Condi Rice Throws Bush Under The Bus

3:03 pm EST October 24th, 2011 | Foreign Policy | 8 Comments

In the hopes of cleaning up history’s view of her and I guess selling more books.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the Bush administration was dismissive toward her concerns over security in a post-war Iraq, according to excerpts from her autobiography that Rice tweeted about Sunday.

“When I finally arranged a briefing on the issue before the President in early February 2002, he started the meeting in a way that completely destroyed any chance of getting an answer,” Rice wrote in an excerpt that appears in Newsweek.

Rice was Bush’s national security adviser, then later Secretary of State. She (like Colin Powell) wasn’t a sidelined party in these affairs, she was an active conspirator in the formulation and execution of these policies.

There are no takebacks.

Topic: Iraq

New NY Times Executive Editor: Conservatives Rule Our World

5:20 pm EST October 23rd, 2011 | Media | 59 Comments

There’s a very telling quote from new NY Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson in the lengthy profile of her in the New Yorker. The quote in question helps put to bed the notion that the most important media outlet in the world (arguably) is some sort of bastion of the “liberal media.”

Abramson, asked whether the Times has a liberal bias, says, “I think we try hard not to” be biased, but she adds that the Times, as its public editor argued in a column seven years ago, has an insular urban bias that is sometimes apparent in social stories. She fervently believes that the Times is an equal-opportunity prober of Democrats as well as of Republicans. Asked about her own upbringing, she responds, “I’m often the one who raises the point in page-one meetings that our mix of stories is too urban in outlook, too parochial. All my years in Washington, and in some ways being attacked by conservatives, made me more conscious of how a story might be seen in the rest of America.”

Here, Abramson tells us that she has in fact internalized the decades of conservative attacks on the media – led by Washington-based institutions that quite frankly have a very poor idea of how stories are really seen “in the rest of America.”

You’ll remember Nancy Pfotenhauer, a DC-based Republican who, while working for the McCain campaign, lectured on what regions of Virginia were “real” (the more conservative, rural areas) versus unreal (the more liberal, urban areas), an argument echoed nationally by Sarah Palin. These artificial, false distinctions are part of the conservative’s false construct of our world.

This is the kind of internalized criticism that led Abramson to be part of the team at the Times that put Judith Miller’s false WMD misinformation on the front page of the paper. As an institution, it’s also the brand of internalized criticism that caused the Times to be in front of the crowd demanding investigations of President Clinton for Whitewater, suspicions of guilt the independent counsel later dismissed after millions of taxpayer dollars had been spent.

The press should, above all, be fair. The Times believes as an institution that this means they should be unbiased in their approach (I would personally argue a news outlet can have a point of view while still reporting honestly, but that’s another discussion), but all the way at the top of the masthead, they overcompensate for what often turns out to be false allegations of bias (the MRC and its tentacles have a less than honest relationship with the truth).

That’s why your news is screwed up.

Obama Orders USA Out Of Iraq, Promise Kept

1:15 pm EST October 21st, 2011 | Foreign Policy | 63 Comments

President Obama just announced that all US troops will be out of Iraq come 12/31/11. This would not have been the case if John McCain had been elected President, and we would probably still be pursuing the failed Iraq war strategy.

Furthermore, we should have never been in Iraq in the first place. Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda, was not an immediate threat to US interests, nor did they possess weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War was a costly distraction from the war against Al Qaeda, and helped Osama Bin Laden escape capture/kill until President Obama redoubled our efforts to get him.

Most importantly, thousands of American lives were lost in this war. First, because the initially foolish, stupid invasion, and then from the mismanagement inflicted by President Bush and his leadership team. These poor decisions also led to the loss of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives.

The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq will go down in history as one of the darkest, most horrible moments in American history.

Thank God it is over.

Topic: Iraq

Heck Of A Job, GOP

11:23 am EST October 19th, 2011 | Republicans | 22 Comments

In all the acrimony between Obama and Clinton in 2007-8 (and God knows I was in the thick of it), there wasn’t any instance where one of them physically touched the other in this fashion. It is amazing that the Republican frontrunner grabbed someone in the middle of a debate. What???

Topic: Mitt Romney

Rush Limbaugh Is Really A Sick Person

1:04 pm EST October 18th, 2011 | Conservative | 34 Comments

VIDEO: LRA Survivor Responds To Limbaugh: “My Heart Breaks”

Evelyn Apoko, a survivor of atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army, has recorded a video appeal to Limbaugh.

Conservatives Try To Work The Refs, Even For Herman Cain

12:22 am EST October 17th, 2011 | Media, Politics | 40 Comments

Herman Cain is neither going to be the Republican nominee for President or the next President of the United States. His is a bubble campaign of the Donald Trump variety, someone who can wave away conservative guilt for their racial past, but not a serious contender in any way.

That said, they’re still going to try and work the media refs in his favor. Case in point: Conservative blogger/writer (and Confederate apologist) Robert Stacy McCain reaching for the fainting couch because David Gregory asked Cain a few basic questions that he flubbed (in the post-Palin lexicon this is described as some sort of grilling).

Specifically McCain whines “When Democrats go on Meet the Press, it’s like Justin Bieber sitting down for a hard-hitting interview with Tiger Beat.”

So I decided to do what conservatives hope liberals never do, and they doubly hope the mainstream media doesnt: I checked.

I went back to May of 2008, and then-candidate Barack Obama’s appearance on Meet The Press with the late Tim Russert. What did I find? Did Russert annoint Obama the next President? Did he crown him? Did he ask him about puppies, or even kittens?

