March
31, 2004 link
I'm listening to The O'Franken Factor
and his "Zero Spin Zone" right now.
Here are the frequencies for
Air America Radio around the
country:
New York - WLIB 1190 AM
Los Angeles - KBLA 1580 AM
Chicago - WNTD 950 AM
Portland, OR- KPOJ 620 AM
Inland Empire, CA- KCAA 1050 AM
Minneapolis MN - WMNN 1330AM
The O'Franken Factor from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
XM Satellite
Radio - Channel 167
I'm getting reports from people having trouble logging
on over the internet, probably because of overload. That's a good
thing.
The Bush administration finally has done the right thing in conceding
Condoleezza Rice's public testimony before the 9/11 Commission. But let's
look at all the chicanery before we got to this point...
First – too many people have forgotten this
– Bush
opposed the
creation of an independent 9/11 Commission. Polls said that was politically
untenable, so he went along with it.
Second, the Bush administration publically
rejected
giving the Commission a two month extension to complete its
work. Polls said that was bad politics, so they did an about face
and publically supported the extension.
Third, the White House didn't really want the Commission
to have more time, though, so they had
Dennis
Hastert block authorization of the extension in the House. Polls
said that was terrible politics, so Hastert stepped aside and the
House joined the Senate in resolving the Commission to finish its
work.
Fourth, Bush said he'd testify only before the Chair
and Vice Chair of the Commission – not before the other 8 members
– for no more than an hour. Polls said people didn't like that, so
after much badgering from the press Bush spokesman Scott McClellan
said they wouldn't keep a watch on it. And then yesterday Bush said
he'll speak behind closed doors to the full Commission, but only if
Cheney can be there to hold his hand and whisper answers to him.
Fifth, Condi Rice wouldn't testify because of executive
privilege or constitutional precedent or whatever other gibberish
sounded right to them on any given day. Polls said people didn't
understand why Rice could talk a marathon on television, but couldn't
utter a word under oath to the Commission.
It's tiresome reading, isn't it? And these are just
some of the highlights.
I glean 3 things from all this:
1. The Bush administration is 100%
responsible for the fact that public hearings and the final report
come out in the thick of an election year. The Commission could have
been created in early 2002 and come out with their public report by
mid-2003.
2. One of yesterday's talking points
– "The President knows not having Condoleezza Rice testify before
the 9/11 Commission is politically unpopular, but he's a man of principle,
and there are precious constitutional issues at stake" – is a canard.
In fact, Bush's campaign 2000 statement that "
I don't run polls
to tell me what to think" has to be considered one of his more ludicrous
lies.
3. The real reason for all the delay
is that Bush/Cheney have a fringe mentality that doesn't allow them
to distinguish between reasonable government privacy and absolute
government secrecy (Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote
an important book about
dangers such a failure poses to our national security). Just a couple
other prominent examples of Bush administration secret-loving: Cheney's
near
fetishistic protection of the anonymity of his energy task force
and
Ashcroft
and Bush's gutting of the Freedom of Information Act. For more, check
out this
U.S.
News and World Report investigative report.
If you're like me and have a five figure
bet on the outcome of Kerry vs. Bush, or if you just want to try
to read the tea leaves, March employment numbers come out Friday.
As a political indicator in the past, they have enormous predictive
value, so much so that I think the next few months' employment numbers
rival what happens in Iraq as the primary determinant of who will win,
probably even more than catching bin Laden or rising gas prices.
March
30, 2004 link
I've been busy reading Richard Clarke's
book.
So far, one of the most discomforting things I've read came in
a single sentence on page 9 that serves as an unwelcome and sobering
reminder:
The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was
next in line to the presidency if Bush and Cheney were killed or incapacitated.
To review, our current line of succession to the most
powerful office on earth goes like this:
1. Nincompoop (Bush)
2. Evil Robot (Cheney)
3. Guy Who You Just Know Is Usually
Wearing, Unintentionally, Two Different Color Socks (Hastert)
295
films have crossed the $100 million box office threshold.
Can you name them?
By the way, you figure about 90% of
the American people couldn't pick Hastert out of a line-up, but
how many members of the House, do you think, wish he'd wear a name
tag? I'd say about 70%.
March
29, 2004 link
5 Quick Points on the White House's
War Against Richard Clarke
1. If you didn't see Clarke's
Meet
the Press appearance, you should
read
the transcript. I hope it reads as good as it played, because
Clarke was pretty brilliant once again. He seems to really enjoy
this stuff. The
headline
is probably that he himself has called for the declassification of all his
9/11 commission testimony. He wants Condoleezza's testimony declassified,
too. This man is a brilliant political strategist; he's consistently
one-upped the White House. He's one man knocking down dozens of
men, like Clint Eastwood in one of those old Spaghetti Westerns.
2. Clarke's on the cover of today's
Newsweek,
and his testimony has led to a
Time
cover that Condoleezza Rice definitely won't have framed for her office.
I had to go to three different bookstores to get Clarke's book,
and the one I finally got today was
Barnes and Noble's final
copy (and there was actually a guy right behind me who wanted it and
offered to pay me for it – I kid you not). The White House's response
to Clarke has been so incredibly strident that they're not only selling
perhaps tens of thousands more of
Clarke's
book, but they're ensuring that this is once again the week's
top story.
3.
Newsweek's poll
suggests that Clarke's media attention has taken its toll on Bush's
approval ratings:
According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, the percentage
of voters who say they approve of the way the president has handled
terrorism and homeland security has slid to 57 percent, down from
a high of 70 percent two months ago. Unfortunately, the poll also
reveals that some of the White House Assassination Machine has impacted
Clarke negatively as well. The good news is that Clarke's not nearly
as worried about his favorables as Bush is his.
4. Clarke criticizes the Bush administration
on two primary points: 1) they didn't place an urgent priority
on al Qaeda and bin Laden pre-9/11 and 2) invading Iraq has been a
catastrophic diversion from a real war on terror. The Bush people
have aimed all their firepower at the first point, which is downright
bizarre. The people who have stated publicly that Bush didn't act urgently
on al Qaeda pre-9/11 include not only Clarke, but also the Deputy National
Security Advisor on 9/11, Lieutenant Col. Donald Kerrick, the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11, General Hugh Shelton, and (drumroll
please).... George W. Bush. I'm still trying to figure out specifically
what the White House is arguing against, and I think maybe they are,
too.
5. Bush has an unshakable belief
in his own goodness. His mother and father have it, too. It leads
him to often and proudly proclaim things like "
I'm gonna change
the tone in Washington" and "
I will restore honor and dignity
to the White House." Self-righteous claims. Stupid claims. Phony
claims. Note this sidebar from a recent post on
Josh
Marshall's Talking Points Memo:
(Bear in mind that top White House aides
have told the press that the president personally initiated and
is directing this campaign against Clarke. Not outside rabble-rousers,
not nefarious aides operating on their own account, but the president
himself. This is all his doing, according to his own staffers.)
Now, I realize that all administrations, to varying
degrees, will savage anybody who threatens their political popularity.
And every White House has not only a right, but an obligation, to
defend itself. What's horribly ironic in this case, however, is that
the 9/11 commission has put a magnifying glass on how a White House's
discretion on how to use its precious time and resources is a matter of
supreme importance, literally life and death. President
Nixon
(oops!) Bush has directed his senior officials to abandon their other
priorities to focus on discrediting Clarke. On our dime, too. That's
inexcusable.
