Out of My Mind

It's great to have a clear perspective, you know, having sensible priorities and all.

From Barron's:

"Ed Yardeni, chief investment strategist for Oak Associates, a mutual-fund concern... finds it unsettling that President Bush's opponents in Congress are diminishing his credibility throughout the world at a time when he is trying to improve trade with Latin America and China.

"'I would like the president to maintain his credibility and his stature,' Yardeni says."

Someone who is not a millionaire might stop to ask a few questions. Like why is the president's credibility diminished? Maybe the source of the problem is, maybe, just that this entire administration is dishonest and it's just getting caught in lie after lie, that's absolute moral bankruptcy becomes clearer and clearer every day. And the GOPers in Congress are getting more and more scared of 2006 between the administration's increasingly toxic perception (alas, reality-based) and acid-drip of the Abramoff affair.

And here's Wall Streeter Yardeni pinning the blame on everyone except the culprits.

If true.

How "red" is the US of ? W's popularity:

Use to your heart's contentment. I know I will.

Right, why should The Onion be allowed to use the Great Seal of the President of the United States for satiric purposes when W himself does such an awesome job of mocking the office himself.





Let's go to the video:

http://www.devilducky.com/media/21502/

See it while you can.

A poster at Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly blog makes the point simply:

"A shield law is predicated on the press not being quislings to power. So long as they are, such a law simpy grants cover to their craviness.

"Posted by: SavageView on November 19, 2005 at 3:36 PM"

Judy, whom the Times (on Pinch's orders, probably) believed to be the poster child for a Federal shield law, is in fact the reason why maybe it's not necessary or even a bad thing.

Simply, why is a courtier like her entitled to protection for refusing to ID self-serving lying apparatchiks demanding anonymity in order to bull$h!t us? Does that help a free press? I mean, can a paper or magazine or news show be journalisticly valid devoid of any leaks of lies from any anonymous government sources? Of course it can. Judy, for example, towards the end of her stint at the Times served the arguably valuable service of being a front-page @$$ kisser of the administration. But what's the necessity of that, the value to us? Beats me.

Off the top of my head....

The Wall Street Journal notes in a holiday weekend Saturday editorial that we're winning in Iraq.

Of course: is Iraq worse off than it was approximately one week post-invasion?

Of course not.

Would it be better off now if the whole sanctions issue have been handled in a more reasonable manner than it was, effectively dictated by the neo-cons (accent on "con"), possibly the nuttiest of the wingnuts? You can discuss the details but I see it as a given.

And Saddam was an utter whore; I cannot believe and have seen nothing to the contrary that he could have been bought off, for cheaper in every way that matters -- money and human cost -- than this ridiculous utterly unnecessary war.

And what have we gotten out of it (excluding W's financial supporters of course)? A weakened armed services? Less security of course; nothing terrorists and radicals like better than an anarchy. (That's why they were in Afghanistan -- wasn't that Taliabani Kabul was such a cool place.)

At least, maybe, the majority of us is copping to the utter dishonesty of this administration; in a year we'll see whether enough voters feel the same way.... Of course voting them out is no way like actually getting rid of the wingnuts cf. the Clinton years.

Free download, but lyrics only :)

Don't agree with him completely, but he's a red-state free-thinker and fighter and that has to respected....
Off of the new album, the first single (or so they say):

AMERICA FIRST
Written by Merle Haggard

Why don't we liberate these United States
We're the ones who need it the worst
Let the rest of the world help us for a change
And let's rebuild America first

Our highways and bridges are falling apart
Who's blessed and who has been cursed
There's things to be done all over the world
But let's rebuild America first

Who's on the hill and who's watching the valley
Who's in charge of it all
God bless the Army and God bless our liberty
Dadgum the rest of it all

Yea, men in position but backing away
Freedom is stuck in reverse
Let's get out of Iraq and get back on the track
And let's rebuild America first

Why don't we liberate these United States
We're the ones who need it the most
You think I'm blowing smoke
Boys it ain't no joke
I make twenty trips a year from coast to coast

From the book Judy, Pinch and Keller have neglected to read, the NYT's very own "Ethical Journalism: A Handbook of Values and Practices the News and Editorial Departments" (the sub-title's even grammatically challenged!!).

