Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

CW ON CT

by digby

In case anybody’s wondering what the conventional wisdom on the Lamont-Lieberman race is, check out this TV report from Chris Matthews on MSNBC:

Chris Matthews: The Connecticut senate race was called a political weathervane suggesting that Ned Lamont’s anti-war win would blow away suporters of the president’s tactics in Iraq. So why is Lieberman running ahead in the polls right now? NBC’s Chris Jansing is following the race up in West Hartford.

Chris, so what’s wrong? Can’t Lamont get the Democratic vote?

CJ: He can’t get any votes right now. And this is a surprise, most people thought that he was going to be the golden boy, but there’s a couple of reasons this whole Iraq referendum isn’t working. It was the number one issue for voters in the primary, now only 35%. For those for whom the war is the number one issue, they go Lamont. Every other area, voters are going for Lieberman.

He also made some missteps and you really hit on one of them when you had Lamont on Hardball Chris. You said, “Look when you had him down after the primary in August, why didn’t you step on his neck” and he said, “well, we needed a break after the primary.” Mistake. Another mistake a lot of people think Lamont made is he used these kind of off-beat political ads using the same guy who got Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura elected. But Connecticut isn’t Minnesota and so he squandered a lot of money there. He’s only started running more conventional ads in the last couple of weeks.

This is a very expensive race for a small state like Connecticut. Take a look at these numbers Chris. Almost 13 million dollars spent by Ned Lamont against — some people say, not well used. Almost every penny of it, by the way, out of his own pocket. And Joe Lieberman loses the primary but raises more money than any candidate in the history of Connecticut — 15 million dollars. And if you’re wondering what happened to Alan Schlessinger just take a look at that, he’s raised less than 195,000 dollars not that Republicans have ever run strong here but that is obviously a very poor showing. So, since August, this has been great political theatre but it sure hasn’t followed the script that Ned Lamont thought it would.

CM: Has the national party basically declared neutrality in this race? With all that money going to Joe you’ve got to believe that nobody told them not to — because they’re all Democratic givers probably — nobody told them don’t give to Joe, he’s not the Democratic candidate. It looks to me like somebody waved a white flag up at the headquarters.

CJ: It seems like everybody likes him. I mean, not only are they giving him the money but you’ve got people who are saying “hey, if he gets elected we’re gonna let him caucus with the Democrats.” He says he will caucus with the Democrats. You’ve got Republicans who are liking him. I mean, what what was it Dick Cheney said, “he is one of the most loyal and distinguished Democrats of his generation.” You’ve got basically everybody praising Joe Lieberman and so Ned Lamont is left out there saying “hey what happened, where is everybody who’s supposed to be supporting me?” He does have, I grant you that one ad with Chris Dodd…

CM: You mentioned some ads, some numbers there, but it seems to me, as a state — I just looked at here — 46th on how much they like President Bush, 46th in approval — the president’s down to 31% approval in that state, that means the Iraq war is way down. People who are against this Iraq war in the worst way are going to re-elect the strongest hawk on the Democratic side.

CJ: Well they might not re-elect him, but you have to look again at that number. 35% of people say that Iraq is the number one issue. For the rest a very strong percentage are those care about the economy. And remember Chris, when the Groton sub base was going to be closed, Joe Lieberman went in and got it to stay open. That’s 31,000 jobs right there. He is somebody who they think can go back to Washington, he may be in the Democratic majority and they’re saying “Look, I don’t think any single Senator can necessarily change the course of where we’re going in Iraq but they can make a difference about the things that matter to me like the economy, like jobs, like gas prices. That may be the ace in the hole for Joe Lieberman.

CM: I just don’t want to hear from those people later about how terrible the war is because the one thing about these elections is that in every national poll the number one issue is Iraq and the issue is going to turn on that elect because we are already seeing develop a new policy refinement based upon these new political circumstances right now.

A couple of things about this are just glaringly wrong, of course. Joe is not getting money only from Democratic givers. Republicans have been giving big money to his slush fund as well. And, Lamont most certainly is getting some votes from the grassroots Democrats who put him on the ballot, who I guess are considered useless pieces of nothing to these people. And it’s always funny to hear people sound as if there’s something wrong with Lamont spending his own money — as if it shows he’s some sort of phony when, in fact, he’s relieving the party and the party donors of the obligation to fund their nominee. (Sadly, many of them then felt “free” to give to his opponent, the Lieberman for Lieberman nominee.)

But I do find Matthews’ comments interesting. He seems to be scolding the voters of Connecticut, who hate the war and loathe George W. Bush, for failing to notice that they are voting for a warmongering Bush enabler and are out of step with the rest of the country by doing it. I feel like scolding them too. (And I especially feel like scolding “headquarters” who do seem to have waved the white flag. More on that later.)