From the AP:
Ralph Nader said Sunday he will meet with
John Kerry next month to discuss the effort to defeat President
Bush in the November election.
While stressing that he is still a competitor in
the race, the independent presidential hopeful said he views
his candidacy as a "second front against Bush, however small."
I don't know what this means exactly, although I
have noticed that Nader so far has focused on getting on ballots
in states, mostly in the deep South, that Bush already has locked
up. Hopefully, it's not just hope that makes me think that even if
Nader does stay in the race he'll run a far different campaign, more
Democrat-friendly, than he did in 2000 when he spent his final days
on the trail in toss-up states like Florida, seemingly deliberately
sabotaging Al Gore's chances.
I'd like to extend a heartfelt, public
congratulations to my brother
Jimmy,
who, as screenwriter of both
Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
(#1 in domestic box office this weekend) and
Dawn of the Dead
(#1 in domestic box office take last weekend), has become the first
person in cinema history to write back-to-back #1 box office hits.
Everybody who knows him knows he's earned any and all success that
could come his way.
March
26, 2004 link
When Bush administration officials
themselves attack Richard Clarke, I notice they usually use the
words "credibility problem." Their surrogates – like Ken Adelman
and Congressman Peter King, to name just two – often attack with
slightly more aggressive and encompassing terms like "character problem"
and "integrity problem." I've heard others simply call him a liar, despite
their failure to contradict a single fact in Clarke's book.
Decrepit Conservative Bosom Bob Novak went to the
most ridiculous extreme on Thursday's
Crossfire, though.
He actually asked Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, "
Do you believe
that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African American woman,
Condoleezza Rice?"
Of course, Novak's inference is that Clarke's negative
assessments of Rice's job performance stem from racism. That's
absolutely outrageous, McCarthyite (Novak has expressed sympathy
for Joe McCarthy in the past), and contemptible beyond words.
Emmanuel looked a little bit pissed off, but he
just kind of shrugged it off and said, "Give me a break."
I only wish Emmanuel would have asked Novak if he
was a segregationist as a young man. I don't know if he was or
not (I certainly wouldn't be surprised if he was and intend to do
a thorough search later), but it certainly would have been an appropriate
response.
I believe almost anything goes in comedy.
But if I were President and I just sent American soldiers to war
primarily on the assertion that Iraq's WMD posed a uniquely urgent
threat to our citizens, I wouldn't be
making
jokes about trying to find WMD in the Oval Office. That's
exactly what our National Nincompoop did, however.
CNN's headline on this is "
Bush
pokes fun at himself at dinner." But what's he making
fun of with the WMD jokes? The fact that he's a jackass for having
made eliminating Iraqi WMD 90% of the argument for invading Iraq,
a cause for which
589 Americans have
been killed and 3383 wounded?
Oh, I get it. Ha ha.
Also, the video on this is downright creepy. The
President makes these jokes and all these journalists guffaw and
even applaud a little. (It was at a Radio and Television Correspondents
Association dinner.) I read that Lieberman was one of the laughers,
too, which is a good thing to bring up the next time he starts pontificating
about immorality in the media.
Check out
all the stars at Kerry's
Beverly Hills fundraiser. No one surprising except Kevin Costner,
who despite being there reportedly said he still hadn't chosen a candidate.
I thought Costner was a Republican, and a fairly conservative one,
too. He was probably just looking for work, offering a headshot to Sherri
Lansing or to do impressions for Jonathan Dolgen, stuff like
that.
The
Center for American Progress is sponsoring a great contest.
They can't find a single instance of Bush, Cheney, or Condoleezza
Rice uttering the words "bin Laden" or "al Qaeda" in public between
inauguration day and 9/11/01. If anyone can, they're offering a copy
of one of Sean Hannity's stupid books.
March
25, 2004 link
All day Tuesday and on Wednesday
morning, senior officials testifying before
the 9/11 Commission for both the Clinton and Bush administrations
were unified in advocating a best-case political defense for their
pre-9/11 political actions. The subtext of each witness's testimony
was basically the same: "
It's not our fault."
So it amounted to one of the most refreshing and
brilliantly winning introductions in the history of Capitol
Hill
testimony
when Richard Clarke, counterterrorism chief for both the Clinton and Bush
administrations, said the following words, :
I welcome these hearings because of
the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better
understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do
to prevent a reoccurance.
I also welcome the hearings because it is finally
a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims
of 9/11.
To them who are here in the room, to those who
are watching on television, your government failed you, those
entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you.
We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed.
And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the
facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness.
The audience, made up mostly of 9/11 families,
roared with appreciation, and George W. Bush, if he was watching,
must have swallowed a pretzel. Clarke, who continued to hammer
Bush and administration officials under oath just as pointedly as
he did in his
book,
is an exceedlingly difficult target to smear. Not only is he
as credible as can be, but he's also about as savvy a political
communicator as you can imagine. I suppose you'd expect that from
a 30 year high-level survivor of four different Presidential administrations.
Most of the newspapers I've gone through this morning
lead with this Clarke statement:
I believe the Bush administration
in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue,
but not an urgent issue.
Although the Bush Attack Machine aggressively refutes
this, George W. Bush himself admitted as much in Bob Woodward's
Bush
at War, as Clarke acknowledged. The relevant passages
come on page 39:
"Until September 11, however, Bush had
not put that thinking [that Clinton's response to al Qaeda emboldened
bin Laden] into practice, nor had he pressed the issue of bin Laden.
Though Rice and others were developing a plan to eliminate al Qaeda,
no formal recommendations had ever been presented to the president.
'I know there was a plan in the works. . . . I
don't know how mature the plan was,' Bush recalled. . . .He acknowledged
that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national security
team. There was a significant difference in my attitude after September
11. I was not on point [before that date], but I knew he was a menace,
and I knew he was a problem.'
When you consider those paragraphs
in the context of Clarke's statements that CIA Director George
Tenet repeatedly warned Bush about al Qaeda, and that there was
"certainly no higher priority" in the Clinton administration than
fighting al Qaeda, it's an especially searing indictment. In limited
time with Bush upon the transition, Clinton himself is also reported
to have put great emphasis on the importance of going after al Qaeda.
Today, I expect Kerry to put his own spin on Clarke's
critique. He'd probably be wise to soft pedal it for now – not
just to avoid appearances of partisanship, but because there's no
better anti-Bush spokesman right now than Dick Clarke. Clarke's
still ubiquitous on tv, and he's a hell of a counterpuncher – he hits
the Bush administration harder and harder as their attacks on him grow
louder. Kerry may as well step aside, watch his poll numbers rise at
Bush's expense, and enjoy himself as Clarke continues to tie the White
House in knots.
One of the Bush lines of attack
is that Clarke, despite being a Republican who voted for Bush
in 2000, must be a rabid partisan because he teaches a course with
Kerry adviser Rand Beers, whom he counts as one of his best friends.
You'd think from the Bush talking points that Beers is some kind of
longtime partisan political operative, but this overlooks the fact
that it was a little bit of a bombshell when Beers, himself a career
long civil servant, left the G.W. Bush administration last Summer.
