Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Bobo’s Shame

I said below, that I wondered if Bill Kristol was having trouble looking himself in the mirror these days and then lo and behold, I come across this transcript of David Brooks, fellow “reasonable, temperate, believable” conservative, on The News Hour and I realize that somebody is giving out mind altering drugs at Gertrude and Irving’s kaffe klatches. Something is seriously wrong with these people. Get a load of this pile of road apples (emphasis throughout is mine):

DAVID BROOKS: The story that was in the Washington Post by a great reporter by the name of Tom Ricks was that Colin Powell had gotten together with the joint chiefs gone around Rumsfeld, gone to the White House, and persuaded that. My reporting has persuaded me, though Ricks is a fantastic reporter, that that was not true.

JIM LEHRER: Rick covers the Pentagon for the Washington Post. He is a superb reporter.

DAVID BROOKS: And I’m convinced it started with the president who may….

JIM LEHRER: Started with the president…

DAVID BROOKS: After the bombing of the U.N. building, decided to internationalize it, went through an interagency process. Paul Wolfowitz played a key role. I was — read documents given to Donald Rumsfeld before any of the Colin Powell meetings allegedly took place in which Rumsfeld signed off on the U.N. wording of the U.N. Resolution. I think this all preceded any end run around Donald Rumsfeld. I think it started with the president and was worked by the administration for some of the reasons Mark talked about–

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with what Mark said? The policy is in tatters and that’s why they had to–

DAVID BROOKS: They made an adjustment. It evolved in the way they planned months ago. That’s their line. I believe what happened was they realized things were going badly — not only because they didn’t have enough troops and I don’t think we are ever going to get French troops. They hoped to get Pakistani, Indian, and Turkish troops. But because they need more money and I think that’s an underreported part of the story, they need more money to support Iraq and that’s not going to come from France or Germany or those countries – it’s going to come from the IMF and the World Bank and the Treasury Department played a major goal in going to the U.N. so they could hopefully get some money from those institutions.

JIM LEHRER: The Treasury said, hey, wait a minute, we can’t afford this on our own.

[…]

DAVID BROOKS: Let me disagree in part. This is so important, this is the future of American foreign policy for a generation. We should not think dollars and cents here. We should think like George Steinbrenner when he buys a slugger, he buys six sluggers because he is just going to throw a lot at the problem. I’m afraid the Bush administration and the Congress is thinking dollars and cents when this has to be done right for the Iraqi people. We need to spend what we need to spend. We can talk about the tax cuts and how we are going to fund it later. But I think the administration so far is being penny pinching and not spending what it needs to get the electricity up, to get all the other problems solved that can be solved with money, of which a lot of them can be.

JIM LEHRER: Do you think politically they can get away with that? Do you think the American people would support what you just said whatever it takes, do it?

DAVID BROOKS: Everybody from Howard Dean to Jesse Helms or whoever is on the right now says we cannot cut and run. We cannot fail at that. Democrats have different ideas how to proceed, but everybody agrees except for Dennis Kucinich, that we cannot cut and run. This has to work out or else U.S. national interests will be harmed across the board.

(ed. How fucking convenient this argument is. “We’ve made this mess and now there’s no choice but for you to help clean it up.” That may be true, but it certainly doesn’t make a very good case for leaving this miserable failure of a president in office any longer than we have to.)

[…]

MARK SHIELDS: This is not a mistake but an error of historic proportions.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that?

DAVID BROOKS: No, absolutely not. They made some misjudgments; they thought there were going to be refugees, that there were going to be food shortages, there turned out not to be, but they under-estimated the extent of Baathist terrorism after the war and now they’re making adjustments by bringing in other troops, by reconfiguring the troops and most importantly by training the Iraqis. One of the problems that has been going on in the past several months since the war is that you walk into the headquarters where Paul Bremer sits, there are no Iraqis there. The Americans are running the government as if there are no Iraqis. And it’s important, and they’re beginning to make this adjustment, too, which is giving Iraqis real power, and that’s another thing they’re changing.

[…]

DAVID BROOKS: Some people, some of your friends pretend they listen to you and don’t. This administration listens to you but pretends they don’t. They pretend they are so far above their critics they don’t have to hear but then they’re really listening.

Good boy, Bobo. Now, sit up pretty.

