I doubt that even Barack Obama can save us from our anger now. That’s because the anger that lately pervades our politics is more than just an after effect of six years of Democratic setbacks (although the strikingly angry Democratic response to their six bad years does call for an explanation).
An explaination…did you say? Well…how about this one…
You should go read the rest of Digby’s post. Digby says of the Kurtz review that, "It’s fascinating because it once again illustrates the degree to which conservatives have absolutely no self-awareness", but I don’t think it’s a lack of self awareness so much as a lack of conscience. When they kick people in the teeth, conservatives don’t see that as anything less then their god given right as superior beings. The role of all the rest of us lesser beings is to just stand there and passively take it because…well…they have a god given right to dish it out to us and if we object, we’re the ones being mean. To them. And of course, if we decide to dish it right back then we are being positively uncivil.
Speaking of which…have you noticed how the word, "civility" has become some kind of watchword recently? Civility. Civility. The news media has suddenly discovered that it is important for us to be civil. Now that the democrats are back in power. Goodness knows it wasn’t important when people like the lady in the photo above were in power. Goodness knows it wasn’t important back when Rush Limbaugh was playing "It’s Raining Men" right after news broke that a New York Times reporter had committed suicide by jumping out an office window. Goodness knows it wasn’t important when Ann Coulter said the only problem she has with Timothy McVeigh is that he didn’t go to the New York Times building. Now that democrats are back in power, the news media that treated Limbaugh and Coulter like elder statesmen have suddenly discovered that incivility is a bad thing. Gosh.
Digby reminds us about the little list of words the father of the new incivility, Newt Gingrich made for republicans to use every time they talked about democrats…
He became famous (with some help from his cohorts) for being a manipulative, vicious asshole and the lesson was well learned. He went on to create a lexicon of derision, used by Republicans everywhere, to describe Democrats and liberals. He called these words "contrast":
Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
I realize it is churlish of us liberals to attempt to defend ourselves from this kind of bad faith and even worse for us to lose our Gary Cooper cool. But, you know, when you push people far enough and hard enough they start to fight for their survival. The level of vitriol and hate emanating from the right — and encouraged by Republicans leaders of all stripes — has been overwhelming. These past twelve years alone have been characterized by smears, toxic rhetoric, impeachments, abuse of power, stolen elections, power mad governance, corruption and ineptitude. So yes, we’re angry — but more importantly, we are fearful for our country.
Until Republicans admit what they have wrought and recognize that their trash talking and boot-to-the-throat mode of fetid politics are responsible for our state today, then for the good of the country, I hope the left remains angry and battles them back with everything they’ve got.
This is ugly, I admit. But the country just can’t take another couple of decades of Republican politics and Republican rule. We have to stop it — and it won’t be stopped if Democrats play nice.
No. It won’t. I say this over and over again but it’s true: we’re in a knife fight with these people. You either fight back to win, or you just stand there and let them laugh in your face and kick your balls, because that’s just what they’ll do, and keep doing, even after you’ve curled up in the fetal position. They don’t care. They hate you. They hate you with a passion that your gay and lesbian neighbors have seen first hand for decades now. Digby’s right. Until the republicans are held accountable for the past couple decades of vitriol and hate they’ve been spewing into the political well all that this newly discovered concern about the level of incivility amounts to, is just another way of keeping us passive while they get to keep kicking everyone they despise in the face. It won’t stop until they’re held accountable.
When Bush got all snippy with Jim Webb, George Will distorted the quote precisely to highlight Webb’s supposed lack of deference.
All the Beltway 500 code words—Civil, Dignified, Ungracious—for trashing Democrats and preventing them from saying what needs to be said have to do with Republicans reinforcing this fundamental aristocratic value of deference.
It’s the same deal with Civil, Moderate, and Bipartisan are also code words for reinforcing deference.
That’s why it’s important to mock, belittle, insult, degrade and make Republicans laughable at all times and in all conditions. These are all tools for eliminating deference from our political discourse.
Naturally, when we do this, the Beltway 500 clutches its pearls and calls us Shrill or Rude. That’s a good sign: It means we’re displaying the lack of deference appropriate a Democracy.
