Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Death Of Common Sense

A weight may soon be lifted off a Maryland woman charged with carrying a concealed weapon in an airport.

It wasn’t a gun or a knife. It was a weighted bookmark.

Kathryn Harrington was flying home from vacation last month when screeners at the Tampa, Fla., airport found her bookmark. It’s an 8.5-inch leather strip with small lead weights at each end.

Airport police said it resembled a weighted weapon that could be used to knock people unconscious. So the 52-year-old special education teacher was handcuffed, put into a police car, and charged with carrying a concealed weapon.

She faced a possible criminal trial and a $10,000 fine. But the state declined to prosecute, and the Transportation Security Administration said it probably won’t impose a fine.

Harrington said she’ll never again carry her bookmark into an airport.

I think this explains why Bush remains even in the polls.

Buckhead Revealed

I haven’t necessarily bought into the conspiracy theories about the Rovian interest in the allegedly forged CBS documents, but something is rotten in Blogland:

It was the first public allegation that CBS News used forged memos in its report questioning President Bush’s National Guard service — a highly technical explanation posted within hours of airtime citing proportional spacing and font styles.

But it did not come from an expert in typography or typewriter history as some first thought. Instead, it was the work of Harry W. MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Times has found.

The identity of “Buckhead,” a blogger known previously only by his screen name on the site freerepublic.com and lifted to folk hero status in the conservative blogosphere since last week’s posting, is likely to fuel speculation among Democrats that the efforts to discredit the CBS memos were engineered by Republicans eager to undermine reports that Bush received preferential treatment in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.

Republican officials have denied any involvement among those debunking the CBS story.

Reached by telephone today, MacDougald, 46, confirmed that he is Buckhead, but declined to answer questions about his political background or how he knew so much about the CBS documents so fast.

“You can ask the questions but I’m not going to answer them,” he told The Times. “I’m just going to stick to doing no interviews.”

Until The Times identified him by piecing together information from his postings over the past two years, MacDougald had taken pains to remain in the shadows — saying the credit for challenging CBS should remain with the blogosphere as a whole and not one individual.

“Freepers collectively possess more analytical horsepower than the entire news division at CBS,” he wrote in an e-mail, using the slang term for users of the freerepublic site.

MacDougald is a lawyer in the Atlanta office of the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice and is affiliated with two prominent conservative legal groups, the Federalist Society and the Southeastern Legal Foundation, where he serves on the legal advisory board and has been involved in several high-profile cases.

[…]

MacDougald helped draft the foundation’s petition in 1998 that led to the five-year suspension of Clinton’s Arkansas law license for giving misleading testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

And MacDougald assisted in the group’s legal challenge to the campaign finance law sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.). The challenge, ultimately presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, was funded largely by the Southeastern Legal Foundation in conjunction with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the law’s chief critic, and handled by former Clinton investigator Kenneth W. Starr.

[…]

Last week, MacDougald once again plunged into a politically charged controversy — but this time his participation was anonymous.

Operating as “Buckhead,” which is also the name of an upscale Atlanta neighborhood, MacDougald wrote that the memos that CBS’ “60 Minutes” presented on Sept. 8 as being written in the early 1970s by the late Lt. Col Jerry B. Killian were “in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.”

“The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers,” MacDougald wrote on the freerepublic website. “They were not widespread until the mid to late 90’s. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn’t used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80’s used monospaced fonts.

“I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.”

The Sept. 8 late-night posting — written less than four hours after the CBS report was aired — resulted in a flurry of sympathetic testimonials from fellow bloggers, spreading within hours to other sites. The next day, major newspapers such as The Times and the Washington Post began consulting forensic experts and reporting stories that raised similar questions.

[…]

While bloggers and some conservative activists hailed Buckhead as a hero in their longtime efforts to paint the mainstream media as politically biased, some Democrats and even some conservative bloggers have marveled at Buckhead’s detailed knowledge of the memos and wondered whether that suggested a White House conspiracy.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe even speculated openly to reporters that the whole thing could have been orchestrated by White House political advisor Karl Rove. The Bush campaign called the allegation “nonsense.”

Using the new laws of journalism and truth, this is all that’s needed as proof that this was a Rovian operation from the get-go. This guy is no expert on typography, and he’s an extremely well connected Republican operative who has worked at the highest level of GOP legal circles. That’s good enough for GOP government work.

This was a Republican dirty trick.

Hell, We Want To Outlaw Apple Pie, Too

If there’s one thing liberals are all about it’s censorship

Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November.

The literature shows a Bible with the word “BANNED” across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word “ALLOWED.” The mailing tells West Virginians to “vote Republican to protect our families” and defeat the “liberal agenda.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said Friday that he wasn’t aware of the mailing, but said it could be the work of the RNC. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we were mailing voters on the issue of same-sex marriage,” Gillespie said.

Ed Gillespie is surprisingly stoic in the face of political hate speech, lately. Seems he’s learned to hold back the tears and keep a stiff upper lip when political operatives spread scurrilous lies and outright falsehoods. What a brave little soldier.

