic at best, the Democrats will bear the burden of the public discontent, allowing the Republicans to once again take charge and pillage the government coffers and the rest of the country’s wealth once again. The circle of life…

This rising and falling deficit hysteria has been a Wall Street tool for decades now, used to manipulate American politics whenever it’s convenient. Greenspan’s arguments proved just how transparently self-serving this whole issue is.

Update: Dean Baker lays out the reasons why “surpluses” are no more real than “deficits.”

Today In History

by digby

Yes, it’s that time of year again. And considering recent events, it’s an excellent week-end to reflect on our politics and the people who report them:

Happy Codpiece Day!

It seems like only yesterday that the country was enthralled with the president in his sexy flightsuit. Women were swooning, manly GOP men were commenting enviously on his package. But there were none so awestruck by the sheer, testosterone glory of Bush’s codpiece as Tweety:

MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just–I can’t think of any, any stunt by the White House–and I’ll call it a stunt–that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It’s not a stunt if it works and it’s real. And I felt the faces of those guys–I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of–the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he–you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That’s what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you’re watching that from–say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We’re coming.’ Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not–we’ve allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it’s time to tell them, you know what, `You’re going to be help accountable for this.’

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

Two weeks later, They were still talking about it:

MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?

LIDDY: Well, I– in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man [Official Naomi Wolf Spin-Point]. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know — and I’ve worn those because I parachute — and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count — they’re all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.

“You know, it’s funny. I shouldn’t talk about ratings,” he [Matthews] said, also gazing at Bush’s crotch. “But last night was a riot because … these pictures were showing last night, and everybody’s tuning in to see these pictures again.”

And we wonder why Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman think they too could be president.

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Poor Struggling Multimillionaires

by digby

At a townhall in Montana, a constituent asks his congressman about the economy and wonders what his net worth is:

REHBERG: I’m a small businessman. My wife is a small businessman. She hasn’t taken a salary in ten years as a result of business. We’re struggling like everyone else. With the ecnoomy.

CONSTITUENT: What’s your salary?

REHBERG: I’m land-rich and cash-poor. Like ranchers and farmers and small businessmen throughout Montana. […]

See, they’re just like you and me, folks. Average Americans, =trying to get through this economy by hook or by crook. In fact, they’re hurting.

Well, it’s all a matter of perspective:

While Rehberg calls himself poor and complains that he’s struggling, the fact is that he is, as of 2009 records, the 14th richest member of the House of Representatives. Opensecrets.org estimates that his average net worth in 2009 was $31 million.

That must be hell. I don’t know how they’re managing it.

I’m sure he honestly believes he being squeezed. After all, a few years ago he was probably worth 40 million and he feels like he’s slipping. But this is exactly the sort of person who rolls his eyes to himself when his constituents complain about Social security and medicare being cut. What do they know about financial pain? “Try seeing your stock portfolio go down a million dollars and then tell me about loss…”

Conservative multi-millionaires, operating as they are from a perspective that says altruism and empathy are for losers, simply cannot fathom that being deprived of a couple of hundred a month could possibly make a difference in your life. That’s tip money. So they think that people who are complaining about it are being petty whiners who refuse to accept even a tiny, insignificant reduction in their benefits. Everybody needs to sacrifice — and lord knows the rich have sacrificed enough already. Look how much wealth these multi-millionaires sacrificed when they gambled and lost!

Update: And here’s some evidence of the political and media superstars commiserating with each other about how tough it is out here.

And I have to make an apology. In a previous post I said that the WHCD was a gathering of B-list stars and has-been rockers. That is obviously no longer the case and I was wrong to demean it as a low rent affair. This was a glittering gathering of America’s VIP tribe, A-list all the way, from Rupert Murdoch to Scarlett Johanssen to Eric Holder to Newt Gingrich to Gloria Borger. The rich, powerful and famous are America’s aristocrats, no less resplendent than the Royals of Windsor. (They did metaphorically hang one of their own in effigy, but then the nobles always do that from time to time, just to appease the peasants.)

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In case you missed them

by digby

President Obama’s very funny speech at the White House Correspondents dinner:

I particularly liked the line about Michelle snatching the candy out of the children’s little hands …

Seth Myers’ also funny speech:

I’m guessing Donald Trump wishes he hadn’t accepted the invitation.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Whoa, Lopakhin!