This is Ted Koppel for
Nightline on June 28
of last year:
Rand Beers, whom you will meet in just
a moment, has an impeccable resume. A life of government
service that began with two tours in Vietnam with the Marine Corps
and then more than 30 years, most of those at the State Department,
working in international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, intelligence,
and counter-terrorism. Most recently, until about three months
ago, he served on the National Security Council at the White House,
as a special assistant to the President for combating terrorism.
He had also worked for the National Security Council under presidents
Reagan, George Bush the elder, and Bill Clinton. Like thousands
of other public servants in this city, especially those working in the
field of intelligence, Mr. Beers might have left office in near total anonymity
were it not for the manner in which he left his last post. He was
so frustrated by what he perceives as the Bush Administration's ineffectiveness
at combating terrorism, at home and abroad, that he quit. A few weeks
after he resigned from the White House, Rand Beers took another step that
was bound to get some attention. He signed on as National Security
Adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry, currently one
of the leading Democratic candidates for President. Mr. Beers has done
a couple of newspaper interviews, he has testified before Congress,
but this is his first television interview since he left the government.
Beers isn't quite as effective a communicator as
Clarke, but as a Bush "war on terror" insider, his words also
carry special weight.
In two facts, the legacy of a Republican-controlled
congress:
Estimated entire cost of the 9/11 Commission: $15
million
Final
cost of Ken Starr's investigation of Clinton's penis: $64
million
March
24, 2004 link
This is a really smart quote from
Atrios, seems so obvious
in retrospect:
...the interesting thing is that, at
various times, the administration has wanted to emphasize the
centrality of Iraq in all of this [war on terror]. Of course, that's
what they're telling us now. But, if Iraq is the "central front
in the war on terror" why wouldn't they have felt that way on September
12? What changed between September of 2001 and September of 2002
to put Saddam front and center? So, again, we have another situation
where they're saying "how dare Richard Clarke say those things which
are completely true and correct about us." It's weird.
Argue whatever you want about Bush's intentions
to attack Iraq before 9/11, but the administration is simply denying
the obvious when they say Iraq wasn't a focus immediately after
9/11. It's simply irrefutable. Check out this
Washington
Post article from January 12, 2003:
On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President
Bush signed a 2½-page document marked "TOP SECRET" that outlined
the plan for going to war in Afghanistan as part of a global campaign
against terrorism.
Almost as a footnote, the document also directed
the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion
of Iraq, senior administration officials said.
The previously undisclosed Iraq directive is characteristic
of an internal decision-making process that has been obscured
from public view. Over the next nine months, the administration
would make Iraq the central focus of its war on terrorism without
producing a rich paper trail or record of key meetings and events
leading to a formal decision to act against President Saddam Hussein,
according to a review of administration decision-making based on interviews
with more than 20 participants.
Whoops.
Here's part of a White House press
release from Sunday:
"
The Government Interagency Counterterrorism
Crisis Management Forum chaired by Dick Clarke met regularly,
often daily during the high threat period."
Monday on Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, talking about
the administration's counterterrorism measures, said about Clarke:
"
He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of
this stuff."
I've got an idea for Scott McClellan. Instead
of trying to explain the various and often comically contradictory
attacks on Clarke by White House officials, why not just boil it
down into one pithy statement that all administration officials could
agree on and reporters can easily understand: "
Richard Clarke wrote
a book we don't like, so we think he is a dick."
Shallow as it may be, that statement is far more
honest and substantive than anything else they're coming up with.
Here's Bush's statement after yesterday's
cabinet meeting:
"
George Tenet briefed me on a regular basis
about the terrorist threats to the United States of America.
And had my administration had any information that terrorists were
going to attack New York City on September the 11th, we would have
acted."
I'm pretty sure I can divine his next thought:
"
And had I acted, I would have deserved a cookie."
March
23, 2004 link
So the question of the day seems to
be: what did Bush administration officials do and not do
to deal with terrorism during their first 8 months in office?
If you're looking for stuff that's fair,
Washington Post
reporter Barton Gellman has written well-investigated and even-handed
articles on the pre-9/11 anti-terrorism efforts of both the Clinton
and Bush administrations. Yesterday, he
reviewed
the whole of Clarke's book. He also did an
on-line
chat in which readers asked him some intriguing questions.
Way back in December of 2001, he did a
part
one and
part
two on the Clinton administration's actions against bin
Laden. Most relevant to today's news, probably, is his
January
20, 2002 article on the Bush administration's pre-9/11
strategy.
Memo to the White House: stop
saying Richard Clarke's opinions are politically-motivated.
He's a Republican. Louder? HE'S A REPUBLICAN.
As is Paul O'Neil, another character assassination
target of yours whose own recollections substantiate some of
Clarke's key points.
As is, according to James Carville, former Clinton
and Bush National Security Council staffer Army Lt. Gen. Donald
Kerrick, who was interviewed by Gellman for his
1/20/02
WaPo article:
He noticed a difference on terrorism.
Clinton's Cabinet advisers, burning with the urgency of their
losses to bin Laden in the African embassy bombings in 1998 and
the Cole attack in 2000, had met "nearly weekly" to direct the fight,
Kerrick said. Among Bush's first-line advisers, "candidly speaking,
I didn't detect" that kind of focus, he said. "That's not being derogatory.
It's just a fact. I didn't detect any activity but what Dick Clarke
and the CSG were doing."
I saw only a brief clip of Condoleeza
Rice on yesterday's
Today Show, but she appeared
very unraveled to me. Obviously, Richard Clarke scares the
bejesus out of the White House, or they wouldn't have everybody
on their payroll all over tv and radio trying to take him down.
They also wouldn't have released this
exhausting pack
of lies rebuttal
to Clarke's
60 Minutes interview.
The Center for American Progress (aka "Opposition
Research Paradise") came out almost instantly with a
rebuttal
to the White House rebuttal.
Clarke testifies publicly before the 9/11 commission
on Wednesday.
This argument ain't going away anytime soon.
It turns out the FBI had John Kerry
under
heavy surveillance for over a year during his war protesting
days. Kerry himself just found out about it three days ago, and
he's kind of freaked out by it.
I envision Dick Cheney reading that article while
eating his morning pheasant, eyes welling up with wistful tears,
grumbling a justification to himself:
We need to take
extraordinary measures to protect our freedom from those who act
against freedom.
March
22, 2004
link
I just watched Richard Clarke
on
60 Minutes. He was extremely impressive.
I can't detail everything Clarke said right
now, but the
Center
for American Progress has a full accounting. Much of what
he says squares with the public record, but there's also some new
stuff that should be very damaging to Bush (emphasis on
should
be, because glancing at a collection of this morning's papers I
can't believe it's not given more prominence).
As the former head of counterterrorism policy
for Bush's own National Security Council, it's powerful when
Clarke says, summarily, "
I think he's done a terrible job
in the war against terrorism."
The Bush administration, of course, is now
trying to smear Clarke. Having worked in the Reagan, Bush 41,
Clinton, and Bush 43 administrations, though, it's pretty clear
Clarke is no partisan gunslinger. That's certainly never been his
reputation in Washington, as much as Bush, Limbaugh, et al will do
their best to revise that.
