Reputations

How long will the Times stake theirs on Judy 'Da Fluffa' Miller? Steve Gillard has an excellent treatise on what is happening, and will undoubtedly happen, to the Gray Lady's rep.

[. . .]

The staff of the New York Times is so frustrated at Miller and her bosses defense of her, they ran to Howie Kurtz to rat her out. At their rival newspaper. Normally, people would have closed ranks. Her collegues are after like she's fucking Frankenstein and they have torch and pitchfork licenses.

[. . .]

Et tu, Maggie?

[. . .]

Although Lady Thatcher remains a strong supporter of the decision to topple Saddam by invading Iraq, it is the first time she has questioned the basis for the war. Yesterday's Washington Post reported that when asked whether she would have invaded Iraq given the intelligence at the time, Lady Thatcher replied: "I was a scientist before I was a politician. And as a scientist I know you need facts, evidence and proof - and then you check, recheck and check again." [my em; Link]

[. . .]

In other words, 'how can you be so fucking stupid not to cover your tracks, you idiots'? I also think it was a slap at the unIntelligent Design idiots in the States.

Great thanks to TBogg for the link.

Friday Cattle Dog Blogging

Princess Shayna says she's tired of the rain that's been inundating the NY Metro Area for the past week. "This weather isn't fit for a dog," she was heard to say.

Quote of the Day

Spudnik:

Again, I say Wow. Bush is crumbling like a slice of Apple Brown Betty.

Enjoy the crash, Republicans. Bed. Made. Lie.

Talk dirty to me...

MSNBC

A Texas prosecutor subpoenaed telephone records for the home phone of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and his political campaign Thursday.

The subpoenas list telephone numbers, but not whom they belong to. They ask for information about the calls, voice mail service at the numbers and long distance calls made from or charged to the numbers.

Hopefully, this will turn up some good conspiratorial dirt evidence against DeLay, but the dirty-ol'-man side of me wants to know about the 900 numbers.

Like the popular country song says, "He drinks tequila, and she talks dirty in Spanish". If only!

How the Republicans Let It Slip Away

Another in today's "Republicans are going down the shitter" series, by David Ignatius.

What's interesting is that most of these wounds are self-inflicted. They draw a picture of a party that, for all its seeming dominance, isn't prepared to be the nation's governing party. The hard right, which is the soul of the modern GOP, would rather be ideologically pure than successful. Governing requires making compromises and getting your hands dirty, but the conservative purists disdain those qualities. They swim for that beach with a fiercely misguided determination, and they demand that the other whales accompany them.

What you sense now, as conservative and moderate Republicans alike take potshots at their president, is that the GOP is entering the post-Bush era. A war of succession has begun, cloaked in a war of principles. The cruelest aspect of Bush's predicament is that the conservatives are treating him with the same disdain they showed his father. What a denouement to the West Wing Oedipal drama: A son who did everything he could to avoid his father's humiliation by the conservative wing of the party is now under attack by the right himself.

Principles are a fine thing, but a narrow, partisan definition of principle has led the Republicans to a dead end. Their inability to transcend their base and speak to the country as a whole is now painfully obvious. Like the Democrats in their years of decline, they are screaming at each other -- not realizing how far they have drifted from the mid-channel markers that have always led to open waters and defined success in American politics.

Note to Republicans: If you really want to enter the "Post-Bush" era, GET RID OF THE SON OF A BITCH. You can come up later with some verbiage that'll make you out to be the fuckin' heroes that saved America. We'll believe you. Yeah, right.

In the dumper

Heh, the Chimp's approval ratings are down to 39%. From the Alternate Brain Mailbag, Think Progress has another statistic:

...A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that just 2 percent of African-Americans approve of his leadership...

What I wanna know is how all these black preachers who sold their souls to Bush can face their congregations now?

Update:

Pam elaborates on this as well.

Conservative Crackup

Howard Fineman

President George W. Bush may have no military exit strategy for Iraq, but the "necons" who convinced him to go to war there have developed one of their own - a political one: Blame the Administration.

Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.

The flight of the neocons - just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about - is one of only many indications that the long-predicted "conservative crackup" is at hand.

The "movement" - that began 50 years ago with the founding of Bill Buckley's National Review; that had its coming of age in the Reagan Years; that reached its zenith with Bush's victory in 2000 - is falling apart at the seams.

