Getting Old but Fast

It's all Bush's fault.

Stick that in your Narrative and smoke it...

From Politico:

FBI agents visited the offices of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine yesterday after a shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and told employees they'd found the magazine's address

A senior Standard staffer confirmed the visit but declined to discuss it in detail. An FBI spokeswoman, Katherine Schweit , also declined to comment on the investigation.

Two other sources said two FBI agents arrived shortly after 5:00 p.m. Thursday at the 17th Street offices of the magazine. They told staffers that they had found the address of the magazine on a piece of paper associated with the shooter, James von Brunn, and asked whether the Standard had received any threats.

The magazine is about a mile north of the Holocaust Museum, and there's no other indication that von Brunn had targeted it. Von Brunn's published rants included attacks on "neocons," and the Standard has been at the heart of the neoconservative movement.

The suggestion that the Standard may have been a target complicates any view of the racist shooter in contemporary left-right terms. Von Brunn's white supremacist roots put him under the rubric of a "right-wing extremist," but the substance of his views -- which included everything from believing that President Bush may have been in on the September 11 attacks to denying that President Obama is an American citizen -- are too far on the fringe to fit into conventional political classification.

The focus on the Standard, though, appears to be of a piece with his central motivation: Anti-Semitism. In one essay, Von Brunn attacked "JEWS-NEOCONS-BILL O’REILLY," and the suggestion that neoconservatism is a specifically Jewish conspiracy is common on the racist fringe.

I thought that only us right-wing troglodytes were prone to shooting rampages...

Why you should wait for History to catch up

From the Telegraph UK:

Hating George W. Bush is not only dull and unoriginal, but it shows a complete lack of understanding of the world in which we live in.

You want liberty but you don’t want to defend it... right.

When measured meets insane

This is what you get when a left-leaning blogger attempts something resembling a measured argument about George W. Bush...in this case, Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum.

LOL at the insanity. I especially loved the letter-writer:

I am appalled. Does Washington Monthly as a magazine support this errant, inaccurate, and uncaring opinion?

I daresay that those unfortunate souls who have been secretly, illegally, and unconstituionally renditioned in unmarked white CIA planes to other countries to be tortured for months -- without recourse to counsel, legal proceedings, or habeas corpus protections -- would be the first to say that Bush's crimes are worse than Bush's. And would they be wrong?

Well -- would they? I'm asking you to defend Kevin's assertion. And if you don't support it, to apologize to your readership. Whether on Kevin's behalf, or not, I don't care -- I'm talking to you. I'm making an ethics and morality check on YOU, the editors.

Yeah, I'm mad. This is how the country slides further and further down the slippery slope to authoritarianism and despotism, when the opinion leaders can't be bothered to call a war criminal a war criminal and a destroyer of the Constitution exactly what he is.

I await your response, and I expect to hear personally from one of you.

Regards,

Rob Conrad
Chicago, IL

The most obvious point (So obvious that it's one of those things you feel guilty pointing out but only for a moment) is of course his confusion of Bush's crimes with those of...Bush; apparently he's so angry he forgot who he was writing about.

Rob needs a big dose of Get Over Yourself...demanding answers from the magazine editors for Kevin's audaciousness. 'Cause after all, he's mad!

I'm no fan of most of Kevin Drum's work as anyone who looks around will notice. But he has all the sympathy in the world on this one.

Kevin's no fan of the President but undertook, as best I can tell, an honest appraisal of the difference, as he sees it, between President Nixon and Bush the younger. And what does he get for his trouble?

The lefty venom that so usually pervades his regular readership turned back onto the unsuspecting author, that's what. I guess though when you've been feeding the bears for years you shouldn't be surprised when one of them takes a bite out of you.

"I don't know jack..."

From the Washington Times' report on Scott McClellan's waste of Congressional time, a.k.a. his House testimony on Friday morning:

Under questioning from Democrats he was unable to name anyone who specifically engaged in deception in the run-up to the Iraq war, instead blaming the style of Washington politics for the problems.

He got paid how much to write a book...?

P.S. I think Politco's John Bresnahan is onto something:

The problem: He doesn’t know the whole truth himself.