First, David Brooks should no longer be considered reasoned, temperate or anything else after this completely ridiculous attempt to paint President Vacuous as somehow leading the administration to change course. This is about as believable as Timothy Bottoms’ version of Bush as John Wayne saying, “If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I’ll be at home! Waiting for the bastard!”

Everything we know about Bush suggests that he would rather chew straight pins than change course. It will take a lot more than Brooks’ word to make me believe that he “led” the administration to do anything other than help him hitch up his codpiece.

And, I suppose that Thomas Ricks might have been fed a bill of goods by the Joint Chiefs and Colin Powell, but let’s just say that since it’s the White House that’s got a credibility gap the size of the grand canyon, I’m going to go with the Republican generals rather than Karl Rove and the editorial board of the Weekly Standard.

This absurdity of the Treasury Department making the case for the UN because of the need to secure loans from the IMF and the World Bank is simply crapola. They have been in Iraq since May making assessments and have been expected to make the necessary loans from the get-go. We have more than a little influence with that group. If there has been an impediment it comes from the Republican party. All they needed to do was have John Snow walk over to the capital building and chat up Jim Saxton.

This is all part of the absurd new meme being tossed about by Wolfowitz and others that this appeal to the UN was part of their plan all along and everything is going just swimmingly. The IMF and the World Bank said early on that they would need some indication that the UN recognized the new government of Iraq. Now, Wolfie and his minions are saying that this UN move is just a natural and expected step in the way to bringing the flowers of democracy to Iraq. In fact, we’re ahead of schedule!

Meanwhile, the bombing and killing of American troops and UN workers and clerics and innocent Iraqis, and the pourous borders and the missing WMD and Saddam sending out tapes exhorting people to resist — IS IRRELEVANT! Commander Codpiece’s astute and unique grasp of foreign policy nuance and concerns in the treasury department are the reason we’re going back to the UN after calling them a bunch of useless losers just a few months ago.

Yeah.

David Brooks is a shill. He pretends to be (slightly) disagreeing with the administration and speaks in measured tones, but in the end, he manages to get every single image and talking point out there that the administration wants. Even “Bush the crackerjack leader among men.” How impressively servile.

All liberals should be put on notice to find another “reasonable” conservative that we can trot out when some mannequin like Paula Zahn asks if there are any conservatives they like. (Besides, as Paula did when Al Franken named Brooks, the media starlets are likely to confuse him with David Brock, so it doesn’t really work anyway.)

I nominate Joe Lieberman.

Finally, you’ve got to love Bobo’s inability to name a far-right fringe politician now that Jesse Helms has retired. It’s hard, I know.

It’s hard because there is no far-right “fringe” in Washington anymore.

They’re all in the administration and the Republican leadership.

You Can Believe Me Or You Can Believe Your Eyes

Nearing the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, seven in 10 Americans continue to believe that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks, even though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of this.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to the latest Washington Post poll. That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals acting for al Qaeda, is broadly shared by Democrats, Republicans and independents.

[…]

Bush’s defenders say the administration’s rhetoric was not responsible for the public perception of Hussein’s involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. While Hussein and al Qaeda come from different strains of Islam and Hussein’s secularism is incompatible with al Qaeda fundamentalism, Americans instinctively lump both foes together as Middle Eastern enemies. “The intellectual argument is there is a war in Iraq and a war on terrorism and you have to separate them, but the public doesn’t do that,” said Matthew Dowd, a Bush campaign strategist. “They see Middle Eastern terrorism, bad people in the Middle East, all as one big problem.“

Ooooh. The “intellectual argument.” I guess they are talking about those nasty Birkenstocked elites again. Real people just wanna kick some Ay-Rab asses. It don’t matter who done it, them ragheads is nothin’ but one Big Problem. Yee – hah!

Golly, one might conclude from reading this that Bush’s campaign strategists see such ignorance, prejudice and racism as opportunities to advance their agenda. How typically Republican of them.

But, you’ve gotta love this:

Key administration figures have largely abandoned any claim that Iraq was involved in the 2001 attacks. “I’m not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with it,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a leading hawk on Iraq, said on the Laura Ingraham radio show on Aug. 1.

Well, I’m not sure even now that I can fully grasp just what a lying, mendacious, intellectually incoherent piece of shit Paul Wolfowitz has turned out to be.

