I was impressed yesterday with Timmeh's phrasing of the Iraq issue, the way he asked if Americans had the "political will to stay the course in Iraq." This is the foreign policy version of the Beltway eat your vegetables conventional wisdom. The idea is that there are good ideas which involve lots of sacrifice from people not named Timmeh and if only those pesky voters would understand that sending their kids off to die was good for them they'd do so but damnit they just don't have the will to do so. And such selfishness! They actually WANT the Social Security benefits they were promised! Greedy!
Right now there's a massive political constitutency who want to withdraw. Anyone noticing? Timmeh? Joe? Other Joe?
As far as I can understand the logic, the MSM decided in 2004 that war had been determined on in 2002, but that there was no way of proving it. So it was a non-issue, and the MSM gave the administration a pass. When the Brits leaked the DSM proof in May, the MSM then decides that this is old news (to themselves, anyway) and gives the administration a pass. I think Heller immortalized this type of logic as Catch 22.
Can’t someone come up with a pithy sound bite that captures this and makes it accessible to a non-political, non-foreign policy public? I love your indignation and your explanations, but I have a hard time seeing this go anywhere without a talking point that even a Democratic senator can remember.
Since we're spending a wee bit of time skipping down memory lane, let's remind ourselves of the case of Wayne DuMond. DuMond was convicted of raping a distant cousin of Bill Clinton, and his conviction and imprisonment became a non-trivial part of Wingnuttia's Clinton conspiracy mythos. DuMond was widely believed to be innocent by those on the Right. He became a cause for NY Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, who regularly pushed the issue claiming his innocence. As was frequently the case in those years, even such outlets as the not liberal "liberal" Village Voice pushed the story. As that last link will explain, DuMond attacked and castrated while he awaited trial. I'm certainly no fan of vigilante justice. But the fact that he was a victim of a crime doesn't make him innocent of the crime he was accused of.
Dunleavy and others flogged this issue for a long time. At some point, DuMond was released on parole. Not long after he was accused of committing two homicides, for which he was sentenced to life without parole (as far as I can find he was just found guilty of one of these though I could be missing something). Nice job Steve Dunleavy! I'm sure the family Carol Sue Shields is thrilled.
When the Clinton rules of journalism are in operation, there is nothing they won't stop at. Steve Dunleavy? Still writing for the NY Post...
"My view is FOX News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party and I don't comment on FOX News," Dean said. That was in response to vice president Dick Cheney calling Howard Dean "over the top" on Fox News on Sunday.
This is exactly right and it's something not enough Democrats understand and not enough people in the media in acknowledge. The problem with Fox is not that it's conservative, the problem with Fox is that it is, as some guy just said, "a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party." There is no equivalent media outlet for Democrats. None.
It'll be interesting to see how wide a hearing in the ethical liberal media a book which alleges that Chelsea was conceived when Bill raped Hillary (see Drudge).
If we had time, we could probably convene an emergency panel on blogger ethics to get to the bottom of that question...
...so people understand where we are now, this book is not being published by Regnery. It's being published by Sentinel, which is a division of Penguin which was established to get in on some of the fact free Regnery action.
Leaving aside all other issues with vouchers and school testing, I think Matt and Kevin are both missing something. People don't just send their kids to private/parochial schools so that they get an education sorta like the public schools only better, they frequently send them there because they're getting an entirely different education. Sure, it's fair to imagine that accountability measures work in early primary school - basic math/reading skills - but after that all bets are off. Religious schools aren't necessarily just about learning what you learn in public school plus a bit of prayer and bible study, and some non-traditional but secular or secularish private schools aren't about "like them only better" either. They're about teaching different things in different ways.
I believe (though I am not certain) that PA has fairly rigorous across the board curriculum standards, but nonetheless the kids I knew who went to some of the creepier Christian schools were certainly getting a rather different version of reality than one generally gets in public school.
We can chat about how accountability and vouchers can be combined, but the people most fervently behind vouchers, except for Milton Friedman, are not going to allow for that.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States will "have to face" a painful dilemma on restoring the military draft as rising casualties result in persistent shortfalls in US army recruitment, a top US senator warned.
Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made the prediction after new data released by the Pentagon showed the US Army failing to meet its recruitment targets for four straight months.
