The more we see of Barack Obama as president, the more we realize that he in no way represents change we can believe in. There is no chess game, there is no Special Barack Mojo that we just can't see yet. What there is, yet again, is a Washington outsider who doesn't understand how the game is played; who doesn't understand that Washington is run by Sally Quinn and Maureen Dowd and Little Luke Russert and Big David Gregory and Sweaty Chris Matthews -- and that even though they don't know jack shit, what they say and what they want happens. The Desiree Rogers fracas is Travel Office II: Electric Bugaloo. Gays in the military is, well, gays in the military. And health care is once again health care. If it feels to you like the Clinton era with all the media scandalmongering and none of the prosperity, you're not alone.

It's not all his fault. He came to office in a clusterfuck, and in a nation full of people whose most important issue is who is going to win American Idol, he wasn't going to have enough time to fix what ails this country. But the degree to which the WAshington Villagers want him to fail is truly spectacular. This morning I was watching The Chris Matthews Show for about five minutes and wanted to shoot myself in the face. "If he doesn't get health care, his presidency is ruined", opined one of the hackocracy on the panel. It's amazing just how much the Village wants Barack Obama to fail. It isn't just for Republicans anymore.

I'll tell you a secret. On September 12, 2001, I didn't want George W. Bush to fail. We were in a crisis, and I wanted a president who knew what the hell he was doing. We didn't have one, of course, and he didn't know what the hell he was doing, but not for one minute did I wish his failure. I don't wish Chris Christie's failure either, for all that I didn't vote for him for governor. If he can somehow manage to get New Jersey out of its fiscal mess that's all to the good.

But Barack Obama doesn't "belong", so he must be ruined. And therefore, the Washington social set has decided that if Barack Obama doesn't get health care "reform" passed, the rest of his presidency is just a waste of time.

I'm ready to say that if it DOES pass his presidency may very well be ruined.

Here's why:

The public option in the Senate bill, it should be emphasized, is a compromise of a compromise already. The first compromise was to have the public plan negotiate its rates directly with providers, rather than set them based on Medicare’s rates. This compromise meant that the Congressional Budget Office was unlikely to score the public plan as producing the huge savings that it projected for a plan that used Medicare-based rates. Whether CBO was right in discounting the negotiated-rate plan’s savings is another matter--as I have written on this site, it’s likely underestimating the cost-containment potential--but the CBO’s numbers rule on Capitol Hill.

The second compromise was to allow states that did not want to have the public plan operating within their borders to “opt out” with the passage of a state law. How many states will take advantage of this option is unclear, but it’s certain to reduce the impact of the public plan even further. Indeed, the CBO is now projecting—again, pessimistically in my view--that only a few million Americans will enroll in the public plan. Yet none of this has apparently appeased the handful of hold-outs. Emboldened by the White House’s lack of clarity and pressure on the issue, they are digging in their heels and spewing false claims about the public plan (for example, that it’s a budget buster when there are no special government subsidies for it and the CBO projects it will exert downward pressure on private premiums, thus lowering the price tag of reform). Hence the new push to find some kind of middle road.

The problem is that the “middle-ground” ideas that are currently flying around aren’t in the middle at all.

[snip]

In short, the new compromise proposals are anything but. They represent calls for advocates of the public plan to eat their crumbs and be happy. But a majority of Senators support the public plan. At least two--Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont and Senator Burris of Illinois--have said having a real public plan in the legislation is a precondition for their support. Those who believe in the public plan—and, more important, who believe in the principle it embodies: that no American who lacks access to good insurance should be forced to buy coverage from the private plans that got us into our present mess--should stand firm in the face of these non-compromises.

This includes President Obama. He made the public plan part of his promise of change in 2008. Now he needs to put his weight and influence behind the public plan and its essential goals, rather than allow them to be gutted. This is in our nation’s interest. It is also in his and his party’s political interest. A bill that forces people to take private insurance but doesn’t create competition or a public benchmark is a prescription for unaffordable coverage, runaway costs, and political backlash. The “middle ground” is nowhere to stand if it’s going to crumble beneath you.

Amen to that.

Labels: Barack Obama, despair, health care, hopelessness

It's become part of the wingnut doctrine that it doesn't matter what the truth is, as long as you BELIEVE that something IS or COULD BE true, it's exactly the same as reality.

So it's hardly surprising that a "terrorist dry run" that seems to exist only in the mind of Debbie Schlussel and her readers once again turns out to be so much horsepuckey:

It's a little easier to understand why a Houston man who claimed to have thwarted a potential terrorist attack on a flight leaving Atlanta has not answered repeated requests to tell his story.

He was not on the plane, AirTran Airways says.

"After conducting additional research into this situation, we have verified, according to flight manifests [legally binding documents] that the individual that allegedly created a first-hand account of events on-board AirTran Airways Flight 297, a Theodore Petruna, was never actually on-board the flight," AirTran said in a statement, which the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the first to obtain.

An e-mail from a Tedd Petruna, in which he told the AJC via a Facebook message Friday was intended only for friends and family, made the rounds online this week after a friend apparently forwarded it to others. In a matter of days, Petruna's account appeared in chat rooms and blogs and on conspiracy theorists' Web sites.

The AJC was forwarded the e-mail dozens of times this week, as readers saw Petruna's tale and noticed conflicting information between it and earlier news reports of the flight delay Nov. 17. Some readers simply asked the AJC to further investigate the matter.

But others who forwarded the message accused the AJC of participating in a politically correct cover-up.

