Difficult Problem, Bad Solutions

thepilot.com

The Dec. 2 murders of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., and the Nov. 14 killings of three people, including a police officer, at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs are chilling examples of the kind of terrorism that seems the most impossible to prevent.

Both were murderous rampages by people who, for the moment, can’t be tied to a specific directive or widespread plot from any particular organization. Instead, what we seem to have here are deranged individuals with nearly unlimited access to high-powered weapons and enraged by inflammatory rhetoric that tells them who the enemies of God are.

It’s hard to imagine how such a plot might be disrupted. Specific plans and instructions from an organization might be intercepted, or members of the conspiracy might have an attack of conscience or otherwise be turned to inform on and break up the plan.

It happens all the time. But how do you find out about a plot that festers in someone’s living room or in some primitive hut on a North Carolina mountainside, under the radar of everyone, including even the killers’ families in the case of the San Bernardino attack?

A difficult problem, to be sure. So, of course, you can count on our politicians to come up with totally wrong solutions.

Take, for example, Donald Trump. The current Republican front-runner has suggested that the solution is to just bar all Muslims from coming to the U.S., until, and I quote, “our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” This apparently includes Muslim-Americans, born in this country and therefore citizens, who are out of the U.S. when Trump’s Super Huge and Classy Iron Curtain comes down.

OK, let’s just address one thing right off the bat. If you’re going to use as your end date some mythical time when “our country's representatives can figure out what is going on,” then you might as well go ahead and say “forever.”

But the biggest problem with The Donald’s latest brain-spew is … well, let’s let another famous Republican explain it: “I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say, ‘No more Muslims,’ and just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in.”

You know who said that? The Dark Prince himself, Dick Cheney. Let me tell you something, folks: When even Dick Cheney tells you you’ve gone too far, you need to slow your roll. It’s like having Keith Richards and Axl Rose do an intervention to tell you you’re doing too many drugs.

In any case, Cheney is right. The idea that we deny people, even American citizens, rights based on religion is not only repugnant, but it also violates the U.S. Constitution that Trump and people like him claim to revere, even as they trample all over it.

And, of course, nothing in the Trump proposal would have done a thing to stop Robert Dear, the Planned Parenthood terrorist. Remember him? Everyone else, including the so-called liberal media, seems to have forgotten.

Unfortunately, The Donald is not the only one with a bad idea to thwart so-called “lone wolf” terrorism. President Obama, apparently frustrated by the inability of Congress to even provide for expanded background checks for prospective gun buyers, suggested that maybe we can at least bar people on the TSA’s “no-fly” list from owning firearms.

Now, on the surface, this makes sense. I mean, if you can’t even get on a plane because you’re a suspected terrorist, you shouldn’t be able to own a gun, right? There’s only one problem. For years, the “no fly” list (actually several lists) has been a fiasco, a Kafkaesque nightmare where people are pulled out of line by security, subjected to “enhanced” searches and interrogation, and even denied flights for reasons which no one can or will explain.

Those people include a pilot told he couldn’t board the plane he was supposed to fly, a former U.S. attorney with a “top secret” clearance, and a 5-year-old child, all of whom have names similar to people on the list. Maybe if the various watch lists could be fixed, they might serve as an indicator of who shouldn’t own guns, but since it’s illegal to even reveal who’s actually on them, I don’t see that happening.

The “lone wolf” terrorist problem isn’t going to be solved by simplistic solutions. It’s certainly not going to get solved by fomenting more hate and fear, whether that be against Muslims or against women’s health providers falsely accused of “selling baby parts.” You can’t legislate that, and you can’t control the hate and fear spewed by radicals. But you can call on the people who want your votes to avoid adding to it.

Look, How Wrong Can You Be?

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

The office was cramped and cluttered, with dusty posters of old TV personalities on the wall: Edward R. Murrow, Howard K. Smith, Walter Cronkite. The single window behind the desk was half open, letting in the noise from the street below.

“So, you wanna be on the network news talk shows,” the man behind the desk said.

He was a big man with a florid, jowly face and a cigar stuck in one corner of his mouth. He had his suit coat off, and his short sleeves were rolled up. The name plate on his desk read, “Mort Nuttman, Talent Agent.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “See, I’ve been writing this political column for years, and I think I know a lot about the subject. I was wondering if maybe I could be one of those high-paid TV pundits.”

Nuttman grunted. He opened the folder of columns I’d brought and scanned through them. After a moment, he set it down. He looked at me, up and down, for a long moment, without speaking. “The question is,” Nuttman said finally, “how wrong can you be?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Look,” he said, “You wanna make the big money as a guest pundit on the big shows — “This Week,” “Fox and Friends,” “Situation Room” — you gotta show that you can be completely wrong. Not just once, but over and over. Look at the heavy hitters — Bill Kristol, Dick Morris, The Cheneys, Palin, even John McCain. You know what they have in common?”

“They were all wrong?”

“You bet they were!”

“I don’t know if I can be like those guys,” I said. “I’m kind of center-left.”

He rolled his eyes. “Dear Lord,” he moaned. “Not a liberal.”

“That’s a problem?”

He shook his head. “Liberals are hard to work with, pal. They show up with facts, and figures, and” he made air quotes with his fingers and put a sneer in his voice, “reee-search.”

“Facts are bad?” I said.

“Facts make people change the channel,” he said. “I don’t need another Alan Colmes on my client roster.”

“Who?”

“Exactly. Now, if you were an actual liberal, you’d be dead in the water.”

“What about Rachel Maddow?”

