Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Gahhhhh!! Could Bush Be Doing A Really Good Job???!

by tristero

I just about had an aneurysm when I read this:

…eyebrows popped up last week when none other than Richard Perle , former Reagan assistant secretary of defense, former Bush brain-truster on the Defense Policy Board, and a key promoter of the war to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, blistered the administration as “dysfunctional…” [italics in original]

Oh. My. God. Do you realize what this means? Richard Perle, who has been right about exactly nothing in his long career, whose grasp on reality is so thin he thinks the UN is on the banks of the Hudson River, Richard Perle believes the present administration is doing a lousy job. And, gasp! there is only one conceivable conclusion to draw from this:

George Bush, we hardly know ye. You must be doing one heckuva job.

I staggered back from my computer, my entire world overturned. If Richard fucking Perle thinks the Bushites are incompetent, my God, have I been wrong about the Bush administration all these years? Could it be that no one could have prevented 9/11? Could the Bush/Iraq war actually be a great idea? Could the situation there actually be going “remarkably well,” as Cheney recently said? No. Wait. I can’t believe it. Well, shoot me in the face, but it’s inescapable. Perle’s angry, fearful criticism of the Bushites can only mean that – no, it can’t be, but logically it follows – Dick Cheney is as sane as you and I.*

Clearly, I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

But then, I read a little further:

…eyebrows popped up last week when none other than Richard Perle , former Reagan assistant secretary of defense, former Bush brain-truster on the Defense Policy Board, and a key promoter of the war to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, blistered the administration as “dysfunctional” when it comes to stopping someone from bringing “a nuclear weapon or even nuclear material into the United States…

“If [the Bush administration] can’t get itself together to organize a serious program for finding nuclear material on its way to the United States, then it ought to be replaced by an administration that can.”

But President Bush , Perle emphasized, is not to blame for this sorry state of affairs. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that if one could . . . put this proposition to the president, he would first be shocked to learn that we don’t have the capability. Secondly, [he] would immediately order that we develop it.” [italics in original]

Oh, thank God, thank Flying Spaghetti Monster, may offerings be proferred to the Cathode, the Anode, and the Holy Grid. Nothing to worry about. Perle’s still nuts, it’s just that the mad dog that is his paranoia is chasing its tail. And Bush is still the worst president. Ever.

Y’see, the Bush administration is dysfunctional to Perle because it isn’t totally freaked out, in a George C. Scott Strangelovian way about, get this, “finding nuclear material on its way to the United States.”

Man, dig it! The assumption implied by Perle’s deliberate grammatical choices is that there actually is terrorist nuclear material on its way here. Right now. Hiding in the Evian you now are allowed to carry on flights again.

Think about it. If Claude Rains in Notorious can stash uranium in wine botttles, why NOT plutonium in designer water bottles?

I feel, I smell the terror. Today, sez Perle, the nuclear material is on its way. Tomorrow, it arrives and gets unloaded by some of Ann Coulter’s foul-smelling men. And on Saturday, the bomb…no, THE Bomb…is gonna blast us all…you, too, Missouri…to hell and beyond. Impeach Bush now!

Okay, a reality check. Experts know a few things about the threat of terrorist nuclear explosions. First and foremost, certain terrorists, including the bin Laden gang, have sought nuclear explosives for years. This is serious shit and you damn well better believe it we should it be very concerned. Especially with lunatics like AQ Khan still on the loose…oh, excuse me, he’s under house arrest, I forgot. That’s stopping him.

But I digress, so before going further, let’s get this upfront and clear as a bell. No one seriously disagrees with the fact that nuclear arms in the hands of terrorists is an alarming proposition. Nor does anyone seriously disagree that security for nukes, especially in Russia, has been atrocious, alarmingly so. Nor does anyone disagree that more can and should be done to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on nukes.

The real question, the only question, is this: How likely is the threat of nuclear terrorism in 2006, and for the next four or five years? The answer seems to be, “very, very unlikely.”

Note: I am not saying the imminent threat of a nuclear explosion is very, very unlikely. Bush, after all, still is president, and I am convinced he wants to be the first since Truman to Push The Button, probably on Iran. And there are some other nuts in the world who also have nukes.

But nuclear terrorism, perpetrated by a McVeigh clone or al Qaeda? I can’t see it in the near future for many reasons. Let’s look at a few.

