Whether you are an Air America listener or have been rubbing your hands together waiting for the final death-gasp, you will want to hear the inimitable Mike Malloy's history of the network, and perspective on the latest foofarah involving Randi Rhodes.

And while you're over there, pop in and give Sam Seder some moral support. He's over in that madhouse trying to hang onto his health insurance for his kid, and he could use it.

Labels: Air America, incompetence, Mike Malloy

I've always been skeptical of deathbed conversions. Some of it has to do with this notion that seems to exist among conservative Christians that salvation has nothing to do with deeds, just faith. You can bugger little boys in the choirloft, cheat on your wife, embezzle money, burn down your neighbor's house, and none of it matters as long as you believe Jesus died just so you could do all these things.

When Lee Atwater, who was Karl Rove's mentor in the politics of destruction, was dying from a brain tumor, he called for an excision of the "tumor of the soul" in American politics. Horse, barn door, etc. Perhaps bigger people than I am can forgive, but when you look at what Atwater's politics of destruction used against Michael Dukakis in 1988 led to, including the presidency of his then-employer's son, it's hard to look at what happened to Atwater as anything other than "Payback's a bitch, asshole." The only thing that kept me from doing that is the desire to be perhaps just a bit better. Not too much better, because sometimes trying to rise above people who want to drag you into the gutter just leaves you face down flat in the mud with a jackboot on the small of your back.

Bill Moyers talked about Lee Atwater a number of years ago:



Atwater may be best known for turning Willie Horton into not just a household name, but also a generic term, like "Kleenex", for any kind of demonology done in politics. The most recent example, of course, is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But what I remember Atwater most for is how he turned the Pledge of Allegiance into a major campaign issue.

In 1988, Joseph Sobran wrote in National Review about the Pledge dustup:

WHILE THE MEDIA were preoccupied with whether Dan Quayle had once squeezed Paula Parkinson a little too close, Mike Dukakis ran into some real trouble: tbe Pledge of Allegiance.

Dukakis explained what his problem was: the Massachusetts state supreme court had given him an advisory opinion that it was unconstitutional. "If the Vice President is saying he'd sign an unconstitutional bill," Dukakis retorted, "then in my judgment he's not fit to hold the office [of President]." Wrong answer, Mike,

Though in practice the Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means, Dukakis must be the first to suggest it means what the Massachusetts supreme court says it means. He only made things worse byfalling back on New Class elitism: the judges know best!

Meanwhile, Bush, who had been down as much as 18 points in the polls, shot ahead by as much as nine points.

[snip]

THE MEDIA themselves were shrieking that the Pledge issue was dirty pool. Newsweek charged that Bush had "seized the low ground," Time loftily deplored "the efforts to impugn Dukakis's patriotism." The New York Times hauled out its own constitutional experts to declare Dukakis correct. Anthony Lewis sniffed McCarthyism in Bush's tactics.

All these defenses may have compounded the damage to Dukakis. In a presidential campaign, you don't want to be the sort of guy whose patriotism has to be debated.

Indeed.

And yet, the debate about what constitutes patriotism has infected our politics ever since. Whether it's a photograph of John Kerry who just happened to be at the same Vietnam War rally as Jane Fonda in the 1960's, or the "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists" meme that Republicans have used as a cudgel with which to beat Democrats senseless for the last seven years, patriotism seems always to be defined as unquestioning acceptance of everything the head of the Executive Branch does-- if that Executive branch consists of Republicans. When it's a Democrat, all bets are off.

Now, Lee Atwater's star disciple, Karl Rove, is preparing to convince Americans that their impending foreclosure doesn't matter, that their job is moving to the Philippines doesn't matter, that the dollar is now only barely acceptable currency in New York City, that billions of dollars have disappeared into Bush crony pockets in Iraq and that thousands of Americans are dead, that America is now hated all over the world -- none of that matters. What's really important is whether or not the candidate wears a cheap flag pin made in the very country that owns us outright now -- China.

There are Democrats, particularly blue-collar Democrats, who defect to McCain because they see McCain as a patriotic figure and they see Obama as an elitist who's looking down his nose at 'em. Which he is. That comment where he said, you know, "After 9/11, I didn't wear a flag lapel pin because true patriotism consists of speaking out on the issues, not wearing a flag lapel pin"? Well, to a lot of ordinary people, putting that flag lapel pin on is true patriotism. It's a statement of their patriotic love of the country. And for him to sit there and dismiss it as he did—

You're not wearing a flag pin, Karl.
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. But I respect those who consciously get up in the morning and put a flag lapel pin on.

And that, my friends, is the big issue for this fall's election campaign, unless the Democrats stop assuming that Americans are too smart to fall for this. They did it in 1988. They did it when they were frightened about 9/11. And when the Very Scary Notion of someone other than an old white guy being president is added to the mix, it will probably work.

Labels: 2008 election, dirty tricks, idiocy

At this point, I think it's somewhat futile to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. You know, there have been so many opportunities to prevent this Administration from committing its crimes, and everyone involved has dropped the ball every step of the way. And there's plenty of blame to go around.

You can blame Al Gore's lackluster campaign. You can blame the media for fostering the idea that the guy with the towel-snap would be a better president than the dull, plodding guy with the intellect because after all, isn't having a president you'd want to have a beer with the most important consideration, even if that guy is, from all accounts, a pretty mean piece of work when he gets a couple of drinks in him? You can then blame the media for its warflogging and general fellating of this guy long after it was clear that he was an evil, and indeed insane, man. You can blame voters who bought the idea that there was not one iota of difference between George Bush and Al Gore.

You can blame Jeb Bush for Florida's massive disenfranchisement of African-American voters. You can blame Roger Stone for the thugs he sent to Florida to disrupt the recounts. You can blame Katherine Harris. You can blame the designer of the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach county.

