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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
According to the NY Times some Republicans have a whole new approach to Iraq:
President Bush isn’t getting our frustrations — it’s time to be decisive, beat the terrorists,” Mike McGavick, the Republican candidate for Senate in Washington, said in an advertisement that began running this week. “Partition the country if we have to and get our troops home in victory.”
Good thinking. We need to beat those damned terrorists, partition the country whether the Iraqis like it or not, win and come on home. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Let’s roll!
Update: I’m reminded by commenter Straight Talk express that there is another even more sophisticated GOP plan out there, proposed by presumptive GOP presidential candidate St. John McCain:
“one of the things I would do if I were president would be to sit the shiites and the sunnis down and say, ‘stop the bullshit.'”