Idiot Brigade

I'm on vacation at the moment in Alaska, but felt compelled to make a quick entry. An interview of President Bush by Brian Willams of NBC this week prompted me to action.

In it, Bush declared his usual steadfast confidence that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. But when faced with the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, a red-faced, shrugging Bush shot back that Saddam was part of the terrorism problem.

The dwindling Americans who still believe Bush's half-baked and disproven rhetoric are the only ones not utterly embarrassed by such preposterous Presidential responses.

Bush made this idiotic statement in New Orleans, a year after he and his pathetic team of cronies botched the Katrina Hurricane response and left the corpse of the dead city of New Orleans to rot. But Bush kept the tired catchphrases and hollow promises flying.

Giving Williams an earnest earful, Bush spoke about his commitment to rebuilding, about how the people of Louisiana were in his heart, and how he would come through.

Oh yeah? When?

It's been a year and the situation has gone from complete disaster to ongoing disaster. Only a quarter of the Big Easy's residents have returned home, the others are displaced and unable to return, and much of the flood-ravaged area is still a wasteland. The Bush timetable seems less like a commitment than a whitewash.

And speaking of incompetence, Donald Rumsfeld went spewing at the mouth today about how critics of the Bush administration may not have learned the lessons of history, implying that the situation in Iraq was like Nazi Germany under Hitler.

But Rumsfeld is incapable of seeing the broader lessons of history--that when a nation begins to compromise its values (torture, invasion of privacy) to face a threat (Osama) or a perceived threat (Saddam), it starts down the slippery slope of fascism itself.

Indeed, the black-and-white, arrogant, judgmental, extreme, good-versus-evil propaganda pouring from Bush and his handlers after 9/11 have a much greater resemblance to those we claim to oppose (Islamic Extremists) than the giants of our own history, like Lincoln, Kennedy and King.

History is already looking back on Rummy and Bush with great disdain, and the only question left to answer is how big a disaster will they leave behind.

That they are incapable of seeing or admitting their errors and shortcomings is only an incremental addition to a far greater tragedy.

And every time they get on television and say stupid things, they push more voters into the arms of reason, progress, accountability and change.

Trash-Talking Fear-Mongers

It’s been a rough week for Republican operatives. They just can’t seem to hold back the bile, dishonesty and spin that flows whenever they open their mouths.

Potential GOP Presidential candidate George Allen greeted a worker from a rival campaign with racial epithets, using angry and demeaning language in front of a gathered crowd in Virginia. Though he apologized for the slur, Allen’s tone was mean, crude and humorless--not exactly a Presidential performance.

And Vice President Dick Cheney crawled out of his dark hole this week to stoke the embers of fear, suggesting that supporters of Connecticut Democrat Ned Lamont were supporters of al Qaeda. In the past, a spineless press might have looked the other way, but with the administration’s Iraq policy in shreds, the press finally described Cheney’s comments for what they were--hyperbolic, insulting, divisive and manipulative. What took them so long?

Media neo-con Mort Zuckerman’s latest op-ed in US News echoed the failed policies Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Libby, Rove and others. Has he learned nothing? He stated:

“Israel must continue to press its attack on Hezbollah until the terrorist threat is removed.”

Just like we must continue the war on terror until the terror threat is "removed"? Which is to say, never. Trying to kill every terrorist is a ridiculous and impossible goal. If Israel wants to feel completely and perfectly safe from Hezbollah, they will need to kill every Muslim in Lebanon. Somehow, I suspect ethnic cleansing isn’t a policy they want to pursue. How about you, Mort?

But perhaps the largest foot inserted into the biggest mouth belonged to Ken Mehlman, chairman of the RNC. On Meet The Press last weekend, the subject of November elections prompted Mehlman to declare:

“...the fundamental question Americans are going to have to answer is, “Do you believe we’re at war?”

Duh. Everybody believes we’re at war. But many Americans don't believe the Bush team is still at war with Osama Bin Laden. Instead, that war has been sidetracked by Cheney and others for deeper, more sinister purposes in oil-rich Iraq, which had little to do with jihad terrorism before we invaded.

Regarding the string of misjudgments in Iraq, Mehlman noted that:

“...we face a movement, not a country. It’s harder to beat a movement.”

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to beat a movement with bombs. You can only undermine it with public support and credibility. Ooops. Mehlman’s observation is correct, but the Bush policy response has been entirely wrong.

That doesn’t matter now, contends Mehlman, playing the 9/11 card:

“We know that 9/11 taught us how dangerous it was when you had a failed state in Afghanistan. Imagine a failed state on the second-largest oil reserves in the world.”

