Poor Joe/It's So/And Time to Go

But speaking of stealing signs - or was that scams? Or padding your batting average? Honestly, it's tough to keep track of the steady stream of mal- and misfeasance from warmongers and corporatists. Fortunately they tend to recycle their sorry and pitiful crimes. Alas, sometimes they come in disguise.

Sorry old Joe Lieberman is apparently having a tough time with the idea that mere citizens might hold him accountable. It brings a whole new meaning to "say it ain't so, Joe," something hordes have been wanting to say to him recently.

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake has the latest:

No Shit, Holy Joe’s Cracking

Update: Compare and contrast — Ned Lamont today on Sam Seder (MP3). Confident, smart, well-informed, very poised. No wonder Joe is flipping out.

In Sunday’s Hartford Courant Colin McEnroe wrote a blistering column that basically reflected many of the same concerns about Joe Lieberman that we voice on the blogs. He concluded that Joe was caught up in Bush rapture and that if the primary were held tomorrow he’d vote for Ned Lamont.

He interviewed Joe today on his radio show and Joe comes off as angry, sulky, defensive and unable to adopt anything higher than O’Reilly-esque shouting tactics in the exchange:

McEnroe: You probably know that I wrote in the Currant last Sunday that if I had to vote in the primary right now I would, with some sorrow vote for Ned Lamont simply because you have kind of drifted so far towards the Bush Administration whose policies I don’t approve of very much. Tell me why I’m wrong, tell me why I should vote for you.

Lieberman: Well I…I think that your statement just then was as ridiculous and unfair as your column was. I was really upset by it. I don’t get to hear you a lot because I’m in Washington but if you’re saying that on the air really I hope your listeners are taking it with a grain of salt.

First off let me go to something that really bothered me. You have this line saying that I’ve come to a point where I’m saying that those who do not parrot my support of the war are unpatriotic and then you take TOTALLY out of context something that I said in a speech that I gave last December when I came back from Iraq and I urge you to go back and look at that whole speech.

[clip]

The line actually reads:

"It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril."

[clip]

I have to say I’m shocked. I thought we would be a lot further along in the campaign process before Holy Joe wigged out, but it seems we’ve gotten deep under his skin. A seventeen year incumbent who goes on local talk radio, admits he’s in Washington too much to listen to the show and then tries to petulantly bully the host and doesn’t want to listen to his own quotes.

McCain the Scam-Stealer

Obviously Senator McCain, as the time to declare his candidacy nears, has begun to take on a certain feverish stench. I wish I could call that odor garlic. But no, I'm afraid it's more in the fecal category. It's almost as tough to attend to reports of his statements and actions if you have any belief in the goodness of our species as it is to watch a Bush speech (see prior post). At least in public I believe he has confined himself to embraces and lip contact with George - no actual fondling or disrobing. But his absolutely disgusting pandering and shilling on behalf of the nonelected non-duty-serving unpatriotic Mr. Bush has been pretty appalling lately. Well that's too kind. It's actually sick and disgusting that his behavior has not been more widely sanctioned. He's not even on my Mr. Charming list anymore.

And of course he's so much a part of the republican party chorus that you have to wonder if the repukelican talking points are being fed to him by some implanted receiver.

But even knowing all of that, it is still pretty astonishing that he is already playing the same phantasmagoric "I didn't know that those were my feet down there below my knees" scam that George tried the other day on the subject of apocalypse (op cit).

This is also yet another sorry indictment of the corporate media, having let McCain's hiring of a staffer with potentially criminal (and definitely compromising) ties to DeLay and other Republican Party scandals go by with nary a comment. Folks like Tim Russert, already famous shills for and suckups to the powers that be, have let this slide. Of course that is why anyone who wants to know what of consequence is going on in the real world does not look to Meet the Press and the like. You might as well count on People magazine.

But the good news is that the citizenry can overcome all of this MI/Media Complex crap, much as water will find a way through. Josh Marshall among others has been championing this issue, and his widespread connections have yielded some results:

TPM Reader AT on John McCain finally getting asked about why he hired a new 'senior advisor' who's implicated in two of the biggest campaign corruption scandals of recent years ...

