Dan Bartlett: Right wing bloggers are regurgitators.

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I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.

Actually, that’s a nicer thing than he might have said. He might have just gone ahead and used words like mindless, bigoted, unthinking, morons…but he’s just a nice guy…

Bob Herbert, Jeffrey Feldman on the trivial reporting on political candidates UPDATED

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The fate of Al Gore offers a window into our condition as a country and the future we are doomed to repeat–soon–if we do not wake up to this problem and fix it.

Gore, whom Herbert calls “one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, talented men in America and remarkably well-equipped to lead the nation,” is the exact opposite kind of leader that America has chosen for the past decade. Herbert blames journalists for what history will mark as one of the monumental failures of all time in that profession:

In the race for the highest office in the land, we showed the collective maturity of 3-year-olds. Mr. Gore was taken to task for his taste in clothing and for such grievous offenses as sighing or, allegedly, rolling his eyes. It was a given that at a barbecue everyone would rush to be with his opponent. We’ve paid a heavy price. The president who got such high marks as a barbecue companion doesn’t seem to know up from down. He’s hurled the nation into a ruinous war that has cost countless lives and spawned a whole new generation of terrorists. He continues to sit idly by as a historic American city, New Orleans, remains wounded and on its knees. He’s blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt. I could go on.

UPDATE: I almost missed Bob Somerby’s rant on the state of the Washington Post.

GOP presidential candidates all approve Bush veto of children’s health insurance

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It’s striking, then, that Bush’s would-be Republican successors all agree with the ridiculous White House line.

If you’ve been following the debate, you no doubt know that practically everything the Bush gang has said about the bipartisan S-CHIP compromise is wrong. If you need a refresher, the WaPo’s usually-mild-mannered Eugene Robinson slammed the president pretty hard today, saying Bush’s veto “should shock the consciences of every American.” He added that the White House’s rationale on the policy is “a pack of flat-out lies.”

But they’re lies that Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain happen to believe.

The four leading Republican presidential candidates have aligned themselves with President Bush’s veto on Wednesday of an expanded health insurance program for children, once again testing the political risk of appearing in lock step with a president who has low approval ratings and some critics of the veto within their party. […]

Bob Cesca: America used to be really goddamned awesome

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On watching Ken Burn’s The War:

One day long ago, it was okay to wish for an end to a war, without being accused of hating the soldiers who were fighting it. It was once a given that socialized public education, police, fire departments, roads, parks, national defense and the constitutionally mandated General Welfare & Domestic Tranquility were simply a part of the American way of life and would always be there.

And when our nation had to go to war, we would be there for her.

Conversely, when we crumble to the pressure of our reactionary and authoritarian elements, we get Japanese internment camps, the rise of the military industrial complex, and men turned away from service due to the color of their skin. Some of our greatest failures have been conceived when our irrationality, fear and lust for power overrule our traditional American ideals — even during our finest hours as a nation.

And now, 50 years later, in our lives and times, we get President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney.

The Bush Years have been a monumental, cataclysmic failure on most fronts due to its inattention to what has, historically, made American great. The president and his thinning ranks of fawn-eyed Hannities don’t understand this yet. They don’t understand it mostly because they’re too ignorant — blinded by sloganeering — to the very basic reality that Bush Republican style government, in practice, is about as successful and practical as a paper condom. It always has been.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when they compare the Bush Wars to World War II. It’s a desperate notion, one that seeks to conflate our current president with greatness he doesn’t deserve and an historical legacy he will never achieve. It’s also meant to inflate our current “enemies” to Hitler status, and thus proving the case for war.

The comparison is pure horseshit.

The Republican Party: sex crimes r us?

Family values? don’t make me laugh.

you want the list? I’ll give you the list.

And that doesn’t include multiple marriages and adultery. Yes, Rudy, Fred, John, I’m lookin at you.

and it doesn’t include the “alleged” and indicted situations recently in FL, or the Foleys who get off because Republican authorities shield them.

There’s something seriously wrong there, people.

James Dobson sees Fred Thompson as he is

It turns out that Fred Thompson, who was wooed to enter the race by social conservatives unhappy with the other candidates, can’t even remotely count on any help from Mr. Social Conservative himself, James Dobson of Focus on the Family.

