Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I’m Sure It’s All Just A Happy Coincidence

Punditwatch posted the following exchange:

Both Kate O’Beirne of National Review, on Capital Gang, and Bill Kristol on Fox used almost identical language to describe a suddenly more hawkish sounding Colin Powell: “Colin Powell is now where Dick Cheney was last August, inspections won’t work, we cannot disarm Saddam Hussein through inspections.”

Ah, yes. Back in August, Cheney was ready to parachute into Iraq right at that moment, right?

And Powell led Junior from the darkness and persuaded him (with the help of other cool heads like James Baker and Henry Kissinger) to take the case to the United Nations. I cheered. At least we wouldn’t be casting aside international law and “going it alone.”

All Things Considered from September 13th:

GJELTEN: The US military official speaking on background says war planners in the Pentagon are basically making that same assumption. For military action to conclude by the end of February, preparations, of course, would have to begin well before that. Some senior commanders say as many as 200,000 US troops would need to be deployed to the region to carry out an Iraqi operation with a good chance of success. John Pike does the math.

Mr. PIKE: That would require military buildup of anywhere from two to three months before the ground campaign began, which would mean that American troops would have to start moving into Kuwait sometime around Thanksgiving.

Waddaya know? According to the Detroit Free Press on January 23rd with the headline:

U.S. firepower a growing force in Persian Gulf . Experts say troops total about 200,000

Cheney may have been “here” in August, but he knew they couldn’t make a move until February. We’ve patiently gone along with the UN inspections process and changed our harsh “regime change” language to “disarmament” for the 4 months it took to build up our forces in the region to the level required for an invasion. Colin Powell, the diplomat, at the most propitious moment possible suddenly become fed up with the UN and is “where Cheney was in August.” We are poised to invade in February.

Whodda thunk it?

David Niewart’s blog Orcinus is so good.

Rush, Newspeak and fascism: Part 1

If there was any question that Rush Limbaugh is the most dangerous demagogue in America, he may have erased it with his latest broadside, describing antiwar protesters as “fascists and anti-American.”

This is the latest step in the right-wing campaign to demonize opposition to President Bush’s questionable policies as “anti-American,” a campaign I’ve described previously. It is closely associated with attacks on multiculturalism. But Limbaugh takes it another step by associating liberals with Nazis and other fascist regimes

This is not the first time he has misused the term. He has referred at various times to “liberal compassion fascists,” and on other occasions has explained to his national audience that Nazis in fact were “socialists.” This is, of course, the kind of twisting of terminology that turns the meaning of a concept into its precise opposite — thereby nullifying its meaning and reality — that is the essence of Newspeak.

More at the link.

This is important. Limbaugh is not a joke and he isn’t an entertainer and he isn’t mainstream and he isn’t benign. He is a powerful demagogue and a high ranking political propagandist for the Republican party. He should be taken very seriously.

Check out Take Back The Media’s boycott. It’s certainly worth a try. MWO reports some progress.

What Was I Thinking?

I was chastised over in Atrios’ comments section for not providing the correction on the “Bush revives confederate wreath practice” story on my blog. I did, of course, but that wouldn’t have been enough in any case.

We left bloggers have been summarily marched to the wood shed for not adequately prostrating ourselves at the feet of George W Bush, indeed all Republicans, for spreading this shameful lie perpetrated by Time Magazine. It seems that we all owe George W. Bush an apology for ever believing such a thing and, even worse, for commenting on it.

I have given it a lot of thought and I agree that when someone attacks the character of someone in office based upon rumors, gossip and an unprofessional media, they owe it to that person to sincerely apologize when it turns out that such a thing is factually incorrect.

So, I apologize to George W. Bush for believing that he would revive a practice of sending a wreath to honor Robert E. Lee and posting a short comment about it. He did not do it and I hope that everyone realizes this and wipes the scurrilous accusation from their mind.

Now, I realize that this will cause a bandwidth crisis that could presage the end of the Internet as we know it, but there can be no logical consistency in requiring me to apologize for a post that linked to a Time article (to which I merely appended “Karl Rove makes Lee Atwater look like an amateur”) without also requiring that Republicans and the press apologize for 8 solid years of character assassination and smears against the Clinton administration. (And I would say that the Gores deserve a mea culpa too, for the lies perpetrated against them by the press and the GOP during campaign 2000.)

