Year: 2006
Elections Are Over — Now Where Is Mark Foley?
On Oct. 1, Republican former Rep. Mark Foley checked into the Sierra Tucson Treatment Center in Arizona, purportedly to deal with the alcohol abuse that he cited as a contributing factor to his sexual pursuit of teenage boys.
Rehab at the center usually lasts 30 days (at a cost of $30,000) but on Nov. 1 we learned that Foley was going to stay at the center for at least another week — thereby conveniently keeping his name out of the press in the final days of campaigning for the midterm elections.
Well, the elections are over and the damage done by his scandalous behavior has taken its first toll. His party lost both houses of Congress, in no small measure due to the revelation of his salacious emails to young House pages.
The elections may be over but the Foley scandal is not. We are still waiting on findings from the House Ethics Committee. We need to know when the House leadership, including Speaker Hastert, Majority Leader John Boehner and others, knew about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward the pages. We need to know whether there was a cover-up by GOP House leaders and, if so, who else may have been involved.
So many questions but let’s start at the top: Where is Mark Foley?
Meanwhile Morgues in Iraq Are Filled to Capacity and Bodies Are Piling Up
In October, Lancet published a report that estimated that the number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000, which would make the war an official huminatarian emergency. But pro-war factions were quick to kick up dust around the report by disputing its methodology, despite the fact that the statistical modeling is commonly used in marketing and for estimating the size of television audiences.
Baghdad’s morgues are full. With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries.
Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.
In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi.
The city’s network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says…
Bodies are sent for burial every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes making corpse identification impossible.
“We can’t remove all the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in again,” al-Obaidi said. “We simply don’t have the staff.”
Al-Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives is an emotional and logistical burden.
“Every day, there are crowds of women outside weeping, yelling and flailing in grief. They’re all looking for their dead sons and I don’t know how the computer or we will bear up,” he said.
While no one knows how many Iraqis have died, daily tallies of violent deaths by The Associated Press average nearly 45 a day. About half of them are unidentified bodies discovered on city streets or floating in the Tigris River.
The United Nations estimates about 100 violent deaths daily. The Iraqi health minister last week put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the U.S. invasion at about 150,000 — close to the U.N. figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000 to 50,000.
In October, Lancet published a report that estimated that the number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000, which would make the war an official huminatarian emergency. But pro-war factions were quick to kick up dust around the report by disputing its methodology, despite the fact that the statistical modeling is commonly used in marketing and for estimating the size of television audiences.
GOP Wakes Up to Fact That Bush is Worst President Ever
As a coda to Republicans’ losing Congress this year, the firing of Donald Rumsfeld may serve as the tipping-point moment when the GOP could no longer ignore the fact that their former Dear Leader, George Bush, is indeed the Worst President Ever in the history of the United States.
History may well show that the forced resignation of the secretary of defense on the day after the election is the equivalent in the political realm of Pres. Bush’s mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested that if Bush replaced Rumsfeld two weeks before the election, voters would not have been as angry about the unpopular Iraq war. Republicans would have gained the boost they needed, according to Gingrich, to retain their majority in the Senate and hold onto 10 to 15 more House seats.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agreed with that assessment.
Bush should have removed Rumsfeld “as soon as he had made up his mind. And that’s a hard thing to calculate. But it’s highly doubtful that he made up his mind between the time the election returns came in on Tuesday and Wednesday when Rumsfeld was out.”
“And if Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference,” Specter said. “I’d still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee.”
The same thought occurred to veteran Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., who was on the verge of becoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. After the election, Shaw said that if Rumsfeld had stepped down before last Tuesday, Shaw and other Republicans might have won.
“It could have made a difference in who is running the Congress,” said Shaw.
Let’s stipulate that lying — often gussied up as “misleading” or “shading the truth” — is part and parcel of politics. But George W. Bush came into politics with a record and a reputation as someone who lies compulsively.
In this instance, whether he lied to the press before the election when he said that Rummy and Cheney were doing “fantastic” jobs and would stay on through the end of his term, or whether, as my colleague Trish has suggested, he lied after the election in order to cover his tracks, the fact is, he lied one time too many — and he may have contributed to the undoing of his presidency, and his party, in the process.
Hat tip to JR
Norquist: Sherwood Lost Because His Mistress ‘Whined’ about Being Strangled
Sherwood’s seat would have been overwhelmingly ours, if his mistress hadn’t whined about being throttled.”
— Grover Norquist
— Grover Norquist
Grover Norqist, the GOP operative who has been best pals with Jack Abramoff since college, is in denial about the message sent by voters in the midterm elections last week.
Norquist believes the heavy Republican losses were not caused by discontent with the Iraq war but rather by voters’ fits of pique over the foibles of various members of Congress. For example, Rep. Sherwood’s loss in Pennsylvania, Norquist says, was a result of Sherwood’s mistress whining about his abusive behavior:
“Bob Sherwood’s seat would have been overwhelmingly ours, if his mistress hadn’t whined about being throttled,” said Mr Norquist.
This is wrong on so many levels, the least of which is the fact that Sherwood’s name is Don, not Bob.
