Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Democratic Sin Eaters

by digby

Speaking of Amy Sullivan’s new article in the Washington Monthly about evangelicals leaving the Republican fold to join the Democrats, Kevin says:

Religion has been a big topic in liberal circles for a while now, and I have to admit that I always feel a bit like a bystander when the subject comes up. It’s not like I can fake being religious, after all. Still, no one is really asking people like me to do much of anything except stay quiet, refrain from insulting religion qua religion in ways that would make people like Brinson unwilling to work with us, and let other people do the heavy lifting when it comes to persuading moderate Christians to support liberal causes and liberal candidates. That’s not much to ask, and Amy makes a pretty good case that it would make a difference.

Sullivan’s article is only partially persuasive to me. I’m with Atrios on this. If people are voting on the basis of abortion or gay rights, then they are unlikely to switch because of the other party’s tax platform or approach to education. Those things are indicative of a certain view of personal autonomy in which compromise isn’t very likely. I have very little hope that all this tweaking around the edges of the abortion issue with talk of abstinence or birth control will make any inroads into the GOP coalition. (There is better picking in the western libertarian camp in my view.)

However, Sullivan’s article talks a lot about an educational program “presenting the Bible in a historical and cultural context—giving students a better understanding of biblical allusions in art, literature, and music,” and (assuming the curriculum doesn’t proselytise) I think it’s a terrific idea and I’m as secular as they get. Back in the day, it was part of plain old Western Civ. and wasn”t particularly controversial. I think that teaching other religions in those terms would be useful and enlightening as well. I’ve mentioned before that I took a year of comparative world religions in high school that was just great. It’s one of those subjects that can make a big impression on a young mind by showing that many religious beliefs are anchored in the same concepts. It promotes tolerance — which may be one reason why the Christian Right is against this new Bible curriculum. (What fun is religion without coercion?)

But I doubt that it will change anything politically. If there is a religious divide, it’s not about being religious per se. Almost the entire country considers itself religious to some degree or another. The parties are divided by religious intensity which is something else entirely. The big divide is between those who go to church more than once a week and those who don’t.

Sullivan says, however, that there are a whole bunch of evangelicals who are willing to jump:

But a substantial minority of evangelical voters — 41 percent, according to a 2004 survey by political scientist John Green at the University of Akron — are more moderate on a host of issues ranging from the environment to public education to support for government spending on anti-poverty programs. Broadly speaking, these are the suburban, two-working-parents, kids-in-public-school, recycle-the-newspapers evangelicals. They may be pro-life, but it’s in a Catholic, “seamless garment of life” kind of way. These moderates have largely remained in the Republican coalition because of its faith-friendly image.

I’d love to see some data to back that up. It’s possible, but I think it’s just as likely that they aren’t voting for Democrats because of taxes or gay marriage or simple tribal identity rather than because the Dems are great except they aren’t “friendly” to faith. After all, millions of religious Democrats don’t have this problem. The numbers indicate that the party already gets 48% of the “abortion should be mostly/always illegal” and 29% of the “gays should have no legal recognition” crowds. I think that is probably the maximum social conservative vote that the Democrats can expect to get. (Well, unless it plans to completely sell out its principles, which is always possible.)

That is why this part of the article made me cringe when I read it:

The immediate post-election conventional wisdom was that Democrats lost because they couldn’t appeal to so-called “moral values” voters. Democrats immediately embarked on a crash course in religious outreach and sought out people who could teach them about evangelicals. Brinson, who had caught the attention of the Democratic youth-vote industry, seemed like an obvious choice.

As for Brinson, when the Democratic chief of staff on the other end of the line asked whether the doctor would be willing to meet with some Democrats, he thought about his recent experiences with the other side and decided “maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to talk to these Democratic people.” In quick succession, the lifelong Republican found himself meeting with advisors to the incoming Democratic leaders—Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)—field directors at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and aides to Howard Dean at the Democratic National Committee. What they found is that their interests overlapped: The Democrats wanted to reach out to evangelicals, and Brinson wanted to connect with politicians who could deliver on a broader array of evangelical concerns, like protecting programs to help the poor, supporting public education, and expanding health care. It had seemed natural for him to start by pressing his own party to take up those concerns, but Democrats appeared to be more willing partners. They even found common ground on abortion when Brinson, who is very pro-life, explained that he was more interested in lowering abortion rates by preventing unwanted pregnancies than in using the issue to score political points.

