Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

No Samaritan

Matthews just interviewed Joe Lockhart and mentioned the new zogby poll question “If your car was broken down on the side of the road, who do you think would stop and help you?” Shockingly, 32% said John Kerry and 40% said Junior.

Unbelievable. It is indisputable that John Kerry saved Jim Rassman’s life in Vietnam, which should be enough to prove that Kerry not only will stop and help you fix your car, he will rush across 6 lanes of traffic to do it. (Our swift boat pals have so successfully lied and schemed that this image of Kerry has been forever tainted, to their enternal damnation.)

However, Rassman wasn’t the only life that Kerry famously saved. How about this one:

Former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht of Nevada is a staunch Republican, but he thanks his lucky stars for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.

Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the hallway.

Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht’s side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver — four times.

The lifesaving incident made international news, and Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the maneuver in 1974, called Hecht to say that had Kerry intervened just 30 seconds later Hecht might have been in a vegetative state for life.

“This man gave me my life,” the 75-year-old Hecht said Thursday.

Hecht said he was amazed that Kerry acted so quickly — some people were assuming that he was having a heart attack.

“He knew exactly what to do,” he said. “But a lot of people know what to do. They just don’t size up the situation immediately.”

The story has a twist of irony: Hecht was up for re-election that year, and Kerry, who was serving as the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, had pegged Hecht as one of the most vulnerable Republican seats.

Indeed, the Democratic nominee for Hecht’s seat, then-Gov. Richard Bryan, beat Hecht, who served just one term in office.

“Only in America can this happen, where he’s working against me to get me defeated and then saves my life,” Hecht said.

Hecht, who prides himself on having one of the most conservative records on the books during his six years in the Senate, said he and his wife, Gail, see politics as “a secondary issue” when it comes to Kerry.

“We’ve had a wonderful life, and it would have all been down the tubes,” said Hecht, who is about to celebrate his 45th wedding anniversary with his wife.

Every year the Hechts call Kerry’s longtime personal secretary, who tracks down Kerry wherever he is.

Then they recount some of their experiences in the last year. Hecht and his wife thank Kerry for thinking so quickly in the Senate halls that day. And Kerry tells them that their phone call is one of his favorites of the year.

“He’s so nice and appreciative,” Hecht said.

Ther Daily Show did a spoof of this and I suspect that many people thought it was a joke. But it’s actually true. Kerry stepped off the elevator, immediately assessed the situation and then saved the guys life while a bunch of others stood around dithering. (Compare this to Bush frozen in a little boys chair reading ‘The Pet Goat” after Andy Card said, “We are under attack.”)

Is there even one example of George W. Bush doing a personal good deed ever in his life? I honestly can’t think of one.

In fact, even aside from all of his cruel policy decisions (like approving the use of TORTURE for instance) there are many small indications that this guy is totally lacking compassion for his fellow man — even his own family.

Remember James Byrd’s family in Jasper texas begging him to help them pass hate crimes legislation?

“I went in there pleading to him,” Mullins says. “I said that if he helped me move it along I would feel that he hadn’t died in vain … [Rep.] Thompson said, ‘Gov. Bush, what Renee’s trying to say is, Would you help her pass the bill?’ And he said, ‘No.’ Just like that.”

“He had a nonchalant attitude, like he wanted to hurry up and get out of there,” Mullins says. “It was cold in that room.”

Remember when his daughter had an emergency appendectomy?

As he boarded the plane, reporters inquired about Jenna’s condition. ‘Maybe she’ll be able to join us in Florida,’ the president-elect said. ‘If not, she can clean her room.’ The reporters stared at him, stunned. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ one of those present later said. ‘First of all, I’m a father, and I cannot imagine a scenario in which my daughter would have major surgery and I would just leave on vacation. And then he just seemed so snarly about it, like he was pissed at her.'”

Not only wouldn’t he stop to help you at the side of the road, he’s the type who’d slow down and stare at you, then laugh uproariously and hit the gas, spraying gravel in your face as he sped away.

The Mediawhore Doctrine

Goddamn it. Wolf Blitzer just asked William Cohen about the so-called “Kerry Doctrine” and then defined it exactly as the Bush campaign is in its talking points — you know, the nonsense about about giving foreign countries veto power over our security yada, yada, yada.

Cohen gave a nice scholorly response that glazed the eyes of every listener before they realized that he was obliquely saying that the spin was full of shit.

Time to blast Wolfie, folks. Call if you can. This “Kerry Doctrine” thing is being pushed by the wingnuts with everything they have, and the whores are eating it with a spoon. Blitzer knows very well that Kerry did not actually say that he would allow other nations to veto America’s right to preemptive self defense. He challenged Condi Rice on that subject just yesterday by showing the entire clip from the debate and explaining it quite lucidly. He knows that it is bullshit yet he continues to “ask” people about it as if there really was some controversy about what Kerry said.

