Category: Politics

Topic Header

Bush Claims Not to Have a Strategy for Governing if Dems Win Congress

Jon Ponder

He has no plan for Iraq and had no plan for Katrina, so it should not be a surprise that President Bush claims not to have a plan for the rest of his term if his Republican cronies in Congress lose their majorities in the election:

Some Republican strategists are increasingly upset with what they consider the overconfidence of President Bush and his senior advisers about the midterm elections November 7–a concern aggravated by the president’s news conference this week.

“They aren’t even planning for if they lose,” says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing. If Democrats win control of the House, as many analysts expect, Republicans predict that Bush’s final two years in office will be marked by multiple congressional investigations and gridlock.

“The Bush White House has had no relationship with Congress,” said a Bush ally. “Beyond the Democrats, wait till they see how the Republicans–the ones that survive–treat them if they lose next month.”

It’s okay, really. I’m sure the Democrats will keep Mr. Bush very busy, if they win either house.

Bush Obsessing Over “Really High Stakes” of Failure

Trish

Not only can I not stand to listen to George W. Bush — the only president who consistently evokes Jimmy Cagney when speaking by using the word, “see” to start or end nearly every sentence — I can’t stand to watch him talk either.

But Julie Mason can, and she records some sharp observations about his recent Rose Garden press conference.

Bush has been using a different speaking style lately, with more angry-sounding, often highly partisan rhetoric and stronger body language.

He grips the podium, jabs a finger and raises his voice. He squares his shoulders, mocking Democrats and scoffing at critics of his policies.

Mason concludes that Bush is in campaign battle mode.

Key issues for Bush are North Korea and the Middle East, where the stakes, Bush said, “are really high.” And numerous: Bush alluded to the “stakes” 11 times in just more than an hour in his Rose Garden news conference.

Bush has been using a different speaking style lately, with more angry-sounding, often highly partisan rhetoric and stronger body language.

In fact, “the stakes couldn’t be any higher,” Bush said. “I understand the stakes. I’m going to repeat them one more time.”

He added, “As a matter of fact, I’m going to spend a lot of time repeating the stakes.”

The stakes are high for Bush in November. If he can’t lead his party to another majority in the House and Senate, his domestic agenda may wind up as scraps of forgotten rhetoric. He could also face stronger and more effective resistance to his Iraq policy…

Everyone got that? See, the stakes are really high. For once I’ll take Bush’s word for it. So get out and vote, see? Because undermining Bush’s ability to have his way is the highest stake of all.

South Slammed as Rest of the Country Gets Free Pass — Again

Trish

A never-ending debate here at PR* concerns the degree of racism in the South, compared to the rest of the country. Editor-in-Chief Jon, who was born in Texas, grew up in North Carolina, and considers California home, feels the South is correctly maligned regarding racism. Editor Trish, who was born in North Carolina but grew up in Florida and considers it home, feels the South is used as a scapegoat to allow the rest of the country off the hook and an air of superiority to boot. Editor Buck, who was born in Florida and returned here after college, largely stays out of the argument.

George Stephanopoulos covered the Tennessee Senate race to fill Bill Frist’s seat on This Week. He unknowingly bolstered Trish’s case when he explained about candidate Rep. Harold Ford, that “if elected, he would be the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction.”

Because you know how we are down here: all unenlightened and everything, unlike the rest of you who are so colorblind and forward thinking. Take a moment now and pat yourselves on the back because it’s not at all surprising to hear Southern states would have sent less African-Americans to the Senate than say, California. Or New York. Or Ohio.

Except that none of those places has ever sent any.

In fact, only five African-Americans have served in the U.S. Senate — two from Mississippi, two from Illinois, and one from Massachusetts.

My point is not that the South is right to have done so little to erase color barriers in this country, rather that it is not alone in this deficiency. And as long as people can point to the South as the “real problem,” they avoid solving what is, in fact, an American problem. So what George Stephanopoulos should have said is that Ford would be the first African-American elected to the Senate in 48 states since Reconstruction.

And that sucks. Go, Rep. Ford.

*Where —full disclosure — we are all white.

