Day: July 19, 2005

With the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. today, Pres. Bush struck an historic note for straight, neoconservative, white men, a group whose voice is often vastly underrepresented in American society.

“I believe John Roberts will speak for ‘the rest of us,’” Bush said during his live televised announcement. “Men like me, men of privilege. Rich men who just keep getting richer, thanks to my tax breaks. Men who play golf in exclusive country clubs and duck hunt with guaranteed minimum kills.”

Bush noted that Roberts was yet another of the men he felt comfortable selecting because they previously served in the one-term administration of his father, Pres. George H.W. Bush.

“He has the qualities Americans expect in a judge: a penis, European ancestry, and firm, resolute opinions,” Bush said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he drives a Hummer. Not a Hummer 2, mind you, but a Hummer.”

Roberts is expected to gain easy confirmation, since so many members of Congress can relate.

TPM Cafe:

Tucker Carlson: Actually, I am objectively pro-France. You know, France blew up the Rainbow Warrior, that Greenpeace ship in Auckland Harbor in the `80s. And I’ve always respected them…

GUEST: That made you like them?

Carlson: Yes. Yes. It won me over.

… The show is the much advertised “The Situation.” The network is MSNBC. No wonder they worked so hard to bring him over from CNN and PBS, attitude, bowtie, and all.

I guess state terrorism is OK when you’re blowing up some wussy peacenik green guys’ boat and killing the photographer on board.

Who can make this stuff up?

No doubt Neal Shapiro, the MSNBC president, would appreciate hearing from viewers about The Situation.

Team Bush is out of ways to deflect the Rove scandal. Not.

Tonight’s Supreme Court announcement will leave reporters and the public scrambling for details. Tomorrow’s papers will relegate Karl & Ko. to page 2 – or worse, to the abyss where the Downing Street Memo vaporized – and we’ll all have something else to talk about.

The big question in the days that follow is not what Bush will do, but how the press will respond. Will they drop Rove like a hot fried tater tot and go scampering off as directed, or will they stay on the job, sniffing out the truth? Will White House Spokestool (thanks, WTF Is It Now) Scott McClellan begin loving his job again, or will he continue to have good reason to phone it in?

The answer will tell us whether Bush’s recent troubles are a passing setback from which he will emerge stronger, or if they signal a true sea change. I’m cautiously optimistic that for Bush, the bad times are here to stay.

There’s only one aspect of the Bush presidency that renders me full of shock and awe – and it is a testament to why Bush must keep Karl Rove by his side. I’m continually amazed how, despite the lies and incompetence that led us into war where hundreds of thousands have been killed and wounded, an anemic economy and his own bitter, inarticulate and pathologically indifferent personality, George Bush remains in good odor with nearly half of the Americans who take these polls.

In the new poll from Gallup, a whopping 47.4 percent of Americans gave him a positive job review. These people are obviously very easily led:

A Gallup poll analysis released today finds President Bush’s job approval rating at the lowest of his presidency and, at 47.4 percent, below 50 percent for only the second time.

This compares to the following at the same point in their time in office: Eisenhower 63.6 percent, Reagan 58.7 percent, Clinton 56.3 percent, Truman 48.7 percent Nixon 44 percent (during Watergate) and Johnson 42 percent (at a low point in the Vietnam war).

By Gallup’s chart, Bush’s current rating is 171st out of 236 for any quarter of a year, going back to Truman in the White House.

“Broadly speaking,” Gallup comments, “presidents who have had similar quarterly averages to Bush’s most recent one did not show much improvement going forward…

“Clearly, Bush is off to an inauspicious start to his second term in office. He had average a 62 percent approval rating during his first term in office.”

All I can say is, way to go, Karl! You apparently can fool half the people all the time.

After recently learning that an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 weblogs are being created every day, I figured that some of those people probably know even less than I do about how to create an effective political blog. And let’s face it, what other kind of weblog matters?

