Apocalypse Denver? Sadly, probably not

Scholars & Rogues

Well, well, well. Look at the snarling beast that’s threatening to rear its head this summer in Denver:

Still, the anonymous veteran in Perlstein’s post raises an interesting idea. I mean, rule of law is a wonderful thing, but it serves those who make the laws. What if people who have simply had enough of the same-old-same-old were to run amok at the DNC like they did in 1968?

It’s worth noting that the elites in both parties have collaborated, for the past seven years, on the greatest campaign of terror the US has seen since McCarthy. Yes, al Qaeda gave Americans a good goosing, but their impact was nothing compared to the resulting 24/7 fearfest visited on the citizenry by the Republican and Democratic parties ever since. A terrified public has been good for the elites because fear makes people manageable, malleable, herdable. In short, we’re in an era where the people are afraid and their leaders are not.

How’s that working out for you, America?

But hordes of angry rabble rampaging through the streets in protest, that would have to be at least a little scary, you’d think. And I wonder how a bit of genuine fear might impact the official actions of serial malfeasers (is that a word?) like Pelosi, Clinton, Reid, Reyes, and 99% of the Republican Party. Hard to say, but what are they going to do about it? Suspend habeas corpus? Conspire with their corporate allies to illegally wiretap the public? Start outing CIA agents? Invade nations that had nothing to do with 9/11?

Hmmm.

I'd fuckin' love to see '68 redux in Denver! Trouble is, there's no draft, no big societal change goin' on, no mass student movement against the war, nobody much against anything to speak of enough to get off their dead asses and go do it.

More's the pity. This country is in a lot more danger from within than it was back then.

Look out, you fish! The government is here to help...

International Herald-Tribune

Torrent in Colorado river is unleashed to aid fish

Yeah, right. Most of the 'fish' live or vacation in too-rapidly-expanding waterless Las Vegas.

What they need to do is dynamite (Fixer?) the Glen Canyon Dam. It never should have been built in the first place.

Bushdance

Bush Dances while waiting for McCain. Everybody Polka!

Americans are revolting! Because we haven't revolted...

The Existentialist Cowboy is calling for revolution:

A revolution is justified! Since King John signed the Magna Carta, no monarch in our tradition has successfully assumed powers that are now claimed and assumed by the Bush/Cheney regime.

Bush's legacy is the end of law

Bush could not have placed himself above the law without help from Republicans of all stripes as well as timely betrayals and sellouts by key Democrats. Without effective opposition, Bush-Cheney were able to assume a "unitary executive", a dubious doctrine without precedent in either American history or English Common Law to which we are heir. This Republican-birthed 'doctrine' --utter claptrap --places Bush above regulation, above oversight or supervision, above the decisions of the courts, including the Supreme Court, above laws passed by Congress, above responsibility to the people. It is treasonous on its face. Tragically, I don't hear the candidates talking about this. All I hear from the 'candidates' is eyewash, focus group approved monkey chatter, platitudes and bullshit!

These are reason enough to forever bar the GOP from positions of responsibility and that includes John McCain --the biggest political disappointment since Dan Quayle compared himself to JFK. Historically, revolutions are fought for considerably less than what is at stake now!

The piece is quite long and well worth a read.

WFB and the Damage Done

Excellent eulogy, if that's the right word, on William F. Buckley at The Regressive Antidote.

Buckley was an astute observer of the human condition, despite keeping, shall we say, a certain polite distance from most of the poor humans who happen to find themselves stuck in that sometimes challenging condition. He was once asked by NPR’s Terry Gross whether being raised in European boarding schools and being a member of Yale’s notoriously elitist Skull and Bones Society hadn’t left Buckley a trifle, um, out of touch with real people (the hoi polloi, that is, as they’re referred to at the Club)? Au contraire!, he skillfully parried. Buckley did a lot of reading and therefore understood people quite well!

So well, indeed, that he came out in support of segregation during the era when the civil rights movement was the most important, the most consuming, political question of the day. So who do you think history will judge to have gotten this question right, eh? – Martin Luther King or Bill Buckley? One could say that Buckley’s position was just about the most spectacular example ever recorded of the missing of a historical train. There was Ol’ Bill (who actually didn’t even have the excuse then of being old), standing on the (whites only) platform, watching the Morality Express go whooshing by.

But then, wasn’t missing just such trains precisely the point of conservatism?