Those Democrats who had initially been wary about working with a conservative evangelical Republican from Alabama found Brinson convincing. They also realized that conservatives had done them an enormous favor. “Listening to him talk,” one of them told me, “I thought, these guys bitch-slapped him, and he’s willing to play ball.”

Who’s playing ball and who’s getting bitch slapped, again?

Hey if I were a social conservative who was trying to leverage some clout against the Republican party for failing to deliver on its promises while in power, I’d run right over to the Democrats too. After all, everybody knows that they have no convictions and are willing to do anything to win. Why not co-opt them with visions of retaking the red states with the evangelical vote? It worked for Republicans on race.

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Go Dolly

by digby

I guess we can all agree now that Dolly Parton isn’t a real American. She wrote a song about God and a transgendered person that didn’t condemn that person to hell.

Here’s the effete, latte swilling, NT Times reading, out of the mainstream, left wing elitist making excuses for herself:

KING: And the lyrics are directly for the film. Example, “I’m out here on my journey trying to make the most of it. I’m a puzzle. I must figure out where all of my pieces fit.” Did you like the movie?

PARTON: Well actually I thought it was very touching. It was very emotional to me to see someone, you know, that really frustrated with who they are and trying to become who they are and trying to become accepted and seen and loved for that.

And I really think Duncan, the director, handled it so well, all the parts of the movie. I was very, very touched with it. Even the son, little Kevin, I thought he was wonderful. I thought his part was great. And I think just all the ways that they all played together and how tastefully it was done for such a sensitive subject. I was real impressed with it all.

[…]

KING: Why have you been — you’ve been interested for a long time in gay/lesbian, transgender stories, why?

PARTON: Well, I’m not interested in anything. I haven’t made any efforts to do — I just am totally accepting of people. I really believed that everybody should be allowed to be who they are.

KING: That’s what I mean.

PARTON: Well yes, I’m very tolerant of just people in general. I believe we’re all God’s children. I think we all have a right to be who we are. I’m certainly — I’m not a judge and I’m certainly not God, so I just try to love the God core in all people. And I know that is in the center of us all, so I just try to accept people for who they are, whatever that is.

Typical liberal moral relativist. Wasn’t her most famous song called “In My San Francisco Russian Hill Home?” I think so.

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Three Years Later

by digby

Appropriately, Taylor Marsh has a nice post up today about movies. Tonight’s the big night in this town and if you are anywhere near downtown Hollywood you’ll see more limousines in one place than anywhere else on the planet. Until recently, the oscars were always on Monday, which was fun if you worked in the biz. There was a holiday feel to it and even if you weren’t going to the show there were parties all over the place so everybody left work early. Now it’s on Sunday and it’s a whole different deal.

It occurred to me today as I was making my predictions (I think “Crash” is going to win Best Picture) that three years ago I was disappointed in Hollywood and the music industry for its cowardice in the face of the Iraq invasion. I wrote a long post about how odd and disjointed I felt watching this glamorous show in which the war was barely mentioned while the invasion was being presented as an epic patriotic pageant 24/7. There were pictures of GI’s who had been captured all over the TV that day and I had been looking at the al Jazeera web-site pictures that were horrible:

… I’m disassociating from the reality. And, it occurred to me that maybe we are all doing that to some degree — maybe because we are biologically programmed to do so just to keep ourselves from going crazy in times of war…

So, when I watched the Oscars last night, something I normally enjoy and go out of my way to see, I was just hoping for someone to say something heartfelt about peace. I was actually hoping that a lot of them would say something about peace — not necessarily in the political sense, but in the universal value sense. Instead, sadly, most of them just pretended that nothing was happening.

But a few — foreigners mostly — did say some words about peace. Almodovar said, “I also want to dedicate this award to all the people that are raising their voices in favor of peace, respect of human rights, democracy and international legality. All of which are essential qualities to live.” (Thanks, Pete. At least the Europeans love us, even if our own timid political brethren want us to tone down the rhetoric and let Rush Limbaugh dominate the discourse.)

But then Adrian Brody, the guy nobody expected to win, came up and let himself be human and emotional — for his win, naturally, but also because of the the nature of the role he was being rewarded for playing. He said:

“My experiences of making this film made me very aware of the sadness and the dehumanization of people at times of war,” he said. “Whatever you believe in, if it’s God or Allah, may he watch over you and let’s pray for a peaceful and swift resolution.”