No, Russert did what Russert often did: He asked Obama a bunch of questions that sounded as if they were hot off the presses from the RNC. Specifically, Russert asked Obama about that most relevant of issues, Jeremiah Wright. A sampling:

* What has the controversy over Reverend Jeremiah Wright done to your campaign?

* You’re still a member of the church?

* Why do you think he re-emerged?

* What happened in those five weeks? Because you already knew, prior to the March speech, that he had suggested the U.S. government created the AIDS virus; you knew he went to Libya with Louis Farrakhan; you knew about his hate speech on September 11th, about the chickens coming home to roost and other things. What did you learn in those five weeks that you didn’t know in March?

* The critics have said he can attack the United States of America, he can do all sorts of things that divide the country, but only when he made it politically uncomfortable for you did you finally separate himself from him.

* Why didn’t you just say then, “You know, Reverend, we’re going on different paths because this country does not believe in white supremacy and black inferiority.”

* He said in a letter to The New York Times, he suggested that you apologized for not letting him do the invocation. Is that true?

* Is it fair for people to raise questions about your judgment for misjudging Reverend Wright?

* You’re done with him? If you’re elected president, you won’t seek his counsel?

* Could you have handled this better, differently, by severing your ties earlier? And what’s the most important thing you’ve learned from this?

These were the first questions Russert asked Obama on the supposedly softball Meet The Press: A litany of right-wing fed scarebait directly out of the school of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glen Beck. It doesn’t matter how far to the right the questions tilt, conservatives will be wailing about liberal media bias until the sun swallows the entire solar system.

Now, look, Herman Cain is a joke. He can’t answer basic 101 level questions, his economic plan is dumb — even for a conservative. But even for a Trivial Pursuit-bound candidate like Cain, conservatives are willing to pervert, twist, and distort history and act under the pretense that the big bad mean liberal media beat up on their poor widdle candidate.

It’s what they do, it’s how they operate. It’s dishonest, pathetic, moronic, and sadly it works.

In Case You Wondered If Republicans Are Still Crazy

9:17 am EST October 15th, 2011 | Conservative | 67 Comments

Here’s Rush Limbaugh, sick as always.

On his radio show today, Rush Limbaugh launched another religion-based smear of President Obama: that he is sending troops to Africa to kill Christians. Limbaugh declared that “President Obama has deployed troops to another war, in Africa,” adding that the group being targeted, the Lord’s Resistance Army, “are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. … So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians.” Limbaugh then claimed that Obama supports “help[ing] the Egyptians wipe out the Christians.”

Sick. Always sick. Eternally sick. And he’s one of the right’s top “thought” leaders.

Rick Perry Better Cowboy Up

2:25 pm EST October 14th, 2011 | Politics | 14 Comments

Rick Perry says he agrees with his wife in her belief that he’s been “brutalized” on the campaign trail so far. Are you kidding me?

So far Perry’s been treated with mostly kid gloves, particularly from his fellow Republican candidates. Compare the fighting so far between Romney and Perry to Obama vs. Hillary, or Obama vs. McCain.

Rick Perry’s barely gotten his cowboy boots dirty, let alone “brutalized” so far. He’s been dancing with people who believe in his trickle down, dirty energy, crony capitalism shuck and jive. He hasn’t been challenged at all.

If he’s the GOP nominee and this is how tough he is, you can expect him to be on his heels from the get-go. This whining is practically Palinesque in how it telegraphs a glass jaw.

Topic: Rick Perry

The New Republic, Who Gets Everything Wrong, Opposes Occupy Wall Street

1:38 pm EST October 12th, 2011 | Liberals | 77 Comments

If you haven’t been playing along at home, you’ll remember the New Republic as the opinion magazine that:

* Supported Joe Lieberman for President
* Supported the Iraq War
* Consistently supported the corporatizing of the Democratic Party
* Publishes the hate tracts of Marty Peretz
* Is wrong on everything

So it should come as no surprise that TNR opposes Occupy Wall Street. It’s main argument is along the lines of the traditional TNR argument, that some elements are just too radical, too left-wing for a mainstream liberal to be in favor of.

Much like Fox News’ opposition to Occupy Wall Street, this should be seen as a well-earned endorsement by the protest movement. TNR is almost always wrong on everything as an institution (they do have the occasional smart writer who breaks out of its DLC-neocon box, but that’s the exception to the norm).

The left, and specifically the Democratic Party, failed America when it adopted Republican-lite economic policy. The New Republic was one of the chief cheerleaders of that folly. Consider the source.

Hey, Occupy Wall Street, I Was Wrong

4:37 pm EST October 7th, 2011 | Liberals | 135 Comments

I was wrong about Occupy Wall Street. Well, sort of. I still think that the protesters need to do more to appeal to non-activists out there in the vast middle of the country, but on the flip side they’re doing the right thing by getting out in the street.

The people that caused our recent economic crisis and the economic disparity that preceded it are right out there on Wall Street. They are the 1% who have lorded over the rest of us for way too long. In America you ought to have a decent shot at moving up, and increasingly that avenue is being cut off. Their message may be varied, but I know many of those occupying Wall Street would like to see a return to the American dream. I’m all for that.

The other, less substantive reason I know that Occupy Wall Street is on the right path is due to the intensifying attacks from the right-wing cheerleaders who helped lead America to the brink. When Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Glenn Beck are pounding their fists — the opposing side is almost always in the right. The team that brought you the Iraq War, the Financial Crisis and the Lost Decade is not to be trusted.

If they’re against Occupy Wall Street, I’m for it.