DOWN BUT NOT OUT

You really have to marvel at the California GOP. They're just so damn entertaining.

I mean these are the same folks who actually defeated their best chance to elect a Republican Governor in 1996 order to nominate the one man in the state who COULDN'T defeat the then floundering Grey Davis.

Now they've come upon the brilliant idea of stealing a Republican victory in November 2008 by scrapping the "winner-take-all" distribution of California's 55 electoral votes and awarding an electoral vote per congressional district based on the popular vote in each district, in essence taking the "winner take all" formula of the electoral college and bringing it down to the congressional district level. In other words, if the GOP candidate wins in a congressional district he gets a California electoral vote and vice-versa if a Democrat wins in a district.

That would have the effect of awarding 20 electoral votes to the Republican -the same block of votes as winning a state like Ohio or Florida. That in turn would make it nearly impossible for a democrat to make up the difference and get to the magic number 270, meaning that regardless the national popular vote the republic party would win the White House.

This desperate attempt at a power grab was dead in the water after it was discovered that the sole fundraiser for the project was one of Rudy-boy's inner circle. But in a classic display of arrogance the initiative is up and running again chiefly due to an infusion of cash and support from Rep. Darrell Issa (R) (duh!), former loser gubernatorial candidate, millionaire, and GOP operative.

The new push is even using direct-mail with the words "your official CA state petition" on it, and sporting the "nonpartisan" (does anyone ever use that word and mean it anymore?) scowling picture of Hillary Clinton with the words "she hopes you won't open this letter!"

Make sure to drop-in to nodirtytricks.com and contribute what you can. This can't be allowed to go forward. As cliche as it sounds -our nation is at stake.

THE ARMY OF (some of) THE PEOPLE

Apparently the Military of the United States of America has become the Military of the Republican Party.

From the "Support the troops" lipservice to the firing of all the generals and commanders who disagree with the GOP party line, to the latest wingnut smear-campaign against a troop who (pseudonymously) wrote about his experiences in Iraq and dared to show them in a less than glowing light (that's a euphamism -the phrase "skull jewelry" should give an inkling of what he wrote).

The military apparently leaked info about this troop to the Drudge report, that paragon of impartiality while they made liberal bloggers file a FOIA request to get the same information, though they deny it vehemently, which leads one to one of two conclusions:

1) that they were (gasp) lying (!) and did in fact leak the information to the wingnuts
2) that there was a SERIOUS security breach by CENTCOM.

neither of which make me feel warm and fuzzy.

Meanwhile (or as Python used to say "during the meanwhilst" Glenn Greenwald got an unsolicited and blathering email from General Petreaus' public affairs officer Colonel Stephen A Boylan because he dared to comment on the above leak. Weird enough, but then Boylan denies that he sent the email, though it came from the same server that sent "denial" email. When Greenwald asks what Boylan thinks about that, he says first that he was the victim of identity theft in Vermont (!?!?) and then says that what he's doing about it none of Greenwalds concern.

WTF is going on over there? Either the military is the victim of a sophisticated hacking attack which has the ability to convincingly spoof emails to seem that they come from military servers in Iraq (yikes), or more likely and more depressingly the military has fallen into the same hands as the now undisputably politicized Justice department.

Two of the government arms that are constitutionally mandated to remain non-partisan in order to preserve that quaint old notion of Justice for All have been infiltrated and commandeered by neocon pod-people.

Scared yet?

AFFIRMATIVELY AND ACTIVELY UNGRATEFUL

USSCOTUS Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is bitter and resentful. He claims that his Yale law degree was tainted because of Affirmative Action policies which made it difficult for him to get a job after he graduated.

The egotistically driven logic is stunning: Thomas is actually saying that the fact that Yale extended a helping hand to minorities who previously hadn't had the same opportunities as whites -and which allowed him to attend Yale Law School- meant that the prestige his law degree had was somehow diluted because while those policies allowed him to attend, they also let other minorities... uh...attend. Make sense? No, not to me either.

This is one of the nine most brilliant legal minds in the nation?

