Via Dan Froomkin, I see that Fox News (of all places) is following this story of Bush making political speeches before military audiences:
… lately the president has been saying more than just “hello” to troops. Twice last month in speeches to military audiences, the president attacked Democrats and fired back at their accusations that pre-war intelligence was manipulated by his administration.
“It is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim we misled them and the American people,” Bush said.
On Nov. 11 at the Army Depot in Tobyhanna, Pa., Bush told the audience of servicemen and women that some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq have attempted to rewrite the past.
“The national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges,” he added.
The attacks against critics at military settings may have put troops in the awkward position of undermining their own regulations. A Department of Defense directive doesn’t allow service members in uniform to attend “partisan political events.”
Questions have been raised about the military’s attendance at events where Bush says something like “they spoke the truth then, they’re speaking politics now.” Several members of the military told FOX News that Bush is inviting the troops to take sides in a partisan debate in his speeches.
“This is a very bad sign,” said retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, who led Central Command in the early 1990s and is an administration critic. “This is the sort of thing that you find in other countries where the military and political, certain political parties are aligned.”
Bush often appeared with troops in his 2004 campaign. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., endorsed him before hundreds of cheering soldiers.
“Where you have our uniformed members being put in a position where it looks like they’re rooting for one side or another is very disconcerting,” said Greg Noone, a former Navy lawyer.
Presidents have generally avoided such military settings due to the chance for attacks from opponents.
“They could be divisive,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “And as commander-in-chief, he represents all the people as does the military defend all the people.”
I wrote about this a few days ago. It’s not only the president, of course, who is doing this. The VP spoke before the troops this week as well. It’s done for the specific purpose of giving the impression that the military backs the administration politically. It’s inappropriate to give speech after speech before these captive audiences in the first place, but to take pot shots at the political opposition is really beyond the pale. There are Democrats among the troops, but they are not allowed to give their political opinion in this situation (by booing, for instance) the way a regular citizen could (theoretically, at least.)
And, as Stephen Hess points out, when Bush dons his Commander in Chief hat he’s no longer supposed to be partisan. In that capacity, he’s supposed to represent all the people. The military is always supposed to represent all the people.
Meanwhile, Dan Bartlet proves once again that the White House believes that they can speak gibberish and everyone will just let it slide:
“They’re the ones who are defending our freedom,” said White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett. “They should be able to listen to the debate, they should be able to hear both sides.”
I’ll be looking forward to seeing John Kerry and John Murtha addressing the troops every couple of days. After all, they should be able to hear both sides.
I’m not religious but I’ve always loved Christmas — the food, the lights, the tree, the music, the whole thing. Now the right wing pricks have gone and made it a cause in their goddamned culture war and I can’t enjoy it anymore. One sniff of fruitcake and a picture of Bill O’Reilly enters my mind. I’m instantly nauseated.
Everywhere I go, even here in the very heart of godless secular humanism, the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, there are carolers on the sidewalk (singing songs like “Oh Holy Night” no less) “Merry Christmas” is written on store windows, decorated trees and twinkling lights are all over the place. And all I can think is “what in the hell are these wingnuts going on about? Christmas is everywhere! Are they nuts???” And then the pure, simple, childlike enjoyment I usually feel for the holiday just slips away.
I resent the hell out of these wingnut bastards turning Christmas into a political football. Is nothing sacred to these people?
Update: Oh, and please tell me again how secularists are declaring war on Christmas:
Many American “megachurches”, huge Christian ministries with thousands-strong congregations, have horrified traditionalists by closing on Christmas Day.
Sunday services on Dec 25 are being cancelled because clergy fear attendance will be poor. Worshippers are instead being encouraged to spend the day with their families.
[…]
Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois, one of the six largest US churches with a weekend attendance of nearly 22,000, is among those closing its doors.
“At first glance it does sound contrarian,” the Rev. Gene Appel, its senior pastor, said. “We don’t see it as not having church on Christmas. We see it as decentralising the church on Christmas: hundreds of thousands of experiences going on around Christmas trees.
