Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

WWBD?

The best writer in America has some good advice for John Kerry:

Kerry has not been anywhere near quick enough on his feet so far. I mean, honestly, here’s the president talking about having a high father — as opposed to a lowdown brother, which would be Neil. (Back in the steamer trunk, Neilsie!) Here’s the president’s favorite policy hot-cha gal comparing abortion-rights demonstrators to terrorists. (Ten Minutes From Normal, indeed. And several miles beyond its sister city, Sane.) These are very big fish in extremely small barrels here.

I know part of the problem: Kerry has brought aboard some career hacks from the commonwealth, God save it. Some of these guys worked for Michael Dukakis back in 1988, and they’re only now getting back in the game because it’s taken them 14 years to get back those parts of their respective anatomies that were still lodged between Jim Baker’s teeth. Nice to see these guys back at the helm of another campaign. It’s like spotting Captain Joe Hazelwood a pitcher of martinis and another oil tanker.

What is abundantly clear is that Kerry’s hired the wrong guys from Massachusetts. There’s only one man, only one true leader, who’s fit for the kind of battle in which Kerry has found himself.

His name is Belichick. Bill Belichick.

Quite simply, we here in Massachusetts believe in Bill, who has led us out of the wilderness and through two Super Bowls. We believe in Bill with a constant faith that makes Tim LaHaye read like Jacqueline Susann. Our devotion is whole. It is complete. In Bill we trust.

[…]

Admittedly, Bill’s politics are a bit of a mystery. He’s a Wesleyan man, so he’s got that small, New England, liberal-arts-college thing going for him. In addition, Belichick has hinted more than once that he’s a Democrat, and Rush Limbaugh once called the Patriots “socialists,” because they were introduced as a team before the Super Bowl in 2002. And he’s a Bon Jovi fan, which can mean anything at all. But he’s driven and focused, and he’s coldly maniacal about winning. That’s all that’s needed for the moment.

Do I overstate? In a political culture in which Fred Barnes is a thinker and Tom Brokaw a historian? Please. It’s time for John Kerry’s campaign to join the faithful. We, too, follow our higher father. I suggest it’s time for the junior senator to adopt the first public expression of faith shared by all New England since the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, beginning our long historical march toward jobs our uncles can get for us on the county-road crews.

WWBD?

What Would Bill Do?

Finally!

Yglesias on TAPPED points out the obvious fact that the DNC should be blastfaxing to every mediamoron in the Washington, who up to now have not said word one about this obvious discrepancy:

“If we had something to hide, we wouldn’t have met with them in the first place,” he said.

Back in the real world of course, Bush did refuse to meet with the commission, only to back down in the face of public pressure. Then he refused to meet for more than one hour and, again, he wound up backing down in the face of public pressure. Finally, he agreed to let the commission ask their questions, but only on the dual condition that Cheney be at his side and that no transcript of the meeting be released. That doesn’t sound at all like the pattern of behavior of a president who’s trying to hide something. Why, it’s been “unprecedented cooperation” from the get-go. And we all remember how eager Condoleezza Rice was to testify. . . .

I’ve had the cable news on all morning and not one member of the “press” has noted this bullshit. It’s spoonfeeding time, Terry.

Calling The Mighty Casio

We knew that Bush “embellished” his National Guard Service. And we knew that he “embellished” his business achievements. Today, Bad Attitudes tells us that Bush even “embellished” his pathetic beersoaked college athletic career (not to mention that he just makes shit up about what classes he took.)

Obviously, swing voters cannot be persuaded of Junior’s total inadequacy by exposing the fact that he lied and bumbled his way into a war and has driven the country into bankruptcy to benefit his rich friends. The Big Lie technique works much too well. The campaign must be run on likeability and proxy “character” issues because that seems to be how people make political decisions in this country.

John Kerry is not particularly warm and cuddly by infotainment standards, so we can only hope for a draw on that one. But, Bush has been remarkably immune to the kind of trivial character questions that plague all Democrats, mostly because of the wingnuts’s phony hysteria every time anybody goes near that stuff.

The blogosphere, Air America, Stern and Stewart are the places to make this stand. Bush failed up his entire life. Now he’s reinventing his past. It’s our job to belittle him for it at every opportunity.

Let the word go forth.

Update:

Tina Brown on trivia (and she knows whereof she speaks) and why it works:

“I’m from the suburbs,” he announced, “and I’m voting for Bush.”