"We're going to have to face that question," Biden said on NBC's "Meet the Press" television show when asked if it was realistic to expect restoration of the draft.
"The truth of the matter is, it is going to become a subject, if, in fact, there's a 40 percent shortfall in recruitment. It's just a reality," he said.
I do wish people like Biden would stop saying things like this without actually offering any constructive alternatives or without properly laying this problem at the feet of the Bush administration. Pretty soon the Democrats will be the party of the draft, thus robbing of us of the opportunity to have exactly 100 Senate seats and 435 House seats.
Though, there is no chance of a general draft in this country. None. Years of fuck you Republicanism has ensured that. There is no way Chris Matthews is going to let his son Michael (who may be a standup guy, this isn't about him being responsible for his father) get plucked out of the Brown to go to war. There's no way that all over this country little Johhny McMansion is going to go take the SATs, get accepted to his Big 10 school of choice, and then get shipped off to Iraq.
If it does happen, the only way it'll happen is if targets the cloutless in this country. They'll be plucking kids out of juvenile detention centers, making it a part of plea bargains for petty offenses, etc... Only kids who no one gives a shit about will go.
Americans are probably more conversant about Angelina Jolie than about the contents of the so-called Downing Street memo, which was leaked in London seven weeks ago to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times. But if the war chaos continues (80 U.S. troops and 700 Iraqis died last month), the awareness gap may narrow - because the memo states that as Washington was preparing for war, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
This is one of the few pieces of hard evidence that supports critics who contend that Bush hyped a nonexistent threat - Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction - as his justification for waging war.
...
Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a war analyst at Boston University, said: "The memo is significant because it was written by our closest ally, and when it comes to writing minutes on foreign policy and security matters, the British are professionals. We can conclude that the memo means precisely what it says. It says that Bush had already made the decision for war even while he was insisting publicly, and for many months thereafter, that war was the last resort.
...
The memo's reference to "fixed" intelligence is noteworthy. It's not a new issue. It has long been clear that Bush's depiction of Hussein as a grave menace was overstated. Among many examples: Bush said, on Oct. 7, 2002, that Hussein intended to use unmanned aerial vehicles "for missions targeting the United States," a distance of 6,000 miles. It later turned out that the UAVs had a range of 300 miles.
But the Bush camp is working hard to deny the memo's fixed-intelligence passage - a sign that the White House is sensitive about the issue. Last weekend, GOP chairman Mehlman stated: "That [memo] has been discredited. Whether it's the 9/11 Commission, whether it's the Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort [by Bush's war planners] to change the intelligence at all."
Mehlman's claim is undercut by the facts.
The 9/11 Commission never looked at the administration's behavior; commission vice chairman Lee Hamilton said last year, "[Under the law] we were to focus our attention on 9/11 and those events, and not on the war in Iraq." And while a 2004 Senate panel did criticize the prewar intelligence as "a series of failures," it didn't look at whether the Bush team had misused the material. That task was postponed until after the election; today, in the words of Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, it's still "on the back burner."
Meanwhile, the morons are still running the show:
Party strategist David Axelrod explained the Democratic wariness: "We already fought that battle [over Bush's veracity] and we lost. He got elected again. So even though the memo is important, there's a sense that people don't want to revisit the lead-up to war. Although I'm not sure I agree with that, when you look at the number of Americans dead today."
Bringing two threads together, given Ali Weldon's Meet the Press Appearance, let's imagine the reaction to some version of this speech:
Good evening my fellow Americans. I must be honest with you. We face a looming threat which we must be equipped to deal with. Iran is intent on striking at our country, and that threat must be dealt with sooner rather than later. Your country needs your service. I am imploring the young and able, and those with much needed special skills, to consider enlisting in our military to help defend this country. [insert bunch of inspiring words here]
God Bless America.
Or the alternative version in which he announces the implementation of the draft.
A related question to the "is there anything Republicans can say that will get the drummed out of public life?" one is the "is there anything that Fox News Democrats can say that will stop the media from putting them on as 'the Democrat'" question.
It's important to remember that there was a lot of good reporting leading up to the war by people such as Pincus. But their reporting was buried by editors and not integrated into the overall narrative about the war. Such news reports were treated by the Russerts and Matthews and Kurtzes of the world, those who sift and shape the news narrative, as nasty smelly farts in their otherwise cheerful cocktail party.
