Category: Uncategorized

That’s the word for Russ Feingold’s performance in the lion’s den of Fox News Sunday earlier today. Here are some other words: forceful, strong, clear, commanding, ethical. He destroyed Chris Wallace’s barrage of right-wing talking points on the censure, one by one.

This isn’t about spying on terrorists. It’s about whether we will require the President to act within the law.

I’m desperately hoping that someone like Crooks & Liars puts up video of Feingold’s appearance, so I can link to it. If this man isn’t the country’s next President, we will all be the poorer for it.

I love the new rhetoric of the right that the only thing the President has done wrong in Iraq is he’s not good enough at “selling the war.”

Selling the war. Hmmm. To me, Iraq isn’t a used car, or a set of encyclopedias. It’s a generational commitment to expend potentially unlimited amounts American blood and treasure in order to install democracy in the Middle East at the point of a gun. (It used to be about protecting America, but that’s *so* 2003.)

I don’t think that the American people should have to be “sold” on a war. The case should be so clear, so obvious that no “selling” should be involved. A war should be scuba equipment in the ocean, not a Hummer in the suburbs.

People who live in America are Americans. People who live in England are English. People who live in France are French.

But people who live in Holland are Dutch.

What’s up with that?

When George W. Bush took office, the national surplus was $236 billion.

After six years of Republican control, the national debt is now $400 billion.

Recently, Congress approved raising our debt ceiling (think of it like filling out all those pre-approved credit card apps that come in the mail – all at once) to $9 trillion. According to the London Times, that amount of money would buy you 28 full-size replicas of the Eiffel Tower – in pure gold. (Or 9,000 Buckingham Palaces. Presumably, not in gold.)

Thanks to Democratic Underground, which basically wrote this post for me. But I thought it was too good not to share.

Well, now that RedState founder Ben Domenech has been forced to resign from his job as the WashingtonPost.com’s resident conservative blogger because of a rather extensive history of plagiarism, the knives are out as usual. This is my favorite line from a commenter:

I repeat: Should the entire American Left fall over dead tomorrow, I would rejoice, and order pizza to celebrate. They are not my countrymen; they are animals who happen to walk upright and make noises that approximate speech. They are below human. I look forward to seeing each and every one in Hell.

You first, buddy.

Now that the “blame the media” meme is back at full strength, thanks to people like Laura Ingraham demanding that the Today Show broadcast footage of smiling Iraqi children, I thought it would be a good time to reprint something written back in June 2004 by Adam Blust on his now-defunct weblog, Words Mean Things.

The Iraq War: A Play in One Act

RIGHT: That hornet’s nest is interfering with my enjoyment of our tree. Let’s poke it and get all those hornets out.

LEFT: What, are you crazy?

RIGHT: No, it’s a great plan. I have this giant stick and I’m not using it at all. Here goes!

[frenzied poking]

[swarm of hornets emerge, stinging both Right and Left]

RIGHT: Damn you, Left! You didn’t help me poke! This is all your fault.

Finis.

It was fun on “Fox News Sunday” this week to watch Brit Hume skate close to a stroke when Juan Williams had the temerity to suggest that The Great and Powerful Bush might have, in fact, broken the law by doing warrantless wiretaps. (At least this time Hume didn’t suggest, as he did in a recent FNS dustup, that Williams be “hosed down.” Nice, Brit. Fucker.)

Well, for all those still clinging to “we need to investigate before we determine whether Bush broke the law,” as usual my new hero Glenn Greenwald breaks it down:

1. FISA requires warrants.
2. Bush didn’t get warrants.

Neither of those facts are in dispute.

“An investigation cannot answer the question as to whether U.S. Senators ought to take a stand against deliberate and ongoing lawbreaking by a President. Only U.S. Senators can answer that question, and they already have all the facts that are relevant to that question already before them. Claiming that they need further ‘investigation’ before taking a position is nothing short of an abdication of their responsibilities, an obvious tactic for avoiding the question of whether they oppose lawbreaking by the President.”

February 24, 2001: “Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capacity with respect to weapons of mass destruction,” says Secretary of State Colin Powell. “He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”

July 29, 2001: “We are able to keep [Saddam’s] arms from him,” NSC advisor Rice tells the media. “His military forces have not been rebuilt.”

Now that we’re entering the fourth year of the war in Iraq, isn’t it tragic and sick how truthful and accurate those statements were?

More compare and contrast:

“Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”
-President George W. Bush, March 2002

“To assume I wanted war is flat wrong, with due respect. No president wants war. It’s simply not true.”
-President George W. Bush, March 21, 2006

Senate to legalize Watergate break-in

While stuff like this is still funny and clever, at this point reading it is like laughing while hitting my elbow against the table edge and getting that nerve-twinge pain.

My position all along, despite the braying from people like Dean Esmay, was not that the President lied about Iraq. My position was that he didn’t know whether what he was saying was true or not, and didn’t care. This applies to the “16 words,” the mushroom cloud, the aluminum tubes, everything. (Of course, this applies to the domestic spying, as well. He didn’t know whether what he was doing was legal, and didn’t care.) In every instance, it sounded good, and it furthered his agenda. That’s all that mattered.

A perfect example of this was the President’s recent assertion that roadside bomb IEDs in Iraq were coming from Iran. The funny thing was, when reporters asked Gen. Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, about this, he admitted that they have no proof of this. But it sounds good, and in fact, Bush’s assertion received a lot more press, even after Pace’s denial, than the denial. Examples like this are legion in the last four years. Remember Condi Rice’s “smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud”? Yeah. Same thing. Sounds good, gets people riled up, and the actual truth is pretty much irrelevant.

“I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.”
-Abraham Lincoln