Dobson wrote in a private e-mail obtained by the Associated Press; “Isn’t Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won’t talk at all about what he believes, and can’t speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail?”

“He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want to.’ And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!”

A spokesman for Focus on the Family confirmed that Dobson wrote the e-mail, which was apparently provoked by Thompson’s admission that he does not attend church regularly.

Karl Rove leaves the US in deep kim shee

As the US standing in national health statistics continues to tumble, and public and private indebtedness rise, the presidential campaign is dominated by politicians who want more failure: war and patchwork “private” health insurance. Financial Times reports that the US Comptroller General is worried:

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

The comparison between our expenditures on destruction and our flagging healthcare record is inevitable and telling. The US, alone among the world’s powers, spends a massive amount of time and money creating havoc, instead of trying to solve the problems of its citizens.  We are indeed facing the greatest crisis in this nations history, and it’s not going to be solved by doubling the size of Guantanamo or bombing Iran. It’s not going to be solved by a Congress who can’t even be bothered to read the laws it passes, and which continues to give idiots like George W. Bush, Karl Rove (thank god he’s gone) and Alberto Gonzales free rein.

Fred Thompson: on the down low?

Andrew Sullivan, Wonkette, and others are saying what has been whispered for years.
Daddy Fred Thompson is into “diversity”. I don’t give a big rat’s ass who the guy bones, but let’s see how his “family values” hypocrisy plays with suburbia. Rudy Giuliani may wear dresses, and hire crooks, but I think he draws the line somewhere short of homosexuality.

Train wreck in Iraq continues, Petraeus trots out same old excuses

An actual train wreck does end, at some point; the crashing stops, the cars come to rest, and there, (but for the human tragedy and the cleanup), it’s over.

Iraq is not like that. It is a train wreck, but it doesn’t end.

The massive piling up of physical and human wreckage just gets louder and more violent, the screeching and the sliding and the collisions are interminable, more trains get involved, more smoke, more torn metal and twisted steel, more noise, more grief….

And, while you watch the Iraq train wreck, there is always someone at your elbow, saying, “you know this trainwreck is someone elses’ fault; we just need to stop these trains, we’ll bring in some more new trackwalkers with brighter red lanterns and put up some new signs and reduce the speed limits and well, yes, we may see a temporary increase in the wreckage for a while because these trains really get angry when they see speed limit signs. In another few months we hope to pass laws against train wrecks, so let’s watch the news about Paris Hilton and just try not to notice this astonishing enormous huge catastrophic hideous trainwreck, which is turning the corner and in six months we will see it coming out of the tunnel and seeing progress, and VICTORY.”

At the moment, the new guy talking into your ear is Gen. Petraeus; but he might as well be Scotty McClellan, or Tony Snow, or George Bush himself. Its the same eerie patter, coming from the mouth of someone who has been dubbed a “straight shooter,” but whose karaoke is ever so faithful to the tunes played by the liars of the last 4 years.

Here is Petraeus/Snow/McClellan/Bush, whispering now ….

Twelve troops died in four separate attacks in Baghdad, officials said, with another two killed by a bomb in the western province of Anbar.

US forces have begun a major offensive against militants linked to al-Qaeda north of Baghdad.

Elsewhere at least 15 people died and 40 others were hurt in a suicide truck bomb attack in northern Iraq.

The attack in Suleiman Beg, 90km (55 miles) south of Kirkuk, destroyed part of a local council office and several nearby homes.

The casualties included several women and children, hospital officials said.

Insurgents ‘will respond’

Earlier, the commander of US forces in Iraq said he expected al-Qaeda in Iraq to respond to the military build-up around Baghdad with one of its own.

In an interview with a British newspaper, Gen David Petraeus said the truck bomb attack on an important Shia mosque in Baghdad that killed at least 78 people on Tuesday was an example of this.

The costs of militarism

We really have gone pretty insane. And the race is on to see which presidential candidate can be the most insane.

quoting extensively from Ian Welsh

– when you spend this much, and bear in mind that the cost of past and current military expenditures comes in at about 41% of all expenditures (28% if you just want to count current military spending) you have to turn around and ask – what are we getting for this?