You can blame a Supreme Court that was already becoming hopelessly partisan on the Republican side, which felt that not damaging George W. Bush's credibility as president was more important than upholding the Constitution. You can blame all of us who knew that this guy was a loser but who didn't take to the streets because it was easier to just figure that it wouldn't be so bad becasue the old man would really be running the show and we lived through that administration -- because when push comes to shove, that guy who stood in front of the tank in Tiannenmen Squre had more guts than most of us ever will. Blame Senate Democrats, not one of whom would stand up in refusal to certify a bogus election.

You can blame Congressional Republicans, who fell in line behind this guy even after, as it now seems appallingly clear and about which I will write about as soon as I can focus, that there was no end of information coming in the summer of 2001 that an attack was about to take place on American soil -- and this Administration ignored it because some of it came from Clinton leftovers, and besides, the president needed a vacation after only six months in office. You can blame Congressional Democrats for not putting up any kind of a fight at all, even if only to do its job to speak up in dissent. You can blame Senate Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, for caving into bullshit out of craven political calculation.

You can further blame John Kerry, who got together with Dick Gephardt to kneecap Howard Dean in Iowa in 2004, only to run a campaign so lackluster and so inept that he made Al Gore in 2000 look like Barack Obama by comparison. You can blame Kenneth Blackwell, who rigged the Ohio vote in 2004 the way Jeb Bush did in Florida in 2000. And you can further blame John Kerry for taking his $14 million in campaign cash and going home before the votes were even counted. You can blame enough American voters who by now knew what George W. Bush was and voted for him anyway to even make Ohio an issue. You can blame Nancy Pelosi for taking impeachment off the table the minute she became House Speaker in 2006.

But most of all, we have only ourselves to blame; the citizens of this country, who have remained ignorant about civics, who refuse to accept the responsibility for vigilance that goes with Democracy and allowing an unelected president to make himself a dictator, and who, like most dictators, has committed the same kinds of atrocities that the tinpot dictator he deposed in Iraq has by embracing torture with an enthusiasm we associate only with the worst despots in history.

But just because George W. Bush will leave the White House in January 2009 shouldn't get him off the hook.

Elizabeth Holtzman:

Some contend that imposing criminal liability for acts performed in the heat of combat is wrong and that we can’t hold the administration to 20/20 hindsight. But we know these acts were not spontaneous, but part of a premeditated pattern of legal manipulation dating back years. At least since 2002, President Bush, Attorney General Gonzales and possibly others including the Vice President knew that torture and detainee mistreatment entailed criminal liability, which they sought to defuse with novel legal theories and retroactive suspensions of established law.

In a February 2002 memo, then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales warned President Bush about exposure to criminal liability under the War Crimes Act, mentioning the danger that future independent counsels or prosecutors might seek to enforce the law (they generally prosecute top government officials, including presidents). He therefore recommended opting out of the Geneva Conventions, famously calling them “obsolete.” His theory was that if the Conventions didn’t apply, then the War Crimes Act wouldn’t apply, so no prosecutions could be brought. The President accepted Gonzales’ theory and suspended the Conventions ’s protections for suspected Al Qaeda detainees.

But in June 2006 the Supreme Court rejected this theory and held the Geneva Conventions applicable to the treatment of all detainees, leaving the President open to liability for violating the War Crimes Act. So in October 2006 the White House effectively pardoned itself by slipping a little-noticed provision into the Military Tribunals Act, conferring effective immunity from the War Crimes Act on high-level officials by making it retroactively inoperative, from 1996 to 2006. Public attention was focused on habeas corpus and other controversial provisions in the bill, so it passed more or less unscrutinized.

Still, holes remain in the legal barricades the Bush administration has tried to erect around itself. Even if immunity from prosecution under the War Crimes Act stands, it only applies through 2006, not for mistreatment of detainees after that. And the 1994 anti-torture law applies throughout.

As Attorney General, Mr. Mukasey can try to plug these holes. He may shield President Bush and others from criminal liability; he may resist appointing an independent prosecutor to investigate White House actions. But he cannot, as the 2002 Gonzales memo recognized, tie the hands of future prosecutors. In lethal cases our anti-torture laws have no statute of limitations. Sooner or later, those who violated US law will be held accountable to them, if not by Mukasey, then by some future AG.

A justice department under John McCain will likely look not much different from the one we have now, one which still recognizes torture as a legitimate method of interrogation. We would hope that a DOJ under either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would take the opposite view. But the next Attorney General MUST bring charges against this president. And if the AG won't, then the World Court must order this president to be tried for war crimes. This man and his Vice President must not be permitted to remain free men, collecting pensions paid for by you and me, continuing to profit financially off the wars they started and used to bankrupt the country.

Labels: George W. Bush, war crimes

Brad Blog has a piece tonight on a story on MSNBC's Countdown, in which Constitutional Attorney, Johnathan Turley, states in no uncertain terms that even though the congress, and especially the democrats, refuse to look at the fact that the way in which we have been getting information was and is a "premeditated, carefully orchestrated, torture program," we are looking at a case of illegal torture planned by the Bush Administration.

So many top administration advisers actually visited and oversaw the goings on at Gitmo that "the only thing missing is a group picture" of top administration officials while torturing...
This is disgusting...what country do we live in, and who are these people representing us?



c/p RIP Coco

Labels: Bush Administration, crime, torture

Today's honoree: Distributorcapny, who just blew my mind completely with this post about tonight's Countdown Worst Person, Darrell Issa, who, after seven years of Republicans treating the 9/11 attacks as though they were the worst thing that has ever happened in this history of this country, has decided that it really wasn't so bad after all.