Instructions: Read item #15 and think of Judy's coverage of the WMD fandango and the (unknown!) editors' handling of same.


The Times really loves and respects its readers, it does!

Somehow sort of appropriate for a Thanksgiving post....

This awful, anti-American, nigh-treasonous administration.

The mendancity of Big Media, Journalism Division, with a visceral
focus on, but not limited to, the TImes.

The crappiness and dishonesty of Windows and Micro$oft (you've been
spard but a clue can be had viewing this site on a Windows "box").

And I dare not even mention the fourth but first clue is: I admit to
spending too much time surfing the web.

Leading the modern western world back to the dark ages.

The American Museum of Natural History can't find a single corporate sponsor for it's Darwin exhibit. And apparently American Big Media can't find it to cover the story:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/22/corporate_sponsors_darwin/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/20/wdarwin20.xml

http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/evolving-into-a-tricky-exhibit/2005/11/21/1132421603091.html

That said, I must point out that maybe it is not a political issue at all but maybe the corporate donors saw the recent hyped dinosaur exhibit at AMNH and were as underwhelmed as I was so, you know, just couldn't be inspired to kick in some money.

But somehow I doubt that's the explanation....

From Salon:

"Mandatory funding for the bridges was written into the 2006 federal transportation bill back in August, but by mid-November, after considerable outcry, Republicans on an appropriations subcommittee in the House stripped the funding for the bridges from the $286 billion bill. It was an attempt to kill the bridge plan -- and the embarrassing publicity it had attracted for a party that boasts of fiscal responsibility. Recent articles in the New York Times and USA Today referred to the move as a compromise. But that looks like a generous assessment: While Alaska is no longer required to spend the money on the bridges, it will still receive all of it (part of the $2.5 billion total awarded to the state in the bill), and can still build the two bridges if the state Legislature so decides.:

(http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/11/23/alaska_bridges/)

One: Things seem to be heading towards a broken up state with some sort of independence for Iraqi Kurdistan and its oil fields under our control (or more precisely the control of multinational America-centric Big Oil). The rest of the state would be an Islamic "Republic" (rigged elections and a significant degree of oppression, hence the quote marks).

Good thing or bad?

"Getting out as soon as practicable": If that isn't even the Cheney/Rove/Bush administration's timetable (and immediate withdrawal isn't either), well, what is its timetable? Forever?

How to get through to a live person at customer support:

http://www.paulenglish.com/ivr/

Who's da turkey? Who's your turkey?

From the White House itself (http://www.whitehouse.gov/holiday/thanksgiving/2005/index.html):


Not a hard choice at all, huh?

That's a better word for the Judy Millers, the Bob Woodwards, the Russerts and the Blitzers (ad nauseum ad infitium) than "water carrier" I think.

Headline from some Washington Times article:

Nearly half of black pregnancies end in abortion

(http://www.insightmag.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=5D3B38F8A2584DB5A77BA05660C6045C&nm=Free+Access&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=DB13D7B3AA914E6E9B01855D9DE69B45)

Thought about 50% of pregnancies do not end in birth for whatever reason....

Wait, I've parsed the article; based on a survey with shaky extrapolations in lieu of facts. (Of course, facts are so 20th century.)

Recorded for prosperity.

Of course the source is, well, questuinable. But there's been a little buzzing elsewhere. And I remember the video from a wedding reception well after W went on the wagon and he clearly had some sort of buzz. Personally, I never believed that he was or is clean and sober. And of course, I loved the articles claiming that is a so-called dry drunk -- essentially, permanently brain damaged.

OTOH, he really was and is a willing puppet for some very nasty nutjobs that needed an attractive front. Not like he actually sets policy, so his sobriety ultimately is of minimal significance; just another big lie he's maybe caught in.

This one's worth, I dunno, hundreds, thousands, zillions? of words:

Or the need for, um, alternatives.

The top editor of the Washing Post demonstrates his philosophy of journalism:

BLITZER: Why didn't you immediately inform your readers, when he told you, yes, he had learned about this early on, long before, you know, Bob Novak wrote his column in July of 2003? Why not, without revealing the source, at least tell your readers what's going on?

