Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Legacy Of Ashes

by dday

The Bush Legacy Project is off to a rough start. Despite a fresh set of talking points and a round of gauzy interviews, the public doesn’t want a damn thing to do with this guy anymore. What has been done cannot be undone.

While the public is giving Obama a nice honeymoon, it’s finalizing its divorce from President Bush. A whopping 79% in the poll say they’re not going to miss him when he leaves office. That’s compared with 55% who said the same of Clinton in December of 2000. Moreover, almost half (48%) think that Bush will go down as one of the worst presidents in our history. Just 18% said that of Clinton and only 6% said that of Bush 41. But Bush 43 isn’t the only Republican who has taken a hit in the new NBC/WSJ poll. Dick Cheney leaves office with sporting an all-time low in his personal rating. And the Republican Party’s fav/unfav is 27%-52%, which is its lowest rating ever in the poll (by comparison, the Democratic Party’s is nearly reversed, 49%-28%).

The hubris of these people, thinking they can throw around a bunch of shady facts and figures and bamboozle the public into loving George Bush again. That ship has sailed. People may not know every single outrageous assault on the dignity of this nation perpetrated over the past eight years, but they certainly have a sense of the broad strokes – the failed wars, the economic collapse, the destruction of at least one American city (and Detroit is on the brink). Not to mention that there’s no contrition or even connection to current world events in these Bush “exit interviews.” They are as devoid of humanity as they are of substance. Ezra Klein had a good piece on this in the LA Times.

Asked to reveal what would surprise us most about his presidency, Bush replied that “every day has been pretty joyous.” That is indeed surprising. Asked if Barack Obama’s victory wasn’t a repudiation of Bush’s presidency, Bush allowed that some people may have voted for Obama in reaction to his presidency, but overall, “most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living room for the next four years explaining policy.”

The most galling answer, however, came when Gibson asked if Bush had any regrets. “The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq,” he said, entirely in the passive voice. “A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq. … I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.” In other words, Bush did not let the American people down. The intelligence community let Bush — and, let’s not forget, lots of others — down.

Nixon decided to give the country closure. That meant sacrificing the comfort of hiding behind partisanship, and it meant admitting the failures of his presidency. To date, Bush shows no such inclination. And on this, he retains agency. Conflicting evaluations of his presidency will simply collide in the postmodern thunderdome of contemporary partisanship. “I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history,” he said to Gibson. “I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.” Then he laughed, even though it wasn’t very funny.

See, Nixon, in his Shakesperian way, admitted his crimes. Bush gave a medal to Chuck Colson.

Actually, to me the Condi Rice interview on NPR was even more galling, considering that she had the nerve to offer a defense of the Administration on torture:

Q: And Guantanamo wasn’t sort of the only issue that tarnished the U.S. image. There is also the treatment of terror suspects, waterboarding, other methods of torture or –

RICE: Well, you know that I’m going to have to object, because the United States has always kept to its international obligations, which include international obligations on the Convention on Torture. The United States, the President, was determined after September 11th to do everything that was legal and within those obligations, international and domestic laws, to make sure that we prevented a follow-on attack.

They keep insisting that the ends justify the means, that the only focus in the minds of the top officials in the Administration was to “keep the country safe,” and thus they had to commit the war crimes. At the same time, they try to pin the abuse on a “few bad apples,” saying their actions are inconsistent with the comportment of the United States in meeting its international obligations.

The two statements are incompatible.

The physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was the direct result of Bush administration detention policies and should not be dismissed as the work of bad guards or interrogators, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Thursday.

The Senate Armed Services Committee report concludes that harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA and the U.S. military were directly adapted from the training techniques used to prepare special forces personnel to resist interrogation by enemies that torture and abuse prisoners. The techniques included forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, and until 2003, waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning […]

Administration officials publicly blamed the abuses on low-level soldiers– the work ”of a few bad apples.” Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., called that ”both unconscionable and false.”

”The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,” Levin said.

Arizona Republican and former prisoner of war Sen. John McCain, called the link between the survival training and U.S. interrogations of detainees inexcusable.

”These policies are wrong and must never be repeated,” he said in a statement.