Dehumanization. That’s what I’m feeling when I see the scared faces of those POW’s and the horrors of decapitated children.

This is why civilization was supposed to be beyond the superficially logical rationalizations of “preventive war” and grand global ambitions of world domination through military force. While tallying up the 20th century’s horrific body count we were supposed to have recognized that war must be a last resort in the face of NO OTHER OPTION. There can be no excuse but immediate self-defense to justify it. If Vietnam didn’t teach us that, then it taught us nothing. Wars of aggression, by definition, cannot be glorious.

This war never met that test. And we have opened up Pandora’s Box.

The historians will sort out the rightness and the wrongness of the policy. But as I was watching that glamorous telecast being held just a few miles from where I live, I could not help but be struck, once again, by the fact that we Americans are the luckiest people on the planet. I hope that we stay that way. We are good people, decent people, but we are being led astray by a leadership that is perpetrating a wrong. We simply cannot expect to remain safe and prosperous if we create a world in which it is the prerogative of one country, our country, to decide that a potential future threat is enough to justify a war. It is a dehumanizing undertaking that devalues every single one of us. It is not the America I know.

Three years ago. And I am now desensitized to the images I wrote about in the beginning of that post, the war images and the pictures of death. And new awful images have come and gone since then. I now argue with people about whether it is acceptable to torture — a concept that would have been completely foreign to me three years ago. I would just as easily have believed we would be arguing about whether it is acceptable to molest children. I now accept that the president and his administration truly and deeply believe they are above the law, something I would have scoffed at not five years ago after the endless bellowing from the right during the Great Clinton Panty raid.

On the other hand, a lot has changed. Bush was a colossus, then. His approval rating was around 70%. The Dixie Chick boycott had just hit the news. It was a difficult time for dissent as I’m sure you all recall. The pressure on the media was perhaps exemplified most starkly by this:

A leaked in-house report said Phil Donahue’s show would present a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” The problem: “He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The danger — quickly averted by NBC — was that the show could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

The good old days. How nice then to realize that this year’s crop of socially conscious and politically themed movies must have been green-lighted right around that time. It usually takes between 18 months and forever to get a movie done. Therefore, while I was fretting about the movies losing their political voice because nobody spoke out at the Oscars, Hollywood was quietly setting about speaking out in a much more powerful way: through its art.

People can’t stop talking about how “unsuccessful” all the movies were this year and that everybody wants to watch nothing but re-makes of “the Sound of Music.” (See Wolcott for for a quick dispatch of that braindead trope.) But the truth is that all these movies succeeded as art, as politics and as popular works on their own terms. Hollywood made these films that are nominated this year because the artists involved had something to say, but they also made them for money. All of them were profitable, which is more than we can say for overpriced behemoths like that piece of shit “The Alamo” which lost 113 million or “Sahara” which lost 75 million and counting.

Perhaps it sounds silly to say that it took courage to make these movies, but I think it did. That night three years ago when I was watching the Oscars, I wondered if the new Republican reality would be with us forever. The shallow, fatcat, money grubbing studios made a bet that three years later this country would come to its senses and reject that awful craziness. Damned if they weren’t right. Bush and the Republicans are in deep, deep shit today, Iraq is a mess, race is once again a hot topic and the cause of civil rights marches on. Maybe those guys and gals are worth the ridiculous sums of money they are paid to predict the zeitgeist after all.

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Tears of A Klein Redux

by digby

As most of you undoubtedly already know, Jane has been holding a “Joe Klein, in his own words” contest these last few nights and they’ve come up with some doozies. It’s down to the final round and I’m sorry to see that my favorite didn’t make the cut:

The Great Society was an utter failure because it helped to contribute to social irresponsibility at the very bottom.

As with virtually everything else he has ever written, he was spouting bullshit GOP propaganda

If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers’ money.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century.

