Who cares?

Obligatory media criticism:  When was the last time you heard a reporter challenge a Republican with something that a loony leftist said?

(h/t Jezebel)

The weep in review

The only way you'll get the tears of John Boehner (R-lacrimose) off his face is to pry them from his cold, dead hanky.  (Note to morons: I'm snarking an NRA bumpersticker.)

Boehner says he's just emotional about the problems facing America.  I wonder whether he's a depressive in need of help, if he's taking something that makes him emotional, if he can't take the strain.

This is yet another way you know that there is no liberal counterbalance to the right-wing media:  If a Democrat ever wept in public as frequently or as copiously as Boehner - or even once and just a little (paging Edmund Muskie) - his career would be over.

And if a woman cried - or just choked up a tiny little bit (Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi) - the wingnut bullshit distribution network (WBDN) would circulate it forever as a sign of weakness and a reason to mock her.

No excuse too lame

Teabaggers showed their bigotry openly because Nancy Pelosi walked softly and carried a big gavel. When they advocate personal responsibility, they're advocating it for us.

(h/t Atrios)

Socialism rules!

Now that health care reform has passed, that's what the Republicans will say. For them, the word socialist is a vicious slur, but it's almost a content-free slur, since they have no clear idea what it means.

From conservatives' use of the word, I interpolate that they mean any government program that helps people (as opposed to businesses) and that they think will require any taxation at all.

The irony is that this health care bill is transparently centrist - too centrist for me to be thrilled, in fact. Yet not one single House Republican voted for it.

We Democrats will immediately set out to improve this reform, with or without the Republicans. Their frankly insane rhetoric suggests that the entire task will fall to us. O.K., we're strong enough to handle that.

"We are still a people capable of doing big things," said President Barack Obama.

And each new President no longer is limited to the first hundred days to get something large done.

Taking sides

Ed Hornick of CNN repeatedly casts Republicans in the best possible light, but he covers his complicity in their lies with a pretense of getting the other side. Here's a clear example:

[Karl] Rove discusses the Bush administration's support for the controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding, which Democrats and others have described as torture.

This is just normal amoral media bullshit about whether waterboarding is torture. John Yoo and Jay Bybee covered this question with a thin tissue of bullshit, and they have now escaped sanction for it, but that doesn't alter at all the plain fact that we have sent our enemies to prison and death for using torture, including waterboarding. Bushist apologists, for whom military opinion is fetish, should consider:

Waterboarding as an interrogation technique has its roots in some of history's worst totalitarian nations, from Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition to North Korea and Iraq. In the United States, the technique was first used five decades ago as a training tool to give U.S. troops a realistic sense of what they could expect if captured by the Soviet Union or the armies of Southeast Asia. The U.S. military has officially regarded the tactic as torture since the Spanish-American War.

Hornick thinks he's being objective. He's really siding with the side of bullshit.

[Rove] defends the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), arguing they were authorized by the Department of Justice in August 2002 and signed off by then-CIA director George Tenet. He also disputes claims that the administration failed to brief members of Congress on the use of these techniques.

"When these techniques were first authorized, Democratic leaders had been briefed about them. Their silence made them complicit in their use," he wrote. ...

He singled out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, who charged in July 2009 that the CIA misled Congress in a secret briefing she received in 2002. Pelosi said the CIA failed to inform her and others at the briefing about harsh interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects.

The CIA responded by saying Pelosi was told about the harsh techniques, including waterboarding, at the classified 2002 briefing.

But the story didn't end there, despite Hornick's willingness to court Rove by implying that it did. Pelosi acknowledged being briefed on the existence of the torture memos but not on the actual use of torture the Bushists intended.

As for whether the techniques were actually torture, Rove says the president "never authorized torture," but rather "did just the opposite" by making sure the techniques "did not cross the legal line into torture."

In sum, Hornick and the big media remain willing to abet the Bushists' claim that a century of settled understanding that waterboarding is torture can still be legitimately disputed. The Bushists dispute it; it must be legitimate. Never mind their self-interested redefinition of the word. Yet Hornick and most of the media accept the word of the CIA, also oft-fetishized by Republicans, based on so-called proof that the CIA itself wrote, that Pelosi is not telling the truth.

Tory tea party

An American Teabagger named Nigel is going to burn Nancy Pelosi and his own Congressman in effigy. Wasn't it his English tea that Sam Adams and friends tossed into Boston Harbor? Nigel's going to all this effort for what he estimates will be a hundred people, so he was probably going to get 40 before CNN picked up the story. Now, every screw-loose malcontent in southern Virginia and northern North Carolina will show up.

