Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Yep. He’s Naked

The New York Times finally notices that the Emperor has no clothes:

…his responses to questions were distressingly rambling and unfocused.

…his rhetoric, including the repetition of the phrase “stay the course,” did not seem to indicate any fresh or clear thinking about Iraq, despite the many disturbing events of recent weeks.

…Mr. Bush seemed to entertain no doubts about the rightness of his own behavior, no questions about whether he should have done something in response to the domestic terrorism report he received on Aug. 6, 2001.

…The United States has experienced so many crises since Mr. Bush took office that it sometimes feels as if the nation has embarked on one very long and painful learning curve in which every accepted truism becomes a doubt, every expectation a question mark. Only Mr. Bush somehow seems to have avoided any doubt, any change.

He was no more incoherent and stubbornly repetitive than usual last night. All you have to do is go back and read the transcripts of his other press conferences to see that he has always been this bizarrely robotic, unresponsive and ill informed. For some reason the press in this country decided not to notice for over 3 years that our president obviously has no grasp of the the complicated issues he faces.

It’s good that they are finally beginning to say something, but an awful lot of misery could have been prevented if they had done their job and instead of regurgitating RNC lies about Al Gore had reported the fact that the Republicans had nominated an idiot to run the most powerful country in the world.

I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just — I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn’t yet…I hope I — I don’t want to sound like I’ve made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t — you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

This is the most powerful man in the world.

Update: NT Times Link fixed.

And Will Saleton has the stomach to deconstruct Junior’s press conference. It’s not pretty.

He Must Be Defeated

The Teacher’s Aid in Chief lectures the American people as if they are just as stupid as he is. As usual, he filibusters with his puerile incoherent blather, going on and on and on not making any sense, projecting arrogance and ignorance in equal measure.

I am deeply ashamed to be American right now.

Consummate Prick

Has there ever been a more blatantly partisan Attorney General than the Crisco Kid? This testimony today was contemptuous, dishonest and disturbingly inappropriate. In any other administration someone who acted out as he did today would be fired:

Attorney General John Ashcroft strongly defended the Bush administration and himself today before the 9/11 commission, laying the blame for intelligence failures prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks squarely on the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Mr. Ashcroft said Al Qaeda was able to plan and carry out the attacks that killed some 3,000 people in large part because of policies of the Clinton administration and its deliberate neglect of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s computer technology.

[…]

Mr. Ashcroft said that to the contrary, he personally went to the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on March 7, 2001, and urged her to scuttle what he characterized as an ineffective policy of the Clinton administration specifying that Mr. bin Laden had to be captured, and only in a way that lawyers would approve.

“Even if they could have penetrated bin Laden’s training camp, they would have needed a battery of attorneys to approve the capture,” Mr. Ashcroft said sarcastically.

Mr. Ashcroft said that he wanted “decisive, lethal action” and had told Ms. Rice, “We should find and kill bin Laden.”

The attorney general sounded almost contemptuous as he spoke of a “legal wall” put into effect in 1995 to separate criminal investigators from intelligence agents in an effort to safeguard individual rights.

I’m afraid that Mr Ashcroft has a strange understanding of his job description. It was not his responsibility to tell the administration that he “wanted decisive, lethal action” overseas. It was his responsibility to deal with terrorism threats in the United States, a responsibility he failed miserably to meet.

I believe that he lied outright today when he denied (under oath) that he told Picker that he didn’t want to hear about terrorism anymore.

BEN-VENISTE: And according to the statement that our staff took from you, you said that you would start each meeting discussing either counterterrorism or counterintelligence. At the same time the threat level was going up and was very high. Mr. Watson had come to you and said that the CIA was very concerned that there would be an attack. You said that you told the attorney general this fact repeatedly in these meetings. Is that correct?

PICKARD: I told him at least on two occasions.

BEN-VENISTE: And you told the staff according to this statement that Mr. Ashcroft told you that he did not want to hear about this anymore. Is that correct?

PICKARD: That is correct.

Ashcroft:

“First of all, Acting Director Pickard and I had more than two meetings,” Mr. Ashcroft said evenly. “We had regular meetings.”