I think the single most sickening example of this phenomenon was the mewling and puking on the part of the Washington establishment over the revelation of an extra-marital affair by one who never understood how to behave in the company of his betters. The way they told it, Washington DC is just like Bedford Falls,Zuzu’s petals and all, upholding the values of mom and pop and McDonalds 2-for-1 apple pies — an aristocracy of small town kids who just happen to be millionaire insiders in the capital of the most powerful nation on earth.
I’m going to publish a long excerpt of the following article, because I’m not sure there is anything in the American media that better illuminates the phony sanctimony and the sickening hypocrisy of the political ruling class. You will note that the author says quite explicitly that the nation does not share the superior values of their betters.
You should go read it…it’s a Sally Quinn column in the Washington Post of November 2, 1998, and it’s frangrant with all the rancid pretenses of the inside the beltway chattering class. Digby makes mincemeat of it. I wish I was this good:
Dear Me! These mandarins and court scribes, these lords and ladies of the beltway, took great umbrage at Bill Clinton’s lack of deference to their completely phony bourgoise pretensions, and that simply was not done. So they crucified him.
Meanwhile, the very well bred cretinous moron who currently occupies the White House behaves like a disgusting pig in foreign capitals and is reputed to enjoy "fart" jokes in the oval office and has never been similarly derided for his uncouth ways. One can only speculate why that might be so.
And all these bluenosed hypocrites who excoriated Clinton for his lie ("I will not be lied to!") about a personal matter and complain that the office lost its moral authority, seem not to be personally exercized about the repeated, endless lies of the Bush administration that landed us in the most unnecessary, intractable foreign policy crisis in the nation’s history. Broder and his snuff-snorting fellow courtiers aren’t nattering on about how Junior "trashed the place." But then the only place he’s trashed is the United States of America, where the silly peasants live — and Iraq which is filled with a bunch of dirty foreigners. In the nation’s capital everyone is perfectly happy because as far as they are concerned, the "right" people are in charge. And that’s all that matters.
Some of us may recall they did the same thing to Carter. There was a time I wouldn’t have credited the hostility toward democrats by the beltway gasbags as something driven primarily by notions of class, but more by politics, and specifically, the after effects of the Reagan era morality of greed. Democrats were bleeding heart brie feeding effete wusses. The future belongs to the muscular capitalists who don’t give a good goddamn about anything but the bottom line. But Bush has been a miserable failure at everything he ever put his hand to, and the cronyism and corruption of his administration is something that even Grant’s ghost can laugh at, and now I understand a little better the tribalism going on here. This isn’t about greed, so much as how blue your blood is. The smirking spoiled rich man’s brat who gets cranky whenever he’s contradicted gets deference from the Washington pundocracy that no democrat ever would, because he’s got the right pedigree. It isn’t money that matters, it’s how old the money is.
We peasents are obliged to be respectful. It is not our place to point out that the king is a blathering idiot.
This isn’t so much about Microsoft and Zune, as about the news media. But…look at this. In the morning I sit down at my computer and call up google news. It’s a really nice headline service. And what do I see? A bunch of headlines screaming at me that Microsoft’s Zune player has already taken second place in the compact digital music player race. Gosh.
And it’s only been out for a few days. So maybe Microsoft’s legendary (and occasionally illegal) marketing power, would succeed once more over it’s legendary technological incoherence.
During the time period in question…the iPod had about 68 percent of the market share, and Zune, at second place, had 9. In other words, Zune is the top dog in the category of "other". Which isn’t hard to fathom, given all the hype that preceded it.
Meanwhile…the other story about Zune that we’re not hearing more about…
Remember that deal Bill made with Universal Music? Yeah. Part of the game for Bill may simply have been to use the RIAA as a tool to cut into Steve’s iPod profits. But that isn’t likely the entire game. Zune doesn’t have to be a money maker for Microsoft in order to succeed. It doesn’t even have to have market share. All it has to do, is kill the ability of Microsoft’s competitors to set the course of this technology as it develops. Zune doesn’t have to be king of the player market, as long as every player in that market, eventually comes to depend on Microsoft technology in order to work…
Microsoft’s handling of the whole "Plays for Sure" initiative can only be described as a fiasco in the wake of the Zune music player launch. The Zune uses its own software to manage songs and has no integration with the "Plays for Sure" ecosystem of DRMed music, so customers who purchased songs from PfS online music stores (including the URGE online store integrated into Windows Media Player 11) are unable to use them with the new Zune.