We don’t need to imagine. Despite our troops, Iraq is a failed state! Bush's miscalculations and incompetence caused Iraq to fail. And now the same Republicans who screwed it up want us to trust them to clean it up. Come on, Ken. We’re just not that stupid.

Or are we? Perhaps the RNC slogan-of-the-week will undo all the blunders, scandals and misjudgments, inspiring voters to support Republicans again. Can you say “Adapting To Win”? Mehlman can:

“The choice in this election is not between “Stay the course” and “Cut and run,” it’s between “Win by adapting” and “Cut and run.”...The fact is, before the successful Iraqi elections, the number of troops went up from 137,000 to 167,000. That’s adapting to win!”

If by winning Mehlman means fostering anarchy, chaos, torture, kidnappings, executions, assassinations, reprisals and death squads, then we are winning big in Iraq.

But word-games can’t whitewash a catastrophe, and Mehlman’s exhausted, baggy-eyed face tells us everything we need to know about the challenges Republicans face in the upcoming elections. "Adapting" is a hollow claim, and character assassination has lost its traction. The GOP has little left to stand on but tired slogans and the thread-bare assertion that Democrats “don’t stand for anything.”

As long as Democrats don’t stand for dishonesty, incompetence, arrogance, cronyism, favoritism, pay-for-play, narrowness, denial, division and stubbornness, they will likely break the Republican lock on power in Washington. And fortunately, Democrats stand for a lot more than Mehlman and his angry bosses care to acknowlege. When they finally break that lock, a lot of things should change for the better.

White House: Elder Bush Caused 9/11

The White House today accused President George H. W. Bush of bringing on 9/11. Or at least, that’s what the twisted logic of White House spokesman Tony Snow implied.

Snow explained that by "walking away" from Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991--a decision made by then-President Bush--we emboldened Bin Laden to come after us because he saw us as weak. And if we exit Iraq now, Snow argued, we will send the same message to Bin Laden again.

What intellectual nonsense. Like Bin Laden isn’t coming after us already?

And Ken Mehlman, the embodiment of GOP spin, distortion and evasion, wouldn’t even deny the implication that Republican leaders, including Ronald Reagan and his withdrawl of Marines from Beirut, have sent the wrong message to terrorists in the past. Talking to Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball, Mehlman changed the subject, as he did with many of Matthew’s other tough questions.

Republicans desperately want the American public to believe that our presence in Iraq still holds some valuable purpose. But voters know better.

And that’s what the nomination of Ned Lamont to the Democratic Senate ticket in Connecticut demonstrates. The public is way out in front of the GOP, and Joe Lieberman, too. Loser Lieberman today tried to paint Lamont as “far out of the mainstream,” which is exactly wrong. By supporting Bush and his disastrous policies, Lieberman demonstrated that he was way outside the mainstream, and voters punished him for it.

The more Republicans try to brand Democrats as hippie Communist peaceniks and America haters, the more they offend the conclusions already made by the general public--that Iraq was a blunder, our occupation has been a disaster, our safety is diminished and none of the GOP “leaders” have the guts to change course.

Ken Mehlman constantly says that Democrats and Liberals love to “blame America”. But in fact, along with many Independents and even some Republicans, they love to blame Bush and the Republicans because the blame is well earned. The GOP has made a big, fat, stinking mess of things.

The stupidity and hollowness of the current Republican battle-cry testifies to their desperation and policy bankruptcy. They cannot concede their mistakes or they will lose their newfound power. And lose it they should.

Our Tolerance For Failure

The highlight of last week’s (8/3) Senate Armed Services Committee meeting was not Hillary Clinton’s indictment of Donald Rumsfeld. Instead, it was a statement made by Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton.

Questioning the witnesses--Donald Rumsfeld, Peter Pace and John Abizaid--on why so many Americans are against the occupation of Iraq, Dayton elegantly reframed the issue:

“It isn’t their will--the will of the American people--that’s being tested. It’s their tolerance for failure.”

And many of those failures were on display at the hearing, including the inability of civilian leaders to grasp realities on the ground. When Senator Clinton blamed our inability to secure Iraq (its infrastructure and weapons stockpiles) on inadequate troop levels, an incredulous Rummy responded:

“You said the number of troops were wrong. Well, I guess history will make a judgment on that.”

Sorry, Rummy. History already has. You blew it and the whole world knows.

But Rummy wasn’t finished. He went on a tirade about the viciousness of our enemy, describing their side as barbaric and lawless while our “side puts their men and women at risk in uniform and obeys the laws of war.”