(That’s right, man of honor and integrity John McCain popped up on this one. He has no right to say a word about it.)

And I should add, if the epitaph for the Bush Administration, so we are told, is “he kept us safe” (I guess every President has a 9-month mulligan on that), how can this be reconciled?

The military ignored steps before the invasion of Iraq that could have prevented the staggering number of casualties from roadside bombs, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general charged Tuesday.

The IG’s report says that the military knew years before the war that mines and homemade bombs, which the military calls “improvised explosive devices,” would be a “threat . . . in low-intensity conflicts” and that “mine-resistant vehicles” were available.

“Yet the military did not develop requirements for, fund or acquire” safer vehicles, the report says. The military invaded Iraq in 2003 “without having taken available steps to acquire technology to mitigate the known mine and IED risk to soldiers and Marines.”

Even after the war was under way, as the devices began taking a deadly toll and field commanders pressed for vehicles that were better protected from roadside bombs, the Pentagon was slow to act, the report says.

People may not know all the details, but they’re very clear on their feelings. The Bush Legacy Project mirrors the Bush Presidency Project: a failure. That’s not accountability, of course, and unless we start sending some people to jail these criminals will return like zombies to feast upon the body politic. The Bush reign isn’t even over and some of his favorite Democrats are calling to retain all of his intelligence officials, which is disturbing beyond the point of reason.

I think we need our own “Legacy Project” to fill in the details and make sure this never happens again. The public is on our side and willing to listen.

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Block Heads

by digby

So, the Republicans are saying that if the Democrats don’t agree to destroy the unions, they will block any loans to Detroit, and allow the auto companies to fail. And even that might not be enough to stop them because this wrecking crew seems have decided that the country needs to understand that if they vote for Democrats the Republicans will make them pay by ushering in another great depression.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, read this interesting post called “Could Detroit Trigger A Global Meltdown” in today’s Daily Beast (via Jane Hamsher) about the near bankruptcy of New York 30 years ago. The Republicans were eager to let the city go bankrupt and Gerald Ford dutifully followed their usual Hooverian economic ideology (over some objections within the administration) until he went to Europe for an economic summit. He was told that Europe considered such a thing so unthinkable that markets would likely see it as American itself going bankrupt and set off some very serious consequences. He backed down and decided to help the city:

Even today you can argue that what New York City went through was a virtual bankruptcy and a “cram down” of sacrifices. The “moratorium” on the debt principal was the equivalent of the default everyone tried to avoid. But what was avoided was something unknown. I wouldn’t argue today that banks around the world would be threatened by a bankruptcy of the American auto industry. Indeed, some European leaders are warning that a federal rescue of Detroit would be seen as “protectionist,” necessitating retaliatory trade steps in Europe. There is another crucial difference between a city and car companies. While going through a painful contraction, New York City got away with delivering fewer services to its customers. The auto industry would have to make cars that Americans still wanted to buy. But who can be sure that if the Big Three automakers go down, it won’t be like Lehman Brothers earlier this year, with surprising impacts around the world and at home? Would a default of the auto companies lead to collapses of countless suppliers and businesses around the country, or to Michigan and other states, or to financial institutions connected to them? In his 1980 book on the city’s fiscal crisis, “The Cost of Good Intentions,” the author Charles R. Morris—who more recently warned of a global meltdown because of subprime mortgages—was fascinated by the subject of why everyone in the middle of the crisis had difficulty understanding what was happening around them. “Maybe we were dumb,” Beame’s deputy mayor, James Cavanagh, famously stated after the city’s brush with financial ruin, “but nobody else seems to have understood what was happening either.” Then as now, an aphorism from Felix Rohatyn would seem to apply. Never place a bet that you can’t afford to lose.

Republicans spent the last eight years like drunken sailors on their first shore leave after years at sea. They wantonly drained the treasury of billions and billions of dollars on harebrained schemes to induce “birthpangs of democracy” around the world, chasing phantom enemies and enriching their defense contractor contributors. They created a lobbying culture so corrupt it finally collapsed of its own weight. They deregulated the financial industry so thoroughly that it created an elaborate ponzi scheme that has just about destroyed the world economy.

They have no standing to lecture anyone about responsibility, fiscal or otherwise, and no right to obstruct the cure for the problem they created.