Indeed althought there have been efforts to obtian them, terrorists have, by all accounts failed to get usable “nuclear materials,” meaning stuff that goes bang, like plutonium. How have they failed? They’ve been played for suckers, for one thing. Like a 15 year old dork from the suburbs of New Jersey,* bin Laden thought he was copping the finest Mexican but ended up with oregano and toasted bananna peels.

And there are many good reasons why no one. at least no state, would be willing to sell nukes to terrorists. Do I have to spell them out? The moment they are traced back to the state – and they will be traced back, even given the poor accounting of nuclear stockpiles in Russia – that state has less than 48 hours of existence left. And that’s for starters.

What about non-state actors? Well, there are a lot of obstacles to that happening, too, when you think about it. First of all, y’gotta steal some bang-bang that’s been refined, processed, and ready to rock. Y’gotta know where it is. Now, it’s not that difficult to find that out, I’m sure, but what is difficult, especially if you have the kind of education even a Muhammad Atta had – and most rank and file terrorists don’t – is knowing what to look for, knowing how to steal it, how to store it, and how to transport it. And that’s over and above the ordinary risks a normal thief would have to go through, like the fact that the Man is after you, and unscrupulous competitors want to know where you stashed the goods so they can rip you off.

Again, for the less than fleet of mind, I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m saying that given what we publicly know about who is doing terrorism today – and I stress the “today” – it’s just not that easy to get their hands on the Big Bang. It just doesn’t seem that likely.

But let’s say they did. Let’s say that somewhere between bin Laden’s hideout and Cheney’s undisclosed location is a large stash of nasty stuff in the hands of nasty people. Remember, now. No current state, that’s right: no current state would be suicidal enough to sell a working bomb, or the makings of one, to terrorists. What that means is that you need people – plural – very conversant with Western physics to build the contraption. Sure, a pretty smart Princeton undergrad, say, can figure out how to design a nuke. But design AND build it? In complete isolation? Without reliable access to specialized supplies and test equipment?

Doesn’t sound that doable to me. But, let’s keep playing the game. They’ve built the bomb. Well, they can’t really test it, y’know. Come to think of it, how they gonna store and maintain the thing? Y’can’t just stuff it in the back of a cave wrapped in a nice rug and trust that two guys with a working knowledge of an ak-47 and a childhood education consisting of memorizing Qu’ranic suras are gonna know how to care and feed a nuclear bomb, for crissakes. That takes expertise which present-day terrorists don’t have. Remember: 9/11 was box cutters. Spain was cellphone detonation. London was timers. These are a far cry, technologically, from a nuclear warhead and don’t forget, Ramzi Yousef was captured because of an explosive accident. The bastards in al Qaeda may be among the worst people alive in the world, but they aren’t rocket scientists. Or nuclear.

And that brings up Perle’s bete noire. How do you transport a nuke? I have no idea, but I’m willing to bet that you don’t simply pack it up in a fedex shipping carton surrounded by a lot of old wadded newspaper and expect it to arrive in one piece at a pier on the Hudson River, next to the UN (to lapse into Perle’s geographical illiteracy). And even if it did arrive, it has to be picked up, at least partially assembled, then tested, deployed, and detonated. And I strongly suspect that arming and firing a nuclear weapon, even a small one, is a lot more elaborate than twirling your moustaches, shouting “I’m king of the world!” and pushing a big red button.

Could a terrorist nuclear explosion happen in the US in the next four years? Yes, it could. Is it very likely? I can’t see how anyone can say that with a straight face.

Should the US take the threat of future nuclear terrorism seriously and institute serious efforts to prevent it?

Of course we should. And you know what would be the most effective way to prevent a nuclear terrorist act in the next ten years, other than more effective port screenings, and the like? Elect American leaders who understand that it is sheer insanity to invade other countries unilaterally, to prop up corrupt oligarchs like the Saudis, and behave as if the United States is the Roman Empire Reloaded. Why is all this crazy? Because the US today is not only breeding more terrorists in Iraq, it is breeding more sophisticated ones.

With every death caused by an American, or blamed on an American, virulent, highly personal hatred of America and Americans spreads. And don’t kid yourself. “They” may already hate us, but atrocities like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo make it quite clear that the present US government has demonstrated that anti-Americanism is infinitely expandable.

