Why do you suppose that in the Pew poll, the second most popular word (after incompetent) to describe the president is “idiot?” Hmmmm.
Good thing he isn’t one ‘o them brie ‘n cheese eatin’ liberals or somebody might look at all that fancy expensive gear and call him an elitist rich guy. Can’t he just shoot his friends in the face like real men do?
Via Pearlswine, who says this may be the most unpresidential picture ever taken, and that was before he noticed the little pink socks.
I do think there is a tendency on the part of some on the left to criticize conservative politicians on the basis of their religious views.
Jeebus, Amy, of course there is! That is a GOOD THING! They SHOULD be criticized! They HAVE to be criticized! And YOU should be among the first to let them have it! Why?
First of all, they’re the ones that bring the subject of religion up in a political context, over and over and over, and – as with the fight over science in the classrooms – when it is wildly inappropriate. They’re the ones making a political issue out of religion. Therefore, it can, and must be forcefully addressed.
Secondly, they’re certifiably crazy. Case in point: This fanatical, bigoted bastard is a close friend of Bush. THAT is why sensible people like Moyers and Phillips are alarmed about an imminent theocracy. And Graham is only one of dozens, many of whom make this guy look as liberal as Jesse Jackson. Amy, do you know how close this country came recently to approving a Christian Reconstructionist agenda as science in public schools? These people are serious about a theocracy. And seriously insane.
Thirdly, they are trying to disguise their purely secular lust for power by hiding behind the skirts of priests. I’d think a religious person like yourself would be the first to be horrified and disgusted at their corruption of Christian belief for political gain. They are cowards and they are liars. They cannot be permitted to advance a secular agenda under the guise of faith.
And fourth, do you have any idea of the filth that spews from these pigs’ mouth on a regular basis about the religious beliefs of liberals? Of Democrats? Of well-known public figures? Against Muslims? Against Jews? Against members of Christian denominations they disagree with? What makes their beliefs immune to criticism? Because they talk the Good Talk, and profess they are people of faith in the traditional cadences of evangelical American Christianity ? Anyone can do that, and has done that. But people of faith aren’t cowards and sneaks who pretend that a religious agenda is a scientific theory that deserves equal time. But that’s what these people do.
Bottom line, Amy: You want people to stop criticizing your religious beliefs, you don’t deliberately make them a political issue. You don’t make them the focus of serious discussions of government policy. Otherwise, your personal religious beliefs are fair game.
And this is said by someone who has demonstrated the utmost respect, tolerance, and interest in the beliefs of all faiths. It is because of their persistent intolerance of other people’s religion and politics that conservative political operatives get no free pass from me. They blaspheme Christ by bringing the Gospels into a partisan political struggle. I am amazed that you, of all bloggers, think that’s not proper to criticize. It most certainly is. The Republican exploitation and hijacking of religious belief is a dangerous travesty of public piety. And it’s at these people – the Dobsons, the Falwells, the Grahams, the Frists, and yeah, the Brownbacks – your anger should be directed. Not at pious, intelligent patriots like Bill Moyers, for heavens sakes!
Every once in a while I’m struck anew by the utter lawlessnes and barbarity of the United States government under Republican rule. I follow this stuff so closely that it all blurs for long periods of time until something, out of the blue, shocks me almost physically. Today, I have been catching up on some things and started reading in depth about the decision of Federal District Judge Trager’s heinous decision to dismiss Maher Arar’s case against the US for kidnapping him at Kennedy Airport and rendering him to Syria to be tortured for almost a year.
This is a Kafkaesque tale that makes shivers go down my spine when I read about it. I simply can’t wrap my arms around the idea that the American government is openly and proudly doing these things — or that those who dissent are veritably dared to speak out against it lest they be branded terrorist sympathizers.
We have normalized torture, which I find akin to normalizing pedophilia for all its deviant — if not uncommon — malignity. To be clear: what shocks me is not that torture happens or that our government tortures. We have ample evidence that it has historically done so. What is unprecedented is this banal, rather dull acceptance that torture is perfectly natural and necessary.
Nat Hentoff has an article in this Week’s Village Voice about this Arar case in which he cites a previous Apellate Court decision about torture from 1980:
In this landmark decision, Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, David Cole points out, the appeals court decided that “the prohibition on torture was so universally accepted that a U.S. Court could hold responsible a Paraguayan official charged with torturing a dissident in Paraguay . . . The [U.S.] court declared that when officials violate such a fundamental norm as torture, they can be held accountable anywhere they are found.”