All eyes turned to him. “It might seem odd that a savvy New Yorker like me is voting for a guy in a cowboy hat,” he went on, as he recklessly doled out ice cream to a network anchor, “but what we want is stability. This Kerry guy — he’s all over the place.”

Huh? Stability? What about all the mayhem in Iraq? His intervention immediately brought the table back from a troubled analysis of American options in Iraq to how the medals debacle is affecting perceptions of Kerry. It was as if the waiter was a plant from the Bush campaign, diverting attention at a critical moment, just as he was supposed to.

The Republican attack machine — again — has made the right calculation: Hit ’em with trivia. Bait the hook with the absurd “issue” of whether it was medals or ribbons that Kerry hurled over the wall when he was a 27-year-old hothead. Then watch the media bite — they’ll do it every time — and let Kerry rise to it and blow it. Presto, a thrice-wounded, decorated war hero running against a president who went missing from the National Guard is suddenly muddying up his own record on the morning talk shows. Shades of 2000, when Bush jokily bowled oranges down the aisle of his campaign plane while Gore argued about whether he did or didn’t say he invented the Internet.

[…]

“When I watch Kerry trying to swat away the issue of ribbons and medals I see Karl as the Oz figure all over again,” Slater told me on the phone. “Rove’s technique is always to go for a candidate’s strength, not his weakness. In Texas, when Bush was running against Governor Ann Richards, her strength was her tolerance, her inclusiveness. She had brought a lot of women and minorities into government. So suddenly in conservative East Texas there was a whispering campaign about why she had hired so many lesbians and homosexuals. It’s the same with Kerry. The war record is his strength — so instead of leaving it alone, Rove just goes right at it.”

It’s spooky to see it working, both in the polls and anecdotally. In the past 10 days, Democrats in New York have been distracted for the first time from focusing their wrath on Bush to dumping it on Kerry. Even among heavy donors there has been a wave of buyer’s remorse.

I think the Kerry campaign should do exactly what Rove does. Go after Bush’s “strengths” — honest, courageous, means what he says. I know it’s distasteful, but so is Armageddon, which is definitely on the menu if Crusader Codpiece gets a legitimate term in office. Fight the Right on their hypocritical, chickenshit, mama’s boy flaccidity in the face of real challenge. Little George reading goat stories and running around the country like a scared little boy on 9/11 is a good place to start.

And Democrats have got to stop internalizing all this GOP propaganda. IT’S NOT TRUE. Kerry is not a waffler; his 30+ public career simply has depth and complexity unlike the simpleminded fratboy’s coddled sinecures. Nor are Democrats a bunch of godless assholes who hate religion, and neither are the various constituencies of our party constantly “mau-mauing” to the party’s detriment.

This is self-hatred, not constructive self-criticism and we are nothing but big fat losers if we don’t stop using GOP propaganda points. If there is one single positive step all Democrats could take today to ensure a fighting chance in this election I submit it would be a promise to never, EVER use the same words to describe each other as the professional GOP smear machine uses to attack us. That simple pledge could go a long way toward keeping us straight on what this fight is really all about.

A good rule of thumb is to temper your argument with a fellow Democrat when you realize that someone overhearing it could mistake you for Rush Limbaugh or a FOXNews “analyst,” if they didn’t know any better. It’s a very disconcerting feeling. I know. I’ve done it. It’s a big mistake.

Misunderstanding

… how do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am — like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we’ve go to do a better job of making our case. —- GWB 10/11/01

A photo from TV shows an Iraqi prisoner with a hood over his head, standing on a box and with wires connected to his hands. Photo: Sky News

United States soldiers at a prison outside Baghdad have been accused of forcing Iraqi prisoners into acts of sexual humiliation and other abuses.

The charges, first announced by the military in March, were documented by photographs taken by guards in the prison.

Some of the photographs, and descriptions of others, were broadcast in the US on Wednesday by a CBS television news program and were verified by military officials.

Of the six people reported in March to be facing preliminary charges, three have been recommended for courts martial.

The program reported that poorly trained US reservists were forcing Iraqis to conduct simulated sexual acts in order to break down their will before they were turned over to others for interrogation.

In one photograph naked Iraq prisoners stand in a human pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English.

In another, a prisoner stands on a box, his head covered, wires attached to his body. The news show said that, according to the army, he had been told that if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted. Other photographs show male prisoners positioned to simulate sex with each other.