I’m not naive. The US will never be the city on a hill. I’m not talking Cumbaya. I’m talking commonsense. If you were bin Laden, and you wished to expand the pool of potential violent opponents of the US, if you wanted to recruit among the best and the brightest, those that could build and deploy an atomic bomb, what could you possibly do better than what the US is already doing in Iraq? In Afghanistan? In Israel/Palestine? And so many other places?

Perle, of course, is totally paranoid, in a Bircher kind of a way. But paranoids have a creepy habit of generating self-fulfilling prophecies. The longer the US continues to privilege the paranoids like Perle, by demanding an “end to evil” and trying to rule the world by hard force, the sooner Perle will be right.

And believe me, you don’t want to live in a world where a man like Richard Perle is right. A Hobbesian world would be paradise by comparison.

Special Note: Obviously, this is all my speculation, but it is something I looked into at one point in some detail. I believe if you search my blog, you will find links to articles and books that make the following points: present-day terrorists are not that well-educated in Western science, especially physics, terrorists generally prefer low-tech strategies to high-tech ones, and the barriers – financial, intellectual, strategical, and practical – to the successful deployment of a nuclear weapon, even the lower tech so-called “dirty” bomb, are formidable. If people are interested, I’ll try to scare up new links, but there are experts who have publicly said as much as I’ve said: Nuclear terrorism is a serious threat, but it is unlikely, at present to be an imminent one. That does not mean the US should do nothing. But there are far more imminent dangerous threats that the US faces, and Perle is wildly wrong to get so hysterical. As usual.

*Of course, I’m aware of the fallacy of the ad hominem here. Geez, not only on the internets does no one know if you’re a dog, but no one has any sense that you may not be a dog.

**I have the right to say this. I grew up in suburban New Jersey so I know whereof I speak, although I can honestly claim that I never bought bananna peels thinking they were something more potent. Whether I’m saying I never tried, or did but never got burned, I’ll leave for your fevered speculation.

ROTFLMAO

by tristero

Until it reaches its entirely unexpected Aristocrats-level punchline, this has to be one of the finest Times editorials of the past 6 years. Here’s a taste:

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.

And then, whammo! Here’s the entire last paragraph:

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office.

Top that if you can, Stephen Colbert!

Now You’re Talking

by digby

Give me a second here, Rush, because I want to share something with you. I am deeply concerned about a country, the United States, leaving the Middle East. I am worried that rival forms of extremists will battle for power, obviously creating incredible damage if they do so; that they will topple modern governments, that they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West. People say, “What do you mean by that?” I say, “If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies.

Huh? So he’s saying that oil prices will go up unless we abandon Israel and our allies? What the hell is he saying?

I have to give the Republicans credit, I really do. The head of their party, the president of the United States, the leader of the free world is virtually unintelligible when he speaks, he insults people, he creates international incidents and when not making gaffe after gaffe he is almost entirely incoherent. Yet they just got away with two days of wall-to-wall pearl clutching and hanky wringing over an irrelevant Democrats’ blown punchline.

They may not be able to keep their majority after this disasterous experiment in Tinkerbell governance, but they continue to impress with their gigantic brass… impudence. Gentlemen, I salute you.

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Consequences

by digby

Now this is funny…

Said Bush, in an interview with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh: “Anybody who is in a position to serve this country ought to understand the consequences of words. …

He knows whereof he speaks:

President Bush said Wednesday that American troops under fire in Iraq aren’t about to pull out, and he challenged those tempted to attack U.S. forces, “Bring them on.”

That worked out really well.

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Funding

by digby

John Fund responded to my post of last night by sending an email telling me that he is friends with a black GOP activist named Ted Hayes, who hails from Waters’ district. Good for him.

He also pointed out that Waters was, in fact, one of those who voted on one bill to cut off funds for the war, which means that his taunting had some basis in fact. What he doesn’t explain is why she should be ashamed of it.

This “cutting off funds for the troops” is an old Republican shibboleth going back to Vietnam. They use it very effectively to say that Democrats don’t support the troops, but it’s actually the only method the constitution provides for the congress to force an intransigent president to change course in a war when the people demand it. This is a democracy last I checked and we do have at least a little say in these things.