Sometimes they have only wanted to unravel a couple of decades worth of history, as when they oppose civil rights, women’s rights or environmentalism. Sometimes it is more on the order of a century, as when they seek to dismantle social safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare. Sometimes their handiwork goes back several centuries, as when they find First Amendment ideas such as separation of church and state to be troublesome, or when they object to that whole pesky checks-and-balances thing. But sometimes it is the work of an entire millennium they wish to unravel, as they rip up the inconvenient notions of democracy itself, expressed as far back as the Magna Carta.

So, how ‘bout it folks? Anybody here excited to return our society to the gleaming days of the twelfth century? Watch where you step in the street! I mean, um, the latrine. Well, what’s the difference, anyhow? And monarchy is really not so bad after all, you know – once you get used to it. It only has a bad name because it gets treated so unfairly by the liberal press. You know, like George W. Bush.

So let’s do it, huh?! Back we go!

All you nice Negroes out there, I’m afraid we’re going to need to ask you to use that other drinking fountain from now on. Sorry about that. Careful with your chains too, if you would please. And ladies, I think you remember your proper position in conservative society, do you not? That’s right. Take off your shoes – you won’t be needing them anymore. Now assume the position. Careers? Oh, that’s a laugh. Political equality? Such a comedian! Family planning? How’s your rhythm?

They say he died at his desk, about to write another essay. Maybe it was entitled “The Achievements of My Life As A Conservative”. And maybe it was sitting there staring at that very, very blank page that killed him.

The damage wrought by people who believed this man will be with us for generations.

Kinda like Christ and Muhammad, huh?

Outright theft ...

But I had to swipe the whole thing to make my point. Gotta go to Maru's for the links though:

One day after the Disaster Monkey "warned OPEC" to pump more oil in order to bring prices down, oil prices reached a new record as OPEC "refused to increase its production, blaming mismanagement of the U.S. economy for high prices."

Thank you, Dumbass McSimpleton.

Now, let's see. Exxon/Mobil made what, $500 billion in profits last year? Somehow, I don't think it's the fault of OPEC that gas prices are so high. Do you?

Late for work ...

How to piss off New Yorkers

NEW YORK - Police have cordoned off a section of New York City's Times Square to investigate what witnesses describe as a small explosion.

Members of the police department's bomb squad and fire officials gathered early Thursday outside a military recruiting station with a large hole in the front window.

...

Okay, listen to me. This was not the work of al-Qaeda. This is some idiot, pissed off at the war, who's trying to make a statement. Nothing to see here, move along. Only thing is, this will fuck up the morning commute for about a half-million New Yorkers by the time the NYPD looks everything over.

Note: This is not the way to affect change. All it does is screw your neighbors.

War drums ...

If you think, just because the Chimp is a lame duck, that war with Iran has been taken 'off the table', think again:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon “one of the best strategic thinkers in uniform today.” Fallon opposed the “surge” in Iraq and has consistently battled the Bush administration to avoid a confrontation with Iran, calling officials’ war-mongering “not helpful.” Privately, he has vowed that an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch.”

...

[W]ell-placed observers now say that it will come as no surprise if Fallon is relieved of his command before his time is up next spring, maybe as early as this summer, in favor of a commander the White House considers to be more pliable. If that were to happen, it may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year and don’t want a commander standing in their way.

...

How else would they support War-boy McCain?

Digby looks at this too and thinks Fallon is critical to keeping us out of another illegal war. It's scary to think we're depending on a flag officer to prevent a war but I guess the Chimp didn't get around to cashiering all of the decent ones:

...

If the Republicans want to shoot the moon to win in November, this is the likliest course. Start a new war and rely on the "rally round the flag" effect. It's hard to imagine they could go to that well again, but never underestimate paranoia and the lure of patriotic grandeur and big ratings to push the country into temporary insanity.

And, as you all know, you can never underestimate the collective stupid of the American public.

Ollie passes the torch ...

To Stanley:

Great thanks to Watertiger for the pic.

McCain = Bush

"He looks like a pathetic old fool. He's just as bad as Bush." - Mrs. F

Yep. I'm in total agreement with the beautiful and perspicacious lady from Lawn Guyland. Here's a new 3rd-party 30 second spot via TPM Election Central:




McSame OLD, McSame OLD...

Emphatically Unsolicited Advice for the Democratic Campaigns

Rachel Maddow, whom I adore:

Dear Potential Democratic Presidential Nominees:

In January 1941, at a time when the world was at war and the United States was more threatened than we had ever been in our history, FDR stood before the US Congress and hailed freedom from fear. That remains the paradigm of Democratic leadership in a threatening world.

