Primary day in Alabama, where it's not the heat, it's the stupidity
After a long weekend jampacked with heavy drinking and numerous other varieties of debauchery, GWBWYPGN?!'s brain, sadly, just isn't capable of some long, involved discussion of Bush's Iraq policy or even the ramifications of this little tidbit. So instead we're going to focus on something more suited to an embarrassingly low level of brain activity: the Alabama primary.
On the Democratic side, things are pretty simple: For the presidential nomination, you cast a vote for Kerry or Kucinich — or, hell, they'll even let you flush your vote on LaRouche if you're so inclined — and then you get to pick which delegates you want to send from Alabama to the national convention, a different slate for each congressional district. There are a couple judgeships in play, and kick-ass Rep. Artur Davis of the 7th district has a primary opponent this year, but other than that, nothing that would particularly interest you.
Things get a little more complicated on the Republican side, though, and it's all thanks to Rev. Judge Roy Moore, whose spectre continues to loom ominously over the entire state like Montgomery Burns casting a beady gaze over the Springfield nuclear power plant. Rep. Spencer Bachus, the Bush hand puppet whose district GWBWYPGN?! unfortunately lives in, got an unexpected primary opponent in the form of Phillip Jauregui, who represented Moore in his fight to be seen on television 24 hours a day, 7 days a week display the Ten Commandments in the state judicial building. But the biggest embarrassment has to be, collectively, the races for the three open seats on the Alabama Supreme Court.
Basically, the candidates for those three seats are in a mad dash to see who can insert their nose the furthest up Roy Moore's ass. It's like that movie "Greedy" where all of Kirk Douglas's relatives are trying to butter him up so he'll unload his substantial inheritance on them, only less dignified. The situation was officially declared out of hand Sunday afternoon, when your humble blogger was subjected to campaign ads for Tom Parker, Pam Baschab and Jerry Stokes in succession, with each candidate mentioning what great buddies they were with Moore and how they never would've voted to ditch his Ten Commandments monument. And those ads were followed by a fourth ad from some interest group, reminding you to vote for Parker, Baschab, and Stokes because they respect the Ten Commandments and everyone else is a dirty godless Commie traitor.
A fourth Supreme Court candidate, Jean Brown, has tried to leap aboard the Moore bandwagon even though, as an incumbent, she was one of the justices who voted to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the judicial building and voted to uphold Moore's removal from the Court afterward. She's already being called on this, though, by a number of people — most importantly her opponent, Parker, whose ad attacking Brown had to be one of the most moronic campaign ads ever aired in a state that's seen more than its share of them. Parker tried to tie Brown to the ACLU, since Brown got the Ten Commandments back into the state judicial building as part of a larger exhibit of historical documents that the ACLU signed off on; he also pointed out that Brown had received the endorsements of the "liberal media" (zzzz . . . ), which in his mind includes the Huntsville Times, the Birmingham News, and the Mobile Register. The Mobile freaking Register, which averages about a staff editorial a week on the "John Kerry will put this country on a road to ruin" theme. The Mobile freaking Register, which recently published this and this!
In 2002, right as I was moving to Alabama, I was subjected to campaign ads from Rep. Mike Rogers condemning his opponent, Joe Turnham, for being endorsed by the Sierra Club, "a pro-choice organization." Now this. I love living in this state, but this is the kind of stupidity that makes me want to crawl under the covers and call in sick continuously until the primaries are over, not to mention the kind of thing that's going to earn me another round of humiliation from my dad when I head down to Georgia to visit this weekend. (Of course, when Pops starts in with the Bama-bashing, I can always remind him that at least we can get the size of our state flag right on the first freaking try, not to mention we're not expected to keep a straight face while uttering the words "Senator Chambliss.")
Oh, well. How nice it would be if today we were instead in South Dakota, helping dear Stephanie Herseth on her way to waxing her Republican opponent in the special election to replace former Rep. Bill "Stop Sign? What Stop Sign?" Janklow. Herseth, you'll recall, made our very first installment of Hot Democrats back in February, and evidently her supporters aren't too bad either.
But anyway. Yes, GWBWYPGN?! did indeed vote in the primary today and cast its vote for you-know-who, and we'll be making the rounds of the state primary parties tonight. What? Drinking? Yes, because we apparently haven't done enough of that this weekend. But anyway, the results of the primary will most likely pop up here sometime tomorrow, and anyone who has the audacity to not be mesmerized by Alabama politics can go here and pout about it.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:44 AM
Friday, May 28, 2004
Bonus Coultertude for the long weekend
If the Ann Coulter hysterics below aren't enough for you, be sure to check out World O'Crap's recap of the Coultinator's recent appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show. (On a side note, Wo'C — voluntarily watching a half-hour of both Coulter and O'Reilly? Wouldn't it be quicker just to get somebody to give you one good cranial whack with a Louisville Slugger?)
The recap includes such nuggets of uniquely Coulterian genius as this one:
Bill asks Ann if President Bush has done anything wrong in his conduct of the war. She ways that the war "is going magnificently," and it's just the media's fault if anyone believes differently. Bill says that Fox News' military experts don't think it's going magnificently, and asks Ann what she knows that the military experts don't. She asks for specifics on what those so-called experts think isn't going well. Bill says there aren't enough troops on the ground to provide security, and that the Fox News people in Iraq won't even go out of their hotels, "which isn't a good sign." Ann replies, "I wouldn't go out of my hotel in Washington, D.C." The implication: Ann would rather live in Tikrit than D.C. We will help her pack.
Good times, good times. This recap snarking is the kind of thing we'd like to do more of here at GWBWYPGN?!, we really would, but we heard O'Reilly's show caused cancer in lab rats, so we're going to continue our policy of restricting our Fox News viewing time to only those hours in which Juliet Huddy is on the air. Nevertheless, Wo'C, we thankee.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:28 PM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: #39 — In Abu Ghraib, Nobody Can Hear You Scream
We at Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot were standing around tapping our feet and looking at our watches waiting for Ann to dig into the Abu Ghraib scandal, positive that any minute now she was going to write a column about how anal violations of possibly innocent prisoners in Iraq should not only be permitted but made the focal point of our relations with all Islamic countries. ("Rectum? Damn Near Killed 'Um!" she would oh-so-coyly title it.) Yet we're doomed to go another week more or less disappointed, because her throwaway mention of Abu Ghraib at the very beginning of this week's screed is just an intro to a long jeremiad about how the so-called liberal media, once again, are losing the war for us. Damn liberal media! Why are we letting them into the military, anyway?
According to Ann, everything is rose petals and champagne in Iraq, just like Paul Wolfowitz promised us. The only stuff that's going wrong is the fact that Islamic fundamentalists are continuing to take potshots at our troops over there, which in Ann's richly imagined fantasy world proves her right about something — and as you'll read below, that "something" is the sky being green, up being down, night being day, or something like that. And the fact that the media aren't utterly and completely denying reality and regurgitating her laughably disprovable theories just proves that they're out to completely hamstring the American occupation of Iraq! Join us, won't you, as we follow Ann down the rabbit hole and enter the upside-down dimension of "Tit For Tet":
Abu Ghraib is the new Tet offensive. By lying about the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War, the media managed to persuade Americans we were losing the war, which demoralized the nation and caused us to lose the war. And people say reporters are lazy.
So the press has been lying about Abu Ghraib all this time? We feel so used!
The immediate consequence of the media's lies was a 25 percent drop in support for the war. The long-term consequence for America was 12 years in the desert until Ronald Reagan came in and saved the country.
Go on and read the next two paragraphs while we excuse ourselves to barf . . .
Now liberals are using their control of the media to persuade the public that we are losing the war in Iraq. Communist dictators may have been ruthless murderers bent on world domination, but they displayed a certain degree of rationality. America may not be able to wait out 12 years of Democrat pusillanimity now that we're dealing with Islamic lunatics who slaughter civilians in suicide missions while chanting "Allah Akbar!"
And yet the constant drumbeat of failure, quagmire, Abu Ghraib, Bush-lied-kids-died has been so successful that merely to say the war in Iraq is going well provokes laughter. The distortions have become so pervasive that Michael Moore teeters on the brink of being considered a reliable source.
. . . While Ann Coulter merely teeters on the brink of being considered certifiably insane. Oooh, we bet it makes her jealous!
If President Bush mentions our many successes in Iraq, it is evidence that he is being "unrealistically sunny and optimistic," as Michael O'Hanlon of the liberal Brookings Institution put it.
Is Ann trying to act like it's only liberals who are worried about the current state of affairs in Iraq? No less than Bill Kristol admitted that George W. Bush "drove us into a ditch." Tucker Carlson now says he was wrong for supporting the war in the first place. Generals from Clark to Zinni (sorry, couldn't come up with an "A" one there) have criticized the way the administration tried to half-ass the occupation. Even Tom Clancy is starting to think Bush doesn't know what he's doing. Could it be that this "liberal" drumbeat isn't really that exclusively liberal at all?
O'Hanlon's searing indictment of the operation in Iraq is that we need to "make sure they have some budget resources that they themselves decide how to spend that are not already pre-allocated." So that's the crux of our challenge in Iraq: Make sure their "accounts receivable" columns all add up. Whenever great matters are at stake, you can always count on liberals to have some pointless, womanly complaint.
Here's the context of O'Hanlon's remarks, which Ann can always be counted on to completely ignore. Giving the Iraqi governing council resources that they can allocate themselves was just one of the ideas O'Hanlon offered in his brief remarks, but pointing that out wouldn't have allowed Ann to call O'Hanlon a pussy, and she just couldn't allow that, could she?
We have liberated the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator who gassed his own people,
Which was hunky-dory in the 1980s, and after we'd liberated Kuwait, but somehow only became an issue again once the neoconservatives got bored looking for Osama.
had weapons of mass destruction,
Which would be where again?
invaded his neighbors,
Which we resoundingly took care of in '91 and, tellingly, he hadn't tried since.
harbored terrorists, funded terrorists and had reached out to Osama bin Laden.
So Ann will chastise Michael O'Hanlon for his "womanly complaint," but then she'll justify a full-scale war on the basis of some Lifetime Television-level offense like "reaching out." Oooh, horrors! Besides, didn't we already debunk that crap like two weeks ago?
Liberals may see Saddam's mass graves in Iraq as half-full, but I prefer to see them as half-empty.
So far, we have found chemical and biological weapons – brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, ricin, sarin, aflatoxin – and long-range missiles in Iraq.
Wait, in that column we just linked to, Ann said we found "research on" brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever and all that other stuff. Now suddenly we've found the diseases themselves. Which is it? We're at the point now where neocons are so desperate to justify their WMD claims, they'd seize upon Saddam's stockpiles of Jack Daniels as "evidence" if they thought they could prove Iraq was about to unleash an epidemic of the whiskey shits on unsuspecting American cities.
The terrorist "stronghold" of Karbala was abandoned last week by Islamic crazies loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who slunk away when it became clear that no one supported them. Iraqis living in Karbala had recently distributed fliers asking the rebels to please leave, further underscoring one of the principal remaining problems in Iraq – the desperate need for more Kinko's outlets. Last weekend, our troops patrolled this rebel "stronghold" without a shot being fired.
Which would be more comforting if the citizens weren't just as anxious to see the Americans get the hell out as well. What is it with the neocons and their blind insistence that the enemy of your enemy is automatically your friend 100 percent of the time? Hasn't that gotten us into enough trouble already?
The entire Kurdish region – one-third of the country – is patrolled by about 300 American troops, which is fewer than it takes to patrol the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach on Easter weekends.
The Kurds have been friendly to Americans for years. This is news?
But the media tell us this means we're losing. The goalpost of success keeps shifting as we stack up a string of victories. Before the war, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof warned that war with Iraq would be a nightmare: "[W]e won't kill Saddam, trigger a coup or wipe out his Republican Guard forces." (Unless, he weaseled his way out, "we're incredibly lucky.")
We've done all that! How incredibly lucky.
Ummm . . . is Ann being facetious here? 'Cause we're pretty sure we haven't done any of those things. Saddam is still clearly alive (if in custody), there was never a coup, and remnants of the Republican Guard, while weakened, are still operating underground and causing trouble for coalition troops.
Kristof continued: "We'll have to hunt out Saddam on the ground – which may be just as hard as finding Osama in Afghanistan, and much bloodier."
We've captured Saddam! And it wasn't bloody!
"Wasn't bloody"? The fuck? Tell that to the families of the 500-some coalition troops who died before Saddam was brought in. Isn't it amazing how people like Ann will claim to be so fired up about the "sanctity of life" as it concerns the unborn, yet when it comes to troops — i.e. people who are already living — they treat them like they're as disposable as Swiffer pads? When is somebody going to take them to task for this?
Indeed, the most harrowing aspect of Saddam's capture was that he hadn't bathed or been de-liced for two months.
Kristof also said: "Our last experience with street-to-street fighting was confronting untrained thugs in Mogadishu, Somalia. This time we're taking on an army with possible bio- and chemical weapons, 400,000 regular army troops and supposedly 7 million more in Al Quds militia."
And yet, somehow, our boys defeated them in just six weeks! Incredibly lucky again! And just think: all of this accomplished without even having a "Plan."
Nobody ever said Bush didn't have a plan for the war — what we're saying (and being proved increasingly right about) is that he didn't have a plan for the occupation. But occupations are so boring, sayeth Ann! Let's focus on the war, which involved a lot of shooting and explosions and fire and killing, and as such is the only part of this exercise that's worth my time!
Now we're fighting directly with Islamic loonies crawling out of their rat holes from around the entire region – which liberals also said wouldn't happen.
What?!?! When the fuck did we say that, Ann? Time for another name change: This feature will now be called Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot and Plus, She Just Makes Shit Up. If anything, it was the liberals who warned that an Iraqi invasion would attract loon-ball fundamentalists from all over the Muslim world, while Bush's people insisted we'd have the whole country snapped in line like a trained puppy in a matter of months.
Remember how liberals said the Islamic loonies hated Saddam Hussein – hated him! – because he was a "secularist"? As geopolitical strategist Paul Begala put it, Saddam would never share his weapons with terrorists because "those Islamic terrorists would use them against Saddam Hussein because he's secular."
Here we go with the old "See, There Were Al-Qaeda Fighting in Iraq!" pseudo-argument, which is about as stupid as anything else the neocons have tried to use to retro-justify the war. Follow along real closely, ladies, and try not to move your lips as you do so: Saddam wasn't collaborating with al-Qaeda before we invaded. Got that? He wasn't. Sure, you can play your Kevin Bacon Game of this-Iraq-guy-met-with-this-al-Qaeda-guy-at-this-place all you want, but you've basically taken what may have amounted to little more than a chat session at the Baghdad Starbucks and run it through your Laurie Mylroie, Girl Genius™ decoder ring until "Saddam" and "al-Qaeda" have become effectively interchangeable in your eyes.
Ann insists that Saddam was bosom buds with those "Islamic loonies," but does she really think it's any coincidence that said loonies only started streaming into Iraq after American troops had the Iraqi army backed up to its own goal line and Saddam's portrait was no longer smirking from every street corner in Baghdad? And yet, even as this ass-whupping was in progress, Saddam ordered his troops not to collaborate with the foreign insurgents entering the country to fight the Americans.
Despite Ann's implication, there's no evidence Saddam "shared his weapons" with any of those insurgents. To recap: The presence of terrorists in a country after the leader of said country has been deposed doesn't exactly count as evidence that said terrorists and said leader were collaborating. It's find another windmill to tilt at, Ann, 'cause this one's all tilted out.
Well, apparently, the crazies have put aside their scruples about Saddam's secularism to come out in the open where they can be shot by American troops rather than fighting on the streets of Manhattan (where the natives would immediately surrender).
Yeah, now that we're fighting a war in Iraq, we will never have to worry about terrorists attacking the U.S. again. We're saved! Yay us!
The beauty of being a liberal is that history always begins this morning. Every day liberals can create a new narrative that destroys the past as it occurred. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
And Ann continues to fall further and further down the rabbit hole. The Bush administration has concocted and erased new justifications for the war like they were going out of style, passed on reams of inaccurate information about Iraq to the American people, sliced into our civil liberties here at home, and encouraged people to go informing on each other. Yet in Ann's world, it's liberals who are living the 1984 fantasy. That takes some fucking chutzpah.
To be sure, Iraq is not a bed of roses. As the Brookings Institution scholar said, we have yet to give the Iraqis "budget resources" that "are not already pre-allocated." I take it back: It is a quagmire.
OK, let's recap: In Ann's world, Abu Ghraib never happened and is just a fabrication of the media; only liberals think the occupation is struggling; Saddam Hussein was not captured but was rather killed in a coup; no wait, he was captured, and nobody even had to get killed to make it happen; Hussein and al-Qaeda were thick as thieves before the war started; liberals were the ones who insisted terrorists wouldn't come streaming into Iraq as a result of the invasion; and there is no longer a terrorist threat against America. And she says we're the ones engaging in 1984-style revisionist history. We still don't know exactly which alternate reality Ann has transported herself to, but we're pretty sure there's not enough amyl nitrate in the world to get us there.