Question for Mr. Issa: So you're saying that we're spending trillions of dollars on a war for nothing, and that there really IS no need to wiretap the entire country?

Honorable mention from the MSM: Dan Froomkin:

Yoo's memo is a historic document. It is the ultimate expression of Cheney's belief that anything the president or his designates do -- no matter how illegal, barbaric or un-American -- is justifiable in the name of national self-defense.

It is also an example of how enabling zealots to disregard the rule of law and the customary boundaries of human conduct leads to madness.

And that is the state of the US after seven years of the evil that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and all of their enablers have wrought.

The question for Americans is, will we make sure that after January 20, 2008, the evil stops? Or will we elect another president who will continue this insanity? Have we wised up, finally, and realized, that yes, it really CAN be that bad?

Labels: assholes, bloggers, House Republicans, icepick meet forehead

I'm visiting family in North Carolina, which has had me somewhat incommunicado. I flew down here via Skybus out of Newburgh, NY on Wednesday, which is kind of an interesting experience.

Skybus is the no-frills airline to end all no-frills airline. Ticket prices start out ridiculously low, and get higher as the flight date gets closer and the flight gets more crowded. The big gimmick with Skybus is that 10 seats on each flight are sold for $10 (you get first dibs on these seats by getting advance e-mail notice if you sign up on the airline's web site). Even if you don't get one of these seats, you can still fly pretty cheaply; I paid $35 for my trip down and $55 for the return. How can they do this? Well, it remains to be seen whether they can, given that as of April 15, they've cut down to one flight a day to Greensboro from Newburgh, and that flight will be after 9 PM, which makes Skybus not exactly viable for future trips. But what they're selling is an a low-overhead, ad-driven á la carte concept. There's no call center, no telephone customer service. You book through the web site. You can print your boarding pass at home, or at an airport kiosk. The girl who checks you in at the airport is the same one you'll see later on at the gate. You want to check a bag? $10 bucks each bag, each way. Priority boarding? $12.50 each way. You want food or a drink? You can get a bottle of water, soda or coffee for two bucks; alcoholic drinks are more, or you can get a sandwich or hot meal for up to $8. And your flight attendant accepts tips.

The flight crew on a Skybus flight doesn't look like any crew you've ever seen. Usually the pilot is some silver-haired, whippet-thin, lantern-jawed Top Gunner with a name like Captain Roger Flint or something equally testosteroneish, and the co-pilot has a similar name, like Mike Manhood. On Skybus, your cockpit crew is "Gwen" and "Rich", and Gwen is the pilot. Your flight attendants are nattily attired in black Skybus T-shirts and black slacks, and all this casual élan gives the proceedings the ambiance of a somewhat hipper-than-normal T.G.I. Friday's. About 2/3 of the way through the flight, there's a show of hands, where the lucky receipients of the $10 seats reveal themselves, followed by those of us who got the equivalent of 3 Powerball numbers and are flying for under $100, followed by the rest, otherwise known as "suckers." And then the shopping starts. Skybus offers a skymall devoid of the usual luxury goods you see in the duty-free Skymall that most airlines carry. Instead, you can buy everything from travel pillows and blankets to TSA-approved locks to perfume samplers and fancy chocolates, all tax free because I guess when you're at 35,000 feet, sales tax does not apply. I've read that Skybus flight attendants' base wage is lower than industry average, and that they make a commission on all the food and gifts they sell, so you do feel kind of obligated to buy something, given that they are still required to be trained and professional.

So the whole thing feels kind of "Hey, kids, let's put on an airline!" -- except that the planes are brandy-new Airbus A319's that still have that new airliner smell and leather seats, and the fact that Skybus is deadly serious about their business model, which is to be profitable by other means than selling seats. This means that if you want to pay for your company to sponsor the safety lecture, or the show of hands spiel, or even, reportedly, plaster your advertisement on the side of Skybus' planes, well, money talks. It's sort of cool and fun and weird and horrifying all at the same time; and it'll be interesting to see if they can make this work in a terrible business environment for air travel, while airlines like ATA and Aloha Airlines are biting the dust and Southwest Airlines is flying planes with cracks in them and the FAA doesn't seem to give a rat's ass. Curiously, I felt safer flying Skybus because at least their planes are new and as a new startup, one crash and they're toast. Of course if it's a flight I'm on, so am I, but you see what I mean.

At any rate, "Gwen" and "Rich" got us to Greensboro in one piece, despite one of the worst takeoffs in wicked crosswinds that I've ever experienced; and assuming I can find my way back to Greensboro on Saturday, I'll be back in the groove on Sunday.

Oh Charlie, I dunno...It was San Francisco, it was stand-up of a sort...
At this time in the life of Air America Radio, don't you think that bringing a little edginess back to the network might actually help? Fer Christ's sake, its practically an infomercial channel after the Greens, and you're worried about a little dicey stand-up in SF?

You shoulda given her a pat on the back, (and give Marc Maron a morning show while you're at it! )Instead we are lucky to be treated to the fantastic vocal stylings of Sammy Seder, who I love, as you know, and who needs a daily show, it's true...and look at all those open slots you have just waiting for the liberal, funny voice!...But, give Randi a break, She has been there since the beginning and the least she should be able to expect from her network is not to be thrown under the bus for an edgy stand-up routine, on the clock or not.

Can we just sorta pretend that you have some intention of resurrecting AAR? Can't we just pretend for a little while that after 5 years of downward motion, we can hope for more than a further gutting of the place and some sort of, oh...investment in talent? I've had a hard year so far, and the democrats have to start to wrap their heads around something common. How 'bout trying that on for size? Help us! We're fighting for our lives out here!