“The best way to honour Jesus’s birth is for families to have a more personal experience on that day.”
Christmas Sunday services were not the most effective use of staff and volunteers, a spokesman said.
Other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are in Kentucky, Texas, Georgia and Michigan.
“We feel that Christmas is definitely a time that should be spent with family,”said Kris McNeil of Michigan’s Mars Hill Bible Church.
Cindy Willison, a spokesman for the evangelical Southland Christian Church, near Chicago, said at least 500 volunteers were needed, plus staff, to run Sunday services for the estimated 8,000 worshippers. Many volunteers appreciated the chance to spend Christmas with their families.
The closures contrast starkly with Roman Catholic parishes, which see some of their largest congregations at Christmas, and Protestant ministries, such as the Episcopal, Methodist and Lutheran churches, where Sunday services are hardly ever cancelled.
The number of megachurches in America, defined as non-Catholic congregations of at least 2,000 people, has soared from 10 in 1970 to an estimated 800 today.
Many function like corporations, running businesses such as publishing houses.
I didn’t know that the Christmas tree actually functioned as an alter, but I’m not surprised. This is America and that’s where the presents are.
I’m awfully impressed by the piety of the conservative evangelicals who attend these churches and lord their superior religiosity over the mainline churches.
Update II: I missed this Atrios post yesterday making essntially the same point.
Kevin Drum is asking some questions about what happened on that flight in Miami yesterday. It all sounds a little “screwy” to me too, but not just because the witness accounts sound as if the marshalls may have overreacted. There’s something else screwy about this.
The marshalls were obviously persuaded that it was quite possible that this man had a bomb in his carry on bag. And apparently, the marshalls went through the plane after the fact, looking for accomplices, pointing guns at the passengers and knocking cell phones out of their hands ostensibly because they thought they might contain guns.
Now I know that the marshalls are taught to shoot first and ask questions later and all that, so no lectures please. But I still find it amazing that after all this time, they automatically assume that a group of people could get a bomb and “cell phone guns” through the gate security in a US airport. Goes to show you how useful all that boarding gate crap really is, doesn’t it?
My favorite comment on this matter is Monica Crowley this morning saying that the good thing about all this is that “the system worked.”
In the latest installment of the “Democrats are in Disarray” show, Fred Barnes just did a reverse triple axel that would make Michelle Kwan weep. After going on and on about how the Democrats are all over the map, they don’t know what they are doing, they are rudderless and lacking in ideas, he said that Nancy Pelosi has got the democrats voting in “lock-step” which is empowering the (apparently useless) GOP moderates. (Then he pouted and stomped his tiny foot in frustration.)
I assume that everyone can see the problem with Barnes’ statement, even if he is so unaware of his own illogic that he makes both of these statements in the same breath.
The best moment today, however, was watching these rich, privileged, middle aged fucks sit around chuckling at the prospect of Stanley Williams asking for clemency. I don’t know what it is these Republican assholes find so amusing about executions but they can’t seem to contain their mirth when someone suggests the possibility of redemption.
These are the same people complaining about a war on Christianity.
Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory heard Howard Dean’s shocking shocking comparison between Iraq and Vietnam and was led to do a rather unusual thing. He went back and read what our leaders were saying during Vietnam and compared it to what they are saying to today. What he found was quite interesting.
Howard Dean, unsurprisingly, is not full of shit after all.
I had meant to review “Syriana” when I saw it over the Thanksgiving week-end, but with one thing and another, I let it slide. Now I see that the reviews are coming in fast and furious and I’m left in the dirt. Typical.
I’m not going to bore anyone with a synopsis, because anyone who is reading this can go to the web-site and see the trailer and read all about it right now. (God I love these internets.)
