Xark!

'You don't know what you're talking about'

Chris Matthew's talk-over-the-guest interviewing style on Hardball has always been nails on a chalkboard for me, but this might be the first time it ever came across as utterly appropriate. Kevin James, a right-wing talker from California, came on the show Thursday after President Bush's Knesset speech to talk about Israel, appeasement and Barack Obama, and his aggressive platitudes prompted Matthews to run a history check on his ass.

It immediately becomes clear that James doesn't have a clue who Neville Chamberlain was, or what happened in Munich. Partition of Czechoslovakia and dialog with Palestinians the Iranians? "It's the same thing!" he says.

What follows might be the greatest smack-down of a self-important, shallow idiot ever witnessed on national TV. Listen to the high-school essay-test evasion ploys and the empty wingnut counter-attack maneuver ("Thirty-eight or 39, Chris? Which one do you want?").

You've got to be morally and intellectually bankrupt if Tweety makes you look small in comparison.

FOX ATTACKS: Going after Obama

The FOX VIRUS...

Even Chris Wallace gets disgusted by it...

Just for context on the M.O. of Rupert Murdock's corporate news philosophy, The Investigators meet The Buzzsaw...

No, of course we're not surprised. I'm sure they originally prepared for an all-out assault on Hillary Clinton, but they retrenched, retooled, and sent their minions out after Barack Obama instead. And let's face it: The GOP is going to continue this steady drumbeat of sleaze from now through the election, supposedly at arm's length via their "remote operative," Roger Ailes, at the FOX News Division.

Our job is to recognize it, name it, talk about it, share it. Human beings, like many living things, are quorum sensors (bacteria do it chemically; we do it psychologically). So it isn't just the quality of the signals we receive from our environments that matter -- the number of signals of certain types that we receive quite literally count toward shaping our image of reality.

Ailes, Rove and others on the Right understood this many years ago.

Which is why I say: Share these videos. Embed them. E-mail them. Every time you use the power of human relationships and social networking to spread this exposure of media sleaze you are acting as an antidote to the sickening virus FOX keeps deliberately injecting into our culture. We have to become D.I.Y. media antibodies in defense of our society. We must inoculate ourselves against bullshit. When you show a thing that attempts to be secret, you remove some of its power.

To clarify: I have no quarrel with anyone who opposes Obama for policy reasons. Don't like his ideas about Iraq, or social security, or economics, or taxation? Fine. I disagree, but I respect reasonable disagreement.

But if you think that Obama is a Muslim, or a black racist, or a shadowy figure who secretly hates America? Conversation over.  You've just defined yourself out of  relevancy. My suggestion? Take another look at why you believe what you believe, and then rejoin the rest of us in our imperfect lurching toward a better future.

Hat tips: Janet, Revere at Effect Measure, MoveOn.org, Robert Greenwald.

I've got a bad feeling about this...

I'm generally a pretty optimistic guy, and there's a general logic to that attitude:  Things have pretty much always looked bad to some degree, yet things have, generally,  gotten better over time.  So you shut your eyes and you keep on walking and you whistle past the graveyard and then, you know -- the sun comes out.

But now a-days you look around, you do the math, and you realize: Holy shit, dude -- are we fucked?

I get the sense that this is one of those moments when things are much worse than "they" are letting on. Which makes me think: We need an "F-Scale."  Like, if stuff is just sorta screwed up, but things generally work and you can pretty much expect that you're going to be able to keep your job and your house and suicide bombers aren't going to move in next door and really downgrade your property values, that would be F-1.

And then an F-10 would be economic depression, the destruction of the Bill of Rights, civil war and environmental collapse. And so on.

So where does that put us? Because when the Feds are bailing out the banks and the President is giving the economy a "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie" pep-talk, and currency converters in Amsterdam stop exchanging dollars because their value is dropping so fast, that's got to be like an F-7.

And when we're five years into a botched, brutal war and still hoping that the latest strategy is someday going to give the Iraqis a chance to build a society that's stable enough to do simple shit like, say, provide electrical power to most of the grid for most of the day, that's at LEAST an F-8.