Will GOP Gay Purge Cast Suspicion on Over-40 Singles Like Mehlman, Bolten and Condi?

Jon Ponder

The problem with purges is that the purgers rarely know when to stop.

Via Digby: Leaders of the Christian right such as Rev. Lou Sheldon at the Traditional Values Coalition and Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, are demanding a “Come to Jesus Meeting” with the GOP to discuss expelling gays from high positions within the party.

“Has the social agenda of the GOP been stalled by homosexual members and/or staffers?” asks Perkins.

He has a point, the Republicans have controlled the government for six years, and yet abortion is still legal and gays aren’t routinely rounded up and sent to forced reorientation camps.

But if “nuts” like Perkins and Wildmon want to cleanse all but God-fearing breeders from the party’s top ranks, will they stop with the Congress?

Digby mentions Mary Cheney, whom the party faithful embraced during the 2004 campaign. Shouldn’t she go too? After all, she is an out lesbian who often works for the vice president. Maybe she is part of the stealth cabal of liberals posing as gay Republican in order to stall the values agenda.

What about gays who are not out? Ken Mehlman, head of the Republican National Committee, for example, has refused to come out as a heterosexual.

How about top Gops who are middle-aged singles?

White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten is over 50 and single — and has been photographed on the arm of every Republican’s favorite beard, Bo Derek.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who apparently thinks of herself as George Bush’s “second wife,” is pushing 52 and very single, as far as we know.

When the Night of Long Knives comes, they’ll all have to prove their heterosexual purity, or they will have to go.

And that’s problem with purges. The purgers rarely know when to stop.

Kolbe Charges Smell Like a Witch Hunt

Jon Ponder

Is the GOP Trying to Discredit Kolbe Because He Says He Acted on a Complaint about Foley in 2000?

The alleged victim told NBC News that “he had a ‘blast’ on the trip and did not report anything improper to his parents or any House officials after the trip. He said he has a favorable impression of the page program to this day and likes Kolbe.”

The FBI has launched an investigation into the behavior of retiring GOP Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona, who is openly gay, toward a teenaged boy on a camping trip in 1996.

Details are sketchy but based on the news accounts so far, the allegations seem a bit suspicious. For one thing, and this is crucial, the former page who was the alleged victim denies that anything untoward happened.

While I am completely unsympathetic toward gay Republicans, even those who are out — as Stephen Kriz put it in these pages yesterday, “a gay person being a Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders” — we cannot allow the Foley scandal to escalate into a witch hunt in which people are accused of improper behavior simply because they are gay.

Why would someone level false charges against Kolbe? Last week, Kolbe inserted himself into the Foley scandal when he announced that he had received a complaint in 2000 from a page about improper behavior from Rep. Mark Foley, and that he took steps that led to “corrective action” against Foley then. This addition to the timeline of the Foley scandal runs counter to the GOP House leadership’s narrative that they were only informed about Foley’s penchant for teenaged boys within the last year.

It is possible — even likely — that someone in the GOP had these charges brought against Kolbe in order to shut him up.

Here are the facts that are available today:

[…]

Will the Foley Scandal Bring Down the GOP’s Candidate for Florida Governor?

Jon Ponder
It beats me why gay people want to belong to a political party that does not want them, that actively attempts to codify discrimination against them into the law and that cynically uses issues related to their civil rights to gin up votes among homophobes and bigots. It can only come from a deep self-loathing.

Like the California governor’s race, the race to replace Gov. Jeb Bush in Florida has not been making a lot of news outside the state. But in the wake of the outing of Florida GOP Rep. Mark Foley, there appears to be heightened interest in the sexual preference of the Republican candidate, Charles Crist:

Last week, [speculation about whether Crist is gay] broke through to the national media when, in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC talkshow, Pat Campbell, an Orlando-based conservative radio host, accused Democratic operatives of floating the gay rumor to help Crist’s opponent, Jim Davis, who is behind in the polls. “What are they playing right now? Charlie Crist is gay,” Campell complained. “This is the party that supposedly deplores the personal destruction, yet they’re experts in it.”