Actually the saddest thing about the whole Nelson thing is that it took a random person calling into a talk-show in Seattle before someone actually asked [McCain] about the whole thing. How many times has he been interviewed or questioned since he hired Nelson? And how many times has the press asked these types of questions? Zero. Where's Tim Russert? Oh that's right, fawning over Mr. Straight-talk.

[clip]

Late Update: Just to keep everyone in the loop, here's the exchange the Seattle caller had with Sen. McCain ...

CALLER: Thanks, I had a question for the senator. For a reformer, I'm kind of curious why he would hire a guy like Terry Nelson as a senior advisor. Here's a guy who was actually in the indictment of DeLay on his money laundering charges. When he was at the RNC, he agreed to take the corporate contributions from DeLay's PAC and then recycle them back into the Republican congressional races.

And he was also, this guy Nelson was also the supervisor of James Tobin, who was the guy convicted last year for helping jam the Democratic get-out-the-vote lines in New England a couple years ago.

So I'm curious why would you hire someone with such a shady background?

MCCAIN: None of those charges are true.

CALLER: You don't believe what was actually written in the indictment from Texas?

MCCAIN: No.

CARLSON: All right.

[nervous laughter]

[clip]

Needless to say, what the caller said was precisely true, as you can see demonstrated in this post about the DeLay case and this one about the phone-jamming case.

The Three Stooges Meet DeSade

I have come to understand that I am not alone in finding it nigh-on impossible to watch any extended speaking session by the President. Or at least the sorts he obviously prefers, with most material seemingly scripted (aside from the endearing – or jarring, you decide – malapropisms and tonguetangles) and any apparent questions from the “audience” in the category of fat underhand lobs intended to raise his faltering batting average.

A big part of this, at least for me, is that the Bush-whacker seems to channel the darker side of Jim Carrey or Jerry Lewis, albeit with a malevolent, sneering, spiteful, and meanspirited quality rarely found in the work of those two entertainers. I enjoy the work of both of them, but it can’t be denied that some of it can be jarring, offputting, and downright disturbing. Throw in some nasty Nixon-like hints of psychopathology, leaven with a conspicuous tone of condescension, and let the reality that this is the “leader of the free world” we’re talking about sink in, and frankly I’d rather pick fleas off a rabid dog.

So I am especially appreciative of the efforts of those with stronger constitutions or stronger flight-suppressants than I have access to. I have seen a multitude of interesting and insightful reporting throughout the ether on the recent speeches and press conferences organized in an apparent attempt by Bush’s Fantasy Presidency Team to hold off reality for just a little longer. The degree of desperation behind this almost-unprecedented executive face-time is signaled by the inclusion of actual Q&A with reporters. I’ll be linking here to two exceptional examples of thoughtful commentary.

I’ll start with a closeup, focused on one brief bit that immediately grabbed my attention: George’s assertion that he’d not previously heard of the idea that some “prophetic Christians” find recent events in the MidEast and Iraq in particular evocative of an imminent apocalypse. Personally I’d give more credence to a claim that he’d never before heard that use of fertility-enhancing drugs can lead to multiple births. But while I was still trying to pull some fresh oxygen into my lungs I came across a piece by Ms. Huffington that says it better than I can. Her whole post is worth a read, but here are key excerpts:

Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the apocalypse? And if not, why not?"

The president was clearly taken aback. He reacted as if he'd just seen a burning bush -- or had just been asked a really hard math question.

First he hemmed. Then he hawed. Then he hemmed some more.

"Um... uh... I... The answer is, I haven't really thought of it that way," he finally spit out. "Here's how I think of it. The first I've heard of that, by the way. I guess I'm more of a practical fellow." He then abruptly Left Behind the question at hand and went off on a long, standard-issue answer about 9/11 and fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here.

It was the least convincing performance since, well, since the why-I'm-optimistic-about-Iraq speech that preceded it.

[clip]

So why the president's over-the-top, "first I've heard of that" denial? If he really hasn't given any thought to the idea that the war on terror, which he has so frequently described as a battle between "good" and "evil," is in any way connected to the Biblical battle of Armageddon, wouldn't a simple "Hell no" have sufficed?