The intriguing story made for intense fodder among bloggers.

Petruna's story appeared in a blog on the Web site for The Project 9.12, a group started by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. A Canadian news site picked up the story. Dallas Morning News airline columnist Terry Maxon made it the subject of his blog for a second time this week on Friday. And snopes.com, a Web site that sniffs out rumors to decipher between fact and fiction, followed the story.

In its continued investigation into the incident, the AJC made several attempts to speak to Petruna about the incident. He has declined throughout the week to respond to repeated e-mail and phone attempts by the AJC to talk to him. That last request was made Saturday.

Additionally, AJC interviews with people on the plane, airline officials and federal agencies did not corroborate his story.

Not that this will change what the Glenn Beckians believe. Because it COULD be true, couldn't it? Isn't it POSSIBLE that there COULD have been a terrorist dry run on that plane just because a passenger speaking SPANISH didn't understand a request to turn off his cell phone? And like all good Cheneyites, the Glenn Beckians believe that if there is a one percent chance that something is true, you proceed as if it is true.

I realize that there are sad little men in this country who simply can't get over that we have a black Democratic president. Their little world of illusory white privilege (I say illusory because the privilege they want to hard to sustain is among people who will never, ever, ever let them into their ranks) is disappearing and they want desperately to "feel like real men." And how better to feel like real men than to regale their fellows with a swashbuckling tale of singlehandedly disarming a terrorist plot iin progress.

Now, I'm sure that Schlussel and her acolytes will tell you that this is all part of a massive cover-up by AirTran, the FAA, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ACORN, Barack Obama, The Homosexual Lobby™, and the 12 Jewish Bankers Who Run Everything. Funny how these are the kind of people who thought people like me should be executed as traitors for even suggesting that perhaps the official story we were told about the 9/11 attacks might not be true.

(h/t)

Labels: utter horseshit, wingnuttia

Today's honoree DougJ over at Balloon Juice, commenting on how the Washington Villagers are once again having the vapors over someone who isn't part of their little club.

Money quote:

But what this article is really saying is that Desiree Rogers isn’t the right kind of person. That’s what Socksgate and Travelgate and all that other bullshit was about too—the Clintons weren’t the right kind of people. It’s what all the bullshit about Michelle Obama’s iPod and bare arms is about too.

I hate to go on and on about this, but it’s pretty remarkable that the media insisted the Clintons being investigated for using White House postage to send letters form from their cat and that the Obama White House be investigated because two weirdos crashed a White House party, but that the Bush White House should never be investigated for torture, politicizing the DOJ, falsifying intelligence, and (not that that I think this one is important but it is similar to the kinds of trivialities that are deemed important when they happen under Clinton or Obama) having a male prostitute show up to lob softball questions at White House briefings.

And now a random cat video that shows why cats rule the world. Now with bonus adorable puppies:

Labels: assholes, cat blogging, double standards, hack journalism, mainstream media

Here's the context: Republican Senators Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma, the state where he says the school bathrooms are overrun with lesbians) and David Vitter (R-Diapers), are the co-sponsors of a Republican protest measure that would require Congress to go on the public health insurance option if it passes. Never mind that Congress is ALREADY on a public option, but that's beside the point. We already know what reality is where Republicans are concerned. The point of this whole thing is relying on the clubbiness of Congress to force Senators to say "Oh, no...that's good enough for the little people, but not good enough for us."

Enter Senator Sherrod Brown:

Whenever Democrats talk about their proposed federally backed insurance plan, or public option, in the ongoing health-care debate, critics pipe up. If you think this public option is so great, they say, why don't you demand that all members of Congress go on it, too?

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown says that's a fine idea. And this morning, he forced his way onto a Republican amendment saying as much, becoming a co-sponsor of a Republican protest measure that would require Congress to go on the public option if it passes.

Fact is, Republicans pushing the amendment are using it as a form of rotten eggs to hurl at their opponents. But Brown, a key sponsor of the public option legislation, likes those eggs.

Brown has refused to participate in the government's array of health insurance plans for 17 years, saying they are more generous than the coverage choices that many other Americans get. Why should Congress get such sweet coverage? he asks.

[snip]

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma didn't seem to be in a hurry to bring on Brown as a co-sponsor. Coburn had Republican co-sponsors, but Brown's office says the Ohio Democrat never could get a commitment to be added, despite nine calls from his staff to Coburn's staff over the last week.

So this morning, Brown stood on the Senate floor and forced the matter. He asked for unanimous consent to be added as a co-sponsor to the amendment. This procedure is usually reserved for issues of little controversy because it bypasses a roll-call vote.

But in an open, televised proceeding, who's going to oppose a senator's genuine desire? So fellow senators granted Brown's wish. Next time someone asks why members of Congress won't go on the public option if it's so darn good, look for Brown to push his way into the fight and say, Yeah, buddy, you're darn right.

Nice work by Sen. Brown. I take back everything I thought about him back when Chuck Schumer forced Paul Hackett out of the race in which he won that Senate seat.

It would have been nice if Al Franken had been the one to call the Republicans' bluff, but he did a nice job of signing on. I especially like him reminding David "Hookers" Vitter of his own 34-year marriage. A nice touch. If we wondered how Franken would integrate comedy into his Senate work, here you go.

More like these, please.

