Below The Belt
I knew the Bush campaign was ruthless and I knew they were cruel. I expected them to play dirty.
But, I never dreamed they would sink this low.
If Karl Rove is willing to play the cute puppy card, we are truly doomed…
They’ll Believe Anything
I thought you might enjoy this wingnut e-mail that’s been going around:
Almost half of the nation’s flu vaccine will not be delivered this year. Chiron, a major manufacturer of flu vaccine, will not be distributing any influenza vaccine this flu season. Chiron was to make 46-48 million doses vaccine for the United States. Chiron is a British company. Recently British health officials stopped Chiron from distributing and making the vaccine when inspectors found unsanitary conditions in the labs. Some lots of the vaccine were recalled and destroyed.Why is our vaccine made in the UK and not the US? The major pharmaceutical companies in the US provided almost 90% of the nations flu vaccine at one time. They did this despite a very low profit margin for the product. Basically, they were doing us a favor.
In the late 80’s a man from North Carolina who had received the vaccine got the flu. The strain he caught was one of the strains in that years Vaccine made by a US company. What did he do? He sued and he won. He was awarded almost $5 million! After that case was appealed and lost, most US pharmaceutical companies stopped making the vaccine. The liability out weighed the profit margin. Since UK and Canadian laws prohibit such frivolous law suits UK and Canadian companies began selling the vaccine in the US.
By the way…the lawyer that represented the man in the flu shot lawsuit was a young ambulance chaser by the name of John Edwards.
Mighty decent of the Bush campaign not to use this bombshell in the last two weeks of the campaign, don’t you think? John Edwards is personally responsible for the flu vaccine crisis and they refrain from using that information in ads and speeches. Wow. To think that some people say they are tough guys who will pull out all the stops to win when they are really just a bunch of softies who don’t want to embarrass their rivals.
On second thought, this can’t be yet another completely unbelievable lie to fool Republican morons, can it? My gawd. I hope these people aren’t allowed to operate heavy machinery or drive without supervision. People that dumb are a public health hazard in and of themselves.
Under Pressure
One of the hallmarks of the modern Republican party has been the efficacy of its communication infrastructure and its commitment to the long term. Over time it has become a sophisticated national political machine. Now, Sinclair Advertiser Boycott has shown that our side truly has the beginnings of a strong and vital counter force if we devote ourselves to long term thinking. The battle is just beginning whether we win or lose this election.
The immediate necessity, however, is to not let up on Sinclair. They have not capitulated. They merely changed their strategy. They are committed to the extreme right wing and will continue to evangelize in various ways for the cause with no sense of fairness or journalistic ethics. This little gambit has personally cost the family more than 40 million dollars and yet they continue. It seems that they have not yet learned their lesson and perhaps they never will. But, there is an object lesson for others out there who might try something like this, so whatever happens we must take this all the way to the end.
We must not let up on the pressure until the propagandists understands that there will be a serious price to pay economically for ignoring their responsibilities to the nation as a guardian of democracy. They are allowed to use the airwaves as a public trust. If they continue to abuse that trust they should be relieved of it.
Via the Sinclair Boycott blog, I see that an unnamed Sinclair employee (and stockholder) is exhorting us to keep the pressure on the company to try to stop them from broadcasting the comedy and keep them from repeating it throughout the week-end. They have not learned their lesson:
You have today and tomorrow to prevent A POW Story from airing. Now is not the time to stop. If SBG is prevented from airing A POW Story, they will be forced to air regularly scheduled programming, and generate regularly scheduled ad revenue. This will have the effect of forcing SBG to accept money against their apparent will.
What you and others are doing here is very much like having an intervention with a drug addict. You don’t give him the benefit of the doubt. You don’t let him dictate terms. You don’t allow yourself to be dazzled by his arguments. And you don’t leave him alone so he can “go to the bathroom.” You are trying to save this company from itself. The Smith brothers took actions that caused their company stock to rapidly lose $90 million in value, of which $40 million came right out of their hides, and they still didn’t want to stop. There is no reason to beleive that they have come to their senses. They said what everyone wanted to hear, and now they are going to do what they wanted to do in the first place. They will do what Fox News does, and pay lip service to offering “both sides”. There will be some liberal lightweight phoning in a perfomance that will make Alan Colmes seem like Kenneth Galbraith by comparison.
…. SBG may use this weekend to get this program on the air more than once. The SBG press release mentions only what affiliates will be airing on Friday night. SBG may chose to air the program any number of times on any number of their affiliates after Friday. Should they do this, the company will likely bleed money like a stuck pig. If Glickenhaus and Media Matters don’t like what they see at 9 pm, what are they going to do? Wait til Monday morning to take legal action?