And all this just to prove that the media hates our troops and desperately wants them to get the crap kicked out of them in Iraq, a hypothesis so mouth-foamingly stupid it didn't even merit the effort in the first place. We were kind of thinking the blame might rest more securely on the Washington nitwits who never accounted for anything other than the best-possible-case scenarios in their feeble attempts at postwar "planning," but according to Ann, their best-laid plans would never have gone astray were it not for Dan Rather and the New York Times. And given her encyclopaedic knowledge of military strategy gained through many long hours of playing Risk with Paul Wolfowitz, who the hell are you to tell her she's wrong, traitor? Go say ten Hail Marys and come back next week for yet another installment of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, if you know what's good for you!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:52 AM
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Where'd everybody go?
In case you were wondering why the right-wing warblogging community seems to have up and forgotten about the roadside sarin-shell bomb that injured some American soldiers last week, when previously they had been hyping it as iron-clad evidence that Saddam was just minutes away from destroying us all, this might give you a bit of insight.
Yes, apparently that shell was more than fifteen frickin' years old — constructed before the first Gulf War, and most likely during a period when the U.S. was arming Iraq to the teeth against what we considered to be a greater threat in Iran. Kind of reminds us of Paul Mooney's "Negrodamus" sketch on "Chappelle's Show":
Q. Negrodamus, why is President Bush so sure Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:12 PM
The natives get restless, and Hot Democrats makes its triumphant, if sexist, return
In February, we hipped you to some of the hot Democrats currently occupying public office in the U.S. In March, we informed you that the left-leaning hotness extends to donors as well. In April, we . . . well, we did bupkus, except to give periodic updates on your humble blogger's fatuous, if politically symbolic, relationship with Elisha Cuthbert. Now, with May almost over, GWBWYPGN?! has no choice but to respond to the worldwide clamor — and by "worldwide clamor," we mean "half a dozen or so 18-to-34-year-old male readers who generally like this site but are getting bored silly by our protracted discussions of prison abuses and/or Iraqi sovereignty" — for more by gracing thee with yet another installment of Hot Democrats: Part III — Donors Gone Wild.
As always, a disclaimer: Yes, this is a superficial exercise. Yes, and not a little bit sexist to boot. But so far, nobody has complained, not even those of the female persuasion — well, except for GWBWYPGN?!'s sister, and maybe she was kind of in a lousy mood that day. (Ha ha, just toolin' on you, baby sis! Please don't kill me!) And come on, it's fun! Sure, it's nothing but eye candy, but look, I've been nothing but eye candy for the Alabama for Kerry campaign for the past three months now, and I haven't heard any of you people getting your undies in a righteously indignant wad over that.
Besides, where else are you going to get this kind of eye candy from, anyway? Glenn Reynolds? Bitch, please! And so we begin:
Ashley Judd gave a thousand to Lois Combs Weinberg's campaign to unseat Tom DeLay's geeky older brother Mitch McConnell.
And Candice Bergen — who may have just turned 58 but is still hot, I'm sorry — threw $1,500 to our boy Kerry, and another ten gees to the Democratic National Committee.
We know what you're about to ask, and no, Elisha hasn't made any donations yet. (Maybe it's being Canadian and all.) But she's assured us that we'll be the first to know if she does.
Enough shallowness and lookism for one day. We now return you to our regular wonky repertoire of outrage, policy debate and Ann Coulter-bashing, (sort of) already in progress.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:48 AM
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
All the donuts you can eat for $2.99! (Limit 3)
Via Sadly, No!, Atrios, and most likely a whole bunch of other places:
Given that this is the Los Angeles Times, you think Ann Coulter will include it in her next rant?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:23 PM
Fed-Up Cheney Enters Presidential Race Himself WASHINGTON, DC—As President Bush's public-approval ratings hit an all-time low, Vice-President Dick Cheney announced Monday that he has been "forced" to throw his hat into the ring for the 2004 presidential race.
"Enough is enough,'" the visibly annoyed Cheney said at a morning press conference. "George blew the whole Iraqi prison-abuse speech, and he barely did better with his Nicholas Berg reaction. Now he's below 50 percent in the polls. I'm sorry, but I can't allow him to drag me down with him in November."
"Do I have to do everything around here?" Cheney asked, pausing to gesture angrily around the White House. "I guess I do."
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:01 AM
You fasten the triggers/For others to fire/Then you sit back and watch/As the death count gets higher . . .
TBOGG today links to a CNN.com story that makes you wonder how some people are allowed within 1,000 miles of America's foreign-policy decisions:
In discussing the Iraq war, both [Tom] Clancy and [Anthony] Zinni singled out the Department of Defense for criticism. Clancy recalled a prewar encounter in Washington during which he "almost came to blows" with Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser at the time and a longtime advocate of the invasion.
"He was saying how [Secretary of State] Colin Powell was being a wuss because he was overly concerned with the lives of the troops," Clancy said. "And I said, 'Look ..., he's supposed to think that way!' And Perle didn't agree with me on that. People like that worry me."
Let's talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I . . . I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.
Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry.
I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy Internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize.
But here’s the good news. You fix this thing, you’re the next greatest generation, people. You do this — and I believe you can — you win this war on terror, and Tom Brokaw’s kissing your ass from here to Tikrit, let me tell ya. And even if you don’t, you’re not gonna have much trouble surpassing my generation. If you end up getting your picture taken next to a naked guy pile of enemy prisoners and don’t give the thumbs up, you’ve outdid us.
* Disclaimer: Conan O'Brien's speech to the Harvard class of 2000, while also awesome, was for a Class Day ceremony and not technically a commencement address.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:28 AM
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
But just in case you thought we were going soft . . .
You know, sometimes we imply that all Republicans/conservatives/Bush supporters are complete morons, and maybe someone calls us on it and maybe they don't, but eventually the Catholic guilt sets in and we're like, "You know, maybe we shouldn't paint entire groups of people with such broad brushes like that," and we even start thinking that it's time to re-evaluate our entire worldview and try to become kinder, more gentle people . . .
. . . And then we read shit like this, and we're like, "No, we were right the first time."
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:43 AM
Bush actually did OK last night. Stand by for apocalypse.
Bush's speech last night about future plans for getting a free democratic government in Iraq? Not half bad, actually. There, we said it!
Granted, we didn't get to see the speech live — monthly Five Points South Community Association meeting last night, don'tchaknow (Southside, son! what!) — so maybe hearing it in Bush's Chris-Klein-reading-his-student-body-president-campaign-speech-in-"Election" monotone would've dampened our enthusiasm somewhat. Who knows. But anyway, we're heartened that for practically the first time since shells started falling on Baghdad, someone has indicated that they know what it's going to take to get a new Iraqi government up and running. Someone realizes that there has to be a plan. Not only that, but for the first time we can recall, Bush has acknowledged that maybe a substantial number of Iraqis — and not just the evil terrorist-sympathizing ones — don't really want us hanging around ("Iraqis are proud people who resent foreign control of their affairs, just as we would").
Anyway, the plan for constructing a democratic government and then getting U.S. troops the shit out of there — as described, at least — sounds promising. But there were only but so many specifics involved in Bush's speech, though, and the question of how exactly this will all be accomplished is where the doubts start setting in. If everything Bush proposed could be counted on to go exactly like clockwork, there'd be no reason whatsoever to worry, but Iraq is a country where nothing is as it seems and nothing can be counted on to go exactly the way we want it to. Will the architects of the reconstruction here in America, the Rumsfelds and the Wolfowitzes and the Feiths, treat this staggeringly delicate operation with the respect and attention it deserves, or will they continue trying to half-ass it? Will they be able to admit to themselves, and to the country, that all may not necessarily go as planned, or will they continue to stubbornly, blindly depend on the best-case scenario every single time?
For reasons we should've made obvious by now, we're not confident that they will choose the right paths. The administration appears to have a plan (or at least the beginnings of one), and it could be a good plan, but implementing it is going to be a battle between the people who are thinking and the people who aren't, the people who really understand the way things work in Iraq and the "don't confuse me with facts when I've already made up my mind" faction that has been wielding most of the influence thus far. In this administration, when it comes to those battles, all bets remain off.
Still, somebody's deigning to wake up to the reality on the ground in Iraq. And that's a start.
Now, don't go thinking that the world has been turned completely upside-down here — we still support Kerry, we still think most of the high-profile figures in the Bush administration are troglodytes, we still like Coke better than Pepsi, we still think Georgia Tech sucks. But a president who has gotten by on a fairly consistent regimen of bar-lowering actually gave us a pleasant surprise last night, and we felt it should be noted, and applauded.
"It's extremely difficult to govern when you control all three branches of government," says Hastert spokesman John Feehery, a burden of which Democrats would happily relieve them.
Um, yeah. In other news, this guy is complaining he isn't getting laid enough.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:17 PM
Liberal media whores: Liberal, no. Whores . . . well, yeah.
Kevin Drum has an ominous prediction about where the Bushies and other assorted neocons will take the next chapter of the Iraq blame game: "[A] lot of them have basically given up and are already setting the stage for Phase 2: figuring out a way to blame liberals and the press for the fiasco in Iraq even though George Bush and his team have been in charge of every single detail of it and have gotten every single dollar they've asked for." Drum links to the increasingly tiresome Instapundit, who parrots some right-winger's whining that, well, FDR didn't have to deal with all this media naysaying.
Which is stupid, because FDR did have to deal with naysaying, only it was coming primarily from prominent Republicans and not that nasty media. But let's talk about that so-called media bias for a moment, because it just happens to be something that GWBWYPGN?! was discussing with our sister over coffee Saturday morning in Atlanta (right before we paid $2.07 a gallon at that Shell station).
The Abu Ghraib scandal, f'rinstance, is being talked up by the wingnuts as an example of how the SCLM is using bad news in Iraq to undermine the war effort. But as Baby Sis pointed out, CBS — who first broke the prison-abuse story on "60 Minutes" — in fact censored itself on Abu Ghraib, sitting on the story for two weeks at the behest of the Defense Department. They only bit the bullet and ran the story when it became clear that the New Yorker was about to run a Seymour Hersh piece on the exact same scandal. CBS wanted to be first, so they broke the story. They didn't break it because they hate Bush or because they want the war to fail; they did it for the simple reason that they didn't want to get scooped.
Furthermore, as someone who's been through journalism school, Baby Sis understood a little thing called media judgment: You only have so much space in a newspaper or 30-minute evening news program, so you have to decide what gets priority and what has to take a back seat. But media judgment is also a business decision — the stuff that gets "priority" has to be the stuff that's going to get people to buy your papers or magazines or clap eyeballs on your TV show, and more often than not, that stuff is the sensationalistic, attention-grabbing image or headline. Ask yourself honestly, right-wingers: You've got two stories competing for space on your newspaper's front page, and the respective headlines are "U.S. Soldiers Bring Running Water to Beleaguered Baghdad Neighborhood" and "Bomb Kills 153 at Baghdad Hotel; Terrorist Insurgents Blamed." Which one do you put on the cover?
Remember, people, these media outlets have newspapers, magazines and/or ad space to sell. One of those headlines is going to bring in legions of curious readers. The other one probably isn't.
"So it's not that the media are liberally biased," we agreed. "It's that they're whores."
In all fairness to the media, of course, there's other stuff involved. Let's say the dilemma is once again between two stories: a good-news piece about soldiers restoring electricity to a Baghdad suburb, and a big exposé of six MPs torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. One is a nice accomplishment for the soldiers and for the people they helped, but really doesn't have that many implications beyond that specific town. The exposé, on the other hand, blows the lid off a pattern of behavior that could dramatically alter the way our military effort is perceived by the entire Arab world. Leaving aside completely where each story sits on the scandal-o-meter, which one comes out on top in terms of sheer importance?
Even then, though, it all goes back to having a story to tell that will make big-time waves and bring in big-time viewers, readers, or listeners. That's the first and foremost consideration of any for-profit media outlet, and anything else is a distant second. Therefore, for the right wing to be ascribing deeper or more insidious motives to any of this is kind of silly. The media don't want our troops to get killed; they don't want our mission in Iraq to fail; most of them don't even especially give a rat's ass whether John Kerry or George W. Bush wins the presidential election. All they want is a fuckin' story.
It ain't socialism, and it ain't even liberalism. If anything, it's capitalism.
But anyway, as Kevin points out, this is far from the first war that's come in for criticism from various sources, and it's certainly not going to be the last. "The press isn't reporting bad news from Iraq because they hate America," he says, "they're reporting bad news from Iraq because there's lots of bad news in Iraq. If war supporters really want to win this war, they should stop whining that the press is reporting the news and instead try to figure out how to actually make the news better."
One would hope that Bush might have some suggestions on that topic when he makes his nationally televised speech tonight. Kevin, however, indicates that it's unlikely to be anything more than "stay the course" — in other words, nothing. But we'll be watching anyway, and we'll have our take on it tomorrow.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:01 PM
And it could all be yours if the price is right! (And if you re-elect me!)
Wonkette relays this bit of info from U.S. News & World Report (second item down), indicating that the Bush administration is looking at "a big housecleaning" at the Cabinet level (and thereabouts) after he gets re-elected. On the face of it, this isn't a huge shock — it's tradition for high-level appointees to tender their resignations right after Election Day even if the incumbent has won, and if the president-elect wants to keep them on (and they actually want to stay), he just tells them to stay. But this is the first time we can recall "a big housecleaning" being talked about with such vigor more than five months before the actual election.
This begs two questions: First, if "up to two thirds of his cabinet and top political appointees" are going to get the ax, whom does that include? Rumsfeld, as many people have called for in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal? Wolfowitz, who was one of Ahmed Chalabi's bestest buddies and has developed a sort of reverse Midas touch for everything he does related to Iraq? Rod Paige, who still looks like an ass for comparing the NEA to al-Qaeda? Norman Mineta, who's still an object of scorn and derision for those on the far right who blame him for letting 9/11 happen? Colin Powell, whom nobody in the administration listens to anymore anyway?
The second is, if such a "housecleaning" is going to be that big and that important, why not do it now, particularly if any of the positions in line for regime change are related to the ongoing efforts in Iraq? Old bromides about horses and streams aside, if someone isn't pulling their weight in that regard and it's harming the overall operation, why not dump them now and put in some new, more effective leadership as soon as possible?
It seems like this may be yet another one of those instances in which Bush is promising something really good and beneficial for the nation — but you'll only get it if you re-elect him, or if you wait until it could have a more positive effect on his re-election hopes. Remember, as recently as last month, we were hearing that Bush was going to wait to ask for more money for the troops until after his re-election; you'll also remember that, as per that sweet deal Bush worked out with the Saudis, we wouldn't get a respite from our skyrocketing gasoline prices until October, when it could more dramatically boost Bush's chance at getting re-elected. (On a personal note, GWBWYPGN?! paid more than two bucks a gallon for gas for the first time on Saturday, at a Shell station in Buckhead. Yay us.) Now we have Bush hinting at an unloading of some of his administration's dead weight, but again, only after you grant him another four years in office.
Bush supporters and opponents alike, take your biggest concerns about America, whatever they are — Iraq, unemployment, gas prices, health care — and throw them out the window, at least for the next five months: This administration's biggest concern right now is preserving its mailing address for the next four years, and anything else is just going to have to sit on the back burner until that's decided. So there.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 10:45 AM
Lie big, lie little
With regards to John Kerry's service in Vietnam, the Bush campaign has wisely stayed just far enough away from the non-controversy to realistically claim that they weren't getting involved in it, while letting bottom-feeding scum like Ted Sampley and John O'Neill act as their unofficial surrogates. But now comes news that another Kerry smearer has come forward and has received the implied endorsement of Bush's official campaign blog. And as Edwardpig points out, some of the statements made about Kerry on the blog are flat-out, disprovable lies.
Now you've gone and done it, George W. Bush Official Campaign Blog. GWBWYPGN?! weren't going to say anything about Bush's little biking accident over the weekend — trying to be the bigger man and all — but you had to go tell lies about John Kerry's Vietnam service, so we're going to have to bring it up anyway. Love and war and all that. Anyway, we're bringing it up for two other reasons:
1. The press made a big deal about Kerry falling off his snowboard in Idaho a couple months ago, and we're trying to be fair and balanced; and
2. The administration's official excuse for the accident ("It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose") turned out to be a complete lie.
Christ. Falsely accusing heavy rainfall and loose topsoil? Ordinarily this would beg the question "What else will Bush lie about," but it appears that might be a category mistake.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:42 AM
Friday, May 21, 2004
Corner kids glimpse man behind curtain, come away disappointed
World O'Crap reports that the Capitol Hill reprogramming session pep rally by the president, described in the post directly below, may have gone even worse than we thought — and some of the folks saying so are none other than the august personages of The Corner. It would seem to us that if things are going really well, you shouldn't have to advertise that they're going really well, and thus it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there was a definite whiff of "methinks the lady doth protest too much" to the Cap Hill session.
Wo'C has a pretty good theory behind why Kathryn Lopez is so despondent over all this, and a really good nailing of K-Lo's most fatuous complaint:
The man is a leader, it's so frustrating when that is not communicated.