Tragically Trapped

Andrew Sullivan, with whom I disagree more often than not on a multiplicity of issues, has posted perhaps the most eloquent "eulogy" for Senator Larry Craig (R) of Idaho I've seen yet.

Sullivan is himself gay, and a conservative, so it's interesting to see how he pities the lot Craig finds himself in, while not condoning his actions or forgiving his hypocrisy.

BUT...BUT...BUT

David Brooks and Roger Cohen have recently published Op-Eds in the New York Times that typify the diaspora from the right.

Neither of these guys has any idea what they'retalking about.

The first (Brooks) wants to redefine conservatism and disown the collapse of its failed idiology. the plain truth is that regardless how Brooks wants to define it, conservatism -"creedal" or "dispositional" stands on the belief that government needs to be restrained. When that restraint then leads to failures like Katrina, the decline in healthcare and education, and policy blunders committed by factions within that weakened government, conservatives then turn on a dime and say "see, look at these problems government has wrought."

If you reduce government to "the size where it could be drowned in the bathtub" as Grover Norquist is so fond of saying, you can't then be surprised when it cannot handle any crisis (deluge) larger than a bathtub.

The second guy (Cohen) wants to claim that the term "neocon" has become a generic insult for anything "the left" (whatever that means) doesn't like. A sort of "Auslander" for liberals. This of course is horseshit.

"Neocon" refers specifically to the group decended from the teachings of Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago professor who believed that the"liberal" cultural economic and political ideals of the west (particularly the USA) that had risen in the first half of the 20th century had resulted in its decline in the latter half. He thought that the only counter to that collapse was to create cultural myths that (though made up entirely) would scare the dumb public into acting properly. The public of course was too stupid to be able to think for itself.

The most elemental of those myths was that there were Really Bad Guys out there who were organizing to attack us, and that we needed to defeat them by any means necessary.

Strauss' disciples included Wolfowitz, Perle, the Kristols (Irving and later Bill) the Pipes (Richard and then Daniel) Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all of their successive proteges. The irony is that, somewhere along the line the disciples actually started to believe the myths they'd created, and like religious fanatics, followed their beliefs right off the cliff despite any evidence to the contrary.

Neocon then is not simply a generic slur, but refers to all who advance a certain set of principles:

1. Liberalism leads to collapse of social order
2. Therefore society needs to be "scared-straight"
3. Evil Ones want to defeat us
4. They must be prevented by any and all means including offensive wars ("offensive" meaning opposed to defensive rather than offending) .
5. American hegemony.

Others might add unquestioning support for Israel, though I don't think this is required because I don't think that all neocons place Israel's interests as equal to ours (kinda defeats the hegemony idea). Many conservatives have become neocons since 2000 (Giuliani) , others have supported the neocon agenda though they have not themselves been historically neoconservative (McCain, Hatch, Specter, Graham), and even some liberals have become neoconservatives (Lieberman. Zell Miller, the Brookings institute douche-bags O'Hanlon and Pollock.)

Both of these columns show how many on the right are desperately trying to diffuse the damage they've wrought on this country. They can't ignore it or spin it away any more so they try to explain it, and their explanations are pathetic.

ENOUGH ALREADY

I've about had enough about this "MoveOn NYT ad" thing.

Aren't there a couple of more important things the senate should be concerned with? And honestly, the dem feeding frenzy is ridiculous -does it really matter if a few Democratic senators voted "yes" on a non-binding "sense of the Senate" resolution that means absolutely nothing? Seems to me it's a even sum game:

• If they vote "no" they get hammered by the noisy right-wing money/press machine.
• If they vote "yes" they get to hold it over the heads of the republicans when the elections roll-around and the GOP start bashing the democratic candidates.
• Also they can say "Ok, whatever, you actually want to vote on this? Great. Let's pass it and then can we please debate something serious?"

The only way they lose is if the democratic voters take the bait and start condemning them for it -i.e. start eating their own, rather than just ignoring a meaningless resolution.

The only reason this is any controversy at all is that some smart-ass over at the MoveOn marketing department thought it would be catchy to print the phrase "General Betray-us".

