The Boot's On the Other Foot Now

From The Volokh Conspiracy:

Just A Reminder, for the folks who thought that President Bush had the power to arrest anyone in the United States and detain them as "enemy combatants" without any hearing as part of his Commander-in-Chief power, that this power is now enjoyed by Barack Hussein Obama. That's right: A liberal with the middle name "Hussein" who pals around with terrorists and is adored in Paris now has all that Commander-in-Chief power. And if he decides that you're a threat to the nation, he can order you seized and locked up indefinitely. Congress can't get in B. Hussein Obama's way: As the FISA Court of Review emphasized back in 2002, Congress "could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power." And that meddling Supreme Court can't stop "The One," either. Or at least that's your view of things.

Heh. I've been saying something similar  for years to the Bushistas who loudly insist that the Commander in Chief's powers in time of war are unlimited, and that he can lock up, torture, or "render"anyone he wants, just by taking the Magic Wand of Presidentness out of his flight suit, waving it about, and shouting "I declare thee an Enemy Combatant! BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!" 

Well, wingnuts, having pissed away your support  and screwed a whole kennel full of pooches so badly that your white-haired boy and his egregious sidekick got thier asses kicked worse than the bastard son at a family reunion, what's your position on "plenary authority" and the "Unitary Executive" now? 

Of course, late conversions into believers of checks and balances are more than welcome.

Only if they stand in the corner with the dunce cap on their heads for a while. 

Oh, Happy Day.

Goodbye to this:



And hello to this:



Okay, maybe not as many laughs when Obama speaks, but I'll deal with it.

Racist Much?

Michell Malkin on the Obama Inauguration:

Pomp and circumstance have been replaced with pimp and self-aggrandizement — all topped with a heapful of double standards.

....Getting ready for the countdown.

3, 2, 1…RAAAAAAAACIST!

Let me clue you in on something, Ms. Malkin: saying, in effect, "I bet someone will call me a racist for that" doesn't make what you're saying any less racist.

You know, I'm trying really hard to follow Obama's message of "we're all one country, we need to work together to solve our problems, etc." But racist bullshit like this, where someone refers to the incoming President as a "pimp", makes it really difficult to do that.

George Dubbya Bush has perpetrated many gross offenses against this country that I love. He's overextended our military, committed the greatest strategic blunder since Hitler invaded Russia, pissed away the international goodwill and support we had after 9/11, tried to turn the Department of Justice into the Holy Office of the Republican Inquisition, put political cronies into important positions for which they weren't qualified, with disatrous results, allowed torture to become offical policy...the list goes on and on.

But to me, George W. Bush's greatest failure of leadership was this: he failed to even try to unify America. In fact, his entire political career was built around dividing it. Since the days of Bush's father, the Republican message has been that only Republicans are "real Americans" and that they need to hate and fear and demonize any American who was different from them. Anyone black was a "pimp"or a "thug", anyone gay was a "potential pedophile", anyone more liberal than they are was a "traitor" who wanted to bring on another 9/11. He and his people divided us into "red" and "blue", and told us that one color was in a "culture war" with the other. We're going to be a long time recovering from that. But I'm hoping that tomorrow is the beginning of that recovery.

Because here's the thing: I'm as weary of the liberal dividers as I am of the faux-conservative ones. don't get me wrong, I think Keith Olbermann, for example, has served a useful purpose; he was one of the first ones to point out that the Republican's Dear Leader was a small, shallow, intellectually incurious man who would have been out of his depth managing a 7/11, much less the United States. But I sometimes feel about Olbermann the way Jon Stewart once described Moveon.org: he has the talent to make even people who agree with him cringe.

Hopefully, the inauguration of Barack Obama is the sign that someday we'll be able to toss people like Michelle Malkin on the ash-heap of history. And then toss Olbermann on there too.

And then this blog can go back to being all about me.

Word of the Day

Snarge (snarj): the bird goo that is wiped off an aircraft after it hits a bird.

As it turns out, there are scientists that study snarge, with the idea being that once you figure out what the hell it was you hit, you can take steps to keep it from happening again. Story from NPR at the link.

And Now, a Little More BSP

The San Jose Mercury News likes BREAKING COVER:

"Breaking Cover," by North Carolina lawyer J.D. Rhoades, is terrific. It kind of eases readers up to the hook like a good fly fisherman, with comfortable opening pages, then yanks the hook deep along about Page 12 or so, and after that the reader is just done for, like a trout dancing in a stream at the end of a long line.