We are running promotional announcements for A POW Story as of today. So, my company believes this is a done deal. Prove them wrong.
Read the whole letter, it’s quite interesting. Keep sending all those calls and letters folks.
According to Atrios, there is also a mass protest scheduled for 8pm on Friday night at all the Sinclair affiliates. He’s got all the info.
If anyone you know lives in one of those towns, send them an e-mail and tell them to head down there at 8pm. Local news is important and if we make enough noise, Sinclair’s competitors will be more than happy to report these actions. The decline of the company, the protests and the boycott, unlike “A POW Story”, actually are news.
Trouble In Paradise?
I have to agree with the Bull Moose that Unka Karl indicating that Pat Robertson is a bald faced liar is quite the risky step to take in the waneing days of a very close election.
Now, what primarily disturbs the Moose are not the President’s comments nor does he doubt that Pat is on the Lord’s speed dial. Rather, the Moose is in a lather over the fact that Karl Rove is apparently calling Pat a liar. The Washington Post reports, “White House political adviser Karl Rove told reporters that Bush never said he did not expect casualties. “I was right there,” Rove said of the president’s conversation with Robertson.”
My, my, is there no gratitude from Karl for all the good works that Pat has performed for the President? And surely, it is not smart to call into question the credibility of a man who has a direct line to God merely days before a national election!
Or a man who just a couple of weeks ago threatened to take his flock and form a third party if he didn’t get his way:
Influential American evangelist Pat Robertson said Monday that Evangelical Christians feel so deeply about Jerusalem, that if President George W. Bush were to “touch” Jerusalem, Evangelicals would abandon their traditional Republican leanings and form a third party.
Evangelical Christians – estimated at tens of millions of Americans – overwhelmingly support Bush for his pro-Israel policies, Robertson told a Jerusalem news conference Monday.
But if Bush shifted his position toward support for Jerusalem as a capital for both Israel and a Palestinian state, his Evangelical backing would disappear, Robertson indicated.
“The President has backed away from [the road map], but if he were to touch Jerusalem, he’d lose all Evangelical support,” Robertson said. “Evangelicals would form a third party” because, though people “don’t know about” Gaza, Jerusalem is an entirely different matter.
The article goes on to quote him raving about Satan and Islam and all kinds of other crazy shit, but his naked threat wasn’t exactly subtle.
Can this marriage be saved?
Oh Please
So, I see (via Atrios) that Junior is taking a day off on Saturday.
Sure he is. In the fight of his life, ten days before the election, he’s taking a precious day away from the campaign trail.
How much do you want to bet he’s being measured for a new military costume as we speak?
My only question is whether it will be Kabul or Baghdad.
And if the braindead press corpse handle this as anything but a cheap, taxpayer financed stunt we should raise holy hell. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to let them know now that any October Surprise like this is not a “surprise” it’s an act of sheer desperation and if they don’t cover this with the skepticism and derision it deserves they can never call themselves anything but whores.
It’s called working the refs folks. If this thing happens, the press needs to have our take on it firmly implanted in their minds before they start their bizarre, erotic fantasizing about the manly preznit.
Cult of the Codpiece
I have been sort of half heartedly working on a piece about the Susskind article this week-end but I may just give it up since Ezra has already eloquently laid out a good part of my thesis:
And the Iraqis will greet us with flowers and shiatsu massages, the tax cuts will result in more revenue entering government coffers while stimulating the economy, the Northern Alliance will do an excellent job securing Tora Bora, we know Putin is good because his soul said so, Ariel Sharon is a “man of peace”, our allies are materially unimportant because a small and maneuverable fighting force can easily carry out the mission in Iraq, simply requesting that companies consider the environment will be more effective than actual regulation…
Time and again, the Bush administration has placed their trust and crafted their policy based on a dubious or unproven assertion, and time and again they’ve found their faith misplaced, though not before the situation spun out of control to the country’s great harm. This Administration’s problem isn’t that they’re optimistic, it’s that they’re certain the world is similarly sunny. People are grabbing on to Suskind’s “reality-based community” quote, as well they should. But they’re missing its point. The Bush aide is arguing that the Administration operates off the idea that they shape their reality, that they are history’s forces, not victims. That’s why, presumably, they only plan for what they believe will happen. The parallels to New Age spirituality would be funny, if they weren’t so scary, and the idea would be admirable if reality didn’t keep proving it wrong.
This “don’t worry be happy” philosophy has gotten these guys into trouble over and over and over again. I’m a Los Angeleno like Ezra so I should have made the connection to New Age spirituality before, but I didn’t. Bush isn’t a bible-based, messianic fundamentalist. His “crusade fer freedom” is really much more in the mode of a New Agey Kumbaaya cult leader than an Armageddonist. (Maybe Ariana could give us some insight on how this works. This is her guy, John-Roger.)