P.P.S. Saving the best for last, Joe & Val pledge to fight on:

Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson released the following statement following former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee today:

“Scott McClellan’s book and his congressional testimony shed some light on — as we alleged in our lawsuit — the decision by senior government officials to betray the identity of a covert CIA officer, Valerie Plame Wilson. Many questions, however, such as the role of Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney remain unanswered. Our civil suit, now before the Court of Appeals, is designed to permit us to uncover the truth, to hold to account those who would use their public positions to engage in private political vendettas, and to ensure that future generations of public servants do not engage in such despicable behavior against fellow Americans.

Mr. McClellan’s testimony today underscores why we need to continue to pursue our rights under the American judicial system, and why Congress should also fully investigate the circumstances of the leak, and the subsequent obstruction of justice which is ongoing.”

It's not even funny anymore how absurd this is...

Stupid Congressional Act of the Day

A new feature? Maybe...Lord knows we don't hurt for entries.

At least on this day though it's a one-time deal, courtesy of everybody's favorite Congressional loon:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic presidential contender, said Monday he wants the House to consider a resolution to impeach President Bush.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi consistently has said impeachment was "off the table."
Kucinich, D-Ohio, read his proposed impeachment language in a floor speech. He contended Bush deceived the nation and violated his oath of office in leading the country into the Iraq war.

Bush is a Traitor

And Clint's a hack...

"...Ours is a just and decent God.”

So begins Jonah Goldberg's column today about Dan Rather's latest adventure. Boy is he right!

The take away for my money is here:

Frankly, we need this. And by “we,” I mean a grand coalition of people who delight in watching one of the 20th century’s most pompous gasbags fall from the top of the laughingstock tree and hit every branch on the way down. These are dour times, and if Gunga Dan and Hurricane Dan and What’s-The-Frequency-Kenneth Dan want to trade their Afghan robes, yellow windbreakers and enormous tinfoil hats for some baggy pants, bright-orange wigs and floppy shoes, I say let them. I just hope all of the Dans show up at the courthouse in a teensy-weensy clown car.

Oh, wait...that was the funny. Here was the near-serious: The beauty of this lawsuit, which has most legal observers laughing so hard that their neck veins look like one-pound sausage casings with five pounds of ground chuck in them, is that if it goes to trial (shortly after unicorns file my taxes), CBS will be put in the position of having to prove that the story was bogus, while Rather will be forced to look even more like a grassy-knoll theorist, climbing back to the top of the laughingstock tree.

Which of course anybody with a functioning brain would have figured out by now, this will never see the inside of a courtroom and for various reasons, this not least among them. But the thought of it all I find amazingly titillating.

On the other side, the producer of the original 60 Minutes II piece, Mary Mapes, unloaded at the Huffington Post on the topic:

And we showed for the first time a cache of documents allegedly written by Bush's former commander. The documents supported a mountain of other evidence that young Bush had dodged his duty and not been punished. They did not in any way diverge from the information in the sketchy pieces of the president's official record made available by the White House or the National Guard. In fact, to the few people who had gone to the trouble of examining the Bush record, these papers filled in some of the blanks.

We reported that since these documents were copies, not originals, they could not be fully authenticated, at least not in the legal sense. They could not be subjected to tests to determine the age of the paper or the ink. We did get corroboration on the content and support from a couple of longtime document analysts saying they saw nothing indicating that the memos were not real.

Instantly, the far right blogosphere bully boys pronounced themselves experts on document analysis, and began attacking the form and font in the memos. They screamed objections that ultimately proved to have no basis in fact. But they captured the argument. They dominated the discussion by churning out gigabytes of mind-numbing internet dissertations about the typeface in the memos, focusing on the curl at the end of the "a," the dip on the top of the "t," the spacing, the superscript, which typewriters were used in the military in 1972.
It was a deceptive approach, and it worked.

These critics blathered on about everything but the content. They knew they would lose that argument, so they didn't raise it. They focused on the most obscure, most difficult to decipher element of the story and dove in, attacking CBS, Dan Rather, me, the story and the horse we rode in on -- without respite, relentlessly, for days.

For a complete dismantling of Mapes' revisionist treatise, visit the Captain. As for myself, all the blustering indignation and self-deluding righteous anger does nothing to change the simple truth of the matter.

