Friday, June 18, 2004

Ignorance of history or American exceptionalism?

Atrios points to this Detroit Free Press column by Brian Dickerson and asks why so many in the press are ignorant of history?

If you trusted George Bush, well, fine I suppose. But the claim that "we could not believe that any president would mislead his constituents about so important a matter..." is just insane. It's ignorant of history, ignorant of human nature, and, frankly, just plain ignorant.

I want to be able to pat people on the head when they come around, but what the hell is this guy thinking?

I don't think it is just a case of being ignorant of history. I think American exceptionalism has a lot to do with it as well. Ask any of these people if they could imagine a Putin or a Berlusconi or whoever it is that is in charge in China of doing something like this and they probably would consider it possible. But when it comes to America they just don't want to believe that our leaders could be just as crass.

I guess that's another difference between myself and them. I have always understood that there is nothing special about our leaders. They are equally capable of greatness and perfidity as the rest of the world. Thus I was open to considering the idea that Bush would lead us to war for political reasons.

Measuring the Veepstakes babble

Daily Interest did a Google survey to determine which of the various Veep prospects is getting the most online babble. Kerry-Edwards comes in first, followed closely by Kerry-McCain. Kerry-Gephardt is 5th followed by Kerry-Dean.

Check it out.

What do you get if you cross an elephent with a rhino?

See if you can spot the logical inconsistency in this comment from Noam Schreiber on Kerry's possible choice of Gephardt for Veep:

But in light of the report in today's Note that "Kerry has told associates that he views the vice presidency as an extremely important institution and wants a person of heft to fill it," and in light of the fact that the universe of possible heavyweights is pretty small--John McCain has taken himself out of contention, and, as my colleague Ryan Lizza reports, the vetting process is essentially over, meaning there's really no way people like Bill Cohen (and probably Sam Nunn) could be added to Kerry's short list at this point--Gephardt looks like an increasingly likely choice. Other than Gephardt, the only people "of heft" likely to be on Kerry's list are Wesley Clark and Bob Graham, both of whom proved themselves to be less than reliable on the trail during the primary campaign.

Um, Norm, in case you forget, Gephardt came in 4th in Iowa!

If we are talking about reliability "on the trail during the primary campaign" then Wesley Clark as Gephardt beat by a mile (Clark actually won Oklahoma).

I think we are deep in the "hell-if-I-know" stage of the Veepstakes. There are so many theories flying around, so many rumors, so many people with their own particular agendas involved, that really I doubt if anyone outside of Kerry and 1 or 2 of his closest advisors have a clue as to where this thing is really going.

If Kerry isn't careful, he risks this approaching the "why-the-hell-won't-he-make-a-choice-and-end-the-chaos" stage. Followed soon after by the "after-all-that-he-picked-HIM!?" stage.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Working to protect Bush

AMERICAblog highlights this paragraph from this AP story:

When it became clear that the nation was under attack, Bush decided to continue his remarks to a classroom of second graders. "The president told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis." Fifty minutes later, he was on Air Force One as it climbed into the sky with no certain destination. The objective was to get into the air as fast as possible and decide where to go, the commission said.

It is my understand that Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, contains the full seven minute footage of Bush's deer-in-the-headlight performance in that classroom. I wonder if the above is being put out as a bit of an inoculation against that footage.

To coin a term

To those of you who don't know what Godwin's Law is, I provide this definition from the Jargon Dictionary:

Godwin's Law     prov.     [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.

The term was originally coined on Usenet, but it has since spread beyond its original realm and can be found in many online discussions (I don't know of any examples of it appearing in the establishment media, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has).

In reference to the last point of that definition, I'd like to coin a new term:

Godwin's Law Nazi     n.     "Anyone who invokes Godwin's Law, not to prevent a discussion from being side-tracked into irrelevant ranting, but instead to shut down a discussion that is going in a direction they disapprove." Put another way, just because someone risks the invoking of Godwin's Law by making allusions to Nazism does not necessarily mean that the allusion is wrong.

