Is Classiness Overrated?

Anticipating a hiatus in posting opportunities and remorseful at having failed to properly publicize one of the better Op-Ed pieces I have seen in quite some time, I am taking corrective steps.

We have all (okay, those paying attention) noticed a certain "head exploding" phenomenon amongst those feeling out of power of late.  Hell, even my bus driver commented on it the other night, sending me home with a grin.

Unfortunately, perhaps inevitably given our national tendency to feel simultaneously exceptional, empowered, embittered, obligatorially-armed, entitled, and martyred, there are some who cannot settle for feeling sorry for themselves and whining in public, the sine qua non of most (R) politicians these days, it seems.  The vitriol, name-calling, and coded invocations to violence and overt hatred are downright spooky.  Well, no, I may have that wrong, as many of the (R) are actually seeming to endorse or goose up the name-calling and violence amongst the know-nothings who seem to be their "base" right now.

I find great irony and frustration in the idea that we now have seeming humans (they appear like us) throwing bricks through windows and otherwise engaging in mini-terrorism over health insurance reform while the eight-year pogrom with the bushinistas and their deadly reign of terror was remarkably peaceable on the domestic front.

Bob Herbert in the NYT was spot-on in his comments on this outrageous crap, under the mast "An Absence of Class":

Some of the images from the run-up to Sunday’s landmark health care vote in the House of Representatives should be seared into the nation’s consciousness. We are so far, in so many ways, from being a class act.

A group of lowlifes at a Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, last week taunted and humiliated a man who was sitting on the ground with a sign that said he had Parkinson’s disease. The disgusting behavior was captured on a widely circulated videotape. One of the Tea Party protesters leaned over the man and sneered: “If you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong end of town.”

Another threw money at the man, first one bill and then another, and said contemptuously, “I’ll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot.”

In Washington on Saturday, opponents of the health care legislation spit on a black congressman and shouted racial slurs at two others, including John Lewis, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was taunted because he is gay.

At some point, we have to decide as a country that we just can’t have this: We can’t allow ourselves to remain silent as foaming-at-the-mouth protesters scream the vilest of epithets at members of Congress — epithets that The Times will not allow me to repeat here.

It is 2010, which means it is way past time for decent Americans to rise up against this kind of garbage, to fight it aggressively wherever it appears. And it is time for every American of good will to hold the Republican Party accountable for its role in tolerating, shielding and encouraging foul, mean-spirited and bigoted behavior in its ranks and among its strongest supporters.

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You owe it to yourself, your self-esteem, and your country to read the rest of this opinion.

Of Bush's Major "Accomplishments," Lying Might Be One of the Few That Isn't An International Crime

On at least one primitive level I guess we might give the conniving, brazen, wholly dishonest, lie-infested, bush regime bastards some grudging credit for their outrageous willingness to just fling their dishonest shit out there and hope something would stick.  Of course Reagan proved that non-sense and a veneration of stupidity are just the sort of "nourishing" pablum some of our fellow-citizens need.  And when you can allow Pearl Harbor II to occur (having invoked it and then taken overt steps to hide from the compelling evidence it was coming) and thus invoke Fear, it turn's out it's light's out for the illiterate and otherwise dumbstruck, i.e. the Repubic base.

And, alas, for our country.

But I don't think we can stand still and appear to honor their traitorous anti-American behavior, including sacrificing the lives of so many of our brave military and deplorably innumerable innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Actual patriotic Americans, attuned to our history, must know that bush, cheney, rumsfeld, ashcroft, rove, rice, powell, and at least several score of their fellow-rodents (apologies, Rodentia, you may have redeeming traits I am as yet unaware of that make you far more admirable than they) actually committed War Crimes, under laws that we as a Nation have repeatedly signed off on and sanctioned.

There seems to be an increasingly desperate effort underway to try to rewrite history and somehow nullify what any actual working brain fully understands were war-crimes.  We should be offering these folks up for the next Nuremberg hearings, without a doubt.