He waved a hand dismissively “One show. One network. Plus, she’s a looker. The big money’s in being able to do a lot of shows, and it’s easier to do that if you’re a far-right wacko. More entertaining. We can work around the ‘center-left’ thing, like we did with James Carville and Bill Maher. But you’ve got to be willing to do what it takes to grab people. Now, yell!”

“What?”

“C’mon, yell! See if you can drown me out.”

I was confused. “Yell what?”

He handed me a piece of paper. “This script’ll do.” He began talking in a calm, measured voice. “One thing that makes the current border crisis more complicated is the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by President George W. Bush…”

I looked down at the paper and began to read at the top of my lungs. “WHEN IS OBAMA GOING TO STOP BLAMING BUSH FOR EVERYTHING?!” I hollered, doing my best to shout Nuttman down. “A COUNTRY THAT CAN’T PROTECT ITS BORDERS IS NO COUNTRY AT ALL! AAAAAAH!”

I stopped and looked up. He was nodding.

“OK,” he said, “good projection, just the right edge of barely controlled rage. We might have something here. But you still need to have been wrong a lot.” He sat back down. “So,” he said. “Were you in favor of the Iraq War? Do you still think it was a good idea?”

“Oh, God, no,” I said. “It was a debacle that should never have happened.”

Nuttman grimaced. “How about Romney? Were you predicting he’d score a landslide win over Obama as late as Nov. 6, 2012?”

“What are you, nuts?”

He pressed on. “Did you predict that Obamacare enrollment numbers weren’t going to reach predicted levels?”

“Nope.”

He sighed. “Sorry, pal. You just don’t have what it takes.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “The people who have been consistently wrong about everything get to pull down fat salaries on TV? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you think this is, kid? News? This is infotainment. No one likes people who are right. Audiences like people who agree with them. Loudly.”

“Even if they’re wrong?”

“Especially if they’re wrong. People who know they’re wrong want someone to tell them they’re right, so they never have to admit it.”

I shook my head. “I hate to say it,” I said, “but you’re right.”

“Don’t let it get around,” he said.

Are You Effing KIDDING Me?

Nigeria charges Dick Cheney with bribery -

The Nigerian government on Tuesday charged former Vice President Dick Cheney with bribery for his alleged involvement in a corruption scandal.

The African country’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is pursuing Cheney in connection with an investigation of bribes totaling $180 million believed to have been paid to Nigerian officials by Halliburton, the company Cheney headed from 1995 to 2000.
Look, I'm no fan of Shooter Cheney,  but being charged with bribery by Nigeria is like being charged with prostitution by Heidi Fleiss. 

I'm Sure This Is Satire. Pretty Sure At Least .

BP Public Relations (BPGlobalPR) on Twitter

Some sample tweets:

We've hired Dick Cheney's former publicist to head up our PR dept. Hopefully she can make us as lovable as Dick Cheney.

I've gotta say, at night the gulf really doesn't look that bad.

We are very upset that Operation: Top Kill has failed. We are running out of cool names for these things.

What do you think? Too soon?

Your Liberal Media At Work

New York Magazine discusses the abominable Liz Cheney and provides some insight into why we keep seeing her all over the so-called "liberal media":

Fox is a regular pulpit, of course, but Liz is also all over NBC, where she happens to be social friends with Meet the Press host David Gregory (whose wife worked with Liz ’s husband at the law firm Latham & Watkins), family friends with Justice Department reporter Pete Williams (Dick Cheney’s press aide when he was secretary of Defense), and neighborhood friends with Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, daughter of Carter-administration national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. When Mika criticized Dick Cheney on her show last year, the former vice-president sent her a box of chocolate cupcakes.

Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC pundit who engaged in a particularly testy shouting match on Good Morning America with Liz Cheney over waterboarding, says the networks have allowed her a high degree of control over her appearances. “She had up to that point been completely accustomed to having interviews go her way and ceded on her terms,” he observes. “She has been careful to make sure that the interviews worked that way.”

I'm really trying to resist the temptation these days to just spit on the ground every time some idiot starts bleating abut how badly conservatives are treated in the "liberal media". Liz N' Dick and their ilk have been handled with kid gloves as they spread their revisionist bullshit, and now we can see one of the reason why. It's time these so-called journalists started being a lot less chummy with the people they're supposed to be reporting on, or at least clearly disclosing obvious conflicts of interest.

I'll Show You Some American Values....

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In the months after the Republicans' electoral loss in 2008 (you do remember they lost, right?), former Vice President Dick "Shooter" Cheney tossed aside years of decorum and tradition to emerge as one of the most vocal and harshly partisan critics of President Obama and the way he's been conducting the country's defense.

It is clear once again," Cheney said, "that President Obama is trying to pretend that we are not at war."

Since Shooter was on Fox News when he said this, no one there bothered to point out that President Obama had stepped up troop levels in Afghanistan, that he'd increased cooperation with Pakistan (resulting in the capture of the Taliban's operational commander) and that strikes by high-tech Predator drones were knocking off senior terrorist leaders at a fearsome rate.
Because who needs a bunch of pesky facts and follow-up questions, anyway? Certainly not Faux News.

Then Dick's daughter Liz started chiming in, singing the same song, and encountering the same lack of challenge from the so-called "liberal" media. But when Liz, her buddy Bill Kristol and their organization "Keep America Safe" started running ads about a group of Justice Department lawyers they dubbed the "Al-Qaeda Seven," even some voices on the far right cried foul

The ad, in fine McCarthyite style, criticizes Eric Holder's Justice Department (which they refer to as the "Department of Jihad") for employing "nine lawyers who represented or advocated for terrorist detainees." Holder, the ad says ominously, has only provided the names of two of the lawyers, leaving the so-called "Al-Qaeda Seven."

