Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Losing the Brakes

In “a nation without brakes” Kevin over at The Tooney Bin notes an important talking point to make among your GOP friends at the water cooler: Colin Powell is checking out after this term.

This article discusses the frustrations of the bloodthirsty chickenhawk neocon contingent with the State department, but offers up a startling admission from a right wing think tanker (whom I’m sure is pulling splinters out of his posterior as we speak):

“State has very valuable things to say to the rest of us,” said John Hulsman, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. “They’re the listening posts overseas. They make the personal contacts; they know the foreign leaders’ quirks and weaknesses.”

Hulsman described himself as “more amused than annoyed” by the department’s weaknesses. He also isn’t bothered by its reluctance to always follow the Pentagon’s wishes.

“Nobody likes hitting the brake,” he said. “But aren’t we glad there’s one on a car?”

That’s sort of odd, when you think about it. Is “hitting the brake” considered something to like or dislike? Do people wish they could just drive until their cars run out of gas on the side of the road? Or would they be glad if their destination were ordained by where their car ended up? The truth is that a car is undrivable unless it has brakes. It’s not really an option. But I digress into a metaphor that is rapidly losing even me…

As Kevin notes in his post, the issue isn’t whether Powell really provides any brakes. After his ignominious appearance before the UN, he pretty much flushed his credibility down the toilet. But, according to Fox news the public hasn’t quite caught on to that fact. Powell still holds a 75% approval rating, 20% higher than the resident.

I think it is useful to continuously and relentlessly shine the light on the “grown-ups” who are handling Bush, whether it’s the “good” ones like Powell who will be leaving or the bad ones like Cheney who are clinging to power. Nobody, not even Peggy Nooner, believes that Junior is really in charge of anything. Even the most die hard Republicans get a little worried at the thought of him behind the wheel with no brakes.

This is, after all, the mental giant who said just this week:

“I flew fighters when I was in the Guard, and I like speed,” he said. “It would’ve been fun to drive up on these banks. … I’d like to, but I’m afraid the agents wouldn’t let me.”

I think we can all agree that it’s long past time for a brake job. In fact, the automobile of state needs a complete overhaul.

Update: Kevin writes in with the question of who might replace Powell if T-Ball erases his asterisk and actually wins the office. I think they will consider an ’04 win to be a total validation of their actions thus far and will become even more aggressively radical than they already are.

Which means that this guy may very well be brought back from the dead to “reform” the State department.

That’s when you start to think about stuff like fall out shelters and big cold, northern countries.

New Feed

My former site feed went kerflooey. New one at left, via blogger.

Buy Your Own President!

Via Cursor, I read about these exciting plans to showcase the GOP as the party of diversity in NYC during the Republican National Convention.

Harris wants the GOP to venture into the outer boroughs. He’s eyeing Flushing Meadows Park in Queens as a possible venue, and is exploring events in the city’s diverse ethnic neighborhoods. The idea is that the sight of Republicans mingling with New Yorkers of all hues will project an image of a new, inclusive GOP to a national audience.

“I fully expect to have events all around New York,” Harris says. “It’s an opportunity to show the country, and the world, what the Republican Party is all about.”

Haha. Good luck. I have the feeling that if the Democrats and the Left in general play this one right, that they can show the world what the Republican Party is really all about.

For instance, the NY Times reports today about a great strategy that I think will entertain and fascinate the media if activists can pull it off with humor and panache:

At one point, as hundreds of guests with invitations waited to pass through velvet barriers to enter the club, a small group of men in bowler hats and women in gowns marched up, chanting, “Four more wars” and “Re-elect Rove.”

As the group approached, a man who appeared to be a security agent of some type, was overheard whispering into a microphone: “We’ve got two groups. One for and one against.”

Actually, it was two against. The person was confused by a group that calls itself Billionaires for Bush, a collection of activists who use satire to make a political point. Indeed, members of the Sierra Club, who were protesting on the other side of the street were also confused and began shouting at what they thought was a pro-Bush contingent.

” We want the truth and we want it now!” the Sierra protesters shouted.

