Big Hair
Just looking at MSNBC and wondering when Bay Buchanan decided to get a Farrah do.
It’s very disturbing. Very.
"what digby sez..."
Big Hair
Just looking at MSNBC and wondering when Bay Buchanan decided to get a Farrah do.
It’s very disturbing. Very.
We All Knew This Was Next, Didn’t We?
From TBOGG
“The proposals, obtained by The Washington Post, are the first indication of the Bush administration’s plans for changing Title IX, which is widely credited with increasing female participation in collegiate sports over the past three decades.”
TBOGG Says:
Anyone think that the Soccer Mom’s won’t notice this? I guess Bush is counting on a boost from the all-important “Wrestling Moms”…see Catfight, below.
Maybe if the universities weren’t paying Bobby Bowden, Mike Krzyzewski, Bob Stoop, and Roy Williams millions of dollars to coach their respective sports, the schools would have enough money to fund wrestling, swimming, and volleyball for men. But that will never happen.
Golly, Tom. Haven’t you heard? 64% of Americans think there should be no preferences in college admissions, even for athletics. They’d be willing to give up their winning teams in the interest of a true academic meritocracy. So, you just know they’ll be willing to give up those winning coaches’ huge salaries in order to preserve fairness for all God’s children, red or yellow, black or white AND girl or boy.
Sure they will.
Update: Kevin at Lean Left makes an excellent point:
So, points for race among points for other things is a quota, but setting a minimum number for athletics is not?
Well…no….it’s completely different because Bush made his quota statement on a Thursday and this will come out on a Monday. Apples and oranges.
The Major Problem Is Bush the Cowboy
This is why you don’t allow an unqualified brand name in a suit be president of the most powerful country in the world. He thinks he’s cute but he is actually confusing and unnecessarily provocative.
To European ears, the president’s language is far too blunt, and he has been far too quick to cast the debate about how to separate Saddam Hussein from his weapons of mass destruction in black-and-white certainties, officials in Paris and Berlin say. They add that his confrontational approach, his impatience with the inspections and even his habit of finger pointing as he speaks undermine the possibility of common strategy against Saddam Hussein.
No kidding. I’m California born and bred and I find his language embarrassingly puerile and simple-minded (although I realize that this makes me something more akin to French than American, what with my diet of brie and cheese and all.) That finger pointing drives me up a wall, too. His default tone is a scold. “Ah tole the Murican people they were gonna half tah be patient, an Ah MEANT it!”
“Much of it is the way he talks, this provocative manner, the jabbing of his finger at you,” said Hans-Ulrich Klose, the vice chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the German Parliament. “It’s Texas, a culture that is unfamiliar to Germans. And it’s the religious tenor of his arguments.”
It’s not Texas. It’s stupid. There are millions of smart Texans. He isn’t one of them.
When Bush is on CNN, if you close your eyes you would believe you are listening to an inarticulate, bumbling Jimmy Swaggert instead of a world leader. His religiosity has all the sincerity of Elmer Gantry. But, it’s one of the only ways he knows how to speak. Lame preacher. Angry scold.
Over the past several months, as Mr. Bush has mounted his argument for forcing Iraq to disarm, the president himself has once again become the issue here. In interviews in three capitals over the past week, diplomats, politicians and analysts said they believed relations between the United States and two of its most crucial allies — Germany and France — were at their lowest point since the end of the cold war.
As the White House was quick to argue today, the American president has friends and admirers among the leading politicians in several Western European countries, starting with Britain, Italy and Spain, and spreading east to Poland.
Not starting. Ending. And there is going to be some tension on those counts as more and more citizens of those countries take to the streets. Unlike the US, when the citizens of Eupopean countries march in huge numbers, the press and the government actually notice.
It is no wonder, Mr. Bush’s foreign policy aides say, that he has redrawn his mental map of America’s alliances, and that Paris and Berlin have been placed in the deep freeze for failing his loyalty tests.
His loyalty tests. His personal loyalty tests. This is all that matters. It’s all about Him. They are supposed to do what he tells them to do. He’s the Commander in chief. Of everybody.
An American diplomat trying to keep European objections from delaying Mr. Bush’s timetable for disarming Iraq said he heard similar complaints all the time.
“Much of it is the way he talks, the rhetoric, the religiosity,” he said of Mr. Bush. “It reminds them of what drove them crazy about Reagan. It reminds them of what they miss about Clinton. All the stereotypes we thought we had banished for good after Sept. 11 — the cowboy imagery, in particular — it’s all back.”
Reagan was Aristotle compared to this little boy. He had many, many years of experience making speeches and talking politics. He could articulate what he believed. And he could be an utterly charming personality even if you hated his policies.
