Paperwight's Fair Shot

Rahm Emmanuel: Soulless Shitheel

"We've put about $45 billion into Iraq's reconstruction . . . and they have not spent their own resources," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.). "They have got to have some skin in the game."

I've pretty much already said what I have to say on this point.

[hat tip: FireDogLake and Moon of Alabama]

[Yeah, it's a little old.]

Also, Water is Wet

From the NYT:

A new study supports our fears: Supreme Court nominees present themselves one way at confirmation hearings but act differently on the court. That makes it difficult for senators to cast informed votes or for the public to play a meaningful role in the process.

The study — with the unwieldy title “An Empirical Analysis of the Confirmation Hearings of the Justices of the Rehnquist Natural Court” —published in Constitutional Commentary, looked at how nine long-serving justices answered Senate questions, and how they then voted on the court. While it does not say that any nominee was intentionally misleading, it still found a wide gap.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, for example, told the Senate that they had strong respect for Supreme Court precedents. On the court they were the justices most likely to vote to overturn those precedents. Justice David Souter deferred more to precedent than his Senate testimony suggested he would.

And water is wet.   Look, anyone who says they didn't know that Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts (in my memory) were lying about their politics and their respect for precedent (when they weren't obfuscating and stalling) is either lying themselves or should have their homes wallpapered in bubblewrap and be ordered into conservatorship for their own protection.

[Yeah, it's old.]

Targeting Military Families

One might consider, in passing, that the Democrats' abandonment of the  4th Amendment to the tender mercies of known liar Alberto Gonzales, allows that fine gentleman to eavesdrop on any conversation he likes, confiscate business records of anyone he likes, conduct a wide variety of searches on anyone he likes, so long as he "asserts that the spying concerns the monitoring of a person believed to be overseas".

You know who's overseas?  Soldiers are overseas.  Marines are overseas.  Sailors are overseas.  Many are in Iraq, as a matter of fact, fighting (in theory) to defend the Constitution.  Anyone who has military personnel in their family is fair game.  No 4th amendment for you -- Alberto Gonzales can read your mail, your email, listen in on your phone calls, probably search your house, listen to your conversations.  So make sure you say good things about the Bush Administration.

Really, I'm struggling to feel anything but contempt for a lot of the Dems right now.

Tab Clearing, Mid-August

Too many tabs, too little time.  It's like having too much stuff on your to-do list, having all that information just sitting there, reminding you of what you're not writing.  Even though some of it eventually times out, not all of it does, and it just fragments one's attention.  So, more tab-clearing, and maybe with some discipline, more longer pieces again.

1)  Everyone, please welcome Josh Marshall to 2005.

2)  Greenwald's gutting of the O'Hanlon / Pollack "evenliberalskepticsadmitthesurgeisworking" propaganda piece is welcome, but you know what would have been even better? For the New York Times to have actually done their job and fact-checked their Op-Ed page, which would have pretty much eliminated every other line of this Op-Ed.  When you give someone real estate in the Grey Lady, you're putting your (now badly tarnished) imprimatur on their words, and you might want to make sure they're being truthful.  And now this bullshit meme is out there, and any amount of follow-up and retraction won't catch up.  Thanks, O'Hanlon / Pollack / NYT!  More Friedman Units in which people (who aren't you) fight and die!

3) No, Senator Schumer, you weren't duped by Alito and Roberts, except in the very limited sense that you and your Democratic colleagues in the Senate were, by and large, such political cowards, so secure in your privilege and wealth, so insulated from everything that Alito and Roberts would do and are doing to ordinary people, that you gratefully accepted the lies that Alito and Roberts told you, just so you didn't have to stand up for anything.  Everything you needed to know about who they were and who they would be as Supreme Court Justices was entirely obvious at the time. So I think you're engaging in some truly transparent and reprehensible post hoc rationalization lying, and I don't trust you any further than I can throw you. If you are actually serious that you did not know Alito and Roberts were lying and obfuscating at the time, then you and your colleagues in the Senate should retire from public life immediately.  You are too damn dumb to be trusted with the nation's business.  Or, as I have remarked with respect to certain noted "legal scholars", too dumb to be trusted even with your own finances.

4) It should be a source of shame that the deceptive campaign/election practices the Senate is considering banning are still practiced.  A decent respect for the opinions of mankind should guide self-restraint in these matters.  Or at least, one might think that we would have banned these practices some time in the past two-hundred-odd years.

5) Glenn Greenwald asked a while back, "How much credence should General Petraeus' reports be given?"  I never got around to answering at the time, but I'll put my marker down now, before Petraeus comes to Congress in September:  Not one bit.  Just like with Alito and Roberts, can there be any serious doubt that the Bush Administration would have tapped Petraeus for the Iraq command unless Petraeus could be counted on to  deliver happy talk consistent with the Bush Administration line?   When has the Bush Administration ever acted in any other way?