Was the Iraq war a foregone conclusion by early 2002? Of course it was. These new memos provide further evidence of that, but I'm not sure there's anyone who really doubted it in the first place.
Look, this is just bullshit. There are two sets of people here. One consists of inside the beltways types and assorted news junkies and the other consists of The Amerkin Public. The former knew the Iraq war was a foregone conclusion by early 2002, but didn't bother to tell the Amerkin Public. They still haven't. I knew the dance with the UN was bullshit and I tried to point it out, but my blog is not all powerful. The American press did not bother to tell people. And, now, they still don't want to bother to tell people.
This isn't about attacking Drum, I've fallen into this trap before myself. Everyone should've known this in 2002. But, they didn't.
It's just like Russert calling the Downing Street Memo the "famous" Downing Street Memo? Famous to whom? To all the fuckers who didn't give a shit enough in 2002 to tell us what was obvious to anyone who was paying attention.
The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.
This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To foster it, Nixon's special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of "destroying the old establishment," sound like the founding father of today's blogging lynch mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports before the '72 election. He enlisted NBC in pro-administration propaganda by browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old coverage of Tricia Nixon's wedding as a prime-time special. It was the Colson office as well that compiled a White House enemies list that included journalists who had the audacity to question administration policies.
Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."
First and most damaging to me, why would the White House see a need to build a strategic information campaign using White House staff to manipulate media coverage in favor of a war months in advance of going to the UN, Congress, and the American people if the issue and decision had not already been made? Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner wrote a little-noticed but never disputed paper that outlined the steps the Bush Administration took to build what in essence was a strategic influence and disinformation campaign to manipulate the media and sway public opinion in favor of a war that Bush says he hadn’t yet decided upon. These efforts started with the creation of the Coalition Information Office by none other than Karen Hughes at about the same time the Downing Street Memo said that Bush had made up his mind. Colonel Gardiner feels that organization was in fact put together at the time of the memo, and that the “marketing” of the war began in September when Congress returned from summer recess. Since his study came out, Colonel Gardiner has received confirmation from a number of sources including sources inside the Bush Administration that almost all of his initial conclusions were correct. Even though the whole study is chilling, pay particular attention to his material from Page 50 onward to see how the Downing Street Memo can be supported with Gardiner’s work. Perhaps Congressman Conyers can call Colonel Gardiner as a witness next week to lay out the involvement of the White House and outside GOP public relations firms in selling a war to the Congress and the American people through an intimidated and spoon-fed media, a campaign that actually commenced around the same time that the Downing Street Memo indicated a decision had already been made. And yes, I've talked with Gardiner today, and Colonel Gardiner is willing to share his information with Conyers.
Second, none other than Bob Woodward himself in his wet-kiss book “Bush at War” reported that Bush authorized Rumsfeld to move approximately $700 million from Afghanistan reconstruction to the establishment of a logistical infrastructure to support an Iraq invasion, without the required congressional notice and authority. When did this happen, as Woodward notes with a great deal of risk of legal problems for the White House? It happened in July 2002, at about the same time as the Downing Street Memo was written saying the decision had already been made by Bush, within a month of the Downing Street Memo. Perhaps Conyers can call Bob Woodward as a witness to testify about what he found in researching his book on this congressionally-unauthorized transfer of funds from Afghan reconstruction to Iraq war planning during the Summer of 2002.
And lastly, it has been reported that Bush dropped in on a White House meeting in Condi Rice’s office in March 2002, and blurted to the three startled US senators Rice was meeting with “Fuck Saddam, we’re going to take him out.” Perhaps Conyers can call the three senators as well as Michael Elliott and James Carney of Time Magazine to confirm what Bush said and did, three months before the Downing Street Memo said that a decision had already been made.
Again, the key for Conyers is not to get trapped into building his case primarily upon the fixed intelligence claim in the memo, but to build also a circumstantial case as well that supports the bigger claim that the decision had already been made by the White House to go to war in the Summer of 2002, despite what was being told to Congress and the American people.
One: The most prominent rumor I hear about Glenn is that before September 11th, he was generally much saner and fairer. This, unfortunately, is bullshit.
Actually Reynolds was widely considered to be eminently reasonable long after that by many people who should've known better. When I began blogging many on "my side" didn't approve of my tendency to not show proper deference to him. Ah, memories.
