– An Early Xmas Present for Obama: They don’t come much dumber than former GOP Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, the UBS corporate shill who is the McCain campaign’s senior economic advisor, and he proved it July 10th by calling America “a nation of whiners” for complaining about the miserable state of the Bush Boy’s economy that he helped craft when he was in the senate. McCain quickly jetted away from Gramm’s remarks, denying they represented his opinion, but he notably didn’t fire the fifth Mutant Ninja Turtle from his campaign. Gramm, finally noticing he had wet his pants at the dance, attempted to back track, claiming desperately that he meant the leaders of the country, not the citizens, but think about it – how is that better? After all, isn’t McCain trumpeting himself as a leader of the country? He just called the War Hero he works for a whiner? I can see this line replayed on Dem oppo ads in the fall to show just how boneheaded and crass the Republicans really are. Crawl inside your shell, Phil, and hope they don’t roll you on your back before you arrive home in Stupidville.
August 4, 2008
July 11, 2008
July 6, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Drowning Down at the Old Rumor Mill Again Edition
From Everybody’s Favorite: Various Possibly Reliable Sources Who Wish to Remain Anonymous:
– China has already given the back-channel ultimatum to the Bushites – attack Iran and interrupt the flow of Iranian oil vital to the Asian nation’s economy and China will interrupt their loans and imports to the US, causing the American markets to crash even further and faster. The question is: will the mad Bush-Cheney neocons, drooling over an assault on Persia before Junior leaves office, pay attention?
– It’s a done deal: Bill Clinton has allegedly started secretly raising money for a run at the New York Governorship in 2010. Not only is Big Dog tired of campaigning for other people, he also sorely misses having political power. And he wouldn’t mind a spot in the record books as the first president to also be elected governor of two different states, one prior to the presidency and one after.
June 30, 2008
May 14, 2008
May 2, 2008
April 19, 2008
Frank Herbert: The Democrats’ Road Map to Defeat
Frank Herbert, The New York Times, April 19, 2008
The Democrats are doing everything they can to blow this presidential election. This is a skill that comes naturally to the party. There is no such thing as a can’t-miss year for the Democrats. They are truly gifted at finding ways to lose.
Jimmy Carter managed to win the White House in 1976 by looking pious and riding a wave of anti-Watergate revulsion. After four hapless years, he dutifully handed the keys back to the G.O.P.
Bill Clinton tried hard to lose, with sex scandals and whatnot, during the 1992 campaign. But Ross Perot wouldn’t let him. Mr. Clinton won with a piddling 43 percent of the vote. For eight years, Mr. Clinton tried to throw the presidency away (with sex scandals and whatnot), but he was never able to succeed.
That’s been it for the party for the past 40 years. The Democrats have become so psychologically battered by these many decades in the leadership wilderness that they consider the Clinton years, during which the president was impeached and they lost control of both houses of Congress, to have been a period of triumph.
Now comes 2008, a can’t-lose year if there ever was one. A united Democratic Party should be able to win this election in a walk. The economy is terrible and getting worse. The Republicans are demoralized. John McCain is no J.F.K. And the country wants to elect a Democrat.
April 14, 2008
Sidney Blumenthal: Dick Cheney Was Never a “grown-up”
Sidney Blumenthal, Salon, April 14, 2008
After Dick Cheney shot a friend in the face on a Texas hunting trip in February 2006, the national press corps began to speculate about him as one of the great mysteries of Washington, the Sphinx of the Naval Observatory, his official residence. Cheney had been known in the capital for decades through a career that carried him from congressional intern to the most powerful vice president in American history, but now his supposedly changed character became a subject of intense speculation. Brent Scowcroft, who had been George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, and had counseled against the invasion of Iraq, told The New Yorker magazine in 2005, “I consider Cheney a good friend — I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” Scowcroft’s judgment was less about Cheney’s temperament than his policy positions. The press, however, sought to disclose the sources of his “darkening persona,” as a cover story in Newsweek described it. “Has Cheney changed? Has he been transformed, warped, perhaps corrupted — by stress, wealth, aging, illness, the real terrors of the world or possibly some inner goblins?” A cover story entitled “Heart of Darkness,” published in The New Republic, suggested that Cheney’s heart disease had produced vascular dementia. “So, the next time you see Cheney behaving oddly, don’t automatically assume that he’s a bad man.”