The Hunting Of The President

I was reading the American Prospect interview of Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, on the occasion of the release of the documentary The Hunting Of The President, and I remembered something that was a revelation to me back in the mid-90s and still applies today. Back then I didn't follow politics as closely as I do now, but I was a regular news watcher (aside: its ironic that the more closely I have gotten involved in politics the less time I waste consuming the news. TV news is to Politics what high school history is to History: the more credence you give to the former the less you will understand about the latter). I can remember all the news stories about Whitewater and Travelgate and Hairgate and what-not and thinking to myself that all these stories were very confusing and that I couldn't understand exactly what the hullaballoo was all about.

It was then I picked up Fools for Scandal, Gene Lyons' first book on the whole era of Clinton scandals (I highly recommend this book as an introduction to the more voluminous material in The Hunting Of The President, the book upon which the documentary was based). Gene's book was a revelation because it was the first time I had seen the suggestion that there wasn't anything to the Whitewater scandal and that the reason it had become such a big story was that the media had convinced itself that there was a pony somewhere in that pile of shit and they just wouldn't listen to suggestions that it was all just crap. The establishment press had become devoted to the idea that the Clintons must have done something wrong so they kept pursuing the story, despite the fact that it was a story that made sense only if you assumed that they were guilty.

The reason this still applies today is that, in the case of George W. Bush, we have the same phenomena, but in the opposite direction. The establishment press convinced itself that Bush was a competent and strong leader and thus refused to listen to evidence to the contrary. The last four years look sensible only if you have convinced yourself that Bush is a good guy with the best intentions and the right plan for where to lead this country. If you have doubts about that, then the suggestion becomes more plausible that his management of this country's domestic and foreign policy has been incompetent and corrupt.

I had doubts about Bush even before the election. Those doubts were confirmed in my mind by his behavior in the post-election Florida fiasco. Therefore, I was open to considering the idea that Bush and the people around him really don't know what they are talking about and that they are corrupt to the bone. Those who didn't learn that lesson from Florida took far longer to wake up to the true character of the Bush administration.

Some of them still haven't woken up.

War of Choice

Correct me if I am wrong, but is this the first time the NY Times has referred to the war in Iraq as a "war of choice"?

Of all the ways Mr. Bush persuaded Americans to back the invasion of Iraq last year, the most plainly dishonest was his effort to link his war of choice with the battle against terrorists worldwide. [...]

Kerry/Dean again

Kos passes on a rumor. Yes, it is just a rumor. But the fact that it has reached rumor stage is interesting in itself.

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Reagan vs. Bush

I've been trying to think of a concise description of the difference between Reagan and Dubya. The New York Times provides us with this comment from a former Reagan official that, I think, says it best:

'Bush wants to defeat his opponents, Reagan wanted his to join him,' one former official of the Reagan White House said.

On the surface these may both sound like "your with me or against me", but in Bush's case there is the implication that if you don't join him he will destroy you while Reagan at least tried to work with his opponents to try and figure out how to bring them into the fold. With Bush, being on his side should be a given. With Reagan, it was something that he understood took work to achieve.

And, in the process of trying to achieve it, he sometimes changed as well. While Bush, who doesn't care what others think, can never change and will bring down the world with him if that is the only option available.

Reagan was someone who wanted to talk WITH me.

Bush was someone who just wanted to talk AT me.

All the difference in the world.

Not the news

The report from the 9/11 commission that there is "no credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda target the United States is not news in the sense that anyone who has been paying attention for the last three years already knew that (even Bush stated this publicly a few months back). But, according to Kos, the report is the top story on CNN and MSNBC (FOX is minimizing it of course) and it is spreading like wildfire (I'm away from the TV so I can't report on this)..

In other words, the establishment media is acting like this is a startling revelation, which is an indictment of them, but good news in the long run because the only thing the establishment media is good at is breathlessly repeating startling news over and over and over again. Maybe that repetition will finally beat it into people's heads that they have been lied to by the Bushies for so long.

We can only hope.

Update:

Enterprising Kosovarians managed to capture the following from CNN (click for larger view):

Talk about bad timing.

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Kerry/Dean redux

Hmmm. In the last week two polls have come out that test the feasibility of a Kerry/Dean ticket (Zogby and Fox). I wonder if the media is getting bored with the Kerry/Gephardt, Kerry/Edwards, Kerry/Vilsack talk and is looking for something more interesting. I wonder if Kerry might be looking for something more interesting?