Anyway, Jesse digs up something from the perfesser from 1995 which proves the point rather strongly.
We should assume there are going to be 100,000 troops in Iraq two years from now, and continuing losses. It is time to repackage this war and let Americans know we are fighting for freedom.
He writes:
Spouting nonsense in response to what you know perfectly well to be a problem is, in my opinion, far worse than just being a dupe. It's obviously that unless we're going to implement a fairly massive increase in the level of resources dedicated to this conflict, which nobody seems to want to do, that we need to be making plans for a relatively expeditious exit from it.
I don't think this is entirely nonsense, though nor do I think it'll solve the problem. The way we were brought into this and the Bush administration's unwillingness to deviate from "happy talk" about Iraq has made our military situation much, much worse than it has to be.
This war was going to be easy, cost nothing, and require nothing from most of the public except throwing away their Dixie Chicks CDs and the pouring out of all of their French wine. Notions of shared sacrifice, of a genuine collective patriotism, and a genuine "support the troops" agenda were ignored. I can't remember a single prominent lawmaker or public figure of any sort getting up and saying "America is fighting for freedom, and those who truly love their country and who are able should make the ultimate commitment to it." No one has asserted that the patriotic thing to do would be to enlist.
And, of course they haven't. Peter Beinart looks to be in fine fighting form to me, but he's busy fighting the patriotic fight against Move On. Tex Sensenbrenner has twentysomething children, and I'm pretty sure they haven't signed up. Jenna and NotJenna haven't enlisted. The 101st Fighting Keyboarders believe they are fighting this war from their basements.
The point is that 9/11 and Iraq could've been used to create a kind of "national greatness conservatism" that the Bull Moose and McCain used to blather about, through a variety of mechanisms. Colin Powell could have been used to give teary "sacrifice for your country" speeches instead of pushing scary stories about Saddam the Destroyer. Peggy Noonan could've shifted from writing mash notes to firefighters to writing mashnotes to the troops. But, McCain lost that election and commander codpiece and his fop brigade are running things, there's no way any of them or their people are going to enlist, and all of this stuff is alien to them.
It's certainly not that I want there to be a successful campaign to get people to send their sons and daughters off to die for George Bush's war. Nor do I really want our country to be defined by a military-centered patriotism. I think that now it's probably too late to have a successful repackaging to do so. However, the prospect of a military hollow in the middle and empty at the bottom is a very real problem.
So, how about it? Private NotJenna reporting for duty?
We talk about southern culture, blue-collar culture, NASCAR culture -- which overlaps, in complicated ways, with evangelical culture. Certainly one tenet they all share is this: When somebody punches you in the gut, you don?t smile, stride halfway between his position and yours, and say that maybe the guy has a point. Behaving like that is precisely what has made the Democrats look so unsympathetically unfocused and confused to so many people.
From the moment on Thursday when the young man sat down in Dr. Richard Stein's dental chair in southwestern Kansas and opened his mouth, Dr. Stein was certain he recognized the enemy. This had to be the work, he concluded, of methamphetamine, a drug that is leaving its mark, especially in the rural regions of the Midwest and the South, on families, crime rates, economies, legislatures - and teeth.
Quite distinct from the oral damage done by other drugs, sugar and smoking, methamphetamine seems to be taking a unique, and horrific, toll inside its users' mouths. In short stretches of time, sometimes just months, a perfectly healthy set of teeth can turn a grayish-brown, twist and begin to fall out, and take on a peculiar texture less like that of hard enamel and more like that of a piece of ripened fruit.
The condition, known to some as meth mouth, has been studied little in dentistry's academic circles and is unknown to many dentists, whose patients are increasingly focused on cosmetic issues: the bleaching and perfect veneers of television's makeover shows. But other dentists, especially those in the open, empty swaths of land where methamphetamine is being manufactured in homemade laboratories, say they are seeing a growing number of such cases.
And a big fuck you to the liberal media for robbing Al Gore of what will probably be his biggest legacy - creating the internet. I've never seen anyone even attempt to seriously dispute the assertion of "no Al Gore, no internet." It's hard to imagine, about 12 years after mosiac, that the web wasn't inevitable. However, it surely wasn't. There's a pretty good chance that without Senator big geek Gore we would never have had the "information superhighway." Sure, we would have had a set of competing walled gardens (compuserve, aol, etc...) which would've probably had improved interconnectedness over time. But, I do believe that without Gore (and, of course, others) there's a pretty good chance that the Web as we know it, or anything similiar, would never have existed.
