Author: digby

You’re Just Mentioning This Now?

Thanks to Atrios for sending me in the direction of Jonathan Alter’s new piece (web-only, needless to say) headlined “Totally Unconvincing.”

It’s great to see that the somnambulent press corp have started to stir and all, but I am gobsmacked that they are only now bringing attention to something that has been glaringly obvious since Junior was unveiled as the Official Brand Name of the Republican Establishment 2000:

His habit—on display again Thursday night—is to simply assert, assert, assert until the message sinks in. It’s as if war supporters believe that if they repeat the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection enough, people will eventually believe it.

I understand that this works on the sub-rational superstitious types that make up a large part of his base, but why the liberal media haven’t gotten fed up with it by now is truly a mystery to me.

The classic example, of course, is the “Who’s your favorite political philosopher?” question in the primary debate. Everyone remembers that he said, “Christ. He changed mah heart,” after which he smirked, shifted and did his little curt dismisssive nod. But, what is forgotten is that the questioner actuallly followed up and asked if he would elaborate. He replied, “Well, if they don’t know, it’s going to be hard to explain … when you accept Christ as your savior, it changes your heart, it changes your life.”

None of this assertion as argument is new. The following are quotes from the presidential campaign. He’s always done this.

“I’m a person who does in office what I say I will do.

As friends begin to work on my behalf around the country, I hope the people of

America will learn what the people of Texas know: that I base decisions on a

set of core, conservative principles from which I will not waver.

As Governor of this great state, I have proven I know how to lead. I know

that a leader must clearly see a better tomorrow. A leader must make

decisions based on principles. And a leader must be a uniter, not a divider.”

I’ve been underestimated before, and Governor Richards regrets it. (Laughter) I understand labels and how the politics works, and the only thing I know to do is to lay my record out, share my heart as best I can, and in a system that often times gets filtered, I know that. That’s why these town hall meetings are important for me. And you can take a look. You can take a look and… and you can say, I trust him. I trust his judgment. Or, you know, got a nice mother, but maybe he doesn’t hack it. When I first got going, people said he doesn’t want to come to our state that much. But it took a while. I knew it was going to happen. Then they say, he didn’t say anything. And now they’re not saying that. And now they’re saying, you know you know, whatever they said George Bush, you know, he’s not smart enough. Well, as I said, I’d rather be underestimated.”

“I mean, I’m a doer. I’m a problem-solver. I get things done.”

“No, I believe the people are going to elect me president because I’ve got what it takes to be the leader. I’ve got a clear vision. People know that I have a uniter not a divider, that I’ve got a solid record of setting goals and leading people to achieve those goals.

But the point is, my record shows that I’ve been the governor of the second biggest state in the union, and I’m going to talk about that proudly, and I’m going to have Democrats stand by my side and talk about that proudly. But in order to get elected, this country needs somebody to set a positive vision for America. Somebody—people of both parties can understand where I want to lead.”

I’m interested in solving problems. That’s what a leader does.”

As glad as I am that the media has taken its first baby steps to discussing what has been obvious from the beginning, it’s hard not to stand up and shout “Where the hell have you people been!”

He’s always been completely inarticulate, he’s always used circular logic and argument by assertion, and he always repeats his Karen Hughes bumper sticker slogans in a boring matra as an answer to any question no matter how irrelevant. The Emperor has been doing a lap dance on American public but until now, nobody bothered to mention that he was stark raving naked.

oy vey.

Best Line of the Week

The human race sometimes makes me feel as if they’re playing the violin with my plumb line.

Julia commenting on Emma’s great post.

Melancholia

Nitpicker expresses what is at the bottom of the burgeoning depression that’s coming over me:

As you’ll notice, I haven’t written in a couple of days. I apologize to my faithful reader. I’m sorry, Mom. However, I just wonder whether it’s worth it at all anymore. Honestly, people, we are currently living in a country where people are recommending pre-emptive nuclear strikes on North Korea, where it is now argued that we may have to go to war with Iraq just because it would make us look bad if we didn’t go ahead and kill a bunch of their people, and guys who probably vote Democrat are saying that we should be allowed to torture people for information.

Good God.

Doesn’t the whole idea of who we are as a nation have to change now? I don’t mean once these things are done, either, but just because there are people in power who aren’t disgusted by these arguments?

Yep. We aren’t even paying lip service to decency anymore.This isn’t the nation I have believed in for my whole life. I feel like I’ve been duped. We’re just another wealthy, conquering military power getting drunk on our own ambition.

Jim Henleysays it too, in a different way:

Welcome to the Southern Cone – Why shouldn’t we have people like Khaled Sheik Mohammad tortured, even though they are mass-murdering scum? There are various prudential reasons, which I went into last year. Twice. But there’s a more important reason.

