Poor David

David Broder's column this morning has a tone of sadness and disappointment. Broder thinks that McCain should have used his trip to the mid east to distance himself from George Bush but instead it was more stay the course and actually demonstrated that he is just as clueless as Bush himself.

It is obvious that the Democrats are planning to run against McCain by linking him as tightly as possible with President Bush, the instigator of the Iraq war and the captain of a seriously shaky economy.

As a member of the minority party in a largely dysfunctional Senate, there is little McCain can do to rescue the economy. But the Baghdad visit offered him a chance to deal with the other big barrier to his election -- his close identification with Bush's policies in a war now into its sixth wearying year.

[.....]

Petraeus told Barr that he and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker had "repeatedly noted that it's crucial that the Iraqis exploit the opportunities that we and our Iraqi counterparts have fought so hard to provide them."

That clearly opened the door for McCain, as a prospective president, to signal to the government of Nouri al-Maliki that his patience with the political impasse is not inexhaustible.

[.....]

Bush and Maliki have both called those steps vital benchmarks, but Bush has refused to threaten any consequences for Iraqi obduracy. If McCain had told Maliki that he cannot continue to dither, he could have accomplished two important goals.

Because Clinton and Obama have publicly committed to a quick start in reducing U.S. combat forces in Iraq if either becomes president, a warning shot from McCain -- even without a timetable -- would put the Iraqis on notice that the next president would not be as accommodating as Bush.

And politically, it would send a dramatic message that McCain is not in lock step with Bush, while once again aligning him with Petraeus.

So far as I can judge from the few public statements McCain uttered while in Baghdad, the senator said no such thing.

When CNN's John King asked him during his visit to comment on Petraeus's "frustration with the pace of political progress," McCain gave a bland response.

With Bush's approval rating at a new low, 31 percent, John McCain continues to sound like John McBush. But I'm sorry Mr Broder, this should come as no surprise - John McCain above all else loves war and if Iraq were to stabilize politically there would be no reason for the US to stay there. Your White Knight is not a good guy after all and in fact he's one of the most dangerous people we could have in the Oval Office in coming years.

David Broder - what can I say

Well I could say David Broder is senile - but I think I have said that before. Mr Why can't everyone just get along has a new hero. And that hero is none other than Newt Gingrich. Yes, it's long past the time for Mr Broder to ride off to that retirement home.
Newt's Vision Thing
By David S. Broder

In the years since I first met him in 1974, I have learned that it's wise to take Newt Gingrich seriously. He has many character flaws, and his language is often exaggerated and imprudent. But if there is any politician of the current generation who has earned the label "visionary," it is probably the Georgia Republican and former speaker of the House.

For that reason alone, it is regrettable that Gingrich has virtually decided to pass on the 2008 presidential race.

Yes, those are gaging sounds you hear! Newt a visionary? It just gets worse and I can't bring myself to even copy and paste anymore.

Please Mr Broder - please retire. Don't you have some nice cabin you could go to and fix those cocktail party weenies yourself?

David Broder says.....

....the problem with the United States is all the pesky citizens.
David Broder asks: what do they think this is, a Democracy? Well at least that seems to be what he is saying in his latest rambling column, A Mob-Rule Moment.

A particularly virulent strain of populism has made official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion.

The nerve of those people to think that those they elect should actually listen to them.

In today's Washington, a badly weakened president and a dangerously compliant congressional leadership are no match for the power of public opinion -- magnified and sometimes exaggerated by modern communications and interest group pressure.

Sorry Mr Broder, I fail to see how politicians being "match for the power of public opinion" is a bad thing. Isn't that why we call them "representatives"?

Of course since Mr Broder sees himself as a centrist both Republicans and Democrats are "guilty" of listening to the people.

The latest cave-ins involve immigration and trade policy, and both seriously threaten the national interest.

The Republican base stopped the immigration bill and "labor and liberal groups" ended fast track trade agreements. We can see where Mr Broder's heart lies, the defeat of both of these bills was a blow to corporate America. The immigration bill would have given them cheap labor in the US and fast track trade makes it easier for corporations to take advantage of slave labor abroad. At least now we know why David Broder hates Democracy.

