Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Drumbeat

I said earlier in the week that the stupid CBS memos flap was becoming a full fledged Wurlitzer frenzy and I think we went one step closer today.

Yesterday, Rush said:

“…the question about CBS, and I don’t mean to be skirting this, but I don’t know how they expect us to trust them on anything else they do, particularly when it’s in this presidential race. This is a problem for them, folks. Now they’re trying to make it go away by stonewalling it with this independent commission but you’ve got a major, major federal crime here.”

This whore was on FOX saying:

“You start tying these connections together … I said I’m so scared because I know what’s going on with my party,” Democratic strategist Pat Caddell told FOX News. “The fact is, [Burkett] did not approach CBS, CBS approached him looking for the documents, which means someone tipped CBS off … which could be a violation of the law.”

On Wolf Blitzer today, they devoted a full segment to the question of whether the forgeries were a crime. Joe DiGenova, former federal prosecutor de jour, said that a special prosecutor with subpoena power was needed to find out who tried to interefere with a federal election during wartime. Blitzer seemed to agree that the subject was so serious that somebody needed to get to the bottom of it.

Later, Brit Hume had some new nonsense about Mary Mapes and federal prisoners in Colorado.

Fasten your seatbelts. The Wurlitzer is gearing up. It’s possible that it won’t have legs, but the set up for a long term mediawhore feeding frenzy is being put in place. The good news is that Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry are the two most experienced flacks on planet in dealing with this garbage.

Calling Mr Rains, Mr Claude Rains

Jeffrey Dubner at TAPPED takes the Kerry campaign to task for following up the DNC’s hard hitting rhetoric of yesterday on the Roger Stone rumor with what he calls a weak-kneed follow-up today:

“Mr. President, this is a shameful advertisement that shows a disturbing disregard for those fighting and sacrificing in Iraq, and you should repudiate it immediately.”

He points out that they will never get the Bush campaign to repudiate anything so they show themselves weak by failing to get results.

But, everybody knows very well that Bush is not going to repudiate it and that is exactly why they are saying it. This is the way the game is played. It’s why Ed Gillespie gets the vapors every time the Democrats say boo and calls it “political hate speech.”

It’s called phony sanctimony and it works very well, as the Republicans have shown for years. They always shed crocodile tears and call the other side’s attacks vicious and beyond the pale while they are sticking the shiv in as hard as they can. The difference is that this time we stuck the shiv in too.

I see Atrios disagrees with me. I think he should repudiate it.

Tin Foil Freakshow

On Hardball just now, Ben Ginsberg just claimed that Barnes, the NY Times, the Boston Globe, CBS, Joe Lockhart and Terry McAuliffe coordinated the memos story and the liberal media just isn’t giving it the kind of scrutiny they gave the Swift Boat story.

Chris asked whether this controversy now means that the public should also be skeptical of the media’s Iraq reporting going forward.

Deborah Orin made the important point that the bloggers who “exposed” the forgeries also are very skeptical of the reporting on Iraq so perhaps that should be a lesson for all of us.

Advantage: Idiots

Masterdebator

Ezra has it right on the debates.

We know he beat the friendly, funny, charismatic Weld. But what’s rarely noted is that he also beat John Edwards in the series of one-on-one debates they held at the end of the primary. Edwads came off as nicer and funnier, sure, but he lacked the gravitas and policy knowledge of Kerry. I watched those confrontations expecting to vote for Edwards, but got up from the couch a Kerry supporter. It was clear to me then, as it is now, that the empathy and charm that pols like Edwards and Clinton possess are not applicable to elections fought on serious, scary ground. As I’ve said before, Bush only won (and he didn’t even do that) in 2000 because the country was at peace and the economy was doing well, voters were unconcerned and thus won over by the friendlier, funnier candidate — that was a popularity contest. But in a time when voters want serious leaders who demonstrate competence, strength and judgment, Bush’s glib moralizing and self-effacing jokes are not going to save him. In contrast, Kerry’s boring wonkishness and obvious thoughtfulness (not to mention his 4-inch height advantage — two of the debates are standing) just might.