And far from turning away from briefings on terrorism, Mr. Ashcroft said, “I care greatly about the safety and security of the American people and was very interested in terrorism, and specifically interrogated him about threats to the American people, and domestic threats in particular.”

All of his actions indicate that he didn’t want to hear about terrorism. I’ll be expecting some harsh words from Senator Catkiller on the floor of the Senate tomorrow. Words like perjury and “letter of resignation.”

Yeah, I know. And people in hell want icewater.

Stretch?

A couple of other questions I’d like to see raised in Junior’s thrid prime time news conference:

1) Three months ago you proposed an ambitious multi-billion plan to send a mission to Mars and establish a permanent base on the moon in the next few years to harvest materials to process into rocket fuel and breathable air. How much of a priority will you place on this initiative in a second Bush administration?

2) There is no mention in your speeches of your immigration proposal announced this January, allowing large numbers of foreign guest workers to temporarily work legally in the United States. Do you plan to put the muscle of the White House behind the legislation proposals sponsored by Senators McCain and Hagel this session?

Chutzpah

E.J Dionne quotes Bush at a fund raiser last week saying: “We stand for a culture of responsibility in America. We’re changing the culture of this country from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and if you got a problem, blame somebody else, to a culture in which each of us are responsible for the decisions we make in life.”

I heard that fundraising speech (dutifully shown in its entirely live on CNN) and I too was struck by the unbelievable irony of his statement. It’s actually beyond ironic. It’s deluded.

In my fantasy America a reporter would repeat those lines to Bush tonight and then ask him if he thinks there are any problems — from 9/11 failures to the economy to Iraq — for which he bears any responsibility.

But, I’m sure that is impossible. Instead, we will hear the “journalists” ask him something like “how soon will you be able to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq?” at which point he’ll filibuster incoherently for half an hour blathering on about good ‘n evul ‘n thugs ‘n caves ‘n smoken ’em out. Then he’ll tell a reporter how ugly he is and everyone willl laugh uproariously at his comedic genius and go home.

Ahmad At The Helm

I said the other day that I didn’t know how to fix the problem in Iraq, but I do know that a good first step would be to uncermoniously dump that charlatan opportunist Ahmad Chalabi. According to this Cheney and Wolfowitz are as committed to him as ever:

Why did they do it? It seemed a safe bet to the civilian echelon policymakers at the Department of Defense when they approved Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer’s fateful decision to close down the newspaper of Muqtada al-Sadr and to arrest an aide to the young firebrand Shiite cleric. Even after Shiite Iraq had erupted into fury over the moves on Saturday, April 3, top-level Pentagon policymakers were privately still convinced it was all a storm in a teacup.

A small event on Sunday, April 4, the very day after the move against al-Sadr prompted the revolt, provides the missing piece to the puzzle. For that was when the CPA announced the name of Iraq’s putative new defense minister for the post-June 30 government. His name is Ali Allawi and he is a loyal, close associate of Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. More, he is Chalabi’s nephew.

[…]

There is no way that the move against al-Sadr was undertaken without Chalabi’s prior knowledge and explicit approval. Instead, given the extraordinary degree to which the Pentagon policymakers and Vice President Dick Cheney continue to privately disparage the far more accurate, sober and reliable professional assessments of the U.S. Army’s own tactical military intelligence in Iraq, it appears clear that, yet again, Chalabi was the tail that wagged the dog. He could have been expected to urge the move on al-Sadr in the first place.

The benefit to him is obvious. Chalabi believes — as do his still-worshipful Pentagon backers — that he has the blessing of supposedly moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the mainstream chief religious authority of the Iraqi Shiites, to take power on July 1 with the force of 110,000 U.S. soldiers and their automatic weapons behind him.

However, just as the neocons lead President Bush by the nose, and Chalabi leads them by the nose, Sistani and the Iranians have been leading him by the nose.

Sistani’s policy toward the CPA and Chalabi has been no different from the way he survived as an ayatollah all those years under Saddam Hussein, which was no mean feat. Sistani is playing a cautious waiting game and avoiding the ire of those who currently are top dog in Baghdad. He will drop Chalabi — and the United States — at the drop of a hat as soon it becomes clear that they cannot run or tame Iraq.