Dance around all you want; you're going to stick with this book, which is a stand-alone from the author of the Jack Keller series.

A big thanks to reviewer John Orr!

Return of the Jed-I: What Sarah Palin Could Learn From the Beverly Hillbillies

Latest newspaper column:

Well, I thought former VP candidate Sarah Palin was going to drop off the radar after the Republicans' disastrous showing in the recent election. Made me kind of sad, really. I haven't had such a reliable source of material for mockery since I discovered PETA.

But it looks like I didn't need to be depressed. Caribou Barbie popped back up recently in an interview in which, in true wingnut fashion, she blamed everyone but herself for the troubles of the McCain campaign. She seems to have a particular ax to grind against Katie Couric.

"Katie," she said, "you're not the center of everyone's universe."

Oh, Mee-yow. In fact, much of the interview sounds the wingnut theme of "yew smart people think yer purty smart, don't yew? Well, yew ain't! So thar!"

The Palin fans still remaining in the Republican Party seem determined to turn the GOP into the anti-smart-people party, because smart people don't cotton to Gov. Palin's "folksy, down-home" style. The Palin Renaissance, however, apparently includes purging even the remaining smart people within the GOP itself.

A recent blog post by right-winger Robert Stacy McCain (who bills himself as "The Other McCain") takes the "conservative intellectuals" within the Republican Party to task: "That born-again, down-to-earth, drawling Texas thing," Other McCain writes, "somehow, it had once made Bush seem like Gary Cooper in "High Noon." But as the disasters mounted and the poll numbers headed southward, that Gary Cooper glow faded and these conservative intellectuals turned on their TVs to behold, with unspeakable horror, President Jethro Bodine."

You know, Other McCain, I'm glad you chose that analogy. Because if there's one thing I know plenty about, it's "The Beverly Hillbillies." I've spent many a happy hour before the tube, ruminating about the wacky Clampett clan and what their popularity tells us about our attitudes toward wealth and class issues. So allow me to retort.

If you're going to use a Beverly Hillbillies-based analogy, Other McCain, you'd be more accurate in saying that with George Dubbya Bush, people thought they were voting for Uncle Jed. Jed may have been uneducated, but he was calm, wise, and a peacemaker at heart. Jed was also a thoughtful man. When he had a difficult problem, he'd sit down and whittle for a spell until he thought of a solution. Jed was a guy you could count on in a crisis.

Unfortunately, what people got with George Dubbya Bush was not Jed, but rather, as Other McCain correctly points out, Jed's nephew Jethro: arrogantly convinced of his own rightness and full of crazy half-baked schemes that he thought were brilliant but which always ended in disaster.

The Other McCain goes on to say that those same "conservative intellectuals" turned on Palin, not because she was a trainwreck of a candidate, but because they were projecting their snotty smart-person disappointments with Bush onto her.

"The conservative intellectuals," he scolds, "looked at her and saw Vice President Ellie May Clampett."

Well, no. Ellie May was noted not only for her hotness, but also for her sweetness. Oh, she could kick the snot out of Jethro if she had to, but mostly she was devoted to the care of her "critters." It's hard to imagine Ellie May talking about someone "pallin' around with terrorists."

Sarah Palin, in contrast, came off as an attack dog. Palin, sad to say, was more like Granny than Ellie May. Granny (aka Daisy Moses, late of Napoleon, Tenn.) was, like Palin, belligerent, prone to dramatics, and shall we say, a little fuzzy on her history. Granny thought the South won the Civil War; Sarah Palin insisted she'd said "no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere.

It's important to remember this fact: Granny, like Jethro, rarely if ever prevailed. In fact, most of the show's plots involved Jed trying to mitigate the damage from Jethro and Granny's crazy ideas and antics. And, lest we forget, Jed wasn't above enlisting the help of the only intellectual on the show, the long-suffering Miss Jane.

Here's the secret to that folksy, down-home, unschooled persona: It works only so long as the person exhibits some sort of innate wit or intelligence. It works even better if the apparent simpleton can slip in some zingers that deflate the pompous eggheads.

Look at Ronald Reagan. Reagan could pull off folksy and down-home, despite his years in Hollywood, because (a) as an actor, he actually could think on his feet and come up with the occasional good line, and (b) he had some decent speechwriters for when he couldn't do it on his own.

In short, if you want to learn how to do the down-home folksy thing right as a politician, you definitely should study up on your "Beverly Hillbillies." But you need to be more Jed and less Jethro or Granny. If Sarah Palin had just taken that lesson, she might be a heartbeat away from the presidency today.