catastrophile

Wow. Just . . . wow.

2009-10-12T00:27:00.001-07:00

2009-08-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

It seems like with all the time conservatives spend griping about ham-fisted overregulation, they'd be eager to encourage the Dems to choose a more subtle market-based solution to the health insurance problem than simply passing laws mandating certain behaviors from people and/or companies.

I.e., rather than forcing a set of policies down the throats of insurers, or compelling people to buy insurance, and spending money to enforce all these laws, wouldn't it be less intrusive to simply set up a public alternative to private insurance and let the market do its thing?

But the notion of a public option is being assaulted as "tyranny" far more vocally than harsher measures that have been discussed.

Strange, ain't it?

2009-08-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

Looking back over the last few weeks of this health care debate, I find it striking how perfectly the opposition illustrates the demagoguery of the corporatist right. On the one hand you have, more or less, the actual reason behind the corporate opposition:

Competition from the public option must be unfair because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers.

In so many words, a government-run health insurance option is bad because private companies won't be able to compete with it (without significantly changing the way they operate, at least). This reform will hinder the ability of health insurance providers to make money the way they have been.

This argument is what it is. I can certainly understand the desire of insurance companies and their stakeholders to protect their profits.

However, it must be fairly difficult to mobilize a significant national effort to oppose legislation on the grounds that it will provide better health coverage than private insurers are willing or able to provide. Not many people are going to show up at a town hall meeting to shout down reform proponents with chants of "WE WANT TO PAY MORE AND GET LESS!"

That's where the core Reep strategy comes in.

Rather than argue the plan on its actual basis in reality, they've opted to make up a bunch of horrible-sounding nonsense about it and use that to mobilize their army of what they refer to as wackos. People who wouldn't show up just to support insurance company profits will go to war to oppose, let's say, government-run abortion clinics, mandatory euthanasia for the elderly, rationing of health care services, or any of the other bizarre measures the right-wing propagandists claim are on the way if the bill passes.

2009-02-23T17:45:00.000-08:00

It's a little hilarious that it took less than one month for people who spent the last few years denouncing all criticism of the Bush administration as treason to start dropping hints about taking up arms against the Obama administration.

2009-02-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

Just to be clear, what they're saying here is that the federal government can declare someone an "enemy combatant," then detain them "indefintely," or for the remainder of the "war on terror." Which essentially means forever (you don't honestly think a U.S. president is ever going to declare terrorism defeated, do you?). No charges. No trial. Just, "Trust us, these people are guilty."

And of course we’re now learning that way too many of them aren't.

Closing Guantanamo had some symbolic value, but it doesn't mean a thing if we’re just going to do the same thing in another facility.

--Radley Balko

2009-02-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

One respects the office by honoring its place in a constitutional system, not by wearing a suit.

--Steve Benen

2009-01-20T17:50:00.001-08:00

I have to say, I'm very disappointed. I was expecting Rage Against the Machine, not Yo-Yo Ma. Obama was supposed to show up dressed like Huggy Bear, with a hijab-wearing Michelle in tow. Jeremiah Wright was supposed to get up on stage and call on God to destroy America, while Bill Ayers flung IEDs into the gathered crowd. And, of course, his first act after being sworn in was supposed to be to disband all branches of the military and ask the UN to come in and organize our peaceful surrender to anybody and everybody who cares to accept it.

Oh, well. Maybe tomorrow.

2008-11-26T09:04:00.000-08:00

All those dog whistles that libertarians respond to whenever Republicans blow the whistle? Those were for other people. Second amendment? It’s a cultural thing, not principle. Free markets? Intellectual cover for corporate welfare. Limited government? This is their way of saying to the subsidized farmers of the Great Plains and the employees of the Military-Industrial Complex and all the other beneficiaries of GOP-style redistribution "Don’t worry, you aren't a welfare recipient like all those city folks that I bash. You're better than that. You're a hearty, self-reliant person who supports limited government."

--Thoreau

Certainty and the Jack Bauer Syndrome

2008-11-23T10:59:00.001-08:00

I've taken to calling it the Jack Bauer Syndrome because, though I love and enjoy 24, the situations depicted in the show are extremely unlikely to occur in real life. Bauer always feels justified in his coercive interrogations because he is absolutely certain that lives are at stake and that his subject has important information that will help him avert disaster. This is how the show's writers justify their protagonist doing things that would otherwise get him locked up or worse.

And, in fact, the course of Jack Bauer's life as the show has progressed has strongly reflected Nietzsche's aphorism about fighting monsters. Bauer has sacrificed virtually everything that made him human, including his personal conscience. Everything has been replaced by his sense of righteousness and duty. He is a sociopath for his country, his every action justified by an absolute certainty that it must be done.

24 is, of course, fiction and melodrama. Bauer's preternatural, unerring certainty doesn't happen in real life. We lack perfect means of telling who's who and exactly what's going on. That is, after all, why we need laws and a Constitution in the first place.

It's just frightening how often otherwise reasonable people seem to forget that.

In this case, Mark Kleiman suggests that we should task the military with killing pirates:

When a pirate ship is sunk by naval forces, is there an affirmative duty to rescue the crew? If not, then the question of whether the pirate crews have rights of asylum might not arise. If the duty exists and is triggered by the presence of ships capable of effecting the rescue, then the use of long-range air-to-surface or ship-to-ship missiles might make rescue infeasible.

The problem Kleiman identifies is that some of the people on a ship might try to claim some sort of legal status -- perhaps claim that they are not, in fact, pirates? That they are hostages or cargo or wrongfully targeted?

The solution he offers to the problem of people claiming human rights is to let them drown.

In response to reader objections (mine, at the very least), Kleiman updates:

And I don't see the force of the "due process" objection: while the people being held as "terrorists" may or may not be so in fact, a vessel engaged in piracy is a pirate vessel, and the crew of a pirate vessel consists, by definition, of pirates . . .

Notice the sudden shift of frame: While people accused of being terrorists may or may not actually be terrorists, people who are pirates are actually pirates. In essence, Kleiman rejects the argument employed by the Bush administration in defense of Guantanamo -- specifically, that they don't have rights because they're terrorists, and we know they're terrorists because we say they're terrorists -- only to turn around and use the exact same argument himself: they don't have rights because they're pirates, and we know they're pirates because they're pirates.