The answer, as far as I can see, is “not much”.

Politicians often claim that military spending “makes Americans safer”. Let’s examine that.

Safe from what? Is anyone going to invade you? Is there anyone who is even remotely capable of invading you? No. Right, so it’s not about “defense” as traditionally understood.

Safe from terrorists? There’s an argument here, I suppose, but it’s not very strong. Certainly the use of military force over the last few years has increased the frequency of terrorist attacks throughout the world, not decreased them. One might argue that by “fighting them there” we aren’t “fighting them here.” I’m sure the Spanish and Brits might have something to say about that, but in fact, the odds of any attack from Islamic terrorists have always been low. How many terrorist attacks by foreigners (as opposed to Americans) have occurred on US soil over the last 20 years? Not many. It’s a low probability event and the lack of an attack since 9/11 on US soil reflects that. Mind you, the attack on Afghanistan did disrupt al-Qaeda, and that was a good thing. But that attack did not require the vast majority of the US military and an expedition multiple times that size could be done even if the US spent much less money on the military.

In fact the majority of actual terrorist captures have been the result, not of military action, but of the sort of police and intelligence work that mostly doesn’t require much in the way of military resources (special ops teams at most. And they aren’t expensive compared to the big iron.)

While the military has soaked up billions, things that might keep the “homeland” safe, like scanning all cargo containers, pushing the most advanced explosive sniffers out to airports, and so on, have been grossly underfunded.

And the use of the military, as is widely acknowledged, has plunged the US’s approval ratings to their lowest ever levels, spawned a whole new generation of guerrillas and terrorists with every reason to hate the US and has plunged the world’s most important oil producing region into chaos which threatens the oil markets, and thus the US economy.

Anything that needs to be done against terrorists by the military can be done with a lot less military than you have now. And, honestly, given blowback such as is occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan, anything the military can do against terrorists that requires large scale intervention, is almost certainly going to be counterproductive.

Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama and most of the Republican field, want to increase the size of the US’s ground forces. That makes sense only if you expect to be involved in more wars on the Iraq model – occupations; guerrilla wars – or if you intend to be blowing over even more, and more powerful governments.

And there is an opportunity cost to the military. As Eisenhower pointed out so eloquently, every dollar spent on the military is a dollar that could have been spent helping someone who needed it – feeding the hungry, teaching those who need schooling, caring for the sick, or even just repairing roads or building high speed Internet so the US stops falling behind other 1st world nations.

A modern military is almost always a huge burden on the state and the people of the state. It produces nothing. It is nothing but a money suck. Sometimes it’s necessary – some nations really are in danger of being invaded. Other states have problems with internal order that require them to have an army to put down parts of their own population (Turkey and the Kurds, for example).

But the US doesn’t have any possibility of being invaded; doesn’t need an army for internal order (and is forbidden to use it for that purpose in any case); and is running significant trade; government and balance of payment deficits. Entitlements are currently under pressure, with much talk, still, in elite circles of ‘reforming” both social security and Medicare. And in this context, folks, reform always means providing less and taxing more.

At some point the US is going to have to make some hard decisions about what’s going to give. You can’t have all of – low taxes on the rich, a big military, entitlements spending, big deficit spending. One, or probably two, of those pillars, are going to have to go.

At the current time, elite thinking is that it’s going to be entitlements and maybe, just maybe, the deficit. It sure isn’t going to be low taxes on the rich or the military which makes so many corporations rich and which so many regard as “untouchable” and oh-so American (an attitude, by the way, that would have made most of America’s founders, with their profound distrust of standing armies, sick to their stomaches.)

Perhaps you think the military gives you something that’s worth all that money. To me all it does is tempt politicians to use it, suck money out of the rest of the economy, and endanger the remnants of the New Deal. Some might say that it endangers republican Democracy itself, as the march towards permanent war “the long war” along with arguments about the “Commander-in-Chief” has been used to undermine liberty at home.

The founders argued that large standing armies were inimical to liberty, to democracy, to the health of the economy and to peace itself. I’d say they knew what they were talking about.