And then we've got a political campaign where the entire focus of the past few days has been a concerted, deliberate attempt to destroy an inspiring presidential candidate by endlessly looping out-of-context statements by his preacher?  At essentially the same time that the President of the United States of America is openly advocating TORTURE? And the media doesn't even think the torture veto is really all that NEWSWORTHY?

Where's the F-scale on THAT?

Answers, please, on a post card...

Iran, I-exaggerate?

I have to admit: My reactions when I saw the headline-alert Tweet announcing the "Iranian naval showdown" story were not pleasant. My first thought was that our government was hyping whatever happened for political reasons.  My second thought was that the News Lords were going to uncritically pound that hype right into the national consciousness.

I don't like either thought, but that's where I find myself today. The federal government says something, and I have to discipline my reaction to make sure that I at least give it the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't this way before 2004, but that where I am now, and it's based on experience, not ideology. The Bush  administration certainly didn't invent politicized bullshit (Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?), it's just that ... great Gawd, there's just so much of it, and the skeptical reporting is just so slow to catch up that it's practically irrelevant.

Lunch hour report: Hersh on Iran NIE

(Editor's note) Say what you want about reporter Sy Hersh, but remember this: History gets the last word. His coverage of the Bush Administration's wars just keeps on getting confirmed -- months, even years later, yes, but that's the way things go in the world.

So what does Hersh have to say about the NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities? Here's a transcript of what he had to say to Wolf Blitzer on CNN last night (-dc)...

Bailouts Aren't What They Used to Be

Late last week, I began reading a news story on MSNBC that centered on Bush’s “bailout” of those individuals who were losing their homes in the current mortgage crisis.  Before getting very far into the story, my attention was drawn to a link for a reader discussion entitled, “Should U.S. bail out subprime borrowers?”   Arriving at the discussion, I found page after page of angry notes, furious citizens fuming about how unfair a “bailout” would be.  The logic, which I’m completely sympathetic with, went something like this:  “I pay my bills; I only buy what I can afford.  I’ll be mad as hell if Bush bails out those people by paying their mortgage.”

The problem is, and this may well ultimately haunt Democrats as well (and it should bother all of us), the term “bailout” is misleading in this circumstance.  While Bush has proposed a number of ways to help keep borrowers lenders in their homes, most of these ideas seem ultimately aimed at allowing a refinancing of the loan—it’ll still have to be paid, but the time will be extended, different terms introduced or so forth.  Yes, in some ways, it’s a slight change in the rules, but the policies don’t carry the force that the term “bailout” implies.

Cheney on Iraq, 1994

Dick Cheney: Not part of Executive Branch

(Cartoonist note: I didn't really get to complete this one before I went to work this morning, so this updated, final version has some differences from the one I put up earlier today-- dc)

Hersh: J'accuse

Have you heard about Seymour Hersh's interview with Major General Antonio Taguba yet? I heard about it today... but not from reading a newspaper.

"There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff (the explicit images) was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."

That's the two-star general who was tasked with investigating the program of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, the same man who was forced into retirement this year. Hersh hit the talking-head circuit last night to promote it. On what planet is this not front-page news? Everywhere?

The "Korea model"

Preview: Dubya's long, hot summer

As the Buddhists say, karma is a bitch...

Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush Administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, when nothing seemed to go right.

"It's just gotten steadily worse," he said. "There was some point during the Iranian hostage crisis, the gasoline rationing, the malaise speech, the sweater, the rabbit" -- Gingrich was referring to Carter's suggestion that Americans wear sweaters rather than turn up their thermostats, and to the "attack" on Carter by what cartoonists quickly portrayed as a "killer rabbit" during a fishing trip -- "that there was a morning where the average American went, 'You know, this really worries me.'" He added, "You hire Presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don't have to think about it, and, at a maximum, to draw the country together to meet great challenges you can't avoid thinking about."

-- Jeffrey Goldberg interviews former House Speaker (and current presidential hopeful)  Newt Gingrinch in his "Letter From Washington: PARTY UNFAITHFUL, The Republican implosion," from the June 4th issue of The New Yorker.