Which is kind of like saying "The man is a great pitcher, it's so frustrating that his lifetime ERA is 7.53." Kathryn, whose job is it to communicate that leadership? That would be George W. Bush's job. Everyone has their own definitions of leadership, but to GWBWYPGN?! it's something along the lines of: one part coming up with important, beneficial ideas, one part communicating them in such a way that people will get behind them. If you can't communicate those ideas, you've kind of blown it on half the definition of leadership, n'est-ce pas?
We've asked a number of questions about George W. Bush, and more specifically about the impressions people have of him — why do you think he's strong on national security,why do you think he's courageous,why do you like him at all — and never gotten much of an answer, even from our pro-Bush visitors. Nevertheless, we forge ahead with a new question: Why do you think this man is a strong leader? He certainly hasn't come up with many new or inventive ideas (and no, "bombing the shit out of Iraq" doesn't qualify as either), and even the most ardent Bush supporters (save for the Noonanator) have to admit he's not exactly well-spoken in defense of the ones he has had. Sure, he's a leader in the sense that people follow him, but there's a subtle difference between "leading" and "scaring the shit out of people to the point where they believe they're only safe if they vote for you," and we would hope that even those famously shades-of-gray-phobic nuance deriders in the Bush camp can understand what that difference is.
If you do, shoot K-Lo an e-mail, because she's obviously confused on the subject.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:13 PM
I came for the pep talk, I'm stayin' for another dose of delicious Kool-Aid!
We've read the WaPo report of Bush's "pep rally" to reinvigorate his Capitol Hill allies and frankly it didn't sound like much fun — at least the pep rallies at our high school had spirit contests and cheerleaders in short skirts. (Then again, we wouldn't particularly care to see Rick Santorum in a short skirt.)
Behind closed doors, Bush gave a 35-minute version of his stump speech covering Iraq, the economy and energy policy. When he finished, the participants filed past a bank of microphones to announce that they were unified in support of Bush and that there had been no dissent expressed at the meeting. Bush took no questions.
"No dissent," huh. Shocker. Well, not any dissent at the meeting, anyway . . .
The meeting did not satisfy dissidents in the party. "There was nothing you haven't heard at other, public appearances," said Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), whose commitment to the GOP was questioned this week by Hastert. Asked whether he felt better because of Bush's assurances about improvement in Iraq, McCain replied with feigned relief: "Oh, much better."
Ha, ha! Oh, John, you bitch! But seriously, what exactly was going on behind those closed doors to result in stuff like this:
Several Republicans were surprised Bush took no questions. He usually does take questions at such sessions, they said, including at a GOP lawmakers retreat in Philadelphia in late January. Bush's reluctance to field queries appeared to be a matter of some sensitivity.
[Sen. George] Allen, for example, called yesterday's session a "good team meeting" with no dissent "that I heard." But asked whether Bush allowed questions, Allen replied: "I don't care to answer that question."
What the f . . . ? A simple "no" would've been too revealing? What is with these people and their obsession with secrecy? "Hey, George, what do you want on the pizza, pepperoni or sausage?" "I don't really feel comfortable disclosing that information."
Well, anyway, we're glad they're all rejuvenated and everything. That oughta hold 'em for at least a day or two.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 10:30 AM
He speaks! (Next week)
President Bush is going to take to the airwaves next week to tell everyone about his plan for the next month in Iraq, to convince everyone that yes, Virginia, he really does know how we're going to transfer sovereigty to the Iraqi people, and that there's even someone for us to transfer sovereignty to.Andrew Sullivan is overjoyed by this and takes it as news that "Bush Gets It"; what, exactly, Bush gets is anyone's guess, and I'll reserve my congratulations for Bush on having gotten anything until I hear the speech itself and it turns out to be something other than this:
Right now U.S. diplomats and Iraqi representatives are hard at work devising a plan to transfer sovereignty from the Coalition Provision Authority to the people of Iraq. This transition will place the responsibility of governing Iraq into the hands of the Iraqi citizens themselves, making them a free people for the first time in decades. Freedom is important for a free people, because without freedom, free people aren't really free. But our hard work, blood and sweat in Iraq will allow the Iraqis to freely express their joy at being free people enjoying freedom. Freedom is God's gift to all free people, and therefore only free people can truly, freely enjoy God's gift. Which is freedom. Free, free freedom. Freedom of the press, freedom of thought. The freedom to be free, to use buy-one-get-one-free coupons on food that is fat-free and sugar-free while listening to "Freebird." Free, free freedom . . .
Of course, Peggy Noonan will still wet her pants describing Bush as the most forceful, visionary speaker since Churchill, but she is shall we say a special case.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:30 AM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: Part XXXVIII — The Coultinator Goes Hollywood
We're in week three of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot's return from hiatus, and Ann is building steam with a grain of salt. Apparently Ann's bizarre two weeks of Republican-bashing were spent getting rejuvenated and formulating a new mission statement, because for the second week in a row, she's blazing away at a Times that isn't located in Manhattan — no sir, the target of her ire is once again the commie pinko liberal-biased fishwrap of record in sunny Los Angeles, California. The Los Angeles Times that recently won five Pulitzer Prizes, the second-biggest single-year haul in the history of the award? Yep, that's the one!
In other words, a pretty big nemesis for "Ahab" Coulter to be taking on after years of stalking the great white whale of the New York Times. But maybe Coulter is on a mission to seek out and destroy liberal bias in every newspaper in the country, picking them off one by one until all are purged of liberal leanings and dutifully parroting the Bush administration's talking points like any good 'Murrkin publication should. We begin with "The Other Lame 'Times'," and we shall not rest until we're down to the Mankato Free Press, the Hamtramck Citizen, and the Andalusia (Ala.) Star-News! Onward to victory!
If liberals won't move on from the prison abuse photos calculated to incite hatred toward the very troops liberals loudly claim to "support," I'm not moving on from the fact that the editor of the Los Angeles Times, John Carroll, is instructing journalists on ethics.
The only difference being that one is an incident that could have staggering repercussions for our attempt to maintain moral influence in the Arab world, while the other one is Ann nursing a bitchy grudge against whichever newspaper editor rebuffed her invitation to "do lunch" this week.
The editor of the Los Angeles Times telling reporters how to behave ethically is a complete contradiction, like ... oh, I don't know ... giving Yasser Arafat a Nobel Peace Prize or something. You know, just patently silly.
This is the same L.A. Times that engaged in desperate, 11th-hour attempts to sabotage Arnold Schwarzenegger during the California recall election with lurid sex stories from anonymous assistant crudite girls who worked the craft services tables on Arnold's movies from the 1980s and were still trying to break into show biz 20 years later.
Watch in amazement a few paragraphs down as Coulter segues into dredging up every Clinton sex scandal she can think of, and does so without a hint of shame or irony.
This is the same L.A. Times where reporters had to be told in an internal memo (from Carroll himself) to stop injecting opinion in news stories, specifically the practice of prefacing the term "pro-life" with the term "so-called."
OK, so Carroll directly ordered writers not to be biased, and by Coulter's own admission specifically told them not to snark around when referring to the pro-life folks Ann loves so much. So how is that evidence that Carroll is a schmuck?
This is the same L.A. Times that in recent years instituted racial and gender quotas for sources on "so-called" news – oops, I mean, news stories – which puts reporters in the position of having to round up a black expert on nuclear fusion, a Native American expert on cubism, and a female expert on great moments in football.
Obviously it puts them in no such position. This is newspaper reporting (something Ann knows little about), not a scavenger hunt. You think it's possible that the paper merely wanted its reporters to look for a diverse array of opinions when hunting for "man on the street" opinions in one of the most racially diverse metropolitan areas in the world?
This is the same L.A. Times that responded to the largest number of canceled subscriptions in the paper's history from readers enraged by the paper's liberal bias by putting Michael Kinsley, one of America's leading leftists, in charge of the editorial page.
How does Ann know that the canceled subscriptions were due to perceived liberal bias and not the salaciousness of the details reported in the Schwarzenegger story? (After all, plenty of newspaper subscribers dumped their subscriptions in protest when their papers printed the gory details of the Starr Report into all those Clinton infidelities Ann loves bringing up.) Hell, this article maintains that the paper suffered a raft of cancellations due to an editorial cartoon (and a right-wing editorial cartoon at that). Maybe the Times is just cursed with an especially fickle readership.
And this is the same L.A. Times that pays unrepentant Castro fan and former North Korea defender Robert Scheer for his hysterical anti-American rants every Tuesday, after hiring him mostly because his wife was on the editorial board.
Yeah, and they also pay Max Boot and occasional columnists like this guy, who thinks "God is a Republican." So what?
The title of Carroll's speech was "The Wolf in Reporter's Clothing: The Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America." One has to admit: If you wanted an expert on the practice of partisan pseudo-journalism, you could do a lot worse than the editor of the Los Angeles Times.
Alas, Carroll's speech wasn't the "how-to" lecture dozens of would-be yellow journalists were expecting when they showed up for his presentation. Like the "ombudsman" at the New York Times, Carroll chastised his own newspaper for some small, irrelevant infraction no one would ever complain about while ignoring the paper's consistent Soviet-style reporting that has led thousands of readers to cancel their subscriptions.
Shorter Ann Coulter: Dammit, Carroll, scold harder! But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that any amount of mea culpas from Carroll would satisfy Ann until he turns the editorial page over to Sean Hannity and makes Mikey Savage a weekly guest columnist. (Nor should we fool ourselves into thinking Ann will ever bother herself coming up with any specific examples of that "Soviet-style reporting" she's so peeved about.)
Instead, Carroll's speech was an attack on Fox News Channel. If conservatives complained about CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Reader's Digest, NPR, etc. etc. half as much as liberals scream about Fox News, even I would say conservatives were getting to be a bore on the subject.
Carroll's case-in-chief of Fox News' "pseudo-journalism" is "The O'Reilly Factor." (Only liberals could force conservatives into defending Bill O'Reilly.)
Isn't it funny how some right-wingers rise through the ranks to garner millions of followers and gain reputations as the standard-bearers for American conservatism, only to be suddenly and conveniently disowned the minute a liberal challenges them? You've heard it in the comments threads on this very blog: "Nobody really takes Ann Coulter seriously."Look, don't back me into a corner defending Limbaugh - I never listen to the guy's show." And now here's Coulter trying to distance herself from O'Reilly. Man, Billy boy, when even Ann Coulter is turning up her nose at you, you must be in deep kimchee.
Carroll lyingly says of O'Reilly: "Where, he asked, was the L.A. Times on the so-called Troopergate story?"
In fact, O'Reilly never mentioned "Troopergate." He didn't mention the Arkansas State Troopers. And he certainly didn't mention "so-called Troopergate." He compared the L.A. Times coverage of Schwarzenegger's alleged inappropriate behavior decades earlier with that paper's coverage of the scandals of various Democrats – among them the stunning, contemporaneous sexual assaults by Bill Clinton on identifiable women.
Direct quote from O'Reilly: "Do you think the L.A. Times sent a squad of reporters to Arkansas to investigate Bill Clinton's problems with women? No, it did not." Thud. Try harder, Ann.
I suppose it's easy to confuse sex scandals involving Bill Clinton – I keep a "Women Bill Clinton Has Raped or Groped at a Glance" file on my Blackberry, just as a time-saver –
You know what? We have absolutely no doubt she does. And the sad thing is, she actually seems proud of it.
but O'Reilly was referring not to the 1993 allegations from Arkansas State Troopers, but to the 1998 Clinton sex scandals involving allegations from specific women, such as Kathleen Willey. We know this because while the word "trooper" never passed O'Reilly's lips, he did expressly refer to "Kathleen Willey."
And as the FAIR link indicates, the Times covered that too. Which Ann even admits in this very next paragraph, but now all of a sudden she's not happy with the way they covered it.
When it came to these Clinton sex assaults, how did the L.A. Times do? Reporter Richard A. Serrano described Willey as "embittered" and said her accusations were "fraught with contradiction" – unlike the truth-tellers who waited 20 years to make anonymous accusations against Schwarzenegger.
Point A: Richard A. Serrano had nothing to do with the Schwarzenegger story. Point B: Accusations typically become much less "fraught with contradiction" as more and more people — six, for instance — come forward to corroborate them.
The Times angrily editorialized that Clinton's impeachment was "grounded not in what is right for the country but what best helps House managers save face." (How anyone can use the expression "save face" in defense of Bill Clinton is beyond my understanding.)
Notice that Ann has spent her entire column griping about the alleged liberal bias of the Times' news coverage, and now she's starting in on their editorial page. Which means she's now attacking the editorial writers for — gasp — editorializing! Of course, anyone who's acquainted with Coulter's rhetorical "style" knows this is a favorite bait-and-switch of hers — i.e., when it's a conservative commentator, that person is just a "columnist" or even an "entertainer," but column-writers like Maureen Dowd are magically bestowed the status of "journalists."
You don't have to enter the "No Spin Zone" to see the "disconnect," as liberals love to say, between the L.A. Times' frantic, wild-eyed search for a woman – any woman, even anonymously – to accuse Schwarzenegger of groping her at some point during the previous quarter century, and the Times' equally determined efforts to discount the many credible accounts of women, all named, who plausibly accused Bill Clinton of raping, groping or otherwise sexually assaulting them.
Uh . . . when did the Times mount "determined" efforts to "discount" those women? We must've missed them.
But Carroll dearly wishes O'Reilly had said "Troopergate" because apparently that's the last time Carroll can remember the L.A. Times going after a Democrat the way the Times goes after Republicans as a matter of policy.
So Ann has already forgotten the Times stories that she herself alluded to — albeit in passing — on the Kathleen Willey accusations. That's the crappiest short-term memory we've seen since Leonard Shelby.
The Times' Troopergate story came out in December 1993. But Carroll is still citing that one time over a decade ago when the L.A. Times engaged in nonpartisan reporting, bragging: "At one point, it had nine reporters in Little Rock." OK, but there were 24 reporters on the Schwarzenegger story.
And why do you suppose that was? Maybe because the Troopergate shenanigans were happening halfway across the country, while Schwarzenegger was the frontrunner in a historic recall race for the top elected office in the Times's own state?!?! Try harder, Ann!
This is the second week in a row Ann has spent lambasting the Times, and so far she hasn't proved anything other than the fact that she really doesn't like John Carroll — and Ann not liking someone is a news development whose shock value ranks right up there with another Bush administration resignation or another Liz Taylor divorce. Must be great, though, to be so famous and sought-after as a columnist that you can devote a thousand words a week to your own personal grudges and people will still print the shit. Who will be wearing the bullseye next week? The St. Louis Dispatch? Us Weekly? Highlights for Children? Place your bets in the comments thread . . . and tune in for next week's Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot for the exciting answer!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:13 AM
Class warfare for me, but not for thee
Came upon an interesting quote this morning:
He got rich speculating in stocks and currency. A great place, America. People who make nothing, who add nothing, who invent nothing can get fabulously rich . . .
The hell you say! But who said it? Michael Moore? Hitlery Clinton? Someone on one of Democratic Underground's infamously treasonous discussion boards? Nope, nope and nope — it was the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's resident grump-con Jim Wooten.
Just for the record, Wooten has yet to pen one single word in condemnation of Ken Lay, favors a repeal of the inheritance tax, and oh yeah, kneels at the altar of a president who's basically screwed up every business he touched. But now all of a sudden he's outraged that people can make lots of money in this country without, you know, actually doing anything. Why has Jim Wooten suddenly turned into some wealth-hatin', fires-of-class-resentment-stokin' Red commie socialist?
Oh, yeah, because the source of his anger is George Soros and George Soros doesn't like George W. Bush. That's why.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:16 AM
Thursday, May 20, 2004
OK, but other than 22 years in the military, the combat wounds and the 5 years in a POW camp, what the f$#! does he know about sacrifice?
Oh, Alanis Morrissette, it's such a shame you wrote that hit song nine years too early, 'cause you missed out on some shit that is way more ironic than a free ride when you've already paid, or ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife: Try Dennis Hastert lecturing John McCain on the meaning of sacrifice.John Motherf$#!ing McCain! . . .
A two-month-old House-Senate standoff over the 2005 budget burst into public acrimony yesterday, when the GOP House speaker questioned Sen. John McCain's credentials as a Republican and suggested that the decorated Vietnam War veteran did not understand the meaning of sacrifice.
Snip:
On Tuesday, McCain gave a speech excoriating both political parties for refusing to sacrifice their tax cutting and spending agendas in wartime. At the Capitol yesterday, Hastert shot back: "If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] and Bethesda [Naval Hospital]. There's the sacrifice in this country."
Here's part of the McCain speech to which Hastert was so lamely retorting:
"My friends, we are at war. Throughout our history, wartime has been a time of sacrifice," McCain said. "But about the only sacrifice taking place is that by the brave men and women fighting to defend and protect the liberties we hold so dear, and that of their families. It is time for others to step up and start sacrificing."
So basically, McCain was saying, "Our sons and daughters on the battlefield are the ones making the real sacrifices here." And Hastert's reply was basically, "Uh-uhhhh, bitch, our sons and daughters on the battlefield are the ones making the real sacrifices here!" What the f . . . ?
