Re-United, And It Feels So Good
by poputonian
Church and State finally back together after forty years of separation.
” … remember the good time we had together … “”Once maybe I touched him …”
“We were just fondling …”
“He seemed to like it … “
” … we enjoyed each other’s company.””… almost like brothers …”
Oh, those young Christo-Republicans. They were so … cute.
Grenade-Threatening Lunatic Interviews US President
by tristero
Every once in a while, like three or four times a day, it is important to remember how genuinely, utterly, bogus modern American mass discourse has become. For example:
O’Reilly said that he knew “for a fact that President Bush doesn’t know what’s going on in the Internet.” O’Reilly then said, “I have to say President Bush has a much healthier attitude toward this than I do. Because if I can get away with it, boy, I’d go in with a hand grenade.”
Four things here.
First of all, O’Reilly equates presidential ignorance with presidential mental health. By his reasoning, then, George W. Bush therefore must be the sanest president that ever lived.
Secondly, note the utterly vacuous nature of the threat. Where, exactly, would Bill 0’Reilly go in with a hand grenade to destroy the evil bloggers? A server farm in Virginia? Well, that doesn’t really eliminate any bloggers, now does it? To do that, O’Reilly would have to come invade our homes.
But Bill’s right. He’d never get away with it. Oh, not that he’d get in trouble with the law: there ain’t any. Hell, a government that can rationalize torture can easily find a way to excuse Bill O’Reilly’s grenade jihad.
No the reason O’Reilly wouldn’t dare attack us is that he knows that many of us bloggers live with the kind of serious protection that would easily scare O’Reilly into dropping a huge load of falafel into his drawers.
And thirdly, even when eliminationism is uttered by blustering fools, it is still elimationism and fascism. This should be particularly disturbing to those who say we need to wait until the Minutemen… sorry, I slipped, I meant brownshirts… start their patrols before declaring the US a fascist state. After all, O’Reilly is presently deemed mainstream enough to rate an opportunity to interview the president of the United States.
And that was point four, in case you missed it.
Exceptionalism
by digby
Nearly a third of people worldwide back the use of torture in prisons in some circumstances, a BBC survey suggests.Although 59% were opposed to torture, 29% thought it acceptable to use some degree of torture to combat terrorism.
While most polled in the US are against torture, opposition there is less robust than in Europe and elsewhere.
More than 27,000 people in 25 countries were asked if torture would be acceptable if it could provide information to save innocent lives.
Some 36% of those questioned in the US agreed that this use of torture was acceptable, while 58% were unwilling to compromise on human rights.
The percentage favouring torture in certain cases makes it one of the highest of all the countries polled.
This is kind of embarrassing. More Nigerians, Israelis, Iraqis and Philippinos approve of torture than we do. But we’re getting there. A couple more years and we’ll be number one. After all, a large majority of our political representatives voted for it.
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Shorthand
by digby
Word to the wise: if both Joe Klein and David Brooks give the same piece of advice to Democrats, do the exact opposite.
Barack Obama should run for president.
He should run first for the good of his party. It would demoralize the Democrats to go through a long primary season with the most exciting figure in the party looming off in the distance like some unapproachable dream. The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come from defeating Barack Obama.
Right. Thank Dave, for all your concern, but don’t you worry your pretty little head about the Democrats, ok? You’ve got your hands full keeping your own party from a full scale implosion.
Apparently both Joe and David think we are such idiots that we would put the callow young pup Barack Obama up against the manly old lion John McCain for president in 2008. (Jesus, I hate having my intelligence insulted by people like the Kumbaaya twins.)
I have nothing particularly against Barack Obama, he seems like he has a lot of good qualities. But this nonsense about how Democrats should nominate him because he’s a nice bipartisan boy who can change the ugly tone in Washington is just a tad presumptuous.
Here’s an idea. How about if the Republicans nominate a bucket of vapid lukewarm spit instead? Joe Lieberman would be a good choice. The Democrats will nominate somebody who is qualified to run the government for a change.
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Fooling Only Themselves
by digby
From the Carpetbagger Report:
This month, it’s a new set of ads — running in more than two dozen congressional districts nationwide — sponsored by a political action committee called “America’s Pac,” which is a project of the very wealthy (and very white) Patrick Rooney. I honestly didn’t think the right could be this disgusting.
“Black babies are terminated at triple the rate of white babies,” a female announcer in one of the ads says, as rain, thunder, and a crying infant are heard in the background. “The Democratic Party supports these abortion laws that are decimating our people, but the individual’s right to life is protected in the Republican platform. Democrats say they want our vote. Why don’t they want our lives?”
Another ad features a dialogue between two men.
“If you make a little mistake with one of your ‘hos,’ you’ll want to dispose of that problem tout suite, no questions asked,” one of the men says.
“That’s too cold. I don’t snuff my own seed,” the other replies.
“Maybe you do have a reason to vote Republican,” the first man says.
There’s more at the link.
I really doubt this is going to work.
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Go Team God!
by digby
Now that’s what I’m talking about …
Weighing in on Connecticut’s hotly contested congressional races, a group of religious activists have unveiled a giant billboard off busy Interstate 95 that accuses four candidates of voting to allow torture.