Sorry again, Rummy. We haven't obeyed the laws of war, and your administration is still looking for ways to circumvent those rules.

Rummy urged that “we should strive to think through how our words will be interpreted by our troops, by the people of Afghanistan and Iraq...and we should consider how our words can be used by our deadly enemy.”

But Rummy and the Bush team have done little to think through how their actions and mistakes will be used by our deadly enemy. Actions like torture, indefinite detention, murder, rendition, pitifully incompetent planning and a failed reconstruction. Perhaps nobody ever told the Secretary that actions speak louder than words.

When confronted with examples of incompetence, Rummy replied that there were “an awful lot of talented people engaged in this.” But he didn't explain how that excused the horrific miscalculations, faulty assumptions and bad policies the invasion suffered.

One of those supposedly talented people, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace, tried to clarify our mission in Iraq: “To help provide enough security inside of Iraq for the Iraqi government to provide governance and economic opportunity for their citizens.”

No wonder so many Senators are concerned. By Pace's definition, we've been failing in Iraq from the start, and the trend-line has steepened downward. How does Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice sum up the situation? From a recent CNN interview:

“Well, I think the problem is that everybody takes a snapshot every day of how we're doing in what is a huge and historical transformation...But I would be surprised, if you look back on the other big historical transformations that the world has been through, that people didn't do the same thing. I think they probably took snapshots that now, in retrospect, when you look back on them, look pretty shortsighted.”

Sadly, Condi misses the fact that when you put all those snapshots in a line, they form a time series--a video--of what’s been happening, and that video is an appalling testament to a long, slow, downward slide.

Asked by CNN’s David Gregory, “when does staying the course become less a strategy and more of a copout?”, Rice responded:

“David, we've just begun the Baghdad security plan. Malaki has only been in office several weeks.”

Except that we’ve occupied Baghdad and Iraq for almost three-and-a-half years and have never been able to maintain order. Indeed, according to General Abizaid, "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."

Condi and Rummy want us to believe that a sustained, growing failure will somehow be reversed by the same people whose ineptitude made the failure inevitable.

Until they stop drinking the White House Kool-Aid, they won’t be able to change course. But to a brittle, dispirited and besieged administration, change might be impossible. At this political moment, a course correction might only confirm what so many have alleged--that the Bush team made a strategic blunder of historic proportions, executed that strategy with total incompetence and deserve to be shown the political door.

How much longer will the American public tolerate their failure?

Go Ned Lamont

As Connecticut closes in on Primary Day, Senator Joe Lieberman continues to pout and spout. Calling in his political chips, Senator Joe brought a swarm of other Senators and dignitaries to rallies this week, trying claw his way back to even with Ned Lamont, his poll-leading Democratic challenger.

Poor Joe. He’s “in a battle.” And his frowny face shows it. Joe just can’t understand why voters seem to be turning against him. The Christian Science Monitor says the race is about “the future of the Democratic party.” They contend that Lieberman’s stance on Iraq places him in the crosshairs of the radical left who will gain power if they can defeat a centrist like Joe, jeopardizing the prospects of other centrists like Hilary Clinton.

I disagree. Everybody knows Joe is a conservative. The Connecticut race is about honesty and competence. And depending on how his actions are interpreted, Joe Lieberman is either deceptive or incompetent. Voters care less about his support for a continuing presence in Iraq, but they care a lot about a Democrat who has not only failed to stand up to the worst President in our nation’s history, but actually embraces the President’s dishonest and divisive agenda. Said Lieberman:

“It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”

Spoken like a true Republican, and a fascist Republican at that.

Either Senator Joe has turned his back on Democratic principles to curry favor with conservative voters or he is incapable of understanding the critical role dissent plays when a Republican President and Republican Congress make an absoute disaster out of virtually everything they touch. Democrats didn't undermine Presidential credibility--Bush and his spineless GOP Congress did it themselves.

Does Joe not care that our Constitution has been trashed? Does he not care that our international standing is in tatters? Does he not care that the environment has been denuded by sell-to-the-highest-bidder Republicans? Does he not care that Federal Agencies are staffed with inept cronies? Does he not care that only the wealthy have benefitted from tax cuts and the rest have been left behind? Does he not care that our health care system is a disaster? Does he not care that legislation is for sale? Does he not care that the Supreme Court has been re-staffed by radical ideologues?

Senator Joe’s track record is as abysmal as the Republicans he sucks up to. And he will likely pay. Nobody wants to be represented by an idiot, a liar or a laughing stock.