Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Dazzling ‘Em With Bullshit In His Native Tongue

Martian

QUESTION: You’ve made Social Security reform the top of your domestic agenda for a second term. You’ve been talking extensively about the benefits of private accounts. But by most estimations, private accounts may leave something for young workers at the end, but wouldn’t do much to solve the overall financial problem with Social Security.

And I’m just wondering, as you’re promoting these private accounts, why aren’t you talking about some of the tough measures that may have to be taken to preserve the solvency of Social Security, such as increasing the retirement age, cutting benefits or means testing for Social Security?

BUSH: I appreciate that question.

First of all, let me put the Social Security issue in proper perspective. It is a very important issue. But it’s not the only issue — very important issue we’ll be dealing with.

I expect the Congress to bring forth meaningful tort reform. I want the legal system reformed in such a way that we’re competitive in the world.

I’ll be talking about the budget, of course. There’s a lot of concern in the financial markets about our deficit, short-term and long-term deficits. The long-term deficit, of course, is caused by some of the entitlement programs — the unfunded liabilities inherent in our entitlement programs.

I will continue to push on an education agenda. There is no doubt in my mind that the No Child Left Behind Act is meaningful, real reform that is having real results. And I look forward to strengthening No Child Left Behind.

Immigration reform is a very important agenda item as we move forward.

But Social Security, as well, is a big item. And I campaigned on it, as you’re painfully aware, since you had to suffer through many of my speeches. I didn’t duck the issue like others have done in the past. I said, “This is a vital issue and we need to work together to solve it.”

Now, the temptation is going to be, by well-meaning people such as yourself and others here, as we run up to the issue, to get me to negotiate with myself in public. To say, you know, “What’s this mean, Mr. President? What’s that mean?”

I’m not going to do that. I don’t get to write the law.

I’ll propose a solution at the appropriate time.

But the law will be written in the halls of Congress. And I will negotiate with them, with the members of Congress. And they will want me to start playing my hand. “Will you accept this? Will you not accept that? Why don’t you do this hard thing? Why don’t you do that?”

I fully recognize this is going to be a decision that requires difficult choices. Inherent in your question is do I recognize that? You bet I do. Otherwise it would have been done.

And so, I just want to try to condition you. I’m not doing a very good job, because the other day in the Oval, when the press pool came in, I was asked about this — the — a series of questions — a question on Social Security with these different aspects to it. And I said, “I’m not going to negotiate with myself. And I will negotiate at the appropriate time with the law writers.”

And so, thank you for trying.

The principles I laid out in the course of the campaign, and the principles we laid out at the recent economic summit are still the principles I believe in. And that is: nothing will change for those near or on Social Security, payroll tax — I believe you’re the one who asked me about the payroll taxes, if I’m not mistaken — will not go up.

The — and I know there’s a big definition about what that means.

Well, again, I will repeat, don’t bother to ask me.

Oh, you can ask me, I can’t tell you what to ask. It’s not the holiday spirit.

(LAUGHTER)

It is all part of trying to get me to set the parameters, you know, apart from the Congress, which is not a good way to get substantive reform done.

As to personal accounts, it is a judgment essential to make the system viable in the out-years to allow younger workers to earn an interest rate more significant than that which is being earned with their own money now inside the Social Security trust.

But the first step in this process is for members of Congress to realize we have a problem. And so for a while, I think it’s important for me to continue to work with members of both parties to explain the problem. Because if people don’t think there’s a problem, we can, you know, talk about this issue until we’re blue in the face and nothing will get done.

And there is a problem. There is a problem because now it requires three workers per retiree to keep Social Security promises. In 2040 it will require two workers per employee to meet the promises. And when the system was set up and designed I think it was like 15 or more workers per employee.

That is a problem. The system goes into the red.

In other words, there’s more money going out than coming in in 2018. There is an unfunded liability of $11 trillion.

And I understand how this works. You know, many times legislative bodies will not react unless the crisis is apparent, crisis is upon them. I believe the crisis is. And so, for a period of time, we’re going to have to explain to members of Congress the crisis is here.