And anyway, for all that stroking and smooching George W. Bush, what did Joe Lieberman get for it? Not much.

Well, they did get this:

WASHINGTON – Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) today hailed President Bush’s signing of a bipartisan resolution giving the President the authority to use military force to eliminate the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Lieberman, who was one of the chief sponsors of the resolution in the Senate, attended the bill signing ceremony at the White House today.

“Saddam Hussein is the most significant threat to our national security, and we must take strong action to pry the poisons, toxins, and the plans for nuclear weapons out of his hands,” Lieberman said today. “This resolution not only expresses our resolute support for President Bush as he seeks international backing to finally force Saddam to disarm, but also strengthens his hand as commander-in-chief to take decisive action if Saddam does not comply or if the United Nations fails to act.”

Lieberman said this is the proper time for action, saying, “The question isn’t ‘why now?’ but ‘why not earlier?’ Over the last decade Saddam has built up weapons of mass destruction, developed the means to deliver them on targets near and far, and consistently ignored and violated U.N. resolutions. We’ve waited too long to address this threat.”

He wasn’t just a typical Democratic war supporter. He was one of the most enthusiastic war supporters in the congress. He can say now that he wants “peace with honor” or whatever Nixonian formulation he’s come up with today, but he’s the most hawkish Democrat in the Senate — so hawkish, Dick Cheney is counting on him to help him stay the course. He is not just another conservative Democrat. He’s the conservative Democrat most responsible for the Iraq bloodbath and he deserves to pay for that great error in judgment with his seat.

Connecticut Dems who are voting for Joe and yet are against the war need to wake up.

Update: D-Day has a transcript from Tweety’s show yesterday:

MATTHEWS: If you’re against the war, vote against it. You only get one vote. Shouldn’t you vote against it, if you care about it? If you care about other issues more, fine.

(crosstalk)

DICKERSON: That’s where they’re coming down, is they’re saying they like, you know, the war is complicated, a lot of positions, they like Joe.

MATTHEWS: There’s nothing complicated. Use your intelligence and vote your brains.

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Bombing The Google

by digby

Back in 2004, the rightwing bloggers came up with the idea of google bombing the name John Kerry so that negative articles came up first on the search page when people googled his name. it worked.

Chris Bowers decided we should do the same thing with our wonderful GOP opponents this time and has come up with a handy list of links to make this easy.

So, while you are on hold on the phone today or sitting in a boring meeting or simply looking to kill a couple of minutes, click on the links below and help us bring the truth about these Republicans to the top of the Google search pages.

Update: Never mind. You don’t have to click on the links (although you might learn more about why you hate these candidates.) Just post the links on whatever site on which you have posting privileges or on your own blog. Mr. Google will do the rest.

Here’s the link to the code you can post on your blog.

–AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

–AZ-01: Rick Renzi

–AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

–CA-04: John Doolittle

–CA-11: Richard Pombo

–CA-50: Brian Bilbray

–CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

–CO-05: Doug Lamborn

–CO-07: Rick O’Donnell

–CT-04: Christopher Shays

–FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

–FL-16: Joe Negron

–FL-22: Clay Shaw

–ID-01: Bill Sali

–IL-06: Peter Roskam

–IL-10: Mark Kirk

–IL-14: Dennis Hastert

–IN-02: Chris Chocola

–IN-08: John Hostettler

–IA-01: Mike Whalen

–KS-02: Jim Ryun

–KY-03: Anne Northup

–KY-04: Geoff Davis

–MD-Sen: Michael Steele

–MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

–MN-06: Michele Bachmann

–MO-Sen: Jim Talent

–MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

–NV-03: Jon Porter

–NH-02: Charlie Bass

–NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

–NM-01: Heather Wilson

–NY-03: Peter King

–NY-20: John Sweeney

–NY-26: Tom Reynolds

–NY-29: Randy Kuhl

–NC-08: Robin Hayes

–NC-11: Charles Taylor

–OH-01: Steve Chabot

–OH-02: Jean Schmidt

–OH-15: Deborah Pryce

–OH-18: Joy Padgett

–PA-04: Melissa Hart

–PA-07: Curt Weldon

–PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

–PA-10: Don Sherwood

–RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

–TN-Sen: Bob Corker

–VA-Sen: George Allen

–VA-10: Frank Wolf

–WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

–WA-08: Dave Reichert

Gutter Politics

by digby

I knew the Republicans would react like animals if they ever found themselves on the losing end of an election. I knew they would engage in rampant lying, race baiting and sexist stereotyping. I was a tiny bit surprised that they would support 52-year-old-man on teenager sex, but it didn’t shock me.

