The overall press silence on contracting abuses in Iraq, despite a major and disturbing Congressional hearing yesterday, really is disgraceful.
As a side note, it’s a weird experience for me to read the American Conservative RSS feed more or less daily and find little if anything to disagree about (one has to assume that will change when we start debating single payer healthcare). They’re not even paleocon in the grumpy racist Weekly Standard National Review under William F. Buckley kind of way. Readers looking for another John Cole could do worse. However, be warned, you’ll probably miss out on highbrow content like this.
Grand Moff Texan
Too busy talking about the Rev. Wright.
Anything to avoid talking about the issues, I guess.
.
Scotty
But they had more pressing issues to talk about. Like a scary black minister in a Q and A session.
Marcus Wellby
It’s a feature, not a bug. You can’t dumb-down a population with a working press corps.
At this point I’ve stopped caring on any level. I just hope our future Chinese overlords are kind…
joe
Not Weekly Standard, National Review.
And yes, TAC is miles better than TWS, NRO, TCS, or any other conservative site on the net.
Arguing with signposts
It’s been pushed off the front pages by Miley Cyrus’ photo shoot. Jeez.
DrDave
Tim:
If you like the American Conservative, read this guy.
He doesn’t get as much traffic as you and John but he makes some good points. (He also writes for AmCon on occasion.)
John Cole
I read them every day and wonder how many of them are still registered Republicans and if so, how?
Punchy
I read Clemons, and he says the Nelson report is reporting on some pretty crazy shee-ot, if true.
We’re so going to bomb the fuck out of Iran.
Medicine Man
Burson’s blog (The Cunning Realist) is on my daily stop over list. I second Dr. Dave’s recommendation.
Zifnab
Someone has to come back and rebuild the party after 40 years in the wilderness.
dricey
I agree with your assessment of American Conservative. I started reading it several weeks ago, and I’m impressed by its realism. And I speak as a very committed lifelong Democrat.
4tehlulz
>>pretty crazy shee-ot, if true.
THIS IS A SHOP. I CAN TELL FROM THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME.
The Populist
Marcus,
I’m with you. I care, yet most people I know don’t seem to care (or pay attention) about the mess we are in.
What is it gonna take to wake people up? If McLame wins this election because the media and Hillary think that focusing on an attention starved black preacher is more important than a war that is bankrupting us, then I truly do not care anymore.
Why should I? I sure hope the Chinese are nice landlords. Judging on how they treat their own people, I have my doubts :(
4tehlulz
By the way, if we’re going to start a pool on when W destroys modern civilization by
driving oil to $250bombing Iran, put me down for August 28 (Dem convention keynote).Yes, during the keynote address.
calipygian
The American Conservative won my heart when they depicted Giuliani on the cover as a certain OF(original fascist).
Punchy
It’s likely to happen during the Convy. Just a matter of exactly when. This is pretty good reasoning, IMO.
BTW, what’s a conservative estimate on the price of a gall of unleaded if oil goes to $250/barrell? Is it a linear relationship? Does doubling the barrell give us $8 gas, or will Bush’s cronies eat the monster profit bullet and sink gas to $2 a gallon no matter what the barrell costs from August till Nov. 4th, and claim it McCane’s doing?
Wilfred
it’s not the responsibility of the press to look into abuses like this but the responsibility of the opposition party to investigate, decide and punish. End of story.
Only there is no opposition, let alone an American left; which has been replaced by a placating, doppelgĂ€nger party whose motto seems to be “don’t ask, don’t tell”.
Stop blaming the press and start pushing for the Democrats to actually do something. The fact that 44 Americans have been killed in Iraq this month needs a political voice aimed at preventing further death, further waste, not a press whose only interest is in giving the hooples what they want.
Chris Johnson
4tehlulz FTW…
I think there’s a better than even chance that there’s high-ranking brass who will say ‘uh no’, meaning a better than even chance that we WON’T attack Iran.
Everything I know about it suggests that to do so would be psychotic suicide, and the military are military and default to being loyal but are not automatically stupid or crazy.
I’m convinced the ‘nukes fly across the country by mistake’ story wasn’t a mistake but a failed attempt to stage nukes for the Middle East, an attempt instigated by Cheney and his crowd.