The billionaires shouted back, “Buy your own president!”

It took a few minutes, but the police finally realized what was going on when they escorted the group behind the blue barricades as well. Still, the show was not over. A black town car pulled up and out stepped a man whom who the crowd assumed to be Mr. Rove. “There is Karl Rove,” people shouted.

Reporters, photographers and television cameramen swarmed the man, but the police pushed them back. Another man lifted the velvet rope to let him enter. But the would-be Mr. Rove walked over to the crowd of protesters and began shaking hands, when finally, again, this was seen to be a joke. It was not Mr. Rove, but an actor playing the part.

Each of the groups has said it planned to stage similar events when the Republican National Convention comes to New York City from Aug. 30 through Sept. 2.

I remember that some activists did a similar thing to protest a Cheney speech in San Francisco where they had a Cheney impersonator shake hands and entertain the crowd. Even the cops were laughing, asking “Mr. Vice President” to stay behind the lines.

Over on TAPPED today, Tara McKelvey links to a Reuters story that reports on “a group of activists from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign are planning to host “reality bus tours” of local slums during the Republican convention. They’re also going to build a tent city. It’ll be called Bushville, of course.”

Perhaps as part of their desire to project an “image of a new, inclusive GOP,” the convention planners would like to stage one of those exciting events there to show “Republicans mingling with New Yorkers of all hues.”

Humor can be a powerful weapon. Especially when the convention itself will be nothing but a bunch of boring windbags telling lie after lie. A little counter programming is definitely in order.

The Wrong Study

In One Short Half Hour Republicans twisted themselves into a preznit pretzel and managed to prove the point that all those dumb old scientists were making:

BEGALA: Well, more than 60 leading scientists, including 20 Nobel Prize winners, today said that the Bush administration has — quote — “misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implications of its policies” — unquote.

The group includes scholars from both political parties, who say President Bush and his team systematically distort science in order to serve Mr. Bush’s political agenda on issues ranging from nuclear weapons to biomedical research to the environment to health.

So, now we know George W. Bush misled us about the war in Iraq. He misled us about the environment, about health care, about science. He certainly misled us about the deficit, jobs and his tax cut. Of course, don’t forget his many fibs about his National Guard service. Of course, Mr. Bush’s defenders do have an important point. He never lied about Monica Lewinsky. And isn’t that really what matters?

CARLSON: Actually, there were not 20 Nobel Prize winners. There were about…

BEGALA: Yes, there were.

CARLSON: Actually, I checked. They were about half that.

BEGALA: So it’s only Ten Nobel Prize winners.

CARLSON: It’s something called the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is a left-wing and completely discredited, utterly partisan group.

BEGALA: It’s totally bipartisan.

CARLSON: No, no.

BEGALA: One of the members worked in the

BEGALA: … for two Republican presidents.

CARLSON: Right, worked in the Nixon administration. Right. That’s exactly right. It is completely partisan. That’s why your alert contained not a single specific example of what — how George Bush had subverted science, because there aren’t any. Go on the Web site.

All those scientists are bloodthirsty leftist partisans who clearly don’t know what they are talking about. George W. Bush has never subverted science. For instance, the Bush team would never encourage his people to stop using the methods and models to measure economic activity that have been used by the government for decades. They would never say that it was permissable to substitute completely different measurements, having the effect of comparing apples to oranges, in order to give the impression that they are successful when the standard surveys reveal that his policies are miserable failures. That, after all, would fall under the definition of “subverting science” and there is simply no proof that they have ever done such a thing.

BEGALA: I want to bring Mr. Forbes in, because I do want to focus on the promises that President Bush has made.

[…]

BEGALA: But shouldn’t he be held accountable for his promises?

FORBES: Even he misunderestimated the damage you guys did to the economy.

BEGALA: Oh, those 24 million jobs we created?

FORBES: All short-term oriented, all short-term oriented. And now the president, as soon as he took office, he reduced tax rates, put in incentives, coped with the disaster of 9/11.