Notice the language in that decision, “enemy of all mankind.” Here’s the final paragraph in the opinion in its entirety:
In the twentieth century the international community has come to recognize the common danger posed by the flagrant disregard of basic human rights and particularly the right to be free of torture. Spurred first by the Great War, and then the Second, civilized nations have banded together to prescribe acceptable norms of international behavior. From the ashes of the Second World War arose the United Nations Organization, amid hopes that an era of peace and cooperation had at last begun. Though many of these aspirations have remained elusive goals, that circumstance cannot diminish the true progress that has been made. In the modern age, humanitarian and practical considerations have combined to lead the nations of the world to recognize that respect for fundamental human rights is in their individual and collective interest. Among the rights universally proclaimed by all nations, as we have noted, is the right to be free of physical torture. Indeed, for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind. Our holding today, giving effect to a jurisdictional provision enacted by our First Congress, is a small but important step in the fulfillment of the ageless dream to free all people from brutal violence.
So much for that. In our quest to deliver the almighty God’s gift of freedom to each man and women in this world, we seem to have decided that the fundamental human right to be free of torture is no longer operative.
This was 1980. In 2006, just 26 years later we see this (from Hentoff again):
Now let us hear how Judge Trager justifies his dismissal of Maher Arar’s suit for the atrocities he endured in Syria because of the CIA. In his decision, Trager said that if a judge decided, on his or her own, that the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” were always unconstitutional, “such a ruling can have the most serious consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both.”
A judge must be silent, even if our own statutes and treaties are violated! What about the separation of powers? Ah, said Trager, “the coordinate branches of our government [executive and legislative] are those in whom the Constitution imposes responsibility for our foreign affairs and national security. Those branches have the responsibility to determine whether judicial oversight is appropriate.”
Gee, I thought that the checks and balances of our constitutional system depend on the independence of the federal judiciary, which itself decides to exercise judicial review.
Judge Trager went further to protect the Bush administration’s juggernaut conduct of foreign policy: “One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case, and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar’s removal to Syria.”
“More generally,” Trager went on, “governments that do not wish to acknowledge publicly that they are assisting us would certainly hesitate to do so if our judicial discovery process could compromise them.”
Right. He didn’t even use a legal reason, just bought into the bedwetting cowardice that seems to have overtaken most of the government after 9/11 and hid under the covers. He left all the scary stuff to the preznit and his big strong armymen, rather than do his duty and follow the constitution or supreme court precedent. Nothing to see here.
When in American history have so many government officials in the other branches submitted themselves so willingly to executive authority? We are now three five years away from 9/11. The smoke has cleared and the rubble has been cleaned up. The “War on Terror” has been going on longer than WWII. If anyone thought that people would gather their wits about them and come to their senses about these things, the rubber stamp congress and deferential judiciary have shown that they have no intention of stopping the Bush administration’s attack on the constitution or it’s normalization of the depraved.
Democrats have got to win this next election. They are, for all their flaws, all we have standing between us a this continued abasement of American values. Taking the Republicans out of the majority is essential to the survival of what few ideals we have left.
I’m beginning to think they are actively trying to destroy the constitution just for the hell of it.
President May Have Known of Constitutional Defect Before Bill Signing
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 — Rep. Waxman asks the White House to respond to information that the Speaker of the House called President Bush to alert him that the version of the Reconciliation Act he was about to sign differed from the version that passed the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Waxman writes: “If the President signed the Reconciliation Act knowing its constitutional infirmity, he would in effect be placing himself above the Constitution.”
The nutshell version of this story is that the Senate passed the Omnibus Budget bill with a two billion dollar error regarding certain medicare payments in it. The vote was as close as possible — Cheney had to break the tie. The clerk found the error, which happens from time to time apparently and requires a re-vote on the correct version of the bill. But the Republican leadership didn’t fix it because they were afraid that when they brought it back up for the required re-vote in the Senate, it wouldn’t pass. They kept it to themselves and the House passed the incorrect version of the bill on another close vote — 216-214 and they sent it to the president who signed it — error and all.
Waxman now has reason to believe that the president was informed by Hastert that he was signing an incorrect version of the bill and Bush unconstitutionally signed it anyway.
This is the kind of corrupt, partisan, iniquitous leadership these assholes have perpetrated since they took power. They commonly hold votes open for as long as it takes to bribe a member to vote for it. Democratic members are locked out of meetings and not allowed to see bills before they are required to vote on them. They design the votes to be as close as possible so they don’t get any Democratic support — the more they can take the Democrats out of the process, make them look impotent to their constituents, the more likely they are to demoralize Democratic voters and make them feel helpless to change things.
But, it’s unconstitutional to do what they did. Just because you have to do a tough vote over again to make it legal, you don’t get to just ignore the constitution to avoid having to do it. Or at least that’s the way it used to be.
