Keith Olbermann is reporting now that the Associated Press is calling the Viriginia U.S. Senate race in favor of Sen. George Allen’s Democratic opponent, Jim Webb.
5:43 PST UPDATE: Olbermann reported just now that NBC is calling the race for Webb.
In his news conference today, Pres. Bush inadvertently admitted that he lied to reporters last week when he said that he planned to retain Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney through the end of his term:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Last week you told us that Secretary Rumsfeld will be staying on. Why is the timing right now for this, and how much does it have to do with the election results?
THE PRESIDENT: Right. No, you and [two other reporters] came in the Oval Office, and [one of you] asked me the question one week before the [election], and basically it was, are you going to do something about Rumsfeld and the Vice President? And my answer was, they’re going to stay on. And the reason why is I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.
In other words, yes, I lied to you and so what? So what if lying to reporters is the same as lying to the American people.
The president continued:
The truth of the matter is, as well — I mean, that’s one reason I gave the answer, but the other reason why is I hadn’t had a chance to visit with Bob Gates yet, and I hadn’t had my final conversation with Don Rumsfeld yet at that point.
Many of us remember a time when the idea of a president admitting during a news conference that he’d lied to the media would have produced excitement and anger among the gaggle on the scene.
Today, however the session continued as if nothing had happened. Three or four reporters lobbed unrelated softballs, apparently oblivous — or apathetic — to the fact that he had just admitted to lying to their colleagues. Finally, someone asked for clarification — and the president, a certified pathological liar who is accustomed to murdering the truth and getting away with it, simply lied about lying:
Q Mr. President, thank you. Can I just start by asking you to clarify, sir, if, in your meeting with Steve and Terry and Dick, did you know at that point —
THE PRESIDENT: I did not.
Q — you would be making a change on Secretary Rumsfeld?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I did not. And the reason I didn’t know is because I hadn’t visited with his replacement — potential replacement.
Q But you knew he would be leaving, just not who would replace him?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I didn’t know that at the time.
And that was it. No follow up. No outrage. Not only did Chris Matthews not spew spittle in outrage, he did not even mention it, probably didn’t even notice.
There are consequences much harsher than the expectoration of pundits. This time — unlike any of the dozens, maybe hundreds of times this president has lied to the American people since 1999 — there was an immediate and unexpected consequence. Bush’s unqualified endorsement of Rumsfeld became a big news story in the run-up to the election that was not received well by the country’s uniformed personnel. Their displeasure was expressed in editorials published in the military newspapers on Monday, the day before the election, that called for Rumsfeld’s ouster.
But just like all the other uncountable lies told by this man since he’s been president, he’s has gotten away with this one, too. The media has moved on. It’s like they simply expect him to lie.
And what about Cheney? The results of the elections yesterday make it even more likely that the lameduck V.P. will be replaced with a GOP heir apparent — the party elders would no doubt like it to be John McCain — sometime before the commencement of election season early next year.
It is notable that Bush included Cheney with Rumsfeld in his “heckuva job.” Perhaps we should expect to hear stories about Cheney’s failing health or his sudden ennui with government soon after the holidays.
Just before the president’s news conference at 11AM PST, the CNN crawl announced that the network was calling the election for Democrat Jon Tester in Montana. Sen. Conrad Burns will face the rest of the Abramoff inquiry without the comfort and privilege of his U.S. Senate seat.
If they are right, there will be 50 Democrats, for certain — and if Webb prevails in Virginia, there will be 51.
That Nancy Pelosi could become the first female president of the United States next year is one of the longest long shots going in the current political environment. Nonetheless, it remains a technical possibility — and even a practical reality — if President Bush and Vice President Cheney were to decide to tough it out to the end of their impeachments in a Democratic controlled Congress in 2007.
We first wrote about this last June, back when the idea that impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney was all but unthinkable except to a few liberal extremist Bush haters.
Now about half of country would favor impeachment if there was reasonable cause to believe the president has broken the law. (And Bush has broken at least 750 laws, so take your pick.) And about a third favor impeaching the president based on what they know now, which is 7 percentage points higher than the number who wanted to impeach President Clinton in 1998.
I was reminded of my musings a year ago about possibility that Nancy Pelosi could become president when I saw this article Sunday at Ice Station Tango:
Impeachment is meaningless unless both Bush and Cheney go down. If Cheney stays in place the goal of the impeachment movement seems that much more daunting. Two impeachments?