It's not. It's juvenile sounding and invokes the language of schoolyard bullies. It also allows people to say that MoveOn is calling a decorated soldier a traitor. I know, I know "But OP -that's what THEY do all the time!" But the add would have been just as powerful (if not moreso) without that phrase. The addition of that phrase only weakens the ad because it makes fun of his name and not his actions/writings/credibility.

Kudos to MoveOn for getting the message out that Petraeus was a lackey, but next time get a proof reader or a marketing rep or whatever who understands the difference between name-calling and clever catch phrases that Move your message On.

PETRAEUS IS IRRELEVANT

The Petraeus Crocker coming out party is quaint but entirely irrelevant. What difference does it make what they tell Congress? The Democratic majority is either too powerless or too scared to do anything about it. Nothing will change and we'll keep losing lives and pouring money into the quagmire until at the earliest 2009. And yes, when we leave things will completely meltdown over there.

The time to prevent the meltdown was pre-invasion. And no, not because the war was "wrong" or "based on lies" (though it was), but because the idiots in charge -Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, et al. actually were stupid enough to believe that things would magically fall into place if they could just knock off Saddam. This was despite and in the face of fervent and informed dissent from everyone across the spectrum from academics to military strategists.

The key to this whole operation was maintaining order and security AFTER Saddam was gone. That would have required at least half a million troops (not simply "the army you have" as Dumbsfeld arrogantly put it) and hundreds of billions of dollars.

That's why none of the cheerleaders can ever define what "victory" or "success" in Iraq means, because if they do then the next thing they have to admit that it's at the best too costly and at the worst impossible.

There was no way the Congress or the American people would have gone along with it had they been told the truth. It would have been laughable. The only way they would have gone along with such a scheme was if the threat was imminent, so the WMD lunacy was created and coupled with assurances (despite all evidence and history to the contrary) that we could do it on the cheap.

Now we're stuck because even if we were to go ahead and put half a million troops there and spend half a trillion, things have spun so far out of control that it will take decades to repair, and we can't stay there and still function as a country here -already things are starting to crumble, infrastructure, disaster preparedness, etc. In ten years at this pace we'll look like the USSR of the 1980's.

So we're forced with three shitty choices: 1) leave now and let things blow up, 2) leave when the Democratic President takes over in 2009 and let things blow up (and guess who'll take the blame) or 3) stay the course until we blow up.I know what the cheerleaders want and I know what the Bush administration wants. I choose option one, but who knows -maybe Petraeus is right and the pony is just around the corner!

HOLY HORSES**T BUCK-MAN

Fresh from reminiscinces about the NYC aristocracy and wincings about the porcelain activities of closeted Republic party senators, comes this charming book review from William F.Buckley.


Either the old man has finally suffered a stroke, or his column has been once again "jacked" by neocon thugs. I've had my suspicions in the past, and this is another piece of evidence in the chain linking to the idea that he's cacked and yet his column, like Tupac's albums, survives.

To work then:

"I am informed that French pacifists, ensconced in the French Academy in 1939
and determined to understate Nazi military exercises (even those being done as
close by as Czechoslovakia), refused to acknowledge such a creature as a
"bombardier."

Ding! Ding! Ding! Godwin's Law Alert! Can't start a fearmongering Islamophobic rant without first invoking the spirit of the Nazi's. WFB even takes the extra step of equating any dissenters from the crusade as namby-pamby Frenchies.

"Norman Podhoretz, a gifted writer and analyst,"

Also:

• one of the original signatories of the Project for the New American Century
• the author of the recent piece in the WSJ "the case for bombing Iran"
• was mentored by neocon cappo di tutti cappi Irving Kristol.

Kind of taints the "analyst" part a tad.

But wait - now the real fearmongering horses**t starts:

"The Islamists have:

"-- A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.

"Potential" access? Who doesn't have potential access? Here's an analogy: I hate all Raiders fans and I have potential access to a gun. I mean -all I have to do is go to a gun shop and buy one, right? You gonna lock me up?