Nothing in the post indicates what, if anything, Kleiman thinks will serve as an adequate standard for establishing that any given vessel is a pirate ship and blowing it up on sight. Since he rejects "due process" in the portion cited above, one assumes that it will be the President's discretion who to label a pirate. And since his definition of "pirate" is simple -- anybody unlucky enough to be aboard (or near?) the ship at the time is guilty. It's just that simple. (After all, the Dread Pirate Roberts never takes prisoners!)

I'm sure this would be the kind of American leadership that other nations would be glad to get behind: "Cargo ship? No, those were pirates! No, of course we can't prove it, we let them all die. They were pirates, after all."

Lawlessness begets lawlessness. Lawless individuals create lawless nations, which give rise to lawless cultures, like piracy, full of more lawless individuals. You can feed into that cycle, or you can try to stop it. You really can't do both.

2008-11-05T09:35:00.000-08:00

There's a tidy symmetry in the fact that Obama defeated, in succession, both the Clinton machine and the Rove-Atwater brand of politics that Republicans have honed for so long.

In so doing, Obama defeated not one, but both of the leading practitioners of that 1960s-rooted cultural politics. More to the point, he did this by quite literally running against politics as both those groups practiced it.

--Greg Sargent

2008-11-04T23:23:00.000-08:00

I like being wrong.

Even so, I'll believe it on January 20th.

2008-11-04T13:15:00.001-08:00

I hope I'm wrong.

2008-10-23T21:53:00.000-07:00

We're living in a golden age of sense and calm compared to what comes next.

--John Cole

Tentative Projection

2008-10-17T14:01:00.001-07:00

Barring any unexpected developments, I'm betting McCain is going to win the election with somewhere between 270 and 290 electoral votes.

The surge in new voter registration will be largely countered in battleground states by the usual vote-suppression methods -- long lines due to inadequate provision of voting machines in dense urban precincts, misinformation and intimidation to prevent people from showing up to vote at all, systematic purges of the voter rolls, et cetera.

Obama may very well still win the popular vote, since many people in solid blue and red states are going to turn out to cast a historic ballot for the first black President who wouldn't otherwise bother to vote, knowing their state's outcome was basically decided already. Still, I'll be shocked if this is enough to overcome the dirty tricks that they're up against in the states where it counts.

As has been the case every two years since 2000, Dems will briefly show an interest in theft-proofing the electoral system in the two or three months that follow. Reeps will gloat and strut and tell America to quit whining, the people have spoken. Congress will slap a half-assed band-aid on the problem, and state officials will immediately start looking for ways to delay, circumvent, or counteract any reforms that actually get passed.

Everyone will then promptly forget about the problem until November 4, 2010.

2008-10-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

It's quite amazing to watch the same people who pushed for concentration camps, hanging courts and genocide during the Bush years to now talk about taking up arms against the tyrannical and violent government that Barack Obama is about to unleash. There are many words one could use to describe this mentality, but I think calling them "crazy assholes" will suffice.

--Brad Reed

2008-10-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

Remember, any world in which McCain has a chance to win on Election Day is a world that looks very different from this one -- some significant event will have to have occurred to fundamentally change the momentum of the race.

--Nate Silver

Lines like that always make me cringe.

2008-10-09T13:19:00.000-07:00

The Palin craze is also a poor reflection on the social conservative base, which has so uncritically embraced her. They embrace her not because they know anything about her, but because they think the world is out to get them, and that Palin is “one of them” who also faces liberal attacks. The truth, though, is that they’re just projecting their preferences onto a blank canvas. At the end of day, they’re apparently not all that interested in qualifications or ability to govern.

--publius

2008-09-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

If something stupid can be said, you can believe someone on Daily Kos has said it.

--Markos Moulitsas

2008-09-04T20:25:00.000-07:00

Almost all political conflict, especially in the US, boils down to a fight between the Sane Billionaires and the Insane Billionaires. It generally follows this template:

INSANE BILLIONAIRES: Let's kill everyone and take their money!

SANE BILLIONAIRES: I like the way you think. I really do. But if we keep everyone alive, and working for us, we'll make even more money, in the long term.

INSANE BILLIONAIRES: You communist!!!

--Jonathan Schwarz

2008-08-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

We've reached the point where it's commonplace for the government to wage violent, confrontational invasions of private homes over the suspicion of possession of the dried leaves of a plant.

--Radley Balko

2008-08-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

Inside the house, officers found "Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder" by radio talk show host Michael Savage, "Let Freedom Ring" by talk show host Sean Hannity, and "The O'Reilly Factor," by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly.

Terrorist movements don't need leaders to spell out a time and place to attack . . . the leaders need only to define an enemy and cultivate a following of desperate and zealous followers who will then independently mobilize.

Of course, it seems we're much more likely to hold the leaders accountable for the actions of the followers when the movement is foreign and the target is America, than when the leaders are American and the target is liberalism.

2008-07-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

As a white man, I can tell you, I derive very little satisfaction from the knowledge that I’m being screwed over by people who look like me. Instead of worrying about the racial and gender makeup of the board rooms and cabinets, I’d like to tear them down.

--Kevin Carson

2008-07-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

It doesn't matter how many times I watch this idiotic two-party dynamic play itself out, it never gets old.

Having clinched the nomination, John McCain is chucking his independence and getting in bed with the party establishment -- the same bunch of crooked and partisan figures that fucked him out of the nomination in 2000 and have been fucking the country ever since.

Why would a person with any principles or integrity do that?

Well . . .

He wants to be President.

Ditto Obama.

There's a reason you have to compromise your principles and resort to doublespeak and pandering to become President, and a great big chunk of that reason is the entrenched political Duopoly that dominates the political debate in this country. If it ain't Dem or Reep, it won't fly. Therefore, anybody who wants to get anywhere has to get in bed with one of these deeply creepy power structures, and that means compromising yourself in ways that would make your mother cringe.

Refuse to compromise your principles, and you'll never be a serious contender.

Sad, isn't it?

2008-06-29T23:53:00.000-07:00

The terrorists' strategy is to draw out the "true face" of an evil and oppressive regime, so that the people will rise up against it. Of necessity, the terrorists strike innocents, because this is the only way to strike terror, and thus draw a repressive response. Whether they realize it or not, the terrorists are counting on the government they oppose being run by men just like themselves-men who believe in force, not law. So long as this is true, the terrorists win.

--Paul Rosenberg

2008-06-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

. . . 'gave money and housing' is the best-ever framing of putting someone in prison that has ever been attempted. Did you know that the Bush administration is giving money and housing to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

--Gavin M.