It’s true that Democrats have, over the years, enabled Republicans and helped their ideology to run amock. But right now they are all we’ve got and their intentions, quite clearly, are to keep the economy from tanking, if only out of self interest. The Republicans are blocking this bridge loan for both narrow parochial reasons and longterm partisan gain. There’s no other way to interpret this otherwise inexplicable unwillingness of the Republicans to even grant a short term bridge loan. They want the economy to fail.

Update: ABC is reporting that there might be a handful of semi-sane Republicans who will stop this game of economic Russian roulette. Let’s hope so.

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New Strategery Same As The Old Strategery

by digby

Why anyone would listen to the Prince of Mayberry after he led the little would-be machiavellis over the cliff I don’t know, but he’s out there yammering away, giving advice, most of which sounds like pretty thin gruel. The Republicans are trying valiantly to pretend that the Chambliss runoff win means something positive when the fact is that Chambliss being in a runoff at all was a shocker. And apparently they are trying to convince themselves that winning a low turnout special election against a man who was caught with $90,000 dollars worth of ill gotten gains in his freezer is an accomplishment. Whatever.

Rove has lot of good advice about state houses and web 2.0 and the like. But there are others in the party are being a little bit more obvious about their strategy. Last night you had Arlen Specter saying he needs to get to the bottom of a Clinton era scandal by holding up the Eric Holder nomination. And now it looks like the Republicans are threatening to turn the Clinton hearings into a side show. (It would be a bad idea — they forget that Bill always kicks their asses in those venues.)

But I would guess that the noise machine is where they are putting their best hopes:

Time magazine foolishly gave Chicago politics its clean government seal of approval last month. Celebrating Barack Obama’s election, the magazine said John McCain’s attempts to tie Obama to corruption in the Windy City failed because they were “based on an outdated caricature.” The left-leaning magazine went on to note that Obama was bringing the Chicago trio of David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and John Podesta to the White House and insisted that these days, “Chicago Democrat appears to be a winning label.” Oops. File that one under things you wish you’d never written, especially since the gushing article never mentioned Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, also a Democrat. It was no secret he was under investigation and, as the stunning criminal complaint filed against him Tuesday charges, Blagojevich spent much of November trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder. Time isn’t the only news organization that turned a blind eye to the Chicago way of doing things. The swamp of the city’s machine politics has never been drained, but the national media chose not to look too closely at Obama’s connections, including to Blagojevich. Now it will have to because of the breathtaking scams charged in the case. And with the money-hungry Blagojevich heard on secret wiretaps talking brazenly about his willingness to make a corrupt deal with the President-elect, Obama will have to explain what, if anything, he and his staff knew. Obama’s quickie statement Tuesday that he had “no contact” with Blagojevich isn’t enough. Nor is his claim that it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment. It is not only appropriate – it is absolutely necessary that he clear the air on the explosive issue. Carrying any taint of Chicago corruption to the White House is the last thing Obama should want for his new administration. As it stands, the taint is already there, laid out in detail over 20 pages of the 75-page federal complaint.

The 76 page indictment certainly doesn’t “taint” the Obama people, as Fitzgerald said quite clearly. No matter. The article goes on to lay out some of the “questions” which allegedly taint the Obama team, all of which are complete bullshit. But at the end is a threat I think we can be assured they will carry out:

Fitzgerald can presumably rest now, but some of us won’t until we know how much the next President knew about the crime spree in his own backyard.

Remember, there is no way that Obama can ever answer those questions sufficiently. There will always be more, it will never be enough. The question is whether or not the right can successfully feed the MSM the kind of juicy tidbits that will keep their small minds interested. The right understands how to appeal to the puerile sensibilities of the kewl kidz in ways the left never mastered. (All that boring talk about torture and unitary executives and bankrupt ideology is so booooring. ) What they want is something with a little tabloid zing — easy to understand tales of individual bad behavior that allow them to cluck and gossip and revel in their own superiority. (For instance, the story today about the “modern day Lady Macbeth,” Mrs Blogojevich, is giving the press simultaneous orgasms all over town.)

