Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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.

Inoculation Priorities

This shortage of flu vaccine is ironic in light of the fact that the vice president himself spearheaded a (luckily) failed effort to force every American to get vaccinated against smallpox which would have cost billions upon billions and killed at least a thousand people. He was said to have been messianic in his zeal to make vaccinations mandatory because of Saddam’s alleged stockpile of smallpox that, needless to say, never turned up.

And, he didn’t care any more about the potential deaths from the vaccine that he cares about all the deaths that have taken place in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: One of your many tasks in the administration, the point person on bioterrorism; you’ve been spending some time at the Center for Disease Control. Do you believe that all Americans should eventually be vaccinated against smallpox?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’re in the middle of improving our capability to do that. A year ago, we had enough vaccine for maybe 15 million people. We’re now well on the way to producing enough vaccine for 350 million people. There is serious consideration now being given to what kind of vaccination program we want. You go to first responders, people who have to deal with this when it first arises. Do you do a broader group than that? Do you do it on a voluntary basis for anybody who would like to have it? These are issues under active discussion, deliberation. Tommy Thompson over at HHS has been actively involved in it as well, too. It’s not a zero sum kind of proposition; that is, it’s not a cost-free operation. There are side effects and consequences for most vaccines. And you have to weigh those against the benefits that would be derived by protecting the population.

MR. RUSSERT: If you vaccinated 300 million Americans, a thousand would die from side effects.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t remember the exact numbers, but clearly there would be some people who would be harmed as a result of the vaccination.

MR. RUSSERT: But the risk may be such we may come to that.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s entirely possible.

It was only because the medical community put it’s collective foot down that Cheney was stopped from forcing everybody to get innoculated against a disease that’s been wiped out and to which Saddam had absolutely no access.

More than 80 hospitals from every region in the USA, including leading teaching hospitals and large, urban public hospitals, are forgoing the vaccinations. The dissenters are a tiny fraction of the 3,000 hospitals recruited by state health officials to vaccinate doctors, nurses and other hospital staff members who are most likely to care for smallpox patients.

But their numbers are growing as doctors and administrators at hospitals around the USA are concluding that the known health risks from the vaccine, which can cause illness and even death, outweigh the unquantifiable risks of smallpox being used as a terrorist weapon.

The refusal to vaccinate raises new questions about the president’s plan just as the first phase is expected to begin this week. And some health care experts and government officials fear that any reluctance to participate in the first phase could lessen the willingness of others to participate in the second phase — and undermine the administration’s goal of eliminating smallpox as a viable option for terrorists.

Richard Wenzel, chairman of internal medicine at Medical College of Virginia Hospitals of Virginia Commonwealth University, finds the resistance neither surprising nor unwarranted.

“This is not an issue that should be framed in terms of patriotism,” he says. “This is an issue that’s medical risk-benefit. We haven’t seen this disease for more than 25 years. We are reacting to a perceived threat that’s not well defined.”

The hospitals are reaching their decisions individually after their own in-house infectious diseasesspecialists study the Bush plan.

Almost as a rule, hospital administrators say they are reluctant to make some of their employees sick to protect them from a disease that no longer exists and would reappear only in the chance of a terrorist act.

The administration did all of this at the very same time that the public health officials were warning of a shortage of the flu vaccine.

“The thing that stops you from doing this is the complexity of the smallpox vaccine, which is not a safe vaccine,” says William Schaffner, head of the preventive medicine department at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, one of the hospitals that is opting out. “There’s a real disease that kills people unnecessarily: the flu. Mr. President, I would love to see you endorse a national flu vaccine campaign with the same vigor.”

Cheney never did learn his lesson from that. They spent millions and millions to get a stockpile of vaccine for which there is absolutely no use and ignored the professionals who warned that the flu vaccine was in short supply. And, a pouting Dick Cheney obviously still harbors resentment about that:

Q: Are there any lessons for you in the way the smallpox vaccine program sort of ran into public opposition? Is that an example of where the public is less aware of the dangers than they ought to be?

CHENEY: Well, we — I’m trying to be careful here so I don’t start another wave of concern out there about smallpox. People clearly were concerned about the side effects of the vaccine. I think there was a certain amount of complacency in terms of people not being willing to take it as seriously as we thought it should be taken. And so far we’ve been fortunate. Hopefully we will continue to be fortunate. It’s to some extent the responsibility, though, of those of us in government to think about the what-ifs, to worry about the worst case, to look at the evidence that’s out there and connect the dots.

And we were criticized, the government was criticized generally prior to 9/11 for, “you didn’t connect the dots.” I think we did, but that charge is made. Here you’re in a situation where you clearly want to make certain that you take all the intelligence available, you look at the capabilities of your adversaries, you draw reasonable conclusions, and you act on those conclusions. And that’s what we did with respect to smallpox.