There are always a few who see the writing on the wall earlier than others. When Johnson wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam some senators famously demured:

Gaylord Nelson … as the junior Senator from Wisconsin in 1965, joined two others in voting against funding to escalate the Vietnam war. At the time Nelson said:

“At a time in history when the Senate should be vindicating its historic reputation as the greatest deliberative body in the world, we are stumbling over each other to see who can say ‘yea’ the quickest and the loudest. I regret it, and I think some day we shall all regret it. . . .

“Reluctantly, I express my opposition . . . here by voting ‘nay.’ The support in the Congress for this measure is clearly overwhelming. Obviously, you need my vote less than I need my conscience.”

As time went on and the war became more and more untenable, more agreed with that argument. And finally, after years of protests and many tens of thousands more dead, a bi-partisan veto-proof majority voted for an amendment which forbade any further U.S. escalation of the war in Vietnam. The next year, after Watergate, a lame duck congress voted to cut off funding.

It’s not as if they were blameless. As Nelson said, in the early days they were “stumbling over each other to see who can say ‘yea’ the quickest and the loudest.” But after years of public debate and outcry, they finally heard what the people were saying and they did what they had to do. Too late, as it turned out, for a lot of people.

Morton Kondracke writes about this topic in this week’s column, bemoaning the fact that a Democratic majority may do the same thing. He believes in the simplistic fairly tale that we would have won Vietnam if it weren’t for the dirty hippies so he finds this a damning propect. But it is only a possibility because of the lies and strategic blunders that got this country into that misbegotten war and the bungling that’s characterized it ever since. At some point you have to do something. And the only thing a congress can do in the face of presidential intransigence and incompetence is deny the president the money to screw things up any further.

President Bush could make it easy on himself and the nation by listening to what the people are telling him, being honest and coming up with the least bad plan out of an array of bad options. But he won’t. He has said that he will not leave Iraq and he’s shown that his administation has no skill to do anything else. Unless he does, there will, by necessity, be more who will be forced to vote against funding, not because they don’t support the troops but because their constituents demand it. It shouldn’t have to come to that.

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Imagine That!

by tristero

How strange:

Florida voters using electronic ballot machines are having persistent problems choosing Democrats in early elections, the Miami Herald reports.

The touch-screen gizmos seem strangely attracted to Republican candidates. One voter needed assistance from an election official, and even then, needed three tries to convince the machine that he wanted to vote for Democrat Jim Davis in the gubernatorial race, not his Republican opponent Charlie Crist.

Another voter who went Democrat across the board kept finding Republicans listed in the summary screen. He made repeated attempts until, finally, the machine registered his votes correctly, and he cast his ballot.

Yet another frustrated voter who complained of difficulties selecting a Democrat was told that the machine she was using had been troublesome. Poll workers fiddled with it for a bit, and then it seemed to work properly.

Supporting The Troops

by digby

I know it’s very exciting and enjoyable for the media to incessantly masturbate each other on camera while chattering about whether a candidate who’s not even on the ballot should apologise for some trivial bullshit, but this story getting no play in the days before an election is downright journalistic malfeasance:

Exploiting GOP vulnerability in the Nov. 7 elections, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki flexed his political muscle Tuesday and won U.S. agreement to lift military blockades on Sadr City and another Shiite enclave where an American soldier was abducted.

U.S. forces, who had set up the checkpoints in Baghdad last week as part of an unsuccessful search for the soldier, drove away in Humvees and armored personnel carriers at the 5 p.m. deadline set by al-Maliki. Iraqi troops, who had manned the checkpoints with the Americans, loaded coils of razor wire and red traffic cones onto pickup trucks.

The withdrawal was greeted with jubilation in the streets of Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite enclave where the Americans have focused their manhunt and where anti-American sentiment runs high. The initial American reaction to the order, which was released by Mr. Maliki’s press office, strongly suggested that the statement had not been issued in concert with the American authorities.

“Our commanders have his press release and are reviewing how best to address these concerns,” Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said early Tuesday afternoon, about an hour after the order was issued.

Late Tuesday night, after hours of silence, a senior American Embassy official who had been delegated to return reporters’ phone calls said the prime minister’s order was “the result of a meeting” between Mr. Maliki, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq. “It was essentially something that Maliki wanted to do and Casey agreed to it,” the official said.