In 2000, when Cheney, as head of George W. Bush’s search committee for a running mate, selected himself, opinion makers in Washington greeted the choice as proof positive of the younger Bush’s deference to wisdom and therefore personifying prudence. Cheney’s “manner gives him immunity from the extremist label,” assured David Broder, the longtime leading political columnist of the Washington Post. “Voters who saw his televised briefings during the Persian Gulf War remember the calm voice and thoughtful expression that are his natural style … By choosing a grown-up, Bush gave evidence of his own sense of responsibility.”
Five years later, in 2005, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, by then the former chief of staff to the former Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking publicly at a Washington think tank, the New America Foundation, was less concerned with the press corps’ obsession with Cheney’s shifting images than with exposing his unprecedented manipulations. “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.” Though he had had extensive experience in government, Wilkerson had never before encountered such “secrecy,” “aberration” and “bastardization” in decision-making. “It is a dysfunctional process,” he said. “And to myself I said, okay, put on your academic hat. Who’s causing this?”
April 13, 2008
Alec Baldwin: Who Can Beat McCain?
Alec Baldwin, The Huffington Post, April 13, 2008
Lotta folks on this site hating Hillary because she’s a woman. Lotta folks on this site loving Hillary because she’s a woman. Makes me think that, in some quarters, men have been uncomfortable with women a lot longer than whites have been uncomfortable with blacks.
Sometimes I honestly believe that a racist white guy would vote for Obama over anyone like his wife or mother. A woman as Commander-and-Chief? Uh-uh, they say.
How sad.
Lotta folks worried about Obama’s level of experience. Whatever you do, don’t buy into that Republican bullshit. Obama is FDR compared to this Bush. The GOP committed every possible sin in order to get Bush elected. They forged a whole set of new ones to get him reelected. Everyone around the world recognizes that America is in real trouble. Most Americans do, too.
Frank Rich: The Petraeus-Crocker Show Gets the Hook
Frank Rich, The New York Times, April 13, 2008
The night before last week’s Senate hearings on our “progress” in Iraq, a goodly chunk of New York’s media and cultural establishment assembled in the vast lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. There were cocktails; there were waiters wielding platters of hors d’oeuvres; there was a light sprinkling of paparazzi. Then there was a screening. We trooped like schoolchildren to the auditorium to watch a grueling movie about the torture at Abu Ghraib.
Not just any movie, but “Standard Operating Procedure,” the new investigatory documentary by Errol Morris, one of our most original filmmakers. It asks the audience not just to revisit the crimes in graphic detail but to confront in tight close-up those who both perpetrated and photographed them. Because Mr. Morris has a complex view of human nature, he arouses a certain sympathy for his subjects, much as he did at times for Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary, in his Vietnam film, “Fog of War.”
More sympathy, actually. Only a few bad apples at the bottom of the chain of command took the fall for Abu Ghraib. No one above the level of staff sergeant went to jail, and no one remotely in proximity to a secretary of defense has been held officially accountable. John Yoo, the author of the notorious 2003 Justice Department memo rationalizing torture, has happily returned to his tenured position as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. So when Mr. Morris brings you face to face with Lynndie England — now a worn, dead-eyed semblance of the exuberant, almost pixie-ish miscreant in the Abu Ghraib snapshots — you’re torn.
Ms. England, who is now on parole, concedes that what she and her cohort did was “unusual and weird and wrong,” but adds that “when we first got there, the example was already set.” That reflection doesn’t absolve her of moral responsibility, but, like much in this film, it forces you to look beyond the fixed images of one of the most documented horror stories of our time.
April 10, 2008
Newest House Member Goes After Bush’s Iraq Policy On Her First Day
Salon, Kartarine Mieszkowski, April 10, 2008
Thursday, the day Rep. Jackie Speier, 57, was sworn into Congress, she wasted no time in pissing off Republicans, by blasting President Bush and Sen. John McCain in a speech about the war in Iraq.
“The process to bring the troops home must begin immediately,” Speier, a Democrat from Hillsbourgh, Calif., told members of Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “The president wants to stay the course and a man who wants to replace him suggests we could be in Iraq for 100 years. But Madam Speaker, history will not judge us kindly if we sacrifice four generations of Americans because of the folly of one.”
While Democrats applauded, some Republicans booed, and a few walked out in protest, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Speier’s 13-year-old daughter, who was watching from the House Gallery, asked, “Why are they booing my mom?”