OK, I reckon that will do it for now.  Still many many more open tabs, but many of them are interrelated, and as I said above, I'll try to work those up into longer posts.

Upping the Ante

Watching the Democratic Presidential debate earlier today, I noticed that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton blamed the Iraqi government for failing to find a political solution to the train wreck that Republican hubris and Democratic fecklessness has created in Iraq. 

This, from members of the party leadership who don't have even have the guts to confront the Republicans and deauthorize the invasion and occupation of Iraq. 

This, from members of the party leadership who didn't even have the guts to stop the appointment of two royalists to the Supreme Court.

This, from members of the party leadership who didn't even have the guts to refuse the rush to invade and occupy a country who had done nothing to us.

This, from members of the party leadership who have knuckled under to the Republicans almost every damn time they had a chance, when the only consequence might have been them losing their titles, not even their income or their security. 

These people, the Junior Senators from Illinois and New York,  have the gall, the chutzpah, to impugn the Iraqis for their political failures, when the Iraqi legislators are under constant threat of death, when almost every decision they could make ends in death, when the Iraqis did not create this situation, but the cowardice and fecklessness of the Democratic leadership sure as hell did.

Well, hell.  Maybe the good Junior Senators from Illinois and New York actually mean that since the Iraqis operate under threat of death and destruction every day, a threat that the United States caused, that because of that, the Iraqis should be more able to reach a political solution? 

And yes, I'm aware that this is one of the new Republican lines as well, but I don't expect anything better from them.  At this point, I don't really expect anything decent from any Republicans at all.

The Criminal IS Political

So, in what may qualify as the least-surprising news event of the month, it turns out that the RNC managed to delete an awful lot, if not most of the emails that the Bush Administration hacks were using to do both political business and bypass the Presidential Records Act in doing what should have been the nation's business.

A couple things to note here:

1)  As many of us out here in the hinterlands have noted, the Republicans have merged party and government in a permanent tribal campaign.  Why the Dems haven't figured that out, or at least, aren't acting like they know that is utterly beyond me.  The press, of course, is about 99 and 44/100ths coopted.

2)  One, regrettably, suspects that the predictable Democratic response will be just like Jim Carrey's response to getting his car scratched by the tow yard in Liar Liar:

Fletcher: You scratched my car!
Motorpool Guy: Where?
Fletcher: [indicating with his hands] Right there!
Motorpool Guy: OH... That was already there.
Fletcher: You - -LIAR! You know what I am going to do about this?
Motorpool Guy: what?
Fletcher: Nothing! Because if I take it to small claims court, it will just drain 8 hours out of my life and you probably won't show up and even if I got the judgment you'd just stiff me anyway; so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!
Motorpool Guy: [tossing the keys to Fletcher] You've been here before haven't ya?

And the concern trolls are already out. Check out this comment from the post on this topic at Lindsay Beyerstein's Majikthise.  Inter alia, the Dems shouldn't pursue this actual wrongdoing and full-on assault on the very concept of the Justice Department by the criminal coterie that we still dignify with the title "Republican Administration", because they could wind up as disliked as the Republicans when they chased the Clintons for years over a money-losing real-estate deal and a goddamn blowjob.

Still More Tab-Clearing

I've got these longer thematic posts in my head, but I can't seem to find the time to develop them.  So, more of these short sharp shot stours.

1) Bush's nominee for Surgeon General is a fundie gays-can-be-converted nutjob.  Yea verily, I say to thee once again:  Satire is dead.  All we have left is irony.  OK, and some mockery.

2) Matt Yglesias fails to understand that political punditing is about half defending the status quo and half bemoaning the lack of character in our public officials quo. Pundits are mostly too damn lazy to learn a new structure, and are really far too lazy to come up with a new set of canned tsk-tsk fingerwagging columns if the new structure were to actually have an effect on who became public officials and what they could actually accomplish.

3) John Emerson and Dave Johnson posting on the exact same thing:  the Republican ratchet.  I may explain at more length in future, but the Republican ratchet is pretty simple: 

• Get all the power you can. 
• Break all the rules you think you can get away with while you're in power.
• Put as many loyalists into the civil service and judiciary as you can.
• Trust the Democrats to be too chickenshit to do anything but leave things as they are when they finally catch you, usually with some call for "National Reconciliation" you can join.
• Block the Democrats from actually getting anything done (in the unlikely event they start to do so), and especially keep them from getting judges or civil servants into tenured positions.
• Repeat every time you get enough power to start again.

4)  No shit, of course Petraeus is in the tank for Bushco.  Who would seriously be naive enough to expect that anyone who got the Iraq command wouldn't be coopted, either by internal ideology or external pressure?  Oh, wait.  The Dem leadership and apparently, pretty much the entire Washington press corps would be naive enough.  I guess that would probably be the answer to almost any question beginning with "Who would be naive enough..."