2 days after the attacks Wolfowitz said:

“I think one has to say it’s not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that’s why it has to be a broad and sustained campaign.”

Even a year later he was still spouting much the same line.

And, why did he say this? What led him to think that “ending states that sponsor terrorism” would end the threat from al al Qaeda? Was he simply lying straight out or did he actually — stupidly — believe it?

I think, sadly, that it may have been the latter.

This nonsensical theory came about because of his and other neocon fellow travellers’ close association with one of the most crazed nutjobs in Washington, somebody who should have been placed in the far fringes of tinfoilhat-land and was instead operating as a “fellow” at the American Enterprise Institute (alongside other kooks like Michael “Ghorbanifar go-between” Ledeen.) That person was Laurie Mylroie and her obsession with Saddam Hussein had led her to the completely insane and ridiculous thesis that international terrorism could not exist without Iraq’s sponsorship, as she reiterated just 2 months ago in testimony to the 9/11 commission.

This is the caliber of thinking Paul Wolfowitz admires and writes glowing book blurbs about.

It has become clear that if Paul Wolfowitz had exercised just a little bit more taste and discretion in his choice of dinner party companions (like Chalabi the conman and Mylroie the paranoid obsessive), we would likely not be in Iraq today. (Josh Marshall has more on the complete destruction of credibility of one of the shining lights of neconservatism, whom he calls the “Comical Ali” of the neocon collapse. Ho. )

With people like this in charge, it is easy to understand why Americans are completely confused and deluded about our foreign policy.

It’s going to take a concerted effort on the part of the Democratic candidates for president to educate the country about this. They must repeat it over and over again.

And, it’s another reason why whoever becomes the nominee is going to be irreparably hamstrung by a vote in favor of the war. Voters may allow a Republican frat boy to be stupid on national defense, but they will not allow it of a Democrat. That’s just the way it is.

Bowl Him Over With A Feather

Avedon Carol says:

“Markets are a great way to organize economic activity, but…”

Couldn’t you just fall over laughing? Just like I usually do whenever I see that Alan Greenspan line Pfaff quoted the other day, about how when the Soviet Union fell he just assumed it would “automatically establish a free-market entrepreneurial system.”

Hey, I only read comic books, but these people think they live in one.

Hahaha. In fact, I even know which comic book Alan and his little friends think they live in. It’s called “Atlas Shrugged” and has kept dreamy romantic schoolgirls and market fundamentalists of all ages atwitter and breathless for decades.

Read the whole post. It’s a timely reminder of why we got all those pesky, intrusive regulations in the first place. And, it wasn’t a perverse, liberal compulsion to make business owners lives difficult.

The article to which Avedon refers also says:

Mr. Greenspan said that after 1989 he – or ”we,” as he put it – discovered that ”much of what we took for granted in our free-market system and assumed to be human nature was not nature at all, but culture. The dismantling of the central planning function in an economy does not, as some had supposed, automatically establish” market capitalism.

It explains a lot about what has happened to the ex-Communist world since 1989 that men and women with the influence of Mr. Greenspan, occupying posts of great power, should have held so egregiously naive, or historically and culturally ”deaf,” a belief as did Mr. Greenspan.

What in the hell is wrong with the intellectuals of the right? Has it simply become habit to disregard anything that doesn’t fit their narrow worldview and ideology?

Or are they just, as the recent Berkeley study found, so psychologically resistant to uncertainty, attached to dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity that they are simply incapable of being true intellectuals.

I don’t know, but it’s pretty clear that the ivory tower think tank culture of the right needs to do some serious reassessment if they plan to run the world. Their incompetence and naïveté is as breathtaking as anything we’ve seen since Russia in the 20’s.

Big Meanies

Gawd, I love Republicans. I really do. If they didn’t exist, you’d forget what the kindergarten schoolyard is like, and that would be a shame.

Here are yesterday’s talking points as faithfully and robotically mouthed by GOP hacks from sea to shining sea:

“The one thing they were unified on was their negativity and their attacks on the president.”

Ed Gillespie, GOP chairman

Oh, my dear Lord, can it be? Can they be so dastardly and despicable as to attack the president during a presidential campaign? Are there no depths to which these treasonous, un-American bastards will sink?