Labels: Al Franken, Democrats with balls, o, Sherrod Brown

The New York Times account today about yesterday's jobs summit reads in places like something from The Onion:

While liberals are calling for ambitious job-creating measures along the lines of the New Deal and Republicans want to scale back government spending programs, Mr. Obama talked at the White House on Thursday of limited programs that he suggested could provide substantial bang for the buck when it comes to job creation. Among them was the weatherization program.

Called “cash for caulkers,” it would enlist contractors and home-improvement companies like Home Depot — whose chief executive was on the panel — to advertise the benefits, much as car dealers did for the clunkers trade-ins this year.

Here at Casa la Brilliant, we just spent a bunch of money ripping apart the cheap no-insulation "finished basement" job done by the previous owners of our house in the 1970's and adding insulation and new windows. This plus replacement of some rusty ductwork has already in its first month resulted in $40 in electricity savings and I don't know how much in heating oil because we no longer need to use space heaters to supplement the house's heating system. But we're both working so a tax credit is meaningful. If you aren't workiing, and you have no income, you aren't going to be able to hire a contractor to add insulation, or install new windows, or anything else to save energy. And not everyone has the skills or the wherewithall to do it oneself, not that that would create a single job.

But the most significant part of the article is where a businessman from Salt Lake City made very clear that at least in his opinion, businesses won't hire as long as Barack Obama is president:

Mr. Obama told the chief executives that he wanted to know: “What’s holding back business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring? And if there are things that we’re doing here in Washington that are inhibiting you, then we want to know about it.”

He got a blunt answer from Fred P. Lampropoulos, founder and chief of Merit Medical Systems Inc., a medical device manufacturer in the Salt Lake City area. Mr. Lampropoulos said some in his discussion group agreed that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”

The president acknowledged, “This is a legitimate concern,” one that he and his advisers had discussed before he took office.

But Mr. Obama said he had decided that “if we keep on putting off tough decisions about health care, about energy, about education, we’ll never get to the point where there’s a lot of appetite for that.”

The argument that Democrats’ ambitions are unnerving business is one that Republicans have been making lately, and it was prominent Thursday when House Republican leaders held a competing round table on jobs with conservative economists.

In case you're wondering, that competing round table was primarily a forum for the kickoff of Newt Gingrich's 2012 Presidential campaign. Gingrich's plan? You guessed it: More tax cuts for business, starve Medicare and Social Security:

He said the government can start by aiming for a balanced budget each year, develop more domestic energy sources and lower or eliminate a number of taxes he said hurt smaller businesses and prevent them from adding positions.

"If you're an entrepreneur, you're going to be able to find the money" if the government isn't sucking it up, the former congressman said.

Gingrich spoke to a receptive crowd, which often cheered as he made his points.

He told jokes and quoted from authors George Orwell and Albert Camus in describing his view of the government's negative effect on job growth.

His tax ideas include a two-year, 50 percent reduction in Social Security and Medicare taxes, lowering the capital gains rate to 0 percent, eliminating the estate tax and lowering corporate taxes.

Because eight years of tax cuts during the Bush years weren't enough for Jamie Dimon and the rest of his Wall Street cronies. And because perhaps if the already preposterously wealthy get even more tax cuts than the Bush Administration gave them, they'll hire a few maids, cooks, butlers, gardeners and pool boys. And the work place of the future will once again look like this.

(Byron Dorgan has a different take on why small businesses aren't hiring, and it has more to do with Jamie Dimon and his cronies than with their tax burden.)

Labels: economic death watch, Greedy Republican Bastards

But a local reporter who was denied press credentials but showed up anyway at Barack Obama's speech at West Point WITH A GUN IN HIS TRUNK was deemed "not a threat":

A local reporter attempting to cover President Obama's speech at West Point this week was not allowed in when he told security officials he had a hunting gun in the trunk of his car.

West Point spokesman Jim Fox tells TPM that the reporter volunteered the fact that he had the firearm in his car, saying he left it there inadvertently.

He was interviewed by both the Secret Service and West Point's military police. The Secret Service determined he didn't pose a threat to the President, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the incident. But the reporter was asked to leave.

The news comes as the Secret Service is facing scrutiny over its role in letting two uninvited guests into the White House for Obama's first state dinner. In several incidents earlier this year, protesters carried guns outside venues where the President was speaking.

The official also told TPM that the reporter, a longtime journalist who has covered White House events in the past, had applied for press credentials to cover the speech but was denied.

I swear, the Secret Service and law enforcement WANT Obama to be assassinated.

Labels: You can't make this shit up

Gene Lyons:

During the former Baptist minister's decade as Arkansas governor, it appeared that no matter how heinous an inmate's crimes, all he had to do for a pardon was drop to his knees, praise Jesus and persuade some preacher known to Huckabee of his newfound holiness. "Everybody knows that Mike Huckabee makes up his mind what to do by what God tells him to do," said one minister who gained clemency for a prisoner serving 100 years for the strong-arm robbery of elderly neighbors.

Making the governor's personal acquaintance also seemed to help. Inmates competed to be assigned to do yard work at the Governor's Mansion. "If you do a good job raking the governor's leaves," Pulaski County (Little Rock) prosecutor Larry Jegley complained bitterly, "you can go free."

Altogether, Huckabee commuted 163 inmates' sentences, including a dozen murderers. Several have already ended up back in prison. Indeed, given Huckabee's track record, Maurice Clemmons probably won't be the last to earn notoriety. We must pray that he ends up being the worst. Only a strong public outcry in 2004 prevented the governor from freeing a Lonoke County killer who'd beaten, raped and run over a pregnant woman with his car, only to get religion in the penitentiary.