This is the kind of thing that would be ripe for hearings if the Democrats were to win the elections in the fall. It needs to be exposed, so that people can see the Republicans held accountable for their reign of political terror in the congress. The public does not understand, nor should they need to understand, the arcane rules governing the Senate. But anyone can understand that the Republican congress passed, and the president signed, a budget knowing that it was unconstitutional. And they did it because if they fixed it, as required by law, they knew it wouldn’t pass.
Waxman will be the Chairman of the committee that will investigate these atrocities — and he’s been making a list and checking it twice since 2001. If the country would like to see some accountability, he’s a guy who will do it. After all, he’s the one who got the tobacco chiefs to say they didn’t believe smoking was addictive — under oath, I might add, something that’s gone out of fashion since the Republican vassals were put in charge of overseeing their liege lord, the prince of the Codpiece.
Gosh, I get a kind of warm feeling remembering those good old days back in 2002, when we were all hunkered down around Atrios’ place, watching the metaphorical skies fill with fireworks. We even had our own campfire song:
If you’ve got no other reason, bomb Iraq (clap, clap) If you’ve got no other reason, bomb Iraq (clap, clap) If you’ve got no other reason, other than election season If you’ve got no other reason, bomb Iraq (clap, clap)
In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that President George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent within his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq next year. The Administration’s best-case scenario is that the parliamentary election scheduled for December 15th will produce a coalition government that will join the Administration in calling for a withdrawal to begin in the spring. By then, the White House hopes, the new government will be capable of handling the insurgency…
A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what…
Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?” another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”
…
This military planner added that even today, with Americans doing the targeting, “there is no sense of an air campaign, or a strategic vision. We are just whacking targets – it’s a reversion to the Stone Age. There’s no operational art. That’s what happens when you give targeting to the Army – they hit what the local commander wants to hit.” One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was optimistic that “American air will immediately make the Iraqi Army that much better.” But he acknowledged that he, too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting. “We have the most expensive eyes in the sky right now,” the consultant said. “But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores. Who is going to have authority to call in air strikes? There’s got to be a behavior-based rule.”
…
Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and who taught for three years at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the air war “will get very ugly” if targeting is turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and Marines have done – plowing through Sunni strongholds on search – and – destroy missions. “If we encourage the Iraqis to clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be useful,” Pape said. “The risk is that we will encourage the Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less judicious about using airpower – and the violence would go up. More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents will be created.”
Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-trained Iraqi Army would not necessarily be any more successful against the insurgency. “It’s not going to work,” said Andrew Brookes, the former director of airpower studies at the Royal Air Force’s advanced staff college, who is now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London. “Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing?” Brookes said. “No. You can concentrate in one area, but the guys will spring up in another town.” The inevitable reliance on Iraqi ground troops’ targeting would also create conflicts. “I don’t see your guys dancing to the tune of someone else,” Brookes said. He added that he and many other experts “don’t believe that airpower is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with airpower didn’t work in Vietnam, did it?”
Nope, it didn’t.
I’ve said over and over again that stay or withdraw is not the issue. Bush will screw it up either way. U.S. military airstrikes have significantly increased in Iraq. And it all makes poltical sense. What better way to boost poll approval ratings hovering at 33% (way, way, too high imo) than to bring the troops home? Airstrikes’ll do that. Nevermind it will make the situation far worse than it already is (hard to believe, but true). It will be an Iraqi problem; a large American presence will be history. And Bush’s poll numbers will rise.
Tragically, the beginning of a plan to find a real-world solution to the dangerous mess Bush created in Iraq will have to wait until January, 2009 when a hopefully sane president will take over. In the meantime, thousands will die for no reason at all except that an incompetent, bumbling, and frightened fool is president of the United States.
Hooyah! Iran is now the new Iraq. Read all about it here. From the article:
The strategy document declares that American-led diplomacy to halt Iran’s program to enrich nuclear fuel “must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided,” a near final draft of the document says.
Fortunately, we’ve got the combined diplomatic genius of Condoleeza Rice and John Bolton spearheading the effort to avoid “confrontation.”
China’s leaders, it says, are “expanding trade, but acting as if they can somehow ‘lock up’ energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets rather than opening them up — as if they can follow a mercantilism borrowed from a discredited era.
That sounds about right. Only America has the right to ‘lock up’ engergy supplies and follow a mercantilism from a discredited era. Where does China get off, anyhow?
Interestingly, the document includes the United States itself in its assessments:
“Recent trends regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions,” the document reads.
Oops. They were talking about Russia. An understandable mistake on my part.
Moving right along, it’s still the case that the worst ideas remain official American policy.
But chief among the sections that remain unchanged is the most controversial section of the 2002 strategy: the elevation of pre-emptive strikes to a central part of United States strategy.