It is the ultimate expression of the village mentality — small bore social disapprobation over personal failings as some sort of proxy for public morality. And it is completely inadequate, as we can see by the fact that Bush, even today, is given plaudits by the whole establishment for not having an affair in the white house, while he is not tarred at all by the fact that top members of his staff watched torture techniques acted out and approved them in the same place.

It is telling that of the mountains of books written about politics over the past two decades, there have been very few that addressed this problem and those that did* were not give the kind of serious attention that even books about white house pets are given. So, the media remain proud and defiant about their behavior and the Republicans pull these storylines off the shelf the minute they get an opening.

*Lapdogs, Fools For Scandal, The Hunting of the President

My Foreign Investor, Right Or Wrong

by dday

As Digby noted yesterday, the auto industry recovery package looked to be on life support. Looks like Mitch McConnell pulled the plug:

The Kentucky Republican, with a large auto presence in his state, had been seen as a potential ally for the industry, and he provided crucial support for the Treasury Department’s financial markets rescue fund this fall. But he has since endured a punishing reelection fight. And faced with strong resistance in his caucus, he said that the bill “isn’t nearly tough enough” and that he could not ask taxpayers to “subsidize failure.” […]

While not entirely surprising, the Republican opposition stands in contrast to what have been significant concessions by Democrats to try to move the bill forward.

“Much of this bill is dictated by the president. It is a stunning vote of no confidence,” [Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.)] said of the Republican opposition.

I think the first mistake was making a “deal” with the loathed President Bush and expecting that to hold.

But let’s be clear what’s going on here. A bunch of Southern-state Republicans (including, amazingly, Diaper Dandy David Vitter), from right-to-work states, want to push GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy to bolster the foreign auto presence in their home states. Kentucky has a Ford factory but they also have a Toyota plant in Georgetown, so McConnell’s on board.

Last week, Jane Hamsher explained the conflict of interest for Bob Corker in Tennessee:

He hasn’t mentioned the subsidies his own state of Tennessee has given to foreign automakers, making it harder for the Big 2 1/2 to compete:

Tennessee offered its richest incentive package — and perhaps the most government assistance and tax breaks ever for an American automobile plant — to lure Volkswagen to Chattanooga.

But the state’s chief business recruiter said Wednesday that the benefits from VW’s $1 billion assembly plant far will exceed what could top $500 million in government assistance and tax breaks for the project.

“The Volkswagen investment in this community is going to have a tremendous economic gain for the entire region,” said Matt Kisber, Tennessee’s commissioner for economic and community development. “I’m confident we’re going to have a very reasonable incentive package when you look at the initial costs of what is being offered compared with a much bigger long-term return.”

Yes, that’s the logic — these incentives will bring more money to the region than they cost. But it doesn’t always work out that way. As David Cay Johnston noted in Free Lunch, these kinds of subsidies frequently wind up costing communities much more than they ever make back:

Johnson writes: “The tribute Cabela’s demanded from Hamburg [Pennsylvania] amounted to roughly $8,000 for each man, woman, and child in town.” Johnson points out that between 2004 and 2006, Cabela’s earned $223.4 million. During those years, it collected at least $293.7 million in subsidies, more than its reported profits. Meanwhile a family business selling fishing and hunting gear was driven out of business in Hamburg.

Funny nobody is mentioning this.

The GOP does a lot of chest-thumping about “Country First” and patriotism. It’s fun to watch them destroy American manufacturing so they can keep Japanese and German corporate executives happy. OK, maybe not so fun.

…stop me if you’re surprised by this:

A $14 billion auto industry bailout bill stalled in the Senate on Thursday, and Republicans demanded upfront concessions from the United Auto Workers as the price for support needed for passage.

UAW officials were in talks with key Republicans and Democrats at the Capitol, although it wasn’t clear what, if any, givebacks the union was willing to discuss.

If the unions would only play ball by disbanding, we could have the auto industry in the same top shape as non-union entities like the financial industry in no time!