2008-06-22T10:01:00.000-07:00

Back in 1974, McCain not only had no problem calling these things torture, he did not think that that point needed any kind of defense or elaboration. Back then, before the definition of torture had become a political issue, it was just obvious.

--hilzoy

Wherein I wax morbid and foreboding.

2008-06-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

I've linked in the past to the Avocado Declaration, but something just reminded me of this passage:

When social justice, peace or civil rights movements become massive in scale, and threaten to become uncontrollable and begin to win over large numbers of people, the Democratic Party begins to shift and presents itself as a supposed ally. Its goal is always to co-opt the movement, demobilize its forces and block its development into an alternative, independent political force.

The Republican Party has historically acted as the open advocate for a platform which benefits the rule of wealth and corporate domination. They argue ideologically for policies benefiting the corporate rulers. The Republicans seek to convince the middle classes and labor to support the rule of the wealthy with the argument that "What's good for General Motors is good for the country," that what benefits corporations is also going to benefit regular people.

The Democratic Party is different. They act as a "broker" negotiating and selling influence among broad layers of the people to support the objectives of corporate rule. The Democratic Party's core group of elected officials is rooted in careerists seeking self-promotion by offering to the corporate rulers their ability to control and deliver mass support. And to the people they offer some concessions, modifications on the platform of the Republican Party. One important value of the Democratic Party to the corporate world is that it makes the Republican Party possible through the maintenance of the stability that is essential for "business as usual." It does this by preventing a genuine mass opposition from developing.

To rephrase this, a little more simply:

The job of the Democratic Party is to inspire hopes of progress, and the job of the Republican party is to dash them on the rocks of reactionism and greed. In this way the country can be trapped in an endless cycle of buildup and letdown, and still feel as if we're getting somewhere. It is a symbiotic process, each side feeding off the other to perpetuate both.

Will we elect a black or female President someday? Definitely. This year? Quite possibly. Will it be momentous? Significant? Historic? Of course.

Will it really change anything? No. But it gives us inspiration and hope, regardless, and makes us feel as if we're getting somewhere.

I grant you, this is a deeply cynical perspective. I grant you further that as a white male, I probably lack a proper understanding of the importance of this kind of symbolism to other groups, groups who historically have been more-universally fucked over by the ruling class.

I will also say that I would love to see Obama win, for no other reason than symbolism and to provide that kind of hope and inspiration, because I think that's what America should be about. (I'd love to see a woman elected for the same reason, although, in my opinion, Hillary's election would be a step backward as far as genuine progress goes.)

But I don't for a second believe that electing a black or female President will change anything, in a fundamental sense. It will not end racism or sexism -- it could, in fact, aggravate them. Not that the prospect of aggravating racists or sexists gives me any pause, but having something to organize against will certainly help their respective causes. Perhaps these demons do need to be lured out into the daylight before they can be laid to rest, but if that is the case, taking the White House will mark the beginning, not the end, of the struggle.

And once met, there is no guarantee that the battle will go the way progressives hope. Too many people benefit too much from fostering ethnic and cultural factionalism to just let it become just another ugly chapter in history. Reactionism and greed, remember, are always the other half of this equation.

And to be clear, the above is just a tiny chunk of the cynicism lodged within me as we march toward this election. To put it bluntly, with expectations built up so high, how will we handle the letdown?

I'm not referring merely to the possibility that Obama will lose, though that is a part; even if he wins -- building up hopes even higher -- there will come the inevitable pushback, the inevitable letdown, the inevitable realization that the forces arrayed against humanity have no intention of giving up that easily.

Then what?

2008-06-14T20:51:00.000-07:00

The US has assiduously kept the detainees separated and isolated all this time so that they could not communicate and have structural control from the top down and, then, out of the blue, viola! Right in the middle of the courtroom, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is blithely allowed to huddle them up like Favre does the Packers. When they break huddle, all of them, even the hesitant ones, suddenly want to dismiss their JAG/military lawyers that have been doing such commendable work under impossible conditions. Exactly at the point it is useful to help the US rid themselves of those meddlesome military lawyers that have been beating up their dog and pony shows.

--bmaz

2008-06-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

--Barack Obama
October 2, 2002

Bingo.

2008-06-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

"It's not news. At least not to some of us who've covered the story from the start."

2008-06-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

In every country on earth, when the governing junta accuses someone of "treason," they are actually accusing them of "telling the truth."

--Jonathan Schwarz

2008-05-24T22:15:00.000-07:00

Bad political movements provide easy answers in the form of all-encompassing worldviews: it's the demons, or the Joos, or the filthy Arabs, or the dirty Mexicans, or the capitalist swine, or Jane Fonda. (Or all of them working together.) Cast them out and all your problems will vanish.

By contrast, good political movements cannot provide easy answers, or in most cases any answers at all. What we think we can do is get us all $4 an hour more, plus health care and a little more control over our lives. What we can't do is end human suffering.

--Jonathan Schwarz

2008-05-15T21:10:00.000-07:00

Go out to celebrate the birth of the most hardcore, anti-authoritarian of the Founding Fathers, get hauled off in handcuffs.

--Radley Balko

2008-05-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

They'll be denied access to places they want to go and be prevented from getting jobs they'd do well. They'll be imprisoned and tortured and put on very bad lists to be on because our political class wants to rule the world but doesn't have the first clue how to deal with the world's major sentient species.

And anyone who wants to call the above "anti-American" should kiss my ass beforehand. America was created by humans. Humans are flawed. All men's righteousness is as filthy rags next to Christ, as the Apostle said. That's the good part of Christianity right there, the humility of recognizing that we are inevitably worse than we can imagine being, and all our institutions too. The trick - okay, duty - is to try to become less so over time. This government is becoming worse.

--Jim Henley

2008-05-09T08:57:00.000-07:00

Now, despite the fact that the Iraqi constitution gives the parliament authority to approve all treaties (and the US constitution gives the congress authority to approve all treaties) Bush and Maliki are planning to sign an 'agreement' approving a permanent US occupation...without the involvement of either country's legislative branch.

--Jonathan Schwarz

2008-05-05T20:33:00.000-07:00

The reality is that war is a negative sum game. Invariably, both sides lose relative to an immediate agreement on the final peace terms. In the vast majority of cases, both sides are worse off than if the war had never been fought. With nearly equal certainty, anyone who passes up an opportunity for an early ceasefire will regret it in the end.