Because we’re the fucking United States of America!

I weep to think that we ever took it upon ourselves to criticize Argentina for the “dirty war” of the late 70s. Evil as the junta was, it was at least responding to a concerted campaign of urban guerilla warfare. (“At the time, political kidnappings, violent strikes and bombings had become commonplace,” notes the Christian Science Monitor.) How little it took, really, to bring far too many Americans down to juntahood – a single, terrible, terrible morning. Perhaps al Qaeda already got its weapon of mass destruction, a virus capable of making all infected forget the most basic facts about who they are, or at least who they were supposed to be. We even know when they used it. From here out, we may live or die, may win or lose, but not as Americans.

He’s Resigned To Being Caesar

I just noticed this letter written by one of Andrew Sullivan’s fans. You can hear the heartfelt regret that this Bush worshiper and budding Imperialist feels at the loss of allies that have existed since the dawn of the Republic now that they are with the terrorists.

He just seemed very, very sad that it must come to this. Very sad to have to admit that France and Germany are likely never going to be ‘allies’ of ours again. Forcing the vote will force their hands…they will reveal whether they are with us or the terrorists…then there will be a break. Bush seems full of regret that this break will happen. I think he’s disappointed in Putin, too, whom he trusted. But he didn’t seem defeated to me. Howard Fineman said it best. He was grim, somber, inexorable…he was Shane, the reluctant cowboy, strapping on a gun to protect his family. I didn’t think he looked tired…just terribly regretful and thoughtful.

Brings a tear to the eye doesn’t it?

And they are right about one thing. Sleepy boy woke up all bright eyed and bushy tailed one time during the conference and it was to say:

No matter what the whip count is, we’re calling for the vote. We want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It’s time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam.

Yep. With us or agin’ us. Show yer Cards, you lily livered yellow bellies.

Orrin Hatch: Drug Lord

Senator, His Son Get Boosts From Makers of Ephedra

Orrin Hatch has kept regulators at bay and benefited via campaign donations. Lobbyists linked to his son have received $2 million.

March 5, 2003

WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, the dietary supplements industry has counted on Sen. Orrin G. Hatch to fend off tighter regulation of products such as ephedra, the controversial stimulant linked to more than 80 deaths — most recently a young Baltimore Orioles baseball player.

Among other things, the Utah Republican co-wrote the 1994 law that lets supplement makers sell products without the scientific premarket safety testing required for drugs and other food additives. That law has proved a major obstacle to federal control of ephedra.

For its part, the supplements industry has not only showered the senator with campaign money but also paid almost $2 million in lobbying fees to firms that employed his son Scott.

From 1998 to 2001, while Scott Hatch worked for a lobbying firm with close ties to his father, clients in the diet supplements industry paid the company more than $1.96 million, more than $1 million of it from clients involved with ephedra.

Hatch has been one of the most fervent believers in keeping the “supplement” industry free from regulation. He has no problem with the selling of mind altering herbs over the counter as long as one of his campaign contributors is making a bundle.

Perhaps the medical marijuana advocates should just start paying off politicians directly. Clearly, Americans are free to do as many drugs as they want, as long as they go through channels and get the ok of medical experts like Orrin Hatch.

The drug war isn’t about illegal drugs, per se. It’s about who gets a piece of the action.

Tortured Logic

For any of you who think that torture is ok because we can be sure of our righteous good intentions, because we know when and where it is right and wrong to do it, because bad guys “deserve it” and we always get only the bad guys, please read this powerful piece by Emma.

None of that makes any difference. By not understanding the ramifications of going down this path, there are many who are one short step away from becoming what they claim to abhor.

Leap Frogging

I heard a long discussion on CNN about who the Bush administration will be putting in charge of the three areas they plan to designate within the “Iraq federation.” The names, where they will be stationed and how they plan to “administer” the various areas until elections can be held were all discussed in some detail.

Apparently, the war is over. Hip, hip hooray.

The Better Rhettor deconstructs the latest Bush rhetorical ploy — “Leap-Frogging” — and finds that it’s a tried and true Karl Rove special.

It’s a bait and switch. Rather than continuing to argue for the merits of their position—an argument they have concluded they cannot win—they now want to shift the terms of the debate. They don’t want to talk anymore, in other words, about whether we should invade Iraq. We are supposed to accept the fiction that this has been already settled, and we are now in the “next phase” of discussing what to do in post-war Iraq. That way they can shift the discussion, aided by our feckless media, away from their losing hand and onto another topic—one that presumes the Bushies won the original debate.