Maybe these angry people can now understand that burning something is in fact the expression of a political opinion. Offensive yes, they're trying to be offensive. Reminds me of flag-burning. Offensive yes, but Constitutionally protected and ought to remain that way.

At least Nigel Coleman is not wearing a hood and burning a cross out in the forest, I'll give him that.

Diagnosis

The problem: Nearly all Republicans and many blue dog Democrats are opposed to health care reform. They are unwilling to do anything that might provide universal health care. The Republicans' opposition stems from the fear that people might actually like the public option. The conservative Democrats' from the fear that their constituents might vote them out of office before they find out they like it.

This loose coalition of conservatives can't come right out and say they oppose reform, but their every behavior shows it. Without a real public option, anything labelled health care reform is fakery. Mitch McConnell knows what he's doing. So does Jim DeMint.

As Nancy Pelosi says, insurance companies have had long enough. They have provided no progress toward universal coverage at all. Paul Krugman argues that the market fundamentally cannot provide universal coverage (although you'll notice he does not say that market mechanisms are completely useless).

Unfortunately, the prognosis is starting to look grim. There doesn't seem to be a working majority for any significant reform, so we may get a few portability fixes and big giveaways for the insurance industry.

Operation Blackbriar

We don't know what this program was. They tell us it wasn't waterboarding or the other torture methods. (You do realize that "harsh interrogation methods" is a euphemism worthy of the Nazis or the Soviets, right?) They tell us it wasn't the massive surveillance that essentially rendered the Fourth Amendment so much empty language.

They also tell us that it was never an "operational" program, even after nearly eight years. Oh, bullshit. To believe that, you'd have to have your head buried so far up your ass that it would be looking out your navel.

Dick Cheney, the true power of Duhbya's maladministration, ordered this program kept secret from Congress, kept immune from the oversight of democracy. He explicitly evaded the rule of law. (Again!) This was - and still is - the canonical impeachable offense. It's also a violation of his oath of office.

There is no way that Darth Cheney would have been interested enough in "planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year" to suppress disclosure of it. The New York Times is playing along to even print such nonsense.

Note: In all the wingnut foofaraw about Nancy Pelosi accusing Leon Panetta of lying about the CIA's legal obligations to brief Congress is the most obvious bullshit. Panetta did not say the CIA always briefed Congress in compliance with its legal obligations. He said that it was not the CIA's policy to withhold legally required briefings. Is everyone in the media too dense - or too happy to play along with the inside game - to notice this?

(h/t Boston Globe, where I first read the Times report on this)

No excuse

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.

Sick of sycophants

The media continues to be a handmaiden to, well, not power but past power. Nothing exposes better their bias to give Republicans a pass, despite the rankest and most obvious bullshit, than their continuing polite refusal to choose the word torture to label even waterboarding - check out the audio clip. Instead, they weasel back to "some call it torture." The GOP has (mostly) stuck to a Minitru vocabulary that dismisses Bushist crimes as merely harsh interrogation - and who could be against that, girlfriend?

The media heaves a sigh of relief and hews to their so-called professional goal of blind, unjudgemental he-said-she-said stories. The big media appetite for bullshit is a journalistic failing that cannot be laid anywhere but the feet of the vaunted big media conglomerates. Their reporters, editors, and publishers did this as a response to fifty years of wingnut whining (see "Accuracy" in Media) about bias. Atrios would and probably has sarcastically called for a blogger ethics panel.

The pretense that there's a controversy over the meaning of the word torture doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. It's a well-known word with well-known past applications that led to punishment when Americans were outraged by Nazis, Japanese, and communists doing the torture. (Yes, that's whose company we have joined. Sorry to tell you the unpleasant truth if you've been storing your unused head up your-- uh, somewhere warm, moist, and dark.)

There is no news balance whatsoever in being unable to use the right word for fear of offending those who advocate the results of torture. As adults (allegedly), we at least ought to have strong enough stomachs to ask the question whether the intelligence Darth Cheney claims might possibly outweigh the monstrous moral crimes that elicited it. We should have strong enough stomachs to look straight at what was done by the President and the Vice President in the name of all Americans.

It's a blight and stain on our honor. Was it worth it? Should the confessed torturers who ran the White House - and DOD, State, and the OLC - walk?

I, of course, don't think so. I still believe that the rule of law is possible, though it's obviously honored less in the observance than in the breach.