Both of these polls show that Kerry/Dean does about as well as any of the other likely picks (I'm excluding Kerry/McCain since that will not happen). Steve Soto points out an interesting detail of the Zogby poll:

What is more noticeable in this poll however is the effect Dean�s inclusion on the ticket has among several key Democratic constituent groups. Adding Dean to the ticket leads to lopsided leads for Kerry against Bush among the Democratic base. Young voters, lower income voters, single voters, and African American voters all reported large majorities in favor of a Kerry/Dean ticket against Bush/Cheney. When a Kerry/Gephardt ticket was substituted amongst these groups, the margins for the Democratic ticket shrank significantly, with the lower income voting block casting their preference equally for Kerry and Bush.

There has been a concern among strategists that if Kerry plays to much to the middle that he could lose some of the Democratic base (either through apathy or through creeping Naderism). But a Kerry/Dean ticket might solidly lock up that base and thus free Kerry to spend more time wooing the centrist swing voters.

Of course, there is also the concern among some strategists that Dean would drive away the centrists because the media has (unfairly) labeled Dean as a leftist kook. I think this is an overblown concern. I've met quite a few fence-sitters over the last few months who have expressed at best mild interest in Kerry but still get excited when the conversation turns to Dean.

A Kerry/Dean ticket would certainly knock all those "Kerry is running a boring campaign" stories off the page (of course, some might question whether that is a good thing). Some have talked about the excitement that a Kerry/McCain fusion would bring. Kerry/Dean would be another exciting fusion, but of a different kind.

I still think Kerry/Dean is a long-shot at best. I just can't see Kerry taking that dramatic a risk (Kerry/McCain held no risk, other then the embarrassment that would come from the eventual rebuff). I also think that Dean's energy might be better spent growing the grassroots as he has done over the last few months. But if Dean on the ticket would give Kerry the boost he needs I'm sure the good Doctor would be happy to answer the call.

The Bizarro Oracle

Digby brings us the good news:

It's official. Clinton will definitely help Kerry win the election, probably in a huge way. How do I know this?

[Dick]Morris believes that "by sucking up the oxygen in the room during July, Clinton cripples Kerry and forces him to compete for attention with a charismatic former president". He predicts that the Massachusetts senator "will look a decided second-best to Bill Clinton".


Morris is the Bizarro Oracle of Delphi. If he predicts something, the exact opposite will come true. He has a very impressive record.

He then lists several examples of Morris' bizarre prognostication abilities. He forgot to mention my favorite example: Morris' repeated insistence that Hillary would never run for Senate in New York and, when she did, that she would lose badly.

free patriot added the following comment to Digby's post:

Hillary on the ticket is a Repuglican wet dream

Dick Morris is just feeding the repugs what they want to hear

I think he might be on to something there. I used to think that Dick Morris was just insane. But, if you think that he is just a whore who is providing a service to his customers (feeding the fantasies of the freeper fans of Fox), then his track record makes a lot more sense.

Dick Morris doesn't care if he consistently gets it wrong. He only cares that the people who are paying him don't care if he consistently gets it wrong.

When even your enemies applaud...

Guess where this comment comes from (make a guess before peeking):

As much as some might try to marginalize this film ['Fahrenheit 9/11'] as a screed against President George Bush, "F9/11" � as we saw last night � is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty, and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.

(courtesy Tom Tomorrow)

Putting out the fire

I second John Scalzi's comment about recent reports that Democrats are worried that Kerry hasn't put forward more than an "I'm not Bush" platform:

Jumpin' Jesus in a lobster bib, isn't that enough? Honestly now. Wanting more out of Kerry than rolling back the odometer on Dubya is like being upset that the fireman who's come to keep your house from burning down to the ground isn't also trimming the lawn. God knows Kerry could spend four years just applying patches to where Bush's crew have knocked gaping holes in the constitutional drywall. Heck, he'll need a second term just to get to his own stuff. So, you know, priorities, people.

The truth of the matter is that Bush as so f*cked things up that it could take both Kerry terms just to return us to where we were before this idiot came into power.

I do not envy Kerry's job once he gets into office. The usual suspects will immediately start blaming him for everything that Bush has fucked up and ask, "Why hasn't Kerry fixed these problems yet?"

John Kerry isn't running for President. He's running for garbage collector.