Via Atrios…via Digby… Okay…Now I understand why that gutter crawling bigot Don Imus is so popular among the Washington Beltway glitterati. I was always puzzled by that, always kept wondering how many times that babbling bar stool bigot would have to go over the line before someone finally booted his ass off the radio. Yet every time I look in his direction I see that he’s just gotten bigger, and Even More respected. What the fuck was it about this low-life crank’s power to attract big names onto his show? Now I know. His blessing on their books directly translates into book sales…
I can’t help but be reminded of the Imus profile of a year ago in Vanity Fair (not online, unfortunately) in which his psychotic freakshow was fully revealed. I’m sure all these disgusting sycophants read it. After all, it featured them in starring roles — being insulted by Don Imus:
"They don’t make good decisions," he says of MSNBC and its programming. "You can’t make idiotic decisions like (hiring hosts) Tucker Carlson and Ron Reagan." Of conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, he says: "He’s a twit. He’s a pussy." This is in the same spirit as an earlier comment on Senate majority leader Bill Frist ("a fucking criminal"). Similarly, when he looks up from his circular desk at a television monitor during a commercial break and sees Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball, silently nattering away, he says, "There’s that idiot," to no one in particular.
It makes you wonder why they continue to appear on his show and are making complete fools of themselves today assuring everyone that Imus is a "good man."This might explain it:
I can feel the high of becoming part of his incestuous circle of regulars-the media elite who have entree with the I-Man and have never seemed troubled, at least publicly troubled as far as I can tell, by the show’s forays over the years into homophobia and crudeness and sexism. I like this idea of being right in there with columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory and Tim Russert (husband of Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth), all Imus regulars. I wonder if there’s some secret media-elite handshake I need to learn, just so I can hear the jubilant sound of the cash register ringing when it comes time to sell my next book, because nobody (with the clear exception of Oprah) sells a book better than Imus.
He likes that power, enjoys going on Amazon to see just how much he can boost a book. During the week I’m there, he has Larry the Cable Guy on as a guest-Larry has just written a book called Git-r-Done. Before the show, according to Imus, the book was about 1,800 on the Amazon list. But when he checks on the Internet just after the show, it’s No. 122.
I wonder if the media elite’s failure to seriously take Imus to task for anything is due to a fear that their book-promotion pipeline will be cut off if they rub him the wrong way. In a 1998 New Yorker piece, Ken Auletta drew up a list, confirmed by Imus, of more than a dozen high-profile journalists who made contributions to the Imus Ranch. It’s hard to quibble with donations to a worthy cause. As George Stephanopoulos said on the air to Imus in 1998, with his book on the White House still in the works, "I’m not too proud to suck up for a good cause. So count me in for $5,000 on the ranch!"
I wonder what I would have done, had I been an Imus regular with a book to sell, when the previous sports announcer for the show, Sid Rosenberg, said on the air last May of a female entertainer who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, "Ain’t gonna be so beautiful when the bitch got a bald head and one titty." I wonder how I would have reacted to the cackling of various members of Imus’s ensemble over the next minute or so to Rosenberg’s remarks, as well as Imus’s own hardly outraged response: "There’s a reason I fire you about every six weeks." He did get fired from the show, and Imus distanced himself from what Rosenberg had said. He says the remarks were "horrible," but there seemed to be something disingenuous about Imus’s repudiation-complete bullshit, as he might put it-given that Rosenberg had already distinguished himself on the show in 2001 by calling tennis player Venus Williams an "animal" and noting that she and her sister, Serena, had a better chance of posing nude for National Geographic than Playboy. I wonder what I would have done had I been in the audience the night Imus made his crude and unfunny remarks about President Clinton and his wife. Would I have said, That’s it, never again. Or would I have been like Cokie Roberts of ABC television, who called Imus’s remarks "profoundly rude," vowed never to go back on the show, and then did several years later when the opportunity arose to push her new book, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.