And the main effort there, the focus was to try to get enough people in the medical community, first responders, inoculated, so that if we did get hit, we could move aggressively to implement a national immunization program. We’re better off now than we were before we started, but clearly we fell short of what we had originally anticipated, in terms of the numbers of people we would like to have seen inoculated.

Yes. And luckily they fell short of killing about a thousand people that wouldn’t have had to die because of a threat that didn’t exist. Smallpox is a disease that has been eradicated. There is a very remote possibility that a small amount could escape from the controlled storage facility, but we have absolutely no evidence that it has happened. Dick Cheney tried to strongarm the CDC into demanding that every person in American be vaccinated because he was trying to scare the country into supporting a war with Iraq and as with everything else in that run-up he was willing to say anything to make that happen. It is unconscionable that he actively fought against the prevailing medical opinions that this country could deal with a real smallpox outbreak without a full scale innoculation scheme in order to advance his paranoid vision. (That it might have benefitted a certain vaccine manufacturer is something we might also ponder…)

After 9/11, the administration, Dick Cheney among the most hysterical, with their friends the lapdog media were in the throes of a delusional fit busily chasing phantom threats and science fiction scenarios instead of showing adult leadership. The disaster in Iraq and the shortage of flu vaccine of a piece. They are the result of the leadership of this country falling to pieces after 9/11 and losing sight of the nation’s priorities. They have proved that they cannot be depended upon to keep their heads when all around them are losing theirs.

Family Tradition

Check out this little trip down memory lane on Consortiumnews. We know that the Bush family has a penchant for dirty tricks in the last month or so of a campaign, particularly when they are fighting for their lives. In 1992, they got so desperate that they tried to paint Bill Clinton as a communist agent and they used the executive branch to do it.

We laugh at Ann Coulter and think of her as a clown. But, the truth is that there are a rather large number of Americans who agree with her that Democrats/liberals are routinely traitorous. And, the Bush family is always ready to exploit that paranoid style whenever they need to.

Again???

I can hardly wait to see Kerry’s stump speech in its entirely today on CNN, MSBNC and FOX. Certainly, since they’ve all been willingly bamboozled into giving Bush another free hour of television to give a “major policy speech” on terrorism that is actually his standard character attack stump speech punctuated by wild cheering and booing from his brainwashed rubes, they will feel bound by journalistic ethics to give Kerry equal time. Right?

Perhaps a little phone call might help to remind them.

CNN

www.cnn.com

1 CNN Center

POB 105366

Atlanta, GA 30348

Phone: (404) 827-1500

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

Fox News

www.foxnews.com

Speakout@foxnews.com

Viewerservices@foxnews.com

1211 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10036

Phone: (212) 301-3000

Fax: (212) 301-4224

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com

world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza

Secaucus, NJ 07094

Phone: (201) 583-5000

Fax: (201) 583-5453

Fox Paradox

Brit Hume and the Gang pretty much agreed this morning that “Stolen Honor” is news and that Sinclair has a right to broadcast it as long as they have at least one ineffectual Democrat on afterwards to rebut the charges (if they can find one.)

The question I have, is this. If it is news, then why isn’t the news media as a whole, and FoxNews network in particular, broadcasting it?

The Simple Strategy

NewDonkey.com says:

It’s bizarre, to say the least: at precisely the moment when the Bush-Cheney campaign has fully committed itself to an 18-day drive to demonize John Kerry as a Massachusetts Liberal, BC04 and its conservative media echo chamber are suddenly focused on a different L-word: Lesbian, as in the sexual orientation of Mary Cheney.

Kerry’s reference to the veep’s daughter, in response to a debate question about each candidate’s views on the nature or nurture origins of homosexuality, is now the obsessive preoccupation of the entire pro-Bush talking points network.

Their motivation is not 100% clear. In part, Bush partisans are simply trying to find something in the last debate that will change the public perception that Kerry won that one, and the whole three-game series. In part, Bushies want to dent the more positive impressions of Kerry’s character by suggesting he’s playing dirty politics. And finally, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that BC04 is simply freaking out at Kerry’s exposure, deliberate or inadvertant, of a vulnerability in their base-first strategy, which depends heavily on piggy-backing battleground state referenda on gay marriage. Mary Cheney’s father, after all, has conspicuously declined to support his boss in demanding a constitutional amendment to defend the “sanctity of marriage” against the alleged assault from those demanding gay marriage rights. This is not something conservatives want to be reminded of.

The morning news on Fox just spent half an hour talking about it and came to the conclusion that this was a bigger issue than taxes and the war in Iraq. Then one of the hideous dough boys wondered if the question had been on obesity, if it would have been appropriate for President Bush to bring up Elizabeth Edwards’s “problems.” I sure wish that all those moms and kids had heard that one.