It’s a lot less painful to act now than if we wait.

QUESTION: Mr. President, on that point, there is already a lot of opposition to the idea of personal accounts, some of it fairly entrenched among the Democrats. I wonder what your strategy is to try to convince them to your view.

And specifically, they say that personal accounts would destroy Social Security. You argue they would help save the system. Can you explain how?

BUSH: If Saddam Hussein refuses to disarm, we will form a coalition of the willing and we will disarm Saddam Hussein. Next question?

Bipartisanship

Some Republicans have suggested leaving the minimum tax in place because those hardest hit tend to be in states that did not support Bush, including Massachusetts, California, and New York. ‘‘It is a tax of people living in ‘blue’ states,’’ said Grover Norquist, the conservative activist who heads Americans for Tax Reform.

He said the tax was originally conceived by liberal Democrats as a way of imposing higher taxes mostly on wealthier Republicans, and he suggested that it be used as a bargaining chip by the White House when Bush tries to enact his tax agenda. The minimum tax should be repealed only when Democrats ‘‘say they are sorry and offer to give us something in return,’’ Norquist said.

I see that Norquist is a man of his word. If you recall, he was recently quoted as saying: “Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.”

Apparently, Grover is a believer in the James Dobson school of animal training.

The Poorman spells out the proper response to Comrade Norquist’s tactic:

Any complaints about Mr. Nordquist’s remarks should be sent to his blue state secretaries: Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), Gov. George Pataki (R-NY), and Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger (R-CA). Here are some folks you can CC on that:

Sen. Lincoln Chaffee (R-RI)

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)

Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL)

Sen. Greg Judd (R-NH)

Sen. Rick “Man-On-Dog” Santorum (R-PA)

Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR)

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME)

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA)

Sen. John Sununu (R-NH)

Muckraking 2004

This liberal media has gone completely out of control. First they make bleeding heart Bush MOTY, and now I find out that they named those hippies over at Power Line Blog of the Year:

The story of how three amateur journalists working in a homegrown online medium challenged a network news legend and won has many, many game-changing angles to it. One of the strangest and most radical is that the key information in “The 61st Minute” came from Power Line’s readers, not its ostensible writers. The Power Liners are quick, even eager, to point this out. “What this story shows more than anything is the power of the medium,” Hinderaker says. “The world is full of smart people who have information about every imaginable topic, and until the Internet came along, there wasn’t any practical way to put it together.”

Now there is.

Congratulations to Powerline. I guess it doesn’t really matter that none of their shocking allegations about the availability of proportional-spaced fonts in the 70’s turned out to actually be, you know, true. What matters is that they helped spur a media feeding frenzy that turned up completely unrelated evidence showing that certain documents that were not material to the truth were given to CBS by an uncredible person. By today’s journalistic standards that’s right up there with Woodward and Bernstein.

(Sadly, like most innovators, the blogfather of modern rightwing cyberfrenzies, Drudge, was overlooked again. He must be fit to be tied.)

Via The Daou Report

A Bold Proposition

Atrios continues to argue with some in our party that we Democrats should not turn abortion into a scarlet letter. He is so wrong. We need to get serious about winning by dolefully expressing regret and guilt for believing what we believe or we will be wandering in the lonely 49% wilderness forever. And, nowhere is it more important to show contrition and self-hatred than on the issue of abortion. It is, after all, icky.

But simply framing abortion as a shameful “right that ends in sorrow” rather than a “difficult decision that brings relief”, is a fools game. And while the Democratic “orthodoxy” on abortion inherently allows for people who are personally opposed to abortion, like John Kerry, to run for national office as long as he doesn’t advocate outlawing abortion entirely for others, everyone agrees that the Republicans are much less “orthodox” because they allow some politicians from liberal states run as pro-choicers to get elected even if they could never in a million years win the nomination of the Republican party for president. (I know that’s a little bit strange, but it’s one of those quirks in our system, kind of like the electoral college.) Therefore, to win it is logical that we must not only shed our orthodoxy and take the pro-life cause as our own, we must take it even further than the Republicans.