--John Quiggin

2008-05-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

. . . conservatives managed to cloak their policy preferences in aesthetically compelling narratives – textualism and originalism. Their policy preferences magically transform into "the plain meaning of the text" or "the original understanding of the Framers." Liberal judges' decisions, by contrast, are "legislating from the bench." Hippie hatred thus provides the foundation of not only American foreign policy, but modern constitutional jurisprudence as well.

--publius

2008-05-02T21:19:00.000-07:00

The thing is, "causes greater than yourself" are all full of people who act in their-own self-interest, too. But they operate in a way that pretends that everyone involved in them is altruistic. Consequently, they end up being pretty damned destructive.

--Radley Balko

2008-05-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

. . . it is no longer true that we are the richest nation in the world. Quite the contrary, in recent years we have become the world's biggest debtor nation. We are financing our prosperity in the manner of an old but declining aristocratic family, living beyond our means year by year by pawning off the assets earned by earlier generations.

But our leaders don't dare to tell us that truth, because they know we wouldn't take it well.

--Jay Bookman

2008-04-25T15:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a good justification for war: you create the conditions for genocide and then you have to stick around to prevent that genocide.

--David Corn

2008-04-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

. . . the purest form of ambition is political ambition, because it represents a desire to rule over other people.

--Michael Kinsley

2008-04-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

If you only want arguments that are "useful" to a hegemonic power, well, maybe that’s part of the problem.

--Thoreau

2008-04-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

As off-putting as I find some of the wilder allegations about the US government's actions in the past, when I read a quote like this . . .

We were attacked from Afghanistan in 2001 and we are at war in Afghanistan today in no small measure because of mistakes this government made – mistakes I, among others, made – in the end game of the anti-Soviet war there some 20 years ago.

. . . and I have to wonder if this is the first time a Bush administration official has publicly acknowledged this simple fact, it brings to mind a simple question:

Is believing that the US government can do no right more or less dangerous than believing that it can do no wrong?

The abject failure of anyone in or associated with the administration back in 2001-2003 to even come close to acknowledging the plain fact SecDef Gates lays out in the quote above was a big hint of what did indeed prove to be the case as the wars played out: That the administration was not interested in making things right "over there" nearly as much as it was interested in playing the same imperialist game and making the same avaricious "mistakes" Gates refers to above.

As I've written on other occasions, I still believe that the Iraq campaign could have worked -- if only those in charge of it had actually believed in all the principles and platitudes they offered up in their attempts to market the war to the American public. (More on that here.)

Alas, these people had obviously learned nothing from past mistakes -- though there were any number of experienced hands on the outside trying to warn them, greed and a thirst for vengeance swept away the lessons of history and plunged us into a protracted bloody mess.

(Not that I believe for a moment that Cheney et al didn't understand what they were getting us into. They simply didn't -- and still don't -- care about all the public resources and American and Iraqi lives that are being sacrificed on the altar of their avarice. This is why levelheaded advisors like Gates had to be forced on the administration in the first place, and are reportedly having their voices marginalized in the White House even at this late date.)

Why I'm now rooting for Obama.

2008-04-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

You think just because you crawled out of the Georgia swamp . . . I don't care what you wear, what kind of car you drive, where you live, I'll always be a white man and you'll always be a nigger. You can call yourself "colored" or "person of color" or whatever you wanna call it, you're still a nigger. And now one of them wants to be President. Well, it's not gonna happen. McCain is gonna be.

--Crazy Old Man (paraphrased from memory), 4/11/2008

File Under: LOL

2008-04-06T20:38:00.000-07:00

How desperate are the Reeps, that they're begging me to send them money?

2008-04-02T21:47:00.000-07:00

Maybe the biggest mistake here is thinking that puritans can be reasoned with.

--Thoreau

Gavin explains it all.

2008-04-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

A must read.

2008-04-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

I realize this isn't as fascinating as Eliot Spitzer's wang, but it's actually kind of important.

--Jonathan Schwarz

Good morning, Colonel Davis.

2008-02-28T21:45:00.000-08:00

"It's gotten so tarnished that if we're going to convince the world that this isn't some rigged process we have to bend over backwards," he said. He said the solutions were simple - giving control to military officials. But he suggested darkly that there are "people at key points in the process, that I just don't know what their allegiance is."

2008-02-27T12:46:00.000-08:00

Buckley leaves an enormous legacy, but to the detriment everyone, the right left Buckley years ago. Where Buckley stood athwart the tide of history and beat it back with wit, sophistication, and argument, we today get best-selling Regnery screeds from lowest-common-denominator clowns like Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, and Glenn Beck. Where Buckley mistrusted government and aimed to slow the world down, he’s been usurped on the right by the likes of William Kristol and David Brooks, men who want to use government to remake the world in their own image.

--Radley Balko

2008-02-24T09:29:00.000-08:00

A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did.

--Clark Hoyt

2008-02-09T14:16:00.001-08:00

In retrospect, voting for George W. Bush in a primary without knowing that Dick Cheney was to be his V.P. was like betting on a Formula 1 car without knowing who its driver would be.

--Jordan Michael Smith

2008-02-05T21:11:00.000-08:00

I think tonight we must acknowledge that we are the Republican front-runner for the nomination for president of the United States . . .

--John McCain

. . . we?

2008-02-05T19:47:00.000-08:00

The scope and application of this federal law is so secret that not even the legislators who enacted it can be permitted to understand it.

--Marty Lederman

2008-01-28T20:08:00.001-08:00

Over the last four years, I have been researching a little-explored area of economic history: the way that crises have paved the way for the march of the right-wing economic revolution across the globe. A crisis hits, panic spreads and the ideologues fill the breach, rapidly reengineering societies in the interests of large corporate players. It's a maneuver I call "disaster capitalism."

Sometimes the enabling national disasters have been physical blows to countries: wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters. More often they have been economic crises: debt spirals, hyperinflation, currency shocks, recessions.

More than a decade ago, economist Dani Rodrik, then at Columbia University, studied the circumstances in which governments adopted free-trade policies. His findings were striking: "No significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis."

[ . . . ]

Do the free-market policies packaged as emergency cures actually fix the crises at hand? For the ideologues involved, that has mattered little. What matters is that, as a political tactic, disaster capitalism works. It was the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, writing in the preface to the 1982 reissue of his manifesto, "Capitalism and Freedom," who articulated the strategy most succinctly. "Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

A decade later, John Williamson, a key advisor to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (and who coined the phrase "the Washington consensus"), went even further. He asked a conference of top-level policymakers "whether it could conceivably make sense to think of deliberately provoking a crisis so as to remove the political logjam to reform."