It’s as if they believe we can’t read or are too stupid to figure out what they are doing. I read Vanity Fair. I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the "angry left" — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.
They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.
Well that about sums up the history of the mainstream news media ever since Reagan, doesn’t it? They followed the big money into the gutter. They followed the big money into the gutter. And they’ve been busy trying to drag their country into the gutter along with them ever since, so they won’t have to know that they’re not living on main street anymore, but in the gutter.
At the end of the post I wrote last week about ABC News and Brian Ross’ new report that Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2009, I noted that ABC and Ross — back in October and November 2001 — were the driving force, really the exclusive force, behind news reports strongly suggesting that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for the anthrax attacks on the U.S. There are several very important issues arising from those events which I strongly believe merit real attention. This post is somewhat lengthy because it is vital to set forth the facts clearly.
Last week, I excerpted several of the Saddam-anthrax reports from ABC and Ross — here and here — but there are others. ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that — and these are all quotes:
(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";
(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";
(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";
(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program"; and,
(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."
At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources." All of those factual claims — each and every one of them, separately — were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. There is now no question about that. Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports — reports which, as documented below, had an extremely serious impact on the views formed by Americans in those early, critical days about the relationship between the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks and Iraq…
The fact is, nobody can trust a damn thing ABC News says. That’s a problem not only because Iran may indeed be a real threat to the world, but because any grave threat to worldwide peace and stability now has to be judged through the understanding gleaned now from the past six years of George Bush and his crony’s, that they govern by way of lies. Who do we trust? Well…not ABC News. We all saw it in the course of their bogus anthrax reporting. Your gay and lesbian neighbors saw it also, on November 26, 2004, when ABC News cynically gave a dead gay kid’s killers a public forum to spit on his grave a few times, so that the republicans could later argue that hate crime laws are unnecessary.
The claim that the anthrax was laced with bentonite, and that government tests detected the presence of bentonite, was simply false — a complete invention from Ross’s sources, eager to link Saddam and anthrax attacks. And separately, it was a complete fiction that "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope." That just never happened.
Equally false, really completely frivolous, was the conclusion Ross’s sources fed to him from this false premise — namely, that even if bentonite — which ABC referred to as a "troubling chemical additive" — had been found in the anthrax, that would be some sort of compelling proof linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks.
The very idea that bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive," let alone that it is some sort of unique Iraqi hallmark, is inane. Bentonite is merely a common clay that is produced all over the world, including from volcanic eruptions. Over the weekend, I spoke via e-mail with M.A. Holmes, a Geologist in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who wrote:
Bentonite is mined and used for drilling mud (getting the rock chips out of a drill hole when drilling for oil or deep water) and now is mined for the clumping-type kitty litter ("swells when wet"). It’s also used to draw cactus spines put of the skin (sold as a product called "Denver Mud"). It has lots of other uses, like lining pits for waste disposal (because it "swells when wet" it forms a pretty good seal).
Bentonite is mined extensively in Wyoming and oh, yes, SOUTH DAKOTA. It is not "a chemical additive" and it is not unique to Iraq. It is widespread and common, and readily available wherever you can get "drilling mud."
Go read the whole thing. The drumbeat to war is happening again. Just remember whenever you hear something from ABC News about Iran, that this is the news organization that stooped to smearing a dead gay kid’s memory for the sake of republican party talking points. Nothing is beneath them. Nothing.
Rumsfeld: No. There comes a mike! Just take a second.
Maybe if people who have questions stick their hand up now, someone will get a mike to you and then the mike will be right there with you. There’s one in the back, good.
Go ahead.
Q: Thank you, sir. First, it’s a pleasure to hear you and to be this close to you and see you in person. We’ve seen you on TV a lot, and it’s a neat experience for us.
I’m part of an AEF rotation here, a part of a group that is deployed for AEF 7 and 8, and this is a great place to be deployed, no doubt. But many of us are asking, how long will we be frozen? But my question is, on the behalf of some of our Guard and Reserve men who are here, we know that some units have been mobilized, partially mobilized. Their question is, do you — are we going to go to a full mobilization of Guard and Reserve? And if we are, when will that decision be made?