One thing Clarke said that's been corroborated
over and over again is this administration's misguided focus
on Iraq after 9/11. When I first read Bob Woodward's
Bush
at War in 2002, I was dumbfounded by this administration's
eagerness, despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever, to blame
9/11 on Iraq. While many people correctly point out Rumsfeld's
and Wolfowitz's overzealousness, revisiting
Bush at
War proves the President himself believed Iraq guilty of 9/11 from
the beginning. At a National Security Council meeting in the cabinet
room of the White House on Septmber 17, 2001, less than a week after
the attacks, Woodward records Bush as saying (on page 99 of the hardcover
edition): "
I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike
them now. I don't have the evidence at this point." On September
28, Woodward again recorded (on page 167) Bush saying, "
He [Saddam]
probably was behind this in the end."
The evidence never did come, but Bush's mistaken
belief endured. Unconscionably, he gave speech after speech
where he burned a link between 9/11 and Iraq into the public consciousness.
It's undoubtedly some of the most deceptive, disgraceful, and
calamitous rhetoric ever spoken by a U.S. President.
Josh Marshall has outstanding stuff
on Clarke on
his
blog. I've got to excerpt these 3 paragraphs from
one
of his posts, because they're brilliantly dead-on:
The first months of the Bush administration
were based on a fundamental strategic miscalcuation about the
source of the greatest threats to the United States. They were,
as Clarke suggests, stuck in a Cold War mindset, focused on Cold
War problems, though the terms of debate were superficially reordered
to make them appear to address a post-Cold War world.
That screw up is a reality -- their inability
to come clean about it is, I suspect, at the root of all the
covering up and stonewalling of the 9/11 commission. And Democrats
are both right and within their rights to call the White House
on it. But screw-ups happen; mistakes happen. What is inexcusable
is the inability, indeed the refusal, to learn from them.
Rather than adjust to this different reality,
on September 12th, the Bush war cabinet set about using 9/11
-- exploiting it, really -- to advance an agenda which had, in
fact, been largely discredited by 9/11. They shoe-horned everything
they'd been trying to do before the attacks into the new boots
of 9/11. And the fit was so bad they had to deceive the public and themselves
to do it.
I'd also add that these diversions have kept
us from much of the real work in an international war on terrorism.
That's what makes this President so terribly weak on defense,
and the citizens of this country and the world less safe.
Israeli soldiers killed the founder of Hamas
late
last night. The earth is better off without that guy, but
this is a powder keg. I wouldn't be surprised at all if between
the time I post this and you read it all hell will have broken loose
in the region. My heart goes out to all the innocent Palestinians and
Israelis.
In the last two weeks we witnessed 2 horrific
terrorist attacks,
public fraying of the "coalition
of the willing" in Iraq, and the release of
a poll
that verified the palpable sense that foreign hatred for America has skyrocketed
on Bush's watch, but somehow the political loser was John Kerry.
During stage one of the campaign – the Democratic
primaries – Kerry couldn't have asked for a better introduction
to the American people: as an experienced, cool-headed, electable
alternative to Howard Dean; as a tested Vietnam war hero in contrast
to Bush's Vietnam-era absenteeism; and as a continual winner
in a crowded field of Democrats. Now we're at stage two, and polls
show that despite his positive introduction, Kerry is still a virtual
mystery to about 40% of the electorate. This is a crucial moment,
because Kerry will be defined mostly either by his own campaign
or by Bush/Cheney.
According to this
NY
Times article, there are at least some in the Kerry
campaign who fail to recognize the magnitude of the moment. Listen
to Bob Shrum, one of Kerry's top advisers:
The notion that you have a one-sided
definition that takes hold five months before an election is
ridiculous. I don't think the Bush campaign's caricatures are
going to stand up to the reality. Voters are smarter than that.
Two words for Mr. Shrum: Michael Dukakis.
Early in his 1988 campaign vs. George Herbert
Walker Bush, Dukakis was up by 17% in the polls. Then came
all the attacks from Bush attack maestro Lee Atwater (who had
more than a little in common with W's attack man, Karl Rove)
– the Massachusetts liberal label, Dukakis looking dweebish in a
tank, the Willie Horton ad, etc.... The race quickly went from a 17
point advantage for Dukakis to an electoral college landslide for
G.H.W. Bush.
John Kerry has a lot more going for him than
Michael Dukakis ever did. For starters, he would look quite
at home in a tank. But his campaign should start using all the
internet dough they're raking in right now, and they should use it
to highlight those moments in his career that contradict the Bush/Cheney
ads that paint him as weak-minded and wishy washy.
There's plenty to draw from to show Kerry
as tough and principled. How many people know the details
of Kerry's heroism that earned him those Silver and Bronze Stars?
How many know Kerry was a prosecutor before he ran for Lieutenant
Governor of Massachusetts? How many know that even Kerry's critics
acknowledge that he distinguished himself in the senate as a focused
and uncompromising leader in a series of high-profile senate investigations?
The Kerry campaign needs to tell those stories
very soon, or he'll be Dukakisized by the end of Spring.
By the way, read What's Right
With Kerry, by
The Nation's David Corn. Forward
it to all your friends.
March 21, 2004
Be sure to watch 60 Minutes
tonight on CBS. Richard Clarke, counterterrorism chief under Bush
and Clinton, is interviewed.
March
19, 2004
link
I won't comment too
much on Ayman al-Zawahiri
being cornered
until we get confirmed details of his death or capture. We've been teased
before with incorrect reports on bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.
But there's no question this guy is one of the worst human beings
who ever lived, and he's as responsible for al Qaeda's atrocities
as anyone. In his book,
Inside
Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, Rohan Gunaratna
puts his power in perspective:
What is undeniable is the influence
that al-Zawahiri wields over Osama. In nearly every media and
public appearance made after Osama moved to Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri
has been at his side. Al-Hayat stated that he often determines
and controls Osama's "actions and reactions." Al-Zawahiri also
provided the crucial, practical, know-how Osama lacked and helped
him develop his organizational capability, turning his ideas into
reality.
This Lawrence Wright
New Yorker article,
The Man
Behind Bin Laden, offers further insight. It's also
generally one of the most enlightening things I've read on the
origins and mindset of al Qaeda.
I'd like to step away from politics
for a moment to endorse
Dawn of the Dead, which opens
nationally in theatres today. Here's what
Washington
Post film critic Michael O'Sullivan has to say about
it:
It is, in other words, a paradigm
of its genre: bloody (and bloody scary), stylish, smart, audacious
and edgy, darkly pessimistic yet inflected with touches of
deliciously sick humor. Yes, it's essentially a remake of a sequel,
albeit a sequel that happens to be one of the greatest horror movies
ever made, but it more than surpasses the original. Its sole aim,
and one at which it succeeds admirably, is to simultaneously revolt,
scare and delight you; to make you as afraid to look at the screen
as to look away from it; to fill you with such a mix of terror and
guilty pleasure that you can't tell the two emotions apart.
Okay, its screenwriter also happens to be
my brother Jimmy, but O'Sullivan's not alone. In fact, I can't
remember the last time an American horror movie has been this
well-reviewed (also has two thumbs up from
Siskel – now
a zombie himself –
and Ebert, and, as of this writing, a
78% "fresh" rating from
RottenTomatoes,
which compiles and tallies film reviews).
I'll be reviewing
The Passion of Jim
Caviezel on this site soon, but if you were planning to see that,
skip it and see
Dawn of the Dead instead. As Jimmy has
been quoted as saying,
"The Passion only has one
guy rising from the dead. We've got thousands." Jesus also
sent him a memo – I'll post the first paragraph here, but you can
check out the rest on
his website:
MEMO
FROM: JESUS
TO: JAMES GUNN
Dear James:
Just returned from a screening of DAWN
OF THE DEAD and, I have to admit, it is REALLY FRICKIN’ AWESOME.