Max Linn, an independent candidate for the governorship, pushed the story along further Wednesday in another radio interview, claiming he knew Crist to be gay for a fact, and challenging him to admit it. “Charlie, come out, come out from wherever you are,” Linn jabbed.

While it’s undoubtedly a poor time for a Republican to be forcibly outed, it’s not clear how much a public admission of homosexuality, on its own, would hurt Crist’s prospects in a state with a large gay population. For one thing, Crist is relatively insulated from charges of hypocrisy: While he supports the state’s Defense of Marriage Act, he also has cautiously endorsed gay civil unions.

That may be why Crist’s antagonists are resorting to a potentially more damaging tactic: trying to make explicit the implicit link between him and Foley. According to Bob Norman, a columnist for the New Times of Broward-Palm Beach, and the first reporter to out Foley back in 2003, “As soon as the scandal broke there were rumors that Crist and Foley had been roommates in Tallahassee in the early ’90s when they were both state senators.”

Crist’s office didn’t return calls for comment, but a search of public records turned up no evidence of a shared address during that period or any other.

It beats me why gay people want to belong to a political party that does not want them, that actively attempts to codify discrimination against them into the law and that cynically uses issues related to their civil rights to gin up votes among homophobes and bigots. It can only come from a deep self-loathing.

Annual Army Association Convention Serves Up Some Real Insights

Buck Banks

Military intelligence — not your father’s oxymoron: How did I miss this convention? Sounds like a real good time was had by all, and if all the panels were as productive of outside-the-box thinking as the one on irregular warfare and counterinsurgency operations, then I could just kick myself. Here are some of the more insightful comments:

“I don’t see conventional challenges to be dominant for a long time,” said Conrad Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History. “Our enemies are going to make us fight this kind of war until we get it right,” Crane said. “This is our future.”

‘Our enemies are going to make us fight this kind of war until we get it right.’

“This is revolutionary” — building democracies and helping them establish capitalist economies and open and public police forces and judicial systems, said Kalev Sepp, assistant professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, Calif. “The mission is too broad to put on the shoulders of the military alone,” he said. “It has to be interagency.”

“We will not prevail with the force of arms alone,” Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, agreed.

“We are much closer to the beginning than the end of this long conflict,” he said, emphasizing the need for public support and financial backing to ensure the mission succeeds.

“Ultimately, victory requires a national strategic consensus, evident in both words and actions,” Schoomaker said. “While such a common strategic foundation, understood and accepted by the American people, existed during the Cold War, … it is not yet evident that such common understanding exists today.”

Embarrassed, Not Broke: Foley Gets to Keep His Federal Pension

Buck Banks

Congressional crime pays: It must be a comfort to know that once one is elected to Congress one would have to engage in treason or espionage against the United States of America to lose one’s pension. Run-of-the-mill bribery, blackmail, influence peddling, vehicular homicide or any of various sex crimes would not jeopardize one’s post-jail retirement income. Must be a comfort to ex-Rep. Mark Foley, who stands to receive a cool half-million simoleans in bennies if he waits 10 years to start drawing on his pension and lives to the actuarial average age of 78.

When he turns 62, Foley, who turned 52 last month, will start getting a pension of $32,000 a year, according to the National Taxpayers Union.

If he can’t wait until 2016, he could begin collecting a “deferred reduced retirement” plan in 2010, when he turns 56. But he would then be able to collect only about $22,400 a year, depending on cost of living adjustments.

Foley also participated in the Federal Thrift Savings Plan, a program he frequently touted as an alternative to Social Security because it works like a private 401(k) plan. If Foley contributed 5 percent of each paycheck to the plan, the government — using taxpayer money — would have matched his 5 percent.

That means Foley — who earned $165,200 as a lawmaker this year — could have easily accrued more than $150,000 in assets since taking office in 1994, Sepp said.

Earlier this year, in his financial disclosure report, Foley reported assets ranging between $237,000 and $1.2 million. Those reports indicated that the former congressman from Fort Pierce invested between $1,000 and $15,000 in companies such as BellSouth, Coca Cola and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts.

Oh, and don’t forget — Foley can use his re-election campaign funds to pay for his legal bills.