Here’s my proposition:

Let’s not be cowards and merely advocate for a culture of disgrace and dishonor for women who have abortions. I agree that it’s important that they should be publicly humiliated and forced to admit that they have done something very, very bad. That’s always healthy and people will respect us more if we do that. But,the other side will rightly retort that just because you feel guilty for something doesn’t excuse it, right? So, let’s get out ahead of an issue for once. Let’s be really bold and call for total abolition and follow up with tough criminal penalities for any woman who has one.

This is where the GOP orthodoxy is weak. The pro-life position is that abortion is murder. But many pro-lifers also believe in exceptions for rape and incest. That makes no sense. If it is murder to abort a child in the womb because it is fully human and endowed with all the same rights as any other person, then it can’t be right to make an exception and kill it simply because of the way it was conceived. Would we think it was ok to kill a one year old if we found out that it was the product of rape or incest? Of course not.

This position implies that the circumstances of conception or the lifelong emotional consequences for the woman bearing an unwanted child can be taken into consideration. Why shouldn’t she simply take her rapist or her father’s child to term and simply give it up for adoption? The fetus has inalienable rights. The woman should deal with that just the same as she should deal with giving up her fourth child for adoption because she can’t afford another mouth to feed and her birth control failed. It’s tough, but she’ll just have to get over it.

And really, if abortion is murder, shouldn’t the woman be criminally liable for murdering her own child? Why is it that pro-life advocates never insist on that and instead place the entire burden on the doctor? Would we accept that a woman who hired someone to murder her 6 month old was not criminally liable for that act? Of course not.

They say it’s murder, but they have “exceptions.” They want to make it a crime but don’t want to make the perpetrator of that crime responsible. These people are practicing … moral relativism.

If I didn’t know better, I might think that Republicans secretly believe that ending an unwanted pregnancy is different from murder after all; that it isn’t an absolute choice between right and wrong. Indeed, they seem to think that it is complicated by circumstances and morally nuanced. Certainly, the fact that they refuse to call women who have abortions “murderers” indicates that they think pregnant women are in a unique position in human experience making judgment by absolute legal standards difficult for society to accept.

And that is our opening, folks. Just as the foreign policy wonks think that we should outflank the neocons on foreign policy by fighting the GWOT with the ferver of a Christian crusader, I think we should simultaneously make a play for the fundamentalists who truly do believe that the woman is a murderer if she has an abortion. The stoning and burning crowd is ripe for the picking if we are only bold enough to do what is necessary to prove that we are sincere. Rove and pals won’t be expecting it.

Then the media will call us the big tent party and we can run against the Republicans for being pro-choice, unpatriotic and soft on crime! Cool, huh?

Seriously, folks, if we can adopt this, the global crusade for democracy and the creationism curriculum into our platform I think we might just be able to finally get that crucial 2% that we need to win. And then we’ll be able to get something done for the progressive cause — like paying off our crippling debt with a combination of brutal spending cuts in social programs and tax increases on the middle class. (And there’s always end it don’t mend it on affirmative action and privatization of SS if we still need to triangulate.)

Tough Guys

This article in The Times seems to validate my theory that Bush saw Kerik as some sort of alter ego. It doesn’t elaborate on his insistence on relying on his gut and therefore overruling the necessary vetting, but I’ll bet you he did. These guys aren’t usually sloppy about these things and this was outrageously sloppy. It has the mark of Codpiece all over it.

Ouch!

“Time chose Bush for sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively)…”

Super glue? Grape jelly? How?

Raising The Future Fascists Of America

I admit that I have a soft spot for animals. The idea of beating a dachshund with a belt to make it mind literally makes me sick. And then it makes me want to do the same thing to the man who felt the need to exercize his sadistic control fantasies on a small dog:

“Please don’t misunderstand me. Siggie is a member of our family and we love him dearly. And despite his anarchistic nature, I have finally taught him to obey a few simple commands. However, we had some classic battles before he reluctantly yielded to my authority.