I happened to have loved “Traffic” (written by the same screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who also directed “Syriana”) so this frenetic, multi-tentacled, highly textured plot line was right up my alley. I like thrillers that I can’t figure out until the end and which require me to go back and review the entire movie in my mind, seeing certain scenes through the prism of the climax and understanding them entirely differently than I did the first time. And I especially like it when a film’s confusing plot is almost a character of the story, as this one is.
On a cinematic level it is not as polished or interesting as “Traffic” which had the brilliant Steven Soderberg at the helm. He used light and color to differentiate the varying threads of the plot to keep things straight in the audience’s mind. This film is less dazzlingly directed, so the complicated plot becomes more challenging. Nonetheless, I found it gripping from start to finish mainly because it is about something that we here in the blogosphere have been talking about since the war began and it asks a question that everyone’s asking (why are we in Iraq?) without ever bringing Iraq up at all.
The film observes various American and middle east actors running about with idealistic, nihilistic, greedy and personal agendas, bumping into each other sometimes at random and at others by design. But the single most important player is oil (which in real life, for reasons that are mystifying, is widely considered to be a tin-foil hat, loony-left explanation, even among liberals.) I don’t normally consider myself a cynic, but on this topic, it’s very hard not to be. In the final analysis, this really is a modern version of the Great Game. When we ask ourselves “why are we in Iraq?” it makes more sense to refine the question and ask whether we would be in Iraq if it weren’t for oil. I think it’s fairly obvious that we would not be. Terrorism, in the grand scheme of things, is not an existential threat no matter how hard the warbloggers wank. Invading Iraq was actually counter-productive to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and may end up creating another Islamic state. Even the Bush administration knew that this was not an adequate rationale for invading Iraq so they pimped the WMD threat.
Atrios has posted an interview with ex-CIA agent Robert Baer, on whom the George Clooney character was based, that is quite interesting. Here’s another interview from Baer on Chris Matthews that I think speaks to my point:
MATTHEWS: What‘s the future look like?
BAER: I‘ll tell you what the Saudis are doing. They are building a fence to keep the chaos in Iraq from moving south, and so are the Jordanians. They‘ve put out contracts.
MATTHEWS: If you had to choose now between Americans forces staying in that country for two more years or getting out now, what is better?
BAER: Chris, the problem is oil. Muslims sit on 70 percent of oil. We cannot afford to see Saudi Arabia destabilized. We‘re going to have to keep troops in the area. I don‘t know where you are going to keep them, on the border, in the rear bases, but we cannot let the chaos in Iraq spread.
MATTHEWS: It would?
BAER: Absolutely. Look at the bombings in Jordan. That came directly from Iraq.
MATTHEWS: You say we have to stay, but when can we come home, ever?
The vice president today sounded like we‘re never really coming home.
That we have to fight for American influence in that part of the world.
BAER: We have to come home one day, it‘s $5 billion a day. We‘re going to run out of money. And we‘re going to run out of soldiers and run out of tolerance from the American people.
We have to find a way to remain the policemen of the Gulf and however you do that, leave that up to the military. But we cannot keep our troops as they are deployed now in Iraq forever.
I would suggest that what Baer says is worth considering as we contemplate what the meaning of “withdrawal” or “victory” or “bringing home the troops” really means. I think that we are going to be in the middle east for a long, long time, the only question is on what terms.
The powers that be in the US (and the United Kingdom of British Petroleum) believe they must control this region’s valuable resource. Indeed, some of the big thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski (in “The Grand Chessboard“) and the PNAC nuts believe that the US must control “Eurasia” or risk being shut out of the future. There is nothing new under the sun and the pursuit of precious necessary resources that belong to others has been going on forever.
Oil is certainly not the only reason we are in this mess. It is, perhaps, the fundamental reason we are in this mess. And it’s the reason that this mess isn’t going to be solved by either bringing the boys home or creating a “democracy” in the middle east. We may leave Iraq as an occupying force due to a lack of domestic support, or we might be chased from the region by violent events. But if we have any illusions that the United States is not going to be deeply involved in the middle east for the forseeable future, we need to wake up. Sadly, whether we know it or not, by our blind and profligate actions the American people lend credence to the insane ramblings of that miniskirted harpy, Ann Coulter:
“Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil.”