--Naomi Klein

2008-01-28T20:03:00.000-08:00

The Clinton machine has a funny sort of relationship to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, one that would not surprise the philosopher. Having been relentlessly hammered by lies and distortions, shamelessly repeated over and over and over again, they've come to the conclusion that the way to win in politics is to shamelessly repeat lies and distortions over and over and over again.

They're even proud of it, in a twisted way. "This is the fun part." "We're just getting warmed up." Like the Republicans, they want the voters to confuse lack of scruple with toughness, and honesty with weakness.

--Mark Kleiman

2008-01-27T23:21:00.000-08:00

The Congressional GOP and the visible parts of the executive branch exist solely to provide cover for the regime’s obscured parts. Some of the Obscure Executive Branch works in government offices. Much of it works in the offices of contractors or mercenaries. Some of the rest sets up shop in party headquarters like the RNC. What we think of as "the government" counts as either an auxiliary or annoyance to it, at best sometimes a competitor. What the Visible Government is not, in any sense, is the Obscure Executive’s master.

--Jim Henley

2008-01-26T17:37:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, a man who gets caught cheating on his wife tries to make up for it by giving her jewelry. I think this is the first time a two-timing husband tried to give his wife the most powerful position in the world instead.

--Mark Kleiman

2008-01-24T15:29:00.000-08:00

This is how the game is played when the stakes are high . . .

--Dick Polman

2008-01-20T19:01:00.000-08:00

Lemme get this straight: Ralph Nader brought down the Republican Party?

2008-01-20T14:21:00.000-08:00

A spoken mea culpa without action can end up being worse than nothing at all. It lets folks tell themselves that by owning up to screw-ups, they've done necessary due diligence -- even if they haven't done squat to change things.

--Greg Sargent

2008-01-09T20:46:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one who finds the whole concept of joining a political party vaguely creepy?

2008-01-02T21:21:00.000-08:00

Since a complete catalog of administration officials who've been accused of some form of corruption or abuse of power would be endless, we tried to maintain a high standard for inclusion.

--Paul Kiel

Claude Allen is still my favorite. How in the Blue Hell can you work at the White House and not find anything better to loot than a fucking Target!?! Your colleagues are handing out six, seven, eight figures at a time in graft and pork, and you're . . . receipt-scamming small appliances? Amateur.

2008-01-02T20:19:00.000-08:00

The fundamental problem is that the Roe debate is only tangentially related to abortion. Instead, it’s about penalties. More precisely, it’s about whether (and what) penalties are appropriate for having an abortion. For this reason, the linguistic labels of the various camps – pro-life and pro-choice – don’t reflect the essence of the political debate very accurately. One can, for instance, oppose abortion personally, while simultaneously opposing efforts to ban or criminalize it. The Roe debate then, stripped to its essence, is about allocation of power. Does the individual get the final say? Or does the state?

--publius

2007-12-27T20:37:00.000-08:00

After ten full years inside the GOP, ninety days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal.

--Allen Raymond

2007-12-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

[ . . . ] there is a history to the Clinton and Bush families possessing damaging secrets about the other, a kind of balance of terror in which the Bushes usually have the upper hand and the Clintons have chosen mostly to make concessions and seek favors from the more powerful family.

--Robert Parry

2007-12-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?

-Rush Limbaugh

2007-12-21T22:40:00.000-08:00

All in all, this is a great template for keeping power if you believe human beings are sheep.

--Jonathan Schwarz

2007-12-20T08:58:00.000-08:00

Ask yourself: why do the good Christian soldiers standing guard in Congress all love Baby Jesus so much?

Because babies can't talk! That's why. The minute Jesus opened his mouth it was all downhill from there. "Help the poor! Love the destitute! Assist the crippled!" Come on, what was he thinking?

--Bernard Chazelle

2007-12-06T21:43:00.000-08:00

Credit the administration with a sudden candor. For the first time in four years, it's admitting that its conception of a normal Iraq is one in which the U.S. military operates there forever and ever and ever.

--Spencer Ackerman

"Unsophisticated people might think the problem with friendly dictators is the 'dictator' part."

2007-12-01T15:33:00.000-08:00

2007-11-12T20:42:00.000-08:00

Hrm.

It seems the White House is trying real hard not to notice that its strategic ally, the dictator of Pakistan, is going all crazy-repressive-authoritarian in his quest to destroy all his enemies.

Wonder why that sounds so familiar?

2007-10-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

"To put this into context, the amount paid to Halliburton-KBR is roughly three times what the U.S. government paid to fight the entire 1991 Persian Gulf War. When putting other wars into current dollar amounts, the U.S. government paid just this one firm about $7 billion more than it cost the United States to fight the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish American War combined."

--PW Singer

Just shoot me now.

2007-09-26T21:48:00.000-07:00

Incarcerex

2007-07-23T22:48:00.001-07:00

It's official . . .

2007-07-20T13:50:00.000-07:00

. . . the White House is now openly daring Congress to impeach. They're gambling that they can keep enough of the Reeps in line to fend off removal -- which they almost certainly can, and that the likelihood of failure will prevent the Dems from making the attempt -- which it almost certainly will.

That is, unless enough Reeps come to their senses to place the interests of their country over the interests of their party.

Don't give me that look. It could happen.

2007-07-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

Democracy has become a term derided in much of the world today because for many beleaguered peoples it has come to mean Western duplicity, uneven standards between the mighty and the weak, an excuse for invasion and occupation, a code word for regime change, or obsessive focus on ballots rather than healthy civil society institutions like courts and a free media that help to keep power accountable.

--Steve Clemons

2007-07-13T01:26:00.000-07:00

Under the Bush administration model, a sick person with no insurance goes to the emergency room for treatment. Does he get a bill once he’s taken care of? Probably, but it doesn’t matter because he can’t afford to pay it.

If the patient can’t pay the bill and hospital can’t treat sick patients for free, who pays the medical bill? Everyone else.

Yes, everyone pays, everyone gets treatment. Bush and his team support the most inefficient system of socialized medicine ever devised.