Has there ever been a more useful Republican idiot than Joe Klein? I don’t think so. If you don’t believe me, check out the huge array of idiotic statements he’s written over at firedoglake. Jane says, “No one man can claim credit for the minority status of Democrats today, but Joe Klein can certainly rest easily knowing that he has done more than his fair share.” I think he and all his fake liberal pundit friends are the most responsible of all. They are killing us. People on both the left and the right confuse Joe Klein with a real Democrat and mistake his incomprehensible political philosophy for that of the Democratic Party. If there is nothing else that the liberal blogosphere can do, we must make it clear to the American people and the Democratic politicians that Joe Klein speaks only for his elite, insider cadre of cocktail weenie addicts. His opinions are irrelevant to serious Democratic politics.

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Don’t Fuck

by digby

I got a track-back from the blog “Responding To the Left” to the post below, specifically the story of the woman who had an abortion because she already had two small children and couldn’t afford another. I think it is an eloquent and honest representation of the way that many in the pro-life movement feel and it’s great to see it out in the open so we can begin to debate this thing honestly:

I don’t really get it. I am supposed to feel sorry for this woman? Does Digby expect me to sympathize with her? I hope not, because she’s a selfish woman who was thinking only of herself.

That’s right. You read that correctly. She couldn’t afford to have another child so she terminated the pregancy. That is selfish. She wanted to have her fun and get laid, but she didn’t want to have to deal with the possible consequences of her actions and guess what people? When a man and a woman have sex and the make is capable of producing sperm and the woman is capable of producing eggs, there is the possibility of the woman getting pregnant.

Digby makes the wisecrack about her not having sex. I can only take from his comment, that he is like so many other’s of the same ilk who believe we’re all like jungle animals and have to hump when the mood strikes. Of course, that isn’t the case. People don’t walk down the street and just bump into each other and start screwing (unless it’s a Cinemax movie). We have the mental capacity to be able to take care of such business in private. We also have the ability to abstain. Nothing is going to happen to us if we don’t have sex.

And if you’re in a position like this woman, a low paying job and two kids already. Guess what? Don’t fuck.

As human beings, we have the cognitive ability to think before we act. The choices we make carry consequences. And we have to accept responsibility for those choices. If we choose to smoke 2 packs of cigarettes a day, we have to accept it when we get lung cancer. If we drink and then drive, we have to accept it if we kill somebody in a car wreck. If we eat at McDonalds every day, then we have to accept it when we gain weight. It’s about choices. Having sex is a choice. It’s as simple as that. Saying, “I can’t afford it” when a woman learns she is pregnant because of that choice is not accepting the results of that choice.
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Personally, I believe abortion is a moral issue, not a legal one. Therefore, contrary to my personal feelings regarding abortion, I don’t support South Dakota’s law. As pro-life as I am, I find this law to be too draconian. That’s not going to stop me from calling out this woman as a selfish person who is concerned more with making herself feel good then dealing with the consequences of the choice she made.

This person assumes that I believe humans are animals who can’t control ourselves, but that is wrong. I don’t believe that we are unable to control ourselves, but I do believe it is a fundamental part of life — unstoppable, inexorable, relentless. It is not immoral (even for poor people) to do it. Nor is it even remotely realistic to think they won’t. People have sex and lots of it, even when the “consequences” are severe. It’s basic. And sometimes birth control fails or people lose their heads in the heat of the moment. Accidents happen. It is so banal and mundane and common that it’s a bit bizarre to even have to make that explicit in the argument. Accidental, unwanted pregnancy happens every single day by the millions on this planet. Nature (or perhaps the “intelligent designer”) expects women to get pregnant as often as possible and created the human sex drive to make that happen. Women, independent sentient beings that they are, want to control how many children they have. It’s a constant battle and often times “nature” wins. It isn’t a matter of morality. Sex between consenting people is simply human. And the right to abortion is simply a matter of human liberty — a woman’s right to decide her own fate and a woman’s right to be a normal sexual being. Without both of those things, she can never truly be free.

No, people aren’t mindless animals who can’t control themselves. But, saying to women, “if you can’t afford another child, don’t fuck” is not entirely different than saying “if you can’t afford food, don’t eat.” Of course, she won’t literally die if she doesn’t ever have sex again (or at least until she’s past her fertile years.)But for many women it would be a death of another sort: the death of her humanity. Sex is elemental.

In any case, however much you exhort them not to, women will still have sex and without a right to abortion (and soon birth control) they’ll end up in forced childbirth, bearing more offspring than they can afford and they’ll end up having back alley abortions and they’ll end up dying. I suspect the people who believe having sex if you are unprepared to procreate is irresponsible will find comfort in that.

