Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

This fight is for everything.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Let there be snark.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

The revolution will be supervised.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

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War on Terror

We can’t handle the truth

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Barring unforeseen events, I predict this statement on ISIS strategy (or lack thereof) from President Obama today will ignite the shitstorm of the week — possibly the year:

President Obama said Monday the United States does not have a complete plan to train and equip Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), saying Baghdad needs to show a greater commitment to building a fighting force.

“We don’t yet have a complete strategy,” Obama told reporters during a news conference at the G-7 summit of leading industrial nations in Germany.

He goes on to add some nuance, including the fact that commitments from the Iraqi government are needed to complete the US strategy, and the question was about a specific component of the anti-ISIS campaign. But I guaran-damn-tee you the messaging teams for every single occupant of the GOP clown car will pounce on that first sentence like a thirsty hipster on a small-batch artisan ale from a nanobrewery.

Should the president have made that statement? Well, it’s the truth, apparently. That such a thing can be true nearly a year into the anti-ISIS campaign signals a disconnect in our bipolar politics. Obama appears to be treating the anti-ISIS campaign as somewhat of an afterthought.

My own preference for US foreign policy in the region is to get out, stay out and let the Middle East sort its shit without our interference. But if that’s not possible, a tiny footprint is preferable to reenacting Bush’s bull-in-a-China-shop act.

Some of y’all predicted in another thread that the GOP primary will be all-ISIS all the time — nonstop scaremongering — and I agree. The question is, how will our countrymen perceive it? Will they buy the existential crisis framing of the Goopers? Or will they accept the truth that our options are limited and there are more important priorities anyway? My Magic 8 Ball says, “Don’t count on it.”

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Sundowning the PATRIOT Act: Come to the Circus

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In violation of best storytelling principles, I’ll give you the results first. From the Guardian, “Patriot Act powers to lapse at midnight as Senate fails to agree on NSA reform“:

Republican senator Rand Paul forced at least a temporary shutdown of sweeping US surveillance powers on Sunday night after refusing to allow an accelerated vote on compromise legislation designed to more narrowly restrain the National Security Agency.

In a double blow for Washington security hawks, represented by embattled Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, it now looks likely that Congress will have to wait several days before passing that bill, the USA Freedom Act.

The reform legislation, which bans the NSA from collecting Americans’ telephone records in bulk, was initially opposed by McConnell. But with the clock ticking down toward the midnight expiration of broader powers initially granted after 9/11 under the Patriot Act, Republican leaders had few options but to get behind the bill as the best way of preserving other surveillance authority.

“This is now the only realistic way forward,” said McConnell as he conceded there was no longer time to seek alternatives to a version of the USA Freedom Act that was previously passed by the House of Representatives. Instead, the Senate majority leader is reluctantly embracing the House-passed bill to which he previously objected, only with the addition of what he called “a few modest amendments”.

McConnell’s concession was a tacit acknowledgement that the bulk collection of US phone records exposed in June 2013 by the Guardian, thanks to leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden, will end.

The Senate voted 77 to 17 to proceed to debate on the USA Freedom Act. Even Paul, after the procedural vote, conceded that the bill will ultimately pass. “Tonight begins the process of ending bulk collection,” he said…

I very much doubt that any of the three-letter agencies consider this more than an annoying temporary glitch, but the Guardian earned their victory lap. And, as a Democratic partisan, it’s cheering to note that a bunch of Republican senators now have new grievances with each other, which is always fun to watch from a safe distance.

I’ve collected a bunch of the more entertaining tweets from earlier today, which I’ll put below the fold for those who find such quick hits confusing or annoying…

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Open Thread: WarWarWar

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From David Corn’s article:

For a dozen years, the Bush-Cheney crowd have been trying to escape—or cover up—an essential fact of the W. years: President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their lieutenants misled the American public about the WMD threat supposedly posed by Saddam Hussein in order to grease the way to the invasion of Iraq. For Bush, Cheney, and the rest, this endeavor is fundamental; it is necessary to protect the legitimacy of the Bush II presidency. Naturally, Karl Rove and other Bushies have quickly tried to douse the Bush-lied-us-into-war fire whenever such flames have appeared. And in recent days, as Jeb Bush bumbled a question about the Iraq War, he and other GOPers have peddled the fictitious tale that his brother launched the invasion because he was presented lousy intelligence. But now there’s a new witness who will make the Bush apologists’ mission even more impossible: Michael Morell, a longtime CIA official who eventually became the agency’s deputy director and acting director. During the preinvasion period, he served as Bush’s intelligence briefer.

Appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball on Tuesday night, Morell made it clear: The Bush-Cheney administration publicly misrepresented the intelligence related to Iraq’s supposed WMD program and Saddam’s alleged links to Al Qaeda…

Professor Krugman, “Errors and Lies“:

Surprise! It turns out that there’s something to be said for having the brother of a failed president make his own run for the White House. Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago.