And yesterday’s press conference, featuring as it did the exotica of un-scripted questions from journalists not on the White House payroll, was too newsworthy to miss altogether. Fortunately Mr. Froomkin (among others) does a terrific job of covering the lights, both high and low. I’ve been a little more generous with the clips here (this is the wideangle shot), but do see the original post for much excellent detail I painfully excised as well as proper linkage to commentary from numerous sources:


At yesterday's press conference, President Bush joked around with reporters, angrily waggled his finger at them, and even called on the redoubtable Helen Thomas for the first time in three years -- but that doesn't mean he actually answered their questions.

Bush made the most news with two offhand, possibly even accidental admissions amid the familiar and increasingly ineffective talking points that took up most of the hour.

When asked if American forces will ever completely leave Iraq, Bush replied: "That, of course, is an objective, and that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."

Asked if he still felt he had political capital, he said, almost as an aside: "I'd say I'm spending that capital on the war."

More typically unforthcoming was his non-answer to Washington Post reporter Jim VandeHei's excellent question: "A growing number of Americans are questioning the trustworthiness of you and this White House. Does that concern you?"

Bush just wouldn't say. "I believe that my job is to go out and explain to people what's on my mind," he replied, launching himself on a rambling discourse on war followed by a straw-man attack on unnamed people who don't take al Qaeda seriously.

The best television, by far, came when Bush called on Helen Thomas, the 85-year-old dean of the White House press corps. Bush hadn't called on the former UPI reporter -- now a Hearst columnist and avowed Bush critic -- in three years.

Given the opportunity, Thomas asked the same question she has asked spokesman Scott McClellan countless times: Why did Bush really go to war in Iraq? She then interrupted, contradicted and harrumphed dismissively as Bush hit the familiar talking points he always does.

[clip]

[not on his watch!]

James Gerstenzang writes in the Los Angeles Times: "President Bush said Tuesday that U.S. troops would remain in Iraq beyond his presidency, a message that could complicate his effort to reassure an increasingly skittish public that the military deployment is not open-ended. . . .

"The president had not previously stated that the military role would continue beyond the end of his second term, on Jan. 20, 2009, a White House spokesman said."

William Douglas writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers: "Bush's statement flies in the face of U.S. public opinion. A Gallup Poll released Friday found that a clear majority of Americans, 60 percent, think the war isn't worth the costs, 19 percent called for immediately withdrawing U.S. troops, another 35 percent favored a pullout by March 2007 and only 39 percent said troops should remain in Iraq indefinitely."

[clip]

[what capital?]

Elisabeth Bumiller writes in the New York Times: "President Bush said Tuesday that the war in Iraq was eroding his political capital, his starkest admission yet about the costs of the conflict to his presidency, and suggested that American forces would remain in the country until at least 2009. . . .

"Mr. Bush in effect acknowledged that until he could convince increasingly skeptical Americans that the United States was winning the war, Iraq would overshadow everything he did."

Tom Raum writes for the Associated Press: "President Bush says he's spending his remaining 'political capital' on the war in Iraq. The trouble is, he may have little left."

[clip]

[the strawman gambit]

Frank James writes in Chicago Tribune's Washington blog: "The press conference once again showed the president's fondness for the old debater's trick of setting up straw men and knocking them down, the result being that you look like you've demolished your opponents' ridiculous argument."

In the long non-answer to VandeHei's question about his credibility, Bush spoke at some length about what he called the "totalitarian movement that is willing to spread its propaganda through death and destruction, to spread its philosophy."

BUSH: "Now, some in this country don't -- I can understand -- that don't view the enemy that way. I guess they kind of view it as an isolated group of people that occasionally kill. I just don't see it that way. . . . I take them really seriously, and I think everybody in government should take them seriously and respond accordingly."

James writes: "I've listened in Washington to many critics of the president's prosecution of the war on terror for several years now. Not once have I heard any of them minimize the threat represented by al Qaeda or its shadowy allies. . . .

"It's not an understanding of al Qaeda's aims that critics, including some Republicans, differ with the president on but the correct response. . . .