--Steve Benen

2007-06-28T09:55:00.000-07:00

After defeating the industrial might of Germany and Japan and Italy we were told that we must continue to send billions to defense contractors and remain on a wartime footing to defeat an economic system that could barely grow enough food. Eventually, that economic system collapsed, and we applauded ourselves for the collapse of somebody else’s unworkable system. Now, we are told that we must spend even more, remain on a permanent wartime footing, and surrender even more liberty at home to defeat some guys armed with boxcutters.

Eventually, the enemy will be one guy named Emmanuel Goldstein, and they’ll tell us that we need to embrace a centrally planned economy in order to defeat him.

--Thoreau @ Unqualified Offerings

"Evangelicals are Addicted to Porn"

2007-06-04T23:37:00.000-07:00

The War Prayer

2007-05-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

2007-05-11T18:39:00.000-07:00

It's been two years now since I first asked the question: What in the Blue Hell is Wrong With These People?

I think the conclusion I came to about those people applies just as well to these people.

After all, in many cases we're talking about the very same people, or at least their wives and daughters.

Explains quite a bit, doesn't it?

2007-04-27T12:47:00.000-07:00

"Listen young man, listen to my plan --
Gonna make you money, gonna make you a man.
Bomb, bomb, here's what you get:
An M-16 and a Kevlar vest.
You might come home with one less leg, but
This thing'll surely keep a bullet out'ya chest.
So come on, come on,
Sign up, come on;
This one's nothing like Vietnam.
(Except for the bullets,
Except for the bombs,
Except for the youth that's gone.)"

--Michael Franti & Spearhead, Light Up Ya Lighter
Yell Fire!

2007-04-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons — and those reasons are debated with often startling depth inside the organization's leadership. Their assessments, at day's end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public, and by association the wider world community, were not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis.

Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection.

At the five o'clock meeting, once various reports on latest threats were delivered, John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: "Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President."

Around the table, there were nods....Jami Miscik talked about how bin Laden — being challenged by Zarqawi's rise — clearly understood how his primacy as al Qaeda's leader was supported by the continuation of his eye-to-eye struggle with Bush. "Certainly," she offered, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years."

But an ocean of hard truths before them — such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected — remained untouched....On that score, any number of NSC principals could tell you something so dizzying that not even they will touch it: that Bush's ratings [in the U.S.] track with bin Laden's rating in the Arab world.

(From Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine.)

I guess some people really don't pay attention.

2007-04-18T23:51:00.000-07:00

Percentage of Americans who think the President is doing a good job: 35

Percentage of Americans who can't remember the Vice President's name: 31

(Give or take a few.)

2007-04-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

We cannot 'shorthand' this issue with concepts such as the 'democratization of the region' or the constant refrain by a small but powerful group that we are going to 'win,' even as 'victory' is not defined or is frequently redefined.

It would have been a great honor to serve this nation again. But after thoughtful discussions with people both in and outside of this administration, I concluded that the current Washington decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically. We got it right during the early days of Afghanistan -- and then lost focus. We have never gotten it right in Iraq.

--General John Sheehan, USMC (Retired)

And I thought I was cynical . . .

2007-04-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

Ed Morrissey is outraged that people might be sued over reporting Muslims to the authorities:

Forcing people to hire attorneys because they tipped authorities to suspicious behavior will keep the next set of people from doing the same -- and that benefits only the terrorists [ . . . ]

He says this in the context of supporting "legislation protecting ordinary Americans who report suspicious behavior, regardless of whether their information uncovers a terrorist plot or not."

Ahem.

While there's certainly the potential that somebody could, in good faith, report behavior they deem suspicious to the authorities and wind up sued -- giving a multitude of individuals and organizations an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is and fund the person's defense -- there's something deeply troubling about this reflexive desire to simply bar an entire field of legal action, and especially to do so for the reason Morrissey cites.

First of all: Does anybody doubt that removing the threat of an abuse of process claim will encourage people to "inform" on anybody they want to see suffer? If you bar all such suits, what prevents people from using the FBI to harass others?

Extending that thought, if there's no motivation for people to employ common sense in distinguishing "unusual" (or "Muslim") behavior from "suspicious" behavior, how many more man-hours is the government going to waste sifting through pointless and even malicious dead-end leads provided by people with no lives and no fear of reprisal?

Second, and much more offensive in my opinion, is the suggestion that somebody observing behavior that they actually find suspicious and potentially indicative of a criminal plot is going to choose not to act because they might get sued.

I can't speak for anybody else, but I'd like to think that if somebody has an actual founded suspicion that something's going on that they're not going to worry about getting sued, they're going to worry about trying to notify somebody of the risk.

The premise that people who would otherwise do so are going to decide not to report suspicious behavior because they might wind up having to hire a lawyer is nothing short of incredible. I can certainly imagine that some people out there might not act for any number of reasons, but the suggestion that that will be the deciding factor is absolutely obscene. It suggests a depth of cynicism that shocks even me.

If we really are that self-centered, if we're so far gone as to let an attack happen rather than expose ourself to a potential lawsuit, then what's the fucking point? We're doomed on our own terms, without any help from terrorists.

2007-04-15T03:22:00.000-07:00

Sullivan points out this passage in an eyewitness account of the aftermath of the bombing of the Iraqi parliament:

At first, no one could decide who was in charge: the U.S. military, the Iraqi police who actually guard the members of parliament, or the men from Triple Canopy, a private security company based near Dulles Airport in Virginia.

With a bullhorn and sheer force of will, the leader of the local Triple Canopy team, a short thick man in a baseball cap, took charge.

Heavily-armed men from Triple Canopy, mostly Peruvian, escorted every one inside the building into a parking lot ringed with a 10-foot high chain-link fence. This became a holding pen. An American Triple Canopy employee told me that they suspected the bomber may have had an accomplice in the building. Therefore, everyone was going to held and searched.

Peruvian mercenaries in the employ of a private contractor overriding the US and Iraqi authorities.

Is there a functional state left that we can refer to as Iraq?

Is this the transformation Cheney was looking for?

I wish these questions were rhetorical.

For Real This Time?

2007-04-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

Dogs love playing fetch. It's fun, we get to feel useful, we get to show our humans how smart and reliable we are.

The game itself couldn't be simpler. Human throws the ball, you hunt it down and bring it back.

Unfortunately, some humans are tricksy. They hold the ball and make like they're throwing, but the ball doesn't go anywhere. You leap into action, running along the anticipated path of the ball a few steps before you realize it's not where it should be. You stop, look around . . . wha? It's still in the human's hand.