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The Sodomized Virgin Exception

by digby

South Dakota:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn’t religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and “sodomized as bad as you can make it?” Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn’t “as bad” as it could have been?

Certainly, we know that if she wasn’t a virgin, she was asking for it, so she should be punished with forced childbirth. No lazy “convenient” abortion for her, the little whore. It goes without saying that the victim who was saving it for her marriage is a good girl who didn’t ask to be brutally raped and sodomized like the sluts who didn’t hold out. But even that wouldn’t be quite enough by itself. The woman must be sufficiently destroyed psychologically by the savage brutality that the forced childbirth would drive her to suicide (the presumed scenario in which this pregnancy could conceivably “threaten her life.”)

Someone should ask this man about this. He seems to have given it a good deal of thought. I suspect many hours have been spent luridly contemplating the brutal, savage rape and sodomy (as bad as it can be) of a religious virgin and how terrible it would be for her. It seems quite clear in his mind.

Meanwhile, outside the twisted imagination of Senator Psycho there, we have reality:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: One patient she saw was this woman, probably in her early 20s. She would not reveal even her age. With a low-paying job and two children, she said she simply could not afford a third.

“MICHELLE,” PATIENT WHO TERMINATED HER PREGNANCY: It was difficult when I found out I was pregnant. I was saddened, because I knew that I’d probably have to make this decision. Like I said, I have two children, so I look into their eyes and I love them. It’s been difficult, you know; it’s not easy. And I don’t think it’s, you know, ever easy on a woman, but we need that choice.

Too bad. She shouldn’t have had sex. Three kids and no money are just what the bitch deserves. Her two little kids deserve it too for choosing a mother like her.

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You Talkin’ To Me?

by digby

John Aravosis is following this delicious Katrina feud. He writes:

Ohhhh, this infighting is really getting interesting these days. “Heckuva job Brownie” is lashing out at his former boss Chertoff. All of that GOP discipline seems to be collapsing faster than Enron.

Hah. It does show you once again that Bush’s vaunted loyalty is actually a necessity. Everytime he fires somebody the tales they tell are damning. It was particularly stupid to try to lay off the epic death and destruction of Katrina on poor little Brownie alone. They left him no choice but to try to publicly recover his reputation. He’s destroyed. If they’d have played it smart they would have fired Chertoff and a couple of others too and just said it wasn’t personal, it was a systemic failure and these people all fell on their swords because they are honorable men. They could have then been bought off with lucrative careers, no harm no foul. But they left poor little Brownie no choice. Now he is going to use every opportunity available to him to keep it in the headlines and convince a very receptive public that the fault was not his.

Rove must really be sweating this Plame thing because he has completely lost his touch.

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Wiping The Sleep From Their Tired Little Eyes

by digby

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who found this article by John Dickerson to be completely ridiculous. A former white house correspondent from TIME magazine apparently has no idea how stupid he sounds when he says he held the belief that Bush was some sort of behind the scenes mastermind until he saw the footage of the Katrina video conference. Weldon says:

So. Okay. What we have here is an experienced Washington hand who has presumably been conscious during at least some of the past five years, and is only now — and only because he saw the frickin’ video — beginning to worry that Bush may not be quite as competent as those responsible for covering his ass say he is. Didn’t it ever occur to Dickerson that executives who consistently ask good questions eventually get good answers that lead to at least an occasional good outcome? Have there been any good outcomes?

No.

I can understand why people may have intially thought that the guy just had to be smarter than he appeared in public because well.. nobody that dumb could possibly be president. It just defied reason. It wasn’t long, however, before it became clear that the Republican Party had insulted our collective intelligence beyond our wildest imaginings by using sophisticated marketing techniques and every lever of institutional power at their disposal to install an idiot manchild in the oval office. (I came to believe they did it just to prove they could.)

After it was revealed that he had ignored the terrorism threat until 9/11 and then he continued to screw up everything that came after, any sentient being should have been able to see that what you saw in public was real: an arrogant, spoiled inarticulate man who didn’t have a clue about how to run the most powerful country in the world. Regardless of how many “grown-ups” he had around him, he was the head of the organization and the organization was a reflection of him. They always are. His staff was just as inept as he was.