But I honestly didn’t think they’d go after the physically disabled. First Tammy Duckworth’s opponent accuses the multi amputee Iraq veteran of “cutting and running.” Then Rush takes a shot at Michael J. Fox. Now the GOP congresswoman who holds Dick Cheney’s old seat says to her opponent, a wheelchair bound MS sufferer, “If you weren’t sitting in that chair, I’d slap you across the face.”

I shouldn’t be shocked, now that I think about it. They had no problem questioning severely wounded war hero Max Cleland’s courage back in 2002. (In 2004, the ever so lovely Ann Coulter even claimed he had wounded himself in combat.)

These guys engage in gutter politics even when they don’t have to so it’s not surprising that they would turn into barbaric political terrorists in the face of serious losses. We’ll see if they can stroke the nation’s id and eke out a victory in these close races one more time.

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How Insane, Exactly, Is The Bush Administration?

by tristero

This insane:

Senior Bush administration officials wanted North Korea to test a nuclear weapon because it would prove their point that the regime must be overthrown.

This astonishing revelation was buried in the middle of a Washington Post story published yesterday…

One of these officials may have been Rice herself, Kessler hints. Rice, he reports, “has come close to saying the test was a net plus for the United States.” Rice has been trying to counter the prevailing view that the test was a failure of the Bush administration’s policy..

821 days left, people.

The least we can do is elect Democrats on November 7 who have pledged to investigate and apply the brakes.

821 days.

It’s Just A Shot Away

by digby

According to the General, during last nights debate, Sen. Lieberman, noting Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, declared, “We’re in another time like that.”

That’s delusional BS. We’re in another time like this:

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Ask Tony

by digby

Weldon at BTC News is asking for reader submitted questions to the White House press Office:

If you’ve ever watched a White House press briefing, you’ve probably felt the sensation of drowning in tepid gruel. It can be an extremely frustrating experience and it led me to try, in the wake of the Guckert/Gannon scandal, to place my own unfettered correspondent in the briefing room. In early 2005, I managed to pester the White House press office into providing BTC News contributor — now BTC News White House correspondent — Eric Brewer with semi-regular access to the White House press briefings held by then-press secretary Scott McClellan.

Eric has done a great job under difficult circumstances (you can read his dispatches from the press room here) with both McClellan and Tony Snow, but he’s only one guy, he has a real job and he can’t be there every day. So I asked our press office contact, who is now an official spokesman, if he would field questions submitted by our readers. He agreed to do that on the record, and I’m here to ask you to ask the White House the questions institutional reporters should ask but don’t.

Drop over and leave a question in the comment section.

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Keller Spanks Bush

by tristero

Nice to read, but it’s at least two, if not four, Friedman Units too late. Most interesting quote:

Americans, Iraqis and the rest of the world need clear, public signs of progress.

Mr. Bush can make the first one by firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There is no chance of switching strategy as long as he is in control of the Pentagon.

Sigh. Everyone still colludes with the Junior Prophet From Crawford in passing the buck to someone else. Not that Rumsfeld is competent and shouldn’t be fired. Of course he should, and then tarred and feathered. But Rumsfeld or no, the strategy Rumsfeld is pursuing is the strategy of George W. Bush. And “there is no chance of switching strategy as long as he is in control of the” White House.

For even if the strategy was somehow changed, there is no chance in hell it will change for the better. For as incompetent as Donald Rumsfeld surely is, his boss is far worse. Therefore, until January, 2009, no matter what happens, the Iraqis and the American military in Iraq will suffer horribly, needlessly, and monumentally. And the security of the US will be further eroded. It is awful, sickening, and infuriating, but it is also a fact.

A different country, with a more involved population, would demand Bush and his cabinet immediately resign. Ain’t gonna happen. A different country, one which held its leaders accountable for its safety, would have impeached Bush by September 19, 2001. But the United States in 2006 is not that kind of country. Barring anything unforeseen, like Bush getting a brain transplant or converting to Islam – both far more probable than he will change direction and that he will do so in such a way that things will get better in Iraq – there’s at least 821 days filled with unspeakable tragedy ahead for Iraq, and the US.

Contrary to what the lunatic, man-on-dog right says, I don’t like saying so, I don’t want it to happen, and I certainly hope I’m wrong. But some six years of nearly total disaster and mismanagement by the Bush administration says I’m right.

And yes, dear friends, the “nearly” in the previous paragraph was pro forma only.

Eight hundred and twenty-one more days of George W. Bush. God help us.