I do look forward to Rush Limbaugh and all of his imitators, the entire Barbizon School of Dyed Blond Former Prosecutors, the editorial board of the New York Times and the Washington Post, William Safire, Maureen Dowd and every other columnist, Lucianne Goldberg and her coven of hideous bitches, AND EVERY OTHER REPUBLICAN WHO SAID THAT CLINTON WAS A CRIMINAL, to now prostrate themselves at the feet of Bill and Hillary for the despicable, cruel and outrageous lies they spread from the years 1992 through the present.

If I’ve got to apologize publicly for posting one inaccurate article, the entire Republican establishment will be spending the rest of its natural life trying to find the time to eat and sleep in between confessions of guilt.

Better get started, Kids. I suggest that you begin with the false allegations of holding up Air Force One with a haircut, go on to the bogus accusations of influencing Beverly Bassett on Madison Guarantee (and ALL Whitewater related smears for that matter.) Don’t forget Vince Foster’s much investigated “murder,” through Safire’s “scoop” that Hillary was about to be indicted and just keep going until you hit Clinton’s illegitimate love child and the phony White House trashing story.

Once you are through with all that, then come back for the next round of apologies to Al Gore for the series of lies told about him during the campaign. (And you might want to send a couple over to your fellow Republican, John McCain, too.)

After all that, then maybe we can be considered even. I have apologized for the harm I did to George W. Bush by repeating an inaccurate story.

The ball is in your court now, fellas.

When Did Police Decide That Common Sense Is For Losers?

You know, if those in authority didn’t behave like robots and used just a tad of reason when dealing with the public, maybe we wouldn’t have to use the legal system to enforce common decency.

Via Skimble

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) – A woman with a brain tumor filed a lawsuit against Walgreens Advance Care Inc., saying when she arrived to pick up her painkiller prescription one day, a pharmacist had her arrested.

In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Pierce County Superior Court, Shannon O’Brien, 35, said she went to the drive-up window at a Walgreen Drug Store two blocks from her home last July 7. The pharmacist on duty thought she had faked her Percocet prescription and called police, the lawsuit stated.

“I was in hysterics – crying, very upset and very embarrassed,” O’Brien told The Associated Press on Thursday. “They could have checked my records. I’ve had the same medicine every month.”

[…]

O’Brien, who was first diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1994, said she told the officer who handcuffed her that he could call her doctor or her nurse to verify the prescription.

“I told him I had brain cancer, and I had a medical information card inside my wallet,” she said. “It didn’t matter to him. He didn’t believe anything I was telling him.”

As Skimble says, “American life gets more humiliating by the day.”

I’m sure Toe-art Reform will put this little whiner in her place. A real American would be glad to get arrested and hauled off to jail if it helped fight the drug war, brain cancer or not.

California GOP twists itself into a big ole Pretzel

“I’m for it, with reservations” Or is it, “I’m against it, for now?” Whatever.

MyDD

posts about the rhetorical fight being waged between Howard Dean and John Kerry over the Iraq resolution. I’m with Dean on this. Kerry’s Iraq vote was disasterous, and all the more so because he didn’t have to do it. He says he’ll hold Bush’s feet to the fire, but unfortunately, he has absolutely no power to do that so it sounds like so much weak political bullshit. Which it is.

The Red Staters who were facing shameful scumbags like Saxby Chambliss last November could be forgiven. But it was important to rank and file Democrats that their leaders (none of whom were facing tough re-election battles) understood how important this issue was to them and that they take a stand.

Every last Democratic presidential hopeful in the Senate took a dive.

It was a cowardly CYA-for-the-future-because-the-big-bad-Republicans-will-be-mean vote that took the starch right out of the Democratic base who made thousands of calls and wrote thousands of letters veritably begging the leading Dems to hold tough on this issue. Any Democratic electoral momentum leading up to the election hit a brick wall when they caved on the issue.

