Personal Musings category archive

Glenn Greenwald on Gingrich (follow the link for the full article):

Casually threatening Americans with the loss of a city unless they allow their Government to violate core constitutional guarantees is deranged fear-mongering in its most unadorned form, exactly what every two-bit tyrant tells his country about why they must be deprived of basic liberties. But what makes it all the more notable is how repeatedly Gingrich invokes this same deranged formulation in order to argue for a whole array of policies he supports — we better accept what Gingrich wants or else we’ll “lose a city”:

From The New York Sun, November 29, 2006, here’s Gingrich arguing that we also need to give up First Amendment rights:

A former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, is causing a stir by proposing that free speech may have to be curtailed in order to fight terrorism. . . .

“We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,” Mr. Gingrich said Monday night during a speech in New Hampshire. . . . “Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people.”

By the time the Republicans Fear Mongers finish destroying American liberty, there will be nothing left of America worth fighting for.

(Aside: By the way, my father was a POW in WWII. No one called him a hero and he was ashamed of having been captured until the last couple of decades of his life, even though his unit had been completely overrun in the dead of night, despite reports from Military Intelligence that there were no enemy troops in the area. He was captured by the Germans and was not mistreated–he told me that, even when he wasn’t getting much food at the end of the war, the American POWs were no more deprived than their German guards. Shame that the persons we the Bushies have captured can’t make similar statements.)

From Michael D. at Balloon Juice; I think his comments are unduly harsh, but not out of the ball park–my thoughts below:

(Michael D. quotes the news):

McCain has repeatedly voted against amendments in the Senate that would have…covered such important services as improving care at veterans’ hospitals, providing mental health services to soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse problems. [2006 Senate Vote #7, 2/2/2006]

In 2006, McCain voted against the Kerry amendment that would eliminate increased fees and co-payments for veterans in the TRICARE health care program by raising the discretionary spending limit by approximately $10 billion. The provisions would have been fully offset by eliminating creating corporate tax breaks. [2006 Senate Vote #67, 3/16/2006]

McCain was one of only 13 Republicans to vote against an amendment that added over $400 million for inpatient and outpatient care for veterans. [2006 Senate Vote #98, 4/26/2006]

(Michael D. comments) . . . Even though I am now becoming more left leaning than I have ever been, I still had the impression that the media supports Democrats (or gives them a fairer hearing anyway). More and more, I am seeing that this is nowhere near the case. McCain gets a pass because is supposedly “a hero.” I’ve never been sure why he is a hero. He graduated 4th or 5th from the bottom of his class. He wrecked three of his own aircraft (if I remember correctly) and he was captured in Viet Nam. Unless I missed the part where he jumped on a grenade to save the lives of his fellow servicemen, I don’t know where the hero part comes in. But I digress.

Candidate McCain has done no more than hundreds of thousands of others.

Surviving does not make one a hero (though Candidate McCain’s refusal to take the easy way out warrants respect; this would appear to be the only hook on which to hang “hero”), except perhaps in some metaphysical sense that makes all of us who get on with life “heroes.”

And now his idea of supporting the troops is to deny them medical and educational benefits.

Television has turned “reality” into a bad word.

Yeah, reality is often bad, but not until Survivor and the rest of that crap has “reality” become a bad word.

How the heck else can Court TruTV get away with a slogan as oxymoronic as “Not Reality. Actuality.”

Furrfu.

It’s not his boy or girl or spouse or parent over there, is it? Republicans are so generous with the children of others.

The Booman has a lengthy discussion of the bogus comparison between occupying–that’s occupying, my friends–a hostile Iraq and having troops in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. You can follow the link to read it. I am not saying I agree with all his points–just most of them–but I think he frames the issues accurately.

Candidate McHack’s analogy fails on the surface.

Suffice to say that no Germans, Japanese, or South Koreans are blowing up American troops. Indeed, when American bases were established in those countries following World War II and the Korean War, the inhabitants of those countries had stopped blowing up American (and other occupying) troops, either through surrender (Japan and Germany) or through partition (Korea).

Candidate McMaverick doesn’t seem to realize that he’s comparing apples and oranges apples and shoes. On second thought, I expect that he does realize it, but can’t think of any other, better fiction to justify endless war.

A war conceived in deceit and based on lies.

Add one more lie: Iraq is like Germany, Japan, and Korea.

While listening to the coverage of the Current Federal Administrator’s trip to Europe, I found myself amazed that the reporters speak of his activities as if he still has any influence, credibilty, or moral authority.

Now that Senator Obama has secured the nomination, the racists are coming out from under their rocks.

Not that I am surprised. The ugliness is always there. Some folks think it is a card to be played for electoral gain.

It can be, and it has been a card, sometimes by implication, sometimes by blatant appeal.

But it has also been death and lynching and murder and the shame of this Republic.

And I fear we shall see more of it, blatant and disgusting. It’s the last refuge of a bankrupt ideology.