[…]

Al-Maliki’s move Tuesday came three days after his closest aide, Hassan al-Suneid, said unabashedly that the prime minister was trying to capitalize on American voter discontent with the war and White House reluctance to open a public fight with the Iraqi leader just before the midterm election. Much of the discontent is fueled by soaring death tolls among U.S. troops and their inability to contain raging sectarian violence 3 1/2 years after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

How very convenient for the administration that the press is concentrating on irrelevancies when a story like this breaks, eh?

The Maliki government is playing Bush for the cowardly loser he is, apparently threatening him with more bad headlines, so the Americans backed off and left a soldier behind.

But look no further, citizens. John Kerry blew a punchline and that requires a full-on media frenzy. Nothing is more fun and exciting to the kewl kidz than going after a simple meaningless anti-Democrat story that pleases the GOP establishment. Everybody wins. Except the American people, of course. Or that abandoned soldier in Iraq.

I would love to see the Democrats blow this up. It’s the hardest of hardball, but I am finding it difficult to think of a good reason why these people should be immune from the kind of treatment they dished out to Clinton over Somalia and would dish out again no matter who we were fighting. I realize that they have retired the concept of hypocrisy, but this is beyond anything we’ve seen. The Bush administration is so weak and so useless that they are allowing Maliki and the Sadr militia to dictate terms to the US military because of the US elections.

Try to imagine what would happen in a Democrat did such a thing.

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Apologies Accepted

by digby

If you are watching the wall-to-wall Kerry-hates-the-troops coverage today on the cablers you can see perfectly how the patented GOP sanctimonious “demand for an apology” works.

• First, you have to be a phony hypocritical Republican. Democrats can never pull this off.
• Second, you have to choose a comment that isn’t particularly heinous or is vaguely worded. You want the comment to not be particularly bad, for reasons that become obvious when you get to the endgame.
• Third, being desperate to do your bidding because they’ve been a little bit harsh and are eager to get back in your good graces, you give the media tons of footage and sound-bites to work with.
• Fourth you pump the story as hard as you can by demanding that other Democrats distance themselves from the remarks, which they begin to do slowly at first then pile on like a litter of puppies.
• Fifth, you wear down the perpetrator (who has, remember, done nothing really wrong) until you get him to apologise.

And then after all this is said and done, you call all Democrats pussies because they aren’t stand-up guys. After all, they just bowed and scraped and apologised for a trivial comment they had no need to apologise for. Who can trust such weaklings to run the government?

Pay no attention to the death, destruction, incompetence and horror that lies at the center of this coming election. The narrative says Republicans are brave and strong and Democrats are weak and cowardly and that is how it must be. Even if they have to make up a story to illustrate that, the press will do its duty.

Update: If we played this game with equal fervor we’d be demanding that Bush ask for an apology from Rush Limbaugh for what he said about Michael J. Fox, since he’s his new BFF and all. But we don’t.

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The Lie Of “Equal Extremism”

by tristero

So I’m reading this NY Times article on the attempts by South Dakota’s fine citizens to repeal the pro-coathanger legislation foisted on them by radical christianists when I came across an interesting little rhetorical construction.

The author tried to compare the tactics of the South Dakota pro-coathangers to the pro-choicers, trying to make them out as equally guilty of extreme rhetoric. So I thought I’d propose a little guessing game this morning.

Now don’t cheat and click on the link before you’ve taken the time to guess how to finish the second sentence. You want to illustrate that both sides are equally inflammatory:

For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards…[INSERT HERE EXAMPLE BY PRO-CHOICERS OF EQUALLY EXTREME AND SICK TACTICS]

So how does this sentence finish up? What tactics can “the other side” deploy that are as extreme an argument as filling billboards with bloody fetuses? Lesseee:

For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards, no posters of hemorraghing 14 year-old girls passed out in a filthy alley.

Not bad. That would show that “both sides” – hereafter abbreviated to BS – are prone to equally revolting demagoguery. But the problem is the pro-choice movement never has done anything remotely like that.

So let’s try again:

“For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards, no graphic tv commercials showing a 50-year old degenerate raping a 13-year old at knife point.

Hmm…Well, again, it does meet the BS criteria, but come to think of it, there isn’t a tv station in the country that would ever show such a commercial.

Wow! I guess it’s harder than you might think to find equally extreme tactics when you’re trying to use BS in an article on abortion. Can we come up with anything the pro-choice crowd has used that’s as dramatically disgusting as billboards filled with bloody fetuses?