By Dennis Hartley

Keanu really digs the theatre: Henry’s Crime

Keanu Reeves does Chekhov? No, I’m not pitching an idea for an SNL sketch. After all, he has done Shakespeare (he co-starred in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing , Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and played the lead in a stage version of Hamlet)-so is it such a stretch to see him sporting a goatee and a 19th-century waistcoat in The Cherry Orchard? OK, it’s not what you think. It’s just that, you see, in the quirky indie heist caper Henry’s Crime, he plays a guy who takes a role in a Chekhov play, even though his character is not an actor. I hear you-“Typecasting?” I know that Reeves has his share of detractors, perennially chagrined by his unique ability to remain completely motionless and expressionless for two hours at a stretch. But I have a theory-although his characters appear wooden, they still enjoy a rich” inner life” (you know…like Pinocchio).

One assumes that Henry (Reeves) has some kind of inner life. He seems to be a likable, easy-going fellow; it’s just that he’s a bit…inscrutable. Maybe it’s his job. Working the graveyard shift night after night at a N.Y. Thruway tollbooth would put anybody in semi-comatose state. Nothing fazes the agreeable yet impassive Henry, one way or the other-although he does display a slight twitch when, one morning at breakfast, his wife (Judy Greer) broaches the subject of the couple having a child. Suddenly, we get the impression that Henry would prefer to be anywhere else but there, at that moment, having that particular conversation. What’s going on? Is this a troubled marriage? Does he love his wife? Is this cipher of a man internally harboring primal doubts about life itself? Or…is he suffering in silence from a sudden attack of gas? There’s really no way of discerning.

We never get a chance to find out exactly what Henry is contemplating, because that is precisely the moment that Fate intervenes. An old high school chum named Eddie Vibes (Fisher Stevens) unexpectedly shows up on his doorstep, with a drunken cohort in tow. Both men are dubiously outfitted for a game of baseball. Eddie wants to know if Henry can give them a ride to their “game”. Nothing about this questionable early-morning scenario seems to raise any red flags for the ever-malleable Henry. Even Eddie’s request to stop at the bank “on the way”-and to park the car out front and wait while his passengers go inside-fails to elicit the tiniest raised eyebrow from Henry. Needless to say, the heist goes awry, Henry’s car stalls, his “friends” flee…and guess who ends up in stir?

Although he owes them squat, Henry doesn’t rat out the real culprits and takes the fall, while his demeanor remains unchanged. At this point, one might surmise that Henry is either some kind of transcendent Zen master…or a clueless moron (not unlike the protagonist of Forrest Gump or Chance the gardener in Being There . Ah, but our little wooden boy is about to meet his Geppetto. Max (James Caan) is a veteran con man. He’s one of those oddball convicts who actually “likes” prison-which is why he has been sabotaging his own parole hearings and enabling himself to continue living on the state’s dime. He becomes a mentor/father figure to Henry, who takes it to heart when Max advises him that he needs to find a Dream, and then pursue it. So what is Henry’s resultant epiphany? Since he’s already done the time, he might as well now do the crime.

Henry gets out of the pen, discovers that his wife has remarried to one of the creeps who set him up (he almost seems secretly relieved-in his own inimitable fashion) and proceeds to foment a plan to rob the bank that he originally had no intention of robbing in the first place. While casing the scene, he is hit by a car driven by a harried stage actress (Vera Farmiga) who is running late for a rehearsal at a nearby theater (it’s a Meet Cute). Soon afterwards, he discovers an old newspaper clipping about a long-forgotten bootlegger’s tunnel that runs under the alley that separates the theater from the bank next door. He encourages a reluctant Max to make nice to his parole board at his next hearing, so he can assist him with the heist. It doesn’t take the seasoned con man too long to figure out that the key to gaining access to the bank is for the heist team to finagle themselves into the theater production in the building next door. Hence, we get to the part where Keanu does Chekhov. One slight complication: he falls in love with his leading lady (who wouldn’t?).

There’s a little déjà vu running through this film (the second effort from 44 Inch Chest director Malcolm Venville). Sacha Gervasi and David White’s script may have been “inspired” by some vintage heist flicks; specifically, Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 comedy The Ladykillers, and Lloyd Bacon’s Larceny, Inc.from 1942 (essentially remade by Woody Allen as Small Time Crooks. I thought that James Caan was recycling his “Mr. Henry” persona from Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket a wee bit. While the film has classic screwball tropes, it lacks the kinetic pace of Lubitsch or Sturges. That being said, I still found Venville’s film to be quite engaging and entertaining-within its own unique universe (yes, even the somnambulant Keanu). I was reminded of Vincent Gallo’s criminally underappreciated Buffalo ’66; in addition the fact that it also was filmed in and around the Buffalo area, it’s another one of those low-key comedies with oddly endearing characters that “sneaks up” on you, especially once you realize how genuinely touching and sweet it really is at its core. And there’s no crime in that, is there?