Day: July 25, 2006

Favorite Bush Moments

Jon Ponder

A compilation by David Letterman of President Bush’s top 10 video moments prompted this call by the Last Chance Democracy Cafe for readers’ favorite Bush moments. Here are a few from commenters that are particularly memorable:

  • “My favorite moment is in the future. As he is found guilty of treason and crimes against humanity and tries to pardon himself in court after the verdict.”
  • “How about when he masturbated in a coffin surrounded by a couple-dozen fellow Skull-and-Bonesmen at Yale? That’s gotta be a keeper.”
  • “being arrested for drunk driving, being arrested for being drunk in public, getting a score of 25 on his air force exam, going AWOL instead of getting tested for drugs,getting his girlfriend an abortion, sitting on his ass like a scared child on sep 11th, invading a country for WMDS that don’t exist (even though he said he would do it even if they didn’t) saying he doen’t care about finding BIN LADEN, or that he doesn’t give him much thought, appointing miers, appointing BROWN to FEMA, giving the PEOPLE most responsible for 911, medals of honor, bankrupting AMERICA, not being able to name 1 thing he has done wrong thats just a few of MY FAVORITE BUSH MOMENTS.”

My favorite George W. Bush moment constituted my first impression of him. At the 1988 Republican Convention, where his father, the vice president, was seeking a presidential nomination, a reporter asked Bush the younger, who was 42 years old at the time, what he and his father talked about when they were in private. The future forty-second president of the United States responded with one word: “Pussy.”

So what is your favorite Bush moment?

When Is a War Not a ‘Civil War?’

Jon Ponder

“I mean, what are people waiting for, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant to get out there before they call it a civil war.”

A scholar in the “New York Times” recently went through about 10 recent wars that were categorized as civil wars, and none of them was as bad as this.

Semantic conspiracy: History will record that our invasion of Iraq in 2003 to depose Saddam Hussein had the unintended consequence of triggering a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. That much is clear. What is less clear is when our politicians and the media will be forced to come to terms with the reality on the ground in the new Iraq.

For the rest of us, it is past time to call the mess in Mesopotamia what it is — the Iraqi Civil War:

[BRIAN UNGER, substituting for Keith Olbermann on Countdown last night]: Jonathan, before anything else, I‘d like to get your take on whether this is or isn‘t a civil war in Iraq.

[JONATHAN ALTER, writer for Newsweek]: You know, I think it clearly is, by any historical standard. I mean, what are people waiting for, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant to get out there before they call it a civil war. A scholar in the “New York Times” recently went through about 10 recent wars that were categorized as civil wars, and none of them was as bad as this.

You know, so I think what‘s going on here is a semantic game where the media doesn‘t want to start calling it a civil war before the politicians do, because then they will be accused of liberal bias and the Democrats don‘t want to call it a civil war, because they‘ll be accused of lack of, you know, patriotism by the Republicans. And, of course, the administration doesn‘t want to call it that because it will confirm it‘s a fiasco.

So, everybody has this kind of semantic conspiracy to not call the elephant in the room, the elephant in the room.

The same cabal of conniving Republicans, million-dollar Kool Kids in the DC media and spineless Democrats who pretended to be blind to the false rationale for invading Iraq in 2002 is obfuscating the fact that our mission there has changed in 2006. We were conquerers then but now the billion-dollar robocop of the U.S. military is deployed as a beat cop, trying to keep the peace in the midst of a civil war.

ABA Bipartisan Task Force Finds Bush’s ‘Signing Statements’ To Be Unconstitutional

Jon Ponder

With both Congress and the media unwilling or unable to challenge President Bush’s unprecendented accumulation of power, we should be grateful that the American Bar Association has had the courage to step into the breach.

