Dammit

Yes I missed the speech. Fie on me for not waking up till noon.

Joe Says Relax

Joe Conason has a great piece today for those of us who see doom in recent poll numbers.

The liberal tendency to assume the fetal position upon hearing any bad news not only creates a damaging psychological environment for those who indulge it, but also repels undecided and independent voters who are seeking strong, confident leadership. Nobody wants to join a team that obsesses more about losing than winning.

Thank you! Yes exactly! Why else did Democratic leadership roll over so quickly in 2000 despite having the will of the voters on their side? Even when we win we act like losers.

Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

This is a great piece of writing by Garrison Keillor. I've been meaning to send this link to various relatives of mine who have recently taken to bringing up Abraham Lincoln as a rationalization for supporting the Republican party, and citing "The Blue and the Gray" as a softer, gentler way of looking at the Civil War from the point of view of the Confederacy.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Jeez, do I really share the same genes as people who could support these nimrods? Hmmm...as number 12 in the line-up, there's only a slim chance that I was adopted.

Thanks to chicanaontheedge for the link.

From Newsweek via Kos:

..Sixteen months after the war's supposed end, Iraq's insurgency is spreading. Each successful demand by kidnappers has spawned more hostage-takings?to make Philippine troops go home, to stop Turkish truckers from hauling supplies into Iraq, to extort fat ransom payments from Kuwaitis. The few relief groups that remain in Iraq are talking seriously about leaving. U.S. forces have effectively ceded entire cities to the insurgents, and much of the country elsewhere is a battleground. Last week the total number of U.S. war dead in Iraq passed the 1,000 mark, reaching 1,007 by the end of Saturday.

...Yet U.S. officials publicly insist that Iraq will somehow hold national elections before the end of January. The appointed council currently acting as Iraq's government under interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is to be replaced by an elected constitutional assembly?if the vote takes place. "I presume the election will be delayed," says the Iraqi Interior Ministry's chief spokesman, Sabah Kadhim. A senior Iraqi official sees no chance of January elections: "I'm convinced that it's not going to happen. It's just not realistic. How is it going to happen?" Some Iraqis worry that America will stick to its schedule despite all obstacles. "The Americans have created a series of fictional dates and events in order to delude themselves," says Ghassan Atiyya, director of the independent Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, who recently met with Allawi and American representatives to discuss the January agenda. "Badly prepared elections, rather than healing wounds, will open them."

Of course we've "created a series fictional dates and events to delude ourselves." We elected were saddled with a fictional president who created a fictional reason for going to war with Iraq and then declared a fictional victory. Why should anything about this war be real except for the people who are dying in it?

President Bowel Movement on the Pantleg of History

I can't even imagine the gnashing and grinding of teeth that would be all over primetime if even a fraction of this stuff was being alleged against John Kerry.

...Bush’s charge sheet for alleged wrongdoing has got it all – sex, drugs, cowardice, cruelty; his alleged failings and foibles are imperial in stature.

But then Jesus forgave George for every transgression and, of course, being born again, and all, he came to embrace Christianity.

Perhaps the most disturbing example of Bush’s zeal for the Death House was shown in 1998 when he was governor of the state of Texas. Karla Faye Tucker was then facing execution by lethal injection. The former teen prostitute had committed murder after a three-day drug binge and later underwent a religious conversion in jail. As a born-again Christian – just like Bush – many religious leaders wanted her life spared. Tucker even appeared on Larry King’s TV show to discuss her case. Bush was caught out by a reporter mocking the condemned woman. Sneering at her, he put on a whiney voice, pouted his lips and whimpered: “Please, don’t kill me.”

Thanks to Smirking Chimp for the link.

Bumper Sticker polling

If it's any consolation to those of you who are becoming increasingly discouraged about the election--on a roadtrip to and from NYC just after the Repuglican convention, (and, yes, this did involve moving Lenora to Brooklyn), the political bumper stickers for Kerry/Edwards were twice the Bush/Cheney stickers. And that's driving across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Didn't see my personal favorite: "I Brake Like a Little Girl"
I might have to produce that one myself.

Good!

In a sharp rebuke of a new administration policy, the House moved Thursday to block the Labor Department from carrying out overtime rules that critics argued could deprive millions of workers of their overtime pay

Even though the convention is over, the protest spirit hasn’t quite died down. People are still passing out flyers and selling anti-Bush pins. The rage of the last week’s protests is spilling over into regular life. It suits me just fine. Despite having watched a sum total of 65 minutes of it, my mind still feels tainted.

I’m not sure what was more disgusting, the sheer number of adoring delegates dwarfed only by the number of lies told, the Zell Miller meltdown, the acceptance speech itself, or the whole 9/11 orgy.

The inspiration the president provided, however, was overshadowed by the disturbing nostalgia for Sept. 11 that preceded it. The phenomenon of "faster nostalgia" keeps accelerating, and the decades we reminisce about grow closer and closer to the present with each passing year. But the two political conventions this August must be the first recorded instances of nostalgia for the 21 st century.