“The pictures show Americans, men and women, in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners,” a transcript said.

“And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing or giving the camera a thumbs-up.”

The program’s producers said the army also had photographs showing a detainee with wires attached to his genitals and another that showed a dog attacking a prisoner.

The photographs were taken inside Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, where US forces have been holding hundreds of Iraqis.

—

The Abu Ghurayb (pronounced ah-boo GRAYB), [Abu Ghraib] prison is located approximately 20 miles west of Baghdad is where Saddam Kamal (who was head of the Special Security Organization) oversaw the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners. The prison was under the control of the Directorate of General Security (DGS) also known as the Amn al-Amm.

As many as 4000 prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib Prison in 1984. At least 122 male prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib prison in February/ March 2000. A further 23 political prisoners were executed there in October 2001.

Finally, the attitude of the Iraqis toward the American people — it’s an interesting question. They’re really pleased we got rid of Saddam Hussein. And you can understand why. This is a guy who was a torturer, a killer, a maimer; there’s mass graves. I mean, he was a horrible individual that really shocked the country in many ways, shocked it into a kind of — a fear of making decisions toward liberty. That’s what we’ve seen recently. Some citizens are fearful of stepping up — GWB 4/13/04

Full story from 60 Minutes II, here.

Update:

Rule of law or men?

Hundreds of Fayli (Shi’a) Kurds and other citizens of Iranian origin, who had disappeared in the early 1980’s during the Iran-Iraq war, reportedly were being held incommunicado at the Abu Ghurayb prison. Such persons have been detained without charge for close to 2 decades in extremely harsh conditions.

Yesterday, George W. Bush argued that he has the same power right here in America. The opposing counsel had this to say about that:

…when you take his argument at core, it is: “Trust us.” And who’s saying, “trust us”? The executive branch. And why do we have the great writ?

We have the great writ because we didn’t trust the executive branch when we founded this government. That’s why the government saying “trust us” is no excuse for taking away and driving a truck through the right of habeas corpus and the Fifth Amendment that “no man shall be deprived of liberty except upon due process of law.” We have a small problem here. One citizen — we’re not talking about thousands — one citizen caught up in a problem in Afghanistan. Is it better to give him rights, or is it better to start a new dawn of saying there are circumstances where you can’t file a writ of habeas corpus, and there are circumstances where you can’t get due process? I think not.

I would urge the court not to go down that road. I would urge the court to find that citizens can only be detained by law. And here there is no law. If there is any law at all, it is the executive’s own secret definition of whatever “enemy combatant” is. And don’t fool yourselves into thinking that that means somebody coming off a battlefield, because they’ve used it in Chicago, they’ve used it in New York, and they’ve used it in Indiana.

But, we’re good and they’re evil. We have nothing to worry about.

Los Angeles Times Orwellian Web Headline Of The Day

“U.S. Committed to Fallouja Talks”

By Tony Perry, Patrick J. McDonnell, Daryl Strickland 9:53 a.m.

Hours after spectacular firefight, several blasts ring out in the city as U.S. planes attack”

There Are “Terrorists” And Then There Are Terrorists

Via Orcinus I find that a real live, rock ’em sock ’em terrorist/assassin was arrested by pure luck last week:

Police came upon Breit after an anonymous caller reported a gunshot going off in his apartment Sunday night.

When officers arrived, Breit told them, “I screwed up.”

He explained he accidentally shot off his AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifle in his home, blowing a hole through his door frame.

Breit agreed to a search of his house and car, according to the complaint.

The search turned up several hundred rounds of ammunition, components for pipe bombs, shotguns, more than 700 rounds of AK-47 ammunition, a cannon fuse and a recipe for dynamite.

The search also turned up a list of federal officials, political and public figures with the word “marked,” next to the names. Breit told agents it meant “marked to die,” because the people were liberal, opposed to gun rights or opposed to the current government.

Police also found a note that reads: “I will die for my cause, for it is just. I won’t put my hands up and surrender — I will not rest till I purge these United States from the treasonist (sic) parasites.”

What the Sun-Times story neglects to tell readers is that it appears that nearly the entirety of his targets were Democrats and liberals. That information comes from a news release from the Brady Campaign:

Federal agents say they recovered seven guns, more than 1,300 rounds of ammunition, pipe bomb making components and other explosives, a list of government officials and political and public figures with the word “marked” written next to them, and a written plan for 15 heavily armed men to kill 1,500 people at a Democratic presidential meeting.