Rumsfeld: Well — (laughter) — let me say this about that. (Laughter.) It is highly unlikely that we would go to a full mobilization. We — I have been signing a great many deployment orders and mobilization orders and alerting orders. The forces have been flowing now for a good number of weeks, and that has had its intended effect. There is no question but that the world’s focus is on the fact that the Iraqi regime, now for some 12 years, continues to ignore and disagree with the now 17 resolutions of the United Nations. The world understands that; they are looking for cooperation and hoping that the force flow will bring about cooperation, but thus far, it has not.
We don’t talk about deployments in the specific, but we have brought a good many Guard and Reserve on active duty. Fortunately, a great many of them were volunteers. We have been able to have relatively few stop losses. There are some currently, particularly in the Army, but relatively few in the Navy and the Air Force. And it is not knowable if force will be used, but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.
Like…you know…six days…six weeks…you know… Whatever. You know.
If you click on the link I’ve provided, to this U.S. Department Of Defense DefenseLink News Transcript, you might notice that it’s a page from the Google cache. Click on the link at the top of the cache page. You know. Where it says, Click here for the current page without highlighting. Go ahead. The original page is gone. We have always been at war with Eastasia…
Earlier in the day, Bush held a National Security Council meeting on the war. He was to discuss the latest developments by secure videoconference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at 9:40 a.m. (1440 GMT), said spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Then at 11:30, the president will make a statement on the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in the Roosevelt Room. It will last about five minutes and he will take no questions," she told AFP by telephone.
On the other hand, when has this spoiled brat ever suffered being questioned?
I’m stealing the title of this post from Atrios, but then the rest of it is recycled too. Four years. Four years. Four years. Well at least they’re not calling them Freedom Fries anymore…
Tuesday afternoon. I am attending a conference on open source software in government being held at George Washington University. I am here because my project manager is investigating the possibility of moving the system I’ve been working on for the past several years to open source software. Work on the Hubble Space Telescope will go into maintenance mode shortly, and the thinking is that the Institute doesn’t want to spend a lot of money it won’t have on software upgrades, simply because a certain vendor has a business cycle that requires you to do that. At least with open source we would have the option of making any small fixes we absolutely needed to have before the end of the mission ourselves, without breaking our systems that depend on it. The alternative is to stick to the vendor’s upgrade cycle, and pray the new versions don’t break anything in our software, or introduce new bugs and security holes.
Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area, and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch, stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall. I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the university that bore his friend’s name, shaking the hand of each of those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… An old friend of mine I’d had breakfast with that morning, told me a joke he’d heard about a man who, while visiting France recently, asked a random Frenchman, "Sir, can you speak German?" When the Frenchman replied that he couldn’t, the American said, "You’re welcome." I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have asked the American, "Sir, do you have a king?"
My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside. It’s a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the look of them, to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes, the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me I’d almost forgotten about, a "Yes I’m a longhair, yes I know you hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don’t give a flying fuck" attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly about writing a book, "Everything I know about living under Bush II, I learned from Nixon". The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of my companions say, "I hope they don’t cancel our flight out Thursday." The other chuckles and says, "The war will be over by then."
I can just close my eyes a little, and still see that drooling jackass…
Responding to legislation introduced in Congress last week seeking to discontinue the military’s "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy, Comedy Central’s fake pundit Stephen Colbert offered his own set of policy prescriptions to those who wish gays should be allowed to openly serve in the military.
"Folks, we are approaching a dangerous level of tolerance," Colbert mockingly proclaimed Wednesday night on his show. "That is why I am encouraging the Pentagon to adopt an even stricter policy, ‘Don’t Know, Don’t Think.’ Under the new policy, it will be against regulations for a soldier to even know what homosexuality is."
Makes a perfect fit with all their other domestic policies, doesn’t it?