A bipartisan task force appointed by ABA President David Greco took on the issue of the so-called signing statements Pres. Bush issues after he signs bills into law. In many of the over 800 statements issued by the president — a number that dwarfs the 600 or so such statements issued by all of his predecessors in the past 217 years, combined — the president has indicated that he intended to break the very the laws he just signed.

The ABA task force ruled that this countermanding of laws passed by Congress is unconstitutional.

With the media focused on the Israeli-Hezbollah war and the Iraqi Civil War, the ABA findings have gotten very little attention.

Imagine, if you will, that a Democratic president had been found to have deliberately and repeatedly engaged in unconstitutional activities. What a hew and cry there would be.

Now Sen. Arlen Specter says he just might sue the president over these activities. What we know for sure about Sen. Specter is that he is all bark and no bite. I, for one, am not expecting much.

Here’s a link to the ABA Task Force Report

And here’s a list of the task force members:
[…]

Media Guy Sums Up the Oprah-Gayle Gay Thing

Buck Banks

The horror, the horror: AdAge’s Simon Dumenco, aka Media Guy, plumbs the depths of his psyche to create images we never wanted to entertain. WARNING: If you read this, it will happen to you, too.

Oprah and Gayle are happy-gay, not gay-gay
Look, when I worked with Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King (on the launch of O magazine), I didn’t think they were gay. I still don’t think they’re gay. I don’t care that they think that the American public might think they’re gay, or that their in-print denials of their gayness (in the current O) are making many people who’d never a-thunk about their possible gayness now think they actually are gay. What I am concerned about is how to strike from my mind the images of Oprah and Gayle sharing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Neapolitan Dynamite (with one spoon), loofahing each other in the shower (in slo-mo) and then shopping at Home Depot together (taking turns pushing the cart).

Ew!

Lebanon: The Red Herring of a ‘Sustainable Cease-Fire’

Buck Banks

The old misdirection: As the rockets continue to fall on Israel and the Israelis continue to bomb Lebanon back into the Stone Age, Bushco’s mouthpieces continue to yammer on about something called a “sustainable cease-fire” as opposed, apparently, to a “cease-fire.” Indeed, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said she would not engage in shuttle diplomacy or even get down to brass tacks with leaders of the region until a “sustainable cease-fire” was in place.

Here’s how Bush meat puppet Tony Snow not-so-eloquently explained the Bushco position yesterday at a White House press briefing:

Q: On Lebanon, there seems to be two tracks that have emerged. There are those calling for an immediate cease-fire; there are those calling for a sustainable cease-fire. And the sustainable camp says there’s a risk — if you just call for an immediate, you’ll be back here in three weeks or three months. Isn’t it worth the risk if you stop innocent Israelis and Lebanese from being killed; isn’t it worth taking that risk while you try to bang out something more sustainable?

So the sustainable cease-fire is one that is not going to enable Hezbollah to declare victory, but instead will allow the people of Lebanon to look forward to peace and prosperity.

MR. SNOW: The question is whether that’s a fool’s errand, Jim. The idea that you suspend — number one, there’s a notion that somehow both sides are going to suspend, and we remain deeply skeptical that Hezbollah is going to abide by any such agreement. But the more important thing is, sustainable really does matter, because as we’ve seen in some places, if you allow terrorists to proclaim victory and to continue to take root within a country, you actually encourage further misbehavior. There’s no place on the record where as a result of a negotiation a terrorist organization has said, okay, we give up, great treaty.

So instead I think the most important thing is to put into place conditions where you’ll have a sustainable cease-fire. What does that mean? It means that Hezbollah not only returns the soldiers, not only returns the rockets, but either decides or lacks the capability to weaken the government of Lebanon by operating independently of that government and serving as a rogue force that is capable of not only seizing territory, destabilizing within Lebanon, threatening the Lebanese government, threatening the Lebanese people, but also threatening the peace of the region.

So the sustainable cease-fire is one that is not going to enable Hezbollah to declare victory, but instead will allow the people of Lebanon to look forward to peace and prosperity.