Look, there are those people who can only control their behavior when they have a religious framework within which to work. I don't understand needing a great white alpha male in the sky ready to smite you in order to behave because I don't need one, I can do it on my own. But hey -- whatever it takes. However, as I noted on Tuesday, deeds rather than faith ought to be the benchmark of whether someone has truly repented. And where Mike Huckabee is concerned, it's all about the professions of faith rather than tha actions of faith. But isn't this a logical outcome of a theology which states that nothing you do actually DO counts, it's all about whether you choose to believe a story? Isn't it only a matter of degree of heinousness that takes you on the road from being Mark Sanford to being Maurice Clemmons? Once you decide that it's about faith not deeds, isn't it one long continuum of amorality and criminality? And that's if you want to buy (as Huck did) that Clemmons' "conversion" was real, and not something being more a function of getting off on the old ultraviolence and tolchocking and getting to bed with one's wives' handmaidens, as Alex in A Clockwork Orange does.

How does one reconcile someone like Mike Huckabee, who's a rabid fetophile, wanting to free someone who beat, raped, and ran over a pregnant woman with his car? What about THAT fetus? Or does a man's conversion take priority over even a fetus?

Labels: just another outrage, Mike Huckabee, religion

We recently saw just how much influence the Catholic Church has over the creation of legislation in this country when the Stupak Amendment remained in the House health care legislation:

Behind-the-scenes lobbying, coupled with a grassroots mobilization of Catholic churches across the country, led the House Saturday to pass an amendment to its health-care bill barring anyone who receives a new tax credit from enrolling in a plan that covers abortion, a once-unthinkable event in Democrat-dominated Washington.

The restriction would still have to be accepted by the Senate, where it will likely face a tough fight. The issue could sink the larger health legislation if the chambers fail to reach agreement, or if any consensus language leads supporters to defect.

The House vote, and the central role played by one of the country's biggest religious denominations, stunned abortion-rights groups that had worked hard to elect Mr. Obama and expand Democratic congressional majorities. Activists on the left had thought social issues would take a back seat to economic concerns.

The bishops' success served as a reminder that Democrats' strategy over the past two election cycles of recruiting more conservative candidates to run in competitive House and Senate seats can have unwelcome policy consequences for liberals among the party's base. About 40 House Democrats are opposed to abortion rights.

The bishops have a history of political activism. In the 2004 presidential race, some bishops said they would refuse to grant communion to Democratic nominee John Kerry, a Catholic who favored abortion rights. In 2005, the bishops' conference backed efforts by then-President George W. Bush and Republican lawmakers to intervene in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case. But rarely has the church entered the fray with such decisive force.

"The Catholic bishops came in at the last minute and drew a line in the sand," said Laurie Rubiner, vice president for public policy at the abortion-rights advocacy group Planned Parenthood. "It's very hard to compete with that."

WHY is it hard to compete with that? A bunch of guys dress up in robes and funny hats and decide that they are God's emissaries and we're all supposed to accept them as holy men?

Yes, if you are Roman Catholic, the bishops are important. But why, in a country in which nonestablishment of religion is codified in the very documents on which it was founded, do Catholic bishops have this kind of influence? And they get a tax deduction on top of it, this church whose empire is headquartered in one of the wealthiest city-states in the world.

Just yesterday, the Catholic Church lobby helped defeat gay marriage legislation in New York. And a few weeks ago, the Washington DC archdiocese threatened to stop providing services to the poor if the city passed a law permitting gay marriage.

That the Catholic Church has any more credibility than any other lobby just because its hierarchy paints itself as being of God is preposterous in a diverse nation like ours. And that we buy into this business about Godliness from an organization with a history of protecting child molesters is even worse. Yesterday the Cardinal of the New York Diocese, Edward Egan, gave a deposition in a case that occurred when he was the Bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut:

The deposition was in its fifth grueling hour. The lawyer and the witness had dueled over the meaning of common words, about whether an executive “supervises” or “administers,” about the difference between a lie and a failure to tell the truth.

Then the lawyer sprang his big question: You could have prevented someone from hurting people and you decided not to. Why?

The witness was Edward M. Egan, then the Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Conn. The question was about a priest who had been accused of sexually molesting children.

“I didn’t make a decision one way or the other,” said Bishop Egan, whom the lawyer suggested had failed to act quickly against the cleric. “I kept working on it until I resolved the decision.”

The exchange is one of hundreds recorded in a vast trove of documents the Diocese of Bridgeport made public on Tuesday after battling in court for seven years to keep them sealed. The archive — more than 12,000 pages of memos, church records and testimony — was gathered for 23 lawsuits, alleging sexual abuse of children by seven priests, that the diocese settled in 2002.

At the heart of it lies the bishop’s testimony, in two wide-ranging depositions from 1997 and 1999. Punctuated by legal parsing and frequent exasperation on both sides, transcripts of the videotaped sessions show the man who would become one of the church’s most prominent American leaders — the archbishop of New York, and a cardinal — as he navigated a budding scandal that still threatens the church’s finances and reputation.

Since 2002, when he moved to New York and nationwide attention focused on the church hierarchy’s handling of abuse complaints, Cardinal Egan has faced troubling accusations about his tenure in Bridgeport: that he allowed priests facing multiple sex abuse allegations to continue working; that he did not refer complaints to criminal authorities; and that he showed little interest in meeting with accusers.