However, according to Michael Gartenberg at JupiterResearch, songs purchased from the Zune online store will actually play on many Plays for Sure devices. It seems as if the Zune player will only play WMA-DRM songs specifically tagged by the Zune online store, but other PfS players only look to see if the song is in the WMA-DRM format and don’t bother checking to see if it is a "Zune" song or not.
You shake hands with Microsoft and you need to count your fingers afterwords. But look at this. Now Bill has a nascent eco-system of playback devices out there, and a few online music stores, that all depend on his technology. And he’s the only one so far offering the kind of deal the big music companies want. The more of that Bill gets out there, the harder it is for Apple, or anyone else, to stand on their own. Remember two things about Microsoft: They’re not a hardware company, and Bill’s primary skill set isn’t his grasp of technology. It’s that he’s a thousand percent more devious and cutthroat then anyone else in America since Rockefeller made his oil empire.
If they get away with it, then in the future there will be both an RIAA tax and a Microsoft tax on every music player sold in America. Including the iPod if the big music companies decide that Plays For Sure, or some Microsoft technology, is the only way they’ll allow their music to be sold. Even the iPod may someday have a little bit of Zune inside of it. And Zune itself could be long gone. People will laugh at how foolish Microsoft was, to produce that piece of junk.
Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do.
What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.
That’s part of it. But more then that, there’s the issue of trust. You really have to regard someone who can passively record whatever in-your-face bullshit a given white house operative wants to dispense at them, and not raise a single squeak of doubt as to the truth or falseness of it, as a fellow participant in the Bush assault on our democracy. If you keep your mouth shut in the face of bullshit, then you’re not a neutral observer. The stenography of lies only makes you a liar too. But it’s even worse then that…you’re helping them bullshit the public. And democracy can’t work if the voters don’t know what the fuck is really going on! A truly neutral observer calls the facts as they find them. They don’t help bullshitters hide the facts, by keeping their mouths shut when they can plainly see a lie for what it is.
I’m not sure why calling bullshit has gone out of vogue in so many newsrooms — why, in fact, it’s so often consciously avoided. There are lots of possible reasons. There’s the increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.
There’s the fantastic salaries of the top network news talking heads, and other celebrity "journalists" and pundits. But you can’t live the cushy life if your business is disturbing power. You have to understand that, going into it. I think most of them just want the fame, and the glory, and most of all, the money…
As it turns out, “regular Joe” Thomas Friedman, who so frequently advocates economic policies with little regard to their impact on working Americans, is among the wealthiest human beings on the planet.
As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club.” He “married into one of the 100 richest families in the country” – the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.
Let’s be clear – I’m a capitalist, so I have no problem with people doing well or living well, even Tom Friedman. That said, this does potentially explain an ENORMOUS amount about Friedman’s perspective. Far from the objective, regular-guy interpreter of globalization that the D.C. media portrays him to be, Friedman is a member of the elite of the economic elite on the planet Earth. In fact, he’s married into such a giant fortune, it’s probably more relevant to refer to him as Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman than columnist Tom Friedman, both because that’s more descriptive of what he represents, and more important for readers of his work to know so that they know a bit about where he’s coming from.
Mind you, I don’t think everyone needs to publish their net worth. But Friedman’s not everyone. He’s not just “doing pretty well” and is not just any old columnist. He’s not just a millionaire or a multimillionaire – he’s member of one of the wealthiest families in the world, and is one of the most influential media voices on the planet, who writes specifically about economic/class issues. If politicians are forced to disclose every last asset they own, you’d think at the very least, the New York Times – in the interest of basic disclosure – should have a tagline under Friedman’s economic columns that says “Tom Friedman is an heir to a multi-billion-dollar business empire.”
Again, there’s positively nothing wrong with people being rich in general, or Tom Friedman being a billionaire scion in specific. The problem is that so few of his readers know this, even as he aggressively uses his platform to justify policies that almost exclusively benefit his super-wealthy brethren – all under the guise of supposed objectivity.
Then again, the fact that we know so little about who is actually making opinion in this country isn’t surprising. Even looking at this kind of information as it relates to the most important opinionmaker in the world is looked down upon by Washington insiders/elites/politicians. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson from “A Few Good Men,” deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties, they want billionaires like Friedman dictating the debate because they need someone creating public rationales for policies that enrich Big Money interests, sell out America and guarantee the next fat campaign contribution.