Keeping Cheney is the equivalent of the Republican party going all in. If Bush and Cheney are impeached and removed, then the Presidency likely falls to Nancy Pelsoi. Convenient for a Rovian administration that has already successfully smeared her. Impeachment would then be a choice between someone Republicans call an “uber-liberal” and “staying the course. Could be a problematic frame for the impeachment movement.
If Democrats re-take the House this fall (and that is a big “if”), Pelosi will become the first female Speaker of the House. In that position, she would also be third in line to become president.
If Democrats also take control of the Senate (an even bigger “if”), the odds that the president and vice president will be impeached become all but a dead cinch.
Assuming all those conditions fall in place, we might expect that Bush and Cheney would follow the course set by the previously most corrupt presidential administration: Cheney would resign as Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, did, and the party elders would force a new vice president onto Bush without consulting him — someone like John McCain.
With McCain in place as VP, Bush would be forced to resign, clearing the way to the McCain ascendancy.
But President Bush is not a student of history, as we have learned, and everything we have seen about his temperament indicates he would hold out until the end — that he and Cheney would fight the impeachment every step of the way, stubbornly refusing to give testimony and evidence, ignoring the entreaties of the party elders to do as Nixon did and fall on their swords, only to become the first president and vice president to be removed from office by impeachment.
Which scenario sounds more like them: falling on their swords for the good of their party and nation — or toughing it out to the bitter end, even though they know they are guilty?
Just in on CNN: Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has resigned today and Pres. Bush will announce the resignation at a news conference at 11AM PST. John King says the resignation is under pressure from GOP leaders in Congress.
Bob Gates, former CIA Director, is likely to be named as his replacement.
I wonder how Borowitz knew this?
Borowitz joked in his column today that Bush would beg for a do-over by firing Rumsfeld.
The White House just scheduled a 1 p.m. Eastern time news conference with a major announcement by Bush. Hmmmm. Wonder what it will be?
In the wee hours of the morning after American voters swept his party from power, President George W. Bush made an extraordinary appearance on national television to ask the national electorate for a “do-over.”
Millions of viewers were tuned into televised Election Night coverage when Mr. Bush, using the nation’s Emergency Broadcasting System, interrupted those telecasts to make a direct appeal to the American people…
Mr. Bush said that if the American people would grant him a do-over, he would gladly fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, referring to his longtime Cabinet member as “that loser.”
Can you say, “irony?” I though you could. If you had to pick a district in Florida where voting was most under suspicion,” wouldn’t you pick U.S. House District 13, the seat most recently occupied by — wait for it — Katherine Harris?
Republican Vern Buchanan was clinging to a 368-vote edge over Democrat Christine Jennings for the 13th Congressional District early this morning…
The results were loaded with controversy as nearly 13 percent of all ballots cast in Sarasota didn’t include a choice for Congress. That difference, and scattered reports of difficulty finding the race on Sarasota’s touchscreen ballots, raised concerns about under-votes in the race.
Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent couldn’t explain why 8,000 to 10,000 fewer people voted in the congressional race than in other high-profile races for governor, attorney general or U.S. Senate. But she said nothing mechanical went wrong with the county’s $4.7 million touchscreen voting machine system…
Throughout the day voters complained that touchscreen voting machines were not registering votes for Jennings properly.
Wait, it gets better.
Buchanan is an ultra-rich car dealer who defeated Tramm Hudson in the Republican primary. You would have thought Buchanan — despite pumping over $2.1 million of his own money into his campaign — would be at a disadvantage because of pesky fraud allegations in a sealed lawsuit. But Hudson was the guy who said blacks can’t swim. You decide.
Buchanan was also one of the few Republicans desperate enough to welcome heavy support from both Dufus Bush and his popular wife, the Lauratron 4000.
Until campaigning for Buchanan, Pres. Bush’s only other visit to Sarasota was on Sept. 11, 2001, when he read the book, “My Pet Goat,” with Sarasota school children, largely without moving his lips. They were just getting to the good part when the news came about the Twin Towers, which explains why another nine minutes went by before our hero returned to his presidential duties of being shuttled back and forth above flyover country.
But I digress.
We’ll keep you posted on how it all comes out, but something tells us Buchanan will maintain his amazing victory. After all, it’s District 13. Not that we’re superstitious, but we’d call Karl Rove in for one of those cleansing ceremonies with a priest before Buchanan unpacks in Harris’ old office.