Why not, indeed? I wonder what would happen if the question was posed just that starkly? At this point, the Great Game players, the oil companies and the politicians who dance to their tune are unwilling to put it that way. They work to keep citizens in the dark about what is at stake, encouraging them to guzzle cheap gasoline at a fantastic pace while droning out messianic statements about good and evil and spreading freedom.
Syriana’s “confusing” plot speaks to that. It’s conveys the sense of drugged vagueness we all feel when we try to unravel the motivations behind these actions. There are a thousand different reasons why we could be doing what we are doing, but nobody knows for sure what is the real one.
There is only one character in the film who holds all the disparate threads in his hands — the James Baker (Christopher Plummer) character who walks freely among the politicians, the oil companies, the ruling sheiks, the spooks and the regional puppets. He is the Grand Master of the Great Game. He ensures that none of the players know what the others are doing, each kept in the dark, flailing about with everything from torture to idealism to pragmatic everyday power politics without ever knowing that they are being manipulated by greater forces.
I suppose that we could prosaically assume that he represents a worldly reality like The Carlyle Group (or in an earlier time, The Trilateral Commission.) But I think he simply symbolises Power and Arrogance. He is fundamentally anti-democratic, amoral and relentless in his quest for more of what he is made of. He is America’s id, perfectly represented as an elderly Texan with his steely talons dug deeply into every consequential player in the New Great Game.
The only character who sees through the subterfuge is the ex-CIA agent, abandoned by his country, whose life of dirty deeds on behalf of The Company prepares him alone to understand his role and dig his way out. That is the most out-of-sync Hollywood moment in an otherwise completely cynical film. (But then, it’s George Clooney who can’t help but be seen as a hero.) In reality, there can be no such neat denouement. The claws would turn deadly if he were to do what he does.
I’ve read a number of reviews in which the writer finds this movie a simple-minded portrayal of evil corporate masters holding the puppet strings of great nations and vast empires. It’s the same complaint about the slogan “No blood for oil”, as if those who see our presence in the mideast in such terms are silly dupes and fools. But I would submit that it is the jaded sophisticates who are missing the point. “Syriana”, for all its “confusion” really does get to the heart of the matter and forces you to deal with the one simple fact that nobody wants to accept. This planet really is running out of oil — and we are entering an era in which our nation is going to be asserting our power to get it.
Rather than finding “Syriana’s” plot confounding, by the end I thought its multiple plotlines led to a bracing clarity: Oil. I don’t know that it’s all that important to understand anything else and if America sees this movie and comes away with that understanding then I think it succeeds as both a film and a political statement.
Atrios has a post up this morning about Mel Gibson the holocaust denier. If the California Republican Party has its way, it could soon be Governor Mel Gibson, the holocaust denier:
With segments of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political base rising in revolt, directors of the California Republican Party have demanded a private meeting with the governor to complain about the hiring of a Democratic operative as his chief of staff.
The request comes as Schwarzenegger faces a sustained wave of opposition from both moderate and conservative Republicans over the choice of Susan P. Kennedy. Before serving as a state public utility commissioner, Kennedy was Cabinet secretary to former Gov. Gray Davis. She also was an abortion-rights activist and former Democratic Party executive.
In appointing Kennedy last week, the governor praised her as an effective administrator who could “implement my vision” and work cooperatively with Democrats who control the Legislature.
But Republican operatives said grass-roots volunteers are so disturbed by the appointment that they are threatening to abandon Schwarzenegger during his re-election bid next year. Others said Schwarzenegger is risking a nasty fight that could cause the party to rescind its endorsement during February’s convention in San Jose.