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They Just Don’t Give A Damn

by digby

While they insist that we shouldn’t play the blame game with the fine upstanding Masters of the Universe who destroyed the financial system, the Bush administration believes that those who are losing their homes are con artists — and, predictably, they assassinate the characters of anyone who tries to say otherwise:

More than any administration official, [FDIC Chairwoman]Mrs. Bair has called publicly for using billions of taxpayer dollars to finance the modification of loans threatened by default. But her advocacy has contributed to a battle that is pitting White House and Treasury officials against the F.D.I.C. and lawmakers in Congress. The discord has influenced programs that have so far proved insufficient to stem a tide of foreclosures that Moody’s Economy.com expects will affect 10 million homeowners over the next five years. And it is drawing personal conflicts and animosities into the policy-making process.White House and Treasury officials argue that Mrs. Bair’s high-profile campaigning is meant to promote herself while making them look heartless. As a result, they have begun excluding Mrs. Bair from some discussions, though she remains active in conversations where the F.D.I.C.’s support is needed, like the Citigroup rescue. A Treasury official involved in the discussions said that while Mrs. Bair was seen as a valuable part of the team, there was a sense of distrust and a concern that she always seemed to be pushing her own agenda.Mrs. Bair, for her part, says she has always sought to work constructively with other officials and is one of the few voices within the administration pushing for a comprehensive program to help at-risk borrowers.”I’ve heard the stories of people who are suffering and can stay in their homes if there is just a small adjustment to their loans,” said Mrs. Bair, a Republican who was appointed to her post by President Bush two years ago. “There are some people in the Republican Party who resent the idea of helping others,” she added. “But the market is broken right now, and unless we intervene, these people and the economy won’t be helped.”

To hell with these people. Do they contribute big bucks to the Republican party? Do they have houses on the Vineyard or fake ranches? I don’t think so. It’s just a bunch of losers like this, who will just have to tighten their belts and pay the price for the epic failure of conservative ideology:

“We’re hurting,” said Aoah Middleton, 31, who began missing payments on her mortgage in 2006 when her 5-year-old daughter was found to have cancer. She says she knows of people who took out loans they knew they could not afford, and do not deserve help. But she spent a year trying to catch up, and could meet her obligations if her interest rate were reduced. Instead, her home is scheduled to be sold at a foreclosure auction this month. “We are doing everything we can to be responsible. Banks are getting helped. Rich people are getting helped. Why isn’t there anyone to help me?”

She and others like her are obviously schemeing liars who must be taught a lesson.

Critics also argue that Mrs. Bair’s program, as well as others sought by Congressional Democrats, fail to adequately distinguish between homeowners who are genuinely at risk and those who might skip payments just to qualify for a modification. And they are skeptical of how much impact such plans will have on the national economy. “Every one of these programs seems like a great idea at first,” said Tony Fratto, the White House deputy press secretary. “Our concerns are that many of them pay off people who knowingly made bad decisions and lenders who created the subprime crisis. It’s unquestionable that rewarding those people lacks support among the American people.”

So there you have it. They don’t want to play the blame game when it comes to wealthy CEOs who are still collecting bonuses for their failures —- everyone knows the government shouldn’t micromanage business behavior. But they draw the line at helping homeowners because they can’t take a chance on rewarding immoral behavior.
Besides, their feelings are hurt:

“It’s become clear that if you stick your head up, it’ll get cut off,” said one White House official. “We’re done in two months. The next administration can try to find a way out of that maze.”

Poor babies. Here they bankrupt the country and nearly destroy the world financial system and all they get is grief.

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Epic Ideological Fail

by digby

Before you listen to one more wingnut try to tell you that the financial crisis and global recession was caused by irresponsible black people, illegal immigrants and Fannienfreddie, take this short, simple trip down memory lane with economist Joseph Stiglitz in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. It concludes with this:

The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, “I have found a flaw.” Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.” “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan said. The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today.

Democrats are working very hard to discredit the very concept of ideology in favor of technocratic competence. And I would guess most Americans find that to be something of a relief by now. But I think it’s as much a mistake to sweep this under the rug as it is to let bygones be bygones on the torture regime. There is ideology and then there is ideology and people should know the difference. These dogmatic deregulators and market fundamentalists ran a decades long experiment that failed on an epic scale. If the country doesn’t understand what went wrong here — if they get confused by complexity and propaganda — there is every reason that the free lunch mentality these ideologues promoted will make a comeback the minute we see the light at the end of the tunnel. Ideology matters.