By Gawd, they won’t get away with it. Not by a long shot.

The Republicans are going to whine and stomp their tiny little feet and sob until the big nasty Democrats just stop it, stop it, stop it! It’s against the rules to be so mean!

And, it will work just great, too, because the American people have forgotten all about that unfortunate eight years, 24-7 of non-stop GOP harping, screaming, chest beating and slobbering about Bill Clinton. Now that the dignified Republicans are in charge, all those years of obsessing about the shape of the President’s manhood and his corrupt, murdering ways and his feminazi wife and his Commie connections are lost in the mists of time.

Today, alls I know is that the Democrats are icky and bad for bashing that nice young man, George W. Bush. Why, I’ve heard that some low class Democrat even called him a “major league asshole,” can you believe that?

They’d better quit it … or else.

Lukewarm Water

I don’t always agree with Joan Walsh but I think she is on to something important in today’s Salon Column.

I wrote last fall that I thought the Senate resolution giving the president carte blanche to invade at will was a serious, perhaps fatal, error on the part of the Democratic Presidential Wannabe Club.

The moral reason was obvious. Dick Cheney made it quite clear, two months before the vote, that the administration planned to attack Iraq, no matter what. It was immoral to give Bush a blank check to do that for their own craven political purposes. This was a vote on a matter of life and death, not “bring your daughter to work day.”

The political reason was that the base of the party was going to be slow to forgive. This was clear from the enormous outpouring of e-mails, letters and phone calls coming into Senators’ offices; record numbers by all accounts. As my own Senator, Diane Feinstein said on the floor of the Senate:

People have weighed in by the tens of thousands. If I were just to cast a representative vote based on those who have voiced their opinions with my office – and with no other factors – I would have to vote against this resolution.

Naturally, she voted for the resolution, ostensibly because of the supposed grave imminent threat Saddam presented to the US that we in the peacenik hoi polloi just didn’t seem to grasp.

…the same hoi polloi who knew very well that invading Iraq was a long held wet dream of radical neocons who were opportunistically using 9/11 as an excuse to advance their agenda… the same hoi polloi who could see with our very own eyes that the Bush Doctrine, published and distributed for every American to read, advocates muscular unilateralism and the emasculation of international institutions and the rule of law. You didn’t have to be an insider to know that the administration’s late blooming “commitment” to getting UN approval and international support was nothing but window dressing to buy time.

As Walsh says in her article:

Frankly, I found it equally incomprehensible how someone could support the war as Gephardt did, and now pretend that he didn’t know the president had no plan and no international cooperation to get it done. I knew that, sitting behind my desk in San Francisco, raising my teenaged daughter. Why didn’t anyone tell Gephardt, the savvy House minority leader?

Walsh doesn’t say it, but here in Santa Monica I knew our Senator Diane was voting for it because she was afraid that she’d be labeled a coward by the Mighty Wurlitzer if she didn’t. Continuing to live in the past, and making political calculations based upon the closed, insular advice of political consultants who have outlived their usefulness, the Democratic leadership believed that the conditions of 1991 were again at play and they would not let themselves be caught out this time. Always fighting the last war, as usual.

Walsh says it is “unseemly” for the contenders who voted for the resolution to now pile on the Bush administration. I don’t think it’s unseemly, it’s just not credible. It showed a remarkable political obtuseness not to recognize that when the base of the party is worked up enough to call and write in record numbers, something is in the air besides the smell of patchouli oil. These were Democrats, not anarchists or Naderites. That kind of political tone deafness is a disqualification in my book. At a time when the electorate is closely divided, you’d better pay attention to your base.

The vaunted Carville-Greenberg-Shrum operation further confused the issue by advising Democratic candidates to go around the country saying “I’m for the war, but with reservations” because that’s what their polls told them that many people felt.

Apparently, they didn’t realize that the people who felt this way were looking for leadership on the issue not equivocation. By saying they were for the war but with reservations, voters were simply saying that they supported the president by default in a time of war (and media cheerleading), but they knew in their gut that something wasn’t quite right.

It was the candidates job to identify and articulate where that feeling came from. When the Democrats appeared to be just as uncomfortable and confused as they were, swing voters went with the guys who seemed sure of themselves. You can’t blame them.