Go ahead.

Q: If you — I don’t think there’s any disagreement about the goal, even the folks calling for an immediate cease-fire want to see something sustainable. The point is, what do you do in the interim — this risk everyone is talking about, that you could be back there in three weeks? So what? So you’re back there in two weeks. In the meantime, you’ve had three weeks less of —

MR. SNOW: No, you’re assuming that there are three peaceful weeks. And I’m not going to take out the crystal ball. I’m telling you what our position is, which is —

Q: About your position, though, if they’re not peaceful weeks, doesn’t that, in some way, also insulate the administration, the Israelis from criticism from people saying that response is disproportionate. Doesn’t that improve and strengthen your position to say, hey, we tried it, we called for it, and it didn’t happen?

MR. SNOW: I don’t think continued civilian deaths strengthens anybody’s position. What you’re saying is if there are further civilian casualties, it strengthens our position from a debating point of view.

Q: (Inaudible.)

MR. SNOW: Well, no, that is — no, that is if you call for a cease-fire that is unenforceable, that is not enforced and people suffer, that is the practical consequence. The point is, there’s no give on this. The United States believes in a sustainable cease-fire. Secretary Rice is in the region talking about it. She had a very good meeting today with key leaders in Lebanon and they talked about that. They also talked about humanitarian assistance and a number of other topics.

So I think the notion that you have a cease-fire that, at this point, is unenforceable, does not really get us to the point we need to be at. You do not want to give — you simply don’t want to go there.

The “sustainable cease-fire” is a red herring. It’s not a viable political goal given the way Bushco has defined it — Hezbollah giving up its rockets and basically ceasing to exist, rather than just agreeing to not fire its rockets at Israel, which would just be a “cease-fire.” By insisting on an outcome that is not realistic, Bushco can continue to back Israel in its excessive counter-offensive and continue to supply the very weaponry with which the Israelis are blowing Lebanon back to the Old Testament.

Now we’re going in with googobs of humanitarian aid for the hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese, so we’re actually the heroes and we could broker a peace deal if only there was a “sustainable cease-fire.” This is what passes for the foreign policy of an administration for which “surprise visits” equal diplomacy.

Point is, Bushco doesn’t much care what happens to Lebanon as long as Iran and Syria get the unequivocal message that unless they want to join their Lebanese neighbors in the Pleistocene Era, they’d better reign in Hezbollah and stop striving for political ascendency in the Middle East.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside a man’s reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.

— William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), American economist, sociologist

Poll: Schwarzenegger Expands Lead over Angelides

Jon Ponder

This is an open letter to all the Democratic leaders of California, starting with senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as the rest of the political establishment:

You foisted Phil Angelides on us with your endorsements of him over Steve Westly, the candidate who was obviously better suited to take on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now it is time for you to pony up, get out there and campaign for Angelides and turn this thing around.

Otherwise, it looks like Schwarzenegger is going to sail into a second term:

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has expanded his lead to eight points over Democratic Treasurer Phil Angelides, who is still struggling to shore up support and confidence among those in his own party, according to the latest Field Poll.

The poll, taken July 10-23, shows Schwarzenegger leading Angelides 45 to 37 percent among likely voters in California, with 3 percent favoring other candidates and 15 percent still undecided.

For the first time since February 2005, more voters approve of Schwarzenegger’s job performance than disapprove — and for the first time in nearly two years, more California voters believe the state is heading in the right direction than think it is on the wrong track, the poll showed.

Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, says the numbers reflect Angelides’ continued struggle to recover from the effects of brutal mudslinging in the June Democratic primary against state Controller Steve Westly. The treasurer now faces a tough — but not impossible — task in the coming weeks if he is to stop Schwarzenegger’s upward trend among voters, he said.

“What’s surprising is the weakness of his support among Democrats, and the lack of confidence Democrats have that Angelides will win,” DiCamillo said of the treasurer.