[snip]

He sparred at one point over the difference between the supervisory and administrative duties; and at another point acknowledged that “media attention” to allegations of sexual abuse by priests had already become a serious problem for the church by 1988, when he arrived in Bridgeport, prompting him to take action. Soon after settling in, he said, he codified — in written form — the diocese’s “excellent policies” for handling sexual abuse complaints, which under previous bishops had been passed along by word of mouth.

Even then, Bishop Egan played down the importance of the action he had taken to stem a problem which, to him, was not a widespread one. At one point, when the deposition resumed in 1999, he stopped in his description of church policies to challenge the notion that any abuse had actually occurred.

“Incidentally,” he said, “these things don’t happen, and we are talking about ifs.”

“Forgive me, Father — Bishop,” replied one lawyer, Cindy Robinson. “But these things do happen because that’s the reason why we’re seated here today.”

She had been asking about two priests with long records of abuse allegations, whom Bishop Egan had sought to remove from the priesthood, though both continued working.

“These things happen in such small numbers,” the bishop said.

Bishop Egan was at his most combative when voicing his belief in the innocence of most accused priests, including one, the Rev. Raymond Pcolka, who was accused by 12 former parishioners of abuses involving oral and anal sex and beatings.

Nice, isn't it? And yet the organization that protects priests like this wants to have control over women's reproductive systems and whether same-sex people who love each other can be married. What kind of happy horseshit is this, anyway?

And in case William Donohue is having the vapors over this, let me be clear: I have no beef with people who practice Roman Catholicism as a religion. If the theology of this faith speaks to you, more power to you. There are aspects to Catholicism that I applaud, such as the ritual of confession, which to my mind is a far preferable framework for developing a moral code than the clean-slate "All you have to do is believe that Jesus died for you and you can do whatever you want" theology that seems to drive much of the Republican Party. I know Catholics of deep and abiding faith who DO help those less fortunate, and who DO turn to their religion for comfort and for whom this faith speaks to them. Whatever gets you through this often hideous level of reality, I say. But to defend the church hierarchy as somehow morally superior and worthy of a strong role in policymaking just doesn't hold water, given its record. Forget about the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, we're only talking about what these men (and yes, it's all men) have done IN OUR LIFETIMES. I am not intolerant of religion, but I am intolerant of corruption and hypocrisy, ESPECIALLY that which is occurs while preaching moral superiority.

And when this church's hierarchy starts getting involved in policy, and has a role disprportionate to what it should in a nonetablishment government, and is characterized by a hypocrisy and corruption of this magnitude, it's time we stopped letting it beat our legislators into submission.

Labels: religion

Even Wanda:

Labels: Avenue Q, Comedians, racism, Tiger Woods, Wanda Sykes

Read the Nightowl Newswrap over at They Gave Us a Republic. That ought to finish the job.

Labels: bloggers, icepick meet forehead

Joe Conason does a service by reminding us just why there is still any issue of Afghanistan at all:

It would be much less fair, however, to ignore the events that led us to this moment, when whatever choice he makes will offer no great guarantee of progress and no small prospect of trouble.

Those events began with the inexplicable decision by officials of the previous administration to allow Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other ranking leaders of Al Qaeda to escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. At the time, as a new Senate report on the battle of Tora Bora recalls, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, decided not to augment the tiny force of special operations troops on the ground with sufficient force to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden and his deputies. They later claimed to be worried that “too many American troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency,” a rationale that can only evoke bitter laughter now.

None of the reasons offered back then for inaction at Tora Bora made sense after the outrage of 9/11, when the entire world, including the Afghan people, were cheering the U.S. invasion. The pattern of deception that later led to war in Iraq began with expressions of doubt by both General Franks and Vice President Dick Cheney about Mr. bin Laden’s presence in Tora Bora—a doubt that none of the commanders on the ground shared and that always sounded more like an excuse than an explanation. If there was any chance that the perpetrators of 9/11 could be found in those mountains, then maximum force should have been deployed as rapidly as possible.

What we know now, of course, is that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, and President Bush himself were distracted from the vital necessity of victory in Afghanistan—which meant not only driving out the Taliban but installing a real government in their place—by their obsession with Iraq. Not only did the Al Qaeda leadership escape, but so did Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, who returned to mount a threatening insurgency two years later, just as the Bush White House and the Pentagon were declaring “mission accomplished” in Baghdad. The resulting neglect of Afghanistan—with all the corruption, disillusionment and anger that has ensued—had reached a critical stage when the Bush administration finally departed. Their own commanders were left behind to warn Mr. Obama that the enemy had gained the upper hand.

It's important to remember this, because it flies in the face of the notion that we had a competent defense team in place to respond to the 9/11 attacks. Because there are only two explanations for what the BushCheney Admininstration did after all their rhetoric about smokin' him out and dead or alive. Either they were so incompetent as to have been unfit for their jobs, or else the tinfoil hatters are right -- and Bin Laden was allowed to escape because he's not the black sheep of his family after all and is therefore connected to the Bush family.

What's it going to be then, eh? Take your time. It's one or the other. Your choice.