I sincerely hope that’s true. I also think that this time the press may just be a bit less likely to fall back on their script simply because the Iraq story seems to be heating up as we go into the stretch. They used the press conference today to talk almost exclusively about Iraq and didn’t mention the CBS nonsense.

I can’t believe there is any question that Kerry will beat Bush in the debates when it’s obvious that your average ten year old would beat him. But we have to take into account the press corpse which seems to adore his incoherent blather and buy into the idea that making sense is secondary to winning debates than presenting a manufactured regular guy image. So, it’s always possible that in spite of what we all see with our eyes, we will be told that Bush won the debate because Kerry was too tall or something. But, I’m hopeful that the electorate is a bit more serious than last time and will see the contrast between a man of real substance and an empty suit.

I do think that Ezra took Atrios and Yglesias a bit too literally. I think their gnashing of teeth about Bush’s great strength in the town hall format was a little tongue in cheek exercise in lowering expectations. Nobody really believes that Bush is good in debates, but the game requires that you set up Kerry as a big loser in order to defy expectations. Politics is so dumb these days.

Why Should I?

40 percent of Army reservists fail to report to Fort Jackson

COLUMBIA–Only about 60 percent of reservists ordered to report to Fort Jackson have reported so far, Army officials said.

As of Tuesday, 186 of the 309 members of the Individual Ready Reserve ordered to report to the Columbia base had arrived, said Lt. Col. Burton L. Masters, spokesman for the Army’s Human Resources Command.

“We’re not surprised by those numbers at all,” Masters said.

Most of those who have not reported are seeking exemptions from active duty or delays in reporting, he said.

Those who have not reported or applied for a delay or exemption will be considered deserters if they do not show up within seven days of the date they were told to report for duty, Masters said.

“We are going to go the extra mile to work with people,” he said. “But if they don’t report, the Army will track them down.”

Troops subject to the recall have been on active duty but have not completed their eight-year obligation to the Army.

The Army said 5,600 individual reservists were being recalled to active duty; 4,500 were to report to Fort Jackson. However, orders have been cut for only 3,667 of the soldiers to return to active duty, Masters said.

Many people believe that the fact that the president went AWOL during his time in the National Guard has set a bad example for those he has called to serve in Iraq today. They fail to see why they should be forced to do something the president used his influence and connections to avoid.

One Republican has spoken out:

The President’s actions have had an intangible and coercive impact upon military personnel. To turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to it would be shame on us. The question soldiers and sailors ask is: I took an oath to swear to tell the truth. And I also took an oath to uphold the Constitution. How can this President take the same oath and not be truthful and remain in office? If I were to have done what the President did, I would be court-martialed.

You see, we also have to recognize that each of the services are recruiting young people all across the Nation. At boot camp they infuse these young people with the moral values of honor, courage and commitment, and they’re teaching self-restraint, discipline and self- sacrifice. Military leaders are required to provide a good example to those young recruits, yet when they look up the chain of command, all the way to the Commander in Chief, they see a double standard at the top. Again, it is the President that sets the tone and tenor in the military, just as he does for law enforcement.

I believe the President has violated this sacred trust between the leaders and those of whom he was entrusted to lead. I also spoke in my presentation that it was the President’s self-inflicted wounds that have called his own credibility into question not only in his decisionmaking process, but with regard to security policies.

Oh wait. Pardon me. That was House Manager Steven Buyers speaking before the Senate during president Clinton’s impeachment trial. A president getting a blow job obviously sets a very bad example for the troops. But, running out on your own military committment and then sending men and women to fight in a useless war overseas is a perfectly fine example and nobody in the military should ever think otherwise. My bad.

Makeup to Breakup

This article pretends that the reason the campaigns insisted on having their own makeup people for the debates is because of Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, but the real reason is that in the last debates somebody sabotaged Al Gore by making him look like a circus freak on national television. I’ve always been curious as to how that happened. I’m glad to see that the Kerry campaign isn’t taking any chances.

It’s also not surprising that the Bush team agreed seeing as how they must have makeup special effects professionals close at all times to cover Junior’s many pratfalls flat on his face.