Try to look on the bright side- if Iran can keep its innocent civilians well versed in use of bomb shelters, then maybe it will be either NO Iran attack, or an Iran attack that is a complete failure and only gets Bush and Cheney an appointment with The Hague.
I would think that so many of these people have already earned war crimes tribunals, but doing ANOTHER unprovoked attack on another country would guarantee it. And Iran is bigger and tougher than Iraq ever was.
We could go from ‘incomparable military force in the hands of a rogue country unanswerable to its people’ to ‘BROKEN military force and totally demoralized people’.
That would be an improvement, if we can’t have ‘not a rogue country anymore’ which would be by far the best.
Chris Johnson
Are you spoofing??? or totally out of your mind?
These people do not SERVE the government or any political party. They are big capital. The government serves THEM. They’re not going to do any such thing, are you crazy? They’ll increase prices more than necessary and cash in, probably in collusion. It will be left to the Republicans to blame the Democrats and make something up for a reason.
There’s a bright side. A lot of these big capital guys, industrialists, bankers particularly, are not stupid or easily fooled. They’re not NICE but they’re not stupid, and they aren’t on board with the neocon fantasy because the cost/benefit of it sucks and it’s catastrophically failed. There are people in the world who seriously do their homework and research the situation, often that’s how they got or stayed rich. These are people who didn’t buy the Colin Powell story for the build-up to Iraq, much less this noise about Iran.
It’s lousy business to plunge the world into apocalypse. There are centers of power which wish to avoid that. They have some influence and I heartily hope they are using it.
Richard Bottoms
This just in: Republicans are assholes.
Dennis - SGMM
I listened to the Bush press conference so that you didn’t have to:
“High energy prices, high food prices and the sub-prime debacle are all the fault of Congress.”
And now, back to our program…
calipygian
He was obsessed with drilling in ANWR, even though, even if you accept the high estimate of 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil and a steady demand of 20 million barrels/day US demand, that is only 525 days of oil supply.
What a douche.
Dork
/checks “high-ranking brass”…reads “Gen. Petraeus”…tempted to make the “no they wont” wager on this…
Tsulagi
Ditto.
Bubblegum Tate
I only started looking at AmCon a few years ago, so my experience with it is kind of limited. Did it ever have a crazy wingnut phase? When I do read it, I often think, “See, this is what honest, respectable conservatism looks like, not this crazy Bushie bullshit,” but I don’t know if that tone is a recent development or an ongoing attribute.
Richard Bottoms
This just in: Some Americans think the GOP is not controlled by fag bashing, snake handling, evolution denying, anti-science, intolerant assholes and that voting for John McCain will not mean four more years of exactly that.
Because he’s a maverick.
tBone
It’s pretty much their mission statement. Which makes them a pack of filthy traitors who are quite possibly stealth liberals, and probably gay.
stickler
TAC started as a response to the crazy wingnut phase of the USA. I was a charter subscriber, back in 2002, or 2003, I forget. It was — and still is — a hodgepodge of writers mostly tied together by crotchety “conservatism” and ravening, howling rage at what Bush has done to the GOP and the USA (in that order, most of the time).
They put Buchanan on the masthead to get attention, and his editorials are always entertaining, if you don’t mind the Know-Nothing anti-immigrant screeds. Plus he hates AIPAC, so the magazine tends to occasionally print the truth about the US-Israel relationship.
Bubblegum Tate
I’ve probably said this before, but I have a weird sort of respect for Buchanan. I think his views (particularly his social views) are deporable and disgusting, but I think he’s a pretty smart guy anyway, and I do appreciate the fact that he doesn’t try to put a pretty veneer on his craziness.
Thanks for the AmCon info, too.
liberal
Tim F. wrote,
I see their stuff not infrequently via antiwar.com. Just today, for example, antiwar.com featured “Surging to Defeat” by Andrew J. Bacevich.
I still don’t get why I never see much said about antiwar.com on liberal blogs, given that they try to be pretty ecumenical (willing to link/post stuff from paleoconservatives, libertarians, liberals, etc).
HyperIon
thanks for the link, liberal.
an excerpt:
uh-oh.
McCain says we have to stay else our enemies will conclude this. so i guess TAC IS a bunch of america haters.