Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Cheap Cannon Fodder For Phony Preppie Chickenhawks

Don’t you feel all warm inside at how the Republicans are supporting the troops? It’s nice to know that they put the highest priority on the men in uniform and their loved ones:

From the Center For American Progress:

DOD – FLYING THE FRIENDLY SKIES: Responding to a request for an inquiry by Sen. Norm Coleman, the GAO released a report yesterday that revealing that “military and civilian defense officials improperly used government credit cards to buy 68,000 first-class or business-class airline seats when they were supposed to fly coach.”

The tickets cost the government in excess of $124 million over two years. The GAO reported that John Stenbit, the Assistant Secretary of Defense purchased 17 first class tickets for $68,000, citing an unspecified medical condition. Jack Dyer Crouch, another Assistant Secretary, took 15 luxury trips costing $70,000, justifying the expense by saying he needed to be ready for meetings upon arrival. The Pentagon has convened a task force to investigate.

Yet

The Army took Spc. Christopher Cohn of Urbana to Iraq, but it wouldn’t pay to bring him all the way home.

Cohn returned home from Tikrit, Iraq, last week for a two-week rest and recuperation leave, but federal funds flew him and other soldiers only as far as Baltimore, Atlanta or Dallas. The connecting flight home was on the soldier’s dime.

Cohn, 21, said his $170 flight from Baltimore to Columbus was a bargain and he would have paid much more.

“It could’ve been $1,000 and I’d have paid it,” said Cohn, a mechanic and wrecker operator with the Springfield-based 656th Transportation Company.

To help soldiers combat such travel expenses, frequent fliers are being asked to donate their miles to “Operation Hero Miles.” The program, begun by Maryland Democratic U.S. Rep. C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, provides round-trip fares on Delta, Southwest and Alaska airlines. The Web site, www.heromiles.org, has collected more than 7.8 million miles.

Congress recently approved an $87 billion Iraqi supplemental funding bill, which includes $55 million to pay for the travel expenses of soldiers returning to their hometowns. However, the funds will not be available for several weeks.

55 million to pay for Americans who are getting their asses shot off and 124 million for a bunch of bureaucrats to upgrade to first class to make their big fat asses more comfortable.

This is an excellent use of taxpayer money during a time of war and deficits. Some people are just going to have to sacrifice and we’re proud to say that the troops and their families are once more at the front of the line while Rummy’s pasty faced paper pushers are kept in the lap of luxury.

And, then there’s this:

FORT WORTH, Texas – With hostilities in Iraq (news – web sites) continuing as Veterans Day approaches, government leaders must remember their promises to help those who have fought and are fighting for this country, Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Texas, said Saturday.

Edwards, delivering the Democrats’ weekly radio address, said trillion-dollar tax cuts benefiting the wealthy are hindering government support for military families and veterans. He criticized House Republicans’ March vote to cut veterans’ health care services by $28 billion over 10 years.

What message does it send to our veterans when the (Bush) administration says American taxpayers can afford to build new hospitals in Iraq, but we cannot afford to keep open veterans hospitals here at home?” Edwards said.

Six Veterans Affairs hospitals nationwide are being considered for closure in a proposed $4.6 billion restructuring plan. A decision is expected by year’s end.

The administration has said it wants to cut costs at outdated or underused medical centers and offer improved care, notably in the South and West, where growing numbers of the nation’s 6.9 million veterans live.

Meanwhile, Edwards said, 60,000 veterans are waiting six months or more for an appointment at a VA hospital.

Democrats have proposed increasing funding for VA hospitals, expanding access to health care for the National Guard and Reserves and improving care for injured soldiers who return from Iraq, Edwards said.

Democrats have opposed the administration’s proposals to impose new fees and co-payments on veterans seeking health care.

There are a lot of people who have become convinced that government programs mainly benefit lazy, big-city liberals and that cutting taxes for the wealthy will not touch them or the things they value. The military is something they value.