And he is spreading this meme “The Kerry Doctrine” a phrase that Kerry has never used, mainly because what he was talking about already had a name — the Pre-emption Doctrine and we’ve been living under it for more than fifty years.

Blitzer’s CNN Complaints Form

CNN

1 CNN Center

POB 105366

Atlanta, GA 30348

Phone: (404) 827-1500

Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784

Justice

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice.

BLITZER: To justice? The guy has been — Khan has been freed. He’s been pardoned by President Musharraf… Khan himself lives in a villa. And the IAEA would like to question him, and the Pakistani government doesn’t even allow that to happen.

RICE: I think we all know that A.Q. Khan was a particular kind of figure in Pakistani lore, a national hero… if you don’t think that his national humiliation is justice for what he did, I think it is. He’s nationally humiliated.

FYI:

Earlier this year, Khan’s underground nuclear bazaar–dubbed the “nuclear Wal-Mart” by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei–was uncloaked, solving the mystery of how North Korea, Iran and Libya acquired so much nuclear technology so fast. The answer: Khan’s network sold it to them.

In other news:

Martha Stewart will do her time for lying about a stock sale at a remote West Virginia prison camp where inmates sleep in bunk beds and rise at 6 a.m. to do menial labor for pennies an hour.

The millionaire celebrity homemaker confirmed Wednesday that she had been assigned to the minimum-security prison at Alderson, but noted that she had hoped to be sent to a facility closer to her family and attorneys.

Stewart, convicted in March of lying to investigators about a stock sale, had asked to serve her five-month prison term in Danbury, Conn., close to her 90-year-old mother and her own home in Westport.

But a source familiar with the government’s decision, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that Alderson was selected because it was more remote and less accessible to the media than Danbury or Stewart’s second choice of Coleman, Fla

Two Faces. One Public, One Private. One Phony, One Real.

Over the last week or so we have seen an edgy, enigmatic black and white image of George W. Bush appear on web-sites and blogs. At first people thought that sites had been hacked, as Eschaton and Kos and Democratic Underground spontaneously erupted with the black and white figure only to have it disappear and randomly return. Within days it linked to a mysterious DNC web-site with cryptic material that only slowly came into focus. Clearly something was up.

This image is disconcerting and it evokes strong reactions because it symbolizes the cognitive dissonance so many of us have been living with for the last four years as we’ve watched the man who lost the election but won the office drive us to distraction with the contradictions of his character. And nothing has been more frustrating than the fact that so many in the media and in the public at large seemed to see something entirely different than we did.

I believe that this happened because after 9/11, the media cast Bush in the role of strong, resolute leader, perhaps because the nation needed him to be that, at least for a little while. And the people gratefully laid that mantle on him and he took it because the office demanded no less. The narrative of the nation at war required a warrior leader and George W. Bush was all we had. Karl Rove and others understood that they could use this veil to soothe the American people and flatter the president to take actions that no prudent, thoughtful leader would have taken after our initial successes in Afghanistan. This “man with the bullhorn” image of Bush crystallized in the minds of many Americans and has not been revisited until now.

That phony image took us from a sense of national unity to a misguided war with Iraq; it excused his failure to effectively manage the economy and fomented partisan warfare by portraying dissent as unpatriotic; it allowed people to overlook his obvious failure to take the threat of al Qaeda seriously before 9/11 (and even after) and created a hagiography based on wishful thinking and emotional need rather than any realistic appraisal of his leadership.

His handlers wisely kept him under wraps, allowing him face time on television only in the company of world leaders or to give stirring speeches written by his gifted speechwriter, Mark Gerson. He rarely held press conferences and when he took questions, he was aggressively unresponsive, choosing instead to offer canned sound bites and slogans and daring the press corps to call him on it. Few did. The mask stayed in place and he remained a symbol instead of a president — the symbol of American strength, resilience and fortitude. He was, in many people’s minds, the president they wished they had.

On Thursday night sixty-one million people watched George W. Bush for the first time since 9/11 not as that symbol, but as a man. And for those who had not reassessed their belief in his personal leadership since 9/11, it was quite a shock. Their strong leader was inarticulate, arrogant, confused and immature. They must be wondering who that man was.

The truth is that since George W. Bush entered politics he has always had two faces. In fact, virtually everything you know about his public persona is the opposite of the real person.