'Bout fuckin' time, too. Go read the rest. Trust me (where have I heard that before?), you'll like it.

10 Pledges to Demand from Democrats

I'm more than a little leery about anything that even sounds like it resembles a "Contract with America" after the last time, given that politicians will sign anything that sounds good even though they know nobody will hold them accountable so they don't have to live up to it. This one from AlterNet sounds good anyway.

You hear it every day in Washington: "Democrats have no ideas, no programs, no deeply held beliefs, no lines in the sand they will not cross." The only discernible passion Democrats display is a passion to be in power again. But in power to do what? You tell me. I have no friggin idea, and I deeply suspect neither do they.

That's why we need to force them to sign a contract with us this time. To put it bluntly, we don't trust them any longer. They've double-crossed at every major moment -- on war, on taxes, on the environment, on health care. They took or votes and our hopes and bargained them away to the enemy for the political equivalent of nylons, smokes and chocolate bars.

So I took the points Bob listed in his article, "embellished" them and put them into the form of 10 contractual pledges Democrat candidates can and should embrace.

Read the rest Below the Fold.

What more to say?

Norbizness:

[. . .]

Reading this account of a conference call with rat-faced, chinless GOP shill Ken Mehlman, it occurs to me that a miraculous thing has happened: apparently, not nominating a firebreathing lunatic who explicitly vows to overturn Roe v. Wade and roll back most New Deal legislation has caused rank-and-file conservatives to begin to doubt the word and/or judgment of the President (by the way, have fun battling the crazies like James Dobson and Pat Robertson on this one).

Congratulations, it only took y'all about 4.75 years of wanton fiscal management, cronyism, broken promises, infantile happy-talk about foreign policy, multiple scandals involving members of the White House and Republican leadership, failure to utilize the veto, deepening debt, rampant corporate welfare, and unfulfilling lip service to your pet prejudices to drive that particular point home. Sorry you're abandoning a rotten, derelict ship of state at such a late point in time; most of us abandoned any hope of a financially sound country operating in any sane manner years ago.

[. . .]

All I can add is, in the future I hope people will use the 'Bush Era' as a lesson about how bad things can get when incompetents and crooks rule the roost. Unfortunately, I think it will get worse before it gets better. Desperate men resort to desperate measures, and I'm getting a whiff of desperation on the wind blowing north from D.C.

Statistics

WASHINGTON - The National Guard and Reserves are suffering a strikingly higher share of U.S. casualties in Iraq, their portion of total American military deaths nearly doubling since last year.

[. . .]

At least when I was in, everybody acknowleged the Guard and Reserves were the red-headed stepchildren of the active-duty military. They get hand me down equipment from the regulars and less training. Not taking anything away from them at all.

I remember, a little over 20 years ago, the Air Force ran airfield security excercises for their Security Police and Mobile Aerial Port people. 11th Special Forces (U.S. Army) was the OPFOR (opposing force). I was attached to 59th APS at the time. A bunch of Reservists, 11th had us chasing them for a week, always a step ahead of us. They inflicted quite a bit of 'damage' on our position too. (Mostly our commander's fault in the way he deployed his assets.) Great troops. I'll never say anything bad about part-time soldiers.

But isn't it the time, since we're using them in the same capacity as active duty troops, to give them front-line equipment and training? Whether the Pentagon admits it or not, the Guard and Reserves are still being shortchanged and it's showing up in their increased casualty count.

Were the leadership not so incompetent, disregarding for a minute the fallacy of the war in Iraq to begin with, they would realize active duty troops and part-time soldiers are not interchangable and would not use them as game pieces of equal value. It is one of the underlying fundamental problems with our straetgy in Iraq.

Jo Fish, from whom I stole the link, has more to say on the subject as well.

Interesting

Via thinks up an intersting scenario.

Pushing back

Never fuck with the Agency:

WASHINGTON - A newly released report published by the CIA rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq.

Policymakers worried more about making the case for the war, particularly the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, than planning for the aftermath, the report says. The report was written by a team of four former CIA analysts led by former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr.

[. . .]

Out one of our operators? Blame us for the WMD bullshit in Iraq? Oh no, fuck you!

Hat tip: Chris T

A little military humor

After reading Fixer's post about Air Force Weenies and some lively comments thereon, I saw this in a book I'm reading, "Ambush Alley", about the 1stBn,2d Marines' fight in Nasiriya on the heels of Pvt. Lynch's capture.