It may or may not cross your mind that this human just made you look foolish, but before you have time to think about it, he draws his hand back again to throw the ball.

At this point different dogs will do different things. A trusting or stupid dog might once again go running in the hopes of staying ahead of the ball, again make it a few steps before realizing . . . that tricksy human's still holding that ball.

Indeed, many dogs will fall for this ploy several times before catching on.

Eventually, however, most of us learn to keep our eye on the ball once we understand the human we're dealing with can't be trusted to do what he wants us to think he's doing.

But then there are the true believers. We all know them; it seems there's one in every dog park. No matter how many times they're disappointed, long after the rest of us have become bored with watching a human pretend he's going to throw a ball and wandered off to pursue more promising activities, one or two especially faithful or stupid dogs remain, steadfast in their faith that this time he's really gonna throw it.

Which, in turn, encourages the tricksy human to keep playing his game, and never let go of the ball. Fooling a bunch of preposterously gullible dogs makes him feel like he's accomplishing something. It's fun, he gets to feel useful, he gets to show us all how superior he thinks he is.

And that's why the rest of us would like to bite him on the ass. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

2007-04-11T21:29:00.000-07:00

"He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn't see how history could possibly have led anywhere else."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1922-2007

Offensive

2007-04-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

Let me say first of all that Don Imus is an insensitive and outrageous person, that he sets out to be, and that he's made a career out of saying things that people will find offensive.

Let me say second of all that I'm not a fan of Don Imus.

Now let me admit that these two things have nothing to do with each other. Let me further admit that I am a fan of a show that routinely says things that would get Imus not only fired, but severely fined, and probably hunted down and beaten to death by an angry mob as well. And yes, I often find this show offensive as well. But most of the time it's entertaining.

Not only do I support the right of people to say objectionable things, I believe it's much better to have them saying those things than to have them thought but not spoken.

To give just one example: Would people who have decided to boycott Imus because he's a racist/sexist bastard prefer it if they were still supporting a racist/sexist bastard out of ignorance?

(I refer to Imus as a racist/sexist bastard in a hypothetical sense, here: As far as I can tell, he's mostly just clueless.)

My position on this is primarily informed by my libertarian instincts, particularly on censorship. I'm against it. I'm opposed to having a set of sensibilities, be they individual or collective, forcibly imposed on anybody.

Fat hairy men walking down the street wearing nothing but sandals? Putting Prince on television? Voting for George W. Bush in 2004? I find these things offensive, yes. I think they're an affront to decency. I wouldn't advocate that anyone be punished by the government just for offending me, though. In fact, I tend to think people who do these things will tend to suffer for their behavior without being directly punished.

When offensive conduct becomes destructive conduct, we can talk about getting the government involved. But it's the destructive element, not the offensive element, that controls. Child pornography isn't criminal because it's porn, it's criminal because of what's being done to the child. Advocating violence isn't criminal because of the opinions expressed, it's criminal if it's likely to cause people to do violence.

Decency isn't something a government can impose. It's learned behavior. And if we're always sheltered from indecent acts, we'll never recognize the line.

2007-04-09T15:59:00.000-07:00

In a comment to my last post, Dan reminds me that I never got around to elaborating on my metaphor about Bush breaking all the Reeps' eggs. He points out, and I agree, that the Dems running Hillary in 2008 will provide the Reeps the best chance of holding on to the White House. But I don't get the impression that even that will help them much (and we seem to be in agreement on that as well).

Before I explain, let me run down the Reep likelies.

Giuliani is a favorite of the money people, which is a bad sign because he's not only badly out of step with the theocratic right, he's got a bad case of foot-in-mouth on foreign policy issues and a history of terrible judgement on security issues (supposedly his strong point) which will plague him if he becomes the candidate.

McCain has broad appeal that would pull him support from across the spectrum, but the political tightrope he's been walking has left everybody doubting his credibility and sincerity, and he's suffering for it. I've officially leapt off the McCain bandwagon in the wake of the Iraqi market stroll debacle, and won't be the least bit sorry to see said bandwagon roll flaming off a pier in the not-too-distant future.

Romney is an unknown quantity. Are the Colorado evangelicals going to embrace a New England Mormon? His career as governor is bound to have left some traces that will open up questions, but I don't know if it will hurt or help him overall. Even so, he might actually be their best shot.

Fred Thompson is in a similar boat -- he's considered a good solid conservative, but he's also an actor and Pope Dobson has already questioned his faith, which could torch him in the primaries. If he makes it to the general, though, his chances seem decent.

Overall, though, the big problem any Reep candidate faces is Gee-Dub.

A highly unpopular sitting President is a millstone around his party's neck, as candidates will inevitably be placed in a position where they'll have to decide (or weasel out of deciding) whether to criticize the President and offend party loyalists, or defend the President and offend the country. Either choice will hurt them, while the Dem candidate gets to please party and country by ripping Bush a new one and promising to take America in "a new direction" (without even having to explain in any meaningful way what direction that will be).

That's why I think that barring some miraculous poll bounce between now and the election -- and we can never count that out, things always look much different around election time then they do in off-years -- the Reeps may already be hosed.

2007-04-08T23:32:00.000-07:00

Bottom line, and I can't even claim to have seen this coming . . . It seems like the Reeps put all their eggs in Gee-Dub's basket, and damned if he didn't drop that fucker.

Unless the Dems do something really amazingly ridiculous in the next two years -- and Heaven knows we can never rule that out -- it's tough to imagine the Reeps pulling it out.

Let me say again that if Hillary Clinton becomes the next PotUS, Bush cultists will have nobody to blame but themselves. Bastards. They might deserve it, but America doesn't.

2007-04-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

A "military victory" in the sense of total control over the whole territory, imposed on the entire population, is not possible.

--Henry Kissinger

Yikes.

2007-03-30T00:45:00.000-07:00

In beloved Iraq, blood is shed among our brothers while there is an illegitimate foreign occupation and a hateful sectarianism that is threatening to develop into a civil war.

--Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah

2007-03-25T19:10:00.000-07:00

There have been a variety of issues occupying my attention this year, but none that would be sufficient to keep me away from this blog if I had anything that needed posting.

The fact is, I'm bored with this whole mess. I'm not enthusiastic about the Dems or their tepid rationality, or the pathetic partisan tit-for-tat of two power structures jockeying for advantage. Political maneuvering is a point of personal fascination for me, but keeping a chronicle of political gamesmanship isn't an appealing prospect for me, especially with a thousand insiders available to do the very same thing.