I think this is simply the opportunistic opening salvo in a full-on character attack on John Kerry as a “hit below the belt” dirty campaigner. Typical GOP projection. In between will be more of the Rove patented ratfucking that they will pin on the Democrats.

At this point I don’t think that Rove has anything too sophisticated up his sleeve. We are going to see simple, crude attacks on Kerry’s character in the hopes that it will stimulate the neanderthals to vote and to swing a few simple minded undecideds.

And, of course, this is an innoculation against a Kerry win. They are setting it up to say he stole it.

Hell Froze Over

CNN.com

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: That’s right. This week there was an issue that hit home with voters and forced the candidates to rethink their scripts. It even walked off with the political play of the week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) SCHNEIDER (voice-over): They’re standing in line in Florida and Michigan, in New Jersey. The line goes around the block. Eager swing state residents lining up to vote? Not exactly. They’re lining up for flu shots.

DR. CHARLES GONZALEZ, INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST: It’s incredibly serious. We have half as much vaccine as we should have.

SCHNEIDER: How did that happen?

BUSH: We relied upon a company out of England to provide about half of the flu vaccines for the United States citizens.

SCHNEIDER: Uh-oh. Sounds like outsourcing. The president had a solution.

BUSH: We’re working with Canada, hopefully they will produce a — help us realize the vaccine necessary.

SCHNEIDER: But hasn’t Bush expressed problems with drug imports from Canada?

BUSH: My worry is, it looks like it’s from Canada, it might be from a third world. We have to make sure before somebody thinks they’re buying a product, that it works.

SCHNEIDER: President Bush made a plea to the public.

BUSH: If you’re healthy, if you’re younger, don’t get a flu shot this year.

SCHNEIDER: Sounds like rationing, something the president said would result from Kerry’s health care plan.

BUSH: Government sponsored health care would lead to rationing.

SCHNEIDER: The government has the situation under control the president says.

BUSH: The CDC responsible for health in the United States is setting those priorities and allocating the flu vaccine accordingly.

SCHNEIDER: Isn’t that government control?

BUSH: My opponent wants the government to run the health care.

SCHNEIDER: Maybe the answer is legal reform.

BUSH: Vaccine manufacturers are worried about getting sued, and so therefore they have backed off from providing this kind of vaccine.

SCHNEIDER: Kerry says the issue is the whole health care system.

KERRY: There still aren’t enough flu vaccinations. What’s the president’s solution? He says, don’t get one if you’re healthy. That sounds just like his health care plan to me, hope and pray you don’t get sick.

SCHNEIDER: The flu bug has infected the campaign. The side effect was the political play of the week.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCHNEIDER: What President Bush warns could happen under the Kerry health care plan, shortages, rationing, that’s exactly what is happening now. So the issue is whether the Kerry health care plan would solve the problem, or as Republicans charge, make it worse.

WOODRUFF: Is there any evidence yet how this issue is playing out politically? Do we see polls? Do we pick up what people are saying?

SCHNEIDER: We don’t have any direct evidence that it’s having a political impact yet. We know it is a very big issue on voters’ minds. They’re very dissatisfied with the fact that there is a shortage and frankly many are looking for somebody to blame. When the administration is the incumbent administration, they’re likely to take some hits.

WOODRUFF: You know it’s serious when you read that some states will fine or jail doctors and nurses who give flu shots to people who are not at high risk.

SCHNEIDER: Right, and that sounds a lot like rationing.

He’s Naked And We’re Sick Of Looking At It

Richard Cohen does it again:

For months now I’ve dropped bets on the presidential election like Hansel (of “Hansel and Gretel”) dropped pebbles. For honor and money, I’ve wagered on George Bush, not because I wanted him to win but rather because I thought he would. Now I’m changing my mind. It’s not the tightening polls that have done it — I knew that would happen — but rather something I could not have predicted. The president is missing.

The president I have in mind is the funny, good-natured regular guy I once saw on the campaign trail — a man of surprisingly quick wit and just plain likeability. I contrasted this man to John Kerry, who is as light and as funny as a mud wall, and I thought, “There goes the election.”

Where it has mattered most — the three debates — Bush has been wooden, ill at ease and downright spooky. He makes bad jokes, cackles at them in the manner of a cinematic serial killer and has lacked the warmth that he not only once had but that I thought would compensate for a disastrous presidency and give him a second — God help us — term. In short, he could take over the Bates Motel in an instant.

The missing president must be Richard Cohen’s imaginary friend because the man I saw in the debates was absolutely no different than he has ever been.

He has always been an arrogant, cold, testy little asshole. It’s just that people like Cohen built some image in their minds — probably based upon some frat house fantasy that we don’t even want to think about — and they have foisted their little wetdream on us for the last four years.