As a society that still believes or at least pretends that it can govern itself, we owe ourselves the truth, at least. Without the truth, voting is largely an exercise in American idols instead of American ideals.

We need to ask questions intelligently. The right question about the efficacy of torture is not whether it ever led to good intel. The right question is whether it did at a higher rate or faster than legal means of interrogation.

There's another crucial question: Did the practice of torture lead to the birth of even more terrorists and thus to even less safety?

We need a fearless investigation. We need an uncompromising investigation. We need the truth.

I hope the truth would lead to criminal prosecution. This would not be the criminalization of policy differences. This would be the prosecution of criminal policies.

Limited hang-out

So far, the Bushists and their apologists in the pro-torture, anti-law wing of the conservative movement have tried numerous defenses against their culpability for illegal and unconscionable torture and prisoner abuse:

• The Jackson 5 defense: "The abuses are the work of a few bad apples, and one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch, girl."
• The patent bullshit defense: "The United States doesn't torture."
• The Minitru defense: "We've redefined the word 'torture'. 'Torture' has never included anything less than total organ failure."
  
• The necessity defense, Darth Cheney style: "There's a one percent chance that a time bomb is ticking somewhere in the world."

Now they're trying the Psycho defense: Nancy Pelosi didn't stop me before I [tortured] again.

It's all bullshit.

Republican evidence

Newt Gingrich (O truthsayer!) tells Fox that Nancy Pelosi has lied about her knowledge of torture at Guantánamo. Naturally, CNN follows along like a dog to heel.

The Republican evidence: Pelosi had a briefing after a classified memo was written in the Justice Department.

And we all know that the Bushists in the executive branch released all their classified memos to Pelosi.

Whatever happened to Amy Carter?

I know CNN is out pounding the hustings and looking under rocks for the new leadership of the Republican Party. Heck, I'd get sick of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, too. (Side snark: I know all the wingnuts think Nancy Pelosi has had botox, and it's pretty clear that nothing short of a jowlectomy would help McConnell, but isn't it obvious that Boehner has work done?)

Meghan McCain I understood as some kind of cross-promotion, even though I don't know for sure that there's any shared ownership between CNN and the Daily Beast. The corporate media is so incestuous, though, that it's a plausible theory.

Now Liz Cheney (no, not Lynne) has her audition. It's awful enough that Darth Cheney himself is basking in the very spotlight he avoided when the media might have held him accountable for the power he wielded in such frequently criminal ways. Vain hope, I now, but the press's watchdog role is one I still honor in the breach. But I wonder why a beneficiary of nepotism in government, such as the Worst Veep Ever's daughter, should get our attention at all.

It's not as though any such privilege has ever been accorded a Democrat, at least not a non-Kennedy Democrat.

(Who would've thought that jowlectomy would be in Firefox's dictionary!)

Update (8/1/2010): It appears that Chelsea Clinton's wedding has provoked interest in whatever happened to Amy Carter? As a random Internet oddity, Google has led a few of them here. I have no idea where she is or how she's living her life. I just wish that Liz Cheney were living as quietly.

My point above was, of course, that the big media cares more about scions of Republican dynasties than about Democratic ones. No, check that, it's not the whole picture. Big media does care when a Democratic son or daughter does something scandalous.

They just don't care what Democratic kids think when they've grown up.

With Nancy on this

Barack is trying to be a transformative figure in American politics, and I wish him success.  Toward that end, he wants to let bygones be bygones.  He also seems to lack any appetite for battling the Republicans.  Maybe he's choosing his battles.

Nancy Pelosi wants to repeal the Bush tax giveaways to the wealthy right away instead of merely letting them lapse, and we seriously need to claw back a tiny portion of the money the rich have looted from the government and from the financial system.

Pelosi also wants to investigate the U.S. Attorney firing scandal and the Justice Department hiring scandal.  I'm not sure that's where I'd start, but Americans and history really need full disclosure of the way the Bushists ran the government as if they owned it in fee simple.

There have to be consequences for the Republicans greater than harsh language.

Like that'll ever happen

If Republicans really want "to erase any remnant of the Bush legacy," it should be easy for them to push forward impeachment, even at this late date. Make Nancy Pelosi take a stand!

Yeah, right.

It is remarkable to hear Newt Gingrich posing for the cameras as a moderate member of the loyal opposition:

“I think the party should be very selective,” he said. “We’ve had an election. The new president and his family should be in our prayers. We should give every indication that we will work with him when we can. But we should be comfortable disagreeing with him when we have to.”

The key words, though, are "give every indication". For Newt, this is about appearance, not reality.