In case you were wondering, Dennis Hastert never served in the military because of his "bad knees" (which evidently were not quite "bad" enough to hinder his career as a wrestling coach). Yet here he is telling John Motherf$#!ing McCain to go to Bethesda. Why? Because McCain wants to fool with Heavy D's sacred tax cut! Here's something you might not have realized, D — John McCain's already been to Bethesda. That's usually where you go to unwind after you clock out on a five-year stretch in a POW camp. So it stands to reason that he has a pretty good idea of what "sacrifice" means, and it ain't giving up a f$#!ing tax cut while our troops are being shot at halfway around the world.
Whoo. Time to take a deep breath. We'll end this one with a quote from our favorite evil leprechaun Texas wingnut Tom DeLay, who also knows the meaning of sacrifice (he had to sacrifice his dreams of serving his country in Vietnam because all those blacks were crowding him out of a spot in the Army):
"I can't believe that those three or four senators are going to bring down one of the best budgets we've ever seen over an issue that makes it difficult for Republicans to get tax relief."
If you're scoring at home, "one of the best budgets" DeLay has ever seen puts the U.S. a further $357 billion in debt and includes no funds for the occupations of either Iraq or Afghanistan. DeLay and the Republicans are hoping those will wait until after Bush is safely re-elected; guess our troops will just have to keep "sacrificing" until then. But hey, they're used to it, right?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:06 AM
You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is totally different . . . can you guess? I'll give you a hint: One of them is alive, the other is not. (Ha-ha, Lynndie, you card!) Just for the record, kids, this is what Rush Limbaugh said amounted to a few soldiers "blowing off some steam," what Zell Miller said was no worse than what he experienced in the showers in gym class, and what Sen. James Inhofe said was something we shouldn't bother getting outraged about.
It's also worth mentioning that all three of those guys consider this to be perfectly acceptable
while this is disgusting and perverted,
and to the best of our knowledge, none of them have said dick about this.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:14 AM
It was an e-mail we weren't meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists . . . we're not supposed to know the National Security Council's top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios. . . .
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth.
Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that "the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph's tomb or Rachel's tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace."
Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
(If the name Elliott Abrams sounds familiar to you, it's 'cause he got indicted for giving false testimony in the Iran-Contra hearings in '87.)
We've always been baffled by Israel's willingness to be cozied up to by America's religious right wing.Surely they know that the Christian fundamentalists applauding their efforts to keep Jerusalem clean and Muslim-free don't actually think the Jewish people get to go to heaven when Christ decides the area is to His liking and makes His long-promised return. It's kind of like the high-school nerd who writes all the term papers for the jocks and cheerleaders — he thinks he's been fully accepted into their little clique because they let him sit at their lunch table whenever he comes up with a new paper for them, but there's no way they're going to invite him to hang out with them after the football game Friday night.
Anyway, the point is that if the Bush administration really cared about Mideast stability as much as they claim to, they wouldn't be turning their Israel/Palestine policy on a dime based on the wishes of an organization like the Apostolic Congress. But it's just another example of how the Bushies throw nuance and compromise out the window the minute they discover it's much more fun being the proverbial bulls in the china shop. And it's only going to add to the mess our next president is going to have to shoulder.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:10 AM
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Should I stay or should I go?
Caution: Long post ahead. Next rest stop 241 miles. If you have an aversion to reading lots of stuff, I'd turn back if I were you.
According to the astoundingly unscientific GWBWYPGN?! poll being conducted at left, readers of this site don't exactly have a sunshiny view of what's happening in Iraq right now. Three out of every five respondents think the situation is hopeless and it's time to pack up and go home, easily trumping all the other responses put together; most surprisingly (for me, anyway), one out of every nine respondents is someone who supported the war but now thinks things are f'ed up beyond repair and it's time to bring the troops back.
It's looking like I may be a rare bird — someone who vigorously opposed the war before it started but is now opposed to summarily yanking all our troops right out and giving up. I've had to defend this position a lot lately, to everyone from fellow leftie homeboy Stanley to the LaRouche head case I had the misfortune of running into in Montgomery. I know I'm in a very narrow, uncomfortable spot here, and two things I read yesterday evening made that clear.
The first was this post by Josh Marshall that passed on the comments of a friend of his, "a retired military intelligence officer, now working as a security contractor in Iraq." The picture Marshall's friend painted ranged from the depressing . . .
The Iraqi people, even my 150 staff think the Americans are essentially not welcome anymore. They fear for their security but would rather go through a cataclysm with a new Iraqi police and army as their security force, rather than be occupied by the Americans. Then they could work through the system and know that their security was in their hands ... Trust me I am training 40 Iraqi bodyguards and the demand is getting serious. Listen Josh, EVERYONE outside of the Green Zone, Iraqis Westerners and Americans alike refer to the CPA and the US Army as "The AMERICANS" as if they were a third-party nation.
No one sees them as part of the solution anymore but as a foreign entity that does as it likes and pisses everybody off in the process. . . . as long as we are seen as occupiers we will never earn the trust of the Iraqi people.
. . . to the downright chilling:
About the Army - Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968. I knew we were finished when I had a soldier point his Squad Automatic Weapons at me and my bodyguard detail for driving down the street when he decided he would cross the street in the middle of rush hour traffic (which was moving at about 70 MPH) ... He made it clear to any and all that he was preparing to shoot drivers who did not stop for his jaunt because speeding cars are "threats."
I also once had a soldier from a squad of Florida National Guard reservists raise weapons and kick the door panel of a clearly marked CPA security vehicle (big American flag in the windshield of a $150,000 armored Land Cruiser) because they wanted us to back away from them so they could change a tire ... as far as they were concerned WE (non-soldiers) were equally the enemy as any Iraqi.
Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit. I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.
Yes, things like that make me want to throw up my hands and quit. These are the kinds of things that speak to a dramatic failure on the part of American leadership — failure to truthfully explain to our soldiers why they're there; failure to outline a definite, achievable mission; failure even to provide them with adequate manpower, supplies, or training.
But then I read an essay in the June issue of Esquire that popped up in my mailbox yesterday titled "Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy." It's by a gentleman named Thomas P.M. Barnett who worked in the Defense Department from 2001-2003, and it looks at the Iraq occupation from the perspective of another piece he wrote for Esquire last year called "The Pentagon's New Map."
The conceit of "New Map" is to divide the world into two parts. There is the Core, which consists of functioning, industrialized nations with stable governments, reasonably high standards of living, and an engagement in international trade; there is also the Gap (which the rest of us probably recognize as "the Third World"), composed of nations marked by poverty, disease, political repression, and the kind of governmental instability that allows terrorist groups like al-Qaeda to flourish. I'm not saying I agree with every single one of Barnett's assessments, but his point is that America must fight terrorism by "shrinking the Gap" — bringing those Gap nations into the Core, using military action if necessary, thereby endowing them with the kind of peace and prosperity that prevents them from thinking someone like Osama bin Laden is the only one who will fight for them.
If that sounds like an eerily Bushian worldview to you, it's probably not an accident. And even if you agree with that strategy, you're totally justified in thinking perhaps Iraq was not the most vital place to start executing it. But that's pretty much academic at this point, because we're in Iraq now, whether we want to be or not. And even if you disagree with Barnett's Core/Gap assessment, his current piece specifically on the Iraq occupation is worth reading.
(Blogger's note — sorry I couldn't link the whole Iraq article here, but it's in the issue on the newsstands right now and thus Esquire would much rather have you purchase the actual magazine rather than boosting it off the Internet. But my advice is to go out and buy the damn thing — how could you turn down a cover like this, especially with the words "John Kerry, Political Badass" at the top?)
Anyway. Whether you believe that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were thick as thieves before we invaded — and I certainly don't — you can't really deny that al-Qaeda has a presence in Iraq now. And that's what lends even greater import to statements in Barnett's essay like this one:
America needs to demonstrate to the Middle East that there is such a thing as a future worth creating there, not just a past worth re-creating, which is all the bin Ladens will ever offer Muslim populations — a retreat from today's diminished expectations. If America cannot muster the will — not to mention the Core's aid — to win this struggle in Iraq, we will send a clear signal to the region that there is no future in the Core for any of these states, save Israel.
. . . and, thus, this one:
The bin Ladens of that region know this and thus will act with increasing desperation to engineer our abandonment of the region. . . . Bin Laden's offer is the offer of all would-be dictators: Just leave these people to me and I will trouble you no further.
That line chilled me as much as anything I've read in the past few months, because I've been guilty of the kinds of defeatist thoughts that play right into that: Why do we even bother engaging in the affairs of the Middle East anymore when all it brings us is pain? Why can't we just build a gigantic wall around Israel and Palestine and say, "Have at it, go kill each other all you want, just leave us alone"? Why can't we say to bin Laden, "Look, we're tired of dealing with you people, so just quit flying airplanes into our skyscrapers and we'll never bother getting involved with another Middle Eastern country again"?
Well, the reasons might not have been clear before the war, but they're clear now: If we yank all of our troops out of Iraq now and leave the country to its own devices, al-Qaeda will take over. The question is not if, it's when, and it's as simple as that. When the Soviet Union abandoned its failed ambitions in Afghanistan, it left a leadership vaccuum in that country that lasted only five years before the Taliban were running rampant; in Iraq, it might not even take that long before al-Qaeda manages the same kind of takeover. Especially since this time, they'd have an added selling point: "The Americans promised you peace and prosperity and didn't even attempt to deliver it."
Once the Taliban took over, Afghanistan spent nearly an entire decade as a festering petri dish of terrorism and anti-American sentiment — one that only stopped being that way once the U.S. went in and kicked the Taliban out. If we pull out of Iraq now, we'll only be going right back in the very first time al-Qaeda succeeds in staging a catastrophic terrorist attack from its new Iraqi home.
No, if we pull out now, we're putting our international credibility and our lives at risk. We have to see to it that Iraq succeeds. The hard question is, how?
I'm not going to act like I know all the answers, although Barnett had some good ideas in his Iraq piece. One of his most intriguing ideas is to split the U.S. military into two forces — "a Leviathan force focused on waging wars and a System Administrator force focused on winning the peace":
The Leviathan force will remain your father's military: testosterone-fueled, lethal, and not subject to civilian law. The Sys Admin force will end up being your mother's military: supportive, nonlethal, and willing to submit to recognized authorities such as the International Criminal Court and the UN — Teddy Roosevelt meets Woodrow Wilson.
In other words, we have a part of the military dedicated to booting out the oppressive and threatening regime and another part dedicated to ushering a democratic one in and ensuring its stability. That would alleviate situations like our current one, in which a single force — and an undermanned, undertrained force at that — is expected to handle the double-duty of eliminating an oppressive regime and setting up a new one and ensuring the country's subsequent prosperity.
It's also, as Barnett continues, a system that might be far more palatable to the rest of the world than our current strategy:
What this bifurcation offers the rest of the world is twice as many opportunities to contribute to America's current scattershot efforts to export security throughout the Gap. The Leviathan is the classic come-as-you-are coalition of the willing . . . [and] any nation able and willing to contribute its own small contingent of tough hombres can join this bandwagon on a first-come, first-to-serve basis.
But contributing to the war-fighting half won't be the only way to gain a seat at the table, because the follow-on Sys Admin effort will allow those nations unwilling to field combat forces in certain situations to nonetheless participate in the peacekeeping force that must necessarily stand watch over the longer haul. . . . What having both forces means is that we will be able to tell potential allies not only to "come as you are" for the war but also to "come when you can" for the peacekeeping.
Correct, and a point Barnett doesn't even address is that offering two distinctly different options for service — a combat-oriented one and a more humanitarian, nation-building one — might be an incentive to participate for our own citizens as well. How many Americans out there are pacifists by nature and feel uncomfortable at best about being sent to a hot combat zone, but still believe strongly enough in humanitarian missions and ensuring freedom in other parts of the world that they'd want to be part of the overall effort?
I don't agree with everything in this latest piece, either — I'm a little squeamish about Barnett's casual use of phrases like "our rules" and "America is not leaving the Middle East until the Middle East joins the world" — but don't dismiss him as just another mouthpiece for the Bush administration's freedom-this-freedom-that rhetoric. Even if Barnett agrees with Bush's grander vision, he appears to have a lot of problems with the way Bush is executing it; he says "the Bush administration did a terrible job of thinking beyond Saddam's takedown" and chides them for being "pointlessly vindictive" in spurning the rebuilding efforts of any country that didn't first participate in the military operation.
Barnett also describes his dual-use military restructuring as something that had better be in the plans of whoever's president for the next four years, whether it's Bush or Kerry. And he even posits that a Kerry administration might be better equipped to effect this change than Bush, given the mistrust Bush has engendered both at home and abroad with respect to his military dealings.
My point is that if we reach out to other countries and truly address the changes that need to be made in our Iraq effort, as Barnett has done — and Bush has not — then it's not too late. We can achieve our goals and make Iraq a free and prosperous country. Not only that, though, we have to. To bug out before we've given the Iraqis what we promised would not only leave Iraq ripe for takeover by al-Qaeda, but it would utterly and completely squander any moral or political authority this country has to be the leader in the war against terrorism that the world desperately needs. Basically our situation is the reverse of the Clash song in the title: If we stay, there will be trouble, but if we go, it will be double . . .
Look, nobody was more against the war than I was — I drove 12 hours to Washington and 12 hours back in the span of two days to protest it. And nobody wants more to be able to bring our troops home where they can't be set on fire or blown up or decapitated. But our work's not done, and we can't leave until it is. It's pointless to ask who wanted to fight this war and who didn't, because we're fighting it now. That's the reality.
I still think Bush is the wrong man to lead the effort, and his administration has proven that it's the wrong one to plan it. But I think that Kerry can do better, and I'm glad that he's declared a willingness to try, rather than making "I'm going to take my ball and go home" the central plank of his Iraq strategy. We need America to be better than that, and I believe that it will. I hope the rest of you believe the same.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:38 AM
Six years later, however, I feel no qualms whatsoever about telling Zell to go piss up a rope, and it's because of stuff like this. Look, if Zell doesn't want to vote for Kerry, that's fine, and it's his right as an American. But he's educated enough — he, too, attended the greatest university in the history of higher education, after all — that he shouldn't have to sound like such a jackass when he does so. Basically he's turned into just another bullhorn for whatever talking points the GOP has issued that week, only he's got to spice it up with some homespun Southern wisdom so that everyone knows he's from Georgia and not some Yankee, and that results in crap like "You can't make a chicken swim and you can't make John Kerry anything but an out-of-touch ultraliberal from Taxachusetts." Zell has coughed up so many of those contrived faux-Southern nonsense aphorisms that I can't decide whether he's trying to be the next Ross Perot or a white Al Sharpton.
Worst of all, that "Taxachusetts" crap is not only tired, it's misleading, as this post demonstrates. Measured as a percentage of income, Massachusetts' state and local tax burden is only 36th-highest in the country, well behind — among other states — Georgia. Also, whereas Georgia's taxpayers get $1.01 in federal spending for every $1 they contribute to the federal government in tax dollars, the poor suckers of Massachusetts only get 75 cents.
(Disclaimer: Yes, I feel bad about dissing my home state this way, but it's not like my dad, among others, doesn't make some kind of crack on Alabama every time I go home to visit, so what's good for the goose, etc. Proud Georgians and/or fellow graduates of the greatest university in the history of higher education can give me my lumps in the comments thread.)
But anyway, Zell, you've been acting crazier than a craphouse rat lately. You've been on John Kerry like ugly on a dog, but that dog won't hunt, so you need to take him to water but he . . . no, wait, make that a horse . . . no, if a dog won't hunt, you need to . . . look, Zell, just can it. Go peddle your crazy somewhere else, we're all stocked up here. If you could manage that, it'd be right kind of you, and I'd be happier than a pig in slop. Thanks.
ETA: Zell further disgraces himself and his state with some Rush Limbaugh-level comments about the Iraqi prison abuses. Christ, even Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions had the good sense to see Abu Ghraib for the outrage that it was. Zell, are you sure you don't want to retire now?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:46 AM
Monday-morning lightning round: What's happening around the world and right here at GWBWYPGN?!
• Shorter Bush re-election campaign: So what if the entire rest of the world hates our guy — y'all don't get to vote, bitches!
WASHINGTON, May 13 — As President Bush was traveling through the Midwest on his exuberant bus tour last week, his campaign aides still sounded confident that the revelations of how Iraqi prisoners were abused would do far more harm to the United States' image abroad than to the president's standing at home.
• Rush Limbaugh is really losing it. His sanity, mind you, not his whiny-little-bitchness. He's still harping on the fact that people are actually disagreeing with his characterization of the tortures at Abu Ghraib as nothing more than soldiers "blowing off a little steam" via tactics that are basically no worse than fraternity hazing stunts. Apparently Rush is completely conditioned to having sunshine blown up his ass by his dittohead callers, because when people actually get up in his face and tell him how full of crap he is, he's now at such a loss to respond that he has to get flunkies like the Landmark Legal Foundation to do it for him:
"There's no question they've been trying to discredit Limbaugh for 15 years and it won't succeed," [director Mark] Levin added. "When these liberals attack Rush, they're attacking his audience."