It isn’t merely that the mainstream news media has been bought out by corporate interests. It’s that the most widely read and listened to journalists these days are vastly more wealthy then even an average upper middle class American, let alone a two-job a week just to meet the bills working stiff. People that rich, might as well be living on another planet. You need to realize this, when you’re reading their opinions about things like, oh, the minimum wage, or college tuition, or the cost of living, or unions, or public education, or the rights of minorities…let alone their opinions about taking America to war. You can damn well figure none of their kids will have to pick up a gun in a fire fight in some distant land, let alone themselves.
The big names in the mainstream news media are so damn wealthy, their interests and the interests of the big corporations that give them a pulpit are just about one and the same anyway…no need to pressure them to take a particular stance on an issue.
WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.
The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. received a copy of the report "indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public," according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.
… Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that "every last piece" of the report be destroyed. "The whole project was just stopped – end of discussion," he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC’s Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.
In a letter sent to Martin Wednesday, Boxer said she was "dismayed that this report, which was done at taxpayer expense more than two years ago, and which concluded that localism is beneficial to the public, was shoved in a drawer."
Martin said he was not aware of the existence of the report, nor was his staff. His office indicated it had not received Boxer’s letter as of midafternoon Thursday. In the letter, Boxer asked whether any other commissioners "past or present" knew of the report’s existence and why it was never made public. She also asked whether it was "shelved because the outcome was not to the liking of some of the commissioners and/or any outside powerful interests?"
The report, written by two economists in the FCC’s Media Bureau, analyzed a database of 4,078 individual news stories broadcast in 1998. The broadcasts were obtained from Danilo Yanich, a professor and researcher at the University of Delaware, and were originally gathered by the Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The analysis showed local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of "on-location" news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market. It was part of a broader decision liberalizing ownership rules.
At that time, the agency pointed to evidence that "commonly owned television stations are more likely to carry local news than other stations."
And you just know that evidence was skewed to fit a pre-ordained ideological belief as opposed to any actual examination of the facts at hand. So when someone later on Did examine the evidence and saw what really happens when you let big media companies monopolize the local airwaves, that evidence was thoroughly destroyed. It wasn’t true, because it didn’t agree with the party line. It had to be destroyed. They probably danced in the paper shreds afterward.
Big corporate media monopolization is the single biggest reason why tv and radio are so worthless nowadays. Thank god for the Internet. And now that I think of it, that might be why the big media companies and news networks hate Al Gore so much.
TPMmuckraker September 12, 2006 02:46 PM: WPost Taps White House War Salesman for Op-Ed Spot: The big story in the New York Times’ Sept. 8, 2002 edition was headlined, "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." That infamous article, by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, told the now-debunked tales of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, through the voices of lying Iraqi defectors and anonymous quotes by Bush administration officials. Most folks who read it probably can’t recall the details of the article. But few have forgotten one comment from an unnamed "hard-liner" administration official, paraphrased by the reporters:
The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.
It was memorable then for being such a clever and powerful turn of phrase. It’s memorable now because we know it was baseless — yet oft-repeated. And it’s important to remember at this moment because the man who wrote it, Michael Gerson, just got himself a regular column in the Washington Post.
With no apparent sense of irony, the Post announced on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that Gerson — one of the men who worked hardest to dishonestly connect al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein in the public mind, and launch an invasion of Iraq based on the horrible events of that day — will join its op-ed team.
In the release publicizing its selection, Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt calls Gerson "an eloquent writer and provocative thinker." Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Take, for example, this eloquent and provocative line from Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own." (We know now, of course, that’s not the case.)
Yep, that was Gerson’s. He was, in fact, the only speechwriter in the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), created to sell the idea of invading Iraq to the U.S. public. He was responsible for nearly every misleading statement that came out of the administration — at least the ones that sounded good…
What is more despicable…a totalitarian state that shuts down the free press, or a free press that sells its country out to totalitarians?
