Day: February 6, 2006

Trouble on the right: Rightwing blowhards like to complain that criticism of President Bush by liberals offers aid and comfort to terrorists and undermines the morale of our troops. They equate being critical of Dear Leader to disloyalty to the United States, as if the Tory Bush really were their King George.

They should get a load of this reaction to the State of the Union speech from their own base:

The Wall Street Journal editorial page accused President Bush of playing “miniball,” code for a Clintonian love of “small political ideas.” Robert Novak reported private concern among congressional conservatives that Mr. Bush was moving toward bigger government. George Will called Bush’s most memorable line – that America is addicted to oil – “wonderfully useless.”

“He’s conservative by temperament; many of his policy positions, such as cutting taxes, are on the right side of the political spectrum,” says John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron in Ohio. “But he doesn’t have a consistent set of conservative principles. That’s what a lot of the complaint has been about, especially after the State of the Union.”

One of the best known rightwing fundraisers is not happy either:

“The party has been hijacked by big-government Republicans,” says [Richard] Viguerie, hinting that it might be good for the party to lose congressional power later this year. “The importance of losing elections is greatly underrated,” he adds. “There’s not any way Ronald Reagan would have been elected in 1980 if [Gerald] Ford had been elected in ’76…”

“We hoped [Bush] would be more like Reagan than his father, but clearly he is not like Ronald Reagan,” says Viguerie. “Reagan was no pure conservative – he wandered off the conservative reservation here and there. But there was such a massive reservoir of goodwill for Reagan, because he was one of us. He walked with us and came to our meetings and receptions and dinners and sat with us.”

Since others are covering the substance of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee today to discuss the president’s domestic spying program, I thought (being in Los Angeles and all) I’d cover the style:

Update:

It may sound like hyperbole but to a great degree the future of our democracy hangs on the hearings taking place right now in the United States Senate. The issue at hand is whether President Bush does or does not have absolute power. On its face, this would appear to be a slamdunk but, tragically, it is not.

On C-SPAN “Washington Journal” this morning Glenn Greenwald masterfully took on a rightwing hack Robert Turner over the Bush Administration’s illegal wiretapping of American citizens.

Greenwald is live blogging the hearings on his website.

The session opened with controversy, as Democrats objected to the fact that committee chair Arlen Specter refused to swear in Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. The Democrats want the AG under oath because he apparently lied in sworn testimony he gave to the committee during his confirmation hearings. (See paragraph six in this post.)

Time Magazine:

T-shirts, it turns out, aren’t the only things that get you in trouble with the Capitol Police at the State of the Union address. Much has already been made of the fact that both anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young, the wife of Republican Congressman Bill Young, were ejected from the speech for wearing shirts with political messages; in Sheehan’s case, her t-shirt read “2,245 dead. How many more?”, while Young was sporting a sweat shirt with the words, “Support the Troops-Defending Our Freedom.” Both have denounced their treatment-and both have received apologies from the police.

But on the same evening that President Bush was lauding democracy and freedom, there was one other person in attendance whose rights were infringed upon. The man, who did not want his identity revealed after the disturbing incident, was a personal guest of Florida Democrat Alcee Hastings. He is a prominent businessman from Broward County, Florida who works with the Department of Defense-and has a security clearance. After sitting in the gallery for the entire speech, he was surrounded by about ten law enforcement officers as he exited the chamber and whisked away to a room in the Capitol.

For close to an hour the man, who was born in India but is an American citizen, was questioned by the police, who thought he resembled someone on a Secret Service photo watch list, according to Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer. Eventually, the police realized it was a case of mistaken identity and let him go. Gainer has assured Hastings that the Capitol Police, Secret Service and FBI will investigate why the man was detained for so long, and try to “sharpen our procedures.” But the man was “very, very scared” by the incident, says Fred Turner, a spokesperson for Hastings. On Tuesday night, he told the congressman that the experience was “maybe just the price of being brown in America,” Turner says.