But in six months, no one is going to remember this, if they even do now. Nor is anyone going to care. As the flag-draped bodies start coming back in multiples again, and the apologies for massacre of civilians attending a wedding, and soldiers going nuts during their fifth, sixth, seventh and beyond deploymentand opening fire on their own platoons start coming back, no one is going to care that George Bush allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape and turned his back on Afghanistan because he wanted to prove that his penis is bigger than his daddy's. Barack Obama may have inherited this war, but by capitulating to the military/industrial complex and the generals whose very lives are defined by wars, he's made it his own. And if you want to know just how preposterous, how, well, Bushian the "Obama plan" is, look no further than Juan Cole:

Months after the controversial presidential election that many Afghans consider stolen, there is no cabinet, and parliament is threatening to go on recess before confirming a new one because the president is unconstitutionally late in presenting the names. There are grave suspicions that some past and present cabinet members have engaged in the embezzlement of substantial sums of money. There is little parliamentary oversight. Almost no one bothers to attend the parliamentary sessions. The cabinet ministries are unable to spend the money allocated to them on things like education and rural development, and actually spent less in absolute terms last year than they did in the previous two years. Only half of the development projects for which money was allotted were even begun last year, and none was completed.

In other words, we can say of the Afghanistan government what Gertrude Stein said of her inability in later life to find her childhood home in Oakland, Calif.: "There is no there there."

The only thing that changes over the generations is that a new "Big fool says to push on."

Labels: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, FUBAR

Tonight's honoree: David Sirota, who asks some simple questions about Barack Obama's plans for Afghanistan.

Money quote/questions:

- Which is worse - a stupid person like George W. Bush starting a dumb occupation, or a smart person like Barack Obama following the lead of that stupid person, but actually escalating that occupation?

- The "we're going to escalate war to end war" refrain throughout the speech - have we heard that before somewhere? It sounds sorta like "we'll burn down the Vietnam villages to save them." Just curious if that's what we're talking about here - because, ya know, that worked out really well.

- Are we really expected to believe that massively escalating a war is the way to end a war? I mean, really? Like, is the public really looked at like we're that stupid? And a follow-up question: Are we really that stupid?

- If Obama's Afghan War strategy about escalating a war to end a war was a self-help strategy for, say, alcoholics, wouldn't it prescribe drinking more whiskey to stop drinking - and wouldn't we all laugh at that?

- How many pundits will insist that bowing down to the Military-Industrial complex and escalating this missionless war somehow shows "resolve" and "strength" and "toughness" and "leadership" and not embarrassing weakness?

- Would the Obamaphiles now telling us to "give President Obama a chance" with this decision and/or defending Obama's escalation - would these same people be saying we should "give President McCain a chance" and/or defending President McCain's escalation if he was the one in office making this decision?

Honorable mention: Dday.

Bonus tracks:

Labels: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, bloggers, the more things change the more they stay the same

God, will this overcompensating limpdick NEVER go away:

MCLEAN, Va. — On the eve of the unveiling of the nation’s new Afghanistan policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed President Barack Obama for projecting “weakness” to adversaries and warned that more workaday Afghans will side with the Taliban if they think the United States is heading for the exits.

In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.”

“I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe as small ‘p’ political reasons, where he’s trying to balance off different competing groups in society,” Cheney said.

“Every time he delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what they’ve been asked to do?”

After reading that I have to either perform a self-lobotomy with a chef's knife just to make it stop, or look at some major league cuteness.

I choose Teh Cute:


OK. I feel better now.

Labels: assholes, Bush Administration crimes, Dick Cheney, STFU

Charles Johnson of conservative blog Little Green Footballs has decided he's not going to follow the American right off a cliff. This doesn't mean that Mr. Johnson has suddenly decided to be a progressive, but he's not buying what the worst elements of his side of the fence are selling.

I realize that there are those on the right for whom, say, Daily Kos represents the equivalent of the anti-science, religiously fanatical, racist, murderous influences peddled by the right's most famous spokespeople in the media. But a better parallel would have been if the Democratic Party were buying the doctrines of A.N.S.W.E.R. lock, stock, and barrel.

In my increasingly rare moments of optimism, I'd like to believe that Johnson's defection represents a step towards a political environment in which intelligent people of good will can disagree, and that we can have things like dialogue and compromise. I'm not optimistic, but for now, I applaud Charles Johnson for refusing to put ideology over his own brain.

Labels: bloggers

Joe Conason notes today Mike Huckabee's unfortunate tendency to buy professions of religious conversion as "proof" of rehabilitation, while Barbara at Mahablog expands on Conason to note that in Huck's world, finding religion in faiths that are not his own don't count.

Conason, who also reminds of the infamous Wayne Dumond case as well as another where a mere profession of a Come to Jesus moment sufficed as evidence of true repentance:

Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated. During those years he granted more commutations and pardons than any governor during the previous four decades, many of them surely justified as a response to excessive penalties under the state's draconian narcotics laws. But others were deeply controversial, especially because so many of his acts of mercy appeared to depend on interventions by fellow Baptist preachers and by inmate professions of renewed Christian faith.

No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again. Clemmons too was among those who benefited from Huckabee's tendency to believe such pious testimonials. "I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak," he explained in his clemency application in 2000. "I'm still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family's name ... I have never done anything good for God, but I've prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I'm humbly appealing to you for a brand new start."

Barbara:

I wrote about Dumond and another Arkansas convict, Frankie Parker, almost two years ago in “A Tale of Two Prisoners.” For reasons explained in the earlier post, Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, was pressured by the Christian Right into pardoning Dumond.

But the Christian Right kept silence on Frankie Parker, who was executed in 1996 over the objections of Mother Theresa and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In fact, Governor Huckabee was so keen to execute Frankie Parker that he intervened to move the execution date up by six weeks so that Parker could be executed sooner. He was so keen to execute Parker that moving up the execution date was Huckabee’s first official proclamation as Governor of Arkansas. Clearly, this was an itch that Huckabee was rarin’ to scratch.