Bush’s entire life had consisted of trading on his father’s name and failing at everything he touched. That is the legacy of this failed presidency as well. That John Dickerson is only now beginning to realize that Bush is exactly what he appears to be is nothing short of mind boggling.

Eric Boehlert, one of the few journalists around who was as gobsmacked by the gooey Bush adulation among the press corps as the rest of us were wrote back in February of 2002, after Bob Woodward’s fellatory series called “10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet”:

Conservative pundits cheered the series, suggesting it was a Pulitzer Prize must-win. Raves from the right were understandable: “10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet” erased any suggestion of Bush as a detached as well as inexperienced leader who relies on more seasoned aides to get things done.

To say the series presented the administration, and Bush in particular, in a favorable light would be an understatement. We see Bush utterly sure of himself, operating on gut instincts, leading round-table discussions, formulating complex strategies, asking pointed questions, building international coalitions, demanding results, poring over speeches and seeking last-minute phrase changes.

The portrait was so contrary to public perception that it was reminiscent of the timeless “Saturday Night Live” sketch that ran at the height of Iran-Contra scandal. It featured an outwardly jolly and oblivious Ronald Reagan, who in private Oval Office meetings revealed himself as a mastermind of the operation’s arcane covert details, barking out orders to befuddled senior aides. In the same way, but without satire, the Post series suggested that a president often depicted as a genial delegator, who ducked the Vietnam War with a stateside post in the Texas Air National Guard, is in fact a hands-on commander in chief of the war on terror.

It was ridiculous, laughable, absurd and yet they actually succeeded in convincing am large number of Americans that they weren’t seeing what they thought they were seeing:

You know, I’m asked all the time — I’ll ask myself a question. (Laughter.) How do I respond to — it’s an old trick — (laughter) — how do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am — like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we’ve go to do a better job of making our case. We’ve got to do a better job of explaining to the people in the Middle East, for example, that we don’t fight a war against Islam or Muslims. We don’t hold any religion accountable. We’re fighting evil. And these murderers have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their evil deeds. And we cannot let it stand

Jesus H. Christ.

Now, like John Dickerson,Howard Fineman, (one of the gushiest Bush hagiographers) seems to have just discovered that the emperor has no clothes as well:

The man-of-few-words approach has its virtues, and they matched the moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and, for the most part, since. Bush’s deep belief in his vision of global democratization, coupled with the eloquence of speeches crafted for state occasions by Michael Gerson, carried the day. Dazed and confused and searching for old verities after the terrorist attacks, I think most Americans found some comfort in Bush the Growling Cowboy.

I know it’s a shock to Republicans but the president’s primary job is not to provide comfort in an emergency, it’s to deal effectively with the emergency. In that, he has always failed. There was, apparently, a massive need among the media (and perhaps the public) to believe that the puerile drivel that Bush spouted after 9/11 was an effective way to deal with Islamic terrorism. In fact, it was precisely the opposite.

Feinman has an epiphany:

That time has passed, though. The main reason of course, is that the simple, black-and-white solutions that the president sketched for us in the “war on terror” haven’t materialized. Most Americans now consider the war in Iraq to have been a mistake, one that has made us less secure here in what is now called “the homeland.” They see his Manichaean clarity not as a comfort, but as a danger — because it underestimates the complexity of the real world. There are many more moving parts to consider in the world than the simple clockwork Bush had described.

No kidding. But then it was always bullshit and a good many of us knew it at the time. The “Manichean clarity” was fairy dust that any high school kid should have seen through. Yet Fineman was desperately in love with Cowboy Bush, as were so many of the elite press corps (for reasons that only their psychologists or spouses can understand) that he wrote:

So who are the Bushes, really? Well, they’re the people who produced the fellow who sat with me and my Newsweek colleague, Martha Brant, for his first interview since 9/11. We saw, among other things, a leader who is utterly comfortable in his role. Bush envelops himself in the trappings of office. Maybe that’s because he’s seen it from the inside since his dad served as Reagan’s vice president in the ’80s. The presidency is a family business.

Dubyah loves to wear the uniform — whatever the correct one happens to be for a particular moment. I counted no fewer than four changes of attire during the day trip we took to Fort Campbell in Kentucky and back. He arrived for our interview in a dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. When he greeted the members of Congress on board, he wore an open-necked shirt. When he had lunch with the troops, he wore a blue blazer. And when he addressed the troops, it was in the flight jacket of the 101st Airborne. He’s a boomer product of the ’60s — but doesn’t mind ermine robes.