Speaking today at the Conservative Political Action Conference, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter said: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” Audience members said “ohhh” and then cheered.
A 21-year-old man from Bayonne, New Jersey was followed off the PATH train in Hoboken and attacked by two men who had been harassing him on the train for, among other things, wearing pink pants.
Hobokenpath Police are calling the attack an anti-gay hate crime, according to the Jersey Journal:
"When the train pulled into the Hoboken station, the two men followed the Bayonne man off the train and up the stairs, then attacked him near a newsstand on the concourse in Hoboken Terminal, police said. The man required 12 stitches to close facial wounds, police said, adding that he also had a black eye and was temporarily blinded in one eye. Using video shot from security cameras, police were able to identify Hoboken High School student Andy Rivera, 19, of Marshall Drive. He was brought to the police station for questioning and arrested Tuesday at 2 p.m. on charges of bias intimidation and aggravated assault."
The other assailant is still at large, but a warrant has been issued for his arrest.
I’ll bet Couter’s audience would have cheered that beating too. Coulter, you’ll recall, is the well respected conservative pundit who said her only problem with Timothy McVeigh is he didn’t go to the New York Times building.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), prior to Coulter’s appearance: “I am happy to hear that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!”
Police in Detroit released a sketch Thursday of the man suspected of killing Andrew Anthos, a 72-year-old disabled gay man whose dream was to light the Michigan State Capitol dome red, white and blue for Independence Day.
Anthos died Feb. 23, 10 days after a fellow bus rider, spouting anti-gay slurs, paralyzed him with a blow from behind with a metal pipe. Police have since questioned several people aboard the bus, including the wheelchair-bound friend Anthos was helping through the snow when he was struck.
Coming up…another lecture from David Broder and the other Wise Old Men of Washington, about how liberals are so hateful, and just too damn angry…
President Bush on Saturday challenged lawmakers skeptical of his new Iraq plan to propose their own strategy for stopping the violence in Baghdad. "To oppose everything while proposing nothing is irresponsible," Bush said.
This from the man who just weeks ago received the Iraq Study Group Report, which did exactly that, and which he reportedly called a "flaming turd". Okay…fine…he doesn’t like what they’re proposing. But why lie about it?
Well for one thing, because for six years going on seven now, he’s been able to lie through his teeth about damn near anything he’s wanted to and the press never called him on any of it. But mostly, it’s just junior doing what he’s always done all his damn life…shifting the blame elsewhere.
I’m seeing chatter making the rounds on the blog nets now, about how those of us who opposed this war from the beginning, those of us who felt it would turn out as badly as it now, unmistakably has, were nonetheless wrong anyway, no matter how right we were, because we based our opposition on our dislike of Bush.
Well…duh! I said early on that I could imagine one of any dozen or so other possible presidents, including republicans I absolutely detest, who if they’d made the case for Iraq I’d have gritted my teeth and reluctantly gone along with it. But from the start the problem was that it was Bush. Anyone taking even a little peek into that toxic waste dump that was his resume before 2000 could have seen this coming. Bush, let alone the right wing machine that pushed him on America, was not trustworthy. Period.
And now…thousands of dead Americans, a foreign policy in ruins, a lost American city, trillions of dollars in debt, a constitution in tatters and our moral standing in the world in the gutter later…the rest of you know it too.
Why on earth couldn’t you people see what this man was made of before you voted him into the highest office in the land? Twice for fuck’s sake!? Why couldn’t you just use a little basic common sense and…LOOKOUT, THE GAYS WANT TO BAN BIBLES AND MARRY EACH OTHER!!!
The American company appointed to advise the US government on the economic reconstruction of Iraq has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican Party coffers and has admitted that its own finances are in chaos because of accounting errors and bad management.
