Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself. We’re allowed to grow past that.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Consistently wrong since 2002

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

The frogs are rarely mistaken.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Second rate reporter says what?

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

Everybody saw this coming.

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Archives for July 2007

Credibility

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Greenwald has a good catch that deserves to be teased out just a bit more. Sen. Kit Bond:

While I agree that we had the wrong plan for three years, we now have the right one, and the right man to lead it.

Whoa. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds to me like Bond just said that for four years he and all of the other elected, media and online war boosters were completely wrong when they argued that everything was under control, we had a great plan. By Bond’s own admission the warhawks had no real basis for telling folks like me to just stop all the damn complaining and let the misunderstood geniuses on top do their job. The war critics had it right. By any normal measure that would mean that war critics, having correctly perceived the situation four years before he did, have credibility on the issue and the war boosters do not.

Good to know. So why does Kit Bond think that we should listen to him now?

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From the No Shit Department

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Madison Avenue charged the Pentagon close to half a million to tell them that people are less likely to assist you if you shoot them. Seriously:

In the advertising world, brand identity is everything. Volvo means safety. Colgate means clean. IPod means cool. But since the U.S. military invaded Iraq in 2003, its “show of force” brand has proved to have limited appeal to Iraqi consumers, according to a recent study commissioned by the U.S. military.

The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves “shaping” both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a brand identity that places what you are selling in a positive light, said clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus, the author of “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation.” The 211-page study, for which the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid the Rand Corp. $400,000, was released this week.

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In an urban insurgency, for example, civilians can help identify enemy infiltrators and otherwise assist U.S. forces. They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks, have their doors broken down or are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English. Cultural connections — seeking out the local head man when entering a neighborhood, looking someone in the eye when offering a friendly wave — are key.

Money well spent, no doubt. Just one question- where the hell is Karen Hughes? Wasn’t she supposed to have figured this shit out a couple years ago?

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Thank Goodness You Didn’t Go Nuclear

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Or you wouldn’t be able to be obstructionists:

This year Senate Republicans are threatening filibusters to block more legislation than ever before, a pattern that’s rooted in — and could increase — the pettiness and dysfunction in Congress.

The trend has been evolving for 30 years. The reasons behind it are too complex to pin on one party. But it has been especially pronounced since the Democrats’ razor-thin win in last year’s election, giving them effectively a 51-49 Senate majority, and the Republicans’ exile to the minority.

Seven months into the current two-year term, the Senate has held 42 “cloture” votes aimed at shutting off extended debate — filibusters, or sometimes only the threat of one — and moving to up-or-down votes on contested legislation. Under Senate rules that protect a minority’s right to debate, these votes require a 60-vote supermajority in the 100-member Senate.

Democrats have trouble mustering 60 votes; they’ve fallen short 22 times so far this year. That’s largely why they haven’t been able to deliver on their campaign promises.

By sinking a cloture vote this week, Republicans successfully blocked a Democratic bid to withdraw combat troops from Iraq by April, even though a 52-49 Senate majority voted to end debate.

This year Republicans also have blocked votes on immigration legislation, a no-confidence resolution for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and major legislation dealing with energy, labor rights and prescription drugs.

When you read this story, remember all the hysterical foot-stomping and wailing and gnashing and beating of breasts that took place in late 2004 and early 2005. It is merely more evidence of what I think that the most breathtaking thing about the pigheadedness of the GOP the past few years- how exceptionally short-sighted they are on everything. And I mean everything. Former proponents of the nuclear option will lamely attempt to claim that it only would have applied to the filibustering of judges- you and I know better. Regardless, over and over and over again, the Republicans have acted in a manner that may provide some sort of marginal electoral or political gain in the short-term (Schiavo, anyone?), but damages them and the country in the long term.

If you don’t think the next Democratic President is going to love the Imperial Presidency Bush and Cheney are trying to construct, aided and abetted by a subservient and supine minority (formerly a majority- think that is a coincidence) in Congress, you need your head examined.

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Show US The Evidence

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An appeals court rules:

A federal appeals court ordered the government yesterday to turn over virtually all its information on Guantánamo detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an effort by the Justice Department to limit disclosures and setting the stage for new legal battles over the government’s reasons for holding the men indefinitely.