And now he has the nerve to say that wearing costumes and talking like a cartoon character “underestimates the complexity of the real world. There are many more moving parts to consider in the world than the simple clockwork Bush had described.” No shit.

I blame the press as much as I blame the Republicans for this nonsense. If they hadn’t gotten a schoolkid crush on Bush after 9/11 and had maintained even a modicum of professionalism, we might not have had to endure this horrible failure for a second term. They built him up so high, and kept him there so long, that it was impossible for the public to fully comprehend what a miserable failure he was until it was too late. Now we are stuck with this bozo for another three years because these alleged journalists took five years to realize what was evident to anyone with eyes to see: George W. Bush was unqualified by brains, temperament or experience to be president, and the party he represents treated their country with tremendous disrespect by anointing such a man for such an important job. They have failed as much as he has and they have a lot to answer for.

Update:

There were some earlier reports about Bush’s behavior in meetings, but nobody wanted to deal with the reality that we had a child in the oval office.

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Lazy, Good-For-Nothin N … agin

by digby

I don’t know if I heard this right, but I think Chris Matthews just said something like this:

This is probably going to bug some people, but the first time I saw Nagin I saw this slow acting, slow talking guy…or do all people talk that way down there? I didn’t see any New Yorker type A get the job done … is this lazy, “it’s a hot day” kind of thinking?

Now why do you suppose he thought that would bug some people?

He agitated for his true love Rudy to take over the for weeks. I thought he was just yearning for another hot codpiece moment but apparently he also thought them slow actin’ N’Olahns boys jess didn’t know nothin’ bout no hurricanes.

What in the hell is wrong with him? Is this unusual form of Tourette’s Syndrome?

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Lying Low

by digby

I’ve linked many times to this astonishing article by Michael Ledeen in which he agitates for an attack on France and Germany for their failure to support the Iraq invasion. Most recently, I used it as an example of right wingers assailing our traditional European allies while the administration cozies up to undependable allies like the UAE in this port deal. Alert reader Kurtis noticed something in the piece that I didn’t:

Both countries have been totally deaf to suggestions that the West take stern measures against the tyrannical terrorist sponsors in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. Instead, they do everything in their power to undermine American-sponsored trade embargoes or more limited sanctions, and it is an open secret that they have been supplying Saddam with military technology through the corrupt ports of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid’s little playground in Dubai, often through Iranian middlemen.

It turns out he’s written a whole lot of things like this over the years. Here’s another one:

Those who care to know such things have long been aware that the two most murderous leaders of the Islamic Republic, Rafsanjani and Rafiqdust, spend considerable time in Dubai, from which Iranians run weapons shipments throughout the region, smuggle Iraqi oil to market, and transfer billions of dollars to their overseas operatives (as well as to their private financial empires in Western Europe, North Africa, and elsewhere in the Middle East). There are more than 40 flights per day between Dubai and Iran, in addition to the countless voyages of ships of the sort captured by Israeli forces.

Strange then that the only thing I can find from Ledeen on the matter since the controversy arose is this entry on the Corner:

There is a clean way to handle things such as the port operations, and it still astonishes me that it wasn’t done properly. It’s been done thusly for many years, actually many decades:

1. Create an American company to handle the matter (if foreigners wish to buy in, or even buy it, that’s ok);
2. Wall off the foreign investors/owners. They are silent partners. They have no say in the actual operation;
3. Create a “classified Board” composed of people with security clearances and experience in sensitive matters;
4. Appoint a CEO and other top executives with experience and clearances.

We do this all the time with, say, foreigners who want to buy companies that manufacture parts for weapons sytems, etc. It seems the obvious solution here. Dubai would get prestige and whatever profits are generated. Americans run the thing and guarantee, so far as is possible, security. Looks like a win/win solution. For that matter, we should have done the same sort of thing with the British owners, and we should do the same thing with the Chinese and others who now have access to all kinds of potentially dangerous information thanks to their buy-ins.

Funny, no fulminating about playboy sheiks from Dubai doing business with Iran or selling arms to the Palestinians or anything else. He just writes a very dry analysis about how Dubai can get out of this sticky wicket. This from the guy who has been the number one believer in the “real men go to Tehran” school of delusional neocon thinking.

How odd.

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