There is even a movement to draft Mel Gibson, the actor and director, to run against Schwarzenegger in the Republican primary next year — in part because the success of Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” could help his chances among religious conservatives. Raised in Australia, Gibson was born in New York and is a U.S. citizen. He has not expressed an interest in elected politics.
“We need to have a good backup,” said Mike Spence, president of the California Republican Assembly, a grass-roots organization that is separate from the state party. Spence’s group has already set up a Web site, melgibsonforgovernor.com. “He seems to be more consistent with the Republican message than the governor does.”
Gibson could not be reached, and his spokesman, who was traveling Tuesday, did not return an e-mail and call for comment.
Let’s hope that the old saw “as California goes, so goes the nation” holds true. The Republican party in this state has become a sad, pathetic joke. And it was a power house not so long ago. After all, it sent two favorite sons to the white house in the last 35 years. (And, once again, I’d like to apologise for that. We’ll try not to let it happen again.)
I see that Senator Lieberman is concerned about partisanship poisoning the atmosphere in Washington and he has some stern words for Democrats who insist on criticizing the president.
“It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he’ll be commander-in-chief for three more years. We undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.”
For instance he really hates it when Democrats say things like this:
After much reflection, my feelings of disappointment and anger have not dissipated, except now these feelings have gone beyond my personal dismay to a larger, graver sense of loss for our country, a reckoning of the damage that the president’s conduct has done to the proud legacy of his presidency and, ultimately, an accounting of the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations.
The implications for our country are so serious that I feel a responsibility to my constituents in Connecticut, as well as to my conscience, to voice my concerns forthrightly and publicly. And I can think of no more appropriate place to do that than on this great Senate floor.
[…]
The president’s intentional and consistent statements, more deeply,may also undercut the trust that the American people have in his word. Under the Constitution, as presidential scholar Newsted (ph) has noted, the president’s ultimate source of authority, particularly his moral authority, is the power to persuade, to mobilize public opinion, to build consensus behind a common agenda. And at this, the president has been extraordinarily effective.
But that power hinges on the president’s support among the American people and their faith and confidence in his motivations and agenda, yes; but also in his word.
As Teddy Roosevelt once explained, “My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have,” Roosevelt said.
Sadly, with his deception, the president may have weakened the great power and strength that he possesses, of which President Roosevelt spoke.
I know this is a concern that may of my colleagues share, which is to say that the president has hurt his credibility and therefore perhaps his chances of moving his policy agenda forward.
[…]
That’s what I believe presidential scholar James David Barber (ph) in his book “The Presidential Character” was getting at when he wrote that the public demands quote, “a sense of legitimacy from and in the presidency. There is more to this than dignity — more than propriety. The president is expected to personify our betterness in an inspiring way; to express in what he does and is, not just what he says, a moral idealism which in much of the public mind is the very opposite of politics.”
Just as the American people are demanding of their leaders, though, they are also fundamentally fair and forgiving, which is why I was so hopeful the president could begin to repair the damage done with his address to the nation on the 17th. But like so many others, I came away feeling that for reasons that are thoroughly human, he missed a great opportunity that night. He failed to clearly articulate to the American people that he recognized how significant and consequential his wrongdoing was and how badly he felt about it.
Lieberman thinks that speeches like that are wrong — that Democrats should not go before the senate and speak about how the president has failed the nation, been dishonest, misled the people and undermined the nation’s moral authority. Unless, of course, there’s a blow job involved in which case Lieberman himself would feel compelled to lead the stampede to condemn and chastise him publicly.
But then, that was an issue of prime importance, unlike lying the country into a useless war of faux masculine vanity in which we are becoming a pariah nation known for torture, kidnapping, and disappearance. As long as Bush keeps his codpiece zipped and doesn’t let anybody see him playing Grand Theft Auto, he’s got Joementum on his side.
I’m not sure what to make of this, but this blog seems to be nominated for a Weblog Award for “the best of the top 250 blogs” (I’m losing badly to that upstart whippersnapper, Jane Hamsher.) I had thought these were conservative awards, but apparently not. Anyway, there are a bunch of really good liberal bloggers nominated in various categories and you can vote once a day (!!?)