[S]ome big money players up from Texas recently paid a visit to their friend in the White House. The story goes that they got out exactly one question, and the rest of the meeting consisted of The President in an extended whine, a rant, actually, about no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he’s doing things would be OK…etc., etc. This is called a “bunker mentality” and it’s not attractive when a friend does it. When the friend is the President of the United States, it can be downright dangerous. Apparently the Texas friends were suitably appalled, hence the story now in circulation.

-- From the April 30th issue of the subscription-only Nelson Report, a Washington insider newsletter, quoted by Think Progress and the Huffington Post...

Today you disparage us for opposing a massive amnesty program that endangers our economy and national security.  Today you even embrace the religion of global warming, a stunning shift from prior policy (your administration even went to the Supreme Court and argued correctly that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant).

What's a conservative to do?

-- Mark Levin, the National Review Online, May 31, addresses the President.

The other thing that's interesting to me is the degree to which the Right isn't even rational about this anymore. It doesn't even make arguments anymore about this or that part of the bill, it's just "We don't want any kind of immigration reform because it's going to legitimize 12 million people who are here and, oh by the way, aren't leaving. So let's just build a fence, and that's it." That seems to be the essence now of the conservative majority's immigration policy.

-- Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal's famously conservative editorial board, addressing the board on May 22.

We hereby challenge the Journal’s editors to debate the immigration bill in a neutral venue with a moderator of their choosing ...  It shouldn’t be a problem for the Journal’s editors to take up this challenge, since opponents of the bill aren’t “rational” on the question, have no arguments, and are “foaming at the mouth,” as they explained in a videotaped session of one of their editorial meetings last week.

-- The editors of the National Review call out their Wall Street brethren for an East Coast Establishment conservative smack-down, May 31...

Longtime readers of this blog know that the Wall Street Journal is notorious for refusing to acknowledge its factual errors in editorials about immigration policy and for tarring its opponents as anti-immigrant racists. Will they rise to NR's challenge or continue to smear amnesty opponents from the safety of their Manhattan offices?

-- Michelle Malkin, treating the WSJ with a tone of scorn usually reserved for The New York Times. According to a poll on the post, 95 percent of her readers think the National Review editors would win.

Laura Ingraham "takes the gloves off." Doesn't she want to "do what's right for America"? Finally, conservatives get mad at this president - for all the conservative reasons we're now familiar with. It only took six years of betrayal to get there, but, hey guys, welcome aboard. I find myself echoing Glenn Reynolds:

Heck, I'm basically pro-immigration and I find the Administration's arguments for the bill sufficiently unpersuasive and insulting that I'm leaning against it on that basis alone.

It's the arrogance and condescension that finally makes your blood boil.

-- Conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan, blogging for The Atlantic, May 31

Message To The Left:  I'm not saying you should impeach him, I'm just sayin', you know, go with your hearts.

-- Conservative blogger Ace of Spades sums up his feelings about the president, May 31.

This is his legacy. Even his own supporters now despise him, even his own samurai are deserting him, even the people who could aid him are pushed aside. And we've got 19 months to go before January 2009.

Scotty writes his memoirs

News item:

NEW YORK (AP) - A memoir by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan will be published next spring by PublicAffairs.

The book will run 416 pages, but the publisher acknowledged on Tuesday that McClellan actually wrote only one 334-word passage, which the former Bush spokesman merely repeats over and over and over.

Marshall on US attorneys

Joshua Micah Marshall, the guy out ahead of the mainstream media on reporting the US attorneys firing story:

Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.

This much is already clear in the record. And we're now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president's perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.

It's yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we've been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown. At most points in our history the idea that an Attorney General could stay in office after having overseen such an effort would be unthinkable. The most telling part of this episode is that they're not even really denying the wrongdoing. They're ignoring the point or at least pleading 'no contest' and saying it's okay.

Walter Reed: It gets worse

Why is it everything our executive branch does smells like the moldy cesspools left behind by Hurricane Katrina?