He claims to be a compassionate, caring man, often admonishing people to “love your neighbor like you loved to be loved yourself.” Yet, going all the way back to Yale, he is quoted as saying he disapproved of his fellow students as “people who felt guilty about their lot in life because others were suffering.” His business school professor remembers him saying that poor people are poor because they are lazy. This from a man who was born rich into one of America’s leading families and relied on those connections for everything he ever achieved.

He lectures on responsibility, saying that he’s going to end the era of “if it feels good do it” and yet he failed to live up to his responsibility as a young man in the crucible of his generation, the Vietnam war. In fact, if it felt good, he did it and did it with relish — for forty years of his fifty eight year life. He has never fully owned up to what he did during those years spent in excess and hedonism, relying on a convenient claim of being “born again” to expiate him of his sins. Would that everyone had it so easy.

He ostentatiously calls himself a committed Christian and yet he rarely attends church unless it’s a campaign stop or a national occasion. The man who claims that Christ is his favorite political philosopher famously and cruelly mocked a condemned prisoner begging for her life. He portrays himself as a man of rectitude yet he pumped his fist and said “feels good!” in the moment before he announced that the Iraq war had begun. (One would have thought that if there was ever a time to utter a prayer it was then.) How many funerals of the fallen has he attended? How many widows has he personally comforted?

He portrays himself as a salt of the earth “hard working” rancher, clearing brush on his land in an artfully sweaty Calvin Klein-style t-shirt. Yet in the first 8 months of his presidency leading up to 9/11, he spent 42% of his time on vacation. His “ranching” didn’t begin until he bought his million dollar property just before he ran for president in 1999. He has lived in suburbs and cities since a brief period in his childhood in the 50’s, when he lived in the medium sized boom town of Midland before going to Andover.

He actively promotes the notion that he is a man of action yet in the single most important moment of his life he froze in front of school kids, continuing on with a script prepared before the national psyche was blown to bits. He didn’t take charge. He didn’t react. He was paralyzed at the moment of the nation’s worst peril.

He claims to be a strong leader and yet he is skillfully manipulated by his staff, who learned early that the only thing they needed to do to convince him of the rightness of their recommended course was to flatter him by saying it was the “brave” or “bold” thing to do. His self-image as a resolute leader is actually a lack of self confidence that is ripe for exploitation by competing advisors who use it to convince this him to do their bidding. This explains why he seems to believe that he is acting with resolve when he has just affected an abrupt about-face. His advisors had persuaded him to change course simply by telling him he was being resolute.

George W. Bush is a man with two faces— a public image of manly strength and a private reality of childish weakness. His verbal miscues and malapropisms are the natural consequence of a man struggling with internal contradictions and a lack of self-knowledge. He can’t keep track of what he is supposed to think and say in public.

There is no doubt that whether it’s a cowboy hat or a crotch hugging flightsuit , George W. Bush enjoys wearing the mantle of American archetypal warriors. But when he goes behind the curtain and sheds the costume, a flinty, thin-skinned, immature man who has never taken responsibility for his mistakes emerges. The strong compassionate leader is revealed as a flimsy paper tiger.

On Thursday night, the president forgot himself. After years of being protected from anyone who doesn’t flatter and cajole, he let his mask slip when confronted with someone who didn’t fear his childish retribution or need anything from him. Many members of the public got a good sharp look at him for the first time in two years and they were stunned. Like that black and white image, the dichotomy of the real Bush vs. the phony Bush is profoundly discomfiting.

Luckily for America and the world, a fully synthesized, mature man stood on the other side of that stage ready to assume the mantle of leadership, not as a theatrical costume but as an adult responsibility for which he is prepared by a lifetime of service, study and dedication. I would imagine that many voters felt a strong sense of relief that he was there.

Too Funny

AMERICAblog does it again:

Drudge outdoes himself today with a post claiming Kerry came to the debate podium and allegedly takes a sheet of paper out of his breast pocket. The debate rules apparently say that you can bring NOTHING to the podium not even paper or pencil, and that all the materials will be placed for you on the podium.

Oh, but only as Drudge can do, the video Drudge posts as “proof” on his site bites Bush in the ass. If you zoom the video to full screen (right click on it while it’s running and click “zoom” and then “full screen”) you can see Bush unfolding a piece of paper and laying it down on his podium!

Here’s the link.

And it’s fairly clear to me that Kerry was taking a pen out of his pocket, probably out of habit, which does mean that he broke the debate rules. Clearly, that’s the sort of lawless behavior that undecided voters won’t stand for. Remember, it’s not about the pen. It’s about the rule ‘o law.

Once again the fighting hellmice of the 101st keyboarders speak truth to power!