"Whose values do they share?" the ad asks, then urges people to call AG Holder and demand that he reveal their names. Or fire them. Or something. The ad also provides directions to KAS's Web site, where, with a simple mouse click, one can make donations of anywhere from $10 to $5,000, depending, one supposes, on the level of panic the ad manages to to create

Even some former Bushistas said "whoa" to this one. Michael Mukasey, who took over as attorney general after Alberto Gonzales resigned in disgrace, called the ad campaign "both shoddy and dangerous," going on to say that lawyers aren't "automatically to be identified with their former clients and regarded as a fifth column within the Justice Department."

In March 8, a letter signed by 19 former Bush administration lawyers, including former Solicitor General Ted Olson, stated that the attacks were "both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications," and stated that the Cheney witch hunt "undermined the justice system."

Moving farther right, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said, "This system of justice that we're so proud of in America requires the unpopular to have an advocate, and every time a defense lawyer fights to make the government do their job, that defense lawyer has made us all safer." Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, a wingnut's wingnut if ever there was one, agreed that calling the DOJ the Department of Jihad is "over the top and unjustified."

I've got to tell you, folks, if you're too far out there for Jeff Sessions, you're so far beyond the horizon you may never make it back to sanity.

Both Graham and Sessions, it should be noted, supported the Military Commissions Act. You know, the one that provides for those "tribunals" of which the Right is so enamored. The one that provides for - guess what? A right to counsel for detainees

I will answer one of the ad's questions, which is "whose values they share." They share the values of an American who jeopardized his reputation and his livelihood to take on the case of several men accused of an infamous crime in which American patriots died. Not because he didn't love freedom, but because he did.

His name was John Adams, and he agreed to defend the British soldiers accused of cold-blooded murder in the Boston Massacre because, he said, "no man in a free country should be denied the right to counsel and a fair trial." He was threatened, both politically and physically, and he reportedly lost up to half of his law practice for a time, but he later called taking (and winning) the case "the greatest service I ever did for my country."

Part of me is sorry that Adams is not here today to remind us of where real American values lie. Part of me is glad he's not here to see what some people are advocating, supposedly in the name of freedom. I think he'd be ashamed.

The Story No One Wants You To Hear: We're Winning

Taliban and Al Quaeda leaders are being killed at an increasing rate. Civilian casualties are down. Recruitment of Afghans to defend their country from terrorists is up. Al Quaeda's strike attempts are growing smaller, sloppier and more amateurish.

We're winning. I don't expect the Republicans to admit it, because, in contrast to what they claimed about liberals, they really DO want us to lose so they can regain the power they pissed away so badly. I don't expect the mainstream "liberal" media to admit it, because they're terrified Republican Brownshirts like Liz Cheney will claim they're biased or that they're downplaying the threat.

But why the hell aren't the Democrats pushing this story? If Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama go on TV and said, "we're not out of the woods yet, but we're making real progress," what the hell are Liz n' Dick Cheney and Pat Buchanan going to say? "No, we're losing?" Good luck with that message.

The O RLY? Factor

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The kids on the Internet have a saying, or as it's known, a "meme." Whenever an Internet discussion gives rise to a claim that's patently absurd, someone is likely to respond with "O RLY?"
Pronounced "Oh, really?" it's a response that indicates anything from mild skepticism to outright scorn. For some reason, it's often paired with a goofy picture of a quizzical looking owl.
Well, you know me, always hip to what's happenin' now with the youths on the webs, there. So, without further ado, we bring you a column we call The O RLY? Factor:
First, there's hysteric-in-chief Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who got his knickers in a bunch when the failed Christmas Day attack on an American airliner was described as an "attempt." Hoekstra took to his Twitter account to try and raise the fear level: "It was a terrorist attack!" he tweeted. "Just not as successful as they (AQ) planned."
O RLY? Well, perhaps Rep. Hoekstra was so eager to politicize the incident that he didn't exactly think through the implications of what he was saying. See, it's a wingnut article of faith that "Thanks to George W. Bush, America wasn't attacked after 9/11."
If, however, you've changed the rules so that even an attempt counts as an attack, then that talking point goes right out the window, because there was a nearly identical failed attack by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. And therefore, all of Bush's waterboarding, wiretapping, renditions and "black sites" didn't keep us that safe after all, now did they?
Unless, of course, you attempt to rewrite history even further, like former White House mouthpiece Dana Perino, who asserted on TV, apparently with a straight face, that "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."
O RLY? I seem to remember that Dubbya was inaugurated in January 2001 and that the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred in September of that year. Now, I'm no fancy political consultant like Ms. Perino, but I do have a nifty little device called a "calendar" that tells me that Sept. 11, 2001, was during President Bush's term.
Ms. Perino went on to insist that the terrible massacre at Fort Hood must be described as a terrorist attack. "We owe it to the American people to call it what it is," Perino said.
O RLY? Because so far, no one has developed any evidence that I know of that Nidal Malik Hasan was anything but a lone Muslim nutball who thought he was killing in the name of Allah.
But if we're going to call attacks by lone Muslim nutballs "terrorist attacks," then, as we've mentioned before in this column, you have to include DC sniper John Allan Muhammad, who was, according to his partner, Lee Boyd Malvo, engaged in "jihad."
You have to include Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, who drove his SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to, in his words, "avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world" and follow in the steps of his hero, 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta. And so, we're back to attacks on our country during Bush's term.
The star of today's O RLY? Factor, however, is former Vice President Dick "Shooter" Cheney, who's broken with years of tradition and decorum to try and undermine the president. (I remember when this was called "treason," but that's a rant for another day.) President Obama, Cheney sneered, "pretends we're not at war" with terrorists.
O RLY? This might come as a surprise to Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, or his deputy Khwaz Ali Mehsud, or to the top Al Quaeda official in Somalia, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. It might come as a surprise to Al Quaeda trainers Mufti Noor Wali and Abdullah Hamas al Filistini, not to mention senior Al Quaeda commander Zuhaib al Zahibi.
It might come as a surprise to them, that is, if they weren't all dead, just a few of the many terrorists killed by American forces in the past year.
It would definitely come as a surprise to those same forces who are still being deployed in the fight against Al Qaeda and their sponsors in the Taliban. Guess Shooter forgot about them.
This has been the O RLY? Factor. We report, you deride.
And just remember: The wingnuts only think they can get away with these outrageous lies because they think you're too stupid to know the difference.
RLY.