Now, I know you’re going head-to-head at the box office this weekend
with “ME” (the actual title, I guess, is THE PASSION OF CHRIST,
but, you know, I feel pretentious saying that all the time – so
I’ve been calling it “ME”), but I have to be honest, I actually
like DAWN OF THE DEAD better. Way. ME is gory, but DAWN OF
THE DEAD is even gorier, and God knows I love gore – Why do you think
I made humans so squishy? Also, I found that scene where your
heroes shot the Burt Reynolds look-a-like HILARIOUS. I fucking HATE
Burt Reynolds (well, except SHARKY’S MACHINE – that was pretty good.)
March
18, 2004 link
You want to know what politicians
your friends, neighbors, or favorite celebrities support?
Want no longer.
Also,
here's an interesting
map that breaks down fundraising regionally for Republicans
and Democrats. Too much of the country is in the red.
Moveon.org uses the infamous
"Rumsfeld is
a jackass" clip from
Face the Nation as its own commercial.
I think it's the best movie of the year. I promise you it gets
funnier each time you watch it.
March
17, 2004 link
On "Hardball with Chris
Matthews" yesterday,
Wall Street Journal
editorialist John Fund slandered John Kerry, pure and simple.
His direct quote: "
He's from France, he speaks French, he went
to French finishing schools." Of course, only the part about
Kerry speaking French is true (I find fluency in a language outside
your native tongue admirable, but clearly there are those in the
Republican Party who prefer their candidates to be unilingual,
if not monosyllabic).
Usually, the Republican Attack Chiselers
who have enough clout to get on tv tell more subtle lies and
leave the underhanded stuff to more anonymous right-wing hacks.
But Fund is a special kind of scumbag.
In 2001, the Jersey City Police Department
filed
an incident
report suspecting John Fund of domestic violence. According
to
this site,
he's got some other problems as well. That is, of course,
in addition to
his uncanny resemblance
to the
interbred
banjo player in
Deliverance.
Kerry's in the midst of a very
challenging period right now. Bush is spending tens of millions
to define him in all the "purple states" (the swing states, which
can't yet be classified as red Republican states or blue Democratic
states). Cheney's got a speech tomorrow that aspires to eviscerate
his career voting record on national defense (the Kerry campaign
will be especially eager to rapidly respond to Cheney,
whose own defense budget slashings
will make him look like a hypocrite). And unfortunately, recent polls are
showing that the BC are driving up Kerry's negatives a bit. This
is all expected, but terribly unnerving. So BC goes on offense for
awhile and we'll have to hold our ground.
This flap over Kerry's
comments in answer to a quesiton about world leaders being
against Bush is not good for us. It's undeniably true that most
world leaders would like to see Bush back on his ranch for good,
but it's difficult for Kerry to express that to the public without
looking and sounding more European than most Americans would like.
It's gonna be interesting to see how the Kerry campaign handles this,
but I think they've got to concentrate on the simple idea that Bush
has alienated our allies in the war on terror, which has made us
less safe. Bush is not just a divider at home, he's a divider internationally.
Bush is eager to cast 9/11
in a political light, yet he fought the creation of the
9/11 commission for months and he's stonewalled the same commission
for months more. Finally, he says he'll sit down and talk with
them (originally, his spokesman was adamant that they wouldn't get
more than an hour of his precious fundraising time, but now it's vague
how much time they'll allow – it's worth noting that both Clinton
and Gore have pledged unlimited time to answering questions from
the commission). It's amazing to me that he hasn't paid more of a political
price for this nonsense; it's a moral failing on his part to put
concerns about potential political damage before the commission's
right to access information that would allow them to make fully
informed prescriptions on ways to avoid future attacks.
I've criticized Bush for co-opting the
images of Americans who died on 9/11, but I've always thought
his performance in response to the terrorist attacks is fair
game politically. This means everything's on the table.
In
Time Magazine this week, Joe
Klein has an important article on questions the 9/11 commission
should ask Bush.
Read
every word of it. But I'll paraphrase what I think are
the 3 most compelling questions here:
1) Why didn't you respond
to the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole? During the transition,
Sandy Berger and counterterrorim chief Richard Clarke left detailed
war plans to eradicate al Qaeda with Condoleeza Rice. What happened
to those?
2) You were told at
least a month before 9/11 that al Qaeda was planning attacks,
perhaps involving airplanes. What action did you take in response
to those briefings?
3) Why did you allow
planeloads of Saudi nationals, including members of the bin
Laden family, to return to Saudi Arabia right after the attacks?
I'm very curious to hear Bush answer these
questions, but I'm skeptical we'll ever get the full truth.
The fact that he's stonewalled the investigation every step
of the way suggests he doesn't think the commission can handle
the truth.
The guy who won the Democratic
primary for the open Senate seat in Illinois,
Barack
Obama, is a rising star. If he wins, and I think he will,
he'll instantly become an important national political figure.
Obama's Republican opponent in the general
election, Jack Ryan, was once married to actress
Jeri
Ryan, which in itself is more good fortune than any man
deserves in this life.
In the Reliable
Source column in The Washington Post, Richard
Leiby points out the comparable intellects of Jessica Simpson
and G.W. Bush:
Referring to Simpson's role
on MTV's "Newlyweds," Bush told the audience, "Jessica Simpson
is here with us, which means we've finally introduced reality
TV to the Lincoln Theater."
He meant Ford's Theatre, of course, but
everyone knows President Lincoln was shot there. "An easy
mistake to make," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told us
at a post-show dinner at the Organization of American States.
Simpson, whose verbal gaffes are also
legendary, pulled another one Sunday visiting the White House,
our sources say. The singer was introduced to Interior Secretary
Gale Norton and gushed: "You've done a nice job decorating the
White House."
March
16, 2004 link
There's a lot
of speculation about whether or not Kerry's overheard statements
last week about his opponents being crooked liars were meant
for public consumption.
The New York Times Adam
Nagourney
takes
a look at it, and points out that Kerry has a history
of getting "caught" making statements that could be politically
helpful.
I tend to think he did make the statements
on purpose, which might be the kind of creative and devious
approach we need to take on Rove and Co.. It also set up
Kerry's
call this weekend, which
I had been hoping for,
to raise the tone of the campaign by having a series of
substantive debates. The challenge got little play in the
press (I don't know why Kerry chose to do it on a Saturday,
the slowest news day), but I'm sure the Kerry campaign will revive
the challenge from time to time.
The offer is not just good politics –
Bush either has to dodge the challenge or he has to debate
Kerry, who actually studies public policy – but with everything
at stake in this election, we deserve more than just 3 debates in
the fall.
Of course, Kerry's reach for higher ground
is a longshot. Although he intimated that he too is guilty
of negative campaigning and put forward the seemingly unassailable
idea that "
America shouldn't have to put up with eight months
of sniping," the Bush campaign immediately sniped at him.
"
With all of the inconsistencies and flip-flops in Kerry's record,
it might be more productive for Kerry to debate himself,"
Bush campaign henchman Terry Holt responded.
I guess you can't teach an old, half-dead
dog new tricks.