Notice the subtle whitewashing here too: He's implying Iran, and thereby labeling the entire nation of Iran "Islamist" .

"-- A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.

That's like saying all Irish Catholics might join the IRA.

"-- An impressively conceptualized, funded and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill and electoral success.

This is pure horses**t. There is no evidence of this. None. At all. There are Islamic terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, but there has been no credible evidence that they are linked in any other way than their dislike for the actions of the US. Some hate the "liberal" freedoms of the west, some have "beefs" with particular actions the US has taken (e.g. Bin Laden's outrage at US bases on Saudi land which was his own professed reason for 9/11), some hate our blind support of Israel, but any assertion that they are linked in any other way than cheerleading each other's "successes" (much less "institutionally") has been easily debunked.

Remember however that this sentiment is brought to you by the same people who previously tried to argue that the USSR was the power-seat of the very same type of "terror network" and that every terrorist organization and "communist" government from the IRA and PLO to Cuba and China were all part of an elaborate plot to dominate and enslave the west. It's paranoid fantasy on steroids.

"-- An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians."

Again "capable of appealing" ? WTF does that mean? OK let's use another analogy - can we then say that Christian fundies like the Branch Davidians followed an idiology "capable of appealing" to Christians of all stripes? What makes an idiology capable of anything? It's nonsense.

Now to the "math" portion:

"If Islamists constitute 10 percent to 15 percent of the Muslim population
worldwide, they number some 125 million to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived."

Let's put that sh*te out of its misery:

"If"?

Who has said that "Islamists" are 10 to 15 percent of ALL muslims? This is known as recycling guesswork. The neocons have completely fabricated this number.

Quite frankly, how could you possibly ever determine the number of "islamists"? The definition itself is constantly shifting and open to personal interpretation. You can inflate or decrease the numbers to suit your agenda. E.g. sometimes Iran is included and sometimes it's not depending on who's arguing and what they're trying to "prove".

All of the typical elements
are here:

• Create a strawman
• attack critics ad hominem
• create/inflate statistics to support the strawman.
• warn of the dire consequences of not supporting the strawman 100%
  

Finally, to address the dopes who will inevitably name call:

This is not to say terrorism is not an important concern. In fact today a story has once again shown that John Kerry was right: the most effective solution is vigilent intelligence gathering and well trained law enforcement.


As I said yesterday, what we are witnessing here are the initial stages of the fall-rollout of the campaign against Iran.

Apparently Buckley is on board -though he can't seem to muster his own arguments so he's parroting Podhoretz'.

Shameful and sad.

DICK'S NEW BROOM

So now it becomes clear.

Cheney has been cleaning house of all of the folks who had a direct line to W's ear. Rove, Gonzo, Snow (although that might actually be the cancer) to clear a path for his Iran ambitions.

Look for Condi to resign before the year's up -to spend more time with her husband , family, conscience.

ABU-GONZALEZ RESIGNS

Damn -I'd hoped the #$%^ *&^ might actually stick around long enough to be impeached. Nope, he's gone. It looks like Dick's cleaning house of all of W's BFF's to prevent having to spend some time in jail after he leaves. First Rove now Gonzo. The plot thickens.

Of Course that's just my OPinion

-OP

DEMOCRATIC VS. REPUBLIC

The GOP have once again resurrected the annoying habit of referring to the "democrat party". Is it because they can't bear to refer to their betters as "democratic"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(phrase)

Seriously, Joe McCarthy made this popular (though he didn't invent the epithet) so should it surprise anyone?

Oddly enough there is a "Democrat Party" -in Thailand. Their opposition is called the "Thais Love Thais" Party

I therefore nominate "TLT" as the proper rejoinder to anyone from the GOP who uses the slur -let them figure it out.

I'M BAAAAACK

And I'm better than ever baby!

"Where, Oh where have you been OP?!?!?" You ask.

Suffice it to say that "life" got in the way. Job. Kids. You know.

Anyhoo -hope I'll have more time to do some more 'a that there postin' now.

Cheers,

OP.