I didn't adopt the handle "catastrophile" so I could agonize over the nuances of Swamp combat or analyze fifteen angles on the merits and drawbacks of defunding the Iraq war. Those things interest me, but what I really enjoy is reading into an agenda, and there's just no challenge left in that at the moment. The only people left who don't see what a resounding error the Bush administration has been for America are more than simply deceived, they are willfully blind to reality.

America understands that Iraq was a lie, even if they don't agree on what to do next.

America understands that Bush is a puppet.

America understands that the administration has no regard for the truth or the righteous path; that they will say whatever they need to say to move their corrupt agenda forward.

There's simply no point in continuing to say so. Finally, finally this bizarre shell has cracked, and now it's for the vultures to set in on it. For my part, I can take no joy in the fact that now, too late, people finally come to understand. I can only sit here and watch it crumble, and hope against hope that we've learned something (because we really haven't, as far as I can tell).

Here is the long and short of it:

The Cheneyists are trying to cover their tracks in the hopes of riding out the next two years. The old-school realists -- Daddy's people -- are cultivating a faction of former Bush-adminstration believers to try and repair or dump a raft of bad policies before they explode.

The national Reeps are scrambling to repair their reputation without turning on Gee-Dub too vehemently. The "peripheral" players -- Cheney to some extent, but even more the Miers and Gonzales and Libbys of the administration, those close to the figurehead President who cooperated with the Cheney agenda rather than trying to rein it in.

The Dems are the Dems. On the Iraq issue they'll play for a draw, wanting to create the appearance of standing up to Bush while trying not to give him the excuse that he could have done it if those nasty liberals hadn't tied his hands. It won't work. The best they can hope for is to get a Gates plan rather than a Cheney plan, and that will go out the window if Cheney's thugs manage to provoke Iran.

At they same time, the Dems are going to attempt to damage the administration as much as possible with a slow, creeping investigations process that is going to keep uncovering crimes and corruption as long as it's allowed to continue. I can safely say that there's not enough time between now and January 2009 to hold this administration to account for every last act of greed and corruption and dishonesty. It remains to be seen how much will, in fact, be exposed, but with the way the DoJ stonewall is collapsing, I can no longer completely rule out the possibility of impeachment proceedings, though I'll go ahead and leave removal of Bush from office off the table. Removal of Cheney or other officials is just barely possible, though it's much more likely that a flurry of resignations and some pardons will preclude such action.

It certainly appears at this moment that the DoJ bureaucracy is revolting against the administration's efforts to politicize its operations. The rapid unravelling of the rationale we were offered for shitcanning those US Attorneys is just a manifestation of this. Furthermore, this is not a war started by the bureaucrats.

Firing the prosecutor that brought down Duke Cunningham was, if not a foolish move, at the very least openly hostile to the Department and its career employees. However, this is nothing new -- we've already seen how the administration treats civil servants who put doing their job above political loyalty.

What was new here was the scramble, the rapid succession of shifting positions and the avalanche of documents and evidence to counter each new lie. The administration was caught off guard. They had no time to concoct a story that would keep them ahead of the evidence. They still have not recovered, though they seem to have found the story they're sticking with. ("So what if we're politicizing the DoJ? We can fire whoever we want, nyah!")

Their lack of sure footing in this mess -- the simple fact that they've made enemies of the very people they depend on to provide justifications for all their other terrible policies -- this is what makes it interesting to watch. A criminal administration cannot hope to win a political war against the Department of Justice, period. If Alberto Gonzales is forced to step down, his replacement will have to get past a narrowly Dem-controlled Senate -- meaning he'll have to be evenhanded and rational enough not to offend either party too greatly.

That means that it's over for the crooks. A new Attorney General might not start indicting the administration for every criminal act he gets briefed about upon taking office, but he will almost certainly make "cut this shit out" a central element of damage control. We might never even hear about it all, though the aforementioned flurry of resignations will probably be a telltale sign.

But at this point, there's not all that much to talk about. It's as if the administration has finally been forced to put its cards on the table, and there's hardly a comment to be offered.

"We did this because we wanted to," they're saying. "What we want is all that matters."

And America already knows what to think of that argument.

Obscene.

2006-12-27T23:17:00.000-08:00

"This is the first time I heard this - I don't know how to pronounce - this meta-meta something," said Hajira Ahmed, whose husband is in jail pending charges that he sold cold medicine and antifreeze at their convenience store on a winding road near the Tennessee border.

"Let me 'splain -- no, there is too much -- let me sum up."

2006-12-14T11:34:00.000-08:00

If we remember this whole 9/11 thing correctly, a bunch of privileged Saudis with U.S. Embassy ties led by a stripper-loving hard-partying Egyptian playboy bought first-class plane tickets with money from Pakistan’s secret service and crashed passenger jets into the WTC, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

In retaliation, the Bush Administration attacked some fanatic goat herders in Afghanistan and then began an occupation of Iraq that’s already lasted four bloody years.

--Whatsisname@Wonkette

Out of the Loop Much?

2006-12-12T18:51:00.000-08:00

How many years have people been celebrating the sheer unfathomable wrongness of John Ashcroft's hilarious anthem, Let the Eagle Soar?

(Hint: the answer is four.)

Suddenly, December 2006, go-to cutting-edge partisan-Reep blogger John Hinderaker of Power Line breaks the story:

DID YOU KNOW THAT JOHN ASHCROFT CAN SING?

Neither did I.

Personally, I still don't.

Barack Osamaddaminejad

2006-12-12T14:39:00.000-08:00

With Barack Obama emerging as a rival to the already-demonized Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Dem nomination, the media is, of course, taking a good hard look at the policies he brings to the table:

The senator was in New Hampshire over the weekend, sporting what's getting to be the classic Obama look. Call it business casual, a jacket, a collared shirt, but no tie.

It is a look the senator seems to favor. And why not? It is dressy enough to suggest seriousness of purpose, but without the stuffiness of a tie, much less a suit. There is a comfort level here that reflects one of Obama's strongest political assets, a sense that he is comfortable in his own skin, that he knows who he is.

[ . . . ] he may be walking around with a sartorial time bomb. Ask yourself, is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of "GQ" to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable.

[ . . . ]

Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful. But an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread. Or is that threads?

Isn't it nice that we can put aside the politics of demonization and cowardice and face the issues head-on?