It is true that Parker was convicted of committing two murders while under the influence of drugs. He admitted he had done this. He wasn’t asking for a pardon; just life.

What made Frankie Parker’s life so untenable? In prison, he had acquired a copy of the Dhammapada, which inspired him to convert to Buddhism. He corresponded with a Zen priest and also worked with a Little Rock Buddhist group to learn the practice. He became a spiritual leader within the prison. A Buddhist spiritual leader. Can’t have that.

So if people are wondering why Mike Huckabee took it upon himself to grant clemency to Maurice Clemmons, look for a religious angle. I don’t know that there is one, but I’ll be surprised if there isn’t.

And that, my friends, is what happens when you allow an unholy marriage of church and state.

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, Mike Huckabee

Remember today, my friends. Because after Barack Obama, purveyor of Hope and Change and Yes We Can, leaves our television screens tonight, he will have officially morphed into Lyndon Johnson.

He won't be the unfortunately nearly forgotten Lyndon Johnson who signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, knowing full well (and accurately) that it meant the Democrats would lose the South for many generations to come, as the warhorses who still revered the old Confederacy would jump ship for the already welcoming Republican Party. In some ways it's a shame that Obama hasn't chosen to be that Lyndon Johnson. For where civil rights were concerned, the situation was very much like it is right now with health care reform:

Lawrence F. O'Brien, President Kennedy's and later President Johnson's chief of liaison with the Congress, recalled it this way:

[Y]ou had a battle on two fronts simultaneously. You had a battle with the conservatives on the committee, the southern Democrats, conservative Republicans, but you had just as tough a battle with the liberals. Their position was the old story of the half loaf or three-quarters of a loaf, and [now they were saying] "we'll settle for nothing less [than the whole loaf.]" . . . We shared their views, and we'd love to do it their way.

We were accused by some of being weak-kneed but, my God, are you going to have meaningful legislation or are you going to sit around for another five or ten years while you play this game? Those liberals sat around saying, "No, we won't accept anything but the strongest possible civil rights bill, and we won't vote for anything less than that." To kill civil rights in that Judiciary Committee was an appalling possibility! And it was not only a possibility, it came darn close to an actuality.

The Kennedy administration had wanted to get past the civil rights fight by the end of 1963, so as not to have the struggle continue into the following election year. That hope had by now gone by the boards, even if the committee reported favorably on the bill, and promptly. It took until November 19 for the measure to make it to the Rules Committee to be scheduled for consideration on the floor of the House. And Rules Committee Chairman Smith was certain to seek ways to stifle the bill first.

But at 12:30 p.m., on a sunny November 22 in Dallas, everything changed.

Jack Valenti, a top aide to Johnson, gave this account of what happened on the night of John Kennedy's assassination:

Twelve hours later, LBJ was in his home in Spring Valley, three trusted friends by his side—the late Cliff Carter, Bill Moyers, and myself. He lay on his huge bed in his pajamas watching television, as the world, holding its breath in anxiety and fear, considered that this alien cowboy was suddenly become the leader of the United States.


That night he ruminated about the days that lay ahead, sketching out what he planned to do, in the almost five hours that we sat there with him. Though none of us who listened realized it at the time, he was revealing the design of the Great Society. He had not yet given it a name, but he knew with stunning precision the mountaintop to which he was going to summon the people.

In his address to the joint session of Congress on November 27, President Johnson gave notice that he wanted quick action on both civil rights and the tax bill:

I urge you again, as I did in 1957 and again in 1960, to enact a civil rights law so that we can move forward to eliminate from this Nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color. There could be no greater source of strength to this Nation both at home and abroad.



And second, no act of ours could more fittingly continue the work of President Kennedy than the early passage of the tax bill for which he fought all this long year. This is a bill designed to increase our national income and Federal revenues, and to provide insurance against recession. That bill, if passed without delay, means more security for those now working, more jobs for those now without them, and more incentive for our economy.

On November 29, the day after Thanksgiving, Johnson met with Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, to talk about the civil rights bill.

"He was asking us if we wanted it, if we would do the things required to be done to get it enacted," Wilkins recalled. "He said he could not enact it himself. He was the President of the United States. He would give it his blessing. He would aid it in any way in which he could lawfully under the Constitution, but that he could not lobby for the bill. And nobody expected him to lobby for the bill, and he didn't think we expected him to lobby for the bill. But in effect he said — and he didn't use these words - 'You have the ball; now run with it.'"

This was Johnsonian hyperbole. Given LBJ's legendary record for "lobbying" members of Congress, the President could only have meant that he couldn't get civil rights passed by himself. In fact the President had been on the phone that same day with the minority leader of the Senate, Everett Dirksen, the Illinois Republican.

"If Congress is to function at all and can't pass a tax bill between January and January, why, we&'re in a hell of a shape. . . . They ought to pass it in a week," Johnson told Dirksen. "Then . . . every businessman in this country would have some confidence. . . . We've got an obligation to the Congress. And we've just got to show that they can do something, because we can't pass civil rights. We know that."

Johnson meant that the southern senators were sure to filibuster against the civil rights bill, and there weren't yet enough votes to shut off the debate.