[…]

The myth of Iraqization of this war is now dead. The Pentagon masterminds remain determined to push Chalabi through as prime minister and absolute ruler of Iraq de facto on July 1. GOP heavyweights have even been assured around Washington that hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks from U.S. companies to Chalabi to do business in Iraq will be used for a good cause: to spread democracy in — read, destabilize — neighboring Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Political Warrior

Kos and Susan are asking: “Why is Kerry running?”

Obviously, there are many reasons any person runs for president having to do with ego and accident. After observing him for a while, I think John Kerry is responding to the call in the 30 year political civil war with the Republicans. He understands that they have become dangerously radical and that it’s time to break their hold on power. He knows this territory.

In that sense, I confess I’m surprised that liberals aren’t taking more heart in the fact that John Kerry is a card carrying fighting Massachusetts liberal. We should be thrilled that somebody as liberal as Kerry has got a chance to be president. Because let’s not kid ourselves, anybody more liberal than John Kerry is unelectable. The last non-southerner was JFK (with the younger JFK sitting on the left):

He’s not a crook, he’s not lazy, he’s not stupid. He’s very accomplished, he’s highly experienced and he’s got good instincts. But, I’m convinced that the most important character traits in a successful President at this point in history are resiliance and cunning; even if we win the election, politics are going to remain a bloodsport. The Republicans aren’t going to fade away. This battle is ongoing and we must have someone who can withstand a punch and come back. It is going to be very, very difficult to govern. I think Kerry is running not because he’s “electable,” but because he’s one of the few Democrats of his generation who has spent his life preparing to govern in the face of a radical political opposition. The job is not for the fainthearted.

But, even if you don’t believe that any of that is tue, I think it is safe to say that the Democratic nominee for president is always going to be running to one degree or another:

To protect and defend the citizens of the United States.

To preserve the separation of church and state

To safeguard the right to choose.

To provide a decent safety net

To encourage progressive taxation

To protect the environment

To advance civil liberties and civil rights

To govern transparently

To provide opportunity

To promote equality

To advance progress

To preserve the American way of Life

These are good reasons to feel ok about voting for John Kerry. The other side has very different ideas.

Update:

Upon reflection I think I failed to make clear the fact that I believe that right now the Democrats are essentially the conservative party, which means as great an emphasis on preservation as progress. This comes as a result of the two party system that places us in contrast to the radical Republican paarty which seeks to overturn the New Deal and dissolve the international order of the last 50 years. By necessity, our candidates are not going to be able to run on as progressive a platform as many of us might wish. One has to take into consideration the nature of the opposition and the character of the body politic when framing a case.

Kerry is not a reformer as Dean was perceived to be, nor is he a champion of a particular constituency as Gephardt was. But, perhaps at a time like this it is more helpful to judge the candidate by the quality of his enemies than his friends. His career has been about fighting bad guys, from Vietnam to Dick Nixon to BCCI.

In light of that, I believe Kerry is running for the simple reason that this time and place requires somebody who has the experience and character to keep the country secure while fighting back a rabid political opposition at home and a series of difficult threats overseas. His life has uniquely prepared him for this political moment.

For a similar perspective read Soldier For Peace in todays Salon.

Sr. Comedy Correspondent

Gawd, how I hate pretentious, boring people telling me what’s funny and what isn’t:

To be honest, I was never a huge fan of Stewart’s humor, which he custom-crafts for a mostly college-age audience. “The Daily Show”‘s intention of showing clips from the news in order to mock the conventional coverage of the news and get to the bottom of what’s really going on in the world always seemed to me too dependent on the thing it derided–the comic equivalent of covering an old song. Stewart’s deflate-the-talking-heads shtick consists too much of sarcastic jibes at the Pompous or Deceitful Public Figure, at the Underlying Reality of Self-Interest; it’s more like throwing fruit than making jokes.