Read on. You’ll learn that as with everything else with these guys, it always comes back to Florida.

Post Mortem

Uggabugga has the definitive word-for-word rundown on the press conference.

And check out the new blog Vote Quimby on Timmy Russert’s bizarre and inexplicable endorsement of Bush’s move to single handedly amend the constitution.

Timmy said: He laid out the case in his way – an interesting way. He said something very straightforward, that he has analyzed all the information, all the intelligence, all the data. That he had concluded as commander-in-chief that Saddam Hussein is a risk to American security and that he has made a decision. Therefore he has to act and has a constitutional duty to act.

You can not argue with that premise. You can argue that he is misinterpreting the data or the intelligence or he should have reached a different conclusion. But, the president will counter saying, “I’m sorry, you have a right to disagree with me. I have made this decision.”

I can’t? Watch me.

Although the President was extremely careful to avoid using the word “war” to describe the methods by which the United States would force Iraq to disarm, virtually nobody believes that an attack on another country that has its own stable government would not constitute a war.

So, although G-Dub put his hand on the bible (didn’t you just love that touch?) and swore to protect the Constitution of the United States, he cannot do so by attacking Iraq. If he wants to protect our Constitution, he will ask Congress to declare a war, which he will then prosecute as the Commander in Chief of our armed forces.

There. See how easy that was? I didn’t have to quibble with Bush’s interpretation of the data one iota. Hell, I could make the argument even if I granted the presupposition that Saddam’s Iraq poses a threat. Regardless of how seriously Bush takes his oath o’ office, war is simply not his call. Yes, Congress voted to cede that authority a few months ago, but again, the Constitution makes no provision for a branch of government signing away its authority on any matter, much less the gravest matter a nation can undertake. Which is to say, it wasn’t their call, at least not then.

Yeah, it’s an “interesting” new take on the whole “congress shall have the power to declare war,” constitutional thing. The congressional wimps may have abdicated their constitutional responsibility to the President in the case of Iraq , but they haven’t gotten around to giving him that power under the constitution yet. Perhaps they are saving it up for when they “constitutionally” declare him King.

William Saleton says that Bush knows the difference between a lie and the truth but that’s all he knows. Uh, Will, don’t think so. Bush definitely doesn’t know the difference between a lie and the truth. This means that we are back where we started. Bush doesn’t know anything.

And Tom Shales has the temerity to actually report on the elephant in the East Room (and I’m not talking about Karen Hughes.) The former hard-partying, frat-boy, mean drunk may be on prescription drugs:

The contrast between the foggy Bush of last night and the gung-ho Bush who delivered a persuasive State of the Union message to Congress not so long ago was considerable. Maybe Bush thought he was, indeed, coming across as cool and temperate instead of bored and enervated, and this was simply a rhetorical miscalculation. On the other hand, it hardly seems out of order to speculate that, given the particularly heavy burden of being president in this new age of terrorism — a time in which America has, as Bush said, become a “battlefield” — the president may have been ever so slightly medicated.

He would hardly be the first president ever to take a pill.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that mind you. Those Dr.’s Feelgood over at Walter Reed prescribe only the very best. (Just so long as it isn’t something really bad that requires the use of certain paraphernalia, if you know what I mean.) It is actually a citizen’s patriotic duty to use mind altering prescription drugs because it creates jobs in the pharmaceutical industry.

UPDATE:

TBOGG informs me that the probable drug in question is called “Weazac,” a sedative used on weasels and press secretaries. I did some research and it is a new combination therapy that is usually prescribed to counteract a Viagra and Ritalin addiction which is apparently becoming epidemic in the flabby, middle aged Republican doughboy population. Good to know.

I think that says it all.

Nobody Does It Better

Atrios links to a mutual hero, Charles Pierce subbing for Eric Alterman

WELCOME AGAIN TO THE MUSTANG RANCH

This overripe piece of faith-based palaver has been on the newsstands for four days now, long enough for the rot to endanger whatever honest journalism may be placed next to it on the shelf. For sheer sucking up to established power, Howard Fineman makes Larry King look like Thomas Paine, and there is so very much in this with which to make happy sport. (Cover your ears, Nick Kristof.)

Let us begin with the obvious: there’s absolutely no goddamn way how to know how genuine someone’s faith is. Perhaps W does spend every morning with a book of sermons. (The Bible, after all, has all those inconvenient passages about rich men, camels, and the eyes of needles.) It doesn’t matter if he spends it playing handball with the ghost of Thomas Aquinas. What goes on in his mind — insert cheap joke here — as regards the family Deity is so far beyond empirical proof that you might as well assert as fact that he’s leading the country based on his dreams.

There’s more where that came from