Check it out.
Update:
If you really love me, you’ll want to stuff your little stocking with some postage stamps or ornaments and shirts with a Digby snowman on them. I’m not kidding. Apparently you can now design your own stamps and Bo Zartz has done up a “holiday blog homage” featuring various liberal bloggers. (And naturally Jane Hamsher gets to be the angel.)They’re all fun, but I particularly like the one that says “Merry Fitzmas” which is guaranteed to piss off Bill O’Reilly six ways to Kwaanza.
I have hesitated to link to Rick Perlstein’s Princeton speech, published here on Huffington Post, because he makes a very kind statement about me in it, and I sound like I’m tooting my own horn by posting about it. But, I decided to post about it anyway, because what he says is so important for people to understand: Republican intellectuals like to promote themselves as the party of Goldwater the principled conservative and Reagan the optimistic conservative, but they are actually the party of Richard Nixon, the aggrieved conservative. Their penchant for secrecy, their disdain for democratic processes, their lawless political tactics and their belief that might makes right are best understood by looking at them in that light.
The modern Republican party set about ruthlessly building a political machine while wearing the mantle of principle and morality after Nixon’s fall. A machine is all they really are, but they persist in this fiction that they have a deep intellectual philosophy — “the party of ideas” and all that. I assume that many of them believe this. But any person of ideas is only welcome as long as he or she is useful, after which he is thrown on the ever increasing pile of liberal traitors.
Here’s one example of a conservative intellectual (one of the fathers of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol) making the Straussian argument that religion is necessary to keep the masses in line, but unnecessary for the highly educated mandarins who actually run things:
Because of Strauss’ teachings, Kristol continued, “There are in Washington today dozens of people who are married with children and religiously observant. Do they have faith? Who knows? They just believe that it is good to go to church or synagogue. Whether you believe or not is not the issue — that’s between you and God — whether you are a member of a community that holds certain truths sacred, that is the issue.” Neoconservatives are “pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers.”
This noble hypocrisy on the part of intellectuals is required in order to encourage religious belief in ordinary people who would otherwise succumb to nihilism without it. In other words, Kristol believes that religion, which may well be a fiction, is necessary to keep the little people in line. This line of thinking has led him and other neoconservative intellectuals to attack Darwinian evolution because they fear it undermines religious belief.
(The author of this companion article writes, “ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is “the opium of the people”; they add a heartfelt, ‘Thank God!'”)
I’m sure that the DC Neocon elites feel very secure that they are the ones running things. But as with so many other intellectual conceits of the conservative movement, it is awfully convenient that their “ideas” track with the needs of a Repubublican political machine. Here’s how the man who identified the evangelical community as an untapped voting block, Paul Weyrich, saw it:
“We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country,” he declared. Weyrich describes his views as “Maoist. I believe you have to control the countryside, and the capital will eventually fall.” (David Brock, “Blinded by The Right” p.54)
I would submit that the Neos like Kristol and Podhoretz are just beltway pundit fodder for the Nixonian political machine. They think they are the mandarins but they are dupes too, of another sort, lending a phony intellectual heft to a movement that isn’t intellectual at all. Nixon would have hated them. Weyrich is his man. (Until he isn’t.)
I urge you to read Perlstein’s speech and description of what it was like to go into the belly of the beast and talk about this among the faithful. He’s got more guts than I do. Clearly he understands them better than they understand themselves:
The response to my address was, understandably, defensive. My co-panelist Stan Evans retorted that my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Nixon had never been a genuine conservative. He added: “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.” I responded: “Thanks for making my point.”
Everyone understands, I assume, that Bush, Delay, Norquist and Reed too, are morphing into liberals as we speak.
Update: I couldn’t, for thel ife of me remember where I had recently seen this Kristol article, so I Googled it. thanks to a reader, I was reminded that it was in this great post by James Wolcot.