What Benazir Bhutto has

She actually stands for something, unlike the Congressional Democrats. She shares ambition with them as a character trait, and that's probably driving her insurgency of the human rights lawyers, but she's willing, unlike Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, to take a stand and put herself at risk.

Krugman, national treasure

Although due to my own procrastination I never bought the late, unlamented TimesSelect, I missed Paul Krugman while he was behind the pay wall. If there's another columnist who is as consistently right about everything he writes about, I'm not reading her.

I hate being pessimistic, but the Pelosi-Reid fiasco that lobbyist-friendly Washington Democrats have become suggests to me, too, that President Hillary would not bring me any of these priorities:

• Restoration of transparent Constitutional democracy
  
• Departure from Iraq
• An apt successor to the New Deal

On the contrary, from President Obama or President Edwards, I believe we would get a liberal path, not just the path of a New Democrat.

Update: Krugman's blog, Conscience of a Liberal, added to my blogroll.

Baby birds

Time expects us to swallow the Bushist spin they regurgitate to "explain" why Gonzo resigned now. First, there's the sweet photo op of lunch with Duhbya and Laura. I wonder: do they get a second, fresh serving after the photographers are shooed away?

Then, there's the Josh Bolten deadline myth again. Why's the weather so nice in August? Josh Bolten told it that it had to leave now or stay until 2009. When senior White House aides jet off to cushy lobbying jobs next year, ya think we'll hear about Josh's deadline then. Tut-tut, how can Condi leave now? Suuure.

The story does quote Pat Leahy and Nancy Pelosi, posing their quotes as rebuttal to unnamed Republican sources who fear those nasty Dems will politicize the confirmation process. But the quotes are just boilerplate and, let me tell you, did not originate in response to the quote they are juxtaposed to.

In short, the Time story is almost pure Republican spin.

To impeach or not to impeach

The American Prospect (subscribe to the dead tree edition - I do) offers two liberal perspectives on impeachment:

• Harold Meyerson takes the point of view of the Democratic Congressional "leadership".
• Robert Kuttner argues for sterner stuff along lines I've walked before.

Both agree the Bushists deserve impeachment and removal for real and serious high crimes and misdemeanors. Meyerson spends a fair amount of copy trying to distract from the merits of the case against these witless would-be tyrants using humor. For me, he just wasn't funny enough to accomplish that.

Meyerson does admit:

This kind of assault on the Constitution is precisely what the founding fathers were guarding against when they crafted its language on impeachment.

Hard to argue with that...

Once the topic of just desserts is finally done, Meyerson starts with:

First, there's no way that there will be sufficient votes to remove Bush and Cheney from office.

Given the primary loyalty of Republicans to their party instead of their country and its ideals, this is true. It also doesn't matter. Politics is about drawing strong and definite distinctions between you and your opposition. John Kerry didn't have a clue about this in 2004, though he appears to have finally learned. Unfortunately, the Democratic caucuses haven't learned this obvious, elementary lesson. Maybe the Blue Dogs just don't want to learn, and the "leadership" lets them lead their more clued in caucus-mates around by the nose.

Democrats and liberals continue to labor under the misapprehension that they should be concerned with governance. This shows them to be slow learners - they've had a decade at least to cotton onto the idea that there is no compromise possible with this bunch of nefarious Republicans, instead only the chance of getting taken - again.

The political point of impeaching Duhbya is to tie his lousy, no-account ass around the deserving necks of every Republican who won't abandon the Bushist abrogation of the Constitution. The Constitutional point of impeaching the Bushists is of course more important - and more obvious.

Meyerson's second reason not to impeach is that Nancy Pelosi would become President and that this would boomerang with the electorate. Uh, wouldn't this only be possible if conviction were possible in the Senate? No matter, I have a rejoinder: Impeachment could boomerang if it were an elite process inflicted upon the country. Democrats need to convince their constituents that impeachment is a necessity of our democracy. Shouldn't that fundamental principle be obvious?

If Pelosi's succession were still a problem, there is no reason not to make a suitable compromise. Tell President Cheney that he can only escape war crimes prosecution if he appoints Chuck Hagel president before resigning. He can only pardon himself for violations of U.S. law.

Third, Meyerson says, the precedent set by changing the party in command of the Executive Branch via impeachment would be bad. This is exactly wrong. The Founders put this remedy in place for that very need. If that is a reason not to impeach Duhbya and Darth, it's a reason not to impeach any President or Vice President ever.

It's no wonder Meyerson writes a column for the Washington Post.