[clip]

[Helen Thomas]

Bush surprised everyone in the room when he called on Thomas, ostensibly to reward her for her well-received performance as Hillary Clinton at the recent Gridiron Club dinner. (Thomas played Clinton as Scarlett O'Hara and sang: "All I want is a plantation, Big White House paid by taxation. A Hil'ry coronation, Oh, wouldn't it be loverly.")

[clip]

"Q I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet -- your Cabinet officers, intelligence people, and so forth -- what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil -- quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?

"THE PRESIDENT: I think your premise -- in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist -- is that -- I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect –

[clip]

[fact-checking]

Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Dick Polman writes in his blog: "Bush defenders complain all the time that the mainstream media 'bashes' the president too much. I would argue, however, that the media's role is to hold any president accountable for what he says, and when he says things that are contradicted by the record, it's our job to point it out.

"So let's compare Bush's Monday claim to the factual record."

For instance, Polman takes on Bush's insistence that he didn't want war. That "is contradicted by the factual record," Polman writes.

" Time magazine reported in March 2003 that one year before the war, Bush had poked his head into a White House room and told three senators, '(Expletive) Saddam, we're taking him out.' And on July 23, 2002, long before Bush went to the United Nations, his British allies met with him and subsequently wrote, in the now-famous Downing Street memos, that Bush 'had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided.' Neither the Time anecdote, nor the British memos, have been disputed by the White House."

[clip]

When the Words Do Get in the Way

I'm trying to make up for lost time here. Lots of readin' and no writin'. Let's see if I can get my collected critters into the corral in something like the order I planned. Open sesame latent Tetris skills. A fair number of words, but we know exercise is good.

First out of the gate would be Mr. Froomkin, who you may recall from that elitist back-East paper the Washington Post. This is from his daily blog of today, serving as intro to the next piece, but I strongly encourage you to follow link to Froomkin's full "White House Briefing" post - as always he does an excellent job of synopsizing recent events - especially helpful for those of us who have been exercising vocab on misbehaving software.

War Is Peace

Yesterday marked three years of war in Iraq -- but not to President Bush. To Bush, it was "the third anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq."

In fact, as Nedra Pickler noted for the Associated Press, Bush didn't use the word "war" at all in his brief remarks .

To hear Bush tell it, what's going on in Iraq -- whatever it is -- is fundamentally about progress, victory and peace. "We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq," he said. "And a victory in Iraq will make this country more secure, and will help lay the foundation of peace for generations to come."

Bush's avoidance of the word "war" in the context of Iraq is the rule, not the exception. In the carefully chosen lexicon of White House speeches, that particular word is almost exclusively reserved for the "global war on terror."

So there is no war, except for the war that never ends, and we're winning.

It's a little reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984, where the three slogans of the ruling party were "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength."

Since the disclosures about Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program, Bush critics have been citing that other dominant slogan from Orwell's book: "Big Brother is Watching You."

But there are plenty of potential Orwell analogies in Bush's use of language, and his historical revisionism, as well.

Of Straw Men

Another aspect of 1984: the daily "Two Minutes Hate" aimed at Emmanuel Goldstein, the enemy of the people. Unlike the obvious contemporaneous analogue, Osama bin Laden, the Goldstein character was actually a straw man -- a made-up figure created by Big Brother just to be knocked down.

Jennifer Loven, in a bold departure for the Associated Press, wrote a whole story on Saturday about Bush's extensive and generally unchallenged use of straw-man arguments.

[clip]

So, speaking of Loven:

Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches

"Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently.

Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free."

"There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care ... for all people."

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" — conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow. But experts in political speech say the straw man device, in which the president makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed "critics," is just as problematic.

Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.

"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."

[clip]

Now stick with me here. Honestly, I think you'll find there is a storyline of merit. Next I have a couple slightly dusty historical snippets from Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who I continue to track despite his elitist Ivy League background.