The ruling, which came in one of the main court cases dealing with the fate of the detainees, effectively set the ground rules for scores of cases by detainees challenging the actions of Pentagon tribunals that decide whether terror suspects should be held as enemy combatants.

It was the latest of a series of stinging legal challenges to the administration’s detention policies that have amplified pressure on the Bush administration to find some alternative to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where about 360 men are now being held at the United States naval base.

A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington unanimously rejected a government effort to limit the information it must turn over to the court and lawyers for the detainees.

The court said meaningful review of the military tribunals would not be possible “without seeing all the evidence, any more than one can tell whether a fraction is more or less than half by looking only at the numerator and not the denominator.”

As you read this, the Powerline, Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, the crack staff of spineless Bush sycophants at Red State, and Dan Riehl are all furiously googling the members of this appeals court, desperately hoping that one or more of them was appointed by Clinton or Carter so that the ritual smearing can begin. Because, as you know- nothing can get in the way of the Deciders decisions.

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Woot- I Am A Bush Hater

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Since I somehow made the mistake of starting to read Hugh Hewitt again and commented twice about his nonsense, I might as well continue on with another post. Today, I am mentioned by name:

I am not surprised that the Bush haters like Sullivan and Cole are outraged that General Petraeus would be interviewed by an admirer of the president, or that the anti-war extremists like Greenwald, Yglesias and the others cannot disguise their contempt for the military (though they think their attack on General Petraeus’ integrity won’t identify them as anti-military.)

I’m not surprised that new media journalists producing interviews of a sort far superior to what MSM serves up in one minute sound bytes excites the anger of folks who prefer their defeatist agendas advanced by a dominant MSM. They don’t want the Beltway-Manhattan media elites to lose their monopoly on “important” interviews as that means instead of Democratic journalists like Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos and Chris Matthews asking defeat-slanted questions, new media outlets will step in and allow serious people to make extended arguments about the stakes in Iraq and the state of the various battles in the broader war on terror.

Dear Hugh- I don’t hate Bush. I voted for him twice (votes I now deeply, deeply regret), and I hate what he has done to this country, I hate his incompetence, I hate that he has let propagandists such as yourself take the lead in designing and pushing policy, I hate that he has lost or is losing not one, but two wars, I hate that he has politicized (more accurately, allowed his lackeys to politicize) everything from NASA to the FDA to the Pentagon to a level that would have made Hugh scream out in rage were the President’s last name Clinton. I hate all of those things.

But for all that, I still don’t hate Bush. I think he is a small, shallow, feeble-minded man, whose “resolve” you cherish is merely the result of a man incapable of thinking on the spot and changing course. While he is ultimately responsible for anything that has been done during his tenure, I am of the opinion that he is little more than a puppet.

So, Hugh, I don’t hate him. In fact, I almost feel sorry for him. This will go down as the most incompetent and morally compromised administration in history, and when those history books look back, they will not refer to this sorry period as the “Cole administration,” nor will they refer to it as the “Hewitt administration,” despite the fact that so very many of your bad ideas have, in fact, been instituted (and usually not because they reflect or represent your ‘deep’ principles, but because you felt there was some sort of immediate political/electoral gain to be seized). History will dub this sorry era as the Bush Administration.

Regardless, even if I DID in fact hate Bush, none of that deflects from what happened and what people are upset about regarding Petraeus’s appearance on your show. It is simply, incontrovertibly, inappropriate for Gen. Petraeus to appear on higly partisan talk shows during a period in time in which he is supposed to be providing the military his apolitical leadership and judgement. The fact that he would, in fact, choose to appear on what amounts to a poor man’s Rush Limbaugh calls his ability to be impartial, apolitical, and honest with the American people into question.

That, Mr. Hewitt, is why many of us are thoroughly and appropriately outraged. Our kids are dying, we are making what appears to be little or no progress in Iraq, and the architect of our wartime strategy (in which the goalposts are bing moved yet again) is playing footsie and passing on vague talking points on the radio with a party hack who honestly believes that the three worst things in the world are the liberal media, Democrats, and Osama bin Laden, and in that order.

BTW- Still think Harriet Meiers would be an AWESOME Supreme Court justice?

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