Breit’s library included The Turner Diaries, the anti-government cult novel that inspired Timothy McVeigh, and Guns, Freedom and Terrorism, the book authored by National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, investigators said.

[…]

Information about this case is nowhere to be found at the Web sites of either the FBI or the Justice Department — though of course, both carry voluminous reports discussing threats from international terrorists. And of course, the FBI has a full phalanx of reportage on various aspects of “eco-terrorism,” which is currently the agency’s prime domestic-terrorism focus

Hey, this guy is nothing like an eco-terrorist. He was just planning to do what many would consider a good deed, fighting the good fight, respecting the culture of life and all that. It’s not like he’s out of the mainstream or anything:

You know, there are two wars going on in the world right now. There’s the United States war against international terrorism and there is the Democrat Party war against George W. Bush.

The good news is that the government is ruthlessly running down the terrorists who are a real danger. Like this evil web-master:

Not long after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a group of Muslim students led by a Saudi Arabian doctoral candidate held a candlelight vigil in the small college town of Moscow, Idaho, and condemned the attacks as an affront to Islam.

Today, that graduate student, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, is on trial in a heavily guarded courtroom here, accused of plotting to aid and to maintain Islamic Web sites that promote jihad.

As a Web master to several Islamic organizations, Mr. Hussayen helped to maintain Internet sites with links to groups that praised suicide bombings in Chechnya and in Israel. But he himself does not hold those views, his lawyers said. His role was like that of a technical editor, they said, arguing that he could not be held criminally liable for what others wrote.

Civil libertarians say the case poses a landmark test of what people can do or whom they can associate with in the age of terror alerts. It is one of the few times anyone has been prosecuted under language in the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, which makes it a crime to provide “expert guidance or assistance” to groups deemed terrorist.

I feel safer just knowing this computer geek is behind bars. He may not actually believe in everything that appears on that web-site, but he ought to be a little bit more careful about the company he keeps.

Yet, I worry that a fine upstanding gun-owner like Mr Breit could be persecuted just for “screwing up” and firing off his AK-47 inside his home, bringing the jack-booted thugs of the Federal Gestapo to his door. It’s not like he actually offed a bunch of Democrats or anything. You can’t blame a guy for dreaming.

I’m just glad that a patriot like John Ashcroft is in charge of these things. He knows how to set the right priorities.

Let Freedom Ring

Our quest — our quest for freedom — our quest for freedom is around the world. Good foreign policy is a foreign policy that insists upon freedom in our own neighborhood. Good foreign policy is a policy that insists upon freedom in parts of the world where there’s hatred and the lack of hope. That’s why I will continue to work, so long as I’m President, for a vision of peace based upon the cornerstone of free societies. And we will succeed. George W. Bush

Headlines on FoxNews at 12 noon, Tuesady, April 27, 2004:

Police Clash With Terror Suspects in Damascus

Fallujah Shaken by Intense Blasts, Gunfire

Marines engaged in door-to-door fighting in Fallujah; U.S. troops kill 64 gunmen during heavy battle in Najaf

Related Stories

Iraqi to U.N.: We Want ‘Complete Sovereignty’

Kidnappers Threaten to Kill Italians in

Blair: Britain Has Sufficient Troops in Iraq

Fight Goes Door-to-Door

What Does Perle Want From Chalabi?

Via Kevin, I find this question from Juan Cole about our good friend Ahmad:

It would be really interesting to know the list of secret promises Chalabi has given Perle (and presumably the Israelis through Perle) that would explain this Neocon fervor for the man.

The question rang a bell for me and I recalled that I had written about this very thing a little over a year ago in this post in which I discussed at great lengths the delusions already being perpetrated in the name of “demahcracy.” I excerped a very interesting Washington Post article that contained this little gem:

In public comments last month, Perle suggested that installing Chalabi in power in Baghdad would alleviate any Muslim fears of U.S. imperialist aims. It would also improve the chances for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Perle said, because “Chalabi and his people have confirmed that they want a real peace process, and that they would recognize the state of Israel.“

It all comes back to “Clean Break.”