Link to Sadly, No! via Phillybits.

A very gracious speech.

Addendum, Sometime Later:

Brendan has posted the text.

The facts speak for themselves.

No, Bush and his enablers aren’t responsible for all of this.

Just most of it, through pursuing a war based on lies and selling the economy to foreign powers to pay for it, an oil policy (it is to laugh) based on what enriches oil companies rather than on what averts a most forseeable crisis, and a domestic economic policy based on making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Whenever the Current Federal Administration has had a chance to plan for the nation’s economic future, it has done precisely the wrong thing.

It’s sorta kinda like their foreign policy, come to think of it.

The U.S. economy entered dangerous new terrain Friday as crude oil prices leapt up by a record $10-plus a barrel, the unemployment rate notched its highest monthly jump in 22 years and growing fears of recession sent the stock market plummeting.

The bleak day began with news from the Labor Department that the unemployment rate ticked up in May by a half-percentage point to 5.5 percent. The last time it jumped so much in one month was in 1986. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also said that employers shed 49,000 jobs, the fifth consecutive month of job losses.

Contracts for deliveries next month of crude oil, called futures, then began climbing because of an escalation of saber-rattling between Israel and Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter, whose location in the Persian Gulf means that any conflict would likely affect global oil supplies.

By the time trading settled late Friday, oil futures had posted a record one-day move-up of $10.75 a barrel to $138.54. That was nearly twice the record uptick set just one day earlier of $5.49.

I’m betting on the last option:

McClatchy (emphasis added):

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces.

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

Oh, yeah, I left out IslamofascistSymps.

Publishers Clearing House flyers are perfect for stuffing Republican Party postage paid business reply envelopes.

Glenn Greenwald:

In order to satisfy the right-wing extremists he now needs, McCain — who only six months ago was giving answers on spying and executive power that were exactly the same as though expressed by the ACLU, Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd — is now spouting theories of the Omnipotent President virtually equivalent to those used by John Yoo, David Addington and Dick Cheney over the last seven years to impose radical changes in how our Government functions. How far McCain has shifted is reflected by the fact that, in the December questionnaire, he said he would never use signing statements under any circumstances — a commitment not even Obama or Clinton would make. A speech McCain delivered to the Federalist Society a few weeks ago presaged this reversal, but yesterday’s statement leaves no doubt that McCain is now explicitly embracing the Bush administration’s most radical executive power theories.

The bulk of the Bush controversies over the last seven years are grounded in the Bush/Cheney view of executive power: that when it comes to national security, war and foreign policy (so broadly defined that it even includes what the Government does to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil), nothing can constrain what the President does — not even laws enacted by the American people through their Congress. John McCain is now embracing those extremist theories in full. The only difficult question is to decide what’s more disturbing: that McCain switches positions so quickly and completely on such fundamental questions, or that he is now espousing a view of presidential power that has fueled the radicalism and lawlessness of the last seven years?

A couple of weeks ago, I found my copy of Green and Gold. That was the directory of incoming freshmen that rising sophomores at my college prepared. We freshman received it when we arrived for orientation.

Second Son was looking at it yesterday. One thing he remarked on (in addition to the freaky haircuts and funny clothes you will see in high school senior portraits from the late 1960’s) was the very small number of black persons, maybe three or four–we called them “colored” or “Negroes” back then–in the incoming class of about 700
persons.

I pointed out to him that, just a few years before, the college had been all white.

Fortunately, he is from a new generation. He doesn’t care about color.

Will Bunch’s post on Senator Obama’s achievement is just too good–and for those or us who lived through it, black, white, yellow, red, or purple, too true–to ignore.

Addendum, a Few Minutes Later:

Dick Polman has more:

When Obama was born on August 4, 1961, southern blacks could not sit with white patrons at lunch counters, or drink from the same water fountains, or use the same public toilets, or sit where they wanted on buses. They were routinely denied the right to vote. Civil rights workers known as Freedom Riders, who rode buses across state lines to protest segregation in transportation, were often dragged from the vehicles that spring and summer, and beaten with tire irons. Even accomplished black citizens got little respect; when NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall met that spring with attorney general Robert Kennedy to discuss the possibility of being nominated for a federal appeals court seat, RFK told him, “That’s the problem with you people. You want too much too fast.”

After all, they keep attacking it. In a column about Dick Cheney’s “joke” about West Virginia, the New York Times points out

Of course, these swipes at parts of the United States have become something of a pattern within the Republican Party — Ms. Capito’s comments not withstanding.

One of the first pages in the Republican playbook these days is to run against “San Francisco values.” This campaign cycle, in Missouri, Republican Congressman Sam Graves is already using the phrase in television commercials against his Democratic opponent.

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, President Bush took a swipe at Hollywood.

Massachusetts is also a frequent target. A few years ago, then-Senator Rick Santorum, commenting on the Catholic Church sex scandal, said it was “no suprise” there were revelations coming out of Boston, because it was a liberal bastion.