But, most importantly, the consultants failed to realize that by taking this position the democratic leadership was telling the energized base to go fuck themselves. The results were predictable:

Here’s what the Carville-Greenberg-Shrum operation said in their post-mortem of the election:

On Election Day, Republicans won by 4 points in voting for the House of Representatives (51 to 47 percent). That produced a gain of just 4 seats in the House. In the Senate, Democrats went from a one-seat majority to being in the minority. That represents a swing of 4 points away from Democratic performance in 2000 (even), actually the switch of around 2 percent of the voters, not a seismic change.

[…]

This imbalance of energy and direction produced a unique electorate, which would have been noted election night, had the traditional exit polls been available. The 2002 electorate was more Republican and much more conservative than those that showed up in the Presidential election of 2000 and the off-year election of 1998. Republicans were greatly energized by their campaigns, while Democrats were not.

If the Democrats had had the balls to say what they knew very well was the truth, we may have won the mid-terms and kept George W. Bush from hurtling forward with the Iraq war when the rest of the world balked at his bullying ways. At the very least they would have had a principled and coherent position from which to run. It was a huge failure of nerve and it explains the predicament the Wannabe Club finds itself in today.

Hence, grassroots support for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.* The others look like presidential pretzels trying to explain themselves, now that things have gone wrong. Many of us predicted it would be so.

*I don’t mean to ignore Kucinich, Sharpton and Braun. They also objected to the war and I admire them for it. Their voices are worthy of respect and all three of them have followings that should be valued in the Party. But, they have little chance of gaining the nomination for reasons unrelated to the Iraq war.

Two More Straws

There are so many political and policy atrocities associated with the modern GOP and this administration that it becomes hard to feel anything more than a sort of resigned acceptance and hope that the historians will place them in their proper place in history beside other failed radical experiments.

But, every once in a while something comes to light that begets an emotional charge of such white hot anger and outrage that I find I’m shocked and awed once again at the sheer lack of decency and any claim to honor these people have, particularly after having to listen to their phony pretensions of patriotism and virtue.

Two such cases came up just recently and I wondered once again how low they can possibly go. Pretty low, apparently.

First, I simply cannot wrap my arms around the fact that the White House “sexed down” the EPA assessment of the air quality around ground zero. That they would knowingly place the people involved in the rescue and clean-up operation in long term health danger is simply so disgusting that I find it hard to imagine that any public safety worker in this country could ever vote for the Republicans again.

Remember, the people most likely to be affected by the bad air quality around the WTC after the attacks were cops, firefighters, municipal workers, rescue units and military personnel. The heroes of 9/11, the ones Bush so shamelessly exploited day after day after day — the ones that Peggy Noonan and K-Lo and Coulter got all misty and moist over.

Thanks guys. And by the way, Fuck You.

Would it have been too much trouble for the party of personal responsibility to give unspun information to citizens of the site of the most deadly terrorist attack in the nation’s history so they could decide for themselves how to mitigate the risk of serious long term consequences? The workers would have gone to work anyway, guaranteed, but they might have used more sophisticated equipment and might have discouraged people with respiratory problems from going into the area until it was completely cleared. Gosh, maybe they would have had themselves medically monitored more closely. That would have been terrible.

The only people who likely would have held back are those who work in the Stock Exchange, and there we find the real reason for the lie. Because a bunch of rich traders might have stayed home rather than expose themselves to long term lung damage, Bush and his cronies decided to throw them to the wolves, too.

Good thing you got those tax cuts boys. You’re going to need them to pay for your health costs.

Vote Republican. They care.

The other story that made me erupt with righteous indignation is the story this morning in the NY Times affirming that the White House authorized the bin Laden family “evacuation” from the US during the time that flights were suspended after 9/11.

This story has been out there from early days and those who placed any credence in the story were derided as dupes and 5th columnists.

With all that honor and dignity swirling around the oval office, you would have thought that somebody would have been concerned about whether it was right to spirit a bunch of Saudis out of the country rather than “protect” them from the supposed howling mob by putting them in protective custody until matters became clearer.

Meanwhile, the FBI was rounding up thousands of Middle Eastern men all over the country, many held for months on end with no legal representation, even eventually trumping up charges of thought crimes against a handful of dumbshits who failed to be born into rich Saudi “friends of Bandar” families.