Update
Ed Morrissey gets Broder exactly right:

At Heading Right, I take a look at Broder's cri de coeur over the use of "modern communications" in intimidating Congress into rejecting bad legislation. The paradigm has changed, and Broder appears unaware of it or incapable of understanding it -- perhaps because he has so much to lose.

Surprise Surprise!

Yes those are the words of the lovable Gomer Pyle but they also could have been the by line of David Broder's commentary on Cheney that I simply dismissed yesterday as a bad 8th grade civics paper. Well Josh Marshall asks, where has Mr Broder and the rest of the DC punditry been that last few years?

Yesterday David Broder wrote a column which one TPM Reader, more or less fairly, described as Broder's expression of shock, shock at just what Dick Cheney has been up to over the last six-plus years. And this is a good opportunity to say that the Post's 'Angler' series seems to be becoming the trigger for that transition moment where consensus establishment opinion goes from seeing the vice president as the powerful administration heavy with a sometimes creepy but largely comic penchant for secrecy to an altogether more nefarious force who has used his unprecedented power as vice president to advance an agenda of official secrecy, non-accountability, untrammeled executive power, legitmized torture and general degradation of the rule of law.

But this is far too easy. Because the simple fact is that we've known almost all of this for years.

I started writing about Cheney about the same day I started this blog. The earliest post I can find is from October, 2005 - It's All About Cheney

While the news and rumors surrounding the Plame case may be focusing on Karl Rove and Scooter Libby it is also bringing to light what many of us have suspected all along, it's all about Vice President Dick Cheney.

Lawrence Wilkerson, last week who said:

....that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

I list of other posts from 2005 can be found here and it's all the same - the source of all evil is the office of the Vice President. In addition to the DC punditry we also have some Republicans now questioning the activities of Mr Cheney. The same question applies to them. What bunker have you been hiding in the last six years. As Digby explains

But I have to say that nobody should be surprised by this when you consider how this lawless cabal took power in the first place. They showed very early on that they would let nothing stand in their way and from their first moments in office they governed as if their institutional power meant they had a mandate to enact their entire agenda by any means necessary. (Bush like to call it "political capital" --- I suspect Cheney just called it raw power.)

I think the most amazing thing about all that is that 9/11 was just frosting on the cake for these guys --- they were prepared to do all this stuff anyway. Cheney said he'd taken office with the intention of "restoring" presidential power. The GWOT made it easier to do the national security stuff, but he would have done it anyway.

So where are all those centrists?

The out of touch DC pundits like David Broder are for ever telling us that the US is made up of moderates/centrists. According to Broder they want Washington to act in a bi-partisan manner and solve the nation's problems. Well now we have a bi-partisan immigration bill written by both Democrats and Republicans including the administration of George W Cheney Bush and Teddy Kennedy. Well guess what, only 22% of the American voters like it.
Just 22% Favor Stalled Immigration Bill

As the Senate prepares to resume debate the “comprehensive” immigration reform bill, the legislation continues to face broad public opposition. In fact, despite a massive White House effort, public opinion has barely moved since the public uproar stalled the bill just over two weeks ago.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 22% of American voters currently favor the legislation. That’s down a point from 23% a couple of weeks ago and down from 26% when the debate in the Senate began. Fifty percent (50%) oppose the Senate bill while 28% are not sure.

But at least there is bipartisan opposition.

Among the public, there is a bi-partisan lack of enthusiasm for the Senate bill. It is supported by 22% of Republicans, 23% of Democrats, and 22% of those not affiliated with either major party. It is opposed by 52% of Republicans, 50% of Democrats, and 48% of unaffiliateds.

So Mr Broder, where are all of your centrists/moderates?.

Thanks to Rational Conservative Ed Morrissey for the link. Ed says:

Rational liberal Ron Beasley at Middle Earth Journal wonders what happened to the supposed majority of moderates in the US electorate. They're there, Ron, but they don't like the bill either, because it won't work.