When a politician looks at risks to our country and sees an opportunity for political exploitation, rather than an opportunity to rally the nation around our unified strength and fearlessness, that politician spits in the face of Democratic leadership and patriotic values.

If there's one thing we ought to have learned from the George W. Bush presidency, it's that there's a difference between Democrats and Republicans on whether the American people should be encouraged to cower in fear.

If you don't get that fundamental difference between Democratic values and Republican values right now? You shouldn't get the Democratic nomination for President. In fact, you probably should get the freak out of the Democratic party.

Your humble servant,

Rachel

GOP* Has Their Man

BuzzFlash


*Gang Of Pirates (or fill in yer own word for something rotten that starts with 'P')

Melanie Morgan Canned from KSFO

While I absolutely agree with Fixer in his assessment of Big Biz control of the media and the regrettable loss of a good journalist, and the Lord knows there's not many of them, sometimes there's an upside:

CoCoTimes

Melanie Morgan canned from KSFO

Morgan, 51, delivered her final broadcast there today after 14 years at the microphone, she says in a news release. KSFO owner Citadel Broadcasting decided not to renew her contract as part of the company’s announced across-the-board financial cost cutting.

I'll bet the skank sues for revealing her age! Heh.

The 'cost cutting' excuse is the corporate equivalent of 'wants to spend more time with her family'.

Go see what Spocko, the San Francisco blogger who’d convinced advertisers to pull their accounts from KSFO by reposting controversial sound clips from Morgan and her cohosts, has to say about Morgan’s layoff.

This a case where a little grassroots action against wingnut vitriol paid off. As long as yer bullshit's makin' money, you're gold. When it fucks with the bottom line, hit the bricks.

This does not make up for the loss of an actual journalist, and there's lots more hateful wingnut radio assholes, but it's something at least.

The Dem primary ...

It's not over? Nooooooooooooo! (banging head against wall) Flip a coin already. I can't take much more ...

And it's not the candidates personally. I give a shit which one wins at this point. I just can't stand a couple more months of the pundits' drivel. We were watching Wolfie last night and Mrs. F said to me: "You know, none of those idiots (the pundits) seem to know what they're talking about."

"No shit," I reply. They were talking about the demographics, who'll vote for whom, and they were going on and on 'Black people - Obama, Latinos - Hillary, Women - mixed' and on and on. 'If this happens when and where, if A wins by a landslide and B does it in a squeaker ...'

I told the Mrs. I was hoping, one by one, the pundits' heads would explode, live on TV. Bill Schnieder, kablooey. Candy Crowley, kablooey. Dana Bash, kablooey. Saving, of course, The Beard for last, just as he's about to throw to Jack, big kablooey. I'da been sitting in front of the TV, clapping my hands, laughing maniacally.

I can't wait until it's over. I'm losing my fucking mind.

Addendum: We're watching McCain's acceptance speech and Mrs. F says "He looks like a pathetic old fool. He's just as bad as Bush."

I hope a lot of other people who aren't as 'politically wired' as bloggers see him that way too.

All in it together ...

No one can tell me the corporate media isn't in cahoots with the Rethuglicans. That relationship has cost a good journalist her job:

KKOB Radio afternoon drive time news anchor Laura MacCallum quit her job last Thursday after the station’s news director pulled her stories about alleged vote-buying efforts at the recent Bernalillo County Republican Party delegate nominating conventions.

...

Nicole adds:

...

But here’s the best part: one of the reasons cited by the station manager for not running the story is because it “would have been picked up by bloggers” and other news agencies if it was valid.

...

These are the same people who take their talking points from Drudge. The bright side is they're scared of us. I love it how, over the last decade, the media takes it upon themselves (with coaching from the Rethugs) to decide what we should see and what we don't.

Update:

Greenwald is thinking along the same lines:

...

Oh, absolutely. Nothing changes press behavior more than accusations that they're "in the tank" for someone. After all, it's only been eight short years since the national press corps fell in love with then-candidate George W. Bush, depicted him as the swaggering, friendly, regular, down-home American male with whom you'd want to have a beer -- unlike that pompous, annoying, boring liar, Al Gore.

Once they got him elected, they then proceeded to click their heels and loyally salute for the next several years or so in the presence of the manly Commander-in-Chief War Hero, as they unquestioningly marched behind him into Iraq, mindlessly trumpeting every word that came out of his mouth, too afraid (according to the NYT's Elisabeth Bumiller) even to ask him questions, and abdicating every basic journalistic duty to such an extent that they voluntarily inflicted on the country what Salon's Gary Kamiya called "one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media."