Today, we are creating jobs. There are 2.5 million more jobs today in the United States than there were when he took office, when you look at the right survey of measuring these things. And now we’re on track again.

BEGALA: What survey is that?

[…]

SPERLING: But, Steve, we’re down 2.9 million sector private — private-sector jobs since he came into office. Let’s forget the recession. Let’s forget 9/11. Since the recession ended, we’re down a million. Steve, our are standards

FORBES: You’re looking at the wrong survey. You’re looking at the payroll — you’re looking at … You’re looking at the payroll survey.

SPERLING: I’m looking at what everybody has always looked at and regarded as the most significant survey.

FORBES: You’re looking at the wrong thing.

SPERLING: Steve, Steve…

FORBES: As a journalist, Paul, you shouldn’t look at what everyone else looks at.

Tuckie? Hello?

Update: Maybe it’s better to simply redefine what a job is. For instance, the administration indicates that burger flipping could soon be classified as a “manufacturing” job. That must be where those 2.6 long-term jobs that Steve Forbes says Bush has created are…

Meanwhile, cashing tax free dividend checks is now classified as a job, as is eating dinner and watching the Paris Hilton video on your private plane. Bush has created more jobs than any president in history.

They Don’t Like It

Atrios quotes Minority Whip, Hammer “hot tub” Delay saying:

Americans “have been tolerant of homosexuality for years, but now it’s being stuffed down their throats and they don’t like it.” DeLay said.

Hmmm. What evocative and detailed images these good Christians use when they talk about gay rights. It’s all “man-on-dog” and something “stuffed down their throats” and “being forced to take it.”

Where do you suppose these disturbing thoughts come from, anyway?

It’s always possible that they make their way into the minds of these fine upstanding Republicans at those junkets put on by their contributors AOL/Time Warner and Comcast, the nation’s biggest purveyors of on-line and PPV pornography. But, that’s just a guess. It could just as easily be those regular “fact-finding” missions over at the Justice Department where they all annoint themselves in consecrated Crisco and sit around sifting through the evidence in Ashcroft’s new war on obscenity.

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

Oh No! They’re Calling Him a Hypocrite!

Here they go. Kerry’s Past to Star in Bush’s Ads

The beauty of John Kerry is 32 years of votes and public pronouncements,” said Mark McKinnon, the chief media adviser. McKinnon suggested a possible tag line: “He’s been wrong for 32 years, he’s wrong now.”

I sure hope they use that one because the response is so obvious.

“32 years ago John Kerry was a highly decorated Naval officer testifying before congress about the unjustified war he fought in halfway across the world. At that very same time, George W. Bush was dodging responsibility and wasting the taxpayers money in Texas and Alabama doing who knows what. He kept doing that for 32 years and he’s doing it now.”

I love the fact that they have resuscitated the concept of hypocrisy just in time to use it against John Kerry. But, there is some danger in it. After all, we have a cowboy president who can’t ride a horse, a wartime president who took many special favors to get out of Vietnam, a businessman president who failed at every single venture he ever went near, a moral leader who sanctions putting the lives of CIA agents in danger for political reasons, a Commander in Chief who took the country into an elective war under false pretenses and a fiscal conservative who has created the biggest deficits in American history and the worst job creation record since Herbert Hoover.

Yes. I think hypocrisy is a fine charge to hit John Kerry with. I’m sure it’s deserved. Politics is not an endeavor for the pure of heart and motive. However, hypocrisy is such a sissy little word when you can respond with muscular words like fraud, fake, phony, corrupt, crooked, unethical, unprincipled, manipulable and criminal.

Bring it on, fellas. This isn’t our first time at the rodeo.

Oh, and memo to John Kerry: I can’t find the $%^!!! link, but I recently read that he was telling anyone who will listen that he won’t “cut and run” in Iraq “like his father did.” I think the entire Iraq issue is wrapped up in some kind of freakish oedipal complex for him and it is probably a good idea to taunt him about it as much as possible. These guys get apoplectic when they are challenged and it leads them to make mistakes. Don’t hold back.