This is just the kind of thing that makes us giggle about the righteous indignation of the wingnut community. Of course we're trying to discredit Limbaugh — you think you deserve some kind of Pulitzer for investigative reporting for figuring that out? More to the point, though, when someone says that forcing potentially innocent people to sodomize each other on camera is just harmless good fun, what credit do we owe him to begin with?
• Made the mistake of getting into an argument with a Lyndon LaRouche supporter at a convention down in Montgomery over the weekend. We'll use the same description for arguing with a LaRouchie that comments-thread regular DAve once used to describe arguing on the Internet in general: "It's like the Special Olympics — even if you win, you're still retarded." When someone chides you for your alleged lack of education and tells you the only way to remedy this is to "get with the LaRouche people," kids, it's time to walk away.
• In all our discussions of links and how people find their way to this site, we neglected to mention Tony Pierce, who links us on a reasonably regular basis. But you'll notice that in his most recent post containing a link to GWBWYPGN?!, there's a picture of Britney Spears with her boobs hiked up somewhere in the vicinity of her chin. Now that's a link, people. If you're gonna link us, give people a reason to stop as they whiz by on the sixteen-lane expressway that is the blogosphere.
• Other avenues by which people have stumbled upon this site: Haven't done this in a while, but there were a few good search queries we wanted to point out recently, and we're not talking about the folks who ventured over here futilely hoping they'd get to peep the Nick Berg snuff film. A sampling:
Altavista search for " 'ann coulter' toes" — We wouldn't dare speculate on just how deeply the worlds of Ann Coulter fandom and foot fetishism intersect, but hey, whatever keeps the attention off her face.
Yahoo search for "john kerry's daughter's boobs" and two separate Google searches for "kerry's daughter's nipple" — Wrong, wrong, and wrong. No soup for you. Was there some widely reported "wardrobe malfunction" we missed out on while we were stocking up on crazy in Magumrie?
First prize, though, goes to the individual who got here last week by Googling "john kerry deuce bag." Number four with a bullet on that one, bitches, and don't you forget it.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:57 AM
Brown v. Board 50th Anniversary Town Hall Shorterpalooza
Today is the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. (Topeka, Kan.) Board of Education, which struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine that had existed since the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. Your favorite Town Hall columnists have elected to commemmorate the day by expressing opinions that are separate, but equally stupid. Let's take a look:
Shorter Pat Buchanan: Because of school integration, decent white folk like me were forced to flee to the suburbs and leave inner-city schools to rot. Hope you're happy!
Shorter George F. Will:Brown v. Board was great and everything, but it gave people this crazy idea that a court should actually be able to correct injustice.
Shorter UncleThomas Sowell: You'd think I'd be happy that I don't have to use separate water fountains anymore, but I can sill find stuff to bitch about, like, uh, those pesky Miranda rights.
Yay integration! Happy 50th anniversary from Town Hall!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 7:21 AM
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Dammit, Fox, stop helping!
A fleshing-out of something we noticed yesterday on Wonkette . . .
May 9: Chris Wallace of "Fox News Sunday" retaliates for ABC's craven, despicable show of respect for our troops' sacrifices by airing a segment called "What We've Accomplished," listing America's positive accomplishments in Iraq.
May 12: In a poll conducted by CBS News, 29 percent of respondents say the war was "worth it," while 64 percent say it was not.
(By the way: Welcome to our 50,000th visitor, whoever you are. If you logged on to this site and saw a big fifty gees in the hit counter on the left, send us an e-mail so we can tell you how cool you are.)
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:35 AM
Friday, May 14, 2004
George W. Bush, irez-vous maintenant, s'il vous plait?
Get this: GWBWYPGN?! has been discovered in France.Sacre merde.
Well, it's only a matter of time before Rush and Ann start calling us "French-looking" just like they do with John Kerry (although we still wish someone would explaine to us why this is a bad thing). Nevertheless, we wish our French visitors bienvenue, and thanks for allthecoolstuff.
Thanks also to the fine folks at Metafilter, who by linking us this morning sent more traffic to this site than we ever deserved.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:53 PM
Time to vote this "survivor" off the island
Outside of professional athletes, is it possible for someone to actually get worse at their job as time passes? Donald Rumsfeld may be a top-notch poet or kung-fu fighter, but after reading some of what he said during his recent visit to Iraq, it seems apparent he's turned into a miserably incompetent secretary of defense.
Q: Sir, there are many DOD civilians who are here in the theater, and many of us are unarmed. And many times we're placed in harm's way in convoys and we have no means to protect ourselves. And I know there's been many memos and letters I've seen floating around saying it's the policy to arm civilians if they need to be armed, if they're in harm's way. But there seems to be a resistance -- (inaudible) -- to actually provide arms to us. I was wondering what the current policy is on that.
Rumsfeld took a swing: "I could admit I don't know." General Sanchez's follow-on: "We're working that and we have been for some time. And we'll get--I'll get a specific status for you. Okay?"
You don't know whether it's the policy of your own department to arm your own people in a war zone?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 10:05 AM
No honor among neocons
Oh, how eager the rats are to disembark this sinking ship. Conservative commentator and shit-eating-grin impresario Bill Kristol, speaking about George W. Bush last night on "The Daily Show":
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:48 AM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: #37 — In which Fox News viewers are good enough, smart enough, and everyone likes them
Man, it's good to have Ann Coulter back. Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot was so relieved last week when Ann concluded the two-week sabbatical she spent inexplicably bashing Republicans and got back to her usual schtick of blaming liberals for 9/11, Fallujah, "Gigli," the Black Sox scandal of 1919, and the common cold. What's weird is that she appears to have actually mellowed out somewhat. This week we were almost positive we'd need to be bracing ourselves for a Coulter column on Abu Ghraib — not decrying the tortures, of course, but decrying the fact that anyone's upset about them (and suggesting better, more painful ways to make Muslims talk, most of them involving hot pokers and rectums).
But wonder of wonders, we didn't get it. We can only guess that even Ann Coulter was too smart to think there was any right-wing lipstick she could slap on the Abu Ghraib pig, because she instead showed a very caring, lovable side this week — she spent her entire column stroking the hair of Fox News viewers and convincing them they're not complete morons. There, there, dear heart, don't listen to those mean boys who say you're misinformed — anyone who'd say Saddam Hussein wasn't involved in 9/11 is not your friend! Aww, Ann, you're a prince among men. Everybody think back to "Good Will Hunting" and Robin Williams hugging Matt Damon saying "It's not your fault, it's not your fault, it's not your fault" as you savor the feel-good, self-esteem-building ridiculousness of "Crazy-Like-A-Fox News Viewer":
Last week, John S. Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles Times, delivered a lecture during "Ethics Week" of the Society of Professional Journalists. The speaker has not yet been announced for "Abstinence Week" of the Society of Professional Whores.
As former SPJ members ourselves, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot takes extreme offense at that remark. As former journalists with extensive English training, we'd also like to add: "professional whore"? What, as opposed to all the whores out there who remain unpaid so as to maintain their amateur status, and thus their eligibility to compete in the Whore Olympics? Try harder, Ann.
Showing the fierce independence of the mainstream media, Carroll's speech was yet another liberal rant about the threat to freedom and democracy posed by the Fox News Channel. Carroll cited the hoax poll liberals quote every 10 minutes that purports to show people who watch Fox News are ignorant retards.
Here's the PDF of said "hoax poll," which incidentally came out last October and Ann is evidently only now getting around to reading. We can just picture Ann sitting at her cauldron desk muttering, "Christ, there's no way I can touch this Abu Ghraib crap . . . maybe I'll finally get around to ranting about this media poll instead." (Even more amusing is Ann's implied assertion that the way for the mainstream media to assert "independence" is to fall in lock step with Fox News.)
The poll was taken by the "Program on International Policy Attitudes," which specializes in polling Americans about pointless little factoids loved by liberals. One PIPA poll, for example, asked whether "so far this year, more Israelis or more Palestinians have died in the conflict, or is the number roughly equal?" To the shock and dismay of the researchers, "only 32 percent of respondents were aware that more deaths have occurred on the Palestinian side than on the Israeli side."
Around three times more, incidentally, which apparently is what qualifies in Ann's mind as a "pointless little factoid."
There was no poll question about which group was more likely to die as a result of suicide bombings against innocent civilians and which as a result of strategic strikes against known terrorists.
Whatever the purpose, a civilian death is a civilian death — in our world, anyway. In Ann's world, though, the death of an innocent Muslim is substantially less important than the death of any other kind of person. (How much less important? Oh, three-fifths sounds about right.)
During World War II, PIPA would have been issuing indignant press releases announcing that "only 32 percent of respondents are aware Hitler is kind to his dog."
Snore. Try harder, Ann.
The most famous PIPA poll claims to demonstrate that "the Fox News audience showed the highest average rate of misperceptions" about the war with Iraq -- by which they mean "misperceptions of pointless liberal factoids about the war with Iraq."
As you'll see below, the fact that we haven't found WMDs in Iraq, or the fact that Saddam Hussein wasn't involved in 9/11, has been reduced to the status of "pointless liberal factoid" by Ann . . .
You say the average American can't regurgitate liberal talking points on command? Well, I'll be darned! And the public schools are trying so hard!
. . . or, alternatively, the status of "liberal talking point."
The poll asked questions like this: "Is it your impression that the U.S. has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaida terrorist organization?" Sixty-seven percent of Fox News Channel viewers said the United States had found evidence of a link. Liberals view this as a "misperception."
And we just bet you're going to prove us wrong. Can't wait.
Admittedly the evidence may not be as "clear" as the evidence proving a link between Osama bin Laden and Halliburton, but among other evidence connecting Iraq to al-Qaida, consider just these three items.
Last year papers were found in Iraqi intelligence headquarters documenting Saddam's feverish efforts to establish a working relationship with al-Qaida. In response to Iraq's generous invitation to pay all travel and hotel expenses, a top aide to Osama bin Laden visited Iraq in 1998, bearing a message from bin Laden. The meeting went so well that bin Laden's aide stayed for a week. Iraq intelligence officers sent a message back to bin Laden, the documents note, concerning "the future of our relationship."
Here's a news story on the papers Ann refers to — which prove nothing more than the fact that an al-Qaeda "envoy" met with certain members of Iraqi intelligence. Nothing about whether anything they talked about was ever acted upon, no mention of Iraq engaging in any attacks against the United States. Yet Ann considers this "feverish" and enough to prove that the two sides were "working closely" with one another. (Hey, Ann, if a single meeting is all the evidence you're looking for, better keep your head down — apparently Richard Shelby, Arlen Specter and Donald Rumsfeld were "working closely" with Saddam too.)
Not to mention that whatever "close" relationship they had was in shambles by the time the U.S. invaded, because Saddam was instructing his troops not to collaborate with foreign Islamic fundamentalist insurgents. Gosh, you hate to see a break-up like that . . . one minute you're kissing and hugging and "feverishly" discussing the future of your relationship, the next minute you're deciding whose CDs are whose. If two evil fascist Islamic nutjobs can't make it in this crazy mixed-up world of ours, who can?
In addition, according to Czech intelligence, a few months before the 9-11 attacks, Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague.
Actually, not even Donald Rumsfeld could definitively say whether that was Atta, much less whether anything related to 9/11 was discussed. But in Ann's world, if you click the heels of your ruby slippers together and say "There's no way Iraq wasn't involved in 9/11" three times, and you believe it as hard as you can, it becomes true.
Finally, a Clinton-appointed federal judge, U.S. District Court judge Harold Baer, has made a legal finding that Iraq was behind the 9-11 attacks -- a ruling upheld by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals last October. When some judge discovers a right to gay marriage in a 200-year-old document written by John Adams, Americans are forced to treat the decision like the God-given truth. But when a federal judge issues a decision concluding that Iraq was behind the 9-11 attacks, it is a "misperception" being foisted on the nation by Fox New Channel.
We could just as easily switch that around and note how remarkable it is that a columnist who assails judges for finding stuff that isn't there is suddenly all ready and willing to believe a Clinton appointee when he says Saddam caused 9/11. Hey, some people still believe the earth is flat — that don't necessarily make it so. Also notice that for the first time ever, Ann is actually accepting the word of a Clinton appointee over that of President George W. Bush himself, and the world is therefore coming to an end.
But even Baer admitted the testimony that he relied on "barely" established a link between the two; moreover, also notice that he relied on the testimony of one Laurie Mylroie, a neocon nut job who has tried unsuccessfully to link Saddam Hussein to everything from the first WTC bombing in 1993 to Steve Bartman snatching the ball away from Moises Alou. (As always, World O'Crap has even more of the good stuff on Coulter's wackiness.) The moral of the story is: If you're trying to prove you're not crazy, don't rely on character witnesses who are just as crazy as you.
Interestingly, liberals refuse to believe Czech intelligence on the Prague meeting ... because the CIA doesn't believe it. Apparently, this is the lone, singular assertion by the CIA that liberals wholeheartedly trust. The CIA also concluded that evidence of WMDs in Iraq was -- in the words of CIA director George Tenet -- a "slam dunk case." But liberals hysterically denounce that CIA conclusion as a "misperception" created by Fox News Channel.
Well, given that the non-existence of Iraqi WMDs has been corroborated by everyone from Hans Blix to David Kay, you'll have to forgive us if we sort of parted company with the CIA on that one.
Thus another question in the PIPA poll was this: "Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the U.S. has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?" Thirty-three percent of Fox News viewers said they believed the U.S. had found WMDs, compared to only 11 percent of those smart NPR listeners.
Oh, great, the whole NPR-is-liberally-biased thing again, which is becoming like the "redrum" of the right wing. The sad thing is, they probably believe that because someone on "fair and balanced" Fox News told them.
(How about asking NPR listeners which kills more children -- handguns or buckets?)
By "weapons of mass destruction," what liberals mean is: missiles pointed at Washington, D.C., with their "Ready to Fire" lights blinking ominously and their warhead payloads clearly marked "Weapons of Mass Destruction! Next Stop, The Great Satan America!" -- basically what you might see on an episode of the original Batman TV series. When we didn't find that, the "Bush lied, kids died!" screaming began.
Here's a hint: Asking Ann Coulter what liberals "mean" is like asking a Red Sox fan what he thinks of Roger Clemens. No, sweetheart, by "weapons of mass destruction" we mean weapons someone could actually use. Not "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities," not memos, not truck trailers used to fill weather balloons with hydrogen, but actual weapons. So did we find any of those?
David Kay's report said we hadn't found "stockpiles" of WMDs in Iraq,
Bing! Nope, we haven't found any actual weapons in Iraq, meaning that anyone who says the United States has found WMDs is, ahem, misinformed. And that Ann just lost the game right here, but now watch as she conveniently tries to move the goalposts:
but we have found:
-- chemical and biological weapons systems, plans, "recipes" and equipment, all of which could have resumed production on a moment's notice with Saddam's approval;
-- reference strains of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents (found in the home of a prominent Iraqi biological warfare scientist);
-- new research on brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin;
-- a prison laboratory complex for testing biological weapons on humans;
-- long-range missiles (prohibited by United Nations resolutions) suitable for delivering WMDs;
-- documents showing Saddam tried to obtain long-range ballistic missiles from North Korea;
-- facilities for manufacturing fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles.
Which all would've been fine, had Dick Cheney simply said on August 26, 2002, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has research on brucella, documents, and facilities for manufacturing fuel propellant." Instead, he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and Ann can't weasel out of that now.
Sorry to bore Fox News viewers with these facts. I'm doing it as a favor to readers of the Los Angeles Times.
If Ann's worried about boring people, she has way more people than just Fox News viewers to apologize to. In attempting to convince those poor maligned Fox viewers that their misperceptions about Iraq are in fact right on the mark, she basically did nothing more than truck out all the same tired bits of "evidence" about the Iraq war that wiser folk have exhaustively debunked many times over. Come on, Ann — Laurie Mylroie? The Prague meeting? That's the best you've got? At this rate, Ann's going to use her next column to insist that Mikey from the old Life cereal commercials really did die from simultaneously consuming soda and Pop Rocks.
But perhaps we shouldn't be so harsh. Ann knows that Fox News viewers need to feel special too, and she's happy to go to any inane lengths to make that happen for them. We still can't imagine why anyone would voluntarily watch Fox for any reason other than to peep Juliet Huddy or Laurie Dhue, but hey, your free time's your business, and should be just thrilled to have the likes of Ann Coulter standing up for you. Hey, Ann, we've got a 96-year-old great-grandmother who still insists that the 1969 moon landing was a hoax filmed on a sound stage somewhere in Hollywood — you wouldn't mind stopping by West Virginia to tell her how dead-on she is, would you? You let us know what your schedule looks like and Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot will take care of the rest! Talk to you later!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:11 AM
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Put your hands in the air and step away from the foreign policy
Maybe Social Security wasn't the only thing Al Gore should've put in his "lockbox" — he should've put America's foreign policy in there while he was at it, and then put the lockbox on the very highest shelf, where conservatives can't reach it.