DOWNIE: Because the source didn't allow us to. The source was insisting on maintaining the confidentiality of this particular part of his interviews with Bob and the rest of these interviews with Bob, for that matter. So we didn't have something we could report at that time.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

BLITZER: You could have revealed to your readers that an unnamed source had told Bob Woodward about this two years earlier without naming the source.

DOWNIE: At that point, once Bob had told me about this, then a chain of events took place that led to his being asked by the special prosecutor to testify in a deposition, which Bob did on Monday.

To, you know, keep things in some sort of perspective: Wen Ho Lee, never convicted in a court of law, spent nine months imprisoned based on the insanity of the wingnuts in charge and their media water carriers.

Or "Intelligence for Dummies." Certainly, it's not fact-based in the Cheney/Rove/Bush administration. It's just a marketing tool, a means to be able to say "This insider admitted...." The fact that he admitted nothing but said was he was forced o say (as opposed to forced to confess to something, well, factual) is a big part of the tragedy.

From Atrios (comment at the end is his, not mine):

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

A recent Times article pointed out that the methods for torture we used were taken adapted from tolitarian communist techniques valued not for their success in obtaining the truth but in their ability to obtain false confessions.

Apparently that wasn't really a bug, but a feature. The Times also recently pointed that even though the Bush administration was warned that one of the information sources, al Libi, was full of shit they kept on using his information to justify the war.

The Times article quoted a Defense Intelligence Report claiming that al-Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" although this stretches the concept of "intentionally" somewhat.

"You see, al-Libi was a fine graduate of our exciting new school of interrogation. On him we used torture techniques designed to encourage the subject to tell the interrogaters what they wanted to hear. And, miracle of miracles, he did indeed tell them what they wanted to hear.

"However, ABC News was told that at least three CIA officers declined to be trained in the techniques before a cadre of 14 were selected to use them on a dozen top al Qaeda suspects in order to obtain critical information. In at least one instance, ABC News was told that the techniques led to questionable information aimed at pleasing the interrogators and that this information had a significant impact on U.S. actions in Iraq.

"According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation, made statements that were designed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear. Sources say Al Libbi had been subjected to each of the progressively harsher techniques in turn and finally broke after being water boarded and then left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight where he was doused with cold water at regular intervals.

"His statements became part of the basis for the Bush administration claims that Iraq trained al Qaeda members to use biochemical weapons. Sources tell ABC that it was later established that al Libbi had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.

"'This is the problem with using the waterboard. They get so desperate that they begin telling you what they think you want to hear,'" one source said.

"However, sources said, al Libbi does not appear to have sought to intentionally misinform investigators, as at least one account has stated. The distinction in this murky world is nonetheless an important one. Al Libbi sought to please his investigators, not lead them down a false path, two sources with firsthand knowledge of the statements said."

Just to recap. Bush administration needs evidence to support their war. They use torture techniqes designed to extract false confessions to obtain that "evidence," which they then use to sell the war despite knowing full well of the lack of reliability of the information.

This almost made me laugh:

From the 17 November Wall Street Journal:

"Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him." -- Mark Twain

Some select quotes from Woodward's... well, paralogical is maybe the nices way I can put it... well, blatant self-serving and dishonest statement; the new Judy speaks for himself:

"Fitzgerald asked for my impression about the context in which Mrs. Wilson was mentioned. I testified that the reference seemed to me to be casual and offhand, and that it did not appear to me to be either classified or sensitive. I testified that according to my understanding an analyst in the CIA is not normally an undercover position."

The astute top editor of one of the nation's most influential newspapers; scary....

"I testified that on June 20, 2003, I interviewed a second administration official for my book "Plan of Attack" and that one of the lists of questions I believe I brought to the interview included on a single line the phrase "Joe Wilson's wife." I testified that I have no recollection of asking about her, and that the tape-recorded interview contains no indication that the subject arose."

And why would he raise the subject?