But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.

Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war…

This was, in short, a war the White House wanted, and all of the supposed mistakes that, as Jeb puts it, “were made” by someone unnamed actually flowed from this underlying desire. Did the intelligence agencies wrongly conclude that Iraq had chemical weapons and a nuclear program? That’s because they were under intense pressure to justify the war. Did prewar assessments vastly understate the difficulty and cost of occupation? That’s because the war party didn’t want to hear anything that might raise doubts about the rush to invade. Indeed, the Army’s chief of staff was effectively fired for questioning claims that the occupation phase would be cheap and easy…

Now, you can understand why many political and media figures would prefer not to talk about any of this. Some of them, I suppose, may have been duped: may have fallen for the obvious lies, which doesn’t say much about their judgment. More, I suspect, were complicit: they realized that the official case for war was a pretext, but had their own reasons for wanting a war, or, alternatively, allowed themselves to be intimidated into going along. For there was a definite climate of fear among politicians and pundits in 2002 and 2003, one in which criticizing the push for war looked very much like a career killer…

But truth matters, and not just because those who refuse to learn from history are doomed in some general sense to repeat it. The campaign of lies that took us into Iraq was recent enough that it’s still important to hold the guilty individuals accountable. Never mind Jeb Bush’s verbal stumbles. Think, instead, about his foreign-policy team, led by people who were directly involved in concocting a false case for war…

cheney warwarwar danziger

(Jeff Danziger’s website)

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Jury Recommends Death for Boston Bomber

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Per multiple media reports, the jury recommended a death sentence for the Boston Marathon bomber instead of life in prison. The bomber is a worthless little shit-bucket who caused a great deal of grief and suffering. But we’ve got no business kicking even murdering assholes like him off the planet if they can be prevented from doing further harm instead, in my opinion. YMMV.

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Hersh on the bin Laden Raid: The Stranger (than Fiction)

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Seymour Hersh published a lengthy piece at the London Review of Books on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Long story short, Hersh claims that many elements of the story we were told by the Obama administration about the raid are lies — including how the CIA found bin Laden, how the SEALS killed bin Laden and how the military disposed of his remains.

To summarize, Hersh’s story claims that the CIA didn’t find bin Laden at all but rather figures in Pakistan’s ISI gave him up in exchange for massive piles of cash and basically presided over a premeditated homicide in the guise of a raid. Hersh’s story further claims that many of the details we were told about the raid and aftermath were invented to cover up a series of massive fuck-ups.

I haven’t read the entire piece yet (it’s long), but the reaction to it has been about what you’d expect on the left. But the response on the right has been interesting. You’d think wingnuts would be on a story that boils down to “You lie!” like dung beetles on a cow patty, but the usual suspects have been strangely muted. Steve M at No More Mr. Nice Blog explains why:

One reason the story is unsatisfying to the right is obvious right away: If Hersh’s version of how the U.S. learned about bin Laden’s whereabouts were to prove true, it would end forever the discussion of whether torture had anything to do with bin Laden’s death, and not in the right’s favor… The right loves torture. The next Republican president will openly and unabashedly torture. So if this is true, it’s buzzkill.

That sounds about right to me.

Like I said, I haven’t read the whole piece yet, but I skimmed it. One part that seems made-up to me is the following, about the disposal of bin Laden’s carcass, which Hersh says wasn’t via a burial at sea off a US Navy vessel as officials claimed:

The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed.

So, just for kicks, the SEALS randomly flung bin Laden’s body parts out the helicopter door, and for all we know, Osama’s head crashed through some dude’s yurt? I guess stranger things have happened, but that sounds like bullshit to me.

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The Chips Keep Falling

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Interesting development:

“Mr. Khadr you’re free to go.”

With those words, Alberta Court of Appeal Justice Myra Bielby turned down the federal government’s last-ditch effort Thursday to keep the 28-year-old detained.

Omar Khadr broke into a big, wide smile when the decision was read. His supporters in the courtroom erupted in cheers.

Captured as a 15 year old, tortured in Gitmo, now a free man.

If for no other reason, you should be happy about this because it might give Darth Cheney a stroke.

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Defeat Is No Longer an Orphan

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Why on earth would they take credit for this shit show:

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack outside a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest in Texas — and warned of more attacks to come.

In a broadcast on its official radio channel Tuesday, the group said two Al Khilafa soldiers opened fire outside the event in Garland, a Dallas suburb. Al Khilafa is how ISIS refers to its soldiers.

CNN cannot confirm the claim, and ISIS offered no evidence that the gunmen were affiliates with the terror organization.

The ISIS radio announcer also referred to Simpson and Soofi as the terror group’s “brothers.” The announcement ended with this warning:

“We say to the defenders of the cross, the U.S., that future attacks are going to be harsher and worse. The Islamic State soldiers will inflict harm on you with the grace of God. The future is just around the corner.”

Sure is convenient timing…

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