I reckon that's about enough for the moment.

Not Only Courageous, But Diligent And Serious

I was pretty sure I couldn't feel more contempt for Congress, but apparently I can:

A new biography of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has once again raised the issue of whether members of Congress read a key intelligence report before the 2002 vote to authorize war in Iraq.

Clinton did not read the 90-page, classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, according to "Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton."

For members of Congress to read the report, they had to go to a secure location on Capitol Hill. The Washington Post reported in 2004 that no more than six senators and a handful of House members were logged as reading the document.

So, before giving George Bush the authority to kill Americans and Iraqis, to destroy the state of Iraq, to pour blood and treasure into the dust, our representatives couldn't even be bothered to read the fucking intelligence report, as flawed and biased as it was.

And an extra-big helping of shut the fuck up goes to Presidential Candidate Joseph Biden (D-MBNA), one of the few who did read the report, but apparently did not read the AUMF (the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force"):

Biden told CNN that he read the dissents in the report and he "spoke to the ones who dissented."

Biden ended up voting for the resolution, but argued that he was casting a vote "to avoid a war."

"It was a vote to give the authority to the president to avoid war by keeping the pressure on Saddam Hussein," the Delaware Democrat said Monday.

Just so we're clear, here's the text of the operative portion of the AUMF:

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

    (a) Authorization.--The President is authorized to use the Armed
Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and
appropriate in order to--
            (1) defend the national security of the United States
        against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
            (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council
        resolutions regarding Iraq.

Huh.  Sure looks like a vote to attack Iraq to me, or at the very least, to give an administration run by PNAC the choice to do so.  Help me out here, Joe... how does a vote giving "with us or agin' us Bush" complete authority to use the military (which I note, would include nukes) turn into a vote to avoid war?  No, never mind.  I don't want to know the answer.  Just shut up.

Daughter of: Who Will Rid Me of This Meddlesome Priest?

I have the Monica Goodling testimony streaming right now.  She's just gotten the order granting her use immunity and has started making her exculpatory statement, and here's how it's going to go for the rest of the testimony:

1) Because she has 100% immunity for truthful testimony, Goodling will fall on her sword for anything that can be pinned specifically on her, like her use of political litmus tests for civil service hires.

2) Because she's a creature of the Republican machine, she will not drop a dime regarding the USA firings on anyone who can get her a nice comfortable post-testimony think-tank or pressure group sinecure, like Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Hans von Spakovsky, or any of the Republican politicians who intervened to try to fire the various USAs.

3) Because of the consensus cloud, everything will be in the passive voice (e.g., names appeared, the list was generated, etc. etc., all like mushrooms popping out of manure after a spring rain), and the only names that will come up will be people who are already on the outs:  Harriet Miers, Kyle Sampson, Paul McNulty, etc.

4)  Everything else will be "I don't recall," even though the events she doesn't recall happened in the last couple years and were important enough that the entire DOJ executive infrastructure was involved.

And that will close her chapter.  She'll get a nice cozy job somewhere in the wingnut infrastructure, and that will be the end of her jeopardy.

This, of course, is entirely predictable, and was the strategy used in Iran-Contra to great effect.  Republicans aren't creative -- but apparently neither are the institutional leaders in the Democratic Party.  As long as the Dems don't learn, the Republicans will run this game.

---

And... pardon me while I take a lap around the bases.  Of course, this is really T-Ball; it ain't like this game is the show.

Nope, only a triple -- looks like she might have sold Gonzales out, but of course, he can't really help her with her future career plans (as she's a good fundamentalist girl, I tend to wonder why she's not focused on her family first right now).

[Further thoughts:  This is exactly why you offer the immunity contingent on the value of the testimony.  That's why it's called  cutting a deal. This "deal" is exactly like almost every other "deal" the Democratic leadership has cut with the Republicans over the last n years:  a capitulation.]

Shorter George Bush

"I'm the commander guy, now shut up and gimme mah money, you dhimmicrap pansies."

More seriously, I have no idea why the Dems in Congress ever thought any sort of legislative finessing would work. Any plan which begins with the idea that Bush will compromise or act reasonably, no matter how weak his position, is based on a premise entirely at odds with every scintilla of evidence.  The only thing Bush will ever do in response to any attempt to limit his authority is flash the one-fingered victory salute, and then attack the dhimmicraps fer hatin' tha trupes. 

Honestly, he does this every time, on basically every issue.  Even rats learn -- why can't the "moderates" who want to "act responsibly" in ending the occupation of Iraq get that through their heads?  You might as well run at Bush head on over the occupation, because no matter what you do, no matter how you try to spin and finesse, no matter how worried you are about the wingnuts in your district, unless you just do what commander guy wants, you hate tha trupes! 

Now gimme mah money!