I still doubt the moderate/centrist America meme but Ed is right. We can all agree, if for different reasons, that this is a bad bill. OK, I'm guilty, I used this as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at David Broder. With that said I'll probably do it again.

David Broder - Rapist?

I found this blog post via memeorandum under 5 Myths About Scooter and the Slammer. The blog, Mercury Rising is one I don't think I've seen before and the post, David Broder Is A Rapist is a classic.

Is he? Literally? Probably not.

But he has the moral vacuity, and the cognitive dissonance, of a serial rapist. Just examine his latest piece of amoral tripe, ”Judge Walton’s Lesson“.

The money quote from Broder:

This whole controversy is a sideshow — engineered partly by the publicity-seeking former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife and heightened by the hunger in parts of Washington to “get” Rove for something or other.

Like other special prosecutors before him, Fitzgerald got caught up in the excitement of the case and pursued Libby relentlessly, well beyond the time that was reasonable.

Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you:

What sort of amorality does it take to ignore the fact that:

1) Dick Cheney outed Valerie Plame in a fit of pique over her husband’s column “What I Didn’t Find In Niger”, and:

2) Outing Valerie Plame not only destroyed her career, but obliterated the far-flung network of Middle Eastern and Iraqi field operatives and contacts she had spent years - decades - nurturing? And does anyone think that the field operatives in Iraq, once Cheney made sure the whole world knew that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent, escaped the notice of the local Sunni insurgents?

You are on the money Phoenix Woman. Good Job.

David Broder should resign

Harry Reid said he wouldn't argue with a Vice president who had a 19% approval rating and I refuse to argue with a brain dead DC pundit who is out of touch with reality and the American people. David Broder proved beyond all doubt that he is a brain dead - out of touch pundit in The Democrats' Gonzales.

A good point by point take down can be found at Think Progress, David Broder’s Continuing Embarrassment. Josh Marshall explains Broder here:

People think of Broder as the 'Dean' of the Washington press corps because of things he did in the 60s and 70s. But the man he is today is much more a product of the long conservative ascendancy of the last three decades -- an ascendancy still very much alive in the town's journalistic and editorial elite. You can hear the animus more and more sharply in this columns as his inability to grasp the political moment becomes more and more clear.

Update
Paul Begala give it to Broder with both barrels over at The Huffington Post. Go read the entire thing but here is a teaser that's right on the money.

Why Reid? Because Reid has been one of the few politicians with the courage to speak the plain, unvarnished truth to power, and the hallmark of Mr. Broder's career has been to suck up to power. Reid calls Bush a liar. Broder can't handle the truth.

Has Bush lost his mojo?

While David Broder has not been paying much attention to reality Frank Rich has and sees an administration that's lost it's mojo.
Oh What a Malleable War

MAYBE the Bush White House can’t conduct a war, but no one has ever impugned its ability to lie about its conduct of a war. Now even that well-earned reputation for flawless fictionalizing is coming undone. Watching the administration try to get its story straight about Iran’s role in Iraq last week was like watching third graders try to sidestep blame for misbehaving while the substitute teacher was on a bathroom break. The team that once sold the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost its mojo.

Surely these guys can do better than this. No sooner did unnamed military officials unveil their melodramatically secretive briefing in Baghdad last Sunday than Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blew the whole charade. General Pace said he didn’t know about the briefing and couldn’t endorse its contention that the Iranian government’s highest echelons were complicit in anti-American hostilities in Iraq. Public-relations pandemonium ensued as Tony Snow, the State Department and finally the president tried to revise the story line on the fly. Back when Karl Rove ruled, everyone read verbatim from the same script. Last week’s frantic improvisations were vintage Scooter Libby, at best the ur-text for a future perjury trial.

And they couldn't even come up with a new story.

Yet for all the sloppy internal contradictions, the most incriminating indictment of the new White House disinformation campaign is to be found in official assertions made more than a year ago. The press and everyone else seems to have forgotten that the administration has twice sounded the same alarms about Iranian weaponry in Iraq that it did last week.