“The world is better off if tyrants know that they pursue W.M.D. at their own peril,” the strategy says.
Um, er…I think the lessons the world learned from Iraq is the critical importance of nuclear defense against the US – it’s worked for NoKo, after all – and that the US is too overcommitted and unpopular to stop anyone else from acquiring them.
And the final sentence of the article notes a curious oversight in the National Security Strategy 2006:
It stays away from the subject of global warming.
But this is not the final draft. I’m sure the complete text will have a lot to say about global warming and what the Bush administration is doing to ameliorate its effects.
The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right. And now you know why Horowitz has been so swift to insist that it’s liberals who are in bed with Osama. But seriously, this could be a terrific book. The thing is that the author, George Michael, is going to have to define the “extreme right”, because obviously many rightwing conservatives – eg Flemming Rose, Franklin Graham, the Dobson scum, etc. – clearly loathe islamism, if not Islam itself. But it sure is mighty curious how close islamist values mirror christianist ones.
Since both these books won’t be out until April, that gives me plenty of time to finish off Jonathan Israel’s masterpiece, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, all 834 pages of it. And it’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. In related reading, I’ll also have time to complete my first serious pass through Spinoza’s writings since college. Folks, you ain’t read nuttin’ ’til you’ve read his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The word on the street (grin) is that Spinoza is dry, cold, and difficult. Not true. I find him deeply moving and, well, not exactly easy on occasion, but clear as a bell most of the time and worth every second. I’ve been gobbling up excerpts from this set of selections from Spinoza’s work. It includes the complete Ethics, which I’ve just started and don’t expect to grok for many, many years. There are the usual disputes in academe about translations, but the ones here, by Curley, seem more than adequate.
If you need some hand-holding getting into Spinoza – as I did – Israel’s book has some superb, concise chapters on Spinoza’s works that can help as a guide. I would skip The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart, about Spinoza and Leibniz, which got some good reviews recently. I read it, and yes, it’s a very fast read, but that’s because most of the book is taken up with biographical stuff and very little detail of their philosophies. But I suppose if all of this is brand new to you, Stewart’s book is a good way to get a toe wet. But definitely go on over to Spinoza himself. Beautiful. And if you already know him, you might want to read him again, just to remind yourself that there once was a time when people thought a reality-based government was a pretty good idea.
The GOP has been anticipating a serious effort to hold Bush accountable for his incompetence for years. For example, here is Jed Babbin from National Review Online in 2003. He’s worrying what might happen to poor George Bush if there’s another serious terrorist attack in the US:
If such an attack succeeds, the Democrats have been positioning themselves to benefit from it. All the talk of inadequate funding for homeland security — as if pouring money on Rainbow Tom Ridge will solve anything — is a predicate to their strategy. Bush will be blamed for protecting us inadequately. If the damage is sufficiently severe, and the economy tanks, they may even try to impeach him. If you think they can’t do that, think again.
But even 2003 seems a little late to start planning the pushback strategy we’re seeing against Feingold. My rough guess is that they started to develop it within days of the Supreme Court decision in 2000 that put Bush in the White House. That’s why this effort to “rally the base” is so organized and the message is so meticulously tailored: this isn’t an attack on Bush, but on the Republican Party which, as we all know, is the true party of America. It’s also why it’s an easy sell to a compliant, lazy press; they’ve been told to anticipate it for years, and “what it really means” when it finally happens.
Dig: Republicans started planning Clinton’s impeachment in November, 1992. Y’wanna bet when they’ll start working to impeach the next we-should-be-so-lucky Democratic president? Y’think they haven’t started? Wanna bet?
What an interesting article. Apparently, David Kirkpatrick is on the “conservative beat” this week for the NY Times and has the big scoop that the Republicans are all atwitter with scary tales of Democrats impeaching the president if they take the House and Senate. “Conservative beat” sources like Limbaugh and Weyrich and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are quoted saying that they are gleeful and excited that the Democrats have handed them this present and it’s onward to victory!
How generous of them to give this warning so that Dems have a chance to dodge that bullet. That’s why the “conservative beat” of the New York Times is such a godsend for liberals. When concerned Republicans need a platform from which to warn the Democrats about where they are going wrong they know they can go there and get their message out. In this case they feel it is only fair to give Democratic politicians a heads up that if they pursue things like Feingold’s motion the Republican base will go wild.
They humbly remind them that the Republicans paid big time for impeaching president Clinton. (Why, if they hadn’t done that they might have an even bigger majority in the House, Senate and Supreme Court than they have today!) I’m sure that the Democrats will take heed and not make the mistake of giving the Republicans any issue with which to motivate their base.
The question is, what are Democrats going to do to motivate theirs?