I'm guessing that Randi is not long for this world...she is pretty over the edge. But, a little controversy is GOOD RADIO! As thrilled as I am to have Sam Seder on and some content that I can actually listen to, I really think that this should be a non-issue. They're only words,and she didn't, as far as I could tell, use it to mean what it might seem to mean; like, she is actually a streetwalking, Spitzer-fucker, whore! She is a politican...and they ARE whores!!


c/p RIPCoco

Labels: Air America, Randi Rhodes

According to Reuters, After giving the keynote speech at CTIA, the wireless industry showcase (that I wish I was at,) John Edwards was asked in a small Q&A session if he would accept the VP slot for either candidate....He said No.
Apparently he also declined to endorse one candidate or the other, but I would've guessed that!
Oh well...Onwards and ...upwards....

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: John Edwards

This week's New York Magazine has a piece by John Heilemann , and Ive been turning the thing over and over in my head since I found it in the mailbox, and shortly thereafter got a call from my Mom who, upon receiving hers, was excitedly reporting to me about how this little piece contains some answers about the silence of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Mom was saying that clearly he and Elizabeth had had some sort of falling out with Obama and also that Elizabeth really, really hates Hillary.

Obviously she had just glanced at it, because the gist was really more about who councils Hillary and who is powerful enough in the democratic party to grab control of what seems to be a runaway train. The fact that Elizabeth Edwards finds Obama's health care plan to be not as good as Hillary's and that Obama had been supposedly "brusque" or rude to the Edwards' immediately following his withdrawal from the race, comes off as the gossipy headline but isn't the real story here. This is the sort of thing that you do find from time to time in New York Magazine, in that it can run with the more lurid lead, even in the face of a more substantial story, and people who do what my Mom does, which is to read the first paragraph and then scan the rest, can miss the point. And this is a kind of misleading journalism that is based on what the journalist can glean through his instant message interviews with party bigwigs, and just his gut, is a little misleading. I like Heilemann, but it seems that he is about opinion. Even as it seems like he is on the inside reporting real news, when you look through his columns, they are really opinion pieces, wrapped in whatever connections he has. I'm not saying hes wrong, but I read New York Magazine with a grain of salt, and I hope that everyone else does too.

Well, today Elizabeth Edwards responded to Heilemann's piece on Morning Joe. In her usual dignified way, she attacked just the gossipy parts and left the rest alone...though if Joe had been a better reporter he might have dug a little. The thing is that I don't think that he wants to go there; not really. Elizabeth stated that she didn't find Obama rude and actually found him quite charming. She did confirm that she doesn't like Obama's plan, and prefers Hillary's, and then she left the question of her storied open dislike for Clinton hanging.

Heilemann's in print guess seems to be that Elizabeth may be the reason that Johnny has not made an endorsement. Y'know, I'm pretty interested in knowing what the hell is going on in the Edwards camp, but this reaching and turning some vague snippets into a story that ends with sentences like "Maybe that's why he...." is a little pathetic. The piece implies, or rather states, that Edwards endorsement has been held up by how nice one or the other of the candidates was to him on the day of his withdrawal. Isn't that silly? Does that make any sense? These people are politicians, and yes they have big egos, but they also have thick skin, and there is no way that an entire strategy could come down to how one or the other acted towards him on that one day.

In going over how badly Obama did with the Edward's, Heilemann pushes the envelope further into concern for his diplomatic prowess, in comparison to the story that Hillary was all over them and was almost, maybe able to win Elizabeth over with her kindness and ass kissing. So, then...he goes on to say that if its true that Obama failed to impress Edwards, he doesn't have the diplomatic skills to run the country! And McCain does? Clinton does? Bush does? I dunno...
I suppose that this is one area that Hillary has more experience than the average politician, because she traveled alot as first lady and was around the necessary niceties in diplomatic exchange, but I'd hardly call Obama a slouch, and certainly not because of this! But Heilemann must know that the art of ass-kissing is a very ass-specific endeavor, and best carried out by people who are very adept and the bend over and twist. I find this all a little embarrassing and rather condescending to the Edwards and everyone else involved in this farce of a democratic process...especially the main stream media.


The real point of this story is that Gore and Edwards are the most powerful people in the democratic party right now and...who is going to stop Hillary??? He eventually wends through the merits of Pelosi or Reid talking to her and how much weight or clout Terry McAuliffe or Stephanie Tubbs Jones might have. But ultimately, it appears, that even here, in the lap of gossip, Hillary listens to no one but herself....and that, my friends, is the real reason for everything that is happening.


We're fighting for our lives here, people, lets try to focus on McCain and his lies, lies, lies!
Its apparent that this thing is gonna go all they way because the M$M needs to sell soap, and the daytime drama market is just not cutting it.

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John and Elizabeth Edwards

Finally, enlightenment is at hand!

Labels: I Wish I'd Written That

OK, so I lied about not blogging.

In the past, when I've headed to North Carolina the first Wednesday in April, it's to go to Full Frame Fest in Durham. Since I'm no longer reviewing movies on anything resembling a regular basis, and in fact rarely even going to the movies anymore, it seemed pointless to either buy an event pass or accept a press pass this year.

It's not that the world of movie reviewing misses me all that much, and I see far more daylight than I used to. But today there's a reason for moviegoers to celebrate: Roger Ebert is coming back!

Among cinephiles, "real" film criticism is the province of guys like Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman, who wouldn't deign to give a good review to anything not made in the Czech Republic. I exaggerate, of course, except that for me, Roger Ebert is a titan of a magnitude I didn't realize until he was gone for the scene and twits like Christy Lemire took over his spot in my local paper.

Aside from an unfortunate obsession with Angelina Jolie's chest that has often colored his view of her work, Ebert is a reviewer for ordinary people. He's able to evaluate a movie based on what it's trying to do within its genre, not just in relation to how it compares to, say, Knife in the Water. And in doing so, he makes his reviews fun to read on their own.