Where civil rights were concerned, Johnson wasn't afraid of Republicans. He wasn't afraid of their filibuster. He wasn't afraid of anything. Now, granted, Johnson didn't have a bunch of poufy-haired, lantern-jawed male and lookalike blond female talking heads acting as on-camera frontmen for executives in industries having nothing to do with journalism who had a vested interest in Republican rule. He didn't have Rupert Murdoch and his army of slack-jawed yokels. He had Chet Huntley and the pre-Archer Daniels Midland David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite instead of the smarmy David Gregory and the hacktacular George Stephanopolous. He had an hour or so every weeknight to deal with in terms of news rather than a 24/7 cable news maw demanding to be fed a steady diet of scandal and innuendo. But still, for a party hack like Johnson to deal this kind of death knell to his own party in the south in order to Do The Right Thing is no small potatoes.

But that is not what Americans think of when they think of Lyndon Baines Johnson. American think of Vietnam.

Then, as now, it was the military, not the president, who wanted greater involvement in Vietnam. And then, as now, it was false information, at that time about the "incident" in the Gulf of Tonkin, that provided the pretext for war, just as the nonexistent WMD provided the pretext for war in Iraq that took attention away from the arguably legitimate mission in Afghanistan. John Kennedy had sent military advisers, but it was Johnson who escalated our involvement in Vietnam.

The U.S. was hamstrung in terms of military policy by two ideas: The first was the domino theory, which held that if you let one country in a region fall to Soviet Communism, the others would inevitably fall. At a time when the Cold War was in full swing, and especially in the aftermath of the fall of Eastern Europe, the domino theory at least had some credibility. But the fatal error, then as now, is in this notion of American exceptionalism. The victory in World War II was still relatively fresh in people's minds; certainly more fresh than the disaster of Vietnam is in the American mind today. That this country could "lose" a war was unthinkable. If you just threw enough weaponry and American lives at a problem, you would eventually prevail -- or so the thinking was.

Barack Obama doesn't have either of those ideas as an excuse. There is no domino theory in the Middle East. The Soviet Union was a large, powerful state, not a ragtag band of guys training on jungle gyms in the desert. And we now have the history of an unwinnable guerilla war under our belts as a reference. And yet, here is Barack Obama, getting ready to send tens of thousands of American young people, many of them already deployed to the edge of madness, to their deaths. And why? It isn't because he has the kind of "terrorists under the bed" fearmongering mindset that drove the military policies of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It can't be that he has any idea that Hamid Karzai is going to be a leader of some kind of free Afghanistan, not after the rigged election that took place earlier this year. The only logical explanation I can think of is that once again, this nation's foreign policy is being held hostage to a man's childhood issues.

With George W. Bush, it was his quite apparent issues with his father, who refused to go to Baghdad rather than fight an endless war that would only destabilize that nation. Bush clearly had a need to gain his father's love and approval while at the same time showing that his own dick was bigger than daddy's. Seven figures of Iraqi and American lives were sacrificed, rather than George Bush going to a good therapist to work these issues out.

For Barack Obama, it's a function of this "straddling two worlds" pattern that characterizes his life -- this need to be the black man who makes white people comfortable, to travel seamlessly in both worlds. Now, as president, it's no longer about black and white; it's about liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. He ran as a post-partisan, championing an end to the era of hyperpartisanship and a new era of cooperation. The problem is, he had absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the Republicans and the DINOs whose only interest is in keeping their Red State seats, were willing to sign on to this new era. And no matter how often the Republicans show that there is no such thing as good faith negotiation and compromise in their world. Barack Obama is still out there thinking that if he's just NICE enough, or if he just shows Bushian "toughness", that he'll get the military and the Republicans to come around. Never mind that REAL toughness would involve standing up before the American people tonight and telling them the truth, a truth that Bob Herbert heartbreakingly notes today:

Afghanistan is not Vietnam. There was every reason for American forces to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. But that war was botched and lost by the Bush crowd, and Barack Obama does not have a magic wand now to make it all better.

The word is that Mr. Obama will tell the public Tuesday that he is sending another 30,000 or so troops to Afghanistan. And while it is reported that he has some strategy in mind for eventually turning the fight over to the ragtag and less-than-energetic Afghan military, it’s clear that U.S. forces will be engaged for years to come, perhaps many years.

The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But that would have taken great political courage. It would have left Mr. Obama vulnerable to the charge of being weak, of cutting and running, of betraying the troops who have already served. The Republicans would have a field day with that scenario.

Lyndon Johnson is heard on the tapes telling Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, about a comment made by a Texas rancher in the days leading up to the buildup in Vietnam. The rancher had told Johnson that the public would forgive the president “for everything except being weak.”

Russell said: “Well, there’s a lot in that. There’s a whole lot in that.”

We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war.

It's not going to happen. Obama is so trapped by his campaign promise of bipartisanship, a promise that the Village is bound and determined he keep, even as he throws the promises he made to those who actually elected him into the garbage, that everything else must be sacrificed to that promise, including human lives.

I don't know what it's going to take for Barack Obama to realize that it's not going to happen, this magic group hug with Republicans for which he's willing to sacrifice the people who seem less enthusiastic about going to the mat for him than we did a year ago. Perhaps he, like his predecessor, is so wrapped up in his childhood issues that he can't see beyond them, and is therefore susceptible to the manipulations of the generals whose business is war, war, and nothing but war. But I for one am sick of watching American kids die because powerful American men have childhood issues they refuse to work through in a psychologist's office.

(UPDATE: Now THIS is the speech Obama SHOULD give.)

Labels: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, rant