Attacks on New York used to be common. They seem to have declined in recent years — perhaps as a reaction to Sept. 11, perhaps because San Francisco and Hollywood are glitzier targets.

I’ve mentioned my qualms about Senator Clinton on several occasions. I have been taken aback by a number of things that she and official spokespersons for her campaign have said and done.

Nevertheless, some of her supporters have, as far as I can tell, frankly fallen off the edge of reality, weaving themselves a fabric of fantasy, lies, delusion (remember delusion?), sometimes with very nasty overtones of the vilest racism.

(Aside: Senator Clinton, of course, is not responsible for the conduct of individuals who support her, but are not part of her campaign, though it can be argued that some of her campaign’s tactics and claims have helped create an atmosphere in which such comments could be seen as legitimate.)

Phillybits has been following one such story with dogged determination. The story is of some significance, since it has already surfaced on the wingnut version of Pravda Fox News (see Phillybits for a discussion of this).

Now the Booman appears to have the scoop.

I have met the Booman. I seriously doubt that he would have published this unless he had the goods.

Addendum, Later That Same Morning:

John Cole has more.

After the 2004 Republican convention, the Daily Kos and Atrios, two political blogs, began posting Drinking Liberally meeting times on their sites. By the time Election Day rolled around, 16 new chapters had sprung up.

(snip)

Baratunde Thurston, 30, a stand-up comedian, performs around New York City with Laughing Liberally.

“After the 2004 election, Drinking Liberally meetings were like a support group,” said Mr. Thurston, who was a co-host of the Boston chapter at the time. “There were a lot of questions: ‘What happened? How could fellow Americans re-elect this man? How exactly do you move to Canada?’ In 2006, the mood started changing from pity party to newfound hope regarding the midterm elections. Local politicians would come by and make their pitches. We did joint events with human-rights groups and abortion-rights groups. It was like a swap meet of liberalism.”

Be a part of the legend.

Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, 6 p. m. to 9 p. m. Tuesday.

Link via Atrios.

Kathleen Parker’s take: Scottie McClelland not only is dishonorable for being late to the game, he also needs to stop snitchin’ (emphasis added):

The honorable man knows what to do when he believes the president is lying about something as serious as the need for war. An honorable man quits his job rather than be complicit in fatal fraud. He stops the lie in its tracks and heads straight to the nation’s newsrooms. Immediately. Not after he’s left. But McClellan didn’t do that. Instead, he warmed himself by the glow of the inner circle and stood before the nation as a bumbling, inept spokesman, saying nothing repeatedly – and badly.

Unfortunately for the short, unhappy political life of Scott McClellan, the boy who squealed all the way home may be stuck with the title after all. Because no matter how sweet the revenge, on the playground, the snitch is trusted by no one.

Guess her take on the situation is appropriate, given the mafia-esque “we’re doing what we want and to hell with principles, morals, and the Constitution” culture of the Current Federal Administration.

A Clinton’s a two face, a worrisome thing,
that will lead you to sing the blues in the night.

Donna Brazile cuts to the quick. Play by the rules:

Donna Brazile’s statement on her website here.

Video via Kos.

Donna Brazile link via DelawareLiberal.

ASZ reports on the efforts of a wingnut blogger to find something with which to swiftboat Senator Obama’s uncle.

Mr. Payne’s brothers-in-arms respond. Interesting fellow-travelers these wingnuts have (emphasis added):

Concerning the service of Mr. Charles Payne: C.T. Payne was a soldier in the 89th Infantry Division. He served in the 355th Infantry Regiment, Company K. The 355th Infantry Regiment was the unit to liberate Ohrdruf. Mr. Payne was there.

For those who seek to minimize the horrors of Ohrdruf since it was a ‘work’ camp and not a ‘death’ camp, we have but one word: shame. Ironically, this argument has been made to us time and time again by various Holocaust-deniers and other pro-Nazi groups. We will let the testimony of survivors and veterans speak for themselves.

Do we really need another President who just says what is convenient? Jeez, we’ve already got one of those.

Senator Clinton in September of last year:

The following is a statement by Clinton Campaign Manager Patti Solis Doyle.

“We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process.

And we believe the DNC’s rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role.

Thus, we will be signing the pledge to adhere to the DNC approved nominating calendar.”

Senator Clinton five months later:

Hillary Clinton issued a statement Friday in which she, for the first time, openly said she will ask her delegates to support seating delegates from Florida and Michigan, in opposition to the DNC’s delegate penalties.

“I know not all of my delegates will do so and I fully respect that decision,” Clinton said in the statement. “But I hope to be President of all 50 states and U.S. territories, and that we have all 50 states represented and counted at the Democratic convention.”

Despite the last seven years having been about magickal thinking and despite their having taken us on a Magickal Misery Tour, running a country is not about a magickal thinking. It’s about reality in a real world. John Cole:

John McCain could set up his campaign headquarters in the Green Zone, and it wouldn’t make his ideas any better.