BearingPoint is fighting to restore its reputation in the US after falling more than a year behind in reporting its own financial results, prompting legal actions from its creditors and shareholders.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, BearingPoint employees gave $117,000 (£60,000) to the 2000 and 2004 Bush election campaigns, more than any other Iraq contractor. Other recipients include three prominent Congressmen on the House of Representatives’ defence sub-committee, which oversees defence department contracts.
One of the biggest single contributors to BearingPoint’s in-house political fund was James Horner, who heads the company’s emerging markets business which is working in Iraq and Afghanistan. He donated $5,000 in August 2005.
The company’s shares have collapsed to a third of their value when the firm listed in 2001, and it faces being thrown out of the New York Stock Exchange altogether…
The company is a mess, not because of malfeasance according to the article, but bad management. Yet they were cherry picked to be consultants for creating a new market economy in Iraq. And BearingPoint had the advantage of months of helping the Bush administration write the specifications for the contract they eventually won. Turns out its competitors only had a week to read the specifications and submit their own bids. Nice.
Well, the Iraqis sure got their new market economy didn’t they? Question: how does anyone in their right mind expect a corporation that can only play in the marketplace if the game is rigged, to help another country rebuild their own economy? I know…I know…that’s not the point. The point is that the got the contract, because they knew which palms to grease. In George Bush’s America, that’s savvy business management. The product doesn’t matter, let alone the customer. What matters is the buying and selling of politicians. Remember children, republicans are better at managing the economy then those communist socialist democrats, who hate the free market.
The president goes on TV to shore up support for his plan to escalate the war. But Americans generally want out of the war, which they now realize they were lied into getting involved in. Meanwhile the president is threatening the countries that border our war zone for allowing weapons and fighters to filter across their borders. It must be 1971 and we’re still in Viet Nam, yet somehow I seem a tad older then 17.
Perhaps We’ll Be Able To Sell Our Wedding Rings On eBay
So here I am…watching the auction of a couple of really nice looking original Canon F1s, and two really nice 85mm f1.8 lenses on eBay. The F1 I bought back in 1971, after a summer of working behind the counter at Burger Chef, has only had to visit the repair shop once and is in great shape now, but I worry about what will happen if it ever needs another repair. So I’d like to get another spare F1 body. I love that camera…best 35mm SLR film camera ever made in my opinion…
They made them practically bombproof. Solid overbuilt mechanical guts, alloy frame, solid brass lens focusing helicoids, roller bearings, titanium foil shutter curtains, oversized film pressure plate, and that breach lock bayonet lens mount that never got loose. The thing was a tank compared to the Nikon F it was competing with when it first came out, and yet in operation it was as smooth as silk. Heavy and yet precise in feel. My friends used to call it the Brass Monster. But in almost 30 years of nearly constant use (at one time I’d wanted to become a professional photographer) it never once failed me. It’s been smacked by a horse, slammed by basketballs and players while covering my school sports, knocked down stairs, knocked out of my hands by angry protesters, taken into the bitter freezing cold, and baking hot conditions. I’ve probably run tens of thousand of feet of 35mm film through it. And only once, did it ever need to be taken to the doctor. That was in 2001 and it took them six months to find a part they needed to fix it. They did a great job…the camera came back restored back to absolutely great shape. But immediately afterwords that repair shop announced they would no longer be servicing any Canon FD series cameras.
So I worry what will happen if mine ever needs repairing again. I just don’t want to be without one of these. For my money, this is the perfect 35mm SLR. Simple, elegant, beautiful, over engineered, yet smooth and precise like a fine watch. I never work better then when I have one of these in my hands. And after all this time, that one I bought back when I was a teenager after months of flippng burgers has great sentimental value to me. So there I am prowling around eBay…looking to buy another backup body (I actually have two others, but one of those is more of a parts camera as it is missing a few pieces), and perhaps get a lens I still don’t have.
Mr. Romney’s supporters came armed with lists of friends and, in the case of politicians, their own contributors. A lot of internal planning had gone into the day, so the recipients of calls asking for donations of $2,100, the legal limit, were not surprised. And Mr. Romney was certainly not taking any chances. When it came time for him to make a fund-raising call, piped over the loudspeaker and in front of a crush of cameras, he chose to call his older sister, Lynn Keenan, at her home outside Detroit.