[…]

Stewart can be funny when he’s not playing his new role as comique engage, though it’s strange that he can’t mimic or do accents–he’s the only American comic I’ve ever heard who can’t do a British accent. My Korean grocer can do a British accent. Most peculiar is that he keeps using the identical outrageous-silly voice Johnny Carson patented decades ago. Maybe someone should give him a nudge. But the really discouraging thing is that nowadays, Stewart seems to consider it more important to be a good citizen than a funny fellow. According to the newspapers, a substantial number of younger viewers actually get their news from “The Daily Show.” So for some time now, Stewart doesn’t just want to skewer the conventional news and the mendacious politicians. He wants to clarify the news, and to educate his audience.

Yeah, well, it’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.

The result is that Stewart weighs down his jokes with a kind of Government 101 knowingness. He’s not just funny about politics, you see, he’s savvy about the way the system works, and he’s going to help us through the maze. In Washington, “you have to cut through the partisan gridlock just to get to the bureaucratic logjam.” Stop, you’re killing me.

Methinks that journalist, TV critic and all around pompous ass Lee Siegel just doesn’t get the joke. But that’s not surprising. He is, after all, the punch line.

Damn Right

I said it before and I’ll say it again, Howard Dean is the guy to make the case against Nader. He understands that you can’t take anything for granted. He’s got my gratitude.

Brain Damage

Q Mr. President, could you tell us, did you see the presidential — the President’s Daily Brief from August of ’01 as a warning —

THE PRESIDENT: Did I see it? Of course I saw it; I asked for it.

Q No, no, I’m sorry — did you see it as a warning of hijackers? And how did you respond to that?

THE PRESIDENT: My response was exactly like then as it is today, that I asked for the Central Intelligence Agency to give me an update on any terrorist threats. And the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?

As you might recall, there was some specific threats for overseas that we reacted to. And as the President, I wanted to know whether there was anything, any actionable intelligence. And I looked at the August 6th briefing, I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into. But that PDB said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America — well, we knew that.

Yes, Dave.

Q Just to follow up on that, Mr. President. There was, in that PDB, specific information about activity that may speak to a larger battle plan, even if it wasn’t specific. So I wonder if you could say what specifically was done, and do you think your administration should have done anything more?

THE PRESIDENT: David, look, let me just say it again: Had I known there was going to be an attack on America, I would have moved mountains to stop the attack. I would have done everything I can. My job is to protect the American people. And I asked the intelligence agency to analyze the data to tell me whether or not we faced a threat internally, like they thought we had faced a threat in other parts of the world. That’s what the PDB request was. And had there been actionable intelligence, we would have moved on it.

I’m not exactly sure what you’re referring to in the PDB, but if you’re referring to the fact that the FBI was investigating things, that’s great, that’s what we expect the FBI to do.

Q Wasn’t that current threat information? That wasn’t historical, that was ongoing.

THE PRESIDENT: Right, and had they found something, they would have reported it to me. That’s — we were doing precisely what the American people expects us to do: run down every lead, look at every scintilla of intelligence, and follow up on it. But there was — again, I can’t say it as plainly as this: Had I known, we would have acted. Of course we would have acted. Any administration would have acted. The previous administration would have acted. That’s our job.

Q Are you satisfied, though, that each agency was doing everything it should have been doing?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, that’s what the 9/11 Commission should look into, and I hope it does. It’s an important part of the assignment of the 9/11 Commission. And I look forward to their recommendations, a full analysis of what took place. I am satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America — at a time and a place, an attack. Of course we knew that America was hated by Osama bin Laden. That was obvious. The question was, who was going to attack us, when and where, and with what. And you might recall the hijacking that was referred to in the PDB. It was not a hijacking of an airplane to fly into a building, it was hijacking of airplanes in order to free somebody that was being held as a prisoner in the United States.

“I am very aware of the cameras,” [Bush] recalled later. “I’m trying to absorb that knowledge. I have nobody to talk to. I’m sitting in the midst of a classroom with little kids, listening to a children’s story and I realise I’m the Commander in Chief and the country has just come under attack.”

Update: Skippy has some questions for the Teacher’s Aid In Chief.