First this, from post entitled "Confidence Men":

Let's be honest. As upset as you may have been in January 2001 that George W. Bush was going to be president, you had to admit he had a pretty impressive team. They had beaten a sitting vice president with seemingly every advantage; they outmuscled and outmaneuvered the Gore camp during the Florida recount; and despite the abbreviated transition, they quickly and smoothly assembled a seasoned White House staff. Many top appointees were in their second or third tour of government service; they exuded experience and know-how--and not just in the splendid isolation of academia or the permissive chaos of campaign work, but in the rugged practicalities of commanding American industry. Dick Cheney was the signature figure: a former White House chief of staff, congressman, and wartime defense secretary, whose vaunted government savvy had been validated in the private sector as CEO of the energy giant Halliburton. Like the administration, Cheney was right-wing, but in a way that was at once daunting and oddly reassuring. You may not have liked what he was doing. But you had little doubt that he knew what he was doing.

Today, that record doesn't look nearly so impressive. We now know that as CEO, Cheney got snookered into a disastrous merger that has since sent Halliburton's stock price plummeting, while signing off on dubious balance sheets that have sparked a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. His mastery of the Beltway is similarly in question. Last year's Cheney-led energy task force produced an all-drilling-no-conservation energy bill that went nowhere.

[clip]

The same applies to the Bush administration generally. After some early successes, like the tax cut and the education bill, most administration initiatives have gone nowhere. The White House's cocky bullheadedness turned Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords into an Independent and gave the Democrats the Senate. Its budget predictions were in shreds well before September 11. Social Security privatization went bust long before the market did. During the California energy crisis, the administration refused for months to cap wholesale energy rates. This ill-advised move looked like payback to price-gouging energy firms like Enron and drove California even further beyond Republican reach, probably for years to come.

[clip]

This unfamiliarity and heightened expectation, matched with the trappings of competence, gave potency to what has turned out to be the Bush administration's signature political tactic: the confidence game. The confidence man is a stock figure in American culture, originating--perhaps not coincidentally--in the boomtowns of the Old Southwest. He's the snake-oil salesman, the wildcat land speculator who mixes boundless optimism with quick talk, bluff, and bluster. The administration is led by such men.

[clip]

Until now, the Bush administration has been trading on the promise that all of these things would work out. But that leaves them in the position of a company that borrows against future profits (Enron, for instance) or an overextended investor who is buying stock on margin. When the bubble bursts, they will have a long way to fall.

[clip]

And then this, from "Vice Grip - Dick Cheney is a man of principles. Disastrous principles":

Early last December, Vice President Dick Cheney was dispatched to inform his old friend, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, that he was being let go. O'Neill, the president's advisers felt, had made too many missteps, given too much bad advice, uttered too many gaffes. He had become a liability to the administration. As Cheney himself once said in a different context, it was time for him to go. It couldn't have been a fun conversation--especially since it was Cheney who had picked O'Neill two years earlier.

O'Neill stormed off to Pittsburgh and within days the White House had announced his replacement. Yet the new treasury secretary nominee turned out not to be much of an improvement. Like O'Neill, John Snow was a veteran of the Ford administration who ran an old-economy titan (the railroad firm CSX) and seemed to lack the global market financial experience demanded of modern day treasury secretaries. Like other Bush appointees, Snow came from a business that traded heavily on the Washington influence game. And--again typical of the president and his men--the size of Snow's compensation package seemed inversely proportional to the returns he made for his shareholders. Of the three new members of the president's economic team nominated in early December, Snow was the only one to get almost universally poor reviews. He was also Dick Cheney's pick.

Week after week, one need only read the front page of The Washington Post to find similar Cheney lapses. Indeed, just a few days after Cheney hand-picked Snow, Newsweek magazine featured a glowing profile of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that began with an anecdote detailing her deft efforts to clean up another Cheney mess.

[clip]

All of which leads me to some fascinating recent poll results. The entire article at this Pew Research site seems to cry out for attention (just not mine, not right now!).

The nexus for purposes of this post though is captured well by this post on Democratic Underground, describing one in particular of a multitude of great charts and diagrams illustrating life in these United Snakes right now:

I LOVE this poll by Pew Research - One word description for Bush

"The single word most frequently associated with George W. Bush today is "incompetent,"and close behind are two other increasingly mentioned descriptors: "idiot" and "liar." All three are mentioned far more often today than a year ago."

Okay. Now for you diehards, a contest. Who will be first to reply with correct citation for source of post title?

If you've got 'em, smoke 'em.