Wow, They're Not All Crazy

Republican Lugar Says Cheney’s Criticism of Obama Is ‘Unfair’ - Bloomberg.com

Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, defended President Barack Obama’s handling of recent terrorism threats, taking issue with former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism.

“It’s unfair,” Lugar said in an interview for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “I think the president is focused.”

Cheney, who frequently has led Republican attacks on the Democratic president since leaving office a year ago, told Politico on Dec. 29 that Obama “is trying to pretend we are not at war” with a “low-key response” to the Dec. 25 attempt to ignite a bomb aboard a flight to Detroit.

To the contrary, Obama has demonstrated “firmness” and “decisiveness,” Lugar, who represents Indiana, said. “That’s been the antidote to the criticism.”

Still, the U.S. may be focusing too much on Afghanistan at a time when al-Qaeda is finding havens in other hot spots such as Yemen and Somalia, Lugar said. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian indicted in the Detroit plane plot, allegedly received his training in Yemen.

“I suspect that we will have to try to think through why we went to Afghanistan,” Lugar, 77, said.
Now see, this is how you do it. Reasoned criticism, credit where credit is due, some idea that we can have a rational debate. As opposed to hysterical demands that a suspect be tortured even though he's already cooperating, and lies about how the President Obama doesn't use the word "terrorism," or that he doesn't think we're at war?

How long you think it will be before some teabagger starts demanding the RNC cut off Lugar's campaigning funding for insufficient purity?

Finally

Rep Eric Massa (D-NY) finally says what needs to be said:

• Dick Cheney is a coward who needs to STFU so we can solve the problems he created.
• Jim DeMint has put Americans at risk for political gain.
• No one complained when Dubbya took SIX DAYS to come out and make a statement about the "Shoe Bomber"
• More Dems need to kick back against Republican liars like Cheney, King, DeMint, and Hoekstra who are making this failed attack by the Undiebomber into a political issue.

Link, for those who can't see embedded vids: http://www.dailykos.com/tv/w/002457/



More Dems like this, please.

When America Tortures, the Terrorists Win

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It looks like Dick "Shooter" Cheney has hit the talk show ­circuit, defending his administration's use of torture -- oh, sorry, "enhanced interrogation." This, after steadfastly denying that the Bushistas used ­torture and insisting that any attempt to obtain documentation about it would imperil national security.
Now he wants CIA memos released -- because, he says, they show that torture works (an assertion which Sen. Russ Feingold, who has seen the memos, disputes). But it's not really torture. And we didn't really do it. Sorry, it's hard to keep all these different stories straight.
But you know, I remember reading once about a country where enemy bombs were exploding all night, every night, all over the country, for weeks. The country's very existence was threatened.
In that country, there was a prison that held dedicated and fanatical enemy operatives. The worst of the worst. People who had information that could help save lives and even save the country.
They did not, however, use torture to get that information. In fact, an interrogator who did nothing worse than get frustrated and smack a prisoner on the back of the head was immediately sacked.
And they got good intelligence. On at least one occasion, they even managed to "turn" an enemy operative and use him to send false information to the enemy.
There was another country whose enemy threatened them with nuclear weapons and repeatedly promised to wipe their way of life from the face of the earth. That country didn't torture people, either. In fact, one of that country's best-loved leaders pushed for and signed a treaty forbidding torture.
I'm sure you've figured out who those countries were. The first was Great Britain during the Blitz. As described in a recent column by Christopher Hitchens, a prison known as Latchmere House just outside of London held what would now be called "high-value targets."
The commander of that prison was no touchy-feely liberal; he was a feared martinet known behind his back as "old Tin-Eye." But he firmly believed (as did Prime Minister Winston Churchill) that "Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information." His methods were based on gaining prisoners' trust. They worked. And Britain survived and prevailed.
The second country, of course, was the United States during the Cold War. Even under the grave threat of nuclear annihilation, a succession of American presidents refused to make torture official policy, even for people caught spying for Russia. And we won the Cold War. Because we didn't lose sight of who we were: We were the good guys.
One way you could tell the good guys from the bad is that the good guys didn't torture people and didn't use weasel words to make torture sound like something else. In fact, conservative icon Ronald Reagan signed an international treaty against torture "and other inhumane practices" which he called "abhorrent."
So were Churchill and Reagan wimps? Did they want to "offer the enemy understanding and therapy?"
No. They were leaders who realized that the contest they were in, like the one we're in now, was for civilization itself. And they chose not to fight barbarism by becoming barbaric.
As I've said before, the central front in the War on Terror is not Iraq or Afghanistan. The central front in the War on Terror in the American mind. The goal of the terrorists is to scare us into forgetting who we are. They want to make us act in a way that will allow them to say to the world, "Look! We were right! America is brutal and barbaric!" And the eight years of Bush/Cheney were one long retreat in that war.
Torture is a squalid and cowardly act ordered by people who have let fear master them. When anyone says "we have to torture because the ­terrorists do," they're surrendering to the terrorists. And yes, that includes any Democrats who signed off on it.
Because torture is wrong. It is un-American. It is not who we are.
Bonus: from the Pilot's letters column today: an answer for those who say "what we did isn't torture": Really, [defining torture is] the easy part. If we would prosecute anyone who did it to our sons or daughters for war crimes, then it's torture.