What will it say about President Clinton? Here’s Rush Limbaugh with a preview:
A friend of mine [Cyrus Nowrasteh] out in California has produced and filmed — I think it’s a two-part mini-series on 9/11 that ABC is going to run in prime-time over two nights, close to or on 9/11. It’s sort of surprising that ABC’s picked it up, to me. I’ve had a lot of people tell me about it, my friends told me about it…And from what I have been told, the film really zeros in on the shortcomings of the Clinton administration in doing anything about militant Islamofascism or terrorism during its administration. It cites failures of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Sandy Burglar.
Condoleezza Rice gets that fated memo about planes flying into buildings, and makes it very clear to anyone who’ll listen just how concerned President Bush is about these terrorist threats — despite the fact that we’re given little concrete evidence of the president’s concern or interest in taking action. Maybe my memory fails me, but the only person I remember talking about Osama bin Laden back in 1998 was President Clinton, while the current anti-terrorist stalwarts worked the country into a frenzy over what? Blow jobs. In the end, “The Path to 9/11″ feels like an excruciatingly long, winding and deceptive path, indeed.
ABC’s drama will purportedly conflate separate incidents into a single fictional account that gives the impression that U.S. operatives were literally standing outside Bin Ladin’s compound ready to go and Clinton refused to give the order. Allegedly, the television program will even depict a make-believe phone call in which Sandy Berger tells field agents that if they go after Bin Ladin, they’ll have to do it without the support of the U.S. Government.
This warped account is pure wing-nut fantasy. It’s both fictional and irresponsibly untrue. But is it even truthy?
Richard Clarke, a terrorism expert who served under Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and George W. Bush, refutes this claim utterly. Clarke does describe an incident in which Clinton hesitates on a question of international law until Al Gore persuades him to be more aggressive. But Clarke maintains that at no time was Clinton ever given an opportunity to capture Osama Bin Ladin that he failed to give the go order.
And if Richard Clarke’s testimony isn’t good enough for you, the 9/11 Commission itself discredits the claim that Clinton ever refused an offer of Osama bin Ladin on a silver platter.
So much for being based on the 9-11 commission report…
What we do know is that after Osama Bin Ladin bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Bill Clinton personally ordered simultaneous military strike camps in Afghanistan, and was roundly criticized by Republicans for "Wagging the Dog" to distract from his Monica Lewinsky scandal.
We also know that President Clinton sent strong Memoranda to the CIA reiterating that they were authorized to use tribal assets or other means to hunt down Osama Bin Ladin, and kill him if necessary. And we know that President Clinton personally negotiated with the leader of Pakistan and secured a joint plan to capture Bin Ladin – plans that evaporated when Mr. Sharif was violently overthrown by General Pervez Musharraf.
We also know that President Clinton demanded daily intelligence reports about Bin Ladin after 1998 and that his administration successfully thwarted a Millenium Attack – with connections to what we would eventually understand to be Al Qaeda – by arresting an Algerian Jihadist smuggling a load of explosives into the U.S.
And finally, we also know that when the Bush Administration transitioned into power, they did not agree with Clinton officials that terrorism should be the major priority of their administration until after September 11, 2001.
Bear in mind, ABC is the same network that tried its level best to whitewash the murder of Matthew Shepard back in November of 2004. it deliberately and despicably planted in the national discourse on gay bashing, calculated anti-gay propaganda that Shepard was a meth addict and his murder was the result of a drug deal gone bad. The religious right had been yapping since before the poor kid’s body was cold that he must have brought it on himself somehow, in some way, because after all he was a homosexual. Whenever anyone made the obvious link between religious right hate mongering and Shepard’s murder, they fell over themselves trying to smear that poor kid even more. He was a sexual predator they said. He was a prostitute they said. He was a drug addict who liked dangerous sex they said. Until ABC News gave their smears the respectability of a mainstream news network, nobody beyond the kook pews took them seriously.
But ABC News knew that calling Matthew Shepard a meth addict who may even have had a sexual relationship with one of his killers wasn’t merely a right wing obscenity. It was…controversial. And that meant ratings. So they did it. Less then four months later, in Santa Fe New Mexico, a young gay man, James Maestas was beaten so badly by his three attackers, his lungs were burned by his own stomach acid.
Now ABC News will, in a few days, give another bitter America hating right wing fantasy wings. And its of a piece with little they care anymore about the lives of common average everyday Americans. Instead of holding the Bush gang accountable for how badly they’ve damaged America’s ability to defend itself, they’re going to help it pass the buck, and never mind that isn’t going to make Americans one whit safer from terrorism. They didn’t smear a dead gay college student to draw attention to anti-gay violence. They did it for the money. And that’s where the fascist right, and the network executives shake hands.