"I also testified that I had a conversation with a third person on June 23, 2003. The person was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and we talked on the phone. I told him I was sending to him an 18-page list of questions I wanted to ask Vice President Cheney. On page 5 of that list there was a question about "yellowcake" and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's weapons programs. I testified that I believed I had both the 18-page question list and the question list from the June 20 interview with the phrase "Joe Wilson's wife" on my desk during this discussion. I testified that I have no recollection that Wilson or his wife was discussed, and I have no notes of the conversation."

No notes? Writing a book (and keeping info away from Post readers to save for the best-seller) and doesn't take notes? We're supposed to beleive this? Or in true wingnut journalist fashion he simply has contempt for his readers and their interest in, like, knowing things? And he's a top editor at the paper??

"My notes do not include all the questions I asked, but I testified that if Libby had said anything on the subject, I would have recorded it in my notes."

Really?

The great thing about modern, informed journalism is that you can read a byline and know whether it pays to read the article or listen to the broadcast.

Woodward: of no journalistic importance other than as a best-selling water carrier for the GOP.

Just in case there was any doubt he's been a GOP water carrier for the last 20-plus years; from Editor & Publisher:

"He has called Patrick J. Fitzgerald a 'junkyard dog prosecutor' and said in interviews this year that the damage done by Plame's name being revealed in the media was 'quite minimal.' He told NPR this past summer, 'When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great.'" (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001480714)

Exactly wrong. Fitzgerald has gotten it just about exactly right -- as far as he's gone.

But as a journalist, being a GOP hack whore is more important than, well, journalism.

From later in the article, Woodward quoted from a Larry King Live appearance 10/27/05:

"Now there are a couple of things that I think are true. First of all this began not as somebody launching a smear campaign that it actually -- when the story comes out I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter and that somebody learned that Joe Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job going to Niger to see if there was an Iraq/Niger uranium deal...."

Journalism or RNC talking point? (Rhetorical question.)

I apologise for this.

Why the liberation excuse for Iraq is wrong: There's far more deserving countries to invade if we were so inclined: keeping close to Iraq, Saudia Arabia and Pakistan leap to mind. You can come with loads more more "legitimate" than Iraq if, you know, freeing the oppressed was an honest goal.

It's certainly not a true reason.

This administration is not pro-freedom; it believes in repressing it here at home in the USA. For but a quick single example, its policies strengthen business entities at the expense of individuals -- which till last 10 or 20-odd years was the opposite of the law.

Anyway, here's the excessive dementia posted by some asshole to the Capital Games blog at The Nation's website:

Who Is Lying About Iraq? A campaign of distortion aims to discredit the liberation.

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ Monday, November 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.

The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.

This entire scenario of purported deceit was given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Mr. Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."

Now, as it happens, Mr. Libby was not charged with having outed Ms. Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that "this indictment is not about the war":

This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person--a person, Mr. Libby--lied or not.

No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting:

This case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.

Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.

So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.

Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, was convinced:

People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.

In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:

Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

But, according to Wilkerson:

The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments? In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr. Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:

I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")

But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:

There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

Posted by *BUSHRULES* 11/14/2005 @ 12:09am | ignore this person

continued......

Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.

Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:

Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."

Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:

Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.

All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."

Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.

The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:

My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . ., both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.

More than a year after his return, with the help of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.

In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.

That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.

As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.

And again:

The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.

This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.

The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:

The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].

More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:

[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.

To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.

But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.

And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals.

The word, especially in the post-9/11 era and especially by the wingnuts, has been debased (like everything out of their mouths).

This, though, is the real deal:

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/11/int05045.html

"Although Buddhist contemplative tradition and modern science have evolved from different historical, intellectual and cultural roots, I believe that at heart they share significant commonalities, especially in their basic philosophical outlook and methodology.

"On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality.

"Both Buddhism and science prefer to account for the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations of the natural laws of cause and effect.

"From the methodological perspective, both traditions emphasize the role of empiricism. For example, in the Buddhist investigative tradition, between the three recognized sources of knowledge - experience, reason and testimony - it is the evidence of the experience that takes precedence, with reason coming second and testimony last.

"This means that, in the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerated a scripture may be.

"Even in the case of knowledge derived through reason or inference, its validity must derive ultimately from some observed facts of experience."