Update: Some of us have talking about this for a long, long time.

I Am A Scientist

by dday

Here’s the expected energy team for President-elect Obama:

Obama will name Steven Chu his choice for Energy secretary, Lisa Jackson for EPA administrator and Carol Browner as energy “czar” reporting to the president.

It is unclear whether the Browner position is cabinet level.

This will not be officially announced this week.

No Blagojevich in there? Proof that he was all set to hire him before the scandal broke. When will Obama resign???!!one!?questionmark???

Carol Browner is a former regulator who administrated at the EPA under Bill Clinton, and believes that government action to regulate the climate can create economic opportunity. Lisa Jackson was New Jersey’s environmental protection head and then chief of staff to Gov. Jon Corzine.

But I want to focus on Steven Chu because he’s something quite novel for Cabinet-level government work: a scientist.

If you look at the history of the Department of Energy, you’ll find that there’s never been a Secretary who actually was an expert on energy. The closest we’ve ever gotten was Charles Duncan who had a chemical engineering degree and had a cup of coffee out of school at Humble (later Exxon). For some reason it just never occurred to the President to install a person who was qualified for the position.

Instead we’ve been subjected to a long line of career politicians, military men and folks that were as far away from energy as you could get (Reagan’s first Secretary of Energy was an oral surgeon) . Is it any wonder that our energy policy is set by industry since the person who is supposed to do that doesn’t have a clue?

Not only does Chu have a clue, he’s a Nobel-prize winning scientist and is already working under the auspices of the Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. A scientist, ya’ll. As the Secretary of Energy. Oh. My. Gawd.

He moved from the arena of quantum physics to political advocacy for admirable reasons.

Consider this. There’s about a 50 percent chance, the climate experts tell us, that in this century we will go up in temperature by three degrees Centigrade. Now, three degrees Centigrade doesn’t seem a lot to you, that’s 11° F. Chicago changes by 30° F in half a day. But 5° C means that … it’s the difference between where we are today and where we were in the last ice age. What did that mean? Canada, the United States down to Ohio and Pennsylvania, was covered in ice year round.

Five degrees Centigrade.

So think about what 5° C will mean going the other way. A very different world. So if you’d want that for your kids and grandkids, we can continue what we’re doing. Climate change of that scale will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We’re not talking about ten thousand people. We’re not talking about ten million people, we’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently.

And he is optimistic about what we can do about this crisis, through energy efficiency, through developing new technologies for fuel, through building a new energy economy at home. This is a guy who is rooting around in bug entrails looking for new sources of energy, with decent results. And this is a godsend of a quote:

Applause broke out when he described how companies, after claiming efficiency gains and lowered costs were impossible, “miraculously” achieved them once they “had to assign the jobs from the lobbyists to the engineers.”

There has been no greater sea change in Obama’s cabinet selections than this choice of an engineer, a scientist, to head the Department of Energy, after eight years of an Administration that waged war on science. It’s the difference between having a serious conversation with the American people about a new Apollo Project for renewable energy and a post-carbon future and “Frosty the Coalman.”

(Yes, that’s real. Go ahead and look.)

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Taint That A Shame

by digby

Today on MSNBC, Shuster had on Pat Buchanan who said that Obama reacted “abnormally” to the Blagojevich news and failed to disclose which of his aides may have spoken to the Governor about his seat. Harold Ford very ineffectually defended Obama. (He spent so much time validating Buchanan before making his point, it was hard to tell which side he was on.)

Shuster interrupted the back and forth to “clarify” the problem by showing that David Axelrod had said a couple of months ago that Obama was talking to the Governor about the seat, but last night amended his comments to say he was mistaken. Shuster parses this to suggest that they are being clever and trying to draw phony distinction between speaking directly and indirectly to the governor.

Buchanan replied:

Let me tell you, the problem is not that Rahm Emmanuel or Axelrod are involved in some deal.It is that they may be “tainted” by the fact that they talked to a Governor who is trolling and selling his Senate seat. They may have talked to him and if they did, they are supposed to report that to the US Attorney. Let me tell you Harold, a lot of my friends in the Nixon white house didn’t do a thing when some guy came running in saying our guys just got caught breaking in and they didn’t do anything with it.