• Matthew Yglesias remarks how, in the wake of the Nick Berg murder, the right wing's attitude on the Iraq war has magically changed from "let us shower democracy upon those poor benighted people" to "let's kill those fuckers." Read his post and the comments, too.
• Matt also links to this post in the New Republic's "Campaign Journal," about the revolving door that the office of Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism has become. If that long-ass title sounds familiar, it's because it used to belong to one Richard Clarke — but if you're under the impression that he's the only one who prematurely left that job realizing that Bush wasn't actually doing diddly-poo to fight terrorism, guess what . . .
• National Review's John Derbyshire, ever the ray of sunshine, made a comment today on Abu Ghraib ("Kick one for me") so disgusting that Andrew Sullivan called him out, and even when Derb's fellow poindexters at the Corner offered him an out, he wouldn't take it. His eloquent, thoughtfully worded explanation? "If you think you can fight a war against a ferocious and unappeasable enemy without your interrogators kicking prisoners, you are dreaming." Ah, yes, it's about time we reverted to a kicking-based national-security strategy. Even Jonah Goldberg had to respond "Bitch, you crazy" to this line of quote-unquote "thinking."
• But just when we were about to congratulate JoGo for having said something intelligent, he went and ruined it with this bit of nonsense about how the media supposedly aren't airing the full Nick Berg execution video because — get this — we expect Muslims to be brutal savages and so it's not news, and the media are therefore racist. The race card gets played again by a Bushie, and it's every bit as stupid as the first time.
• By now you're probably starving for some intelligent commentary on Iraq, so why not read this insightful piece by some dude named Wesley Clark, who, uh, happens to be a friend of ours. Bright guy, that Clark — do you kind of get the impression that just maybe he'd make a better Secretary of Defense than the guy we've got now? . . .
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:10 PM
Sinking (and other good news)
New CBS poll has Bush's approval rating at 44 percent, which if you're scoring at home is the lowest of his presidency. Josh Marshall points out that the thirties are not so very far off — like close to margin-of-error distance. We're at the point now where George may have to call the Saudis and ask them not to wait until October to do that little drop in gas prices they'd engineered.
In other happy news, Sebastian is back at Sadly, No! after a protracted leave of absence. Swing by and give him a holla if you've got a minute. His Republican-flaying hasn't missed a beat, though you have to admit sometimes they make it awfully damn easy.
ETA: Here's an analysis of the poll numbers from Mark Mellman, who, while not exactly an unbiased observer, nonetheless has some interesting information to share. The quote that really struck me was, "Only one challenger has ever done as well against an incumbent at a comparable time in the election cycle. Jimmy Carter had a similar six-point lead over the unelected and subsequently defeated Gerald Ford," and I couldn't stop thinking, A Democrat with a six-point lead over an unelected Republican incumbent? The hell you say!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:50 PM
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
The right wing's Nick Berg Memorial Hypocrisy Triple-Flip Kerfufflepalooza
1. Back in March, right-wingers were furious when Al-Jazzeera showed graphic photos of the four American contractors being burned and mutilated in Fallujah; American media outlets, by and large, did not show the truly graphic shots. Now, however, conservatives are demanding that the whole Nick Berg murder video, decapitation included, be aired in the press.
2. Not only that, but the fact that the media haven't shown the whole thing is a sign of liberal bias. Yup, the media are biased when they do show images of American soldiers' caskets being loaded en masse aboard a cargo plane, yet they're also biased when they don't show Berg's entire gruesome murder. Hey, Sharkansky, how about you make use of that gray wrinkly thing growing out the top of your spinal cord for once and imagine what would've happened had America's newspapers, as you instructed, published that gruesome photo you linked to: Right-wingers all over the country would've been decrying the liberal media for exploiting a man's grisly death just to shock Americans and undermine their faith in the war effort — oh, and the FCC would've fined anyone who aired the tape for showing gratuitously graphic images of violence that violated decency standards.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:03 PM
In spite of everything, I still believe people are really . . . oh, f$#! it
Before anyone even asks, yes, we're outraged over the death of Nick Berg. It shouldn't have happened, and I can only hope the people responsible will be found and punished; it was a horrific, sickening, tragic crime.
Yet apparently not so horrific, sickening, or tragic that it won't be used to score cheap political points by the very same people who accused the left of trying to score cheap political points with the photos from Abu Ghraib. In fact, to hear some of them talk, you'd actually think this latest tragedy comes as a relief, because Berg's death makes Abu Ghraib look not all that bad and thus we're not really required to care about it anymore.
Also interesting: Before Berg was killed, if someone on the left had said "The pictures from Abu Ghraib will only make the terrorists angrier at us," they would've received the right-wing rejoinder, "Oh, pshaw, stop worrying about that, you ninny — they'd want to kill us no matter what." Only now it seems the pictures Abu Ghraib really did make them want to kill us that much more, at least Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.):
Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the beheading of an American captive in Iraq has House Republican leaders concerned that the release of more photos to the public could lead to more Americans being harmed.
"We've got to make a decision on precisely how we handle it, especially in light of what's occurred today," Hunter said. "From my own perspective, it validates Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and General [Richard] Myers' attempt to keep these initial photos from being published . . . "
Of course, if Duncan Hunter hadn't voted to go to war at all, Nick Berg might still be alive and we never would've had an Abu Ghraib to deal with in the first place . . . but oops, now I'm being a Monday-morning quarterback and undermining America's resolve. 'Scuse me.
But anyway. One last bit of food for thought for those who would blame Nick Berg's death on the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, or on liberals undermining America's resolve, or on the fact that all Muslims or evil, or hell, on their usual target Bill Clinton: One of the warhawks' earliest explanations for why the war in Iraq was a good strategic move was the "flypaper strategy," or the idea that by forcing terrorists to fight U.S. forces in Iraq, they'd be too preoccupied to mount major attacks against the United States homeland. Well, as The Daily Kos points out, that's where the fight is taking place, and they're killing innocent Americans over there instead of over here — in other words, all is going according to their plan.
War really does debase entire nations, and even the people who aren't over there fighting come out of it damaged, right along with the people who are. We've so demeaned ourselves as a nation, we've set the bar for humanity so low, that we act like not being as bad as the people who murdered Nick Berg is some kind of cause for celebration. The question has been asked here before, but it's time for it to be asked again: Once upon a time, weren't we better than that?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:57 AM
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
With half his brain tied behind his back — and only one hand on the keyboard
Rush Limbaugh digs himself yet deeper vis-á-vis the Abu Ghraib prison torture fraternity-hazing shenanigans. Limbaugh as quoted in today's Mike Signorile column (link courtesy Atrios):
"If you look at these pictures, you cannot deny that there are elements of homoeroticism . . . I've seen things like this on American websites. You can find these if you have the passwords to these various porn sites, you can see things like this. And [Hughes'] point was maybe these kids — the soldiers, the guards, whoever, who are of a certain age group, who've grown up with access to this are simply acting out what they've seen on these websites or something, just for the fun of it, or maybe other reasons." (Emphasis ours.)
And thus we discover more about El Rushbo's evenings at home than perhaps we ever wanted to.
You now have GWBWYPGN?!'s permission, as our sister Ann would say, to gouge out your mind's eye.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:59 PM
Paint it black
Got an e-mail this afternoon from Andy, one of GWBWYPGN?!'s covert operatives in the Mobile area, relating an unpleasant (though not at all surprising) tale from some college kids in Kalamazoo, Mich. We looked it up on the Web and sure enough, found this story:
According to Ted Hufstader and Julia VanAusdall — two of the Kalamazoo Seven — here's what happened. Last week, the students heard that Bush would be appearing at Kalamazoo during a bus tour through the swing states of Ohio and Michigan. Hufstader maintains that this group of friends, which was made up mostly of Bush detractors (some of whom have engaged in protests in the past), only wanted the chance to see and hear the president. They were, he says, not interested in waging any anti-Bush action. "We wanted to get a better idea of what he's like," Hufstader notes. "All we get are little soundbites on the news." And he points to the fact that one of the seven was an international student as evidence of their sincerity: "We would not have done anything to jeopardize this student's standing in the country."
. . .
When the gang arrived at Wings Stadium--home of the Kalamazoo Wings, a minor league hockey team — they had to pass through a series of checkpoints. Hufstader maintains they were each dressed conservatively — "you know, khakis and sweaters" — and sported no political buttons or any other accouterments of dissent. At one of the checkpoints, they were spotted by a member of the College Republicans. He was familiar with the political predilections of several of these students and asked how they had received tickets. "We stood in line," Hufstader says he replied. At another checkpoint, Hufstader and his friends saw several College Republicans talking to the volunteers working security. The security people then told Hufstader, Dallacqua, VanAusdall and the others (Leah Busch, Shanna Barkume, and the international student whose identity Hufstader and the others are currently protecting) that they could not enter. "They told us," Hufstader says, "that we failed a background check, that we had been identified by volunteers as a potential threat, and that if we didn't leave we would be arrested."
Hufstader and the others insisted they simply wanted to hear Bush and demanded to see what list — if any — indicated that they had failed a background check. They argued their point until local police showed up and said they would be arrested unless they departed.
I'm counting down the seconds until some Bushie posts a comment saying something to the effect of, "Well, those seven students were probably just hooligans going down there to cause trouble," but that's precisely the problem — all these kids did was disagree with Bush and they were automatically assumed to be troublemakers, even in the absence of anything more than circumstantial evidence. They didn't go to the stadium with placards or noisemakers, but got turned away anyhow, just because the College Republicans didn't deem them worthy. (If it makes you feel any better, guys, getting the thumbs-down from a College Republican is probably the best sign of your character and moral fiber around.)
And even if they were going to make a scene, it's just one more example of what's good for the goose not being good for the gander in Bush Country.
College blacklists, "free speech zones," intimidation tactics . . . boy, that "land of the free" stuff was great while it lasted, wasn't it?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:02 PM
Somebody give Barbara Gillett a radio show!
World O'Crap has a smashing post today chronicling Rush Limbaugh's ongoing descent into whining pussyhood. El Rushbo, you see, has spent most of the past few days harrumphing about how the guards at Abu Ghraib were just "blowing off a little steam" (like college frat boys, see) by beating up Iraqi prisoners, sodomizing them with broom handles, forcing them to perform sex acts on one another and the like — but now people are actually having the temerity to disagree with that opinion, and that makes Rushbo sooooo upset!
There were editorials in Pascagoula, Mississippi, talking about what a rotten SOB I am for the Skull and Bones comment or the college fraternity prank comment. Must have been 75 hits all using the same quote, out of context and without the perspective that I offered in making it. But why do this? I'm sitting there, like I said, I'm just a kid from Missouri that wanted to be on the radio. And now all of a sudden I have to be discredited along with the administration.
Awwww. Poor baby. His opinions are what the majority of Americans are thinking — because he's right, see, and it would be preposterous to even think that anyone might not agree with his glorious rightness — he just had the courage to say it! Hell, even George W. Bush agrees with him — don't ask him how he knows, he just knows!
[T]hey are using me to say what Bush can't say so I have to be discredited because that's a way of discrediting what Bush really wants to say but can't say. That's what it is, and make no mistake about it.
How horrible! Rush merely expressed an opinion that everyone in America shares, even the president — how could they not? He's Rush Limbaugh, people! — and yet the liberal elites insist on persecuting poor Rush by disagreeing with him! Oh, the humanity!
But in the interest of fairness and balance, GWBWYPGN?! would like to present an opposing view. Here's Barbara Gillett, who is no relation to your humble blogger except for the fact that she gave birth to him back in 1978:
The thing that ticks me off about Rush Limbaugh isn't even his political opinions, it's the fact that he's so whiny! I mean, he sits there spouting off all day on his radio show, talking about how Democrats only want to whine all day and never actually do anything for themselves, but he's even worse! All he does is complain about how this person or that person is making George W. Bush look bad, or how Republicans are so oppressed by this person or that person — criminy, Republicans control the entire government! And his radio show is so boring — all it is is people calling in to kiss his ass and talk about how great he is, but whenever anyone disagrees with his opinion, he bitches and moans about how everyone is treating him bad! I don't know how people listen to that crap all day. He spouts off all day long about what whiners liberals are, but he's the biggest crybaby in America!
Don't anybody leave any remarks in the comments thread disagreeing with Mrs. Gillett's viewpoint — you don't get to persecute her just for saying what the rest of America is thinking!
Man, if that doesn't get her a drive-time radio show in Columbus, Ga., at the very least, there's no justice in this world. "The Barbara Gillett Show," featuring segments like "Reasons George W. Bush is a Dumbass," "Stupid Letters I Read in the Ledger-Enquirer This Morning," and "Penny Dug Under the Fence and Got Out of the Backyard Again," along with updates on how much weight Clark has lost, every hour on the hour.
The Barbara Gillett Show — whupping Rush Limbaugh's monkey ass with half her brain tied behind her back.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 10:30 AM
Anybody? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller? . . .
Aww, look — the Post-Crescent in Wisconsin wants to be more fair and balanced:
We’ve been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him. We’re not sure why, nor do we want to guess. But in today’s increasingly polarized political environment, we would prefer our offering to put forward a better sense of balance.
Since we depend upon you, our readers, to supply our letters, that goal can be difficult. We can’t run letters that we don’t have.
Well, hell, the Bush administration has never been afraid to just make some shit up — why should the Post-Crescent be any different? Grow some balls, Post-Crescent!
But no, that was too harsh, and as a former newspaper reporter myself, I should be applauding the Post-Crescent for this kind of outreach in the name of fairness and balance. So let's give them a hand in their efforts. General J.C. Christian, Patriot, helpfully points you in the direction where you can send your fair and balanced letters, and he even provides a list of Bush's accomplishments you can use for inspiration.
Now have at it! What the people of Appleton/Neenah/Menasha won't do, you must!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:19 AM
Monday, May 10, 2004
"Sure, we can go out — you're going to have to ditch your geeky friend, though."
NATO is thinking about contributing to the military presence in Iraq, but apparently they're holding back. What's the story?
The Western military alliance had expected to announce at a June summit that it would accept a role in the country, perhaps by leading the international division now patrolling south-central Iraq. But amid continuing bloodshed and strong public opposition to the occupation in many nations, allies want to delay any major commitment until after the U.S. presidential election in November, officials say.
Don't want to look like I'm putting words in anyones' mouth or anything, but that sounds an awful lot like "We'd like to donate some troops, but we want to wait until we know for sure whether they'll be led by a bunch of arrogant, bumbling incompetents."
Then again, maybe that's just me.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:11 PM
More chickens come home to roost
Where will we put all of them? . . .
• The Economist calls for Rumsfeld to get the heave-ho.
• Even Andrew Sullivan, bless his little heart, gets it.
• The administration's solution: Wait until the very last minute to ask for more money and resources so that people don't have time to get pissed off.
We refer thee to our "797" post from a few weeks ago, in which we indirectly made the point that if a CEO ran his company the way Bush and his people have run this Iraq operation, that CEO would be served with the pinkest of pink slips. Yet despite the fact that Bush, Rumsfeld et al. have humiliated America eight ways from Sunday through their willful arrogance and incompetence, we're expected to keep them around, because Bush is the only man in the whole entire United States who can protect us from terrorists, and besides, changing presidents in the middle of a tense situation like this would just be so tacky.
Sorry, no. You're going to have to do better than that. I may be a bleeding heart, but I'm not stupid. Once upon a time I may have felt a little sorry for Bush and his people — yes, running a country at war is hard work. But they've proven time and time again that they're categorically unfit for the task.
ETA: Andrew Sullivan helpfully provides the link to the Army Times editorial in question, which seems to remove any doubt that it is, in fact, the publication's institutional opinion and not that of a particular columnist.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:12 AM
Sunday, May 09, 2004
Shleprock Rumsfeld
Our boy Wes Clark (w00t!) was on "Press the Meat" today, along with a bunch of senators, to talk about the Abu Ghraib mess. Biggest surprise of the day was from Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), who verbally posterized Dick Cheney in a typically subtle but nonetheless satisfying fashion -- he alluded to the VP's insistence that Rumsfeld's critics "get off his back," and while I don't have the exact wording handy, Graham's response was that the Senate investigative committee, for its part, isn't on Rumsfeld's back, they're merely trying to get to the bottom of why the Abu Ghraib incidents were allowed to happen, and Cheney needs to butt the hell out. Ha. I've actually been pretty cool with Graham for a while now -- I don't agree with all (or even most) of his political opinions, but most of the time he has a refreshingly McCain-like aversion to abject bullshitting.
Anyhoo. Next they had on James Carville and Mary Matalin, who's looking increasingly like Martin Short's gay wedding-planner character from "Father of the Bride," and Matalin's best defense of Rumsfeld was that he'd led the nation's military through two wars and it would be a mistake to boot him out now and have to regroup at this stage of the War on Terror. (The old "Don't switch horsemen mid-apocalypse" pseudo-argument, though it was interesting to see it applied to someone other than Bush.)
But let's look at what Rumsfeld has accomplished. He pissed off our allies in Europe just for the sake of pissing them off; he pooh-poohed the advice of Eric Shinseki and other advisors who knew we'd need hundreds of thousands of troops to properly occupy Iraq, thus leading to the current occupation debacle; and now he's got the Abu Ghraib disaster to answer for. No matter how delicate you see our current situation in terms of the state of the world, isn't it possible that Rumsfeld's liabilities are now outweighing his assets at this point?