Found via Francis X. Archibald: this piece from today's WaPo on the Army's decision to replace Maj. Gen. Weightman with Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley (commander of Walter Reed from 2002-2004):

Here's where the story stops making sense. Much of The Post's article detailed the abuse by omission that Gen. Kiley, not Gen. Weightman, committed, first as head of Walter Reed, then in his current post as Army surgeon general. Gen. Weightman, who very well might deserve his disgrace, has commanded Walter Reed for only half a year, while Gen. Kiley, now back in charge of Walter Reed, headed the hospital and its outpatient facilities for two years and has led the Army's medical command since...

(T)he evidence compiled so far suggests that Gen. Kiley has been more complicit in the scandalous neglect of Walter Reed's outpatient facilities for longer than Gen. Weightman has been. It also indicates that the Army's reshuffle is really about projecting the appearance of accountability, not punishing those most responsible.

So, to recap. First they punished sergeants and said there wasn't a problem besides, you know, the liberal media. Then they fired the facility's commander and replaced him with someone who was apparently an even bigger asshole. And when that didn't placate the people (damn those upstart journalists!), they forced their political appointee (Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey) to resign.

A visibly angry Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced the resignation in a brief statement this afternoon, saying he was "disappointed" by the Army's response to disclosures of inadequate outpatient care at Walter Reed and bureaucratic inertia in dealing with wounded soldiers.

Well, it's nice to know that Gates has a pulse on this one. But how does getting rid of Harvey deal with the Kiley problem? Apparently Kiley was Harvey's choice, which alone should have been a firing offense, but Kiley's still there. And are we to believe that Harvey didn't discuss the Kiley option with Gates before he made the appointment?

At least Gates isn't happy with Kiley as a replacement:

Appearing before reporters at the Pentagon, Gates indicated that he was dissatisfied with Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the Army surgeon general, who was named by Harvey as a temporary replacement for Weightman.

"I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation pertaining to outpatient care at Walter Reed," Gates said. "Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems."

Does that mean he'll be replaced? Here's the WaPo, again:

Shortly after Gates spoke today, the Army announced that Maj. Gen. Eric R. Schoomaker, currently the commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, Md., would become the new commander of Walter Reed and of the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command.

Sounds like it, in an indirect way. Which is the only way anything good every happens with this administration. This bunch is provisionally adequate only when cornered like a rat in a trap.

Bush, by the way, has called for a "comprehensive review" of care for our war wounded. Well rah-rah. Way to get out in front, Mr. President. It only took him a week. Thank God he's so principled, eh?

The 101st Fightin' Chickenhawks
By the way, I just went to check Harvey's military experience. Anybody want to guess?

His official biography (which includes this line: "Secretary Harvey's number one priority is the well being of Soldiers and their families") makes no mention of him ever serving in uniform.   So what background inspired President Bush to appoint this man in 2004, in the middle of a ground war in the Middle East?

Prior to becoming the Secretary, Dr. Harvey spent much of his career with corporations that provided products and services to the federal government, particularly the Department of Defense. He has been involved in over 20 major defense programs and was a member of the Army Science Board in the late 1990s.

Which corporations?

Prior to his appointment as the Secretary of the Army, Harvey held various professional, management and executive positions within the Westinghouse Corporation from 1969 to 1997, including President of the Electronics Systems Group, President of the Government and Environmental Services Company, and Chief Operating Officer of the multi billion dollar Industries and Technology Group. Most recently Harvey was a Director and Vice Chairman of Duratek, a company specializing in treating radioactive, hazardous, and other wastes, as well as a member of the board of several other corporations.

Yeah, I'll just bet that a career technocrat from the defense industry made improving the lives of soldiers his top priority.

One last thing: The emerging storyline appears to be about privatization. Expect Democrats in the House to explore with subpoenas the Army's aggressive campaign to privatize care at Reed by farming the job out to big private contractors... such as IAP World Wide Services ("one of the companies that experienced problems delivering ice during the response to Hurricane Katrina"), which received a $120 million contract for facilities management.

It's the same story, over and over. Only the names and the scandals change. We are being led by lying incompetents whose first instinct is always something underhanded, whose true allegiance isn't to the country, or to the field officers who sacrifice for honor, or for the enlisted men and women who form the backbone of the force.  There is a name for such people:

Carpetbaggers.

I say again: FILE CRIMINAL CHARGES AGAINST THESE PEOPLE.