…"I’ve never done anything like this before," said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, in a break from her callers. "I start out by saying: `You won’t believe where I am! I’m at the Boston Convention Center with four or five hundred other people dialing for contributions for Mitt Romney.’ "
Meg is one of Mitt’s regional chairs for his finance committee, and apparently she’s doing a bang-up job for him. According to this link, Meg gives money to, among others, Orrin Hatch and…yes…George Allen. No macacas on her payroll I guess.
There is apparently no way to cancel your eBay account. Once you sign on, you’re in their system for life. In the meantime I’m trying to find a viable email point of contact, just to let them know that I’ll be shopping elsewhere for the time being, and maybe forever if Mitt’s anti-gay same sex marriage amendment succeeds in cutting off the ring fingers of gay people in Massachusetts. I’m probably better off shopping for used camera equipment at a real camera store anyway, like B&H in New York City. I’ve never bought anything from their used camera department that wasn’t in exactly the condition advertised. I can’t say the same about everything I’ve bought on eBay. That parts F1 I have being one example.
When I discuss the Left’s embrace of New Anger with people across the political spectrum, two not very satisfactory explanations keep coming up. One is that the party that is out of power has more to gripe about. Yes, but that doesn’t explain why the Left gravitated to a form of anger that exacerbated its unpopularity. Nor, why the Right, in similar circumstances kept its New Anger aficionados on the margins.
The New Anger. The left gravitiates to it. Even though it makes them unpopular. The right would never do such things…
Fortunately for liberals, the Iraqis executed Saddam Hussein the exact same week that former President Ford died, so it didn’t seem strange that Nancy Pelosi’s flag was at half-staff.
Civility. Why are you liberals so angry? Why can’t you be more civil?
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That’s not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
If you read nothing else this weekend, you should read this article by Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books. Reprinted with permission by Tom Engelhardt on his blog, TomDispatch, it’s the best account I’ve seen yet of how that right wing separate reality that Ron Suskind was writing about in that New York Times Magazine article above, dragged this country into the war in Iraq. Read it if for nothing else, to understand that the people responsible for the worst military debacle in U.S. history are Still living in that fantasyland.
…the War of Imagination draped all the complications and contradictions of the history and politics of a war-torn, brutalized society in an ideologically driven vision of a perfect future. Small wonder that its creators, faced with grim reality, have been so loath to part with it. Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider. And finally, for most Americans, the War of Imagination — built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run" — began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.
Why was there no plan for what to do After Saddam fell? The only figment of a plan existed at the Pentagon, and that was simply to install Ahmad Chalabi and his exiles as the new Iraqi government. But President Junior vetoed that plan as running too Obviously counter to his professed goal of spreading democracy in the region. It just wouldn’t do to be Seen imposing a new set of rulers on the Iraqi people. So plan A was discarded, and they never came up with a plan B.
And if you’re asking why Junior didn’t notice that there was no plan B, you probably weren’t paying attention back when he was running for president in 2000 either. This entire debacle is what happens when you give a pampered jackass who never learned the value of a dollar and never had to fix anything he ever broke, responsibility for something. His entire skill set in 2000 consisted of knowing how to bully people into giving him what he wanted, and getting them to clean up after the messes he made. That’s all there was on his resume, because that’s all he’s ever had to do in his life to get by. And when the republicans on the Supreme Court short circuited the electoral process to get him in, Bush brought his skill set right into the White House with him. That he’s made an unmitigated mess of everything he could get his hands on in the Executive branch since, plus everything he could bully his rubber stamp republican congress into giving him, should surprise no one. There was no plan B for Iraq, not because of overconfidence, but because in Bush’s entire life failure was always someone else’s fault, and someone else’s problem.