Here's an idea: If Rumsfeld has become a bigger drag than he is a help, make him the sacrificial lamb. If the Muslim world -- hell, the entire world -- has lost a measure of respect for us as a result of what went on at Abu Ghraib, maybe a very high-profile sacking of Rumsfeld would demonstrate that we're at least serious about rectifying the problem and reforming the occupation. And given that Rumsfeld's recent track record has been one fuckup after another, one could reasonably make the case that we wouldn't be losing a whole lot.
It's kind of a drastic solution, but hell, it's not like every other pundit in the country -- the ones who don't know the secret neocon handshake that gets you into the West Wing, at least -- hasn't already called for Rumsfeld to get the ax. Just saying we wouldn't be losing a whole lot if Rummy got whacked, and we might even stand to gain. That's all.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 10:12 AM
Saturday, May 08, 2004
Special weekend brain dump
What's this? A Saturday post? Why, yes, you lucky fucks! Just a quick rundown of some shit that's on our minds and some links y'all ought to look into . . .
• New blogroll passenger fo' that ass: Approximately Perfect, who offers a delightful view into the current mindset of the right-wing blogosphere. A place where John Kerry's SUV is more important than Iraqi prisoners being beaten to death and where no Bush administration employee should ever get fired, ever. A fascinating place, this!
• Speaking of no Bush employees getting fired: What would it take to get fired from the Bush administration, anyway? I mean, you've got Rumsfeld, who completely whiffed on the number of troops it would take to occupy Iraq and is now the buck-stoppage point for the Abu Ghraib incidents, plus you've got George Tenet, who caught the lion's share of the blame for both the 9/11 intelligence lapses and the phantom WMDs in Iraq. In most companies, wouldn't cockups like that be grounds for a pink slip? What do these guys have to do, get blown by an intern?
• Oh, and apparently what we've seen from Abu Ghraib ain't even the worst of it. To hear Rumsfeld tell it, there was more than just human pyramids and slapstick penis-ridiculing going on down there -- and while I have no idea yet what "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman" specifically means, it sounds like some real messed-up bring-out-the-Gimp-type shit. In other words, just the kind of thing that's going to make those Iraqi civilians love us for the merry pranksters that we are.
• We've been reading back over Dr. Zoidberg's Joe Lieberman's comments from Friday about the Abu Ghraib stuff just to see if maybe we were being too hard on the guy, but the more we read what he said, the more he comes off as one of those passhole-aggresshole pseudo-"apologizers" who can't express contrition for something that he did without reminding you what you did to elicit that kind of unwarranted response in the first place -- kinda like, "Hey, man, I'm sorry I deliberately rammed my SUV into your car back there. I mean, you did cut me off a few miles back, and I guess when people do that it kind of makes me snap a little . . . but yeah, it was the wrong thing to do . . . " Can it, Joe, and go suck up to the right wing on your own time.
• Do people just not sell VHS tapes anymore? I'm just asking.
• Another new link yo' ass should know about: Media Matters, founded by reformed right-wing hatchetman David Brock for the purpose of debunking -- oh, and you Republicans are just gonna love this! -- instances of right-wing bias in the media. Listen very closely and you can hear L. Brent Bozell's head imploding.
• Yes, it's wrong, and yes, I may only be opening myself up for a world of hurt, but I'm pretty sure I want this girl to be my girlfriend. And you know you do, too.
• Finally, if you're looking for some Flash-animated goodness and you've got some time you can devote to loading and whatnot, peep this. Think of it as HomeStarRunner presents "Dr. Strangelove." Or whatever.
There, that should give you plenty to do. Happy weekend.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:21 PM
Friday, May 07, 2004
Zoidberg speaks! (Unfortunately)
OK, we think we finally have a theory put together: An alien species of insect has been burrowing into the ears of prominent politicians and laying eggs, and the eggs begin damaging the victims' brains, with the primary symptom of this alien infestation being that the victims feel an uncontrollable urge to connect 9/11 to things with which it is completely unrelated. For some reason, maybe pheromones, they're specifically attracted to Republicans.
Today, one of those alien insects found Joe Lieberman, mistook him for a Republican (understandably), and Joe immediately started saying shit like this:
Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.
I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.
But for crying out loud. So we don't have to feel too too bad about Abu Ghraib, because after all, some people crashed 767s into the World Trade Center two and a half years ago. That's like if someone robbed my house and killed my mom, and then a few weeks later I get busted trying to rob a liquor store, and as the cops lead me out of the store I'm like, "Sorry for shooting up the place, but nobody ever apologized for killing my mom!"
What next, Joe? I think there are maybe three things left in the world that the Republicans haven't tried to arbitrarily connect 9/11 with, and you just took care of another one for 'em. Good show. You want to try and knock out the last two before you head home for the weekend, or are you set?
It's time to come to a sad realization, my fellow Americans — 9/11 isn't a national turning point anymore. It's not a national tragedy anymore. 9/11 isn't even a fucking day anymore. 9/11 has ceased to be any of those things but is rather the fresh-faced blonde blue-eyed all-American girl who got on the Greyhound in Nebraska and rode it all the way to Los Angeles, hoping to make it big but not lower herself in the process because she wanted to be known as the star who got to where she was without compromising her principles. And when she got off the bus in L.A. she met a guy who said he'd show her around town and promised her he wouldn't let anything bad happen to her, but then one night she got drunk and they had sex, and after that he felt no qualms about introducing her to his friends and letting them do the same thing to her, and before long the guy had her standing out on Sunset Boulevard and was pimping her out to any random guy who was on his way home from a hard day at the office and needed to work out some tension for ten or fifteen minutes.
Or if that's too florid for you, then 9/11 has become the duct tape of political excuses: You can use it for anything now. Hope you're proud of yourself, Joe.
ETA: Completely missed this Lieber-gem that came directly afterward: "And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody." Oh, all right, Joe. To the people who murdered and burned the four Americans in Fallujah, I'm sorry that we . . . uh . . . cluttered up your bridge, or something? WTF?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:04 PM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: Chapter 36 — Welcome Back Coulter
Welcome back, your screeds were your ticket out
Welcome back, to the liberals you laughed about
Well, the names are still the same since you hung around,
You'll be blaming Bill Clinton 'till they put you in the ground
Yeah, we tease her a lot 'cause she's a lousy writer and she isn't that hot,
Welcome back,
Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.
For a few weeks here, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot was dying. For some as-yet-unexplained reason, Ann elected to use her last two columns to slam prominent Republicans rather than prominent Democrats, and that left us with pretty much nothing to do on Fridays except wander aimlessly through a rhetorical desert, parched with thirst for some stupid Coulter comments to sink our teeth into, desperate to drink deep of her lunatic intellectual dishonesty and then spit it through the gap in our front teeth, right back into her smug face . . . ahem. Well, anyway, all is well again in GWBWYPGN?!'s little world, because Ann is back blaming the liberals for everything, and she's just as inane as ever!
Not having bashed liberals in the past few weeks, Ann's evidently a little rusty, because this week's column is a blatant laugher. Her first premise seems to be that you can't blame the 9/11 intelligence lapses on any one person, but she amends that to say that if the "one person" is Al Gore, then it's OK. Second of all, she chides the liberals for thinking there was any kind of "silver bullet" that could've prevented 9/11 — then lays into them for not selecting racial profiling as that silver bullet! Welcome back to the world of Ann Coulter, where up is down, left is right, night is day — and "Even With Hindsight, L:iberals Can't See Straight" is completely idiotic:
Over in the alternative universe of the 9/11 commission hearings watched only by me, Richard Ben-Veniste recently proposed an amazing new standard for investigating Arabs in this country. In the middle of haranguing Condoleezza Rice, Ben-Veniste demanded to know why the suspected 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, had not been more aggressively investigated, despite the fact that -- I quote -- he had "no explanation for the funds in his bank account, and no explanation for why he was in the United States."
So let me get this straight: Airport security can't acknowledge that a person is an Arab, but they should be allowed to audit his bank records? (Come to think of it, "Can't Explain His Bank Account or Why He's Here" is also a pretty good description of John Kerry.)
Ann has been trying to advance this stupid lie ever since 9/11. Airport security can acknowledge that a person is Arab. They can even search him if they want! But they can't pick him out to be subjected to a search for no other reason than because he is Arab, same as they wouldn't be able to pick Ann out to be subjected to a search for no other reason than because she's a shrill, pissy white girl.
Can we use that as a standard going forward? The government prohibits airlines from searching more than two Arabs per flight, so it would be terrific if liberals would let us examine their bank accounts.If Democratic Party shills like Ben-Veniste — who himself looks like someone who ought to be searched at airports —
What the f$#! kind of a silly third-grade insult is that? "You look like someone who ought to be searched at airports and your mother dresses you funny!"
are going to make ludicrous, macho statements like that in order to win applause from weeping widows in the peanut gallery, can't we hold them to that policy when it matters?
Ben-Veniste thinks the key to stopping the 9/11 attack was for the FBI to have drawn the obvious conclusions from an Arab in flight school. If only the FBI had searched Moussaoui's computer, they would have found a flight-simulator computer program, information about the Boeing 747, and extensive files on crop dusters. From this, apparently, Ben-Veniste imagines the FBI would have drawn the obvious conclusion that on Sept. 11, 19 Muslims were going to hijack airplanes out of Logan, Newark and Dulles airports and fly them into buildings.
Oh, Ann, we see what you're trying to do here. You're trying to accuse Ben-Veniste of pulling the Underpants Gnomes Maneuver™, only you went and cocked it up. See, the Underpants Gnomes tried to go from Step 1 to Step 3 without knowing what Step 2 was, and you think Ben-Veniste wanted to do the same — go directly from finding flight-simulator programs on Moussaoui's laptop to declaring, "Eureka! This flight-simulator program clearly indicates that four airplanes will be hijacked on the morning of September 11, 2001, two out of Boston's Logan airport, one out of Newark and one out of Washington, and they will be crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House! Q.E.D.!"
Well of course they weren't going to draw that entire conclusion just from the existence of a flight-simulator program. But maybe someone would've noted that Moussaoui had an unusual interest in flying. And then maybe that would've jogged somebody's memory that Moussaoui had no desire to learn how to land a plane at his flight school. And that would've prompted more questions, which would've prompted more questions, until . . . well, hell, maybe somebody would've gotten wise and maybe they wouldn't. But that certainly offers more opportunity for blowing the lid off the plot than saying, "Well, this flight-simulator program contains neither an exact date nor an exact time of an attack, must not mean anything!" as Ann apparently would've done. Like Condoleezza Rice, she evidently believes that nothing is actionable until the full details of the plan, right down to what ensembles the hijackers would be wearing for their plane trips, drop right into your lap.
A somewhat more direct chain of causation traces its way back to the aviation-security commission chaired by Vice President Al Gore in 1997. If that commission had done its job, you wouldn't have to wait for one of my columns to find out that there was a commission on airline safety years before the 9/11 attacks.
Ah, yes, it's all Clinton and Gore's fault! You knew we'd be getting around to this eventually, didn't you?
Isn't it curious that Democrats aren't bragging about Gore inventing air safety? The reason Al Gore hasn't added "anti-terrorism" to the list of things he invented is that Gore's commission concluded that passenger profiling must ignore ethnicity and nationality. Or as Gore himself might have put it, "I took the initiative in making it easier for Muslims to use airplanes to slaughter innocent American citizens."
That's three "Al Gore invented X, Y, Z" jokes in the same paragraph, and it wasn't even funny the first time.
The Gore commission on air safety decided that profiling should be based on "reasonable predictors of risk, not stereotypes or generalizations." Amazingly, all those "reasonable predictors of risk" failed to stop a single Muslim terrorist on 9/11. One wonders whether a profiling system that included ethnicity and nationality would have been more helpful in stopping 19 Muslim men, 15 of whom were from Saudi Arabia, all speaking Arabic to one another, from boarding planes on Sept. 11.
If we're going to stop every single group of Muslim people speaking Arabic to one another from boarding planes, that's kind of going to hurt business for Saudia, Emirates, Royal Jordanian and EgyptAir, wouldn'tcha think?
But OK, let's say for the sake of argument that the Gore commission gave airports the go-ahead to profile the shit out of their Arab visitors. In spite of the lovely images of Arabs being herded into holding cells and strip-searched en masse at airports around the country, al-Qaeda decides the United States still isn't a nice country and puts the 9/11 plot into motion anyway. Only now that they know Arabs (and Arab-looking people) are coming under special scrutiny, they put together 19 of the lightest-skinned members they can find, give them all fake American passports with names like Kevin Kirby and Bobby Jones, and send them flying into the World Trade Center. Now, not only are the twin towers still in ruins, but civil-rights groups the world over are assailing us for a racial-profiling policy that didn't accomplish a damn thing except discrimination. (And somewhere, Ann Coulter is writing a column about how the racist Gore administration twiddled its thumbs while pale-skinned Muslims plotted death and destruction.)
Recently — i.e., about the time Ben-Veniste was shocked that the FBI hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot based on the fact that Moussaoui had overstayed his visa — Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Schumer were clamoring for the release of Ansar Mahmood, a 26-year-old Pakistani immigrant detained in October 2001 after he was observed taking photographs at a water treatment plant in upstate New York. Mahmood later pleaded guilty to committing a felony by giving financial aid to illegal immigrants from Pakistan. Schumer says Mahmood should be permitted to stay in the U.S. because he "was cleared of terrorist links," and he has already served his time for "a non-violent felony." Hillary simply calls Mahmood's detention "disturbing."
Where is Ben-Veniste when we need him? What happened to the "We Don't Know Why He's Here or His Sources of Money" standard for harassing Muslim immigrants?
What, exactly, is Ann's point with all this? That we should've taken Mahmood to a dark alley and kicked the crap out of him, even though nobody could prove he was a terrorist?
In contrast to Mahmood, Zacarias Moussaoui had committed no felonies; his only apparent offense was to have overstayed his visa. But Ben-Veniste is appalled that the FBI didn't beat Moussaoui for information. The French had linked Moussaoui to al-Qaida — based largely on the information that he took frequent trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mahmood's home country.
When FBI agents in Minneapolis requested a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer, FBI headquarters wrote back, "We don't know he's a terrorist" — i.e., the argument Schumer is making for Mahmood's release right now.
No, the argument Schumer is making for Mahmood's release right now is, as you just stated a couple paragraphs ago, he "was cleared of terrorist links." Which is not the same as "not knowing." But hey, he's a Muslim . . . Ann says beat his ass for something anyway!
Liberals always claim to know exactly what to do as soon as it's too late. After Muslims attack with airplanes, they want to investigate flight schools. After Muslims attack with shoe-bombs, they want to investigate shoes.
Yeah, it was only liberals who wanted to do that stuff. But read that statement very carefully again: Ann's accusing us of Monday-morning quarterbacking, but she's doing so right after she just got finished saying, "Well, if Al Gore had allowed us to round up all the Muslims, this wouldn't have happened!" Monday-morning pot, meet Monday-morning kettle!
After a Muslim introduces E. coli into New York's water supply, liberals will be enraged that Muslim immigrants taking pictures of New York water treatment plants weren't investigated more aggressively — as soon as they are done blaming Bush for not stopping the attack amid their caterwauling about the detention of Muslim immigrants.
Maybe, Ann, but when you were cobbling together this little hypothetical scenario, you forgot to mention the Presidential Daily Briefing that Bush received titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike U.S. Water Treatment Plants" and the fact that he ignored it because it didn't include the exact date, time, and location of the potential al-Qaeda attack.
Liberals are the only known species whose powers of reasoning are not improved by the benefit of hindsight. Not only are they always fighting the last war, in most cases they're surrendering.
Yeah, that's a favorite belief of Ann's — anytime a Democrat or liberal tries to fight a war, they end up surrendering. That must be why the Nazi flag currently flies over every corner of the globe — except for Serbia, of course, which is still run by Slobodan Milosevic, and the Korean peninsula, which is entirely Communist. Idiot.
Basically this column, and indeed Ann's entire view of America's anti-terrorism efforts over the last decade or so, boils down to: "Liberals, enough of your Monday-morning quarterbacking — you should be listening to my Monday-morning quarterbacking!" Of course, such rank hypocrisy coming from Ann should only be a surprise to those who've spent the last three years sequestered on the "Survivor" island. Man, we never thought we'd find ourselves saying this, but it's good to have Ann back — Fridays just aren't the same without her being a complete assface! Hope you enjoyed the triumphant return of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot — it's our sincere hope that we won't have to wait another three weeks before bringing you the next one! But with Ann appearing to have gone right back to her well of liberals-hate-America stupidity, we're betting we won't be!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:08 PM
Every time the Clenis™ thinks it's out, they pull it back in
Come on, people, you're missing the Big Daddy of them all here — it's Clinton's fault! Here's a bit from today's "Morning Edition" on NPR, in which Steve Inskeep asks Joel Himmelfarb, an editorial writer for the Washington Times on defense issues, about Donald Rusmfeld's culpability in the controversy:
INSKEEP: . . . You said it's difficult for the secretary [of defense] to ensure in advance that terrible things won't happen. But the investigation found, as I understand it, a lack of training and a shortage of troops at the Abu Ghraib prison, and isn't it a secretary's responsibility to have people ready to do their jobs properly?