Swine

by digby

From John Amato I see that Rush Limbaugh, with his usual lack of any form of human decency, questioned Michael J. Fox’s sincerity in his ad for Claire McCaskill. Accoring to Rush, Fox was being dishonest by not taking his meds and allowing the full ravages of his disease to show — or he was acting. Limbaugh felt it was “exploitive.”

As it turns out, Fox’s affect was caused by his medication, not his lack of it. From an interview with an expert on Parkinson’s by Jonathan Cohn at the Plank:

What you are seeing on the video is side effects of the medication. He has to take that medication to sit there and talk to you like that. … He’s not over-dramatizing. … [Limbaugh] is revealing his ignorance of Parkinson’s disease, because people with Parkinson’s don’t look like that at all when they’re not taking their medication. They look stiff, and frozen, and don’t move at all. … People with Parkinson’s, when they’ve had the disease for awhile, are in this bind, where if they don’t take any medication, they can be stiff and hardly able to talk. And if they do take their medication, so they can talk, they get all of this movement, like what you see in the ad.

I took a lot of grief for a snarky post I did about Rush’s little trip to the Dominican in which I implied he might have been there seeking the company of underage locals. I have absolutely no regret about it. The man is a cretinous bag of rotting pig meat and he deserves anything that’s dished out at him.

Meanwhile Fox is doing more ads.

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Nixon’s Bastard Son

by digby

So old Tricky Joe got hot under the collar at tonight’s debate:

Evidently after the debate Lieberman walked up to Ned and said “You goddamn sonovabitch,” and something to the effect of “how dare you run those direct mail pieces accusing me of voting for the energy bill in 2005 because of campaign contributions from the oil companies.” Joe’s losing it.

I wonder what it would be like if he ever turned some of that on a Republican? Even when they stole the presidency right out from under him he couldn’t have been more gracious. When he debated Dick Cheney you would have thought they were a couple of old friends spending the afternoon shootin’ the shit at the old fishin’ hole. A Democrat criticizes his record and he turns into a rabid dog.

He’s sounding more and more like his crooked mentor every day, isn’t he? But then Nixon hated Democrats too.

Here’s a neat analysis of the Nixon tapes that might be useful as we examine the very religious, moral and upright public Lieberman vs his slush funded, phony anti-war posture and private conversation:

A search of the Internet produced a number of transcripts of Nixon tapes. Naturally these focus on the evidence of crimes or intent to commit crimes, the cover-up of the Watergate burglary, and the specific events that led to the Watergate hearings, impeachment motions and the resignation of President Nixon. These tapes evidence Nixon’s crimes. The public image Nixon presented to the American people and his denials of illegal activities are well known. Therefore such are not presented herein. Several of the conversations evidencing illegal conduct are. There are more available, but only several are sufficient to demonstrate that Nixon’s private persona is vastly different than his public image. This is not a statistical question.

[…]

Analysis of the conversations in the Appendix also evidence another disparity between Nixon’s public and private images. One of every sixty words Nixon uttered was a profanity. Nixon’s profanities included damn, Goddam or Goddamit, son of a bitch, son of a bitching, hell, asshole, crap and several deleted expletives, all words inappropriate in public political speeches.

Now I am not one to criticize anyone who uses profanity. But I do criticize religious moralizers who pretend that they are above this sort of thing and lecture bloggers and grassroots activists for their incivility. Nixon had a similar smarmy, bathetic public voice — lecturing, hectoring and eye-rollingly “moral” on the outside while being crude and ruthless in private.

Ever since I saw the Nixon angle on Lieberman, I realized why it is I’ve always had such a visceral mistrust of the man. That phony-baloney piety always made me sick when I saw Tricky Dick and it makes me similarly sick when I see Joe Lieberman.

But I have to give Nixon credit in one way. When he lost elections he didn’t cozy up the ones who stole it and pretend to be their best friends. He had enough pride to come back and win his party’s nomination fair and square and take on the political opposition that had bested him. Tricky Joe is just trying to save his seat so he can join the enemy. That’s lower than Nixon would have ever gone.

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What’s The Matter With Bagdad?

by digby

I think it’s clear that the nation should want to keep the party in power that is responsible for this:

I keep seeing his face. He appears to be in his mid-20s, bespectacled, slightly bearded, and somehow his smile conveys a sense of prosperity to come. Perhaps he is set to marry, or enroll in graduate school, or launch a business — all of these flights of ambition seem possible.

In the next few images he is encased in plastic: His face is frozen in a ghoulish grimace. Blackened lesions blemish his neck.

“Drill holes,” says Col. Khaled Rasheed, an Iraqi commander who is showing me the set of photographs.

