Month: October 2006
Platitudes and Pralines: The Ice Cream Shop Photo Op
As we reported on Friday, President Bush celebrated “Character Counts” week by campaigning in Pennsylvania for GOP Rep. Don Sherwood. The congressman’s campaign is in a bit of trouble because he is a newly admitted adulterer and accused mistress-strangler.
After the speechifying, Karl Rove took the president and Rep. Sherwood out for a photo op. I guess the “mom and apple pie” shoppe was closed, so he opted for the wholesome goodness of an ice cream parlor:
During the quick stop, the president picked a cone filled with pralines and cream while Sherwood opted for a more conservative Styrofoam cup of vanilla ice cream.
Bush told [Paul Manning, the owner of the ice cream shop] that “hard-working people are the backbone of the country,” and to “keep up the good work,” Manning recalled.
The president and Manning exited the store ahead of Sherwood and company. A crowd of onlookers cheered and applauded as the president spoke of his dairy delight in a cake cone.
“This man knows how to make good ice cream,” the president said. A reporter asked to know what kind of ice cream the commander in chief preferred. “Pralines and cream; I strongly recommend it.”
All that stage-management, scripting and security, and yet the takeaway photo of the photo op is one of the president caught mid-bite, staring awkwardly at the floor, looking retarded.
The Blank Check
“The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection [has been] snuffed out.”
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom, to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy combatants and ship them somewhere, anywhere, but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “unlawful enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere, anywhere.
And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.
And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant,” exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check.
He lied to get it.
He lied as he received it.
Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?
Tabloids: Bushes Headed for Divorce
Bush has been drinking again so Laura is leaving him
It may be a coincidence that both the Globe and the National Examiner are out with cover stories alleging that President Bush’s marriage is ending. It is more than likely that there’s nothing to this story, but, as BuzzFlash pointed out, the tabs were ahead of the mainstream media on the president’s personal problems in the Clinton era.
If it’s true, it’ll be interesting to see how George W. Bush handles becoming the first president to go through a divorce while in office.
The Devil We Know: California Buys Schwarzenegger’s Latest Act
What contrarians we Californians are. While much of the country is finally waking up to the fact that Republicans really are incompetent at governing, we are on a glide path to re-electing the biggest faker in the bunch.
If California were a person, I would be worried that she is suffering short-term memory loss. It was just 11 months ago that she held Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with little more than contempt. He had been on TV a lot promoting his ballot initiatives, and he had his back up over fierce opposition from the unions. The confrontation brought out his natural tendency for bullying, which is unpleasant to begin but sounds especially harsh with a German accent.
This time last year, the only politician less popular in California than the governor was President Bush. Today the president’s numbers are still in the dumper but Governor Schwarzenegger’s approval is 56 percent in the latest Los Angeles Times poll. It appears he’s going to wallop Phil Angelides, the Democrat, in the election next month.
Angelides is part of the problem. Physically, he looks like the 98-pound weakling in the old Charles Atlas ads — the skinny guy who gets sand kicked in his face by the bully who, come to think of it, looks remarkably like der Gubernator.
An Unhappy President
Perhaps President Bush’s expression matched his mood yesterday as he left Washington for a campaign appearance with Rep. Don Sherwood, a Pennsylvania congressman who was recently forced to admit he was having an affair after his mistress reported him for trying to strangle her. Sherwood is one of a very few Republican candidates who would welcome a campaign appearance by the president whose approval numbers are in the mid-30s.
Jews Don’t Heart Huckabee
From the mouths of dolts: What is it with Republicans this year? Did they all attend the Earl Butz School of Public Speaking? Or the Cheney Institute of Insensitivity?
The latest bumbling blabbers is Arkansas’ governor, who joked that he lost weight at a concentration camp. Jews were not happy, according to the Jewish Telegraph Association:
Mike Huckabee, a Republican, has advertised his diet as a health model for obese Americans, and he bantered Thursday with radio talk show host Don Imus about his weight loss. Imus chided Huckabee that he looked “emaciated.” “I have just come from six weeks at a concentration camp held by the Democrat Party of Arkansas in an undisclosed location, making a hostage tape,” Huckabee replied. “That’s why I look that way.”
The National Jewish Democratic Council said Huckabee, a likely contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, “ought to think about the people who he might offend with such insensitive words. At the very least, he owes all of us an apology and explanation for his tasteless comments.”
Kevin Tillman Speaks
This one needs to be shouted from rooftops.
Kevin Tillman is the brother of Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who died in Afghanistan in what the military first termed as “killed in action” and later admitted was friendly fire. Both brothers enlisted in 2002, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
Kevin has written an extraordinary essay that contains all the thoughts he and Pat knew they would have to keep to themselves while they served our country.
You need to read it in its entirety and then email it to everyone you know. You can do both at Truth Dig but here’s part of this incredible work.
Much has happened since we handed over our voice:
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
…Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.
…Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
…Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
…Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.
Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.
…Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.
Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.
Somehow this is tolerated.
Worst. Congress. Ever.
The debate over whether President Bush is the worst president in our history is settled. He is. Now there is a growing sentiment that we may be enduring the final months of the Worst Congress Ever, too:
American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule by consensus — so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for show, human pieces of stagecraft — a fact the Republicans don’t even bother to conceal…
These days, [the Democrats] consider themselves lucky if they manage to hold a single hearing on a bill before Rove’s well-oiled legislative machine delivers it up for Bush’s signature.
Apparently, Republican politicians were all picked on in grade school:
The GOP’s “take that, bitch” approach to governing has been taken to the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.
“Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn’t in session, hoping that no one would show,” recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. “But we got a pretty good turnout anyway.”
Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.
“He was like a kid at the playground,” the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.
The article is long and worth the read.