Update: South Knox Bubba has more, saying (as only can) the irony drips like bar-b-cue sauce from the chin of a county ward heeler at a GOP tent revival.” What an image…

Harpy Valentine

Sommerby recounts a truly sickening exchange by erstwhile Dukakis campaign manager and now all around backbiting harpy, Susan Estrich, commenting on the Kerry non-scandal. I honestly don’t know how this obviously very financially desperate woman sleeps at night, but if you can set aside her unbearable voice long enough to hear what she is saying, you will find something interesting in her foul screech:

ESTRICH: Right. And the story got out, does John Kerry have, as we Democrats like to call it, a Clinton problem? And if it weren’t for Clinton, it probably wouldn’t be an issue. It didn’t make it to Fox News. [sic!] It didn’t make it to a lot of the mainstream media. But if you look at the election season, you see the jitters that happen along the elite can translate to voters really quickly. So what I’ve been hearing in the last week, and it remains to be seen, maybe this was all a Republican dirty trick. Maybe there’s no truth to it.

But I think one of the factors that may have been playing in Wisconsin was the jitteriness among primary voters that maybe we don’t know everything we need to know. If there is any truth to this, we don’t want to go down this road again, particularly when we have got a situation with John Kerry where he doesn’t have a wife of 30 years who’s going to stand by her man, like Hillary did or Maria Shriver did. When we have this more complex situation where his wife has said I will maim him if I catch him cheating. That got Democrats nervous.

I had actually noticed something like she describes in comments sections around the left blogosphere and it kind of disturbed me. If the Lucianne clique’s idea was to make Dems nervous we sure didn’t disappoint. I could hear her and Drudge and Coulter cackling fiendishly all the way from DC to Santa Monica.

Democrats have got to get over their fear of the Clenis, just as the GOP needs a lot of therapy to relieve themselves of their obsession with it. As far as I know, every Democrat still running for President has a penis and has used it a time or two. The Right compulsively ruminates about this because it makes them all tingly in certain parts of their usually flaccid bodies. They are going to keep talking about it and enjoying the feelings it gives them and there isn’t much we can do about it. Look at the way G. Gordon Liddy swooned over the rather insignificant and embarrassing junior codpiece that lil’ Cap’n T-Ball sports.

There is no reason for us to get nervous about this. It’s just part of the show. Unless we nominate a sanctimonious homunculous like Joe Lieberman it’s going to happen. They have a little insecurity problem that even sending young men and women in uniform out to fight useless wars apparently cannot erase. It’s best to let them fiddle and fidget under their Brooks Brothers and Talbots without comment.

The Greatest Strategic Blunder In Modern Memory

I get the impression from casual conversation and reading the papers that a lot of Americans understand that Junior lied to get us into Iraq, but they don’t think it really hurt anything. In fact, since Saddam was a prick and it didn’t really cost us much to take him out (well, except for the loss of life and the billions spent), it was a pretty good thing to do, on balance. Kicking a little butt after 9/11 probably sent a message we needed to send.

The problem with this is that they don’t understand what a huge error in judgment the Iraq operation was in terms of our long term security and readiness. Nor do they understand the extent to which we damaged our alliances and how dangerous it was to blow our credibility at a time like this.

This post by Nick Confessore on TAPPED goes to the heart of what must become the Democratic critique of the Preznit’s calamity of a foreign policy if we hope to educate the public and permanently tear Junior loose from his absurd image as a “trustworthy” Commander in Chief in the WOT.

First, Confessore quotes James Webb, secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, writing in USA Today:

Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence.

There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves.

Confessore goes on to excerpt a portion of James Fallows’ truly frightening account of our “hollow army.”

However, there is even more to it than that. Wes Clark and others made the argument some time ago that Iraq was a distraction from the real threat and it has been said by many that the invasion would lead to more recruitment of terrorists. And, there have been other discussions about the effects of a stretched thin military of reserves and national guard troops. But, I haven’t heard any talk about what an enormous amount of damage has been done by the conscious exposure of our intelligence services as paper tigers.