In the ever-friendly spirit of Inter-service Rivalry, here goes:

"Three high-school friends meet up for a camping holiday a few months after they have joined up. The one who was in the Air Force says:

"Boot Camp was horrible. They ran out of Diet Coke in the soda fountain.

"The one from the Army says:

"That's nothing. They made me sleep outside and it rained on me.

"The one from the Marine Corps says nothing. He carries on lighting the fire with nothing but his dick."

If the Marine Corps taught me nothing else, to this day I know how to ring a doorbell with my arms full!

Raucous laughter

That must be what's happening in Damascus right now:

[. . .]

Bush also repeated U.S. warnings to Syria that it should do more to stop foreign fighters from crossing its border into Iraq.

[. . .]

Yo, Dicknose, you don't have the troops to warn Syria about anything. You're barely keeping Iraq together.

[. . .]

Bush underscored warnings given last month to Syria by Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who said "patience is running out with Syria" for failing to stop foreign fighters from crossing over into Iraq.

[. . .]

Whatcha gonna do, bleed on me?

Do the Neocons actually believe anyone takes them seriously? Mark my words, if the Chimp goes after Syria, or Iran for that matter, shit's gonna start blowing up over here on a regular basis. Hopefully the scandals and future indictments neuter these assholes so they can't take 'pre-emptive action' anywhere else.

Let's hear it for the "I" word...

After Downing Street

Poll: Americans Favor Bush's Impeachment If He Lied about Iraq

The poll was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,001 U.S. adults on October 6-9.

The poll found that 50% agreed with the statement:

"If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."

"The results of this poll are truly astonishing," said AfterDowningStreet.org co-founder Bob Fertik. "Bush's record-low approval ratings tell just half of the story, which is how much Americans oppose Bush's policies on Iraq and other issues. But this poll tells the other half of the story - that a solid plurality of Americans want Congress to consider removing Bush from the White House."

Duck-walkin' in chains he should be removed from the White House! With every camera in the world present.

The strong support for impeachment found in this poll is especially surprising because the views of impeachment supporters are entirely absent from the broadcast and print media, and can only be found on the Internet and in street protests, including the large anti-war rally in Washington on September 24.

Go read this one. Let's hope this starts something.

You da man, Jane!

Imagine my surprise when I saw our gal Jane in a headline on my Yahoo homepage! She and her henchman ReddHedd are burnin' up the wires with their fine analyses of the whole Traitorgate deal over at Firedoglake. I'm damn glad the world is noticing!

Bush's Gusher Finally Came In...

Comedian Harry Shearer said the other day that "Bush spent his whole life drillin' dry holes. Looks like he finally found his gusher in Harriet Miers." I've got way too much class to wonder about how dry her...

Anyway, Uniongrrl asks the burning question, "Is it just me? Or is Maureen Dowd having WAAAAAAY too much fun with the Harriet Miers' nomination?"

Since there is no breathtaking Miers judicial record to pore over, I was eager to read more breathless Miers missives to a president she describes as the most brilliant man she has ever met. How could I get the notes from the White House, given how opposed Mr. Bush is to leaks? I called Scooter and Karl and they sent the secret documents right over.

August 2001 "Thank you so much for letting me bundle up and drag away the brush that you cut down today. And if I might add, Sir, I've never seen a man wield the nippers so judiciously. It was awesome! You are the best brush cutter ever!!"

January 2003 "Just a quick note to say how cool it is that you picked Brownie to head FEMA. There's nothing like having someone you know and trust in a top job. Your gut is the best judge ever!!"

April 2004 "There is no other president who would have had the courage to allow torture, dude! (It's only too bad that Abu Ghraib rules out Alberto's chances of getting on the Supreme Court.) You are the best torturer ever!! xo, H."

October 2005 "How can I thank you, Sir? I never, ever expected the Supreme Court. Phat! I hope Clarence doesn't make me watch 'Debbie Does Dallas' again. That movie is so anti-Texas! I miss you already!!

MoDo's a hoot! Go read the rest.

We're movin' to Jersey

BlueJersey that is:

[. . .]

Over at the LIVE blog and over my radio I hardly believed it. Both candidates were asked about medical marijuana by a caller and both said they were FOR IT!

[. . .]

Perp walks

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. ... If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

Click for graphic.

Hat tip: The King