This is one way to illustrate the fact that when Republicans say they support the military, what they really mean is that they support bureaucrats, expensive weapons systems and big military contracts for their fat cat cronies, not the troops. And it’s an opening to discuss Republican hypocrisy on the issue of “honor and integrity” and the values of patriotism and shared sacrifice in a time of war. A lot of Americans sincerely and deeply believe in those things and this administration has pulled a bait and switch the likes of which have never been seen before.

It’s a wedge issue in the making and it’s in our favor.

Terrorist Lapdancers

I missed this one last week.

LAS VEGAS – The FBI used the USA Patriot Act to obtain financial information about key figures in a political corruption probe centered on striptease club owner Michael Galardi, an agent said.

Investigators used a section of the Patriot Act to get subpoenas for financial documents, said Special Agent Jim Stern, a spokesman for the Las Vegas FBI office.

“It was used appropriately by the FBI and was clearly within the legal parameters of the statute,” Stern said.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Tuesday that records were subpoenaed from Galardi, the owner of Jaguars in southern Nevada and Cheetah’s in Las Vegas and San Diego; his lobbyist, former Clark County Commissioner Lance Malone; former Commissioner Erin Kenny; County Commission Chairwoman Mary Kincaid-Chauncey; former County Commission Chairman Dario Herrera; and Las Vegas City Councilman Michael McDonald, who lost a re-election bid in June.

The Patriot Act, passed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was originally touted by the government as a tool to help federal law enforcers combat and prevent terrorism.

So, what’s the problem? The Ashcroft justice department promised that they would never misuse these provisions and we must believe them or we too are terrorists and Saddamites. Therefore, strippers and nightclub owners must be engaging in terrorist activities and the PATRIOT Act is being rightfully invoked.

Just think of those poor FBI agents who had go back again and again and again to gather the evidence. The hardship. The sacrifice. President Bush himself has personally offered to don his flight suit and “go to San Diego,” to support the troops. I hear he plans to ride down the “runway” on the back of a cheetah, singing “It’s Raining Men.”

Seriously, my friends, we are at war. We don’t have time for any shilly shallying about civil rights and civil liberties. Bin Laden and Saddam are out to git us and we’d better git them first. We cannot let them infiltrate our most cherished institutions.

Kick Ass Haiku

And the winners of the DNC Kicking Ass haiku contest are:

1st place: Mark L.

I pledge allegiance

to the United States of

Halliburton, Inc.

2nd place: doogieh

What Roves the hallways

of the Bush America?

Some say it’s treason.

3rd place: Wayne Canne

YOU ARE EITHER WITH

deficit rich guy tax breaks

US, OR AGAINST US.

4th place: doogieh

Please watch what you say.

Patriots don’t criticize

The Republicans.

5th place: acallidryas

New attacks each day.

Over one hundred more dead.

Mission Accomplished?

6th place: Mark L.

No child left behind,

Clean skies, healthy forests and

Iraq. Pants on fire!

7th place (tie): Rumblelizard

There should be limits

To freedom, he said. And now,

We see he meant it.

7th place (tie): Shant Mesrobian

Screwed the country bad

Two thousand four awaits him

He’ll go just like Dad.

9th place (tie): Irfo

Preppy cheerleader

Pretends to be working man

But nothing’s working.

9th place (tie): Debbs

Watch fat cats choke down

$2,000 hot dogs.

Hand me a pretzel.

Special Honorable Mention: Hollywood Liberal

Thank you DNC…

Can’t stop thinking Bush haiku.

Now look what you’ve done!

Dereliction of Duty

Sisyphus Shrugged has the goods on this strange story of the Green Beret who’s been accused of cowardice:

I’m much too angry to talk about this yet, so

I’m going to let Siegfried Sassoon do it for me.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, Sassoon was a poet and a british soldier in World War 1 who was not executed for his anti-war statements (although the army did consider it) because he was a decorated hero with a reputation for being almost suicidally eager to kill the enemy after his brother was killed at Gallipoli.

[…]

So we’re OK with putting soldiers on trial for their lives in the dark because they sought treatment they’re entitled to under military law, but they’re willing to be flexible if anyone should, you know, hear about it.

Way to model your basic military virtues for the soldiers, kids.