HIMMELFARB: Ultimately, it is his responsibility, and that is, that is certainly something that's going to be factored into things. But I think when you're, you're dealing with a war, when you're dealing with a constantly changing situation, it is simply inevitable that there are, there are going to be problems. And I think what we really need from our secretary of defense is to be sure that once he learns of those problems, that he takes action.
Now, certainly one thing I will say is that I believe, as, as a lot of folks on the, on the political right believe, that our military has been undermanned for many years, and it's very, very difficult to fight a war like this with a, a military that basically is, is Bill Clinton's military and a military that basically was formed during the days when we were all talking about the "war is peace" dividend.
No, you're not dreaming. That's actually what he said.
So let's get this straight: "Clinton's military" was good enough to rout the Taliban out of Afghanistan and cut through Iraq like a hot knife through butter, but when Donald Rumsfeld tries to do an Iraq occupation on the cheap and leave the job of occupying an entire country to a mere 135,000 soldiers, it's Bill Clinton's fault for leaving the military, and by extension the Abu Ghraib prison, undermanned. So if you're an Iraqi prisoner who's still miffed about having a fluorescent light bulb shoved up your poop chute, send those angry letters and e-mails to Bill Clinton!
Christ. It's no wonder the right wing always seems so stuck in the past; for them it never stopped being 1992. They're going to be running against Clinton until the sun burns out.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:46 AM
Dubya gets served by the Gallup Organization
What did the five fingers say to the face? . . . SLAP! (Ha, ha. I'm Rick James, bitch.) For those of y'all who don't click hyperlinks, let's do the rundown:
The poll finds 36% of Americans satisfied with the way things are going in the United States, while 62% are dissatisfied.
The poll shows that 49% of Americans approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president, while 48% disapprove. . . . The current reading ties with the lowest approval readings Gallup has measured in Bush's presidency. . . . In past elections, incumbent presidents who won re-election all received approval ratings above the 50% level at this point in the election year, while those who were defeated all received ratings lower than 50%.
At 42%, Bush's job approval on foreign affairs is another record low for the president.
Bush's rating on his handling of the situation in Iraq -- now at 42% -- has fallen 19 points since January and is three points below the previous low rating (last November).
Bush has placed a great deal of emphasis on his being a "war president," fighting the global threat of terrorism. Job approval in this area has been one of Bush's major strengths. The latest poll, however, finds a substantial drop in the public's approval of how Bush is handling terrorism, and it is now at the low point in his administration. Barely a majority of Americans, 52%, approve of the way he is dealing with the terrorist threat, while 45% disapprove.
And now the money shot:
Bush is now in a dead heat with Kerry in Gallup's trial heat ballot. In the two-way ballot, Kerry receives 49% support among likely voters, Bush 48%.
Oooh, snap! You just got served! You gonna let the Gallup Organization serve you like that?
The funny thing is, it was only a couple of weeks ago when Kerry's campaign had seemed to hit something of a dead spot, and anti-Kerry folks were gleefully sending me editorials asking whether the sky was falling, even asking if maybe the Democrats shouldn't dump Kerry and start the whole primary process over again . . . Well, now it's my turn to say: Damn, son, that is one weak-ass candidate y'all have there. Are y'all sure you don't want to start the nominating process over again and maybe come up with somebody better?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:04 AM
Thursday, May 06, 2004
Please kill help me
OK, I've tried to figure out this wrapping problem, and I'm just not getting it. Fie on thee, main blog text! Why will you not accept the concept of line breaks? Why? Why? Why?!?!
Seriously, if anyone can figure this out or knows what I need to change, give me a hand here. Evidently people with Macs or Mozilla browsers can see everything just fine, but the text won't wrap properly on PCs, if that narrows it down any. Keep in mind you're dealing with a complete Web idiot who only recently figured out that he could make stuff different colors.
And hurry -- I want everyone to be able to enjoy the rich chocolatey goodness of tomorrow's Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot without continually scrolling to the right like a madman. Please help! The blog you save may be your own! (Except it isn't.) But still!
ETA: Success (probably)! A deceptively simple fix seems to have solved the problem, at least on the Dell laptop I'm using, which Moses may have used while he was leading the Jews through Egypt. Thanks to all who answered GWBWYPGN?!'s pathetic, girlish cries for help! Free links for everybody!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 5:32 PM
Aren't we better than this?
The right wing has two new excuses to explain why the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison is not a big deal and something we shouldn't get all worked up about. Cal Thomas does us the favor of including both in his column:
1. The same kind of thing happened in those prisons under Saddam Hussein and nobody got outraged then, so what's the big deal now?
2. Our troops face hatred and resentment from these people every day, so it's only natural that they should respond in kind.
Wrong, and wrong.
Yes, Saddam Hussein tortured people in those prisons in a manner very similar to what the offending U.S. soldiers did. Yes, our troops face potshots from radical Muslim extremists over in Iraq every day. But that isn't an excuse to act like them! When we went into Iraq, we claimed to be "liberating" the people of that country from people like Saddam Hussein and the radical Muslim extremists. If those people were so awful that we had to wage a full-scale war to liberate Iraq from them, why would we now set the bar for acceptable behavior in Iraq at their level?
"Hey, those guys weren't any worse than Saddam Hussein" doesn't cut it. We pride ourselves on being better than Saddam Hussein, as well we should, and we always have. For all their disdain for the concept of "moral relativism," the right wing certainly doesn't seem to have any qualms about whipping it out now.
This feeble defense of the Abu Ghraib prison guards reminds me of a common response I used to hear when protested Bush's run-up to the war in 2003: "Why are you out here protesting our president? Why are you protesting him and not Saddam Hussein?"
Because what the hell good would it have done to protest Saddam Hussein? Saddam's not going to be looking at a picture of some dude from Birmingham, Alabama, holding a sign saying "SADDAM BACK DOWN" and think, "Holy shit, I'm in deep trouble here with this kid, I better back down." I didn't elect Saddam Hussein; Saddam Hussein doesn't have any kind of obligations to me. But Bush does. I'm not one of Saddam Hussein's constituents, but I am one of Bush's, and if there's anything at all I can do to show him that I don't want him taking this country to war, then it's something I've got to do. And granted, he may not be any more responsive to one solitary dude from Birmingham, Alabama, than Saddam would've been, but if there's 100 or 1,000 or 500,000 of us, all of whom will be voting in the next election, maybe that's something different . . .
But anyway, the same people who shouted "Why didn't you protest Saddam Hussein when he started a war?" are now shouting, "Why didn't you protest Saddam Hussein when he tortured prisoners?" Well, partly for the same reason, because it wouldn't have done any good. But also because we're supposed to be better than Saddam Hussein. When Saddam Hussein had people tortured in Abu Ghraib, it was tragic and it was disgusting, but it was pretty much par for the course for him; we knew he was a schmuck. When it's members of my armed forces, however, wearing uniforms that are decorated with my flag, that represents a lowering, a debasement. We expected those soldiers to be better — because we expect Americans to be better — and those soldiers fell willfully short.
I don't know what's going to happen next; I only know it isn't going to be good. Our already-tenuous moral authority in Iraq has further slipped, and is likely to slip further should people find out just how many people in that prison were not "enemy combatants" at all but rather simply women and children who blundered their way into U.S. checkpoints unable to explain how they'd ended up there (according to Seymour Hersh's article in this week's New Yorker). I'm worried that a major terrorist retaliation for Abu Ghraib might be in the offing against our troops in Iraq, and worried almost an equal amount about what our reprisal might be for such an attack. Maybe I'm overreacting, but I have this dread that what we're headed into is not another Vietnam but another Israel, where the opposing sides get caught up in such a rigid cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, revenge and counter-revenge, that any chance at peace is all but completely and irretrievably buried.
But it's all OK, because people like Cal Thomas and Rush Limbaugh say the soldiers were just "blowing off a little steam."
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:51 PM
Ha ha. I'm Vladimir Lenin, bitch
Yet another test for y'all to take. Here's my result:
Heh. Sweet.
On second thought, though, "practically communist" might be a little extreme even for a bleeding-heart like me. If you take the test and read all the questions, you may end up deducing that the "practically communist" label gets applied to pretty much anyone with the audacity to say they won't be voting for Dubya of Nazareth this year . . . but maybe that's just me.
Anyway. A liberal counterpart to this quiz, anyone? Stay tuned.
(Editor's note: The title of the preceding post is much funnier if you imagine it being spoken by Dave Chappelle as Rick James.)
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:09 AM
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
'Scuse me while I diss this guy
A lot of conservatives log on to this site and proceed to piss and moan that we disagree with everything George W. Bush does. So, what of it, kids? You want us to just arbitrarily reverse field and decide we like one of his policies after all, even though it's diametrically opposed to our own political beliefs? Yeah, even though the Bush tax cuts have been partially responsible for wiping out the budget surpluses and saddling us with a mountain of debt, and my kids will probably be paying for them decades into the future . . . umm, I'm sure Bush meant well when he was doing that, and the fifty bucks I saved this year will come in handy when I fill my car up two whole times!
Nope, sorry, that ain't in our job description. But lest anyone think we're not equal-opportunity sonsabitches, we're going to make a good-faith gesture — OK, a bad good-faith gesture, but a good-faith gesture nonetheless — and lay into a liberal, just to prove we can.
The liberal's name is Ted Rall. Now, once upon a time, we actually kind of liked the guy — far from being one of those radical lefties who automatically lumped the troops in with the alleged fascists calling the shots and hated both with equal fervor, Rall seemed to be somebody who sympathized with the troops and got upset on their behalf that they had to be sent halfway around the world to indulge the Bush administration's invasion jones. But at some point between the linked post and today, Rall snapped a little. I mean, all of us on the left have serious bugs up our asses about George W. Bush, but Rall's bug evidently climbed yet further up his ass and proceeded to lay eggs, to the point where he was drawing cartoons like this one, which has engendered well-earned controversy over its treatment of fallen soldier and ex-NFL player Pat Tillman. According to Rall's portrayal, Tillman was a dumb redneck jock who enlisted in the Army in 2002 just so that he could personally enslave Afghanis.
Well, this is America, and Rall has a right to his opinion; it just's that his opinion happens to be fucking stupid. Sorry, Ted, but you went into orbit with that one. It's one thing to have a legitimate beef with the reasons we went to war — hell, GWBWYPGN?! certainly does — but once soldiers are actually fighting in said war, we want them to fulfill their objectives and come home safely. And if some of them don't, there's absolutely no excuse for dropping a deuce on their graves. You're turning into the left's version of Mikey "Savage," pal, and the further you stay away from the rest of us this election year, the better.
So there you go, folks. We're not going to apologize for Rall, mind, since he doesn't represent the views of this blog (or the left in general) any more than Fred Budin, our evidently special-needs letter-writer from a couple posts down, represents the right. But what Rall did was shitty, and he deserves to be called on it, by Democrats as well as Republicans.
Now then. We've gone ahead and admitted Rall is an ass crack; wonder when somebody on the right will do the same to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:23 PM
Dude, where's my goalposts?
If you're scoring at home, the Pentagon says they're going to need to keep troops in Iraq at their current level (currently around 135,000) at least until the end of 2005.
Well, hate to do this, Bushies (wait, no I don't), but the red light is flashing and that means it's time to whip out these old quotes again . . .
Richard Perle, an influential former Pentagon official who is close to Rumsfeld, reportedly gave a briefing to Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs 10 days ago in which he predicted that the war would last no longer than three weeks. "And there is a good chance that it will be less than that," he said. (Knight-Ridder News Service, March 29, 2003)
TIM RUSSERT: The army's top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.
DICK CHENEY: I disagree. We need, obviously, a large force and we've deployed a large force. To prevail, from a military standpoint, to achieve our objectives, we will need a significant presence there until such time as we can turn things over to the Iraqis themselves. But to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don't think is accurate. I think that's an overstatement. ("Meet the Press," March 16, 2003)
Yup, that's what they said. Who knows, they may still believe it. And if Bush gets another four years in office, that's another four years that they'll get to influence our strategy and presence in Iraq. So if you vote for Bush in 2004, you're giving the thumbs-up to this kind of incompetence.
How's that working out for you so far?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:36 PM
I see dumb people
Ordinarily we try to reserve this site for some kind of informed policy debate or discussion of the merits of opposing political parties/philosophies/etc., but GWBWYPGN?! didn't have any coffee this morning for the second day in a row, we're in a bad mood, and we're going to simply unleash our fury on a random complete idiot. How about . . . this guy:
Muslims' indignities far more egregious
I am sick of all the concern and worry about what the Arab Muslim world will think about what a handful of U.S. soldiers did. What was so bad, anyway?
They embarrassed some Muslim Arabs. Who cares? They are the same people who place bombs in schoolhouses, who danced in the streets on Sept. 11, who want all Christians and Jews dead. Their humiliation pales next to what they have been doing to non-Muslims for 50 years. Muslim clerics have called for our destruction in front of cheering throngs.
What those soldiers did may be wrong; I would not do what they did. But this is a war we must win, and if we have to embarrass a few Muslims to save American lives, it's a good trade-off.
FRED BUDIN
Hoschton
I don't mean to be rude here, but . . . you fucking retard.
"If we have to embarrass a few Muslims to save American lives." Oh, so that's it! I had no idea that by sticking broom handles up Iraqi prisoners' asses, we were actually preventing future 9/11s! Or that by having her picture taken pointing and laughing at the penis of a hooded Iraqi prisoner, this chick might actually be saving my life! (Man, if pointing and laughing at a penis is all it takes to defend the United States of America, Marta Limbaugh should be in line for a Silver Star by now!)
In fact, pumpkin, these actions could've indirectly endangered American lives. We came in as the "liberators" of Iraq, and now a substantial number of Iraqis may well think we're pulling the same prison-torture shit that Saddam Hussein did. That sense of betrayal might just be enough to push a few extra Fallujahans or Najafians over to the side of the anti-American resistance, and those folks may well be sitting behind some of the RPG launchers that pick off however many American soldiers we're going to lose this month.
Remember the dream where you came to school naked from the waist down? Well, congratulations, America — being an occupying force is like being in that dream. Everyone's eyes are on you, every move you make is scrutinized like the Zapruder film. And if a few random assholes step forward to exhibit behavior almost indistinguishable from the tyrants that proceeded them, the whole world gets to see it, and we end up looking very, very bad.
But Fred Budin says don't worry, they were actually saving American lives. If you listen really closely, you can hear our brain cells gently weeping.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 10:51 AM
Sadly, No! has the post we would've liked to have written to commemmorate Mission Accomplished Day, had we thought about it far enough in advance. Take the time to read it, please. No matter where you fall on the subject of the Iraq war, you'll be enlightened.
The valuable lesson of the post, as grammatically awkward as it may be: War never doesn't hurt. If you're one of the pro-war people who was angered by ABC's decision to read the names of our dead soldiers on "Nightline" last week, ask yourself: What did you think was going to happen? You knew American soldiers were going to die in this war, didn't you? Why, then, is the acknowledgment of those deaths so difficult for you to handle? Is it because you're starting to realize that the war was a lot easier and more fun to be in favor of back in February 2003 when you were just writing letters to the editor or talking with your buddies about how bad you wanted to kick Saddam's ass, and nobody had come home in a bag yet?
My parents can remember back in the 1960s and '70s when a new list of names of soldiers who'd died in Vietnam would be read on the news practically every night. But now, more than 30 years later, we can't handle one night of acknowledging our war dead? Have we become that anaesthetised to the horrors of war, to the point where any acknowledgment of its consequences is too much for us to handle? Are we at a point now where the fact that someone talking about the deaths of those soldiers is a greater outrage than the fact that they died in the first place? If so, that may be scarier than anything else that's happened in the last three and a half years — maybe even scarier than 9/11.
If we can't handle the thought of that many people coming home in caskets, this country truly wasn't prepared for war. We claim to be a nation at war, but we have no idea how to act like one. I can only hope our next president will be able to change that.
ETA: Yeah, What He Said, Part Deux — Pandagon has a great post on a similar topic.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:03 AM
Monday, May 03, 2004
From far and wide, O Canada, we stand employed for thee
From Matt Lavine comes this link revealing two things about Coalition of the Willing™ non-member Canada that George W. Bush would rather you not know: Not only has Canada's job growth over the last three years blown the U.S.'s into the weeds, this growth was accomplished by lowering middle-class tax rates while leaving the top rate completely alone.
If you're scoring at home, that's 850,000 new Canadian jobs in the last 42 months, or an increase of 5.6 percent. Of course, exchange rates being what they are, that would only equal about 620,000 American jobs, but still.
Man, sensible tax policy, faster-growing employment, a kick-ass national anthem, cheaper prescription drugs andElisha Cuthbert . . . what's not to like! Not that I'm planning on moving there or anything. I'm just saying.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:43 PM