And we can thank the vaunted political strategists of Carville, Shrum and Greenberg for this incredible miscalculation:

According to the memo, the most effective argument for Democrats who oppose the war is one which “affirms one’s commitment to wage the war against terrorism, including getting rid of Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but that questions the rush to war; it calls on the U.S. to seek U.N. and international support, others sharing costs and making sure we will achieve greater stability.”

Nearly as strong, the memo argues, is explaining a no vote as a no “for now,” and “stressing the need to go to the UN and try to get the inspectors back into Iraq and work to get the support of our allies.”

That position, the memo notes, is strongest by far with “independents and with men (where the issue has more salience.)”

The least effective argument?

“Outright opposition to the war against Iraq and to the concept of regime change, finishing with the phrase, ‘it is the wrong thing to do,’ produces a weak response,” they write.

Driving the point home, the memo points out that the poll found that a Democrat who opposes the war who simply argues that the policy is wrong loses by 15 points (39 percent to 54 percent) to a Republican who says he or she “trusts Bush to do this right.”

Yeah. The politician who sounds the most like he’s trying to have it both ways is always a big winner.

Carville,Greenberg and Shrum’s post mortem of the election said:

In the end, 39 percent of the actual voters self-identified as Republicans, 3 percent more than in 2000 and 1998. The Democratic portion fell to 35 percent (down from 39 percent in 2000 and 37 percent in 1998). That alone could more than account for the shift witnessed at the polls. There was an even bigger increase in self-identified conservatives in the elector-ate, 41 percent, compared to approximately 30 percent two and four years ago.

How surprising.

Now, we are stuck with this absurd position of having to defend giving Junior a blank check while pretending that we are “influencing” the debate. And this happened, in my opinion, largely because some of the Democratic base was depressed by the craven behavior of its Senate leaders on the grave issue of whether to go to war.

I love Carville on Crossfire. He seems like a great guy. But, I have to wonder when the last time these three mythical Democratic strategists actually won any elections.

I lay the loss of the last one at their feet.

The James Earl Ray Historical Society Is Upset

Josh Marshall has too much class to mention it to this ignorant cretin, but he has a PhD in …. History.

God And Man At UM

OOOOh. Julia eviscerates William B. Fuckley.

And finds an inconvenient little factoid that has gone missing from the press accounts of the case.

What he didn’t add, from the same article in the Wall Street Journal he’s quoting without attribution:

Sons and daughters of graduates make up 10% to 15% of students at most Ivy League schools and enjoy sharply higher rates of acceptance. Harvard accepts 40% of legacy applicants, compared with an 11% overall acceptance rate. Princeton took 35% of alumni children who applied last year, and 11% of overall applicants. The University of Pennsylvania accepts 41% of legacy applicants, compared with 21% overall.

At Notre Dame, about 23% of all students are children of graduates.

…

Although universities have always paid special attention to their alumni, the legacy preference was formalized early last century, in some cases partly to limit enrollment of Jews. Today, the practice often has that effect on other groups. At the University of Virginia, 91% of legacy applicants accepted on an early-decision basis for next fall are white; 1.6% are black, 0.5% are Hispanic, and 1.6% are Asian. Among applicants with no alumni parents, the pool of those accepted is more diverse: 73% white, 5.6% black, 9.3% Asian and 3.5% Hispanic.

and this woodnote wild from the Michigan case:

One of those students, Patrick Hamacher, was turned down by Michigan despite having a legacy preference. An earlier version of Michigan’s legacy preference had boosted his 2.9 high-school grade-point average to 3 for purposes of considering him. The suit that he and co-plaintiff Jennifer Gratz filed asks for the elimination of race as a factor in admissions at the university. But Mr. Hamacher says he actually doesn’t think Michigan should consider either race or parentage in its admissions. He is now a graduate of another university, Michigan State.

Julia says:

So the student who’s suing was willing to get in ahead of more qualified applicants. Funny we didn’t hear that earlier…

The average SAT of legacies admitted at Harvard is two points lower than that of the average student admitted which number includes the legacies?

Take out the legacy scores from the average and tell me how the average legacy stacks up to that number.

Better yet, let’s talk mean scores.