Anyway, here’s what Siegfried Sassoon had to say about – erm – a not entirely dissimilar war*

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize”.

and this is what he had to say about Staff Sergeant Georg-Andreas Pogany and his fellow sufferers of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (who include a majority of the homeless men in the United States)

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain

Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.

Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ –

These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.

They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, –

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud

Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

Support our troops. Refuse them medical care and then shoot them.

There’s a metaphor for you.

This is one of the wierdest stories to come out of the war so far. The charge is highly unusual in the first place, but it turns out that the Army doc on the scene said the guy just had a case of PTSD and needed a couple of days rest. Apparently, he had a bad reaction to seeing a body cut in half for the first time.

They’ve dropped the cowardice charges but he’s going to be charged with dereliction of duty.

The Reagan Cult

It may be apocryphal, but the bin Laden family’s good friend and everybody’s favorite Leninist right wingnut, Grover Norquist, is reported to have said back in the 1980’s:

“We must establish a Brezhnev Doctrine for conservative gains. The Brezhnev Doctrine states that once a country becomes communist it can never change. Conservatives must establish their own doctrine and declare their victories permanent…A revolution is not successful unless it succeeds in preserving itself…(W)e want to remove liberal personnel from the political process. Then we want to capture those positions of power and influence for conservatives. Stalin taught the importance of this principle.”

I think he’s been damned successful so far. You can’t fault the guy for thinking small.

Inspired as he is by all things totalitarian, Norquist went on to do a number of things that Uncle Joe would be proud of, one of which was The Legacy Project.

Here’s what Mother Jones had to say about it:

Win one for the Gipper? Hell, try winning 3,067 for the Gipper. That’s the goal of a group of a powerful group of Ronald Reagan fans who aim to see their hero’s name displayed on at least one public landmark in every county in the United States.

A conservative pipe dream? The intrepid members of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project don’t think so. Launched in 1997 as a unit of hard-line antitax lobby Americans for Tax Reform, the project’s board of advisers reads like a who’s who of conservatives; it includes, among others, staunch GOP activist Grover Norquist, supply-sider Jack Kemp, and Eagle Forum chief Phyllis Schlafly. To this crew, the Great Communicator is the man who almost singlehandedly saved us from the Evil Soviet Empire, made Americans proud again, and put the nation on the road to prosperity through tax cuts that helped the poor by helping the rich help themselves.

Buoyed by an early success in having Washington National Airport renamed in Reagan’s honor in 1998, the project started thinking big. In short order, they convinced Florida legislators to rename a state turnpike. From there, it was a logical step to the push for a Reagan memorial just about everywhere. “We want to create a tangible legacy so that 30 or 40 years from now, someone who may never have heard of Reagan will be forced to ask himself, ‘Who was this man to have so many things named after him?'” explains 29-year-old lobbyist Michael Kamburowski, who recently stepped down as the Reagan Legacy Project’s executive director.

[…]

…it was the Gipper’s ho-hum performance in a 1996 survey of historians that apparently triggered the right’s recent zeal to enthrone him in the public eye. It was in that year that presidential historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in The New York Times Magazine, asked 30 academic colleagues and a pair of politicians to rank all US presidents, and when conservatives saw their undisputed hero languishing in the “average” column, they were aghast. Appearing on the heels of Clinton’s landslide victory over Bob Dole, the Schlesinger article seemed a slap in the face, a challenge to the GOP to stake its claim on recent history.

The charge was led by the Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank that helped devise the Republican Contract with America. In the March 1997 issue of the foundation’s magazine Policy Review, the editors charged that Schlesinger’s survey was stacked with liberals and New Deal sympathizers, and presented opinions from authors more appreciative of the Gipper. (The 40th president has always fared better with the general public than with the pointyheads: In a recent Gallup poll, respondents rated Ronald Reagan as the greatest American president, beating out second-place John F. Kennedy and third-place Abraham Lincoln.)