My friend Valentine Miele
emailed me his response to this
thoroughly
ridiculous NY Times op-ed by pompous, decrepit, right-wing grammar
jackass William Safire. I agree wholly with Val's comments,
which made me laugh:
...Safire jumps over the obvious
implication in Kerry's (unofficial) remark; that he was speaking
about the Bush administration and their record with regards
to campaigning and politicking (at least) and their actual execution
of policy (at worst). He writes as if it were clear that
Kerry meant to say that all Republicans "...are the most crooked,
lying group of people I've ever seen." William Safire wrote this
in the nation's most popular daily newspaper, based the entire argument
of his column on it, and he knows that he is lying.
The rest of the column seems to have
materialized (a) out of his ass or (b) out of his ass.
Bush apologists often push
this talking point:
Everybody thought there
were WMD in Iraq. It's true that most international experts
did, including just about every nation that has an intelligence
agency. But the UN weapons inspectors certainly weren't convinced,
and they're not given the proper credit often enough for having been
right (yes, G.W., the UN is more than just a debating society). I'm
sure Hans Blix would forgive us Americans if we all bought
his
book.
Just a thought: there are
3 blocs of voters who almost certainly won't go for Bush in
the same numbers as they did in 2000. Arab Americans went
largely for Bush in 2000, but should go just as largely for Kerry
this year. About a million (out of 4 million) gay Americans voted
for Bush last time, and I expect to see that figure seriously
reduced. Many more military families, especially those in the National
Guard, should go for Kerry than went for Gore last time.
In a close election, Bush's alienation
of these groups could make a real difference.
The only group I can think of that Bush
has made inroads with, probably, are Jewish Americans. His
immigration reform proposal was meant to sway Latino Americans,
of course, but I think that's now widely seen as a pander.
Yesterday, The
Note ran this piece comparing Big Bush and Little Bush:
In case you missed the must-see
"This Week with George Stephanopoulos" yesterday, The Note
on TV featured a demonstration of what we here at The Note
find to be a rather uncanny father/son campaign message resemblance
between Bush 41 and Bush 43 — we thought the similarities
were just so striking, they needed to be highlighted.
41: And Governor Clinton tries to be
on every side of every issue. And you cannot have that as
President of the United States.
43: In fact, Senator Kerry's been in
Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every
issue.
41: Today, America's economy is working
its way through an era of profound change.
43: As the economists say this is a time
of transition, it's a time of change.
41: Think of this in terms of the commander-in-chief
of the armed forces. He said, well, I agree with the minority,
but I guess I would have voted with the majority. What kind
of leadership is that?
43: Once again, Senator Kerry is trying
to have it both ways. He's for good intelligence. Yet he was
willing to gut the intelligence services. And that is no way
to lead a nation in a time of war.
Howard Stern's website has
some good stuff on it lately. It's interesting to watch Howard's
conversion into political activist.
He's getting railroaded right now, and
it's ridiculous that only 22 people in the House of Representatives
voted against the profoundly stupid "
Broadcast
Decency Enforcement Act of 2004." If Congress really
wants to act as advocates for us as owners of the airwaves,
there's about 1000 things they could do above this. In addition
to being completely disingenuous, political showboating, it's
an insult to the spirit of the first amendment.
Check out
this video on the 2000
election in Florida, too.
March
15, 2004 link
Eerily, the attacks in Spain
last week, now believed to be orchestrated by al Qaeda,
occurred 911 days after September 11, 2001. While the Spain
attacks have generated considerable press over here, I feel there's
a missing sense of solidarity between our countries.
Everyone remembers the international
outpouring of sympathy for Americans after 9/11. There were
public showings of shared sadness and shared outrage even
from countries we know don't like us very much.
I'm afraid we missed a golden opportunity
then to assert loudly as a nation that terrorism is first and
foremost an international disorder and an affront to all
human beings, a moral abomination that transcends nationalism.
President Bush may have given some lip service to this idea, but
not much more. Sure, he met and spoke with all kinds of world leaders
in the days and weeks following 9/11, but the focus seemed to be
more on what they could do to help us in the short term than what we
could build together to help each other in the long term.
The problems really began when Bush Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, now infamously well-established
as a nearsighted shaper of international policy, sharply dismissed
NATO's historic and unprecedented offer to invoke Article V
of the Washington Treaty (which declares that an attack on any
NATO ally is an attack on all of them) with a simple, "
If we
need collective action, we'll ask for it." It's here that the
Bush administration started its own international anti-American
public relations assault, and the list of diplomatic failures
has grown at an astonishing rate over the past few years.
Frontline highlights
some of them.
It's tragic to think what might have
been if we had only opened ourselves up to innovative ideas
from thinkers all over the political spectrum, rather than confining
ourselves to the cynical plan of action dictated by the stubborn
hard-line ideologies of men like Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Richard
Perle, and Douglas Feith.
Things could have been different. In
The
Washington Monthly September 2002 issue, Wes Clark
detailed one alternative vision:
The Kosovo campaign suggests
alternatives in waging and winning the struggle against terrorism:
greater reliance on diplomacy and law and relatively less on
the military alone. Soon after September 11, without surrendering
our right of self defense, we should have helped the United Nations
create an International Criminal Tribunal on International Terrorism.
We could have taken advantage of the outpourings of shock, grief,
and sympathy to forge a legal definition of terrorism and obtain
the indictment of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban as war criminals
charged with crimes against humanity. Had we done so, I believe we
would have had greater legitimacy and won stronger support in the
Islamic world. We could have used the increased legitimacy to raise
pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to cut off fully the
moral, religious, intellectual, and financial support to terrorism.
We could have used such legitimacy to strengthen the international
coalition against Saddam Hussein. Or to encourage our European allies
and others to condemn more strongly the use of terror against Israel
and bring peace to that region. Reliance on a compelling U.N. indictment
might have given us the edge in legitimacy throughout much of the
Islamic world that no amount of "strategic information" and spin control
can provide. On a purely practical level, we might have avoided the
embarrassing arguments during the encirclement of Kandahar in early
December 2001, when the appointed Afghan leader wanted to offer the
Taliban leader amnesty, asking what law he had broken, while the United
States insisted that none should be granted. We might have avoided
the continuing difficulties of maintaining hundreds of prisoners in
a legal no-man's land at Guantanamo Bay, which has undercut U.S. legitimacy
in the eyes of much of the world.
Instead of cutting NATO out, we should
have prosecuted the Afghan campaign with NATO, as we did
in Kosovo. Of course, it would have been difficult to involve
our allies early on, when we ourselves didn't know what we wanted
to do, or how to achieve it. The dialogue and discussions would
have been vexing. But in the end, we could have kept NATO involved
without surrendering to others the design of the campaign. We
could have simply phased the operation and turned over what had
begun as a U.S.-only effort to a NATO mission, under U.S. leadership.
What's at stake in this year's election
is the realization of a vision like Clark's (
Kerry's)
– one that makes the repair of the Atlantic breach a top
priority – versus the continuation of a simplistic hard-line
vision
(if it even qualifies as a vision) that
alienates us from the rest of the world.
Yesterday on Face the Nation,
Bob Schieffer asked Don Rumsfeld, "
If Iraq did not have
WMD, why did they pose an immediate threat to this country?"
Rumsfeld responded with characteristic bluster:
You and a few other critics
are the only people I've heard use the phrase "immediate
threat." I didn't. The President didn't. And it's become, kind
of, folklore, that that's what happened. If you have any citations,
I'd like to see them.