The devil was in the details and the details were wrong. They were shown to be wrong and while Mapes and others may argue that was never proven conclusively, it was obvious enough to most not blinded by Bush-hate that something was rotten in Denmark. Namely, that Burkett's "documents" were at best re-productions of old documents not available for corroboration and at worst--what most suspected for a number of reasons best laid out in Captain Ed's post--sheer fabrications.

I'd love to see this dirty laundry paraded around a NY court room but alas, I'm sure it is not to be. Oh well.

Making Idiots Everywhere look Smart

This Democratic Congress is all about stunts. It's latest comes courtesy of Wisconsin's Russ Feingold who will introduce a resolution to censure the President for, among other things, assaulting the Constitution of the United States.

My first thought was, would it be possible to censure Feingold for assaulting our intelligence?

Unreasoned Outrage

I chuckled all the way through this low-key, sharp-tongued dismantling of EJ Dionne's latest Bush Outrage of the Week:

Having failed coherently to analyze the merits, Dionne proceeds to drink the Kool-Aid of conspiracy theory. He cites approvingly the suggestion of left-wing blogs that, by not pardoning Dionne, Bush avoided the prospect of Libby testifying before Congress at this time. He also says that, by commuting the sentence, Bush removes the incentive for Libby to give the prosecutors new information.

As to the former point, Bush's action merely delays any congressional appearance by Libby until his appeal is decided, which likely will occur next year. That's a more advantageous time for the Democrats, whose interests are always Dionne's paramount concern.

As to the latter point, whatever incentive Libby might have had to "help" the prosecutors vanished a while ago. In any case, nothing supports Dionne's assumption that he had anything he honestly could offer them. Nothing, that is, other than Dionne's partisan-based outrage.

Carter should stop speaking

I mean really:

Former President Carter says President Bush's administration is "the worst in history" in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy.

The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush's environmental policies and the administration's "quite disturbing" faith-based initiative funding.

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."

Unreal as it comes from the man whose policies mid-wifed the modern Iranian theocracy.

War for Oil

Our War for Oil worked out well:

The first crude oil pumped by a foreign company in Iraq in decades will flow into the global market next month.

DNO, a Norwegian oil company, will announce on Wednesday that it will begin producing a small amount of oil from the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan, marking a symbolic return of foreign companies to Iraq after 35 years of state control.

The company’s experience is being closely watched by larger competitors, eager for a slice of the world’s third-largest oil reserves, but deterred by security fears and the lack of a legal framework for Iraqi oil.

But DNO’s announcement could add strain to relations between Iraq’s Kurdish authorities and the central government in Baghdad. DNO’s contract is with the local administration in the relatively peaceful north of Iraq, rather than with Baghdad.

The sharing of oil resources has been a point of dispute between Iraq’s sectarian communities. The Kurdish authorities’ decision to sign separate contracts, which could bring them a direct income source and consolidate their power, has provoked fears of a break-up of Iraq.

DNO’s contract may have to be amended once the country’s hydrocarbons law is finally agreed. Passage of the law – which is critical to attracting foreign investment – through the Iraqi parliament has stalled over control of individual oil fields.

Talk about incompetent...not only can Bush not win his staged war, he can't get his oil buddies the hefty contracts they so greedily covet.

When is irony ironic?

When the most hated man in America is more popular than his detractors. It's all relative of course but no less funny for it.

Moronica's Citizen of the Year

I give you Gale in Santa Maria, in all his mindless, rambling ridiculousness:

George, you've done enough damage to me, and to our children, and you are going to have to leave!

I'm filing for a divorce today. And there will be no child visitations! You sent our children to war without enough training, without enough supplies, without body armor or armor to protect their vehicles. We've done enough bake sales to buy our children body armor.

Every time I hear you say the words, “Support our troops,” I am thinking, then why don't you?

We do support our children. We support them coming home. And when they do come home, we want to see them, whether they are in a body bag or a coffin or a wheel chair. We deserve to see the results of your immoral war. You can't hide that from us any longer. And the ones who are alive but injured need every bit of medical and psychological help they deserve. They already paid the bill when they enlisted to defend us.

So, George, it's time for you and Dick to step down, to get out of our sight. This isn't a vote of “no confidence,” it is a kick out the door. In a just world, you and your sidekick would be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.

But we don't have time for that. We have a lot to repair in this country and in the world. Be a man and leave!

I'm filing for divorce...