Thank you, Kevin Smith of Aberdeen NC for that.

Please Tell Me He's Kidding

If there was ever a perfect example of how far outside the mainstream the American Right has gotten, it's Ross Douthat's bootlicking worship of Dick Cheney in the allegedly liberal New York Times:

George W. Bush seems happy to be back in civilian life, but Cheney has taken the fight to the Obama White House like a man who wouldn’t have minded campaigning for a third Bush-Cheney term.

Imagine for a moment that he’d had that chance. Imagine that he’d damned the poll numbers, broken his oft-repeated pledge that he had no presidential ambitions of his own, and shouldered his way into the race. Imagine that Republican primary voters, more favorably disposed than most Americans to Cheney and the administration he served, had rewarded him with the nomination.

There's more at the link, but the pathetic gist of the piece is that if the Republicans had just drafted Cheney, they and a "conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions" would be doing a lot better right now.

Yes, he actually said that. He actually touts torture as a vital tenet of conservatism. That rumbling you hear is the sound of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley spinning in their graves.

Imagine Shooter Cheney, a guy who by the end of the Bush years was polling only slightly higher than necrotizing fasciitis, flip-flopping on his pledge not to run, then taking the field against Barack Obama, pushing a conservatism of torture and failed economic policies. That would've been a sight to see, you betcha. And he doesn't seem to be doing any better in America's rearview mirror. But to wingnuts like Douthat, their only regret is that they weren't mean and crazy enough.

Reality has really become a foreign concept to these people.

It's Offical: Conservatives Now Hate America

Jay Nordlinger gets all pissy at the National Review:

It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively. What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person’s image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows....

A country that believes that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo is a country with its head up its . . .
Heh. Remember how aghast wingnuts were when those awful traitorous Democrats dared to be unhappy about the narrow (if even that) victory of their Dear Leader? How dare they question the wisdom of the voters?

But IOKIYAR!

The Shapeshifting Veep

Latest Newspaper column:

I'm sure it's become obvious by now that I don't have any great love for the Bush administration.

But every now and then, I have to confess a certain admiration for their sheer chutzpah. (If you're not familiar, chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning sheer, unmitigated brazenness. The classic definition of someone with chutzpah is the boy who murders both parents, then pleads for mercy because he's an orphan.)

This time, the one making me shake my head in disbelief is the Vice President, Dick "Shooter" Cheney. Recently, Cheney has begun to advance one of the most cockeyed legal theories since a guy out in San Francisco claimed eating too many Twinkies was evidence of a mental imbalance so he couldn't be guilty of murder.

This latest exercise in vice-presidential gall began with a request from a little-known organization called the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office. As part of their jobs, staff members have to make sure that classified documents are subject to proper security safeguards. In order to do that, naturally enough, they have to know what classified documents are held by whom. To make thispossible, the president signed an executive order requiring all offices to provide information on their classified documentation, including letting the National Archive inspect the VP's offices to see how they're handling sensitive information.

Nope, said Shooter, I ain't a-gonna do it. According to a spokesman, the vice presidency is not part of the executive branch of government and therefore not subject to the required disclosures of the president's order.

Say what? Doesn't the Constitution provide that "the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," who shall "together with the Vice President, chosen for the same term, be elected," etc.? Doesn't that pretty clearly put the president and the veep in the same branch?

Well, Dick Cheney's never been one to let clear language or simple logic stand in his way when he wants to keep something a secret, even in defiance of an order from the president. He's not "an entity within the executive branch," his office claims, because he also presides over the Senate and casts deciding votes in case of ties. So he's really a senator, thus part of the legislative branch.

Except when he isn't. Remember the Super-Secret Energy Task Force that met with Cheney to determine national energy policy in the first Bush term? Remember how they resisted all attempts to find out who actually met with Cheney? Remember what Cheney claimed as his justification for refusing to release the information? Do the words "executive privilege" strike a familiar note?

And he says all of these things with a straight face. At least, I assume that's a straight face. It's hard to tell with Cheney, since his face seems capable of only three expressions: anger, smugness or contempt.

Dick Cheney: He's a legislator! He's an executive! He's both! And neither! He can change his form at will! He's the chameleon vice president! No man can command him, not even the president! (Or he won't. Dubbya won't even back up his own executive order if his veep says no. Some decider.)

It's no wonder that Cheney's popularity ratings have dropped to historic lows, approaching those of the buffoonish Dan Quayle. At least Quayle was good for a few laughs. A poll taken two weeks ago by the American Research Group found that 54 percent of Americans would support impeaching Cheney. (A whopping 45 percent would support impeachment of Bush himself). If this keeps up, there'll be infectious diseases with higher favorability ratings than Shooter.

It looks, however, as if the Congress is at least moving to rein Cheney in, even if it refuses to stand up to Dubbya. On July 10, a Senate appropriations panel chaired by Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) stripped $4.8 million out of Vice President Cheney's budget for not complying with security rules.

It may be just in time, too. Cheney is reportedly the person in the White House who's most determined to get us into yet another shooting war, this one with Iran. He has apparently convinced himself and his minions that a full-out bombing campaign against Iran won't cause the entire Middle East to explode in anti-American warfare, and so what if it did? We'll get the troops from somewhere.

Fortunately, this appears to be very much the minority position in the White House, but we'd better keep an eye on the vice president and make sure he doesn't come up with some other insane theory that also makes him supreme commander of the armed forces.