Myth Takes

On TAPPED today, Matt talks about Victor Davis Hansen’s lame assertion that left wing arguments about the war are “myths.” In his usual convincing fashion, Matt demolishes Hansen’s tired wingnut defense that while the WMD issue was put forth perhaps “erroneously” it doesn’t matter because there were other good reasons for invading. And anyway, when everything comes up roses it won’t matter why we did it. Matt gets to the meat of the matter and brings up the related fact that the repeated assertions of “grave and gathering” danger made majorities of the public believe until this day in what has been proven to be a complete falsehood about Saddam’s WMD and ties to terrorists. He says:

I’ve written previously, these false beliefs correlate highly with support for the war. Now there’s a case to be made that the president’s done the right thing here. I can imagine an argument that the American people are just too unsophisticated to grasp the needs of American grand strategy and that, therefore, they need to be tricked into doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. But if that’s the case you want to make, you need to produce an argument. Just deriding liberal arguments as myths when they are, in fact, perfectly accurate doesn’t cut it.

I can imagine that argument, too, particularly coming from a bunch of phony Straussians. But it would be more than a little bit contrary to Crusader Codpiece’s happy talk about liberating the Iraqi people and in total contradiction to the self-righteous Republican oratory about their commitment to freedom and democracy. Let’s be clear about the real “myths” at play here.

If you look closely at the last few years you have no choice but to believe that Republicans think democracy itself is a myth. For instance, there was that little matter of impeachment over a private sexual matter — a manipulation of the constitution to overturn the public will, to which the public, thankfully, registered its displeasure in midterm elections and polls. Not two years later there was the bizarre sight of Republicans in Florida professing that arbitrary deadlines and the mere possibility of human error were more important than the principle of making sure that all votes were duly counted — even by judges who are charged with matters of life and death every day. Now we see Republicans slyly admitting that the public needs to be tricked into doing the right thing rather than being told the truth and being allowed to make their wishes known. It’s been clear for quite a while to anyone paying attention that the GOP “reverence” for the principles of freedom and democracy is strictly a marketing device.

And this may present a little problem for Junior’s Freedom Crusade because even though some Americans may be, shall we say, “biased” enough to believe that all Arab bad guys must be in cahoots and trying to kill us, I doubt that either Americans or Iraqis are gullible enough to believe that “freedom and democracy” can possibly mean this:

The Bush administration’s plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws, administration officials said Thursday.

[…]

The arrangement would be, I think as we are doing today, that we would do our very best to consult with that interim government and take their views into account,” said Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. But he added that American commanders will “have the right, and the power, and the obligation” to decide.

Sure, you can call a foreign military occupation “freedom” and you can say that “democracy” is a caretaker government or a handpicked governing council, but that doesn’t make it so. What it does do is make a mockery of the very values we are supposedly trying to impart. A good number of Americans see it, most of the rest of the world sees it and the Iraqi people definitely see it. At this point it might be better part to have Junior just shut the hell up. His mindless blathering just draws attention to our government’s rank hypocrisy.

The Enemy Within

History is going to show that a nutcase by the name of Laurie Mylroie and a group of equally nutty followers, including the Vice President and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, led the United States into a war on the basis of a daffy conspiracy theory.

The proposal, pressed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, called for President George W. Bush to declare Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as an enemy combatant in the war on terror. This would have allowed Yousef to be transferred from his cell at the U.S. Bureau of Prison’s “supermax” penitentiary in Florence, Colo., to a U.S. military installation.

Wolfowitz contended that U.S. military interrogators—unencumbered by the presence of Yousef’s defense lawyer—might be able to get the inmate to confess what he and the lawyer have steadfastly denied: that he was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent dispatched by Saddam to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 as revenge for the first Persian Gulf War.

The previously unreported Wolfowitz proposal—and the high-level consideration it got within the Justice Department—sheds new light on the Bush administration’s willingness to expand its use of enemy-combatant declarations inside the United States beyond the three alleged terrorists, two of them American citizens, who have already been designated by the White House.

Actually believing this nonsensical conspiracy theory about Ramsi Youssef, and attempting to change 200 years of legal precedent in order to prove it, would be the equivalent of Bill Clinton using Oliver Stone’s JFK as the basis for prosecuting the remaining members of the Johnson administration for the assassination of Kennedy.

There is no greater reason to get rid of Bush than to put this little Mylroie/Wolfowitz freakshow back in its little Lyndon Larouche conspiracy corner.