Subtract Iraq from the books, and you have a disaster. There’s the wreckage he’s left in the constitutional balance of powers. There’s the wreckage he’s left of the rule of law. There’s the wreckage in the arts and sciences. There’s the wreckage of the City of New Orleans. We Lost A City On His Term. This Thanksgiving nearly one-hundred thousand refugees from an American City were still living in FEMA trailors. There’s the staggering debt he’s piled up in just six years, dispensing favors to cronies. There’s the wreckage of the health care system. And not just domestically. In Africa, the rates of HIV infection have started to rise as a consequence of Bush’s ideological opposition to condom use. And there is the wreckage of the American political landscape. Republican scorched earth politics have made it nearly impossible for Americans to talk with each other across the isle. The cold war has turned inward. Subtract Iraq and you still have a disaster of mind boggling scale. Factor it back in and you have an unmitigated nightmare. And that nightmare will be running its course long after he is out of office.
We are well down the road toward this dark vision, a wave of threatening instability that stands as the precise opposite of the Bush administration’s "democratic tsunami," the wave of liberalizing revolution that American power, through the invasion of Iraq, was to set loose throughout the Middle East. The chances of accomplishing such change within Iraq itself, let alone across the complicated landscape of the entire region, were always very small. Saddam Hussein and the autocracy he ruled were the product of a dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it. Reform of such a politics was always going to be a task of incalculable complexity.
Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope — in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.
How did it come to this? The blame for it cannot rest entirely on Junior’s stooped shoulders alone. It isn’t as though anyone with half a brain couldn’t see him for what he was back in 2000. There’s talk since the election about how Bush fooled a lot of people. Perhaps. But not the majority of those who voted for him. It is worth bearing in mind that the changes that swept through congress and the statehouses last election day, came largely on very thin margins of victory. In the face of one major Bush administration scandal, one disaster after another after another, these voters simply cannot be taken for chumps. No. They know what they’re voting for.
The politics of resentment has a large constituency. The fact that Al Gore was the more qualified candidate in 2000 counted against him with that voting block. His intelligence and wonkish grasp of the issues was like nails on a blackboard to them. They liked Bush precisely for his know-nothing sense of entitlement, his cheapness of spirit, and all his simmering resentments which were theirs too. He was their ideal man, living the good life they’d always dreamed of. A life of power over others, new toys every day, and the canned respect of doting sycophants who always have to smile at you, and do whatever you tell them, and never ever ever tell you that you’re wrong about anything, because you never are, everyone else is.
The support the Bush republicans have today now rests on nothing more profound then a desire to put a thumb in the eye of everyone who can deal with the world as it is, not as they might wish it to be. The more their imaginary world collapses around them, the more they’ll be blaming the reality based community for it. And when the bills come due, the constituency of resentment will blame everyone else for the mess it made, probably including Bush too.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs across the country engaged in retaliatory attacks following coordinated car bombings that killed 215 people in a Shiite slum the previous day.
They’ll say Bush deceived them. He didn’t. He promised them their dreams would come true. They have.
What Would You Do For A Million Dollars? What Would You Do For A Million Votes…?
There’s this ethical question that goes something along the lines of, If someone offered to give you a million dollars to kill some random person, with the certainty that you would get clean away with it…would you do it? There was a time when I would have been shocked to hear people admit that they would.
What I would like to do now is change the terms of the test a little…
If you were running for President of the United States…and someone offered you a million votes in a swing state to kill some completely random person, with complete certainty that your name would never be attached to that murder…would you do it…?
Subject: re: you
From: "P. BELL"
Date: Wed, November 22, 2006 3:39 am
To: pam [at] pamspaulding.com
Why should you get the same privledges as we married couples do? I am not here to judge you. Love the person, hate the sin. But about you and Bush? I pray that law will be passed so you will NEVER be recognized in the US. Your beef will him is because he actually wants us to be more like we were when we first started this country-Chrisitian roots and all. I am not talking about the nutso Chrisitians out there who make a fool of themselves to be seen, I am talking about the people who really have a relationship with God, living the truth.