During the Democratic convention, too many speakers looked back to 9/11 with fondness. They didn't recall the months after the worst foreign attack in American history as a sad and tragic time. Instead, they appeared to remember those days as a warm-and-fuzzy time of national unity, now lost because of Republican partisanship. But the GOP's wistful look back at the tragedy as a marvelous occasion that somehow justifies the re-election of President Bush was even more stomach-turning. The convention's final night had the air of a VH-1 special: I Love Sept. 11.

I don’t buy Suellentrop’s assessment of the Democratic Convention. That convention was about many things and 9/11 was one of them. But he’s spot on about how much this election hinges on that vision of Bush cheerleading on the charred ruins of the Twin Towers.

In Sunday’s times Frank Rich has a discouraging piece on how the image of Bush as a fake war hero has (so far) succeeded in trumping Kerry’s real war heroism. I do agree with Rich in that Kerry gets into trouble when he lets himself get caught up in a pissing contest with Bush. But I don’t think the answer is to create a new image of Kerry as the vet who stood up to the Vietnam war. I personally prefer that image above all else (if you haven’t seen the footage of him testifying before Congress after his tour of duty, check out C-SPAN). But I think that’s a loser at this late date, Kerry’s problem is that he is too hesitant to turn the tables on the opposition. Take this story on Bush’s National Guard days. This article should be in the talking points of every Democratic operative out there. Part of image-making in a campaign is doing damage to the other guy’s image. And Bush in vulnerable.

Live from New York

As of 6:00 P.M. EST, I am a New Yorker. I have the scary cab ride and the tummy full of good eats to prove it. I had planned to be here a day or two earlier and maybe blog part of the convention but you know how these things go. You start thinking about traffic and getting lost and crowds, and the next thing you know you're two days behind schedule.

I did not catch much of the Republican Convention. I couldn't stomach it. I saw Junior's speech last night though. It's depressing. If we give him another four years in office, we deserve whatever catastrophe follows.

Okay, I'm exhausted. More to follow.

If we lived in a better world, last night's episode of The Daily Show would be the end of this Swift Boat Veteran crapisode.

STEWART: Here's what puzzles me most, Rob. John Kerry's record in Vietnam is pretty much right there in the official records of the US military, and haven't been disputed for 35 years?

CORDDRY: That's right, Jon, and that's certainly the spin you'll be hearing coming from the Kerry campaign over the next few days.

STEWART: Th-that's not a spin thing, that's a fact. That's established.

CORDDRY: Exactly, Jon, and that established, incontravertible fact is one side of the story.

Oh and tune in tonight. John Kerry is the guest.

ADDED: The Chicago Tribune has been all over this as well.

O’Reilly wins?

You all may have noticed today the NYTimes front-page story by Susan Sach & Judith Miller on the Oil-for-food Scandal I’ll talk momentarily about the contents of the article, but the real story is why it’s there at all. For months now, O”Reilly, Safire, and all the bottom feeders on the right have been pushing this story as THE scandal, and complaining mightily that a left-leaning media have avoided it in their preoccupation with beating up the Bush administration for such things as lying to the nation about Iraq and torturing prisoners at Abu-Ghraib. O’Reilly has taken to mentioning “oil-for-food” when anyone so much as asks him the time of day, and when Russert had both him and Krugman on recently, O’Reliable Bullshit Bill brought it up by contrasting the number of articles the Times had run on Abu Ghraib vs. the number on oil-for-food. And so, voila, this story appeareth—ah capitulation, thy name is liberal media.

What’s the goal? First of all changing the subject by charging that the real corruption is not in the White House but in the UN. Equally important, though is discrediting the global antiwar effort in the run up to the election. France and Russia are deeply involved and what the Right has been charging all along is that the reluctance of so-called old Europe to back the war was based on nothing more than that these countries were profiting handsomely from kickbacks from Hussein. This is Bush’s grab for the moral high ground after pursuing and unnecessary and illegal war, and we shouldn’t forget that fact.

As for the story itself: Well, at present Paul Volcker, who’s chairing the panel that’s looking into the issue says that it’ll be at least a year before they determine whether the charges are justified (but that’s not going to matter if the Right gets to prosecute this in the press during the next twelve weeks). And from what’s been reported thus far, it’s pretty clear there were kickbacks galore, but all stemming ultimately from the ill-designed sanctions against Iraq after the first war, which were punishing the Iraqi people and not doing anything to oust Hussein’s regime. The “Oil-For-Food” program was a 1996 compromise, and who’s to say that it wasn’t working at some level given that Hussein appears to have given up his WMD and fewer Iraqi's may have starved than would have otherwise? Be that as it may, however, the real point is that since neither the first Gulf War nor the sanctions following it were part of our agenda, the only dog we have in this fight is the one that keeps biting at the administration for having unjustly led the nation into war

I’m back, folks. I return triumphant. My waking nightmares of a cramped, windowless, New York existence have been wiped clean by a charming abode in Williamsburg complete with non-scary smart future roommate.