Better yet, how about Mr. Buckley go back to the Dartmouth Review where his kind of reasoning is more at home.

He has always been a liar. Now, he has virtually everything he’s ever wanted but he just can’t stop himself. It’s embedded in the DNA.

UPDATE: Ampersand has a very instructive analysis about how many and which whites are rejected because of affirmative action.

Honor and Integrity

Kevin Drum says:

Let’s recap: When Democrats controlled the Senate and Bush and Reagan were president, they were nice guys and allowed judicial nominations to proceed with only one blue slip.

When Republicans took over the Senate and Clinton was president, Republicans played hardball and demanded two blue slips.

When Bush became president, they suddenly decided that those nice Democrats were right after all: one blue slip should be enough.

Don’t you just love principled conservatives?

I just love ’em.

And, FWIW, I’ve been following the Lott study story mostly on Kevin’s great site and I just have to say that it’s pretty obvious that this guy is fucked up on a grand scale. Kevin says:

And don’t forget: Lott originally sourced the 98% number to someone else and then changed his mind only in 1999 when it turned out that he had misinterpreted the survey results he was using. He had never mentioned doing a survey of his own until then. What’s more, Lott’s first reference to the 98% number was in early 1997, well before his survey could have been finished.

That does it for me. cred-i-bil-i-ty-gap

So, what are the gun guys saying about all this? Are we demanding that they repudiate everything they’ve ever said on the issue and crawl on their bellies to every gun control advocate they know and beg for forgiveness and pledge to tell all the world how wrong, wrong, wrong they are? I certainly hope so….

Via Hesiod:

South Korean Leader Criticizes Bush Approach

“We are looking for some peaceful way of solving this through dialogue,” the presidential spokesman said.

Kim Dae Jung reiterated that message in remarks at a luncheon today, in which he took an indirect swipe at President Bush’s refusal to negotiate with the North Korean leader.

“Sometimes we need to talk to the other party, even if we dislike the other party,” he said, repeating versions of the phrase three times. “There’s no other way but to engage North Korea in dialogue. It’s reality whether we like it or not.”

The barbs were aimed at President Bush’s harsh personal rhetoric directed at the North Korean leader, which many in Kim’s administration feel have helped create the current crisis. Bush began his administration by bluntly declaring he did not trust the North Korean dictator, and recently was quoted by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward saying, “I loathe Kim Jong Il”– personal affronts that have great weight in Asian cultures.

(Another instance of Cowboy Bob’s lack of experience and intellectual development leading him to unnecessarily personalize a policy dispute with the most paranoid, proud despot on the planet. Calling an Asian leader names is perhaps the most ignorant and disrespectful thing this moron has done. And he did it at a time when Kim Jong Il was trying to re-establish relations with its mortal enemy, Japan, and its estranged brother, South Korea. Calling him a pygmy and saying he loathed him at that moment was akin to pissing on his head in public.

And, you don’t have to be a career diplomat to know this. You only have to have read something other than the “Hungry Caterpillar” and watched “Combat” re-runs after school.)

In his State of the Union address last January, Bush lambasted North Korea as part of an “axis of evil.” Many South Koreans resented that, feeling it was a gratuitous remark that torpedoed South Korea’s “sunshine policy” and scuttled efforts to coax North Korea out of its isolation and hostility.

As Hesiod says, “Is there ANYONE left on the rest of the planet who supports President Bush?”

He also points out:

The Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq, and the increasing reluctance/opposition from many countries to our machinations, brings to mind the old Groucho Marx joke: “I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member.”

Why do I say that? Because, Bush is very good at lining up oppressive, ant-democratic regimes to his cause. But he’s terrible at getting Democratic nations to follow his lead with respect to Iraq. The reason is…public opinion. The vast majority of people OUTSIDE the United States don’t want a war with Iraq. Hell…it’s even unpopular HERE!

The Supreme Irony is…one of the very reason Bush claims he wants “regime change” in Iraq: to advance human rights and democracy, the the very thing that could undermine his whole effort.

The people of the world just do not want this war.

This is just one more example of the undemocratic streak that runs through the modern Republican Party. Creeping fas…..