The billboard in Stratford names Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Republican Reps. Christopher Shays, Rob Simmons and Nancy Johnson as supporters of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
The legislation, which President Bush was expected to sign into law Tuesday, allows military commissions to prosecute suspected terrorists and spells out violations of the Geneva Conventions.
Organizers say about 100,000 commuters pass the billboard in Stratford each day. The billboard – 14 feet high and 48 feet wide – was sponsored by Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice, which describes itself as a statewide interfaith network of religious leaders created in 2002.
The legislation would prohibit war crimes and define atrocities such as rape and torture but would otherwise allow the president to interpret the Geneva Conventions, the treaty that sets standards for the treatment of war prisoners.
“This is a shameful law,” organizer Rev. Kathleen McTigue said Monday. “It grants extraordinary power to the president to interpret the Geneva Conventions, including which methods of interrogation will be considered torture.”
And what about Connecticut’s most awesomely religious and moral candidate?
“This is just another example of the kind of mudslinging partisanship that Joe Lieberman wants to remove from our debates about how best to keep our nation safe,” said Lieberman spokeswoman Tammy Sun. “The fact is, Joe Lieberman does not support torture. He joined 11 other Democrats as well as Sen. John McCain – who is himself a prisoner of war – in voting to uphold the Geneva Convention.”
And that is just another example of the kind of slick, Rovian PR spin that Democrats across the country want to remove from our debates about right and wrong. The fact is, Joe Lieberman joined 11 other Democrats and John McCain — who is himself a man with no principles — in voting for a law that allows the president to unilaterally decide what constitutes torture, gives him the power to imprison people (including American citizens) indefinitely, try them in a kangaroo court based on heresay and coerced evidence and then sentence them to death with no right to appeal.
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Go Team Jesus
by digby
Kevin highlights a post by Rebecca Sinderbrand on the Showdown ’08 Blog in which she posits that evangelicals will look at the Kuo book like this:
…Kuo’s story — if it’s believed at all — wouldn’t affect the way voters like my mom feel about the president. And the White House-based account definitely wouldn’t have an impact on how they view the GOP-controlled Congress, which doesn’t make much of an appearance in the book. So what sorts of questions does it raise in their minds? How about: Why did this come out three weeks before the election? Who’s plugging this story? And: is there any reason to trust them?
Here’s your answers: This story — which people they trust dismiss out of hand — comes by way of a turncoat. Even if it is true, the words of some nameless White House aides, and a couple of missing numbers on a spreadsheet, aren’t enough for to make them question long-standing frindships. Meanwhile: the fact that these charges are emerging in mid-October makes them feel manipulated. And sure, that kind of manipulation makes them angry — but not at the Republican party.
…I think the only possible ballot-box impact in the short term, if any, could be a rare bit of good news for Republican congressional leadership: Even the suspicion of an “October surprise” at work might be enough motivate some evangelicals who might otherwise have stayed home to turn out for the GOP.
I have no special knowledge of evangelicals, but I suspect she is correct. Their identification with the Republican party seems to me to be tribal ID and religion as politics. (I sure haven’t seen many cases where religion trumps politics anyway.)
Frankly, I have no choice but to also doubt their sincerity as Christians — and so, by the way, does David Kuo:
Part of the problem, he says, was indifference from “the base,” the religious right. He took 60 Minutes to a convention of evangelical groups – his old stomping ground – and walked around the display booths, looking for any reference to the poor.
“You’ve got homosexuality in your kid’s school, and you’ve got human cloning, and partial birth abortion and divorce and stem cell,” Kuo remarked. “Not a mention of the poor.”
“This message that has been sent out to Christians for a long time now: that Jesus came primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing political agenda – as if this culture war is a war for God. And it’s not a war for God, it’s a war for politics. And that’s a huge difference,” says Kuo.
I’m pretty sure they like it that way. It’s competitive, it’s fun — and it has nothing to do with religion. Democrats who try to appeal to them are chumps. They don’t care about Jesus (you’ll recall he was very, very big on helping the poor.*) They care about beating Democrats.
I continue to believe they will vote in their usual numbers this election. If we win it will be because the independents will vote for us and the non-evangelical Republicans will stay home.
*as are most decent Christians. The Christian Right, however, is not in the least bit interested in poor people.
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Beautiful Minds
by digby
Following up on tristero’s post below discussing this NY Times op-ed, I have to take exception to the vague implication that the Republicans failed to read books about mid-east regional issues, Muslim history or arab culture. They did.
They read books by the neocon nutball Laurie Mylroie:
Historians will be debating that question for years, but an important part of the reason has to do with someone you may well have never heard of: Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie has an impressive array of credentials that certify her as an expert on the Middle East, national security, and, above all, Iraq. She has held faculty positions at Harvard and the U.S. Naval War College and worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as well as serving as an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. During the 1980s, Mylroie was an apologist for Saddam’s regime, but reversed her position upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and, with the zeal of the academic spurned, became rabidly anti-Saddam. In the run up to the first Gulf War, Mylroie with New York Times reporter Judith Miller wrote Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller translated into more than a dozen languages.