“The greatest confrontation occurred a few years ago when I had been in Miami for a three-day conference. I returned to observe that Siggie had become boss of the house while I was gone. But I didn’t realize until later that evening just how strongly he felt about his new position as Captain.

“At eleven o’clock that night, I told Siggie to go get into his bed, which is a permanent enclosure in the family room. For six years I had given him that order at the end of each day, and for six years Siggie had obeyed.

“On this occasion, however, he refused to budge. You see, he was in the bathroom, seated comfortably on the furry lid of the toilet seat. That is his favorite spot in the house, because it allows him to bask in the warmth of a nearby electric heater…”

“When I told Sigmund to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie’s way of saying. “Get lost!”

“I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud.”

What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!”

I don’t suppose that picking the dog up and carrying him to his bed would have been nearly as satisfying, either.

The identity of the man who takes pride in repeating this story and using it as an example of good child rearing should come as no surprise when you learn that it comes from the pen of none other than James Dobson, the latest self-annointed moral leader of America. It’s a passage from “The Strong Willed Child”.

This is the man who is leading a moral crusade in America along with another famed animal abuser George W. Bush.

Animal abuse is well known to be the one consistent precurser behavior of serial killers.

Wish I’d Said That

The Sideshow is on a tear today. Avedon’s got a number of really good posts up, but this one is a barn burner:

What they love is their hatred of liberals and liberalism. And hating liberalism is hating America. Make no mistake about this: the foundation of America is liberalism. Our form of government, from the very beginning, is liberal democracy. And, while they talk about how they love America while liberals do not, and how it is conservatives who adhere strictly to the Constitution, it is also abundantly clear that when they are given an opportunity to prove such things, they do the reverse.

[…]

What makes it so easy to hate France, and any other nation that shows every sign of being a liberal democracy, is that they’ve got liberal democracy. In the parlance of conservatives, any government that shows a concern for the welfare of its people is practically a communist state. But, wait:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And that, my friends, is the organizing principle of liberalism. The “general Welfare” and “the Blessings of Liberty” are meant to be the goal of the United States of America – it says so in the very first sentence of the Constitution. It is the obligation of the government to “secure” these things for us.

But France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have “socialized medicine”, so they are obviously indistinguishable from Stalinism, to hear conservatives tell it. That’s why it was so easy for conservatives to start accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of being communists when they campaigned for “Hillarycare”. Although they sometimes claimed to despise this program because it was supposedly complicated or bureaucratic, the truth is that they opposed it precisely because it might actually work. The same reason they despise Social Security, which clearly does work. Because such programs promote the general welfare.

This is why conservatives must lie about what they are doing. They are trying to destroy Social Security while claiming they mean to save it. They have to lie, because no one with any sense, or any concern for our nation, would want them to succeed at destroying it. They make up reasons why any proposed national health insurance plan would fail, because they do not want one to succeed. They claim they want to stop abortion “to save lives” while instituting programs that are known to increase the likelihood of unwanted pregnancy and abortion. They empty our treasury and cut taxes to the rich while claiming to “improve” our economy. They construct a program of theocracy while claiming it’s in aid of “freedom of religion”. They claim to be “Constitutional constructionists” while stripping the Constitution of any meaning. They even restrict our travel and threaten to remove our citizenship for political reasons while claiming to “protect our freedoms”.

Oh, they hate America, there’s no question of that. The only question is why liberals hesitate to say so.

I think it’s because liberals believe in our system so dearly that it’s been very hard for us to wrap our minds around the idea that our government is seriously under threat from within. This is a very frightening proposition. You feel a little bit crazy for even thinking it. In this way, we are the victims of faith-based thinking, too. We just can’t seem to accept what we are seeing before our very eyes. We think that our system is so strong that it can withstand anything.

Impeachment, stolen election, terrorist attack, trumped up war, media dominance all in less than a decade. It’s happening.

Check Him Out Now

We doin’ big pimpin, we spendin’ cheese

We doin’ big pimpin’ up in DC

CNBC Sunday, 8 PM EST

Be there or be square. Wolcott’s on Tina Brown.

(Well, not literally. I don’t think, anyway. Better watch, just in case.)