No Joke

The wonderful Meteor Blades over at kos comments on the George P Bush quote from spin alley in the NY Times today in which he says:

“I think his main objective, apart from not falling on the ground on the stage, which he didn’t do tonight, was to say, look, here are my positions, and talk directly to the voters.”

The Times characterizes this a setting the bar low and Meteor Blades generously says:

I wish I could be certain that hunky George P. merely succumbed to a bit of nervous levity after the stress of watching his uncle send months of meticulous image manipulation down the toilet in 90 minutes. Just a joke to take the edge off.

Or maybe not. We all know the President has fallen down on the job for the past four years. But we didn’t mean it literally.

Frankly, I think he meant it literally. After all, George W. Bush falls flat on his face quite frequently, for reasons that nobody can adequately explain.

Little Voices

TalkLeft mentioned during the debate how wierd it was for Bush to say “let me finish” when nobody had interrupted him. I noticed it too and thought he had just had a bit of a brain lapse and fell into an intimidation tactic that often works to restrain the press but was clearly inappropriate in the present circumstances. (See the infamous Carole Coleman interview for a perfect example of how he employs it.) I even commented that I could only imagine what they would have said about the “delusional” Al Gore if he’d done such a bizarre thing in one of the debates.

I see, however, that some think that this is actually an indication that Bush uses an earpiece, which would explain why he oddly appeared to be speaking to someone who wasn’t present during the debate.

I can’t remember where I saw it, but there have been pictures of Bush published on the internet that show a strange outline in the back of his jacket when he’s standing at the podium. And if I’m not mistaken, one of the debate rules was that they could not shoot either candidate from the back.

The right-wing blogosphere has a very good defense for this charge, however. If Bush was using an earpiece you have to assume that the person who was feeding him his lines at this debate was very drunk or very dumb because his answers were just awful.

On the other hand, that would definitely explain why, in front of 61 million people, he finally had to say something even though it made him look like he was speaking to an imaginary friend. He was desperate for Karen to shut the hell up.

Update:

Here’s a picture from the actual debate posted on Raw Story. This truly is strange.

Thanks to Hepzipah for the tip

Better Red Than Dead

Jesse and Atrios both rightly take Press The Meat to task for their unbalanced panel of bloviators this morning, although I disagree that Brownstein leans Republican. I think he is one the last of the real journalists in the business. Kate O’beirne can only be correctly balanced by someone like Robert Sheer or Katerina Vandnheuvel (maybe even the ghost of Joseph Stalin) but they never have them on.

However, I think both of the guys miss the truly egregious crime perpetrated by Lil’ Russ these last couple of weeks.

He’s featuring a stultifying series of Senate debates for most of the hour and he’s done something quite appalling by only focusing on senate races in conservative states where the Democrat is forced to repudiate John Kerry at every turn in order to eke out a win — South Dakota and Oklahoma. And he glories in putting this Democrat on the defensive by making him publicly disagree with Kerry while the other guy backs his strong reolute “leader” to the hilt. Unfortunately, the people voting in both of these contests are rather small compared to the national audience that is led to believe that Democrats don’t like Kerry or are useless wimps.

Will we be seeing a debate between Specter and Hoeffel do you think? How about Boxer and Jones? It’s only fair that we watch some blue state Republican twist in the wind a little bit, too.

The Two Faces of Bush

Good Instincts

LiberalOasis, as usual, has a very cogent take on why Kerry pulled it off last night and I agree with him.

In serious times, people are unsurprisingly anxious for a serious, substantive discussion of serious issues. Kerry’s calm, cool temperament and his mastery of the facts made people feel confident that he could handle the job:

How did Kerry make this happen?

Part of it what was LiberalOasis discussed yesterday, the Bushies blew the expectations game, setting Kerry’s bar very low.

Part of it was Bush’s own defensive and irritated demeanor.

(The guy has never had to debate with a controversial record to explain, and he’s not naturally good at it.)

But the other part of it was Kerry’s own instincts.

He chose not to panic at the polls, not to feel the need to force a KO punch.

He made the decision to be himself, which is, to be a statesman (a good contrast with Dubya).

And to not dumb down the issues, but treat the voters — who are looking for answers in an uncertain, anxious time — as adults.

Surrogate Rudy Guiliani’s main spin point (heard on NBC and The Daily Show at least) was Kerry was “lecturing” people.

Nice try.

Rudy and the GOP message masters may think people are stupid, but Kerry doesn’t.

By delving into the issues, Kerry’s the one treating the voters with respect, not you.

The media should take note of this.

Kerry is is a sixty year old man who is prepared to be president in every sense of the word. But, he also has great political instincts and they should not be underrated. By showing his serious, authoritative personality in direct contrast to the impatient, hot-headed president, he may have turned this race at exactly the right moment.