Sure, there are other kinds — baby blogs, sports blogs, swingers’ blogs — but if you eliminate those from the mix, you’ve probably got only 10,000 to 20,000 new political blogs coming on line daily.

I still figure I know more about the topic than some of those wannabe bloggers. Therefore, in the interest of fostering intelligent political discourse for the good of the country, I offer the following guide for how to create your own political blog.

If you follow these simple steps, I cannot guarantee that you will create a blog that is as pertinent, insightful and well-read as Pensito Review.

But so what if only your mom and her new boyfriend from the bowling alley read your weblog, you’re trying and doing your best, and that’s what matters.

Step 1. Stake your place on the political spectrum and stick to it.

If you’re a liberal-hating, queer-baiting, fornicating Repug wingnut, then say so, and don’t go flippy-floppy when someone turns up the rhetorical heat and exposes your biases and prejudices for what they are — the result of ignorance, malevolence and an utter lack of humanity.

Step 2. Come up with a name for your blog that says something about you and your views.

This is a very important step because it is by your blogger “handle” that you shall be known. Choose something descriptive yet clever, such as Right-Wing Asshat, Jerk for Jesus or NeoNaziNews.

Step 3. Set your journalistic standards.

Decide early on if you are going to take your cues from those paragons of journalistic integrity among our great newspapers, such as … oh well, let your conscience be your guide. Or, if you want to take your cue from the Bush administration, then you can lie, obfuscate, spin, twist, create and ignore the truth to your heart’s content.

Step 4. Set forth your positions on the issues with a bit of wit, to maintain reader interest.

For example, you could encapsulate your argument simply by writing: Liberals suck! That may express your opinion perfectly, but it doesn’t give the reader much incentive to read on. Try injecting a little wit into your expression: Liberals suck — and they blow, too! See? That’s much better. You’ve used the rhetorical device of balancing two opposites (suck, blow) to create cognitive dissonance in your reader’s mind, which is what all blog readers want.

Step 5. Accentuate the positive; don’t tolerate the negative.

Finally, only allow the posting of comments that concur with your views (Example: I think liberals blow more than they suck.), and delete the other ones (Example: These are clearly the views of an immature, babbling, subhuman cretin.) Hey, it’s your blog. If someone wants to disagree with you, tell her to get her own weblog.

Now, blog on, brother!

Over the two-year course of the Plame Name Blame Game scandal, both President Bush and his spokesman Scott McClellan have both gone out of their way to aovid using the word “fired” to describe what would happen to a White House staffer who was discovered to have leaked classified information and/or broken the law.

Instead, they use phrasing that is both carefully and inelegantly constructed: the culprits “will no longer work in this administration” or worse, “will no longer be a part of this administration.”

Why not simply say the leaker “will be fired” or “have his employment terminated” or “find himself suddenly between jobs?”

The phrasing they use is too awkward, and too consistently repeated, to be accidental. It sounds like something that a committee of lawyers came up with.

As noted, I think it’s a signal that the main culprit is Ari Fleischer, who is in fact already “no longer a part of the administration.”

There is mounting evidence that it was Fleischer who ran afoul of the 1982 law that forbids government officials from knowingly revealing the identity of a secret agent. Fleischer saw a memo drafted by the State Dept. in which Valerie Plame Wilson was described as a CIA agent, and he must have talked to at least one reporter at Mrs. Wilson’s role in the authentication of the Niger forgeries: Judith Wilson.

Fleischer was famously not a part of the West Wing inner circle – not for nothing he was the only Jew in an executive suite where Baptists lead prayers every morning. More importantly, he’s not from Texas, and would therefore be the first candidate to be thrown overboard.

Maybe Team Bush knows that one day it will be Ari who is frog-marched to jail, and they are pre-emptively covering their asses so that reporters can’t say then, “You said you would ‘fire’ the leaker but you knew no one would be fired because Fleischer was no longer on staff.”

Or maybe they don’t want to come off sounding like Donald Trump.