In August 2005, NBC News, CBS News and The Times cited unnamed military and intelligence officials when reporting, as CBS put it, that “U.S. forces intercepted a shipment from Iran containing professionally made explosive devices specifically designed to penetrate the armor which protects American vehicles.” Then, as now, those devices were the devastating roadside bombs currently called E.F.P.’s (explosively formed penetrators). Then, as now, they were thought to have been brought into Iraq by members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Then, as now, there was no evidence that the Iranian government was directly involved. In February 2006, administration officials delivered the same warning yet again, before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

As Rich reminds us it's deja vu all over again - think Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN complete with props and photos. And while the administration couldn't keep it's story straight George W. Bush could still say this with a straight face.

“My job is to protect our troops. And when we find devices that are in that country that are hurting our troops, we’re going to do something about it, pure and simple.”

OK, so why doesn't he do it?

But if the administration has warned about these weapons twice in the past 18 months (and had known “that they’re there,” we now know, since 2003), why is Mr. Bush just stepping up to that job at this late date? Embarrassingly enough, The Washington Post reported on its front page last Monday — the same front page with news of the Baghdad E.F.P. briefing — that there is now a shortfall of “thousands of advanced Humvee armor kits designed to reduce U.S. troop deaths from roadside bombs.” Worse, the full armor upgrade “is not scheduled to be completed until this summer.” So Mr. Bush’s idea of doing something about it, “pure and simple” is itself a lie, since he is doing something about it only after he has knowingly sent a new round of underarmored American troops into battle.

So why is the administration trying to pull another quick one?

To those who are most suspicious of this White House, the “something” that Mr. Bush really wants to do has little to do with armor in any case. His real aim is to provoke war with Iran, no matter how overstretched and ill-equipped our armed forces may be for that added burden. By this line of thinking, the run-up to the war in Iraq is now repeating itself exactly and Mr. Bush will seize any handy casus belli he can to ignite a conflagration in Iran.

Iran is an unquestionable menace with an Israel-hating fanatic as its president. It is also four times the size of Iraq and a far more dangerous adversary than was Saddam’s regime. Perhaps Mr. Bush is as reckless as his harshest critics claim and will double down on catastrophe.

Or is is something else?

Let’s not forget that the White House’s stunt of repackaging old, fear-inducing news for public consumption has a long track record. Its reason for doing so is always the same: to distract the public from reality that runs counter to the White House’s political interests. When the Democrats were gaining campaign traction in 2004, John Ashcroft held an urgent news conference to display photos of seven suspected terrorists on the loose. He didn’t bother to explain that six of them had been announced previously, one at a news conference he had held 28 months earlier. Mr. Bush played the same trick last February as newly declassified statistics at a Senate hearing revealed a steady three-year growth in insurgent attacks: he breathlessly announced a thwarted Qaeda plot against the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles that had already been revealed by the administration four months before.

We know what Mr. Bush wants to distract us from this time: Congressional votes against his war policy, the Libby trial, the Pentagon inspector general’s report deploring Douglas Feith’s fictional prewar intelligence, and the new and dire National Intelligence Estimate saying that America is sending troops into the cross-fire of a multifaceted sectarian cataclysm.

That same intelligence estimate also says that Iran is “not likely to be a major driver of violence” in Iraq, but no matter. If the president can now whip up a Feith-style smoke screen of innuendo to imply that Iran is the root of all our woes in the war — and give “the enemy” a single recognizable face (Ahmadinejad as the new Saddam) — then, ipso facto, he is not guilty of sending troops into the middle of a shadowy Sunni-Shiite bloodbath after all.

As I discussed below the reasons for the war and the definition of victory have been a constantly moving target. Rich refers to it as a malleable war.