And now, after a long absence due to a recurrence of cancer, he's coming back -- at least to the printed page:

In a letter published in Tuesday's Chicago Sun-Times, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and co-host of TV's "Ebert & Roeper" said surgery in January ended in complications, and his ability to speak was not restored. He said the return of speech would require another surgery.

"But I still have all my other abilities, including the love of viewing movies and writing about them," Ebert said.

Ebert, 65, said he's looking forward to his annual film festival starting April 23.

"I will resume writing movie reviews shortly thereafter," he said.

Ebert, famous for his "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" critiques, had surgery in 2006 to remove a cancerous growth on his salivary gland. He also had emergency surgery that year after a blood vessel burst near the site of the operation.

He had undergone cancer surgery three times before the 2006 operation — once in 2002 to remove a malignant tumor on his thyroid gland and twice on his salivary gland the following year.

Ebert said he remains cancer-free, and is not ready to think about more surgery.

"I should be content with the abundance I have," he said.

I know I am.

Welcome back, Rog. We missed you.

(h/t: Melissa)

Labels: movies

Traveling this morning; no blogging till later on today.

We've already seen what happens when we have a president who has massive issues with his father. George W. Bush has demonstrated a combination of extreme need for his father's approval and love, combined with a strong resentment of his father for clearly favoring his younger brother Jeb and a need to show that he can be more successful than his father. Bush has played out his family baggage on the world stage in every facet of his presidency, from spurning the old man's advisors to invading a country that did nothing to us, because in his eyes, the old man didn't have the balls to see the Iraq conflict of 1991 through to the end. It was one thing when George W. Bush, a lifetime screwup, was drilling dry holes in Texas or running businesses fueled by the money of his father's friends, into the ground. But then he was given the entire country to play with, and true to form, he's run it into the ground -- and destroyed another country, Iraq, as a bonus.

Do we really think that another president who has unresolved issues from his youth is going to be able to fix this mess?

The conventional wisdom about John McCain is that he comes from a long line of distinguished military men, and with a strong sense of duty and patriotism, decided to continue this noble tradition. The truth, however, makes him sound more like the current occupant of the White House -- a legacy admission with a distinct ambivalence about carrying on a family tradition:

Following in his fathers' wake, McCain sets course for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, the class of 1958.

Sen. McCain: It was always a certainty that I was going to go to the Naval Academy as my father and grandfather had before me. Not that I didn't' want to go to the Naval Academy, but my sort of resentment that it was a preordained kind of an operation.

At first he enjoys the physical challenge of basic training.

But McCain refuses to submit to the rigid discipline and often humiliating hazing rituals. He spends the next four years fighting the system.

Sen. McCain: I viewed it as a competition, to see how much I could get away with, and at the same time remain at the school, a very careful balancing act [laughs].

While most midshipmen are towing the line, McCain spends much of his four years crossing it. Partying is becoming his trademark.

Frank Gamboa, Naval Academy Classmate: If you went to a party with John, you were going to party right until the absolute last man coming racing back to the Naval Academy just before the end of curfew [laugher]. So if you didn't want to live on the edge, then you never went to a party with John McCain.

Sen. McCain: We had incredible enjoyable times with each other, and of course our constant search for female companionship consumed a great deal of our time as well. Not to mention the time we spent trying to illegally consume alcoholic beverages So, it was fun.

With bad grades and a rash of discipline demerits, McCain comes perilously close to flunking out of the academy.

But McCain hangs on, barely. In May 1958, with President Eisenhower himself passing out diplomas, McCain graduates, fifth from the bottom of his class.

Sen. McCain: President Eisenhower had asked to see the anchorman, the person who had finished at the bottom of the class. I remember at the time regretting a bit that I hadn't done a little worse so that I would have gotten to go up and shake hands with the president.

That McCain wasn't the rigid-backed tightass of his legend is largely because of his reputation as a war hero after enduring five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. But while we can argue about whether this makes him a hero or a victim, we cannot ignore that Vietnam is still the prism through which he views his role in the world. George W. Bush saw Iraq as either a way to vindicate himself to his father, or a way to prove that his penis was bigger than that of his father. John McCain sees Iraq, and gaining the presidency so he can preside over the Iraq War, as his way of finally winning the Vietnam War and putting his own demons to rest.

Mark Benjamin, at Salon:

In a major national security speech delivered last week, John McCain invoked his experience in Vietnam to explain his support for a significant U.S. troop presence in Iraq for as long as it takes to prevent a wider catastrophe in the region. "I hold my position because I hate war, and I know very well and very personally how grievous its wages are," the former POW said in an address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. "But I know, too, that we must pay those wages to avoid paying even higher ones later."

But the truth is that it's always about Vietnam for John McCain. He has invoked avoiding the mistakes of Vietnam with a sort of religious fervor in every important debate about dispatching U.S. troops since he first entered Congress in 1983. As he put it in an Aug. 18, 1999, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he studies "every prospective conflict for the shadow of Vietnam." In fact, a look at his record shows that he subjects every major foreign-policy decision to a Vietnam-derived test similar to the famed Powell doctrine, a test summed up by the McCain quote, "We're in it, now we must win it."

So entrenched are those lessons that McCain sounds, at times, like he wishes they could be applied retroactively. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal," McCain said at a speech on Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 5, 2003. And for that reason, it might be advisable to take him at his word when he says he'll stay in Iraq for 100 years. Whether Vietnam is the prism through which he judges national security decisions, or the rationale he uses to explain whatever position he decides to take -- and even if the lessons he says he's learned from Vietnam often seem contradictory -- he has applied his Vietnam test to Iraq and come up with the decision to stay.