Despite running a campaign ad in which he apologized for committing adultery but denied the allegations of abuse, Sherwood lost to Vice Adm. Joseph Sestak, his Democratic opponent.
Poll: Bush Drops to 31% in Newsweek Survey
A four percentage point drop since last week:
President Bush’s job approval rating has fallen to just 31 percent, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll. Bill Clinton’s lowest rating during his presidency was 36 percent; Bush’s father’s was 29 percent, and Ronald Reagan’s was 35 percent. Jimmy Carter’s and Richard Nixon’s lows were 28 and 23 percent, respectively. (Just 24 approve of outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s job performance; and 31 percent approve of Vice President Dick Cheney’s.)
But He Meant It In a Good Way
I don’t even know anybody in Mississippi, and I’m insulted by what U.S. Charles Rangel (D-NY) said.
Rangel, a Democrat, was quoted in The New York Times on Thursday saying: “Mississippi gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?”
Rangel said he didn’t intend to insult the state…
Obviously.
Maybe Rangel needs to get out more. He could come south and listen to some live blues and maybe even eat a fried catfish. But let us know when you’re coming, Charlie, so we can all peel our “We don’t care how you do it in New York” bumper stickers off our cars.
Quote du Jourk
“Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.”
— George W. Bush on Nov. 4, 2004
He Wasn’t Lying Then, He’s Lying Now
You heard it here first.
I don’t think Bush was lying when he told reporters last week that Rumsfeld was here to stay. I think he was lying when he told reporters this week that he was planning to get rid of him all along.
I mean, come on, since when has Bush/Rove ever been careful not to do something that would impact an election, the justification he gave for not announcing Rumsfeld’s departure sooner?
Think about it. If Bush had done as “fine” as he expected, do you think for one minute he’d have gotten rid of Rummy?
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 [Rumsfeld] and I both agreed in our meeting yesterday that it was appropriate that I accept his resignation. And so the decision was made — actually, I thought we were going to do fine yesterday.
Think about it. If Bush had done as “fine” as he expected, do you think for one minute he’d have gotten rid of Rummy? Hell no. He’d have stayed the course with maniacal glee, tacking that boat right over a tsunami without a backward glance.
On the other hand, if they had realized how fed up we all were with his conduct of the war (among other things), do you really believe he wouldn’t have rushed to dump Rumsfeld? Think how differently the election would have gone if he had. People would have taken it as a sign of hope that things were going to change, and that maybe the Republicans aren’t such bad fellows after all. And they would have softened on throwing the bastards out.
He blew it but he wasn’t lying then, he’s lying now.
That’s my take. So what do you think?
First Mehlman, Next Karl Rove?
Somebody measure the drapes in Karl Rove’s office. It didn’t take long for Georgie’s vexation at his party’s sorry showing in the midterm elections to manifest. First Rumsfeld was gone and now Ken Mehlman has gotten the ax. Yes, the Republican National Committee’s chair is outta there at the end of the year.
No one’s pointing a finger at the guy who was really in charge of all the losing strategies. Yes, I’m talking about Turd Blossom himself, Karl Rove
And while rumors abound about both men — Mehlman being pretty much known to be gay and Rumsfeld’s head supposedly on the chopping block for at least a week before his “resignation” was “accepted” — no one’s pointing a finger at the guy who was really in charge of all the losing strategies. Yes, I’m talking about Turd Blossom himself, Karl Rove.
Karl has shown the pressure lately. After Florida Governor candidate, now Governor-elect, Charlie Crist failed to attend a rally with the President in his honor just before the election, Karl was feeling it. One moment of Rovian pique was even immortalized by Crist’s campaign workers at a victory party.
…dozens of campaign staff then arrived wearing black T-shirts that said “Ask George LeMieux.”
…Asked [earlier] by CNN why Crist wouldn’t appear with the president at an election eve rally in Pensacola, a miffed Rove snapped that the reporter should ask George LeMieux.
LeMieux was Crist’s campaign manager.
Mehlman was hand-picked and cultivated by Rove, so his failure and subsequent exit can’t be good news for Karl.
A protege of Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, Mehlman became RNC chairman after managing Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004, when the president won re-election and Republicans expanded their majorities in the House and the Senate…Before that campaign, he served as White House political director under Rove.
Bush’s comment to reporters post-election speaks volumes about his current feelings toward the man who more than likely took a fall for Bush in the Valerie Plame affair.
Bush also got in a dig at his trusted top political adviser, Karl Rove. Rove is widely credited with Bush’s presidential victories in 2000 and 2004 and GOP gains in the 2002 congressional elections. As recently as last week, Rove predicted Republicans would retain both House and Senate.
“I obviously was working harder in the campaign than he was,” said Bush…
Ha ha, funny. Unless you’re Karl Rove, and then there’s a big sweat stain spreading under both your arms. People contrast George with his little brother, Jeb, finding the elder sibling more affable, down to earth, etc. (Not me, of course, but people.) Jeb has always made it abundantly clear he’s a conniving, nasty, petulant asshole who will take you out if you cross him. But I think this trait, inherited from Mom’s side of the family, is present in all the offspring.
And Karl Rove should be putting his affairs in order.
