Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Can You Say Intellectually Inconsistent?

Avedon Carol Says:

[…]

And given the Bush Family Empire’s performance in America, just how seriously can we take their occasional flights of fancy about creating democracy in Iraq? They are speaking openly of shifting the burdens of taxation almost entirely onto those who must get up every day and work for a living, and even those who cannot make a living, and relieving the rich of any such obligations to society. They speak openly of removing whatever protections America’s working people have against unsafe conditions, fraud, and broken contracts so that the wealthiest and most powerful can treat us virtually as slaves – only without the obligation to feed and house us. The administration itself is comporting itself as if it has a divine right of monarchy, and the changes it is effecting in our laws and official culture really do parallel those of the early Third Reich. If these people are so happy to accept – promote, in fact – such measures in the United States, what makes you think they have any real resistance to the idea of tyrannical leadership in Iraq? Certainly their past (and, for that matter, continuing) history in the area doesn’t lend credence to their fidelity to the values of liberty for the people, in Iraq or anywhere else.

[…]

Bravo.

Aside from wondering why keeping Saddam in a box, even with sanctions, isn’t better than dropping a payload equal to the firebombing of Tokyo on a civilian population, aside from knowing an explosion of terrorism is likely to result from the sight of a massive US army on the ground in the mid-east at this most dangerous moment, aside from being fully aware that the planning for this invasion has been underway for more than a decade undergirded by the same arguments of imminent danger that have not come to fruition, and aside from the fact that the administration has openly and shamelessly cast itself as Ariel Sharon’s kindred spirit at a time when such a declaration of solidarity is recklessly stupid…

Aside from all that, the main reason that I cannot support any kind of quasi-unilateral pre-emptive or preventive war is that I am 100% certain that the people who are agitating the strongest for it are hypocritical, incompetent, myopic, twistedly idealistic, mendacious and psychologically crippled.

I think it can wait for another 2 years until smarter, saner people can be put in charge of running the world. I’ll support freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny if somebody else is doing the freeing. These guys are far more likely to throw them out of the frying pan directly into the fire. For the sake of the Iraqi people and the people of the world, these people must not be allowed to play with matches.

War Planners Speak of the Risks

NY Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 — Senior Bush administration officials are for the first time openly discussing a subject they have sidestepped during the buildup of forces around Iraq: what could go wrong, and not only during an attack but also in the aftermath of an invasion.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has a four- to five-page, typewritten catalog of risks that senior aides say he keeps in his desk drawer. He refers to it constantly, updating it with his own ideas and suggestions from senior military commanders, and discussing it with President Bush.

A top advisor to the Secretary of Defense told the NY Times that Mr Rumsfeld’s discussions with the President have been frank but mostly positive. The Secretary is quoted as saying, “Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.”

The advisor stressed that despite the hard choices facing the president that Mr Rumsfeld nonetheless was optimistic that US forces could pacify the Iraqi troops and people in a short time, while “keeping a lid” on terrorist recruitment and possible reprisals at home. Still, he was honest in his assessment that the American people would have to accept some vulnerability to terrorist attacks in the coming days. He reportedly told the President, “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks.”

Vice-president Dick Cheney, who has taken the lead in preparations for possible biological or chemical attacks in here United States was reported to have insisted upon the smallpox vaccination program for all “first line” emergency workers. According to administration sources, however, his concerns are incresingly focused on possible contamination of the water supply.

At a meeting of The National Academy of Creationist Scientists and Christian Astrologers in January, Cheney was quoted as saying, “It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Terrorist works.” The orange alert of last week was said by sources in the Office of Homeland Security to have been put in place by Cheney himself when he lost control of his precious bodily fluids during Shania Twain’s half time appearance at the Super Bowl.

More

Whoopsie Daisy

Connie Chung just mouthed the words “Oh Shit” after mangling the word glucose. Heh.

Speaking of bad language …. My favorite protest signs were:

Stop Mad Cowboy Disease

and

Dick + Bush = We’re Fucked

New Kidz

Welcome to a very good writer, Glen England at A Brooklyn Bridge.

And

Political Parrhesia a political blog with an interesting point of view.

Thanks to The Lefty Directory for including me.

Is It Time For Godwin’s Law To Be Repealed?

The Baltimore Sun reports on Ashcroft and his cadre of Federalist ideologues. As with the foreign policy team, the Justice Department is riddled with a bunch of right wing radicals who would be more at home in Pinochet’s Chile that the world’s oldest democracy.

[…]

“In the Justice Department, one of the great tensions is always between the political appointees at the top and the career lawyers in the middle,” said Mark Graber, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. “This seems to be an administration where the political appointees are far more determined to set policies on more matters than usual.”

Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland law school, agrees: “From what I can gather, there is a tight circle around the attorney general. There is not a lot of vetting of ideas beyond that. A lot of career attorneys who have served the attorney general through a lot of different administrations have been shunted aside.”

[…]

I think what you have within the Justice Department is a small group of very bright, federalist society lawyers who are talking to each other and coming up with ideas that have a superficial attraction — military tribunals, detaining enemy combatants — while anybody practiced in the area will tell you this stuff accomplishes absolutely nothing,” Greenberg said. “It’s sort of like counterterrorism by headline rather than counterterrorism by a scientific analysis of what law enforcement is all about.”

Others are concerned about the damage that Ashcroft-sponsored measures, passed under the guise of fighting terrorism, could do to civil liberties. The first Patriot Act, which saw little opposition in the weeks after Sept. 11, lessened restrictions on wiretaps and allowed long-term detention of material witnesses without charges. The draft of the second measure goes further in these areas.

[…]

According to the ACLU’s Nojeim, the act “would encourage police spying on political and religious activities, allow the government to wiretap without first going to court and allow it to more readily strip Americans of their citizenship, rendering them stateless in their own country.”

Said Warnken: “If you take this to its ultimate conclusion — and I am only being slightly flippant here — as long as we are under threat of terrorism you can literally say that the Bill of Rights is de facto repealed until we catch the last terrorist. And that won’t be until your great-grandchildren grow old.”

You know it’s quite difficult to contain the impulse to break Godwin’s Law when I read things like this. There is an aggressive and radical global ambition, a total assumption of power in the hands of the executive, an overhaul of the legal system that blatently abrogates fundamental principles and an unprecedented cronyism between big business and government. All that is left is the internal “threat” who must be eradicated.

Oh wait. There is one.

“There are spooky parallels between the way Hussein and American liberals campaign and try to get support. Saddam Hussein is obviously a student of American liberal Democrat politics and Stalin at the same time.”

The Mouth That Roared Redux

Atrios links to a story in Ha’aretz in which John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, helpfully (to Osama bin Laden) tells the world that the US will be going in to Syria and Iran next.

If anyone would like to read a little bit more about this fine diplomat and master of subtlety, you can read my post about this putz from last month. This is another one of those wonderful “grown ups” who can’t shut his pie-hole no matter how dangerous, ill-timed or counterproductive — even to his own cause — it is. He is a fucking menace.

His most memorable quote?

“There is no such thing as the UN”

His political mentor?

Jesse Helms.

Need I say more?

I didn’t think so

“I don’t have to have probable cause. The police have to have probable cause.”

Check out Wis[s]e Words on the unbelievable story of the 19 year old kid who got 26 years in jail for selling marijuana.

See, Martin lives in a civilized country, Holland, where things like this make us look like a thundering hoard of Visigoths. It ain’t easy being Murican these days….

Martin also, as I’m sure you know, runs Progressive Gold

Hahahahahahaha

La Noonan:

She was in a well-tailored dove-gray wool suit, collarless and double-breasted, with a knee-length skirt, dark-gray heels and pearl earrings. Her makeup had been applied with some art, her auburn hair was subtly highlighted, and her nails were professionally manicured, with red-orange nail polish. I mention this because sometimes grooming is a statement. Mrs. Bush said: Don’t worry too much, we’ll all be fine; if I didn’t know this I wouldn’t have been able to put on my eyeliner in such a straight line. Good grooming and a cheerful demeanor are sometimes heroic.

TBOGG:

Using this as a barometer, the next time Laura Bush shows up in public with uncombed hair, in a housecoat, with a scotch in one hand and a cigarette hanging off her lip….kiss your ass goodbye.

I hear much of people’s calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.

Daniel Dafoe

Whether or not you believe in the death penalty, I think it’s fair to say that nobody believes in executing innocent people. There are those who think our judicial system makes it virtually impossible and, like our President, refuse to acknowledge that if prisoners have been found innocent as close to 48 hours before their execution then it is likely that innocent people have been executed. But even he is unlikely to admit that executing innocent people bears any relationship to justice (unless you are a 3 year old Iraqi, but that’s another post.)

So, there is absolutely no reason that everyone in this country shouldn’t support the Innocence Protection Act. which allows every prisoner the right to DNA testing, if applicable, after conviction. Now that it’s available, the concept of Justice requires that it be used.

Go to The Justice Project to find out what you can do to convince your elected representatives to be reasonable and rational and support this obviously just legislation.

Via Talk Left

Wow

If you don’t have time to slog the blogs, check out the handy dandy me-zine shortcut to the best of the blogs over on Sysiphus Shrugged.