It isn't as though McCain has viewed every military conflict through this "must-win" prism. He voted against Ronald Reagan's plan to keep American troops in Lebanon in 1983. He had concerns about the first Gulf War. But whether it's because of the sacrifice to his honor that sucking up to George W. Bush for the last eight years, or because of his primal need to win the Vietnam War, he has developed a blind spot where Iraq is concerned.

It's time we put a stop to allowing these men to resolve their issues with their families by putting the blood of other people's children on the line.

Labels: John McCain

Well, not quite. But here in New York, progressive talk radio, which has sucked royally since Air America moved to the weak-signalled WWRL, has become even suckier this week. The suck started with the move, was mitigated somewhat when long-in-the-wilderness Richard Bey was brought on to do an evening show. Then, just as that show was achieving a kind of groove, WWRL owner Rennie Bishop hired Mark Riley and put Bey on with him in the morning. This duo worked well, even though the callers were often not up to the intellectual level of the hosts. But Mark Riley decided he didn't want the hours and went back to his old stomping grounds at WLIB. Bishop brought in the clearly lunatic Coz Carson, and before I could turn around, Bey was out of there. And with Air America having decided to abandon morning drive time altogether, that left Carson to rant and rave all by himself -- without me.

This week, the so-called "flagship station" of Air America Radio, jettisoned two more Air America shows -- the Lionel Show, otherwise known as Mark Green's Boondoggle (well, David Bernstein's boondoggle, actually, but Bernstein was Green's boondoggle) -- a show that will NOT be missed, and the Thom Hartmann show. Hartmann's timeslot here in New York will be taken by Ed Schultz, which I guess is better than, say, Rush Limbaugh, but it's enough to make me miss All Franken. So now WWRL's lineup is chock full of vitamin supplement infomercials, punctuated only by Randi Rhodes and Rachel Maddow -- the latter at least until the suits at MSNBC get smart and give her a show there. And the hour of Seder on Sundays that they had deigned to give us for a while is gone as well.

This morning Air America boasts a new web site, which looks much better than the old one but is even more difficult to navigate and slow as molasses; and the whole thing is enough to make me want to pull out some old Morning Sedition podcasts from 2005 to listen to today, except that our old friend and fellow Seditionist Vernon sent along this clip of Marc Maron on Tampa Bay's Media Talk:

Labels: Air America, Marc Maron

If America had a collective urethra, it would be peeing in about five different directions by now. Because that’s what happens when a nation has had its prostate populi pounded by the Grand Old Party that was had by all. But you can’t say that we didn’t have it coming to us. Because I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the majority of Humanity with an abstract, capital H is almost always in the wrong.

Humanity once thought that Vlad the Impaler should have been allowed to skewer his enemies on pikes.

Humanity once thought that human sacrifices kept them alive by appeasing the Gods.

Humanity once thought that a coward who hid under a table during his own beer hall putsch was justified in annexing Europe, murdering Jews, the mentally disabled and gay people en masse.

Humanity once thought using shanghaied Africans as slaves was necessary to the South‘s economy and, at worst, worthy of debate.

And Humanity thought that electing, for want of a better word, a man who actually used the White House’s greatest moment of failure as a pretext for indefinitely putting our constitutional protections and civil liberties in his pocket in order to protect us was a good, just and necessary thing, as was the invasion, occupation and subjugation of a nation that had played no role whatsoever during that Great Day of Failure. No matter how this man has openly shown, time and again, how garishly indifferent he is to his own crimes, all too many of us find it our collective bleeding heart to cheer him on as if his rule has actually been characterized by even a modicum of foreign and domestic competence or a bloody shred of humanity.

And when he tap dances before endorsing another man who promises more of the same and sings about his crimes and jokes about not finding weapons of mass destruction that hundreds of young American men and women died looking for, we laugh, laugh and laugh in a neverending, completely interactive Theater of the Absurd, an Alice in Wonderland nation in which the rabbit hole has become the Homeland, where the nonsensical is perfectly lucid and the sensical is subversive, seditious, treasonous.

Anarchy is unthinkable to the American soul so we keep a stiff upper lip, put our nose to the grindstone, put on our best face and attempt to make Koolaid out of the lemons with which this administration has pelted us since Day One because it’s much easier to call him the 43rd President. We laud his ability to throw a baseball better than any Chief Executive because it’s never a convenient time to bring up the fact that he resembles the paranoid King Lear more than an American President.

It always seems to be a gauche, inappropriate time to bring up the inconvenient fact that at his behest we have captured German nationals and even American citizens, have detained and tortured them indefinitely while denying them the means to defend themselves in a court of law. That he’s openly hectoring Congress for not giving retroactive immunity for giant corporations who have spied on us by the millions, for denying him the right to torture both the guilty and the innocent.

This is all subject to debate, just like the gassing of the Jews and the gays, just like slavery, just like the impalings and other human sacrifices. Because everything is relative.

Thank God for Overton’s Window, which makes the once intolerable and even blatantly illegal seem mainstream, necessary and, in the ultimate nightmare scenario, a matter of firmly implemented, institutionalized policy. We have wrenched Overton’s Window so far to the middle in our own way that people even seem reasonable on TV when they call for the return of the spirit of Joe McCarthy, rounding up and detaining people in internment camps built by American corporations on American soil with American taxpayer dollars.

We need to torture, we need to deny freedom, we need to monitor the innocent in order to keep us safe. Give us your most basic and inalienable rights. We’ll give them back to you when this decades-long ideology is hate is finally defeated. Scout’s honor.

How does this in any way not recall the atrocities of Nazi Germany or the darkest days of the Soviet Union?

And, when all is said and done, we will be left scratching our fat heads when the rest of the world asks us, “What were you thinking?” Like the people of post-Nazi Germany in the wake of the Nuremberg trials that are now a quaint notion, we will throw up our hands and say, “But, but… we didn’t know!”