He doesn’t know the bible except in the most rudimentary way. He doesn’t attend church. He doesn’t follow any of the most basic tenets of Christianity. He is simply the leader of the republican cult whose members believe that anything he says is the word of God — hence the bizarre screams of orgasmic fervor when he say words that one would not usually associate with deep emotional beliefs, like “tort reform.” It doesn’t matter what he says, it’s how he says them.
This is why he doesn’t have to make any sense and this is why his followers are so blind to reality. As with all cults they are willing to give up their money and their free will and turn it over to the leader. It has nothing to do with any traditional religion.
He’s the leader of the Cult of the Codpiece and as far as his followers are concerned, anything he says and does is divine.
Fabulous Flyboy
Paul Lukasiak has uncovered evidence that Bush was discharged from the TANG:
for failing “to possess the required military qualifications for his grade or specialty, or does not meet the mental, moral, professional or physical standards of the Air Force.”
It’s likely because he was either dumb, gay, drunk, high, insubordinate or cowardly. That’s what “mental, moral, professional or physical” means in military speak.
Looking across the entire landscape of his life, I’m thinking it just screams repressed gayness.
The Chippendales costumes alone…
Reality-Based Torture
I know that we are all obsessed at this point with the immediate needs of getting out the vote and making sure that Kerry wins two weeks from today, but I didn’t want to let this article slip past without comment. The NY Times reported over the week-end that people are beginning to speak out about the torture at Guantanamo.
Many detainees at Guantánamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases.
The people, military guards, intelligence agents and others, described in interviews with The New York Times a range of procedures that included treatment they said was highly abusive occurring over a long period of time, as well as rewards for prisoners who cooperated with interrogators.
One regular procedure that was described by people who worked at Camp Delta, the main prison facility at the naval base in Cuba, was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels, said one military official who witnessed the procedure. The official said that was intended to make the detainees uncomfortable, as they were accustomed to high temperatures both in their native countries and their cells.
Such sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks, said the official, who described the treatment after being contacted by The Times.
I wrote several pieces about this a couple of months back and I remain shocked and stunned that we have done what it now appears clearly that we did. We created a high tech concentration camp in Cuba that evolved into primarily a training camp for interrogators — the training of whom is bound to be inferior because of the suspect methods employed. This was done because of a hysterical overreaction to 9/11 combined with a truly cynical opportunism that allowed certain people in the administration to act upon some dark compulsion to “show strength” through cruelty.
Many of the prisoners had no affiliation with al Qaeda or the Taliban and those that did were very low level and useless for intelligence. Indeed, the top level al Qaeda who have been captured are being held and tortured elsewhere. The military tribunals are a joke and it is said that most of the prisoners, like Yousaf Hamdi, will be set free having served their PR purposes in a failed strategy to project US strength. Gitmo is a show prison camp.
Back in August, I summed it up like this:
Here’s the nut. Prisoners in Guantanamo were taken into custody under extremely questionable circumstances and assumed to be terrorists with no further recourse. This was done (again via VF) because:
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Gitmo plays not one but three vital roles in what the Pentagon calls the gwot, or global war on terror. First, it keeps terrorists “off the streets,” until death if necessary. Second, it turns them into sources of intelligence. Finally, with the first special “military commission” tribunals set to begin at Gitmo early in 2004, it lets America bring the perpetrators of terrible crimes to justice-in accordance, says Rumsfeld, “with the traditions of fairness and justice under law, on which this nation was founded, the very principles that the terrorists seek to attack and destroy.”
We know that in the first case, many of these people were not terrorists yet they are being subjected to horrifyingly inhumane treatment indefinitely. The three Britons being the ones most able to tell their stories to westerners, confirm this. There have been more than 60 others released back to their home countries after having been through this. We don’t know how many more are still inside.
In the second case, there has been little intelligence value in their interrogations, not just because they aren’t actually terrorists, but because even if they were, they’ve been out of the loop now for years. In fact, we know that there have been no high value terrorists ever held in Guantanamo. They are being water-boarded at discreet facilities elsewhere in the gulag.
In the third case, these sham military tribunals, the nature of which military lawyers themselves are appalled at, really mean that hundreds of innocent men could spend the rest of their lives in prison and for the forseeable future undergo mental torture that can only be described as criminal. At the least, the administration is intent upon dragging its feet for years, if necessary, to keep them from ever seeing the light of a real courtroom.
I don’t know what the Kerry admnistration will do about this, but I think it’s fair to say that they are going to be under tremendous pressure to appear “tough” on terrorism by the enraged firebreathers on the right who are already gearing up to engage in their own special form of political torture should they lose. Counter pressure is going to be needed.