This seems like a big story to me — one that should rightly have the entire beltway awash in gossipy speculation.

Let’s be clear. One of the more fanciful conspiracy theories to emerge immediately after 9/11, the one charging the Bush administration of protecting the Saudi royal family and the family of Osama-bin-fucking-Laden turns out to be TRUE!

Ok. It isn’t as big of a deal as fundraising at a Buddhist temple or a DNA stained dress. I understand that. But, you would think that Tweety and the rest might find it just a little bit intriguing that our president authorized the escape of intimates and family members of the mastermind of the worst terrorist attack in American history.

Wait…

Look! Over There! Arnold’s shaking hands at a fair!

Britney Luvs Bush!

never mind…

Last Refuge

Anyone who thinks that the battle in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror should tell it to the Marines of the 1st Marine Division who comprised the eastern flank of the force that fought its way to Baghdad last April.

[…]

America’s troops and our coalition partners are determined to win–and they will win, if we continue to give them the moral and material support they need to do the job. As the president said recently, our forces are on the offensive. And as Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane said in congressional testimony, “They bring the values of the American people to this conflict. They understand firmness, they understand determination. But they also understand compassion. Those values are on display every day as they switch from dealing with an enemy to taking care of a family.”

I saw the troops in Iraq, and Gen. Keane is absolutely right. I can tell you that they, above all, understand the war they are fighting. They understand the stakes involved. And they will not be deterred from their mission by desperate acts of a dying regime or ideology.

[…]

Young men and women from across America rushed to the trio, eager to touch them and talk to them. One soldier, a mother of two, told Christy she’d enlisted because of Sept. 11. Another soldier displayed the metal bracelet he wore, engraved with the name of a victim of 9/11. Others came forward with memorabilia from the World Trade Center they carried with them into Baghdad. And when it was Christy’s turn to present Gen. Tommy Franks with a piece of steel recovered from the Trade Towers, she saw this great soldier’s eyes well up with tears. Then, she watched as they streamed down his face on center stage before 4,000 troops.

To those who think the battle in Iraq is a distraction from the global war against terrorism . . . tell that to our troops.

Cue the plaintive wail of a lone trumpeter playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” as through my patriotic tears I grab blindly for a barf bag and my passport.

I’ve read enough gushy patriotic drivel in the last 2 years to tide me over until Armageddon and I thoroughly expect the Mighty Wurlitzer to play Sousa and Lee Greenwood on a loop during the presidential campaign. However, the above piece of manipulative treacle wasn’t written by a delusional codpiece worshiper like Peggy Noonan. It was written by one of the foremost intellectuals of the neocon movement and the premiere architect of the hallowed Bush Doctrine.

It’s none other than Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz himself, expelling a steaming pile of saccharine pap in order to avoid explaining how his every prediction about the postwar occupation was wrong. Read the whole thing. You’ll find not even one word of substance in the entire embarrassing sermon.

I’m sure the AEI Ladies Auxiliary and “Bush Is A Hottie” groupies get all teary eyed at the mere mention of 9/11 widows and brave fighting men on the “front,” but thinking people are supposed to demand a little bit more from the leading designers of our foreign policy. He’s writing in the Wall Street Journal, after all, not the Toby Keith fanzine.

And, please spare me any more adoring profiles of Wolfowitz, extolling his virtue and good intentions, much less his intellectual integrity. This pathetic appeal to emotion exposes him as either dangerously naïve and childlike in his thinking or so ideologically driven that he is willing to say and do anything in service of his goals.

Remember, these guys have always been wrong about everything. It is their special talent. They thought Kissinger was a dangerous appeaser with his weak kneed wussy détente. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall they were agitating for a stronger military presence in Europe to check an inevitable resurgence of communism. If they’d had their way we would have invaded Russia, for Gawd’s sake.

Typically, now that they have been proved to be both baldly dishonest and dramatically incompetent, they are falling back on their old favorite — rank sentimentality and gooey patriotic tributes to the troops.

The scoundrels are scurrying to their last refuge much sooner than I would have thought possible. Get out your trowels and shovels because we are about to be buried in patriotic clichés. It’s all they’ve got.

Ahmad’s Ugly Secret

Josh Marshall hints about a dark episode from the mid-90’s featuring our favorite Iraqi cocktail party guest. I’m guessing this is it.

