Day: July 17, 2006

Cincinnati Inquirer:

House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-West Chester, called on Democrats last week to pull a TV ad that shows images of flag-draped caskets of U.S. soldiers, calling the spot “outrageous.”

“To use those images to rally Democrats and to raise money is, I think, appalling,” said Boehner.

But the outrage from Republicans comes after Democrats complained in 2004 about a campaign ad from President Bush that showed firefighters carrying a flag-draped coffin from the ruins of the World Trade Center.

Questioned by reporters on what the difference was, Boehner seemed tongue-tied. “These were American citizens killed by terrorists. That is a very different policy issue than American soldiers dying on the battlefield protecting the rights and freedoms of American people.”

“How so?” a reporter asked.

“How so? You want me to describe the difference between men and women of the military out there defending the American people, and victims – victims – of terrorist activities?” Boehner asked.

“They were both killed by opponents, right? Terrorists or Islamic insurgents?” a reporter pressed.

An exasperated Boehner said: “The World Trade Center victims were victims of a terrorist act here on our shore and I think all Americans were appalled that this did in fact happen. But I think the differences, in terms of the images, are as clear as night and day.”

Check out Googlism.com. You enter your name, or any other word, and it gives you a list of phrases. Not sure what it means but it’s a fun way to waste a few minutes. It said it didn’t yet have enough information on “jon ponder” to provide results but on my last name (and cousin Trish’s) it returned this list, some of which is true, or at least unverifiable, as regards me or Trish:

ponder is an object
ponder is not dickens
ponder is never “preachy”
ponder is to dwell upon with long and anxious attention
ponder is meeting the needs of its readers
ponder is considered one of america’s foremost inspirational authors
ponder is a compilation of thoughts
ponder is the manager
ponder is never satisfied with the status quo
ponder is terse and hard
ponder is a more mature gal
ponder is a declarative
ponder is not a lawyer
ponder is a wizard at understanding the interrelationships of multiple processes and devising systems to serve them
ponder is just as important as to push and produce
ponder is determined to continue the project
ponder is best when he sticks to what’s comfortable
ponder is where their industry is heading

But most of it is definitely not true:

[…]

What Liberal Media? There’s an interesting profile of my congressman, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Liberal Enclave) in the Los Angeles Times today. But the story could have some editing, however — or the writer needs a thesaurus — because he described Rep. Waxman as a “partisan” no less than six times:

And his public utterances are so unfailingly partisan that he has little capacity to get cooperation from his Republican colleagues. He also contributes to the toxic political climate that many decry in present-day Washington…

Investigative reporters in Washington agree that — partisan as Waxman is — his staff research is highly reliable. Chief Counsel Phil Barnett, the final gatekeeper, vets every report the office releases…

Conservatives liken him to a male Jane Fonda or a liberal version of their own Tom DeLay, the disgraced former House majority leader known for his intense partisanship…

“It is clear his interest has always been more focused on using his position for partisan attack rather than legislative achievement….”

And his intense partisanship contributed to his isolation…

Some have a partisan edge: a file called “Iraq on the Record” chronicles “misleading statements” by Bush and his Cabinet leading up to the war…

What makes this stranger still is that I don’t see Rep. Waxman as being all that partisan. He’s a liberal fighting the cause but he’s hardly a lackey for the party.

Jonathan Chait:

Ron Suskind’s new book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” paints a harrowing picture of Bush’s intellectual limits. Bush, writes Suskind, “is not much of a reader.” He prefers verbal briefings and often makes a horse-sense judgment based on how confident his briefer seems in what he’s saying. In August 2001, the CIA was in a panic about an upcoming terrorist attack and drafted a report with the title, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” When a CIA staffer summed up the memo’s contents in a face-to-face meeting with Bush, the president found the briefer insufficiently confident and dismissed him by saying, “All right, you’ve covered your ass, now,” according to Suskind. That turned out to be a fairly disastrous judgment.

Bush loyalists like to dismiss Suskind’s reporting, but it jibes with the picture that has emerged from other sources. L. Paul Bremer III’s account of his tenure as head of Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority depicts Bush as uninterested in the central questions of rebuilding and occupying the country.

Video of a presidential meeting that came to light this year showed Bush being briefed on the incipient Hurricane Katrina. His subordinates come off as deeply concerned about a potential catastrophe, but Bush appears blase, declining to ask a single question. And of course there was the famous 2001 incident in which Russian President Vladimir Putin conveyed to Bush a story of being given a cross by his mother. Bush invested deep significance in the story. “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” he told reporters. “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Bush’s supporters have insisted for the last six years that liberal derision of the president’s intelligence amounts to nothing more than cultural snobbery. We don’t like his pickup truck and his accent, the accusation goes, so we hide our blue-state prejudices behind a mask of intellectual condescension.

But the more we learn about how Bush operates, the more we can see we were right from the beginning. It matters that the president values his gut reaction and disdains book learnin’. It’s not just a question of cultural style. The president’s narrow intellectual horizons have real consequences, sometimes cataclysmic ones.

“See, the irony is what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this [shit].”

— President Geroge W. Bush, displaying his trenchant grasp of Middle East politics to fellow world leaders at the G8 summit yesterday