Regardless of whether they hyped, sexed up or pimped out the intelligence on Iraq, the fact is that by invading Iraq the way we did and being proved complete asses now that no WMD have been discovered, one of our best defenses has been completely destroyed. It may have always been nothing but a pretense that we had hi-tech, super duper satellites with x-ray vision and all-knowing eavesdropping devices that can hear a pin drop half a world away but it was a very useful pretense. Nobody knew exactly what we were capable of. Now they do. It appears to everyone on the planet that our vaunted intelligence services couldn’t find water even if they fell off of a fucking aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

It’s this kind of thing that makes really crazy wackos like Kim Jong Il make mistakes. When a hugely powerful country like the United States proves to the entire world that it is not as powerful as everyone thought, petty tyrants and ambitious generals tend to get excited. This is why mighty nations should never fight wars unless they absolutely have to. It is always better to have enemies wonder whether they are as omnipotent as they appear. They should not risk proving otherwise unless they have no choice.

It is, therefore, in the national interest for the Democrats to lay this strategic blunder at the door of this administration as clearly and as forcefully as possible. We can only benefit by the world coming to believe, in no uncertain terms, that this war was fought in spite of what we knew, not because of what we didn’t know. Bush and his neocon wet-dreamers need to take a very public fall for what they did, not just for justice but for national security. Nobody should allow the world’s dangerous crackpots to believe that our institutions of the military and intelligence services have been tainted by this enormous error in judgment. It’s too dangerous.

Who Says Republicans Are The Only Uncool Guys Guys?:

“THE GENERAL’S SWAN SONG: I know this may be old news, but while we’re on the subject of Wes Clark, I can’t resist passing on the story of how Clark spent the final night of his campaign Wednesday in Little Rock after he bowed out of the race and began his bid to be John Kerry’s vice president.

Semi-chilled Bud Light was the drink of choice, as it was on the Clark campaign bus. The already paper-thin wall separating the young Clark media embeds and the young Clark staffers was finally torn down, and both sides joined the general in the kitchen. There, at the top of his lungs, the former Supreme Allied Commander sang Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’ and Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’ One ex-Clarkie quipped, ‘The scariest part was that he knew all the words.'”

Yeah, yeah. I know. He’s a freakshow on wheels, a complete failure who nobody can understand how he ever came to get into West Point much less earn four stars and who should have been put away in a looney bin years ago because he’s such a hated grudgebearing egomaniac, hypocrite and phony like all those other generals who have been thrown on the ash heap of history.

But, since 2000 showed us that the most important quality in a president seems to be whether you would like to have a beer with the guy, put me down as one of those losers who would would much rather hear Wes Clark sing “Like A Prayer” over a couple of lukewarm Bud lights than hang around with a towel snapping, frat boy cheerleader asshole whose idea of fun is an evening hazing of fuzz faced freshmen followed by a hilarious late night round of cow tipping. But, that’s just me.

Scribbles

Check out “The Rope Of Our Ends” over on American Street.

And, I’ve got much more saved up for good ole Hullabaloo starting tomorrow. Check back.

For instance, can anybody explain to me why this is ok?

Musharraf says no to nuclear site inspections

Pakistan would in no circumstances permit foreign inspectors to enter the country and monitor its nuclear weapons or civil nuclear facilities, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military president, said on Tuesday.

[…]

…Gen Musharraf, whose “rogue scientist” account of the scandal was endorsed last week by George W. Bush, the US president, said he was confident no further proliferation would take place from Pakistan.

I must once again set forth the proposition that, as with Iraq, we must immediately invade Finland. After all, they might someday have the capacity to maybe form the intent to think about possibly collecting the information that could lead to the development of programs that could produce weapons of mass destruction. That is a grave and gathering danger. We cannot wait for the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud. (Plus, the place is just crawling with Vikings, terrorists extraordinaire.)

Pakistan, however, is not a problem. move along, folks.

At what point do Republicans literally turn themselves inside out with their internal contradictions? Do you think it’s physically painful to have this kind of moral clarity?