Clinton actually had the goods. He had a politicians’ gift for drawing people to him. But, he also had a lively and nimble mind that could flexibly adapt to situations and people. He knew what he was talking about and that gave other countries’ leaders confidence in him. (They were unconcerned with his cock because, well, Europeans know that genitalia is common to all creatures on the planet. It doesn’t make them giggle like schoolgirls or recoil in shock.)
Junior is callow, unschooled, unpredictable and tempermentally mean. His good-ole boy persona is a phony mask for his insecurity. He makes thinking people nervous because he is so obviously in over his head.
He has a credibility gap as wide as the Grand Canyon and his rhetoric is so unpredictable and incoherant that they simply cannot trust what this government says.
From the French Foreign Ministry to the chancellor’s office in Berlin, there is broad acknowledgement that the breach between the United States and its traditional allies in Western Europe has gone beyond the friction that has long been a staple of French-American relations or the misunderstandings that have grown since the cold-war ended.
Senior officials insisted in interviews that in France and Germany Mr. Bush had not made the case that Iraq posed a more imminent threat than, say, Al Qaeda.
One French official argued that the American military’s failure to hunt down Osama bin Laden and other members of Al Qaeda’s top command had led Mr. Bush to search for “easier but less important prey.”
That is only partly true. He was manipulated by the people in his administration who wanted to go into Iraq before 9/11 and cynically used that tragedy to justify what they were planning to do anyway.
And it is wrong to say that he is not completely on top of the Al Qaeda situation. Why, just today he made the bold and unprecedented statement that we have Al Qaeda “on the run” and that we’ve “disrupted their operations,” something I don’t think we’ve heard before. I believe he also mentioned something very intriguing about how the terrorists “live in caves” and we are going to “rout them out.” Very interesting new developments on that front.
“Terrorists are a hundred times more likely to obtain a weapon of mass destruction from Pakistan than from Iraq,” one senior European official said, not permitting a reporter to identify even his nationality because tensions with Washington are so high. “North Korea is far more likely to sell whatever it’s got. But can we say this in public? Can we have a real debate about priorities? Not with George Bush.”
No, you cannot have a debate in public if it challenges the omnipotence of our great and good leader George W. Bush. It is treasonous for Americans and it is disloyal for world leaders. He TOLD the world what he was gonna do, an he MEANT it!
This sense that many European officials have of dealing with an American president who makes up his mind and then will accept no argument is a central element in the current friction.
[…]
Yeah. It bugs the hell out of over 50% of Americans, too.
In all seriousness, this is a real problem. Say what you will about the Europeans, after 9/11 they were backing us 100%. They are our very closest allies politically, culturally and economically , most especially on the threat of Islamic terrorism. We have worked hand in glove for over 50 years to establish international institutions and a set of norms to govern civilized behavior in the era of nuclear weapons and an increasingly interdependent world.
It is truly outrageous that Cowboy Bob and his band of frustrated middle aged warriors have so little regard for these long standing alliances. They seem determined to destroy every single shred of goodwill we have built up over the last half century the same way they destroyed the post 9/11 goodwill in a matter of months.
I fear that the Strangelove elements in this administration suffer from a feeling of impotence because they did not receive the victory parades and heroic adulation they felt they were entitled to for zealously fighting the cold war and defeating communism.
Containment sucks. Nobody ever says “uncle.” Our allies don’t lay wreaths of gratitude at our feet. The anti-communists don’t get any credit for keeping the heat on. The chickenhawks are frustrated.
So, they bought themselves a nasty little sock-puppet and are going to seize what they think they deserve. They want to be worshipped for being right.
…damned liberal media
Demosthenes wonders when the US became the Imperial Rulers of the world
Perhaps I missed the memo.. when exactly did the Security Council and the U.N. itself become something that needed to be judged? Where this comes from is pretty obvious; it’s a way of reinforcing that ridiculous line that Bush was pushing at the U.N. that it is the legitimacy of the U.N. that is in question, not the American invasion of Iraq. This is absurd, of course: the United States neither has the right, nor the authority, nor even the ability to objectively judge the U.N., and attempts to do so should be (and yet unfortunately have not been) roundly and thoroughly condemned by those outside the United States who do not agree that American exceptionalism is some sort of carte blanche. Instead we have a British minister acting as if the invasion of Iraq was something upon which the U.N. should or even could be judged. That begs the question; the whole point of gaining U.N. approval is not to grant legitimacy or deny legitimacy to the U.N. (which gains its legitimacy from the consent of its signatory states, consent that the United States cannot take away) but to decide whether or not the U.N. decides the invasion itself is legitimate under international law
“There is no such thing as the United Nations”
John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security
William B. Fuckley can still make the most officious prick sound like a good ole’ boy. George Will can’t shine his shoes.