Even while the man who is ultimately responsible for bringing about these dictatorial initiatives made no real pretense at reasonableness, joked and sang paeans in praise of some of his foulest crimes, called our most revered document “just a Goddamned piece of paper” and openly speculated about how great things would be if only he was dictator. A self-styled cowboy with the loneliest job on earth who thought he could lasso the world through sheer dint of manliness and God-given righteousness and bend it to suit his will.

How were we to know, indeed?

Gentlewomen:

I was reading zuzu's excellent post today on why sexist framing of Hillary Clinton matters, and decided to write a post I've been wanting to put together for a long time. Doing it on a morning when I have to go to work is probably not the greatest idea, but when the time is right, it's right.

Like you, I'm appalled at the virulent misogyny that's been directed at Hillary Clinton not just during her presidential campaign, but for the last sixteen years. For whatever reason, Hillary has been the focal point of male fear and loathing throughout the country. Whether it's a Hillary nutcracker, or sex club devote and Eliot Spitzer ratter Roger Stone forming an anti-Hillary group the initials of which are C.U.N.T., it's clear that the castration fears of American men are almost entirely focused on this one woman. It seems odd that this should be so.

This is a woman who could have achieved a political career herself, but put her ambitions on the back burner in favor of her husband's. She seems to know perfectly well who she's married to and what he does, and I think she decided long ago that what's good in their connection compensates for her husband's mammoth character flaws. I never quite understood what the foofarah about the "two-for-one" notion was; after all, presidents have unelected cabinet members working with them all the time. Had she not been married to Bill Clinton, but become a successful attorney in her own right and married someone else, there's no reason to think she couldn't have become a United States Senator anyway. That her husband was president helped give her name recognition, but she won her office by winning over many of the upstate counties whose denizens hated her most. So despite the attempts to reduce Hillary to a know-nothing who's trying to ride her husband's coattails to the presidency, I think that sells her short. She's smart, she's capable, and she's eminently qualified for the presidency.

That said, I think you are making a mistake by rallying behind Hillary as some kind of feminist icon, and I think you're making a bigger one by using the politics of victimology to do so.

I realize that this post is going to get me blacklisted from the feminist blogosphere in perpetuity. I realize that this post is going to put an end to the links and other assistance some of you have given this blog, but before it does, I want to thank those of you who have helped me along by blogrolling and linking. And I also want to say that while we may disagree on this particular question, and in many cases we are of different generations, there is much we have in common. I would like to think that what what we have in common is more important than our differences of opinion on Hillary Clinton or even our generational difference, but I realize that may not be so.

As I've posted before, a few weeks ago a woman called in to Randi Rhodes and stated that because blacks were given the right to vote before women, it meant that women were more marginalized and therefore "we" deserve one of "ours" in the White House more than "they" deserve one of "theirs." This argument is ridiculous on the face of it for anyone who has even had the rudimentary history study they do in American high schools and remembers learning about Jim Crow laws and poll taxes. For that matter, it's ridiculous for anyone who remembers Florida in 2000. No white woman was ever pulled over for driving while being a white female. No white woman has died in a fusillade of police bullets because the cops automatically assume that a white woman has a gun and is by definition an imminent threat. Half of all white women are not high school dropouts. Half of all white women are not jobless against their will.

We accomplish nothing by trying to assign relative degrees of victimization and make this election a question of who's been more oppressed. This kind of "Who's suffered more" thinking is what created the schism between African-Americans and American Jews, who at one time worked side-by-side in the civil rights movement and now automatically assume that the other group is attempting to hoard all the suffering marbles for itself. I'm seeing women do this now about the Hillary Clinton candidacy, and all this is going to accomplish is giving us President John McCain and another four years of neocon lunacy.

I am a 52-year-old woman. I am supposed to be Hillary Clinton's base. I'm supposed to be one of those people who's going to emulate Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles and vote for McCain if she isn't the nominee. And I'm supporting Barack Obama. Does this make me a traitor to my sex? I don't think so, and here's why.

From the very beginning, feminist theory was created by comfortable, middle-class white women. I remember the mothers of friends going to consciousness-raising groups. One of these mothers was divorced and had a generous alimony check coming in. Another was a psychologist who, along with her husband, had a very nice income. It was all about what female executives get paid and about sexism in the language and things that really don't matter one whit to the waitress at the diner who left her abusive husband, cleans house during the day and waits tables at night to support her kids, and lives in fear every day that he's going to come in and kill her right when she's pouring the coffee.

I would point out to you, zuzu, that the examples you provide in your post are similarly about the concerns of middle-class white women: The female president of a package manufacturer talking about how male executives view Hillary. The low percentage of women with full partnerships in law firms. A Ph.D. who can't find a full-time job at a local college. It isn't that these concerns aren't important, but they are a symptom of a kind of myopia that has been an integral part of feminism since the very beginning. It isn't just about climbing the corporate ladder, and it isn't just about abortion rights. But you'd never know that if you look at the history of feminism.

I remember the women that Betty Friedan wrote about. I remember the women who stayed home and drank because they were smart and creative but in the late 1950's and early 1960's to buck expectations and take a job were out of the question unless you truly didn't care what the neighbors thought. What grieves me about young feminists is that you have grown up in a world that isn't anywhere near that limited, but I often see in you a sense of victimization that is completely at odds with any notion of female empowerment. Yes, zuzu is absolutely correct that the language that people, mostly men, often use when talking about Hillary is an indicator of how they feel about women in general. Yes, sexism is pervasive in our society, and as the available pie gets smaller, it's going to become more so -- and that is the main reason why the biggest mistake of early feminism was in painting men as the enemy, instead of as fellow victims in a corrupt system.