So for some god forsaken reason I was watching the network news last night. Oh…right…I know what it was. I was watching for stories about that escaped convict that killed two people down in southern Virginia. First of all I have family down there, but secondly the crime itself seemed just dumbfoundingly stupid. Stupid beyond stupid being its own excuse. Here’s this…kid, basically…who was in jail for attempted armed robbery, and he tries to escape and in the process kills two people and now he’s facing a death sentence. Far as I could tell it was his first arrest so there was no "three strikes" kind of thing going on there. What kind of drooling moron turns a few years in prison into an appointment with the gas chamber? Making an escape attempt if the opportunity just threw itself at you I could see (it’s still dumb, but not catastrophically dumb), but when the guns come out, hey, just go quietly man. It’s just attempted armed robbery. Just do the fucking time and deal with it. But no…and now he’s 24 and headed for death row. So I was searching for any insight into this guy I could snatch from the news stream. That’s why I happened to be watching CBS News last night…
…and among the stories Bob Schieffer read to me was a little nugget about the Jose Padilla case. Padilla, you may recall, had been in a South Carolina brig for over three years as an ”enemy combatant”…an American citizen accused but never charged in the Bush administration way of doing things, of planning to set off a ”dirty bomb” somewhere in the U.S. Padilla is one of the guys the Bush administration has been holding out as a reason for doing away with that troublesome bill of rights that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and liberals. But rather then loose a fight over it in the supreme court before he could pack it with enough right wing lunatics who were willing to declare Bush King George The First, the Bush administration finally brought Padilla into court. Schieffer casually informed me last night that the judge had thrown out one of the three counts against him. And as I was busy searching for news about the Virginia killings, I casually shrugged off the story just as Schieffer did while he was reading it.
MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — A federal judge in Miami on Monday dismissed a terror count against Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen once identified as a "dirty bomb" suspect and detained as an "enemy combatant."
U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said in a written opinion that the charge — conspiracy to "murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country" — duplicated other counts in a federal grand jury indictment handed down last year.
"An indictment is multiplicitous when it charges a single offense multiple times, in separate counts," Cooke wrote. As charged, she added, the indictment exposes Padilla and his co-defendants to multiple punishments for a single crime.
The indictment, Cooke noted, "alleges one and only one conspiracy" and that the same facts are "re-alleged in each of the consecutive counts."
Cooke also ruled that a second count against Padilla and his co-defendants was "duplicitous" — charging them with the same offense under two sections of federal law. She ordered the government to choose between the two counts, which provide for different penalties, by Friday.
The counts in question are conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, and providing material support to terrorists.
The main terror charge against him was thrown out. Not just …one out of three. And…in case you haven’t been following this…remember that the accusation the Bush gang had been throwing around, that he was plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the U.S., was never even part of the indictment. So now it’s just two charges of conspiracy to support terrorists abroad, and get this, the charges are that he was involved in a plot for five years, and the other charge is that he was involved in Exactly The Same Plot, for 15 years.
What the fuck? I’m shocked that the Bush gang didn’t manage to find fifteen squared charges in that fifteen years of plotting to…er…support terrorists abroad. Count one: Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for one year. Count two: Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for two years. Count three: Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for one year, and then again for one year more. And so on until you get fifteen times fifteen counts against him that you can wave around as proof that the president needs more power then the constitution gives him, because these are very dangerous times. What the judge said was, no…that’s all just one conspiracy.
I discovered what the implications of the ruling were not from CBS News, but via Americablog, which had a link to a Miami Herald article that gave me the details CBS News didn’t feel like I needed to have, and once again I hit the roof. I hate those bastards. I really hate them. I used to watch the evening network news avidly. I grew up watching Walter Cronkite, and Huntley and Brinkley. Maybe it was just living in the Washington D.C. suburbs. Maybe it was just the hungry curious about the world mind I always had. But I had to have my news fix every day after dinner, even when I was an elementary school kid, and anxious to watch Astro Boy too when the news was over. And now I can’t really bear to watch TV news anymore. Why even bother, when I have to double check everything I hear them tell me anyway?
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