After that, they swooned in unison over how manly and powerful the Leader was when he pranced around that aircraft carrier declaring -- five years ago -- that we had Won the War. They then spent the 2004 election season glorifying the Conquering War Hero while mocking his opponent as a wind-surfing, flip-flopping, French subversive loser and his running mate as a vain, hair-obsessed, effeminate weakling. The next few years were spent overlooking, justifying and dismissing away revelations that the President had tortured people, broken the law repeatedly, spied on Americans without warrants, promulgated theories of presidential omnipotence, sent detainees to other countries to be abused, and had his top officials repeatedly and transparently lie to Congress.

...

And on it goes for your 'liberal media'. By the time the Dem primary is settled, McCain will have been the one to fly CAP* for Jesus when he walked on the water and provided air cover for George Washington when he crossed the River Delaware.

*Combat Air Patrol

Quote of the Day - Zwei

PhysioProf:

...

We are living in a uniquely teachable moment, one that has not occurred in a generation, where a Democratic candidate has the opportunity to remind people that all of the values and attributes of the United States that we consider good are liberal.

...

Not Ready to Make Nice

If Il Capo di Tutti Braini can post a music video on Tuesday, then under basic democratic principles so can his underling. Heh.

This is dedicated to all the phony patriot wingnut chickenshitshawks.

Dixie Chicks

"...even more crazy than the Republican mainstream"

Go read Matt Taibbi on McCain:

According to current political wisdom, John McCain is "controversial" among Republicans because he lacks true conservative credentials. His main offenses, ostensibly, are a smattering of domestic-policy positions that defy the GOP's Limbaugh-Hannity orthodoxy: He took a public stand against the Spanish Inquisition, he shared a room with Ted Kennedy for a few hours to fashion a failed immigration bill, he passed a roundly criticized campaign-finance-reform bill, he accidentally deemed the Bush tax cuts insane out loud before realizing that this was a political error.

...skanky bitch-whore Ann Coulter...

To me, though, what's strangest of all is how irrelevant such positions seem when it comes to McCain. For all of his supposed unreliability in the domestic arena, McCain may be even more crazy than the Republican mainstream on the issue that matters most of all: the war in Iraq and war in general. My guess is that Republican voters are not going to mind that McCain's candidacy might drive a stake through the heart of the weenie fascism of Rush and Hannity, once they figure out that the candidate is a solid bet to deliver them World War III. And that should scare the shit out of us all.

No matter how moderate McCain seems on domestic issues, on the issue of war he's stark raving mad. He's a wounded, crusading Ahab, and civilian command and diplomatic restraint are his Great White Whale. If he gets put in charge of a Middle Eastern war that is easily widened, it's whirlpool time for all of us.

That idea — the principle of fighting first, thinking later and never, ever saying sorry — is what matters most to conservatives, and John McCain may be its last line of defense. If he fights hard enough to save it, you can bet that even Ann Coulter will come around to supporting him.

The Repug bastards will support the Devil himself, and not for the first time either, to try and hang on to the power to ruin our country.

Iran-Contra 2.0

[A big welcome to Crooks and Liars and Maru's readers - F.]

Good and extensive article in Vanity Fair about how Bush has compounded the Israel/Palestinian/Hamas/Fatah clusterfuck.

It’s “a tough situation,” Bush admitted. “I don’t know whether you can solve it in a year or not.” What Bush neglected to mention was his own role in creating this mess.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’ ”

Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take place. In late December 2006, four Egyptian trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled crossing into Gaza, where their contents were handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips, and two million bullets. News of the shipment leaked, and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, an Israeli Cabinet member, said on Israeli radio that the guns and ammunition would give Abbas “the ability to cope with those organizations which are trying to ruin everything”—namely, Hamas.

Jaberi pauses. He spent the night before our interview awake and in hiding, fearful of Israeli air strikes. “You know,” he says, “since the takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise.”

It is impossible to say for sure whether the outcome in Gaza would have been any better—for the Palestinian people, for the Israelis, and for America’s allies in Fatah—if the Bush administration had pursued a different policy. One thing, however, seems certain: it could not be any worse.

"It could not be any worse". Bush's legacy.

Quote of the Day

[A big Brain welcome to Shakes' readers - F.]

LATimes

...I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq.

-President George W. Bush, to Army Lieutenant General Ray Odierno

I read that as "we don't need nobody to defeat us - we can do it ourselves without any outside help".

With the Chimp in charge, it's a slam dunk. For real this time.

Update:

Video of the imbecile if you can stand it, and comments here.