Thomas Friedman, who joined Schieffer
in the questioning, then read Rumseld this pre-war quote from
Donald Rumsfeld:
No terrorist state poses a
greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people
and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein
in Iraq.
Without blinking, Rumsfeld casually changed
the subject, showing the professional calm of a bureaucrat
who's been pushing the public nonsense for decades.
[Update: Maybe Rumsfeld
wasn't as calm as I perceived him. According to a
Face
the Nation transcript, this was his response after Friedman
nailed him:
Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that
he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and
other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not
know--we will know.
Okay.
For your entertainment,
The Center
for American Progress has
posted a video clip of the exchange.
]
March
12, 2004 link
What's more outrageous?
John Kerry's aside yesterday to a few union workers that some of
those who oppose him are a bunch of crooked liars, or this
incredible sentence from Tom DeLay at yesterday's "attack Kerry"
Republican press conference:
Democrats have produced
nothing but hate.
Rick Santorum, who hates gay people
so much that last year he equated gay sex with "
man-on-dog
sex," said directly that Kerry has a character problem.
Bill Frist, who never met a pharmaceutical
company he wasn't intimately involved with, and Denny Hastert,
who sought to shut down the 9/11 commission last week, chimed
in a little, too, crying foul about Kerry's un-Presidential
indignities.
Can't we all just agree, regardless
of what side we're on, that we think the opposition is a
bunch of
major
league assholes?
Crooked Liars Exhibit 5,158:
The Washington Post looks at Bush's recent statements
that Kerry proposed a bill that would have gutted our current
intelligence services.
Read
the whole thing, but just this paragraph lets you know
that such an allegation is a little crooked, and at least half
a lie:
In terms of accuracy, the
parry by the president is about half right. Bush is correct
that Kerry on Sept. 29, 1995, proposed a five-year, $1.5 billion
cut to the intelligence budget. But Bush appears to be wrong
when he said the proposed Kerry cut -- about 1 percent of the overall
intelligence budget for those years -- would have "gutted" intelligence.
In fact, the Republican-led Congress that year approved legislation
that resulted in $3.8 billion being cut over five years from the
budget of the National Reconnaissance Office -- the same program
Kerry said he was targeting.
Crooked Liars Exhibit 5,159:
When the White House first sold their prescription drug
plan to Congress last year, they guaranteed that it wouldn't
cost over $395 billion. Two months after passage, the White House
Budget Director revealed its true pricetag: $534 billion.
Yesterday,
Knight Ridder
published an email from the government's chief Medicare
actuary that indicates he was silenced:
Richard S. Foster, the chief
actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,
which produced the $551 billion estimate, told colleagues
last June that he would be fired if he revealed numbers relating
to the higher estimate to lawmakers.
"This whole episode which has now gone
on for three weeks has been pretty nightmarish," Foster wrote
in an e-mail to some of his colleagues June 26, just before
the first congressional vote on the drug bill. "I'm perhaps no
longer in grave danger of being fired, but there remains a strong
likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding
of important technical information from key policy makers for
political reasons."
Also note that the guy who muzzled Foster,
the Bush-appointed director of Medicare Thomas Scully, is
a former health-care industry lobbyist.
Crooked, crooked, crooked.
Divider Not a Uniter Exhibit
7,421: The latest Bush 2004 ad has another divisive image.
Imagine that!
In an attack ad on John Kerry called
100 Days, there's
a racist stereotype. It's already been coined "The Muhammad Horton Ad."
The
New Republic's Ryan Lizza both describes and
posts the image
in question:
The center of the screen
is filled with three different rectangles of slow-motion
video. In the top panel travelers at an airport study the
arrivals and departures monitor. In the center panel there is
a shadowed image of a person wearing a gas mask. And on the bottom
there is a close-up of a swarthy, somewhat sinister-looking man
with darting eyes who slowly turns toward the camera. He is clearly
the terrorist in this scary montage.
The Bush campaign held a conference
call for the press this afternoon to unveil the ads, and
one reporter asked whether it was appropriate to use an Arab-American
to depict a terrorist. Campaign aides said the actor in "100 Days"
wasn't Arab-American. One official on the call insisted it was just
a "very generic" image.
I wonder why they didn't cast an actor
who looked like Timothy McVeigh to play the terrorist.
March
11, 2004 link
Republican National Committee
Chairman and Bush errand boy Ed Gillespie
said on Tuesday
that only a
"small segment... who are very anti-war" of the 9/11 families
criticized Bush's recent ads.
Tell that to Jack Lynch, who lost his
son Michael, a firefighter, on 9/11:
"I'm not
anti-war on terrorism, and I'm pro-Bush and everybody knows
it. I still think that neither party ... should be using images
of 9/11 for political gain."
Here's candidate Bush, in
a 2000 debate with Al Gore, criticizing the Clinton administration:
"I believe they've moved that sign, `The buck stops
here,' from the Oval Office desk to `The buck stops here' on
the Lincoln Bedroom. And that's not good for the country."
Meanwhile, the
AP
reported yesterday:
President Bush opened the White House and Camp
David to dozens of overnight guests last year, including
foreign dignitaries, family friends and at least nine of
his biggest campaign fund-raisers, documents show.
The Lincoln Bedroom "scandal" during
the Clinton years struck me as pretty phony then, and I
don't think it should be an issue for Bush now. Not only is
Bush's hypocrisy pretty comical, though, but what kind of arrogance
does it take for an administration to do an exact replay of what
their predecessor was so roundly criticized for?
Also, Bush's line about moving the
"buck stops here" sign really doesn't make a whole lot
of sense, but Kerry could steal it from him and mention how
the bucks have stopped in Vice President Cheney's office, the Energy
Department, the Environmental Protection Agency – everywhere,
basically, but in the current Oval Office.
On a related topic, one
of the things that drives me so crazy about this President
is that he never, ever accepts responsibility for anything.
He's always quick to blame others for his mistakes (i.e. the
CIA on his SOTU uranium from Africa claim), and his whole campaign
so far has amounted to, as Josh Marshall has pointed out, a big
"it's not our fault."
Josh
pointed out another rather remarkable example from
Bush's economic speech in Ohio yesterday:
And therefore, in 2002 and
early 2003, the television screens across America had banners
saying, "March to war" -- and, as business leaders, you understand
that's not very conducive to investing capital.
Lately, hasn't he been talking about
how well investors have been doing in this economy due to
his tax plan? Shouldn't he give the liberal media some credit
there?
Talking to a bunch of union
guys yesterday, John Kerry took off his microphone.
It was still on, however, and here's what it picked up:
"Oh, we'll keep pounding on them. The fight has just
begun. These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group of
people I've ever seen."
Kerry didn't mean for it to be public,
of course. Thank God he said something absolutely unassailable.
Republican talking points
always, always remind us that Kerry's proposal to repeal Bush's
tax giveaway to those making over $200,000 annually will
hurt small businesses, which are the most powerful job engines
in our economy. What they fail to point out is this fact, courtesy
of today's
LA
Times:
Kerry has proposed rescinding
Bush's tax cuts on the top two income brackets. According
to the IRS, 88% of small businesses earn less than $100,000
a year, keeping them well below the top two brackets.
On Good Morning America
today, John McCain flirted a little with a Kerry VP invitation:
John Kerry is a close friend
of mine... Obviously, I would entertain it... But I see no
scenario, no scenario, no scenario, where that would happen.