I'm not sure if Majikthise is correct on this. There have probably been worse. But, I just want to make sure to add that what she calls the worst restaurant review of all time was written by someone who is fast getting the reputation for being the worst restaurant reviewer, if not of all time than at least of all the New York Times.
And that man, Frank Bruni, we must remember, was probably the worst campaign reviewer or campaign reporter or whatever we call them of all the time. One can blame Gore's "loss" on many things, but it certainly wasn't helped by fluffer Bruni's daily love letter to George in the liberal New York Times. I find it fairly funny (not, of course, "ha ha" funny) that Bruni's food reviews seem to get more aired criticism than his campaign reviews.
In a just world John would be a millionaire. He may be, for all I know, though since we both own the same $20 gap shirt I doubt it. He has an excellent idea:
This story is 100 times as important as anything Howard Dean did or didn't say. We need to take what happened today and run with it. I can only imagine the protests - members of the House with gags on. Imagine all the Dems walking around for one day next week with gags on, on the House floor, in hearings. Come on guys, let's do it :-)
AUSTIN - The Texas Association of Business, accused of illegally soliciting and using $1.9 million of corporate money in 2002 statehouse elections, must give their accusers information about the donations, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday.
Those alleging wrongdoing are some 2002 Democratic candidates who lost their races. The TAB must give the candidates' attorneys a list of how many businesses donated to the group and how much each donated.
"It means everything for the future of the case," said attorney Buck Wood, adding the information will be used to investigate which companies donated money to TAB and how that money was used.
Democrats contend the association, along with Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee, worked together to funnel corporate money into Texas House races in 2002. Attorneys for TAB and TRMPAC argue the money the groups raised was used legally.
It's true that there are conspiracy loons on the left too. But to get a glimpse of the genuine 200-proof article, you really have to hang out at the right wing taverns. There's just nothing to compare.
To be fair, one can find the genuine 200-proof article hanging out at the left wing taverns too. However, such people are completely marginalized by our media when they are on the left and when they're on the right they have their own television shows and major positions at prominent think tanks and full access to the liberal media to push their crazy new books, etc...
To be fair to conspiracy loons of all types, sometimes they're on to something...
So FishbowlDC runs a funny MSNBC photo. A former journalist says he's "started to hear references to it being fake. Is it fake? I have no idea. Nor does he. But, from this he concludes:
Then I thought, what a coincidence: This is EXACTLY why newspapers are still more reliable in the end than blogs: Newspapers have editors to check to make sure photos like this are indeed authentic or fake.
And on Thursday, a new photograph of the senator and the actress began circulating via e-mail. Unlike the image Mr. Sampley bought, which shows Mr. Kerry seated several rows behind Ms. Fonda, this picture - its origins are unclear - shows them side by side, Ms. Fonda behind a microphone and Mr. Kerry, holding a notebook, to her right.
Very tricksy of the Times this was, saying "its origins are unclear." However, a quick google search would've brought them here. So, its origins were clear just not to the reporter or editors who didn't spent the 5 seconds on the internets to determine what they were..
The point here is not that newspapers shouldn't be allowed to ever screw up. The point is that journalists should stop talking about the Platonic ideal of their profession, rather than what actually goes on day to day.
When is it time to start referring to Bush as an unpopular president? When his approval ratings are solidly below 50 percent for at least three months? Check. When his approval ratings on his signature issues are in the red? Check. When a clear majority of Americans say he is ignoring the public's concerns and instead has become distracted by issues that most people say they care little about? Check.
Sounds reasonable, but they won't do it. The narrative frame of "unpopular president" will not be allowed to take hold in the media. They won't do it.
WASHINGTON - As the war in Iraq drags on, President Bush's job approval and the public's confidence in the direction he's taking the nation are at their lowest levels since The Associated Press-Ipsos poll began in December 2003.
About one-third of adults, 35 percent, said they think the country is headed in the right direction, while 43 percent said they approve of the job being done by Bush. Just 41 percent say they support his handling of the war, also a low-water mark.
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