I find it truly disgusting that the turd rove, the ultimate lying sleazeball, (think of the lowest on the totem-pole in grade school,  continually lying to get by because he has always gotten away with it and actually doing the work is hard) can get a straight interview these days without intense counter-questioning.  His mere existence as a seeming important presence proves the irrelevancy of the mainstream press.  They're too afraid of him or something to call him the shithead he was and is.

At least partly catalyzed I guess by recent book laughably titled "Courage and Consequences," by one K. Rove, there seems to be a focus on the fine point of whether "bush lied."  This particular venture includes  mocking that particular convenient construction that I suspect for a majority of literate Americans properly emblemizes eight nightmare years with sociopaths and worse somehow behind the wheel and with all the traffic laws suspended by and for them.

For such souls it requires little imagination to grok the idea that these folks are playing semantic games, on some level amounting to the idea that we will never be able to "prove" what bush "knew" when.  Balancing on the pinhead of what "lie" means, the argument would be that any amount of dissembling, purposeful misleading, aggressive propagation of misinformation, planting of falsehoods by others never explicitly told by bush to do so and such is perfectly fine, never justifying the words "bush lied."

I suppose it is possible they went to the trouble and pain to protect against every possible instance, but when their entire zeitgeist involved a campaign of dishonesty, delight in intrigue, and stovepiping of cherry-picked or fantasized threats and lots of fear-mongering, that certainly seems like a stretch.

Regardless, the evidence is abundant that on the most basic level, "bush lied" is absolutely correct and does not go anywhere near far enough.  It seems important that we do not forget that or allow the would-be rewriters of history to go unanswered.

Hence this fine piece on rove's attempt to do a Brothers Grimm on us, excerpted briefly here but well worth full read:

Joseph Goebbels, the leading propagandist of the Third Reich, believed in the power of the lie; the greater the lie, the greater the power. Goebbels would have loved Karl Rove's "Courage and Consequences: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight," a pastiche of lies, fabrications and distortions designed to rehabilitate the record of the Bush-Cheney years. There are too many lies to treat in this one column, but his greatest lie is that the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq if it had known there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there. Its corollary is that the administration did not lie about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein's Iraq

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In fact, the Bush administration mounted an intense six-month campaign to make sure that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) produced "evidence" of WMD, and then made sure that such players as National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell parroted the administration's big lie to the American public and to the international community. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their acolytes Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Karl Rove desperately wanted to go to war against Iraq for reasons that have never been explained. As a result, they created and employed a strategic disinformation campaign to convince Congress and the American people of the need for war. Goebbels would have beamed.

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And David Corn is also excellent on this topic and likewise should be cherished in full:

Bring it on.

Conservative apologists for the George W. Bush crew are swinging hard these days to defend their man -- and themselves -- from the charge that W. and his gang misled the nation into war. They must worry that they are going to end up on the wrong side of history. After all, a 2008 Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans believed that the Bush administration "deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." (This was a big change from a poll taken two months after the 2003 invasion that noted that 67 percent believed that Bush had played it straight.)

Still, my PoliticsDaily.com colleague, Peter Wehner, who worked in the W. White House, wants to mix it up over this. In a recent column, he took issue with a piece I had written decrying Iraq war triumphalism. Wehner disagreed on several fronts, but he zeroed in on what he derisively called the " 'Bush lied' mantra"-- meaning the assertion that his former boss bamboozled the public about Iraq's WMD capabilities. He scornfully wrote, "I fully understand that this remains an article of religious faith among many of those on the left. But there is no real evidence for it." And Karl Rove, who claims in his new book that Bush did not "lie us" into war, cheered on Wehner, tweeting on Tuesday, "Fantastic piece by fmr WH colleague Pete Wehner responding to @DavidCornDC on Iraq." Moreover, in a column this week, New York Times op-edder Ross Douthat, while assailing Matt Damon's "Green Zone," scoffed at "the comforts of a 'Bush lied, people died' reductionism." Accusing Bush of misrepresenting the case for war, Douthat huffs, is "glib" and "lame" scapegoating; the real explanation for what went wrong in Iraq, he asserts, is, well, more Shakespearean.

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