Keeping Track

The fabulous Mary over at the Left Coaster (and also Pacific Views) alerts me to a Truth Squad compilation of Administration lies leading up to the war. Bookmark this baby for future reference.

I honestly think that one of the keys to the Bushies’ “success” is the sheer volume and magnitude of outrages they perpetrate. It’s exhausting keeping up with them and the resultant static makes even a hard core news junkie like me want to pick up a cheap novel or mindlessly watch TVLand just to keep my head from exploding.

I salute those who have taken on the immense project of keeping track of the truth. It’s going to be important in the coming months.

Oldie Goldie

Andrew Northrup at The Poor Man, does an excellent job of deconstructing this Weekly Standard hit job on Clark (regarding his comments on Meet The Press about the effort to connect 9/11 with Saddam Hussein immediately after the attack on the WTC.)

However, it is important, I think, that we remember that this kind of parsing of extemporaneous speech to make it appear that someone is “slick,” rather than just humanly imprecise is a Wurlitzer tactic that goes back to 1992. They take a comment and spread the idea throughout the media that it was deliberately misleading and further that it represents a character flaw on the part of the person who uttered it. Tucker and Sean and their ilk snidely hammer the accusation to a Dem talking head who then spends his entire time (when he isn’t being interrupted) explaining the statement to prove that the intent was not what these guys are saying it was.

We look defensive, they sound confident and the public is confused. Eventually they believe that there must be something to the charges because the endless parsing of it sounds lawyerly, desperate and boring. The charge gets dropped and another, similar, charge is leveled and the process begins again.

It is the death of reputation and credibility by a thousand small smears.

Therefore, I think we have to respond in two different ways to such charges. In print (and on blogs and elsewhere) we should analyze the charges in detail and keep an accurate, truthful record of the entire episode.

But, on television and for quotes in the print media, Democrats should never allow ourselves to get mired in such detail. We need to get past our need (as rational people) to defend with the facts and, instead, attack with the truth.

For instance, when a Democrat is confronted by Tweety or Scarborough about Clark’s “lie” on Meet the Press, he should not allow himself to get involved in the minutiae of the charge and instead should simply point out that it is well documented that the administration set out to tie Saddam to the WTC attack, without evidence, from the earliest hours of the event. Talk about the “unassailable” Bob Woodward’s account in Bush At War and Rumsfeld’s directive to “pull it all together” just 5 hours after the Pentagon was hit.

Of course, big shot Republicans put out the word all over the media about Saddam being behind 9/11. Everybody knows that. The TRUTH is that:

… Perle, Woolsey, Gaffney, and Kristol were using the same language in their media appearances on 9/11 and over the following weeks.

”This could not have been done without help of one or more governments,” Perle told The Washington Post on Sep. 11. ”Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don’t think that can be done without the assistance of large governments.”

Woolsey was more direct. ”(I)t’s not impossible that terrorist groups could work together with the government…the Iraqi government has been quite closely involved with a number of Sunni terrorist groups and — on some matters — has had direct contact with (Osama) bin Laden,” he told one anchorman in a series of at least half a dozen national television appearances on Sep. 11 and 12.

That same evening, Kristol echoed Woolsey on National Public Radio. ”I think Iraq is, actually, the big, unspoken sort of elephant in the room today. There’s a fair amount of evidence that Iraq has had very close associations with Osama bin Laden in the past, a lot of evidence that it had associations with the previous effort to destroy the World Trade Center (in 1993)”.

The “facts” in this matter are that Clark made an extemporaneous statement on television that has been widely interpreted incorrectly. He corrected it on the record. All of the Democratic candidates are going to do that from time to time; it is part of public speaking. But, using this minor bit of confusion to imply that he was untruthful or misleading is just another example of the Wurlitzer’s coordinated “dazzle ‘em with bullshit” attack strategy.

It is what killed Al Gore in the press last time and we simply have to stop letting them dictate the terms of the debate that way. One way to do that is to stop being defensive and stop miring ourselves in detail before the public. It makes us look geeky and weak next to the bellowing neanderthals. We must ignore their taunts and remind ourselves that going after our guy is calculated misdirection. We need to keep the audience looking at what we want them to see, and not let the other side direct the show.