Flipping back and forth between the two legitimate cable news outlets, MSNBC and CNN, last night, I saw what I hope will be the low point in election night coverage on television.
The coverage on MSNBC was nothing less than a train wreck. The source of the problem was Chris Matthews, the disgruntled former Democrat who hosts the network’s Hardball program.
His co-anchor was Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s Countdown, and the only professional newscaster on the set. Olbermann succeeded in keeping the coverage on track when he was on camera alone — and did his best not to wince when he was forced to engage in colloquies with Matthews, whose analysis grew increasingly off the wall as the evening progressed.
The lowest point in the evening started just prior to Matthews’ interview with Democratic Party chair Howard Dean in an exchange between Matthews and Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, who hosts MSNBC’s Faux Fox News shout show, Scarborough Country.
The topic was Hillary Clinton — a subject that never fails to make Matthew spew spittle. But this time it was Scarborough who said, almost off-handedly, that Sen. Clinton, a conservative Democrat, represented the “far left” of the Democratic Party.
Matthews let the comment go as went immediately into his interview with Chairman Dean, but Dean, who was not in the studio and could not see a monitor so did not know Scarborough had made the statement, stopped the interview to say, “I don’t know who said [Clinton represented the “far left”] but whoever he is is not being objective.”
Matthews agreed, “No, he’s not.”
After the Dean interview, Scarborough took the floor and did what seemed like a five minute rebuttal. He went on at length about his own purported newfound fairness when looking at politics — how he has spent months trashing his own party and praising Democrats. To prove he point, he wrapped up — finally — by admitting that what he’d said about Sen. Clinton was inaccurate, that her voting record as been moderate and that she is a very fine senator. Matthews apologized to Scarborough for characterizing him as less than a down-the-middle newscaster, which just added to the absurdity and wasted more air.
That outburst, coupled with the fact that Matthews has had a half dozen instances over the past few months in which he can’t remember the names of the politicians he’s discussing — counterposed by the polished neutrality of Olbermann’s presentation last night — make it clear that MSNBC needs to replace Chris Matthews with a professional broadcaster to pair with Olbermann, who was criminally under-utilized last night.
My nomination would be Phil Donahue, who was fired by MSNBC one month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq because of his vocal opposition to the war.
Things were a bit better at CNN where there were more professional newscaster on the set, including emcee Wolf Blizter, commentator Jeff Greenfield and poll expert Bill Schneider. (Later, Anderson Cooper took over, who performed with his usual polish. There was also a segment with Larry King that literally put me to sleep.)
The panel of partisan experts on the set is getting very tired. I am biased, admittedly, but I do like Paul Begala and admire James Carville but the rightwing pundits, Bill Bennett and J.C. Watt, usually simply spout talking points faxed to them by Karl Rove’s office but apparently had not gotten their marching orders last night.
The worst idea of the evening, however, was CNN’s “blog party” at the restaurant Tryst in D.C. They invited big name bloggers from both the left and the right to Washington but then apparently did not have a plan for what to do them when the broadcast began.
As anyone who has tried it will tell you, live blogging at a party is practically useless and the coverage last night on the blogs of the folks who were at the CNN party generally suffered because they were distracted.
My recommendation is to ditch both the old partisan pundits and the blogger party idea and instead bring a handful of bloggers from both sides onto the set where they can cover the news on their sites, argue with each other and discuss their coverage with Blitzer, Greenfield, Schneider and the rest.
Hope it sticks — if it does, Dems are one seat away from control of the U.S. Senate:
Sen. George Allen’s political career hung by a thread on Tuesday, as Democrat Jim Webb claimed victory — though fewer than 8,000 votes separated the two, and a recount was virtually certain.
“The votes are in and we won,” Webb said, though there were still votes to count. With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Webb had 1,170,564 votes, or 49.6 percent, to Allen’s 1,162,717, or 49.3 percent.
A final count, including all absentee ballots, was expected later Wednesday.
There are no automatic recounts in Virginia, but state law allows a candidate who finishes a half-percentage point or less behind to request a recount paid for by state and local governments.
With a margin greater than that but less than 1 percentage point, the trailing candidate can still seek a recount but has to pay the costs if the results are unchanged. Either way, a recount could not begin until after the State Board of Elections certifies the results Nov. 27; the losing candidate has 10 after that to request a recount.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