Did you know that homosexuality is specifically mentioned in the bible? Listed as ABNORMAL, DISCUSTING, and an ABOMANATION. You were not created to be this way, and so when you SLANDER a person who is againist you, mock their beliefs, and try to screw up this nation even more than it is for my children’s future, than you will deal with me.
I am not talking about the nutso Christians… You know this is only going to get worse, now that their White House messiah has lost his rubber stamp congress. And never mind the nutso Christians. Take a long hard look at how Mitt Romney and John McCain are belly flopping into the fundamentalist gutter now that the next presidential election cycle is closing in on us.
The problem the republicans face is that their policies are just not popular. Make the rich, richer…make the poor and middle-class poorer…rape the environment…curtail civil liberties…war, war and more war… There is no majority in America for any of that. So for the past few decades the republicans have been cobbling together a rough coalition of faux libertarians, fascists, Me-First Americans and bigots and with the ascendancy of George Bush, it’s won them elections…barely. Corruption and wild deficit spending cost them enough of the faux libertarians and the Me-Firsts that they lost last time. But make no mistake: the religious right and the rest of the bigot vote stuck with them. They lost the voters who finally got fed up with the spending and the corruption and the war. They loose the bigot vote now, and they’re done for decades to come and they know it.
The point being…don’t assume that as the Gay Bogyman looses it’s power to sway the independent voters that the republicans will stop using it. They can’t take even a middle ground position on gay rights, without loosing the bigot vote.
So republicans running for president in the coming years are going to fall all over themselves in the coming election to prove that they’re bigger gay bashers then the other guys. And in the process, they are going to deliberately rouse the passions of the mob. Because that mob is a vital part of their political base. Even long after it stops winning them elections. Because there is loosing, and there is having the bottom fall out. So they will keep inciting the mob.
And somewhere right here in America, some random gay people are going to die for the sake of giving those campaigning politicians some extra votes they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten. Think about that, the next time you hear one of them talk about Morals, and Values and God and Country.
Next time some republican half-wit starts yapping at you about how Militiant Homosexual activists and Liberal Activist Judges hate the democratic process because they don’t want the voters to decide the issue of same sex marriage…laugh in their face.
Laura Ingraham has asked her listeners to call the Dem Voter protection hotline — and they are now being flooded with calls from crank callers. Please call Laura and tell her what you think about this: 800.876.4123. You can e-mail her here. Apparently, voter intimidation and fraud are a joke to Laura Ingraham. Let’s let her know that it is no joke […]
More on Laura Ingraham: "caller indicated she is running a tape of Bill Clinton over and over saying "call 1-888 Dem Vote to report problems" — and then making fun of him, thus producing a spike in crank calls to the number" Protecting voter integrity is no joke. And I am not laughing. If anyone has audio of this, I’d love it.
The headquarters for Jay Fawcett’s campaign for Colorado’s 5th Congressional District was vandalized overnight and a death threat – the third such threat – was also emailed to Fawcett. Both incidents have been reported to the police.
As voters headed to the polls, Fawcett campaign volunteers arriving at campaign offices were greeted with a vile "Skunk" aroma, making it virtually impossible to conduct work there. The campaign is expecting more than 200 people to come through the offices today to help with Get Out The Vote and Poll Watching efforts.
"Don’t let these hooligans deter you from exercising your Constitutional right to vote," said Fawcett. "It’s time to take a stand against these attacks."
This is the second time the Fawcett Campaign has been vandalized. Last Tuesday the Campaign Finance Director’s car was covered in the skunk smell, while parked out front of the El Paso County Republican Office.
"I find it disgusting that, as we are fighting for Democracy in Iraq, people are besmirching Democracy here in Colorado Springs," said Fawcett Campaign Manager Wanda James. "Death threats and childish illegal activities will not deter us from getting out the vote to victory today."
Bush republicans. They love America. Really. It’s just democracy they hate.
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