He preserves the snapshots in a drawer, the image of the young man brimming with expectations always on top. There is no name, no identification, just a series of photos that documents the transformation of some mother’s son into a slab of meat on a bloody table in a morgue.

“Please, please, I must show these photographs to President Bush,” Rasheed pleads in desperation, as we sit in a bombed-out palace along the Tigris, once the elegant domain of Saddam Hussein’s wife, now the command center for an Iraqi army battalion. “President Bush must know what is happening in Baghdad!”

He doesn’t care what is happening in Bagdad and neither does the Dark Lord Cheney. They think people getting literally drilled in the head is an Iraqi tactic to deny them a Republican majority.

On Oct. 17, Cheney told Limbaugh: ‘I was reading something today that a writer — I don`t remember who — was speculating on increased terrorist attacks in Iraq attempting to demoralize the American people as we get up to the election. And when I read that, it made sense to me. And I interpreted this as that the terrorists are actually involved and want to involve themselves in our electoral process, which must mean they want a change.

[…]

[The]show was not the first time Cheney has suggested terrorists have picked favorites in the upcoming election.

In August, Cheney told wire service reporters that ‘al-Qaida types’ were looking to break the will of the American people to stay and fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He linked that al-Qaida effort to the Connecticut Democratic primary rejection of Iraq war supporter Sen. Joe Lieberman.

It’s all about them, you see.

That article linked above, called “Into The Abyss Of Baghdad,” shows just how much the Iraqis care about maintaining that majority in congress:

Every day the corpses pile up in the capital like discarded furniture — at curbside, in lots, in waterways and sewer lines; every day the executioners return. A city in which it was long taboo to ask, “Are you Sunni or Shiite?” has abruptly become defined by these very characteristics.

Once-harmonious neighborhoods with mixed populations have become communal killing grounds. Residents of one sect or the other must clear out or face the whim of fanatics with power drills.

[…]

People are here one day, gone the next. Those who do go out often venture no farther than familiar streets. In the sinister evenings, when death squads roam, people block off their lanes with barbed wire, logs, bricks to ward off the killers.

Many residents remain in their homes — paralyzed, going slowly crazy.

“My children are imprisoned at home,” says a cook, Daniel, a Christian whom I knew from better times, now planning to join the exodus from Iraq. “They are nervous and sad all the time. Baghdad is a big prison, and their home is a small one. I forced my son to leave school. It’s more important that he be alive than educated.”

But homes offer only an illusion of safety. Recently, insurgents rented apartments in mostly Shiite east Baghdad, filled the flats with explosives and blew them up after Friday prayers. Dozens perished.

Even gathering the bodies of loved ones is an exercise fraught with hazards. A Shiite Muslim religious party controls the main morgue near downtown; its militiamen guard the entrance, keen to snatch kin of the dead, many of them Sunni Muslim Arabs. Unclaimed Sunni corpses pile up.

[…]

On a recent patrol in Adamiya, one of the capital’s oldest sections, U.S. soldiers went door to door speaking with merchants and residents, trying to earn their confidence. Everyone seemed cordial as people spoke of their terror of Shiite militiamen. Then a shot rang out and a soldier fell 10 yards from where I stood with the platoon captain; a sniper, probably Sunni, had taken aim at this 21-year-old private from Florida ostensibly there to protect Sunnis against Shiite depredations. The GI survived.

Coursing through the deserted cityscape in an Army Humvee after curfew empties the streets is an experience laced with foreboding. U.S. vehicles, among the few on the road, offer an inviting target for an unseen enemy. Piles of long-uncollected trash may conceal laser-guided explosives. Russian roulette is the oft-repeated analogy.

“Everyone’s thinking the same thing,” a tense sergeant tells me. “IEDs,” he adds, using the shorthand for roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices.

ONE evening, I accompanied a three-Humvee convoy of MPs through largely Shiite east Baghdad. Before leaving the base, the commander performed an unsettling ritual: He anointed the Humvees with clear oil, performing something akin to last rites.

[…]

At this point, anything seems possible here, a descent of any depth into the abyss. Militiamen and residents are already sealing off neighborhoods by sect. Some have suggested district-to-district ID cards. Word broke recently of a plan to build barriers around this metropolis of 6 million and block the city’s entrances with checkpoints. The “terror trench,” as some immediately dubbed it, seemed to have a fundamental flaw: The killers already are in Baghdad.

Sure, it’s a little “untidy” and all, but they should be a lot more grateful to the liberators who freed them and created this wonderful democratic paradise. Interfering with the Republicans’ ability to do more of this good work in their country is drilling through their faces to spite their noses.

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