Oh what a malleable war Iraq has been. First it was waged to vanquish Saddam’s (nonexistent) nuclear arsenal and his (nonexistent) collaboration with Al Qaeda. Then it was going to spread (nonexistent) democracy throughout the Middle East. Now it is being rebranded as a fight against Tehran. Mr. Bush keeps saying that his saber rattling about Iran is not “a pretext for war.” Maybe so, but at the very least it’s a pretext for prolonging the disastrous war we already have.

But the Iraq war does have a winner. No it's not the US or even Iraq - the winner of course is Iran.

What makes his spin brazen even by his standards is that Iran is in fact steadily extending its influence in Iraq — thanks to its alliance with the very Iraqi politicians that Mr. Bush himself has endorsed. In December the president welcomed a Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, to the White House with great fanfare; just three weeks later American forces had to raid Mr. Hakim’s Iraq compound to arrest Iranian operatives suspected of planning attacks against American military forces, possibly with E.F.P.’s. As if that weren’t bad enough, Nuri al-Maliki’s government promptly overruled the American arrests and ordered the operatives’ release so they could escape to Iran. For all his bluster about doing something about it, Mr. Bush did nothing.

It gets worse. This month we learned that yet another Maliki supporter in the Iraqi Parliament, Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Ebrahimi, was convicted more than two decades ago of planning the murderous 1983 attacks on the American and French Embassies in Kuwait. He’s now in Iran, but before leaving, this terrorist served as a security adviser, no less, to the first Iraqi prime minister after the American invasion, Ibrahim al-Jafaari. Mr. Jafaari, hailed by Mr. Bush as “a strong partner for peace and freedom” during his own White House visit in 2005, could be found last week in Tehran, celebrating the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian revolution and criticizing America’s arrest of Iranian officials in Iraq.

Even if the White House still had its touch for spinning fiction, it’s hard to imagine how it could create new lies brilliant enough to top the sorry truth. When you have a president making a big show of berating Iran while simultaneously empowering it, you’ve got another remake of “The Manchurian Candidate,” this time played for keeps.

Yes indeed, since Mr Broder isn't paying attention it's good we have a Frank Rich who is.

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It's time to pull the plug

This is so moronic I wasn't even going to waste bandwidth discussing it.
Bush Regains His Footing
I was just going to chock this up to another example of how the DC punditry corps is just as brain dead as Terri Schiavo but Glenn Greenwald does such a great job of taking Broder down that it was just too good to pass up.

Beltway pundits have long been petrified of the reality that most Americans have turned against the President permanently and with deep conviction. Because the David Broders of the world propped up the Bush presidency for so long, they are deeply invested in finding a way to salvage it. They do this exactly the same way -- driven by the same motives and using the same methods -- that they refuse to accept the reality that the Iraq war which they cheered on and enabled is a profound failure, and are therefore intent on finding a way to salvage at least the apperance of success, if not the reality.

The DC punditry, including Broder, have spent six years building Bush up and when he goes down for good so will they. And yes, he has gone down for good.

The collapse of Bush's approval ratings is not some isolated or fleeting event that can be reversed with a few magic tricks from Karl Rove. Americans who once vigorously supported the President have simply abandoned him over time. Contrary to Broder's desire (masquerading as belief), the contempt with which Americans regard the Bush Presidency is not some recent, fleeting, reversible phenomenon. Instead, the Bush presidency has been steadily collapsing over the last two-and-a-half years:Simply put, as Americans have come to see what George Bush really is, they have inexorably turned against him. It is not some petty scandal or momentary intemperate outburst from the masses. The Bush presidency has collapsed because Americans, with emotional distance between themselves and 9/11, were emancipated from the fear-mongering which was the administration's sole weapon, and gradually realized the extreme corruption, dishonesty, and ineptitude which drives this presidency. And yet all along the way, the David Broders have repeatedly insisted that Bush was on the verge of some grand "comeback," as though eventually, the poor, confused Americans would come to their senses and realize what a decent and honorable man the President really is.

Sorry David, the Bush administration and you have dug a hole too deep to ever come back.

Yes, it's time to remove the feeding tube from Broder and the other DC pundits, they are obviously brain dead.

Update
Even Rick Moran on the right thinks this is nonsense.