Dreams and Visions

I just had the strangest dream. I thought I saw a president who spoke in complete sentences, in great detail, in direct response to questions posed to him in a press conference. It was bizarre and freakish. It made me feel fevered and nostalgic for some reason.

Then I heard a president talk about the pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate. He explained, “The CIA laid out several scenarios. It said that life could be lousy, life could be OK, life could be better. And they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like,” he said. “The Iraq citizens are defying the pessimistic predictions.”

I realized that I was not sleeping and our waking nightmare is still ongoing.

Still, it was nice to dream of what might be if we had a president who was sentient and aware — how much more secure we would all feel with someone in charge who is in control of his faculties. Someone who wasn’t living in a fantasy world. It would be such a relief.

OhMyGoodness

New York Post :

The hot rumor in New York political circles has Roger Stone, the longtime GOP activist, as the source for Dan Rather’s dubious Texas Air National Guard “memos.”

The irony would be delicious, since Rather became famous confronting President Nixon, in whose service a very young Stone became associated with political “dirty tricks.”

Reached at his Florida home, Stone had no comment.

Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time ole Rog has been called upon to do a little dirty work. He was one of the original ratfuckers back in the day. I wrote about Stone back in August of 2003. Here’s just one of his more recent forays into dirty tricks:

What the world watched was a G.O.P. melee. When Geller walked out of the room with a sample ballot, the crowd accused him of stealing a real one and responded as if he had just nabbed a baby for its organs. Geller says he was pushed by two dozen protesters screaming, “I’m gonna take you down!” Luis Rosero, a Democratic observer, claims he was punched and kicked. Republicans dispute the charges, but video cameras caught scenes of activism that had morphed into menace. The organizers in the RV outside, who G.O.P. protesters have told Time were led by hardball Washington strategist Roger Stone, had phone banks churning out calls to Miami Republicans, urging them to storm downtown. (Stone could not be reached for comment.)

I have no doubt that he could have done this. And, by the standard of proof set forth over the past 12 years by Chris Vlasto, Jeff Gerth, Susan Schmidt, Ceci Connolly, Brit Hume, Judith Miller, Howell Raines, Lisa Myers, Jackie Judd, Dan Rather, John Stossell, Chris Matthews, Paula Zahn, Bill O’Reilly, Fred Barnes, and all the rest of our news media, that makes it worthy of endless hours of speculation and long in-depth articles about his past quoting many unnamed sources saying that he’s guilty. Bring it on.

Smart Polls

Today DonkeyRising features a study by Alan Abramowitz that shows the ARG September poll was was highly accurate in the the 2000 election —- certainly far more accurate than the wildly up and down Gallup poll.

They’ve just released the first 20 states of their 50 state poll for this year. Unsurprisingly it shows what we all know to be true. The reds are red and the blues are blue — and it’s going to be a street fight in the purple states.

Here’s the ARG web site.

Deja Vu Vu

This passage from “Citizen Perot” by Gerald Posner reminds us that where there’s a Bush campaign, there are often strange Texans wielding information and evidence that blows back on the ones who fall for it:

IN JULY 1992, Ross Perot hastily called a press conference to announce he was dropping out of the presidential race. He reentered the race on Oct. 1 and, through infomercials and solid performances in the presidential debates, soon approached 20% in the polls. Then he made a decision that stopped his momentum cold: he agreed to a 60 Minutes interview to present the “real reason” for his earlier withdrawal.

On Sunday, Oct.25, he told startled viewers he had pulled out after receiving “multiple reports” that there was a Republican plot to embarrass his daughter by disrupting her summer wedding, and that there was also a plan to distribute a computerized false photo of his daughter. After the show Perot was widely ridiculed, and many believed his reasons were bogus.

Some aspects of this scandal have long been known, yet the details were always murky. The full account, now available, reveals that while Perot did have some basis for his bizarre charge, he appears to have relied on sources of dubious credibility. The episode provides insights into the behind-the-scenes intrigue of political campaigns, as well as painting a disturbing portrait of FBI incompetence.

Read the whole thing. It’s very reminiscent of the bizarre tales we’ve been reading about these last few days. Funny that.