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage. His third novel, "Safe and Sound" is available now.

God Bless the USA (And No, I'm Not Being Ironic)

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Wednesday is one of the most significant days in the American calendar: July 4, Independence Day. The day when Americans decided to, in the words of the surfer dude character from the movie "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "leave this England place because it was bogus."

So, 231 years into this experiment we call America, how are things going?

You could look around and think, "not too good." And it seems a lot of people would believe you.

A recent Gallup poll showed that Americans are losing confidence in just about every institution the folks from Gallup cared to ask about. Confidence in "the presidency" was at 25 percent, down eight points since 1996. Confidence in Congress was only 14 percent, an all-time low, down five points. Confidence in newspapers is down a whopping eight points, with only 30 percent of people polled saying they had a "great deal" or "a lot" of confidence in the press.

We're still stuck armpit-deep in a war we actually won years ago but from which we can't seem to extricate ourselves. Despite the claim that "we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so they won't follow us home," a recent report warns that squads of suicide bombers have already been dispatched to the U.S.

We're getting hit with so many scandals around the presidency, some days it's hard to keep track of them all. The president himself seems hell-bent on grabbing more and more power for himself in the name of the terrifying concept he and his henchmen call the "unitary executive": the idea that the president has the "inherent power" to do literally anything, including break the law, if he claims it's to protect America.

Meanwhile, the Congress, which we elected to end this war, goes back to its old habit of knuckling under to Dubbya whenever he says, "Vote my way or the voters won't like you." Well, surprise, surprise, Congress. You voted his way on the troop funding bill and your poll numbers plummeted.

So what is there to celebrate this Wednesday? Should we raise our beers in salute to our country or slump over them in dark bars and mutter darkly about impending doom?

Well, my friends, despite of all of the above, I still believe there are a lot of things to love about America. Some are sublime, some are wonderfully ridiculous. For example:

-- We still have Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show," as well as Stephen Colbert and his "Colbert Report." I don't know how they do it, but they manage to keep us laughing about the absurdities of our government and our society.

-- We still have people in this country like Florida's Dale Rippy. According to The Associated Press, when the 62-year-old Vietnam veteran was attacked by a rabid bobcat on his deck, he "endured the bobcat's slashes and bites until it clawed into a position where he could grab it by the throat. Then he strangled it." Now I'm not automatically anti-bobcat, but you've got to admit, that's pretty bad-ass. "If that cat had attacked a child, it would've been really bad," Rippy said later. Glad that old dude's on our side.

-- Support for the idea of banning "books with dangerous ideas" from public school libraries has declined from 55 percent in 1998 to 46 percent. It has now fallen to the lowest level of support of the past 20 years.

-- Vice President Dick Cheney's influence appears to be waning in the White House, with the war-mongering, power-grabbing holdout from the Nixon administration wielding less and less power in foreign policy. People like convicted perjurer Scooter Libby and the guy Cheney shot in the face down in Texas might be actually due for a Presidential Medal of Freedom for turning the veep into the joke he so richly deserves to be.

And let's not forget the biggest thing: We still have our Constitution -- and people who are willing to support it. Like the judges in the Fourth Circuit who recently delivered a stinging rebuke to King George's idea that he can lock people up on his own say-so without due process. Or people from Dubbya's own party, like Sen. Arlen Specter, who are willing to stand up and challenge the idea that any chief executive can just issue a "signing statement" saying, in effect, "I don't have to pay attention to this law."

There are still people who believe in the American system of checks and balances, that no man is a king over us, and that there is still such a thing as the rule of law. We still have the power to change the course America is on, if we'll take it. And that's an idea in whose honor we can light a Roman candle and hoist a beer.

The Hit Parade of Liars

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Last week, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for lying during the investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Libby, as you may remember, was chief of staff to Vice President Darth Cheney, the only man in America whom the Flying Tuberculosis Guy can look at and go "at least I'm not as unpopular as THAT jerk."

Plame was the smokin'-hot CIA WMD specialist whose cover was blown by the Bushistas after her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, published an op-ed in The New York Times revealing that not only were the famous "16 words" in the president's State of the Union address ("The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa") untrue, but Wilson had also told them they were untrue.

This earned him the wrath of the administration, which they expressed through a series of leaks and a whispering campaign that ended with columnist Robert Novak crawling from his crypt to pen his own editorial in which he identified Plame as a CIA operative.

Libby was charged and convicted of obstructing the investigation into the leak, which eventually led former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to admit that he was the primary source of the leak and caused Novak to identify White House aide Karl Rove, aka "Bush's Brain," as his second source.

Since the case is all about lying, it might behoove us to examine the lies, distortions and jaw-droppingly outrageous statements told along the way. Taken in their entirety, they reveal a breathtaking disregard for, even outright contempt for, the truth that is the hallmark of this administration and its rabid supporters.

* "Valerie Plame wasn't a covert agent. She was just a desk jockey."

This is probably the most persistent lie, and it pops up everywhere from the ranting of drug addict Rush Limbaugh to letters in this very newspaper. Except that the CIA, in recently declassified documents submitted as part of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's sentencing memorandum to the court, confirms that Plame was, in fact, "a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States."

Further, the CIA stated, "when overseas, Plame traveled undercover, sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias -- but always using cover with no ostensible relationship to the CIA."

Now, when asked to choose whom you believe, the partisan rantings of a bloated gasbag high on Oxycontin on one hand, and the people who actually grant covert status on the other, who are you gonna believe?

*"Dick Cheney's office was just trying to defend itself from lies told by Wilson, because Wilson said Cheney sent him to Niger."