By the way, when did the Democrats finalize plans for the “ban the Bible” movement, anyway? Here I thought I was in the loop. How are we doing on the kitten strangling and the grandma slapping? It’s so hard to keep up.

What If God Was One Of Us?

Atrios says that even Little Russ now believes that the insurgency in Iraq is actually aimed at defeating Bush in November. In fact, we must now assume that all bad acts everywhere in the world are aimed at that one particular goal.

If this is true, we need to ask ourselves why God would throw three huge hurricanes in a row at the southeast of the United States just before the election. Coincidence? I think not. Obviously, God wants Bush to lose.

…voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns.

Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.

God is definitely sending a message. Spread the good Word.

Solipsism For Dummies

I know that it’s hard to understand why anyone would vote for George W. Bush, but the fact is that most people just don’t think he’s that bad. And the ones that listen to talk radio and watch FOX think he is a downright genius. Sometimes, the world doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Mark Kleiman tells it like it is:

A reader says:

Democrats are panicking because they aren’t thinking about how this election looks to the median voter. A partisan Democrat looks at Bush and sees: 1) upcoming disaster on Iraq and Al-Qaeda (latter brought about by former); 2) upcoming disaster on climate change and the environment; 3) upcoming disaster on the economy; 4) upcoming disaster on the Supreme Court. Then he or she wonders, “how in the world could anyone vote for this man? We’re going to hell in a handbasket! The fact that Kerry isn’t miles ahead shows that he’s an abysmal candidate, and can never win!” And then Kerry becomes Gore-ified, with the potential of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The problem with this model is that all these disasters are UPCOMING. Policy wonks, politically educated and motivated Democrats can see them (or at least they think they can). But there is absolutely no reason for the median voter to look at the situation that way. The voter is rationally ignorant. He or she is not going to spend time digging into policy details, considering potential budget models, etc. What does this voter see? The economy isn’t fabulous, but it isn’t terrible. Maybe there will be environmental problems, maybe not, but at this point, there isn’t anything in front of his or her face. Newsweek might say that Iraq is a disaster, but I don’t see it: maybe it’s just tough. I’m not comfortable with it; we probably made a mistake, but it’s not clear what we do now. Besides–in Vietnam, we were losing 2,000 soldiers A MONTH. We were told that Reagan’s deficits would kill us, but they didn’t: every economist has some model. I’m not real satisfied with the way things are going, but things could definitely be worse, and it’s tough out there. 9/11 taught us that.

All of this leads to basically what we have now: a very close election, with Bush up by a very small margin. That means that campaigning, and money, and turnout, and events, will determine things. But it is NOT a reason to think that somehow Kerry is doing a lousy job. WE think that no one in his right mind would vote for Bush, but we’re not the median voter.

Put another way, panic is the product of solipsism. It should stop.

I think it’s stopping. Dems are starting to recognize that as inexplicable as it is, this election is going to be close. So, maximize the strategy, get a slacker to the polls, volunteer to phone bank, download Liberal Oasis’s handy “suggested answers to tough questions about Kerry” and use them at the water cooler. Keep giving money.

For a variety of reasons this is a rare presidential race that will depend upon turn-out. That’s us.

Storyline

Drafts of a report from the top U.S. inspector in Iraq conclude there were no weapons stockpiles, but say there are signs the fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had dormant programs he hoped to revive at a later time, according to people familiar with the findings.

…which explains why the “gathering danger” was so “grave” that we had to launch a war immediately, without allies, without enough troops and without a plan for reconstructing the country. There wasn’t time to put those things together before Saddam revived his dormant programs under the nose of the newly admitted weapons inspectors.

And it’s all worked out so very well:

The National Intelligence Council presented President Bush this summer with three pessimistic scenarios regarding the security situation in Iraq, including the possibility of a civil war there before the end of 2005.

In a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate, the council looked at the political, economic and security situation in the wartorn country and determined that — at best — a tenuous stability was possible, a U.S. official said late Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The document lays out a second scenario in which increased extremism and fragmentation in Iraqi society impede efforts to build a central government and adversely affect efforts to democratize the country.

In a third, worst-case scenario, the intelligence council contemplated “trend lines that would point to a civil war,” the official said. The potential conflict could be among the country’s three main populations — the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

It “would be fair” to call the document “pessimistic,” the official added. But “the contents shouldn’t come as a particular surprise to anyone who is following developments in Iraq. It encapsulates trends that are clearly apparent.”

So, we rushed into the war for no good reason and things are going to hell in a handbasket. It’s likely that we have created far more danger for ourselves and others by these actions.

John Kerry thinks that it’s a mistake to rehire someone for a job if they’ve made these kinds of catastrophic errors:

Citing an intelligence estimate prepared for Mr. Bush in late July that presents a bleak picture of prospects in Iraq, Mr. Kerry said the president was turning his back on his own intelligence and ignoring the reality that Iraq was increasingly in the hands of terrorists.

“He didn’t tell you this,” Mr. Kerry said, even though “his own intelligence officials have warned him for weeks that the mission in Iraq is in serious trouble.”