Until this point, there was nothing controversial about Mylroie’s career. This would change with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the first act of international terrorism within the United States, which would launch Mylroie on a quixotic quest to prove that Saddam’s regime was the most important source of terrorism directed against this country. She laid out her case in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, a book published by AEI in 2000 which makes it clear that Mylroie and the neocon hawks worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the ’93 Trade Center bombing. Its acknowledgements fulsomely thanked John Bolton and the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as “splendid and wholly convincing.” Lewis “Scooter” Libby, now Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, is thanked for his “generous and timely assistance.” And it appears that Paul Wolfowitz himself was instrumental in the genesis of Study of Revenge: His then-wife is credited with having “fundamentally shaped the book,” while of Wolfowitz, she says: “At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult.”
None of which was out of the ordinary, except for this: Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-U.S. terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the ’93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America
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Richard Clarke wrote in his book “Against All Enemies”:
Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.”
I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.
Mylroie wasn’t the only one. They also read books by other crackpots:
The book in question is called The Arab Mind, and is by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at several US universities, including Columbia and Princeton.
I must admit that, despite having spent some years studying Arabic language and culture, I had not heard of this alleged masterpiece until last week, when the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh mentioned it in an article for New Yorker magazine.
Hersh was discussing the chain of command that led US troops to torture Iraqi prisoners. Referring specifically to the sexual nature of some of this abuse, he wrote: “The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind … the book includes a 25-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression.”
Hersh continued: “The Patai book, an academic told me, was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour’. In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged – ‘one, that Arabs only understand force, and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation’.”
Last week, my own further enquiries about the book revealed something even more alarming. Not only is it the bible of neocon headbangers, but it is also the bible on Arab behaviour for the US military.
According to one professor at a US military college, The Arab Mind is “probably the single most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the US military”. It is even used as a textbook for officers at the JFK special warfare school in Fort Bragg.
[…]
In contrast, opinions of Patai’s book among Middle East experts at US universities are almost universally scathing. “The best use for this volume, if any, is as a doorstop,” one commented. “The book is old, and a thoroughly discredited form of scholarship,” said another.
None of the academics I contacted thought the book suitable for serious study, although Georgetown University once invited students to analyse it as “an example of bad, biased social science”.
There is a lot wrong with The Arab Mind apart from its racism: the title, for a start. Although the Arab countries certainly have their distinctive characteristics, the idea that 200 million people, from Morocco to the Gulf, living in rural villages, urban metropolises and (very rarely these days) desert tents, think with some sort of single, collective mind is utterly ridiculous.
So it really isn’t quite fair to say the Republicans and the braintrusts of Donald Rumsfeld’s military didn’t educate themsleves about arab culture or politics. They did — by consulting looney, tin-foil conspiracy theorists and discredited comic-book racist tracts. (They also watched “The Sands of Iwo Jima” at least twice.)
Remember, they don’t believe they have to be part of the reality-based community. That’s for silly losers like us — and those 650,000 dead Iraqis.
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A Day Which Will Live In Infamy
by digby
Today President Bush took the constitution and tore it into little pieces.
President Bush signed legislation Tuesday authorizing tough interrogation of terror suspects and smoothing the way for trials before military commissions, calling it a “vital tool” in the war against terrorism.
Bush’s plan for treatment of the terror suspects became law just six weeks after he acknowledged that the CIA had been secretly interrogating suspected terrorists overseas and pressed Congress to quickly give authority to try them in military commissions.
[…]
The American Civil Liberties Union said the new law is “one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history.”
“The president can now, with the approval of Congress, indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero.
“Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act,” he said.
Yet, here is the very next sentence in that AP report:
The swift implementation of the law is a rare bit of good news for Bush as casualties mount in Iraq in daily violence.
I assume that was written without irony.
I don’t ever want to hear anyone on the right talk about moral values again. They are concepts which they clearly do not understand. And if they dare to bring up the Bible or Jesus Christ after this I will laugh in their faces, knowing that by their own standards they are going straight to hell for what they’ve done.
Remember these faces:
Where’s St. John McCain? How odd that he isn’t there to enjoy the poisonous fruits of his labor.
Update: Jack Balkin talks about the new law, here.
Scandalous Ignorance
by tristero
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when the sound of the military airplanes patrolling the skies of Manhattan were still traumatizing everyone, I picked up some books on bin Laden, the Middle East, and Islam. I also peppered with questions the few people I knew back then who had some expertise on the subjects. In fact, lots of people I knew were doing the same thing; we were passing around books, articles, and clippings, emailing links to each other.
This strikes me as totally unremarkable behavior. We were scared stiff, and the first thing we wanted to know – other than that the attacks had stopped for now – was what the hell was going on.
But even today, people involved in counterterrorism policy in the United States still don’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite.
This is scandalous, as in worse-than-covering-up-for-Mark-Foley scandalous. Why? Well let one of the ignorant buffoons explain it to you:
Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.
“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.
Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”
To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”
Oh, dear God. I’m living in a Mel Brooks movie:
Roger De Bris: Did you know, I never knew that the Third Reich meant Germany. I mean it’s just drenched with historical goodies like that…