Even if this was true, it would seem the best way for Cheney to refute it would be to say, "I never sent Joe Wilson to Niger," rather than have his people engage in a smear campaign against Wilson and attempt to destroy his wife's career. But that's a moot point, because Wilson never made any such claim. His op-ed clearly states that he was asked to go by the CIA, who told him that Cheney had questions.

*Wilson was lying. Saddam Hussein really was trying to buy yellowcake from Africa."

No, they weren't. George Tenet later admitted that the famous 16 words should never have gone into the speech. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer publicly retracted the uranium claim on July 7, saying it was "incorrect," and Colin Powell flatly refused to include the claim in his presentation to the U.N.

*This is just a partisan witch hunt by a partisan prosecutor."

Well, they certainly weren't calling U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald a "partisan witch hunter" when the Republicans were talking about recruiting him to run for the Senate seat in Illinois, the one now held by Barack Obama.

* "Fitzgerald didn't find any real crime, just perjury."

This was first floated by Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who said she hoped that "if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality." This is the same Senator who, while pushing the impeachment of Bill Clinton for perjury, stated that "our system of criminal justice depends on people telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

Right now, there's a growing drumbeat among the Bush Cult for Dubbya to pardon Scooter. I think it's a great idea. Do it, Mr. President. Give Scooter a pass for perjury and his lying to federal investigators. It'll brand Republicans as what they've become -- the party of lies, corruption and cronyism -- like nothing else could.

Let's Make a Deal

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To all my good friends in the right wing: I have a deal to offer you.

First, a bit of background. As you know, recently Vice President Dick Cheney visited Afghanistan to confer with commanders there. While he was there, a suicide car-bomber attacked the base where Cheney was staying. The vice president wasn't hurt; however, a number of others, including American soldiers and Afghan civilians, were killed or wounded.

When the news broke on the liberal blog The Huffington Post, some readers went waaay over the top. Like many online sites, The Huffington Post provides a space after news stories in which readers are invited to comment on the articles.

Some of the comments on the Cheney bombing story were, indeed, disgraceful. "They missed?? Dammit. I hope they try again before he leaves." "Better luck next time!" And so on. Several other commenters were quick to deplore such sentiments: "C'mon, guys, let's have a little bit of honor, no one deserves to die in a bomb blast."

The moderators of the site quickly removed the offensive comments, but not before right-wing pundits and bloggers gleefully dutifully copied them down and spread them farther across the Internet than HuffPo, as it's known, could ever have done. Rather than note the fact that the majority of comments did not wish Cheney dead or the fact that the owners of the site took the offending comments off, wingnut commentator Hugh Hewitt called HuffPo "the one indispensable stop for readers wishing to sample the fury, bile and idiocy of the sub-moronic left."

"Liberals wish assassins had succeeded!" trumpeted Rush Limbaugh. The idea was that a few angry nutballs hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet and posting on someone else's site not only reflected the opinions of the owners of the site, but that they epitomized liberals in general.

A few days later, right-wing harpy Ann Coulter was speaking at the yearly Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. She had some glowing words for Mitt Romney, Massachusetts governor and current presidential candidate. "I think he's probably our best candidate," Coulter said. Romney also spoke highly of Coulter.

When it came to former senator and current presidential candidate John Edwards, however, Coulter was less complimentary: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I'm kind of at an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards." She also said about African-American Republican candidates: "Our blacks are better than their blacks."

Now, if Barbra Streisand or Harry Belafonte or Michael Moore had called George Dubbya Bush that nasty name and made condescending comments about "our blacks," not only would the right-wingers have thrown a hissy fit, but the "journalists" of the so-called liberal media would also have leaped into the fray, brows furrowed with fake concern over the "tone the Democrats were setting" and demanding that, for example, Barack Obama comment on things he didn't say. After all, they've done it many times before.

But it's a bit much to hope for that the mainstream media were going to demand the same level of accountability for "tone" to the Republicans that they demand of the Democrats. It was left up to people like Howard Dean and Ted Kennedy to demand that Republican candidates Romney, McCain and Giuliani, who were all at the meeting, dissociate themselves from Coulter.

Republican supporters scoffed. They denied that there ever was any slur and called the demand for candidates to disown Coulter "disingenuous" and "political grandstanding" -- until their candidates cut the legs out from under them by providing just the declarations their supporters deemed unnecessary.

"The comments were wildly inappropriate," a spokesman for John McCain said. And Romney, so recently a Coulter cheer-leader, released this terse statement: "It was an offensive remark. Gov. Romney believes all people should be treated with dignity and respect." Rudolph Giuliani also called the comments "completely inappropriate" and went on to say that "there should be no place for such name-calling in political debate." Good for them, I say.

But you know what? When you really think about it, maybe it is a little silly to expect the main-stream of either party to apologize or to take the blame for inflammatory remarks of their hotheads or their lunatic fringe.

And so, my modest proposal: Stop hanging Michael Moore or Rosie O'Donnell or David Geffen or Barbra Streisand or Harry Belafonte or even some obscure Muslim cleric around the necks of the Democrats, and I'll stop hanging Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin around the necks of Republicans.

Deal?