“That is the hard truth, as hard as it is to bear,” he said, adding,

“I believe you deserve a president who isn’t going to gild that truth, or gild our national security with politics, who is not going to ignore his own intelligence, who isn’t going to live in a different world of spin, who will give the American people the truth, not a fantasy world of spin.”

What is this fantasy world of spin you speak of?

“This country is headed toward democracy,” Mr. Bush said at a Thursday morning campaign rally in St. Cloud, Minn., about five hours before Mr. Kerry made his remarks at the Guard conference. “There’s a strong prime minister in place. They have a national council, and national elections are scheduled for January. It wasn’t all that long ago that Saddam Hussein was in power with his torture chambers and mass graves.”

The Vice president thinks that the most important thing is that you make decisions, a simple and rather basic job description for the world’s most powerful position:

Vice President Dick Cheney campaigning in Reno, Nev., took issue with Kerry’s remarks at the National Guard convention. “Senator Kerry said today that leadership starts with telling the truth, but the American people also know that true leadership requires the ability to make a decision,” Cheney said.

Oddly, however, he doesn’t seem to think it matters if every single decision is wrong.

Pious Phony

Current and former White House aides, as well as religious leaders close to the president, maintain that underneath Bush’s religious references is a no-frills set of classical Christian beliefs that he holds firmly but voices softly.

Kevin Drum notices this new talking point that’s beginning to float around about Bush being a nice mainstream Christian instead of the fundamentalist zealot that many portray him to be. I read the same article in the Washington Post this morning and wondered about what “classical Christian” belief this was:

“Aides found him face down on the floor in prayer in the Oval Office. It became known that he refused to eat sweets while American troops were in Iraq, a partial fast seldom reported of an American president,” according to Stephen Mansfield author of “The Faith of George W. Bush.”

Now I’ve always wondered if he was really praying or if he’d had a few too many “pretzels” myself. (And as for the sweets thing, he must be jonesing for a candy bar big time, by now.)

Frankly, I don’t think Bush is the least bit religious. I think it’s as phony as the rest of him. Phony cowboy, phony flyboy, phony Christian. The only authentic thing about him is that he’s a self-centered fratboy who’s greatest faith is in his ability to get away with anything. A real Christian would never have made fun of Karla Faye Tucker the way he did. (A real human being would never have made fun of Karla Faye Tucker …)

Apparently the evangelicals have taken it on faith that this guy is one of them because his speech writer is adept at using familiar religious phrases and he often evokes God as his guiding spirit. But, it’s clear to me that he is nothing but a rich prick playing a role for people for whom he has nothing but contempt.

Man With A Plan

You know, I don’t know why Atrios is so upset about people like Woodruff and Gergen and Carlson obviously spewing RNC talking points about how Kerry has to come up with a plan for Iraq in order to win, but Bush doesn’t. The logic is obvious.

Suppose you hired a contractor to put on a new roof and he ended up creating a huge hole in it instead. The contractor simply denies that a hole exists and keeps telling you to relax that your new roof is coming along just fine. The other contractor in town drives by and says he can fix that hole in your roof. You ask him how and he says, “well, I’ll have to take a look at it and see how much damage is done but I have years of experience and a lot of good workers and I can get the job done for you. I’ll tell you one thing, that guy you’ve got working on it doesn’t know what he’s doing. The hole’s getting bigger while we stand here looking at it.”

Gergen, Woodruff and Carlson would pick the first contractor because they know his work. (And he’s a blast to have a beer with at the end of the workday.) The second guy refused to say exactly what he would do without looking at the damage up close so he can’t be trusted.

All of these people are very highly paid analysts and they know what they are doing. We should listen to them.

My Big Endorsement

After exposing the “undecideds” for the attention craving egomaniacs they are, Larry David more or less threatens them with my Slacker Project:

If we really had any brains, we wouldn’t spend another second on you, but on the people who can truly make a difference: the “unlikely” voters. And there are millions more of them than there are of you. Those people aren’t after attention, they’re just incredibly lazy. The only way they’ll register to vote is if someone shows up at their door with a form. And then the only way they’ll actually vote is if you carry them to the booth.

Not only are they lazy, they’re also indifferent. They just don’t believe that voting can have an effect on their lives. Well, it just so happens that right after I voted for the first time, I landed myself a big fat job in Hollywood, a biopsy came back benign and I met my future wife as soon as I walked out of the voting booth. Coincidence? You decide.

I’m telling you, all you have to do is get them registered and tell them that it will really mean a lot to you if they will vote for John Kerry. You’ll take care of the details of getting them registered, getting them absentee ballots or getting them to the polls.

Just one slacker per person, that’s all we need.

Cannibals

On the CNN morning show they just did a story on Jason Blair receiving $3,000 to speak at a college. Apparently, the students were not happy and gave Blair a very hard time.

One of the happy talking whores (the grizzled, creepy one) said, “who are they going to get next? Dan Rather?”

I thought I was watching FOX.