Here is one of my favorite examples of Bush’s warmth and likeability that Cohen believed in so fervently. Here you see the guy who really believes that the country would be a lot better off with a dictator — as long as he’s the dictator:

The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we’re going to be there for a while. I don’t know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it’s not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through. The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says “Join us,” I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.

And when the world told him to stick it where the sun don’t shine, they meant it too. Strangely, they didn’t seem too impressed with his macho threats.

Go to the link and listen to the audio to get the full effect of this phony jerk lecturing the entire world about what they had to do. You’ll see that the entire diatribe was spoken as if he were an angry father punishing his children. It was disgusting. And it was way back in 2001. It’s not like this creepy, aggressive personality is anything new.

I don’t consider myself to be any more persipicacious than others. I generally don’t have superior insight into the hidden psychology of people I see on television. But, it has been clear to me and to millions of others that George W. Bush is a prick from the moment we laid eyes on him back in 2000 and nothing he has done since ever made me change my mind.

Richard Cohen, the emperor has no clothes you silly twit, and most of us have known it for a long, long time. In typical Democratic pundit fashion you waited until the very last minute to admit it. Very impressive performance as always.

Fighting The Narrative

Jonathan Chait has an interesting article in TNR in which he makes a good case that it’s Kerry’s to lose. He chalks it up to a better Democratic ground game and obvious Bush weakness.

But he says something at the end which I find kind of amusing:

The biggest mystery may be why most pundits haven’t noted how bad things look for Bush right now. Maybe the reason is that he’s built an aura of inevitability, starting with his 2000 victory and continuing through his legislative triumphs. The man just doesn’t seem to lose very often. And his campaign firmly believes in projecting an air of confidence in the belief that it’s self-fulfilling. (Remember Bush in late fall 2000, in an effort to show he was so confident that he could play for a landslide victory, devoting time and money to California?) The day before the 2000 election, a front-page headline in The Washington Times read, “Bush campaign says it’s in the bag; Top strategist sees 320 votes.” In retrospect, we now know that Bush’s victory was not exactly inevitable. So maybe it’s just hard to believe that Bush will lose, even if the data suggest he will.

Could Bush still win? Of course. I can think of three things that could intervene. First, Kerry is highly gaffe-prone. Roughly once a week he utters a statement–global test, terrorism as a nuisance–that plays right into his opponent’s hands and forces him to explain himself. Any day, he could utter a gaffe big enough to change the dynamics of the campaign. Second, whenever the terrorism threat level rises, Bush’s ratings go up. What are the odds we don’t have an elevated threat between now and election day? Right–pretty slim. And third, a terrorist attack within the United States would probably cause a major rallying effect for Bush. On top of all that, there are limits to our predictive ability. Elections can’t be forecast with perfect accuracy. It’s possible that there are other important variables that we don’t or can’t know right now that could swing the race toward Bush. But what we do know says a lot, and what it says is that Kerry looks like a good bet to win.

With the exception of a terrorist attack, every single point that Chait makes is a result of a flaccid, ineffectual and in-the-tank news media.

Why does Bush have an “air of inevitability?” Why, it’s because they have pretended in plain sight and the news media have either been too lazy or stupid to challenge it, despite the fact that in the paragraphs preceding this one, Chait just laid out a devastating case against Bush’s electability. The fact that an incumbent wartime president is in this much trouble two weeks before the election is a powerful story that the media just can’t be bothered to report. They are going to wake up on November 3rd scratching their heads and saying wtf because they aren’t paying attention to what is really going on. And then they’ll do it all again.

Furthermore, the idea that Kerry is “gaffe prone,” at least in comparison to the most inarticulate president in the history of the United States, is ridiculous. It’s not that Kerry is gaffe prone, it’s that the media are addicted to snotty GOP talking points and the GOP is quite adept in knowing how to frame these little gaffes and scandals in ways that appeal to their puerile worldview. They play willingly into the GOP’s hands by pimping stories they know very well are full of shit but thrill them in some way.

The terrorist alerts are a national joke and the mainstream media have done virtually no reporting on how this came to be. They behave as if these stupid color coded charts are some sort of third rail and as a result they have allowed the administration to manipulate the electorate over and over again. If they allow the administration to cry wolf again, they have no one to blame but themselves if it nobody pays attention and something horrible actually happens.

So, maybe it’s true that it’s Kerry’s to lose. But he is forced to anticipate the moves of a very powerful and dishonest GOP machine (and likely controversial election result) and at the same time he has to battle the silliest and most ineffectual political media in the world in order to win. Talk about a challenge.

I think we’ll do it anyway. But it’s a testament to Kerry’s skill as a politician, a great organization and more than half the country just getting sick and tired of this bullshit and coming out to vote. It really shouldn’t be this hard.