2007 --The Year In Preview

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OK, I've got all my gear lined up. I've got my Tarot cards, I've got my Magic 8-Ball, I've even got my chicken entrails.
That means it's time once again for your Humble Columnist's fearless predictions for 2007:
January: The new Democratic-controlled Congress takes power.
In the first 100 hours, they enact the security recommendations of the 9/11 commission, raise the minimum wage, enact comprehensive lobbying reform, cut the interest rate on student loans in half, pass a bill to allow the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients, and broaden the types of stem cell research allowed with federal funds.
The mainstream media pronounce Speaker Pelosi's tenure a "failure" because, explains NBC's Judy Woodruff, "that's just what we do these days. Otherwise, Michelle Malkin and Sean Hannity might get mad, and we can't have that."
February: Sunni and Shiite militias take to the streets in open sectarian conflict, each group seizing command of key government ministries. When asked if this constitutes civil war in Iraq, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow twirls his parasol and answers, "Fiddle-dee-dee! There isn't going to be any war!"
March: Failed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a joint awards ceremony with former FEMA Director Michael "Brownie" Brown. "You guys did a heckuva a job," President Bush tells the award recipients. The moment is widely considered the low point in both men's careers.
April: Rising sea levels cause several inhabited islands in the South Pacific to sink beneath the surface of the ocean. In an interview, Vice President Dick Cheney announces that global warming is in its "last throes" before shooting the interviewer in the face.
May: As casualties, both American and Iraqi, reach their highest levels ever in the bloodiest month of sectarian conflict in the Middle East, President Bush does a skit at the National Press Club Dinner where he peers under tables and the podium, chuckling, "No civil war here! No civil war under here!" The national press pronounces it "the funniest thing since the Marx Brothers" and denounces those who call the joke callous and insensitive as "anti-fun nanny-state liberals."
June: In a college commencement address, Sen. John Kerry asks, "How many Bush administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb? Give up? None! They can't admit that it's dark!" Six weeks of media furor ensue over Kerry's use of the words "give up" and whether he meant that as an "insult to the troops."
July: The National Political Humorists' Guild issues an open letter to John Kerry pleading with him not to attempt any more jokes.
August: A leaked Pentagon report states that Iraq has "definitely been in a state of civil war" since late 2006. When asked about the report and whether the administration has changed its opinion about the Iraqi situation, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow replies that the president hasn't read the report. When a reporter notes that the Pentagon sent the report to the White House in March, Snow accuses him of partisanship. "Everyone knows the partisan bias of calendars, so asking about the passage of time is clearly a partisan question," Snow asserts to the dumbfounded White House Press Corps.
September: A Congressional investigation turns up shocking evidence that Vice President Cheney's staff had, since mid-2006, been cruising the streets kidnapping hobos and bringing them to the vice president so he could shoot them in the face. "After that guy in Texas, well, it just got good to him," one witness testifies.
Republican pundits and bloggers denounce the Democratic Party over the Cheney story, claiming that, while the story is admittedly completely true, the Democrats are at fault for withholding it until September for maximum political effect. "Can you prove they didn't do that?" Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina triumphantly asks Wolf Blitzer. When Blitzer asks McHenry how releasing the story in September 2007 creates any kind of political timing, McHenry rolls his eyes and calls Blitzer "another one of those calendar-obsessed liberals."
November: Sunni and Shiite forces don blue and gray uniforms, pick up muskets, and start marching in line to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Dixie." The Bush White House finally admits, "Well, maybe you might call what's going on in Iraq a civil war." "Finally!" exclaims radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, doffing his wool uniform. "We were beginning to wonder what it would take before those bozos finally admitted it. Oh, by the way, death to America."
December: Melting of the polar ice caps causes Santa's Workshop to plunge to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. George W. Bush predicts that in the future, the death by drowning of Santa and all his reindeer and the subsequent cancellation of Christmas will be regarded by historians as "just a comma."
Well, there you have it. Not a pretty picture, I'll admit, but don't blame me, blame the future. I don't create it, I just predict it.
Now, can someone tell me how to get leftover chicken entrails out of the rug?

Hmmm.....

November 1, 2006--President Bush says he wants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney to remain in his administration until the end of his presidency.

November 8. 2006: Rumsfeld resigns. No one's seen Cheney today.

My friend Steve just noted, "well, he said to the end of his presidency..."

So will Bush resign?

Waist Deep In The Big Muddy

Cheney Vows 'Full Speed Ahead' on Iraq War - washingtonpost.com: "COLORADO SPRINGS, Nov. 3 -- The Bush administration is determined to continue 'full speed ahead' with its policy in Iraq, regardless of Tuesday's midterm elections, Vice President Cheney said Friday.

It was back in 1942, I was part of a good platoon
We were on manoeuvres in Louisiana one night by the light of the moon
The Captain said, We got to ford the river, that's where it all began
We were knee deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fool kept yelling to push on

The Sergeant said, Sir, are you sure this is the way back to base
Sergeant, I once crossed this river not a mile above this place
It'll be a little soggy but we'll keep on slogging, we'll soon be on dry ground
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fool kept yelling to push on

Captain, sir, with all this gear no man will be able to swim
Sergeant, don't be a nervous nellie, the Captain said to him
All we need is a little determination, follow me - I'll lead on
We were neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fool kept yelling to push on

All of a sudden the moon clouded over, all we heard was a gurgling cry
And a second later the Captain's helmet was all that floated by
The Sergeant said, Turn round, men, I'm in charge from now
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the Captain dead and gone

We stripped and dived and found his body stuck in the old quicksand
I guess he didn't know the water was deeper than the place where he'd once been
For another stream had joined the Muddy a half mile from where we'd gone
We were lucky to get out of the Big Muddy
When the damn fool kept yelling to push on

I don't want to draw conclusions, I'll leave that to yourself
Maybe you're still walking, maybe you're still talking
But every time I hear the news that old feeling comes back on
We're neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools keep yelling to push on

Knee deep in the Big Muddy
And the fools keep yelling, Push on
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools keep yelling, Push on
Waist deep, neck deep
We'll be drowning before too long
We're neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools keep yelling to push on

copyright 1963 by Pete Seeger