April 9, 2008
Robert Parry: Losing the War for Reality
Robert Parry, Consortium News, April 8, 2008
When future historians look back at the sharp decline of the United States in the early 21st Century, they might identify the Achilles heel of this seemingly omnipotent nation as its lost ability to recognize reality and to fashion policies to face the real world.
Like the legendary Greek warrior – whose sea-nymph mother dipped him in protective waters except for his heel – the United States was blessed with institutional safeguards devised by wise Founders who translated lessons from the Age of Reason into a brilliant constitutional framework of checks and balances.
What the Founders did not anticipate, however, was how fragile truth could become in a modern age of excessive government secrecy, hired-gun public relations and big-money media. Sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in.
That is the crucial lesson for understanding the arc of U.S. history over the past three decades. It is a central theme of a new book by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
As a senior Kremlinologist in the CIA’s office of Soviet analysis, Goodman was on the front lines of the information war in the early 1980s when ideological right-wingers took control of the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan and began to gut the key institutions for assessing reality.
April 7, 2008
The Tattlesnake – McCain Says Listen to Bin Laden Edition
“I’ll speak for the man, or against him, whichever will do the most good.”
– Richard M. Nixon
On March 25th, MSNBC’s First Read reported John McCain’s delusional comment, “We’re succeeding [in Iraq], I don’t care what anybody says.” True to form, McCain’s Big Media Fondlers cast this bit of insouciant ‘unsinkable Titanic’ stupidity as their War Hero’s steadfast refusal to back down after the marking of the 4,000th American death in Bush’s Bust in the Dust.
What was more interesting about the story, though, was McCain’s embrace of Osama bin Laden’s position on Iraq, and how the Big Media mavens covered it.
Bin Laden, as he’s wont to do to influence US politics, apparently echoed George Bush’s and John McCain’s contention that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism and McCain, incredibly, accused those that didn’t believe bin Laden of “naivete”.
Who’s being naïve, Senator?
April 5, 2008
Paul Krugman: Voodoo Health Economics
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, April 5, 2008
Elizabeth Edwards has cancer. John McCain has had cancer in the past. Last weekend, Mrs. Edwards bluntly pointed out that neither of them would be able to get insurance under Mr. McCain’s health care plan.
It’s about time someone said that and, more generally, made the case that Mr. McCain’s approach to health care is based on voodoo economics — not the supply-side voodoo that claims that cutting taxes increases revenues (though Mr. McCain says that, too), but the equally foolish claim, refuted by all available evidence, that the magic of the marketplace can produce cheap health care for everyone.
As Mrs. Edwards pointed out, the McCain health plan would do nothing to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to those, like her and Mr. McCain, who have pre-existing medical conditions.
The McCain campaign’s response was condescending and dismissive — a statement that Mrs. Edwards doesn’t understand the comprehensive nature of the senator’s approach, which would harness “the power of competition to produce greater coverage for Americans,” reducing costs so that even people with pre-existing conditions could afford care.
This is nonsense on multiple levels.
Quayle Again?
VP Reprise with McCain? Quayle Says He’s ‘Rested and Ready’
By Mo Larkey
Continental-Affiliated Press International
August 3, 2008
INDIANAPOLIS – At a press conference here today, former vice president Dan Quayle told reporters he’s “rested and ready” and prepared to “help Sen. McCain win the White House” in 2008.
The Indiana Republican, a former US senator and vice president in the administration of George H. W. Bush from 1988 to 1992, claimed that he had the “kind of wide-body life experiences” Mr. McCain needs in a vice president and would “be assetable” to the Republican candidate’s chances.
“I believe that I have been road-tested and trialed and I have found myself willing,” said Mr. Quayle, “and I could do for Sen. McCain what I did for President Bush’s father – put him over the top with the Republican Party baseline.”
“I’ve been there and done that,” continued the former vice president, “and I can do it all over again. I’m rested and ready and set to rip into this campaign like a tissue paper tiger.”
“Look at it this way,” Mr. Quayle summed up, “if we can deposit men on Mars, as we have been doing, we can get a Republican elected president this year, and I’m just the astronaut to help Sen. McCain win the White House.”
As he left the podium, Mr. Quayle mimicked dialing a phone and whispered, “Johnny, call me.”
Reached last night, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis had no comment on the former vice president’s offer.
Copyright 2008 Continental-Affiliated Press International