Major announcement coming up today. I’m hearing rumors that it’s not a happy one. He’s one of the only candidates who addresses poverty and labor issues head on, and it would be a shame not to have his voice included in this overly-long campaign season.
Speaking of Edwards, Limbaugh’s been playing one of his “joke” songs, a version of “I Am Woman” as sung by … John Edwards. Maybe Coulter’s explanation for that little “faggot” remark really should be taken at face value: it was a schoolyard taunt — which is all these people are apparently capable of. Honestly, what kind of mentality do you have to have, to consider it a useful critique, or even an effective insult, to call someone a “woman”? (Limbaugh’s other nickname for Edwards is, of course, the “Breck Girl.” Maybe you need to be a thrice-divorced misogynist to really appreciate the “humor”.)
If you will forgive some of that nasty left wing blogger swearing we hear so much about, these people are fucking idiots.
Updated: Elizabeth’s cancer is back but “the campaign goes on…”
I’ve been using the OSX mail app, but it’s notoriously glitchy — in my case, large chunks of old email occasionally just … vanish. If you’re on OSX and have a reliable mail program that you like, shoot me an email. I need something that can handle multiple email accounts and sort messages into folders based on keywords, sender, etc. And which isn’t going to take an excessive amount of time to figure out and set up. Suggestions? Shoot me an email: tomtomorrow-at-ix-dot-netcom-dot-com.
… okay, I’m good. Got a whole bunch of feedback on this, so please consider this a blanket thank you to everyone who replied.
The hardcore right seems determined to continue creating their own reality. Last night O’Reilly was haranguing a woman from World Can’t Wait, denying torture, death estimates, etc. To her credit, she didn’t let him walk all over him, though she did seem taken aback at his complete denial of well-documented facts. (”I have the information right here,” he says, shuffling papers on his desk. “Where’s your evidence?” As if people come on these shows with their own stacks of paper, ready to refute any right wing talking point O’Reilly or Hannity might pull out of their asses.)
Also: did you know 30,000 war supporters gathered in the streets of DC last weekend — and nobody got a photo of it? Here and here. At least when war protesters claimed their numbers were being under-represented back in ‘03, there were, you know, actual photographs of the streets of NYC jammed with people as far back as the eye could see.
They are exactly who you think they are, part eleventy-million-and-five
WASHINGTON, March 19 — A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.
Story’s here, but really, the lede pretty much says it all.
Via Jackson Williams at the Huffpo, a look back at what Bill Kristol and the gang at the Weekly Standard found oh so amusing four years ago.
Here in our office there’s this giant archive of newsclips, transcripts, and Internet postings we collected in the months preceding the war, wherein a world community of jackasses confidently predicted that the events lately unfolding on our television screens could not and would not ever take place. And you can imagine the temptation, we’re sure: A lesser SCRAPBOOK would throw open the file boxes and run through the streets with treasures like these, laughing hysterically.
“This invasion of Iraq, if it goes off, will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe. What will set it apart, distinguishing it for all time, is the immense–and transparent–political stupidity.”
–Chris Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 2002
* * *
“Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America’s intentions than Saddam’s. . . . [I]f President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then [he] is deluding himself.”
–New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, October 4, 2002
* * *
“If history is a guide, you cannot subdue a large and hostile city except by destroying it completely. Short of massacre, we will not inherit a pacified Iraq. . . . To support ‘the groundwork’ for this effort is to support a holocaust, quite soon, against Iraqi civilians and also against the troops on both sides. That is what victory means.”
–James K. Galbraith on the American Prospect website, April 1, 2003
* * *
“Cheney [down arrow] Tells ‘Meet the Press’ just before war, ‘We will be greeted as liberators.’ An arrogant blunder for the ages.”
–Newsweek, April 7, 2003 edition
* * *
“Is Wolfowitz really so ignorant of history as to believe the Iraqis would welcome us as ‘their hoped-for liberators’?”
–Eric Alterman in the April 21, 2003, issue of the Nation
There’s more. And here’s a related cartoon from a few weeks back.
It’s funny that an article about how everything the Republican party touches turns to shit could somehow be a hidden gift to conservatives everywhere, but Time magazine has somehow accomplished it with their cover story “How The Right Went Wrong”. The first sign that the article would be a thinly-disguised love letter to a conservative Never Never Land is the cover itself which sports a Photoshopped Reagan portrait that’s just begging to be turned into a velvet painting.
Good question, Time. What would Ronnie do? My guess is he’d probably thank you for making him a martyr with unvarnished praise like this :
Reagan restored a sense of America’s mission as the “city on a hill” that would be a light to the world and helped bring about the defeat of what he very undiplomatically christened “the evil empire.”
. . .
Conservatives are in many ways victims of their successes, and there have indeed been big ones. At 35%, the top tax rate is about half what it was when Reagan took office; the Soviet Union broke up; inflation is barely a nuisance; crime is down; and welfare is reformed.
You can almost hear John Ashcroft singing in the distance as Time breathlessly exhorts “the Reagan legacy”. Jeez, guys, why don’t you just skip the middleman and just write the entire 2008 GOP campaign script for them? The one time when the article actually tells the truth about the Reagan years, it’s done as an aside.
The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan’s legatees. Government is not only bigger and more expensive than it was when George W. Bush took office, but its reach is also longer, thanks to the broad new powers it has claimed as necessary to protect the homeland. It’s true that Reagan didn’t live up to everything he promised: he campaigned on smaller government, fiscal discipline and religious values, while his presidency brought us a larger government and a soaring deficit. But Bush’s apostasies are more extravagant by just about any measure you pick.
The conservative movement of Ronald Reagan was never about fiscal discipline or shrinking the size of the government, but to make sure all that money went to the “right” people. You’d think the fact that the Reagan presidency didn’t actually accomplish the things his acolytes insist he did would be worthy of more than a footnote. The more damning part about the article is the insistence that the actions of Bush and the rest of the GOP leadership over the last six years have somehow been at odds with what the Gipper would have done (WWRD?).
George Bush isn’t some conservative poseur, he’s the proverbial student that’s become the master. On just about every level, George Bush has improved upon Reagan. Bush has presided over political patronage that reaches every level of the government (and even into the realm of war profiteering). The Administration has had deficits that not only dwarf the gargantuan debt of their spiritual leader, but serve as a tribute to their spendthrift leader (”Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter….this is our due.”) And as the ultimate act of one-upsmanship, not only has the President pissed away every penny that comes into the treasury and buried the country under a mountain of red ink, but Bush was able to do so while continuing to cut taxes for the super rich. Beat that, Bonzo!
Your choice. Via Howie Klein. (To spare my inbox, yeah, a couple of these people might be ringers, or messing with the interviewer, or whatever. But most of them are clearly not.)
A week later, after the statue of Saddam fell, I got a call from the New York Times’ David Carr, one of my favorite writers there, who seemed to be asking me, politely, gently, even compassionately, what it felt like to be so, well, wrong — and to be so alone in being so wrong. Carr wrote a fair piece; he corralled me, Dan Perkins (our Tom Tomorrow), Katrina vanden Heuvel and Eric Alterman of the Nation, and Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker; he didn’t lump us with any far-left Saddam-boosters or anyone hoping for “a million Mogadishus.” He did let Christopher Hitchens say this about us: “Their prediction and deepest hope was that the black shirts of the fedayeen were going to win and force a stalemate. Just like they predicted, the Arab street did explode, but with the joy of freedom, which is not the one that they meant, so they are furious and depressed.” But that’s a nice quote to have four years later. Just look at all that joy of freedom out on the Arab street!