I did bring my laptop, meaning of course to find a cool hotspot from where which to blog but somehow it never happened. I ended up wandering around Chelsea and Greenwich Village just getting used to the layout and finding nice corners for coffee, lunch, and bubble tea.

I also got a taste of what life on “high alert” feels like. A couple of times on my rambles I was forced to turn back due to the fact that streets were blocked off while police investigated suspicious packages. On the Upper East Side there is a visible military presence because of all the embassies. It’s slightly surreal. Initially I felt a thrill of fear. What if it’s real? What then? But nothing did, and it’s hard to know what do with that stop-and-start of tension. This of course makes me dread moving during the week of the Republican National Convention. It’s all people are talking about; the protests, the security, the traffic, the security.

But I’m looking forward to it, particularly now that I’ve cleared the first hurdle of living space. I’ll be living in the city of great theatre, great food, great literature, and of course, Jon Stewart.

P.S. I almost had a chance to see the taping of Bill Clinton on The Daily Show but it fell through. Oh well.

Note to Senator Kerry

After reading this Boston Globe article about your Iraq vote, I started to wonder why you give those slimy bastards on the right more rope with which to hang you. I know you want to take an honorable stance and not let on that the current president of the USA can't be trusted to take the country around the block, much less to Iraq. But it's time to call a duck, a duck. I've come to agree with an alternative answer that a certain professor I know suggested you use the next time the question comes up:

If I had known then that the president and his advisors were going to handle the Iraq situation in such a boneheaded, hamhanded, incompetent way, then I wouldn't have voted to give the president authorization to go to war. I made my vote on the assumption that the president could be trusted to act responsibly. Obviously, I was mistaken.

It's short but sweet.

If you had any suspicions that political motivations determined the timing of Tom Ridge's targeted Orange Alerts last week the AP story today about the handling of similar intelligence about Las Vegas casinos seems to confirm that the Bush administration has no consistent policy about how to keep the public informed about terror threats and tends to release information when it is to its advantage to do so. The decision about whether or not to go to an Orange Alert in 2002 when FBI officials informed Las Vegas authorities about threatening videotapes was left to local authorities, whose fears about liability and loss of tourist revenues led them to suppress the information. So much for protecting the nation. Any chance Bush & Ridge will face tough questions from the mainstream media?

So here's the deal.

For the past couple of weeks I've been engaged in tying up umpteen thousand loose ends before leaving my job and today was finally the last day. Tomorrow I am off to New York to look at apartments for four days. At some point after that I will be moving. So yes things are going to be a little sloppy here for the time being. I've been sorta keeping up with the news but in a channel-surfing way. But I do see things picking up. I will be busy once I start classes but I also will be in a very good thinking place and hopefully my posts will blossom. I might--MIGHT--start a New York blog. We'll see. So bear with me. Life is happening.

This is great.

I stuck to watching C-SPAN for most of the convention so I missed most of the pundit reaction to Kerry's speech, but I did hear tell that on PBS for a bright and shining moment, David Brooks removed his head from his ass.

Unfortunately he has reassumed the positionor rather he never really removed it in the first place.

So far, I think Josh Marshall has the best first-hand take on the convention. I'm glad I'm not there (Bono's presence notwithstanding). It sounds like chaos. But back to Josh. Having watched most of the speeches last night, I'd have to agree that the dems seem to understand their base a bit more than we give them credit for.

When it first occurred to me to write this post I was going to say that partisan Democrats have decided to give Kerry a free hand in appealing to independents and swing voters. But that doesn't get it quite right. That was the case in 1992 when the party's core voters, after twelve years out of the White House, were willing to give Bill Clinton all sorts of leeway with what most viewed as his DLC heterodoxies. But something different is at work here.

Among Democrats, the rejection of this president is so total, exists on so many different levels, and is so fused into their understanding of all the major issues facing the country, that it doesn't even need to be explicitly evoked. The headline of Susan Page's piece in USA Today reads: "Speakers offer few barbs, try to stay warm and fuzzy." But the primetime speeches were actually brimming with barbs, and rather jagged ones at that. They were just woven into the fabric of the speeches, fused into rough-sketched discussions of policy, or paeans to Kerry.

Gore’s Speech

I always enjoy watching Gore speak. I also hate it. I hate it because seeing him reveals in stark relief exactly what should have been. Seeing him makes it harder to hear Bush speak, to open the paper and see how far we have fallen. I hate it because the man who spoke tonight is not the same man who conceded the election nearly 4 years ago. This man would have fought tooth and nail. This is a man who hit his stride too late to himself any good.

Seeing Gore reminds me that I don’t ever again want to feel the way I did nearly 4 years ago.

Convention Blogging

Not much of this from me. All the cool kids are in Boston. I might blog on some key speeches throughout the week.

And apparently someone's crashing our party. Ann Coulter in Boston, during the Democratic Convention? She must be breaking out in hives. I hope she gets all scabby.