We are going to have to be prepared to support the Kerry administration as it tries to do the right here while keeping the mediawhores from lapping up the inevitable Wurlitzer feeding frenzy with cries of treason and appeasement. This is going to be a very tough issue for a Democrat to deal with in this political environment and I think all of us need to be prepared to help the administration do what needs to be done. (Along with a million other things over which the wingnuts are going to lose their tiny little minds …)
Will The Media Be Rove’s Patsy Again?
Atrios has a list of potential October Surprises that we might look for and I’m wondering if he may actually try the hail mary of a trip to Iraq. I had heard some rumblings elsewhere that he might try to put on some kind of a uniform again (hopefully sparing us the codpiece this time) and drop in on the troops.
I wrote sometime back about the possibility of Bush parachuting into Baghdad on the eve of the election, but it was, you know, a joke. If he tries a stunt like that this time, I have a feeling that it will be remembered as the most desperate act an incumbent president has ever taken. The press corpse, unfortunately, would probably enjoy the theatre of the thing. They like nothing more than pretending that the lil’ preznit is some kind of action hero.
They cannot be allowed at this point to go along with such a thing. If they have even the tiniest shred of self-respect left, they would have to reject such a blatant ploy. To that end, I might think of sending this hilarious link to various members of the press corpse to remind them of what dewy eyed little debutantes they were at the sight of Commander Codpiece in that oh-so-snug jumpsuit:
MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo of in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.
Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.
Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…
MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.
Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.
MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.
Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just–I can’t think of any, any stunt by the White House–and I’ll call it a stunt–that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.
MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It’s not a stunt if it works and it’s real. And I felt the faces of those guys–I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.
Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of–the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he–you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That’s what he has going for him.
MATTHEWS: Fareed, you’re watching that from–say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We’re coming.’ Do you think that picture mattered over there?
Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not–we’ve allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it’s time to tell them, you know what, `You’re going to be help accountable for this.’
MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.
Here’s how CNN reported it “straight” at the time (when they weren’t featuring Kyra Phillips pretending to be TopGun herself.)They spent theentire afternoon breathlessly “reporting” the harroiwing landing and lovingly featuring the pictures of the phony flyboy on a loop:
Moments after the landing, the president, wearing a green flight suit and holding a white helmet, got off the plane, saluted those on the flight deck and shook hands with them. Above him, the tower was adorned with a big sign that read, “Mission Accomplished.”
Bush said he did take a turn at piloting the craft.
“Yes, I flew it. Yeah, of course, I liked it,” said Bush, who was an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard after graduating from Yale University in 1968.
“Great job,” said Bush, a wide smile stretched across his face as he posed for photographs with crew members who gathered to get their pictures with the president. He draped his arms around some, slapped the backs of others and shook hands with many.
“Yes I flew it!” Liar. And the media ate up this ridiculous cartoon version of reality with a spoon. Slowly but surely,however, the absurdity of the pageant became obvious. Even Matthews later called it a stunt.
And then, as if they hadn’t already been played like a violin, they fell for it yet again with the ridiculous Thanksgiving stunt. Check out Fox’s bizarre interpretation of events. First he played a fighter pilot president. Then, a few months later, he pretended to be a super duper secret agent:
CRAWFORD, Texas — Under cover of night as well as baseball caps, President Bush pulled off a Thanksgiving Day bait-and-switch that James Bond would have been proud of.
The president even stunned himself with the success of his trip to Iraq Thursday to visit troops for the holiday, saying if word of the dangerous mission had leaked out, he would have turned Air Force One (search) around and headed back to Crawford to spend the day with his family.
“I was fully prepared to turn this baby around, come home,” Bush said late Thursday as he returned from his two hour visit to Baghdad airport, where he served dinner to the troops and personally delivered his Thanksgiving message of appreciation to the nation’s servicemen and women.
But even Bush’s twin daughters and parents, who all headed to the president’s ranch for the holiday, were not informed in advance of the plan, and the overwhelming secrecy helped make the plan a success.
Feigning to be an “ordinary couple,” Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice snuck away from the ranch and endured the street traffic to get to the airport where Air Force One was parked. In a departure from the usual perks of being president, the unmarked motorcade had to obey all the traffic rules, stopping at lights and following the speed limit. During those pauses, Bush said he and Rice pulled their baseball caps down low so people could not see their faces.
Please. “I was fully prepared to turn this baby around.” I guess we are supposed to believe he flies Air Force One in his spare time, too. (And, I don’t even want to know why he kept saying “couple” about himself and Condi.)
I sincerely cannot believe that the media will let Rove and company get away with another of their cheap little cons, but it’s hard to have any faith in their ability to know when they are being played. They have, after all, been duped by this phony showboat team over and over and over again.
Update: I see that DU is on to this too.