It kind of seemed like he had been
looking for a scenario and just hadn't found it yet. I'm
sure some Republicans started going a little nuts. His chief
of staff came out with a statement later in the day that said,
"The Republican senator will not be a candidate for Vice
President in 2004."
Too bad. If he's not Kerry's best option,
he's close. I'm serious, and will explain when I do my upcoming
VP round-up.
On March 31, we make
inroads in trying to even the score.
In Los Angeles, our station will be
1580 AM.
March
10, 2004 link
CIA director George Tenet
testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday
that he's privately corrected, on several occasions, public
misstatements by Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administraion.
The NY
Times gets into some of the grimy details:
In his testimony, Mr. Tenet hinted
at private disputes with policy makers. He disclosed that
he had not learned until last week about a highly unusual
briefing given in August 2002 by colleagues of Mr. Feith, the
under secretary of defense for policy, to senior aides of Mr. Cheney
and Mr. Bush. The briefing outlined evidence of ties between Iraq
and Al Qaeda, contradicting the C.I.A.'s view that such links could
not be verified.
According to government officials
who have seen copies of the briefing documents, the
information was presented to Stephen Hadley, the deputy national
security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff,
and included slides that were strongly disparaging of C.I.A. analyses.
The other two instances in which
Mr. Tenet said he had acted to correct administration statements
involved the State of the Union address in January 2002,
when he objected after the fact to Mr. Bush's inclusion of disputed
intelligence about Iraq's seeking to obtain uranium from
Africa, and a Jan. 22 radio interview in which Mr. Cheney portrayed
trailers found in Iraq as being for biological weapons, and thus
"conclusive evidence" that Iraq "did in fact have programs for weapons
of mass destruction."
Tenet implied there were more instances
of public misstatements, too.
Nobody's surprised by this testimony,
of course. In fact,
The NY Times is the only
major newspaper I can see that has it on the front page of its
on-line edition. It strikes me as a fairly major deal any time a
CIA director comes forth with specifics about the VP and others carelessly
misleading the public, but I suppose Bush, Cheney, et al have
defined
deviancy down to the point where these revelations are mundane.
Whatever the case, for quite awhile
now Tenet has played a delicate balancing act of sometimes
supporting the administration and other times pushing them
back. He's a pretty slick operator, but I doubt he can walk that
tightrope forever.
By the way, do you notice how Bush's
first few ads steer entirely clear of the stink of Cheney?
You think Cheney's 33% favorability rating (that's the
kind of favorability rating you'd expect to see for Scott Peterson)
has anything to do with it?
John Kerry has come a
long, long way in the past few months. In fact, I think
his political resuscitation is probably unparalleled in the
history of American politics. I came across this
calpundit.com
message board from December 23. I found these first
3 comments pretty hilarious, both because their authors
have been proven so wrong and because they accurately reflect
the prevailing wisdom at the time (
I was guilty, too):
Kerry has as much chance
of being the Democratic nominee in 2004 as you or I do.
His poll numbers are in Sharpton-land. He should've saved
his $6 mil.
Posted by Frederick at December 23,
2003 10:47 PM
He ain't spending $6 million
of his own money because he thinks he can win. He's
hoping he can save face.
Posted by obe at December 24, 2003
12:45 AM
I have a student, a real
sharp and humane one I really like, who is volunteering
for Kerry. She comes to my office hours and tries to convince
me to come work on the campaign. I can honestly say that a) I think
he'd be a better president than Clark or Dean, and b) she's wasting
her time and energy. I can't bring myself to shatter her dreams,
though.
Posted by Merv at December 24, 2003
12:49 AM
Kerry's doing an amazing
job criticizing Bush on the campaign trail. Just one example:
Monday, referring to an appearance Bush made at a Houston
livestock show and rodeo, Kerry said, "
If the president of
the United States can find the time to go to a rodeo, he can
find the time to do more than one hour in front of a commission
that is investigating what happened to America's intelligence
and why we are not stronger today."
Tuesday, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan
softened
his stance on how long much time Bush would take out of his busy schedule
(attending fundraisers and attacking John Kerry) to sit
down with the 9/11 commission.
Kerry may actually be beating some
sense into the guy.
I also love the way Kerry's going
right after Bush on his perceived strength, national security.
I can't wait until some of these Bush administration "war on
terror" insiders like
Rand
Beers and
Richard
Clarke start spilling their guts more on this administration's
incompetence when it comes to defense.
In an unusual step this early in
the campaign, Bush himself has taken to attacking Kerry
by name. It's very generous of him to jump down from the majestic
Presidential podium and relegate himself to political hack status.
I appreciate it, and I'm sure Senator Kerry does, too.
This is from an NBC News
exit poll in Florida last night:
Preferred Vice Presidential pick
of Florida's Democratic primary voters
EDWARDS
45%
GRAHAM
20%
CLINTON
16%
CLARK
7%
Graham, of course, is Florida's senior
senator. Another poll released this week also shows Edwards
helping the ticket in Florida more than either Graham or Florida's
other Democratic senator, Bill Nelson.
March
9, 2004 link
There's something pretty
huge going on right now that's being underreported. According
to the Kerry campaign, they've raised nearly $6 million on-line
in the past 6 days. That's record-shattering. The campaign has
declared a fundraising goal of $85 million before the convention,
but reports suggest they hope to raise about $105 million. There
is no doubt Kerry will be the best financed nominee in the history
of the Democratic Party. What would be really great is if they can
raise the money fast enough to run rapid response ads to counter Bush's
negative ads, which are coming soon. It's critical that he defines himself
positively before BC's negative tags are rooted too deeply in the
public conscience.
One of the reasons it was tough
for me to decide whether Kerry or Edwards would be more
electable is because Kerry can spend so much more than Edwards
would have been able to under the federal spending caps. You
can only spend about $45 million before your convention if you accept
federal matching funds, and Edwards had probably already spent close
to $30 million. He would have had only about $15 or $20 million to
defend himself against over $100 million in Republican attack dollars.
It looks like Kerry could have about $80 million or more. This is
unchartered terrain for a Democratic Presidential challenger.
It may be true that the
controversy over the scumbag 9/11 ads actually helped Bush
a little politically, because it took some focus off the disastrous
jobs report that came out Friday. 21,000 new jobs is atrocious,
particularly when his administration forecasted about 10 times
that. Even if they had created that many, it still wouldn't be
anything for them to brag about because the work force expands by about
150,000 people every month. It's laughable when these disingenuous
BC bastards spin 21,000 new jobs as a good thing, saying "we're headed
in the right direction because of the Bush tax cuts." What a distortion!
I can't believe how few Democrats have pointed out that anything less
than 150,000 isn't even hitting par. It's not too difficult for voters
to understand.
We should also be reminding Republicans
at every turn that Bush's gargantuan 2003 tax cut was entitled
the
American
Jobs Creation Act of 2003
. Judging by jobs increases since its passage, it's a clearcut, miserable
failure. (Although, to be fair, their real problem may have
been erroneously labeling it as an immediate stimulus, because
one of the Democratic complaints about it was that it provided
no short term relief.)
For more on jobs, check out the
great Ron Brownstein in the
LA
Times. The skinny:
During the four years
of the first President Bush, the economy created just 2.6
million jobs. The economy generated nearly 