Nixon!

As Bob Cesco pointed out earlier, “taint” is the word of the day, being used by wingnut bloviator all over the airwaves. And that’s to be expected. It’s what they do. But sadly, the MSM clones are running with devils once again. Shuster smelled blood:

Shuster: I agree with you Pat. And I think Obama needs to give a better clarification than he has and that he blew it on the first day.

But in any case we’ll wait and see what happens tomorrow with Obama at his news conference tomorrow tomorrow where surely he’s going to be asked about all of this again.

You can sure tell that Shuster cut his teeth at Fox during the Lewinsky pageant. It’s politics as scandal theatre, where Obama is judged by his performance on opening night.

You can see by the energy and excitement among the gasbags that they want nothing more than to wallow in this thing as long as they can. They are terrifically bored by stories about bailouts and health care and the like. This is what they live for — endless speculation about things which they can’t possibly get answers for. (They must have closed down the Barbizon School of blond former prosecutors because we are seeing a slew of white guys in suits giving expert commentary so far. But perhaps the booking people just haven’t sorted out their rolodexes yet.)

So it looks like it’s game on, at least for a little while. What a nice Christmas present for the media.

Update: Arlen Specter says he’s going to try to tank the Holder nomination on the basis of a Clinton scandal.

It’s quite clever. They are just picking up right where they left off in 2000 as if the Bush administration never happened, perhaps even drawing lines between the old and new if they’ play their cards right. And the press seems eager to go there with them.

I can see why they’d want to pretend the Bush years were just a bad dream. After all, they were exposed as shills and dupes for an immoral, incompetent president. But they still consider their glory days to be those they spent chasing trumped up Clinton corruption scandals and poking around in the president’s pants. To the best of my knowledge they have never admitted in the smallest way that their obsession with tabloid scandal and character assassination was intrinsic to the disgusting, politics that came of age in that era. Why wouldn’t they want to go back there? They had a ball.

Update II: Boehlert and Foser have been following this all day at County Fair. Ugh.

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Eve of Destruction

by digby

So the Republicans have thrown a roadblock in front of the auto bridge loan. There is no longer any doubt that they want the Big Three to fold by the end of the year.

Emergency aid for the nation’s imperiled auto industry was thrown into jeopardy Wednesday, opposed by Republicans who were revolting against a hard-fought deal between Democrats and the Bush White House to speed $14 billion to ailing carmakers.

The House was on track to vote on the bailout Wednesday night, and Democrats held out hope that it could be enacted by week’s end. But a growing number of GOP senators declared they would not go along.

And now the house is in on the act. Here’s Stoller:

The Republican House membership might try a vicious strategy to stop the auto bailout bill. Typically, bills go through the rules committee in the House, which controls floor time and which amendments are allowed to be proposed and voted on. However, Republicans use a tactic called a ‘Motion to Recommit’, which is a motion allowing the minority to add an amendment or kill the bill outright by sending it back to the committee out of which it was reported. During the Delay era, Republicans were ruthless about MTRs, and they were routine matters that went down by party line pretty much every single time. During the Pelosi era, Republicans propose MTRs and Blue Dogs often threaten to vote with the Republicans, so they are used to overwhelm Pelosi’s control of the chamber.

Tonight, Republicans in the House might use the MTR to add all sorts of nasty stuff to the bailout. Below is an email circulating in the House about what they might do. Right now, the only amendment the Rules Committee authorized for a vote is one that adds oversight to the TARP program, but as you’ll see, there’s ample opportunity for Republicans to get very nasty if they can rustle up the votes from wayward Democrats (probably Blue Dogs). read on

This is really beyond destructive. These people are willing to take down the entire economy so they can bust the unions and prop up a completely discredited ideology with the bodies of middle class Americans who are losing everything.

And I hate to say it, but the fact that so many of the autoworkers are black just makes it all the sweeter for some of those “right to work” legislators, I’m sure.

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Modernism and The Book

by digby

Check out this discussion between Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee on gay marriage. It lays out the issue as well as I’ve ever seen it:

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Why can’t Democratic “strategists” do that?