Two issues later, for its 20th anniversary, Policy Review ran a followup cover story: “Reagan Betrayed: Are Conservatives Fumbling His Legacy?” For its centerpiece, the magazine invited soul-searching by prominent Reagan acolytes including senators Phil Gramm and Trent Lott, representatives Christopher Cox, and Dick Armey, then-Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, Gary Bauer, and Grover Norquist. Soon after the cover story appeared, Norquist launched the Reagan Legacy Project as an offshoot of Americans for Tax Reform, which he had founded a decade earlier to further Reagan’s fiscal policies.

And tonight, Grover won the very first Ronald Reagan Award. from the Frontiers of Freedom Foundation. Check out the sponsors, a veritable who’s who of GOP luminaries.

How sweet it must have been for these lovers of freedom to be able to celebrate successfully repressing a “docu-drama” about their Dear Leader without even having seen it. After all, “a revolution is not successful unless it succeeds in preserving itself.”

I have no doubt that they all stood up at the gala tonight and proudly proclaimed “Thank You Comrade, Norquist!”

And Now For Something Completely Different

A rousing essay on pornography by Steve Gilliard. If I’m not mistaken, Steve is a heterosexual.

Not that there’s… no I won’t go there.

Very Gracious

He is a fine fellow, which I always knew and always said.

I too apologize if I offended anyone in my zeal to make my point. I used the phrase “waving the flag on the stump” and was rightly accused of demagoguery by a couple of people I respect. I truly didn’t mean to say that Dean himself was doing this, but was responding to some of his supporters who seemed to feel that he should even more actively use the symbol. I succumbed to my love of hyperbolic imagery in a situation where it wasn’t appropriate and failed to make it clear where I was deriving that particular concept from.

I suspect that Howard Dean and I have a lot in common, personality-wise.

Now let’s put all this nonsense behind us and figure out how to get those redneck crackers to vote for us!

I’m kidding…I’m kidding…

Final Word

I promise

From The Temple of Democracy, which with the SPLC, are the best online resources out there when it comes to the “southern heritage” movement and racial politics in America.

What Howard Dean doesn’t understand.

It is not a new observation that the racial division between white and black working people in the former Confederate states has worked against them and enabled various elites to dominate both of them. Hinton Helper realized that the plantation system oppressed white non-elites before the Civil War. One of the fears of the plantation class before the Civil War was that blacks and whites would work together. You can read about this in “Towards a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia,” by Michael P. Johnson.

There were attempts for black-white alliances during Reconstruction, in the 1890s with Populism, and Mahon in North Carolina, and other times in the history of the South, and this has been an ongoing hope continuing to this day. However, it has been defeated, again, and again, and again. The trump card that the elites have played over and over is white nationalism. The convincing of white working people, farmers, that their interest lies in a common white identity rather than the common economic interest they hold with African Americans in the South. You can’t defeat white nationalism by giving into it. You can’t appeal to it and expect to defeat it. You also can’t expect to beat the established interests in using it. They can always beat your appeal to it. You can’t build an alliance on top of it. The established interests will bust it up with a stronger appeal to white nationalism than you will be willing to make.

To have a movement of ordinary people, black and white, against established anti-democratic interests, you need to defeat white nationalism. FDR thought he could build a progressive future by side stepping the issues. We now witness a party with its strength centered in the former Confederate states demolishing FDRs legacy one step at a time.

Why Imminence Matters

Or, one of the reasons at least. This may be the one that hits home with the public.

Matt Yglesias

“…the reason the Clinton administration was so focused on keeping the body-count super-low is that they were primarily involved in humanitarian “wars of choice.” The standard of sacrifice that it is appropriate to ask of the military in such a conflict is different from the appropriate standard when the United States is responding to aggression or even, I would say, responding to a clear and present danger. This, however, is why all the talk about Iraqi weapons and whether or not the threat was imminent matters. We’re taking casualties in Iraq like it was necessary to fight this war, at this time, in this way, with these allies or else seriously imperil America’s national security. But it wasn’t necessary, even if it did help out the people of Iraq and remove a long-term irritant from our foreign policy, only to replace it with a much more severe short-term one.

New Life!

Congrats to Mr and Mrs Kos on the birth of their adorable Bundle ‘o’ Joy, Aristotle Alberto. He looks like he’s got the Democratic mojo already.