Only 6 weeks ago the headlines said:
“White House Claims Election Is Broad Mandate”
My, how the mighty have fallen.
Nearly 50 percent of the public expressed disapproval of how Mr. Bush was handling the economy, while 41 percent expressed disapproval of his management of foreign policy, which has been the foundation of his extraordinarily high levels of support since Sept. 11. Those disapproval figures are the highest they have been since Mr. Bush took office.
Half of all respondents said Mr. Bush did not share their priorities for the country, an increase of 14 points from when the question was asked a year ago. That is a question pollsters watch closely to measure potential vulnerabilities of a candidate.
[…]
A majority of the poll’s respondents — including 49 percent of Republicans — said reducing the deficit would be more likely to revive the economy than would cutting taxes, the course pressed by Mr. Bush. The White House announced last week that the budget deficit for next year would reach at least $300 billion.
Finally, 63 percent said things were going worse in the country that they were five years ago.
[…]
Although Mr. Bush has signaled that he is prepared to lead a war against Iraq without the support of the Security Council, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they wanted him to try to find a diplomatic solution to the Iraq situation, while 31 percent said the United States should resort to military force. Even so, 64 percent said they approved of the United States taking military action to oust Saddam Hussein, while 30 percent said they disapproved.
[…]
The poll found that 54 percent of respondents said affirmative action in hiring, promoting and college admissions should be continued, while 37 percent said it should be abolished. Along those lines, the respondents said they expected Mr. Bush to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will vote to make abortion illegal, but that stance was not shared by a majority of respondents.
So far, at least, Mr. Bush does not appear to have persuaded the nation that the way to repair the economy is a new round of tax cuts, or that the cuts he has proposed would not favor the wealthy.
And 58 percent of respondents said that Mr. Bush’s policies favor the rich, compared with 10 percent who said they favored the middle class. In addition, 26 percent said they treated everyone the same and 1 percent said they favored the poor. Two-thirds of respondents said big business had too much influence on this White House.
The poll pointed to some vulnerabilities in what has been Mr. Bush’s strong suit, foreign policy and the war on terrorism. By 55 percent to 40 percent, Americans said the administration was reacting to events as they occurred abroad rather than having a clear foreign policy plan.
[…]
Slightly more than half of the respondents said the United States was less respected in the world today than it was two years ago, when Mr. Bush took office, while one-third said relations with Europe had worsened. And while the public said they viewed Iraq as a bigger threat to world peace than North Korea, reflecting the White House view, respondents named Al Qaeda as the biggest threat of all.
The poll also suggested some concern about what the White House has done to forestall future domestic terrorist attacks. Just over 40 percent said Mr. Bush had a clear plan for fighting terrorism, while 53 percent said he was reacting to events.
Fifty-two percent said they believed the government had done “all it could be reasonably expected to do” to protect the country from future terrorist attacks. But 45 percent said it could have done more.
Now, that’s a mandate, my friends.
Oh, What Does He Know?
“President Bush has a vision that the U.S. should be the first to strike and will never be militarily challenged again,” Clark said. “It’s an incomplete vision. Those of us who have fought in wars know you don’t make friends when you use weapons.”
[…]
Clark said hatred toward the United States may have originated in the 1980s with the end of the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
“We seized the opportunity and took advantage of free trade and open markets,” Clark said. “We built tremendous prosperity, but we didn’t understand the risks we were taking over our economy, our environment and our lives.”
Clark said American Muslims who believe in peace and tolerance should be encouraged to help persuade extremists that American democracy does not threaten their way of life.
Clark commended the president’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks and the war on terrorism that followed. But, he said, the United States responded out of fear, which is foreign to Americans.
Clark said America’s mission in Iraq should include the best interest of all nations.
“When you use force and you talk about using force, it should be used as your last, last, last resort,” Clark said. “You have to use it with a lot of prayer because a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt.”
I continue to be impressed with Wesley Clark. It’s difficult to assess when I don’t know his positions of a wide variety of issues, but he sounds eminently reasonable to me on issues of war and peace. All things being equal, I think he would be a dynamite addition to the ticket.
Via Blah3: Thug Cabal’s Final Strategy: Call out the entire WORLD!!!
I don’t really think that’s overstated. They keep stating their case, but they haven’t made it. You can smell the desperation.
This is because they have what is called a “credibility gap.” Remember that? It’s what happens when an administration repeatedly lies, changes rhetoric but not goals and basically treats the public as if they are as stupid as President George W. Bush.
Very few voters are as stupid as George W. Bush.
Ahead Of The Curve
That damned LA Times is reading my blog again. That Greatest-Generation-is-against-the war-thing is sooo early January.