One more try:

For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards, no trucks with billboard-sized pictures showing deformed progeny of third generation incest, either.

Nah. no pro-choice group has ever done anything like that.

Okay, give up? How does the NY Times balance the extremism of the pro-coathanger crowd by showing “the other side” can get equally inflammatory and out-there on the cultural margins? Here’s what the reporter actually wrote:

For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards, no absolute claims are being offered about women’s rights.

And that’s the reason, ladies, gentlemen, and Republicans, why I say that the culture war in this country isn’t between the left and the right, or the religious and the secular.

The culture war is really between extreme rightwing fanatics and the rest of us.

Special note: Some of you might point out that my use of the phrase “pro-coathanger” to describe the anti-choice gang is just as extreme as calling pro-choice people “baby-killers.” Well, yes, of course it is. And that is the point. I’m using the term deliberately here to shock you into realizing that that is how perverse our rhetoric has to get even to begin to come close to matching the revolting rhetoric of the far-right that we take for granted as normal discourse.

For example, to counter the inaccurate term “pro-life” with the accurate “pro-choice” is to cede the rhetorical advantage to the extreme right by permitting them to lie about their position. There is nothing even remotely pro-life about insisting that poor girls who get pregnant without wanting to must suffer the horrors of an incompetent medical procedure. And yet, every day, this is how the mainstream discussion of abortion is conducted, even by liberals who really ought to know better.

Well…what about using “anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion” to label the “two sides?” That seems fair, right?

It does not. There are very few people, even those of us who insist that the state has no right to tell a woman what to do with her body, who go around saying, “I’m pro-abortion. Every woman should have one. Men should try them, too!” The pro/anti-abortion construction grossly distorts the complex positions that nearly everyone has.

So…what is the best way to characterize the “two sides?” Well, the advantage of “pro-choice” is, as mentioned above, that it is accurate. I suppose you could characterize the nutjobs as “anti-choice” and be technically correct. But that doesn’t capture either the Puritanism or the explicitly punitive element of their opposition to decent healthcare for poor women. They want raped teenagers to suffer unspeakable additional shame should they choose to terminate a pregnancy. And they certainly want all women who fuck for pleasure – ie, all women except for Phyllis Schafly wannabes – to be ashamed of themselves, and if they get pregnant, to “suffer the full consequences of their sin.”

So, while I admit it’s nauseating and extreme, “pro-coathanger” has the distinct virtue of being a 100 percent accurate description of the far-right’s position on whether women have the right to choose. And I will persist in labelling them as such for as long as they feel they can get away with labelling those of us who want poor women to have equal access to competent healthcare “baby killers” or even “pro-abortion.”

Oh, and one final thing. Perhaps you think that the far-right hasn’t done anything so sick as to promote billboards of bloody fetuses. You would be wrong:

Two 8-by-22-foot rolling billboards displaying extremely graphic photos of aborted fetuses are expected to travel state Route 8 and interstates 76 and 77 in and around Akron this morning and afternoon. The trucks, which critics are calling “deplorable,” will cruise through downtown Akron during the rush hour today and head to Canton on Thursday

And if you click, you’ll be taken to a site that collects articles from many states where this tactic was used. That’s right, folks. The use of trucks with billboard-sized pictures of fetuses was part of a well-funded national campaign.

But of course, calling for women to have an absolute right to do what they want with their body is an equally extreme tactic.

NOT.

Rolling In The Pen With Pigs

by digby

George W. Bush is so desperate to get his embarrassed base out to vote that he’s appearing with extremist talk show pig Rush Limbaugh tomorrow.

That honor and dignity schtick is now so dead it stinks — they aren’t even pretending anymore. He is sullying the presidency worse than a million adulterous blojobs could ever do. Just days ago that gelatinous blowhard cruelly derided a man with Parkinson’s Disease for lowlife political purposes. And now the President of the United States is going to validate his malevolent cultural poison by appearing on his show.

Say your final good-byes to that silly Hughesian alliterative construct, “compassionate conservatism.” George W. Bush and his porcine hatchet-man are going to be smothering the last remaining vestige of it tomorrow as they wallow around together in the fetid shit pile known as the Rush Limbaugh Show.

It sure makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

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