But you can't have it both ways with Hillary, and you can't have it both ways with yourselves. Hillary cannot want to be seen as a strong, capable female leader and then cry that she's a victim of sexism by the media -- even though her treatment by people like Chris Matthews has been appalling. But when she and her husband frame every criticism of her as "bullying the woman", they make her weaker, not stronger.

When Branch Rickey brought Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, he told Robinson that he wanted a player who had the guts not to fight back. It isn't that he wanted Robinson to be a victim of what he knew were the inevitable racial taunts, but he wanted a black player strong enough to not let the taunts get to him, but to answer his critics on the field -- which is exactly what Robinson did. Most of us can't even imagine what it was like to be Jackie Robinson that year, when he not only took abuse from opposing teams and the fans, but even some of his own teammates. But Jackie Robinson didn't go before the press and cry that people were picking on him, he just went out there and hit .297, led the National League in stolen bases and won the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award.

Sexism IS ingrained in our society. But we have been talking about sexism in the language for thirty years, and there are still women making beds in nursing homes for twelve hours a day and then going home and sending their kids to McDonalds for a Dollar Menu meal because it's a six-mile walk to a grocery store. And there are women who used to work on assembly lines whose jobs no longer exist. And there are women trapped in terrible marriages because they have no skills. And there are women in the military being raped by their commanding officers. And frankly, they have been largely ignored by feminists who for thirty years have been parsing language and talking about professorships and law partnerships and the number of female CEOs.

Hillary Clinton is a woman who has been treated appallingly by the press, and by many of the citizens of the country she hopes to lead. But she is also a corporatist; a woman who refuses to acknowledge the huge role being played by the for-profit insurance industry in rising medical costs and is willing to garnish the paychecks of low-wage Americans to continue to pour money into this corrupt system. She is a woman who has had cozy relationships with outsourcing companies that send high-paying American jobs to India where lower-paid employees, some of them women, are already showing the stress illnesses of Americans. She is a woman who for reasons I simply cannot fathom, inflated a photo-op visit to a war zone into something approaching combat, when she should have known full well that someone was going to find the video. And then she sends her husband out there to do her dirty work for her.

Hillary Clinton may be the first viable woman candidate for president, but she is no feminist icon. And to dump all of feminism's credibility into this particular vessel is a huge mistake over the long term.

I think about another woman who went into politics with less fanfare but who represent female empowerment far more than Hillary Clinton does: Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was killed and son injured on a Long Island Railroad commuter train and is in her 11th year in Congress as a leading gun control advocate. McCarthy has never once painted herself as a victim, and has held onto a Congressional seat that opponents once ridiculed as a sympathy seat. You want a political female icon? You could do worse than Carolyn McCarthy.

There is nothing that any generation hates more than the previous generation saying, "You kids don't appreciate what we dod for you, blah blah blah." My father-in-law fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and this was a frequent litany. We of course hated it. But I am saying to you young feminists right now: Don't make the same mistakes that the early feminists did. Don't focus on minutiae to the exclusion of the big picture. Right now there are issues that affect all of us -- male and female, rich and poor. It's not about gender this year, it's about our place in the world and about economics -- economics that victimize poor, working-class and middle-class men and women alike. You do us no favors by making this election about how Hillary is being treated and about language. Resist the temptation to succumb to victimhood-by-grievance. If you believe that Hillary Clinton is the better candidate, than of course you should support her. But recognize that if she is to be a viable candidate in November, she cannot use the politics of victimhood to advance herself as a strong candidate. Because strong leadership does not say "Oh, poor me."

The last thing the Democratic Party needed this year was a watershed election pitting a black man and a white woman against each other. This is why I said earlier to vote for the southern white guy. The grievance battles in this campaign have obscured the more important need to kick the Republicans out of Dodge at least long enough to fix the huge mess they've made of everything. But frankly, I'm not seeing Obama's supporters crying racism the way I'm seeing Hillary Clinton's supporters crying about the mean bullying men picking on their girl.

Polls say that over a quarter of Hillary Clinton's supporters and one in ten Barack Obama supporters will not vote for the other candidate and may in fact vote for John McCain. These people are idiots. If you think for one minute that John McCain is going to advance any kind of feminist agenda, you'd better sit down, have a cup of tea, and think again. Because if you think the media are being mean to all women by being mean to Hillary Clinton, wait till you see what two more Supreme Court justices like Samuel Alito are going to do to you.

Labels: feminism, Hillary Clinton

Preznit "I'll Drop Nukes On Iran If I Have To In Order To Show I'm Still Relevant" was the target of boo-birds last night at the Nationals/Braves opener at the new Nationals Park. When you consider how Carlos Delgado was booed for going back into the clubhouse instead of coming out for the National Anthem in the early years of the Iraq War, this is an astounding change of fortunes for this sniveling little man (who looks even smaller and more sniveling in the caverns of a baseball stadium:



As difficult as it is watching Lastings Milledge introduced in a Nationals uniform, it was worth it to see booing this loud. After all, they can't throw half the fans out of the stadium. The announcer tried to put lipstick on this pig by admiring the throw, but there's no getting around it: Americans simply detest this guy. And, Mr. Bush, THAT is going to be your legacy.

Labels: Baseball, George W. Bush

From the "Holy shit!" file:

You know, it may not even matter who gets the Democratic nomination this summer, because there may not be an election in the fall. And it won't be because of martial law or Republican corruption. It could be a scientific experiment gone horribly amok:

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

I'm all for science, and I know that things can sometimes go wrong, and experiments can have unintended consequences. But when the potential unintended consequence is complete destruction of the planet into a black hole, maybe "very unlikely" isn't unlikely enough?

And if the "unlikely event" occurs, who the hell is going to even be around to care about what happened seconds after the Big Bang?

Labels: Science