-- The Dalai Lama at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last Saturday.

Quote found at Good Morning Silicon Valley.

10 November 2005 on Charlie Rose (taken from The Drudge Report). I dunno, always Pinch was a complete dope in his way or maybe he's just totally and delberately lying his face off (so to speak). Of course the biggest difference between the Blair matter and the Miller matter is that Judy's his buddy, still. And really, that's his sole criterion.

The fluctuates between clueless and simply dishonest. I have wondered for years and continue to wonder: how can he manage any major journalistic medium?

EXCERPT #1

CR>> HAS THIS HAS BEEN TOUGH NOT JUST FOR YOU, BUT FOR THE FAMILY.

AS >> YOU KNOW, I'VE GOT TO SAY, MY FAMILY, GOD BLESS MY FAMILY. THEY ARE A BULLWARK. THIS PALES BY COMPARISON TO THE JASON BLAIR, IT'S NOT EVEN ON THE SAME SCALE. JASON BLAIR AND THE ISSUES THAT FLOW FROM THAT, THOSE WERE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES INVOLVING NOT JUST A REPORTER, BUT A WHOLE SERIES IN "THE NEW YORK TIMES." THAT WAS HARD. AND MY FAMILY STOOD BY ME LIKE A BULLWARK. AND THEY DID THIS TIME, TOO. WE JUST HAD A FAMILY REUNION. WE HAVE FAMILY REUNIONS. AND I WAS DOWN AT CHATTANOOGA WITH MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY FROM ALL GENERATIONS, WE ALL SAT DOWN ONE MORNING IN A RESTAURANT AND JUST TALKED ABOUT THIS.

CR>> WHAT WAS THAT CONVERSATION LIKE?

AS>> IT WAS FABULOUS. THEY WERE CONFUSED AS MOST PEOPLE ARE BECAUSE IS THIS A CONFUSING SET OF SCENARIOS. AND A CONFUSING TIME. WE FOCUSED FOR ALMOST 40 MINUTES, I'M GOING TO GUESS, BUT WHO'S COUNTING ON WHAT IS RATHER A SMALL BORE ISSUE IN THE BIG SCHEME OF THINGS.

CR>> BUT IT'S NOT A SMALL ISSUE IF "THE NEW YORK TIMES" REPORTERS AND PEOPLE WHO INHABIT THAT BUILDING CONSIDER IT A BIG ISSUE. IT'S A BIG ISSUE.

AS>> NO, IT'S A BIG ISSUE IF YOUR READERS LOOSE TRUST AND RESPECT AND DEVALUE THE JOURNALISM THAT THEY'RE GETTING.

CR>>IS IT AN ISSUE? AS>>AND THE ANSWER IS, NO,

EXCERPT #2

AS >> LET'S SEPARATE TWO ELEMENTS THAT I THINK HAVE BECOME TOO MUCH ENTANGLED. THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION COVERAGE WHICH WE RAN THREE OR FOUR YEARS AGO AND RAN A MAJOR EDITOR'S NOTE A YEAR AGO. AND THE VALERIE PLAME CASE. THOSE ARE TWO DIFFERENT ELEMENTS. THEY BOTH INVOLVE A REPORTER NAMED JUDY MILLER. BUT ONE HAD VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH THE OTHER.

AS<

EXCERPT #3

AS>>AND WE DIDN'T BRING THE DEGREE OF EDITORIAL SKEPTICISM WE SHOULD HAVE BROUGHT TO THAT STORY.

CR>> SKEPTICISM AND SUPERVISION?

AS>> PERHAPS ONE IS REALLY THE SAME. I THINK IT'S FAIR TO SAY THAT THOSE STORIES WOULD NOT HAVE RUN IN "THE NEW YORK TIMES" TODAY.

EXCERPT #4

AS>> JUDY IS SEEN THROUGH A HIGHLY POLITICAL PRISM, IF SHE CAME BACK TO "THE NEW YORK TIMES" TO WRITE RESTAURANT REVIEW, I'M CONVINCED THE FIRST TIME SHE GAVE A REVIEW OF A RESTAURANT, SOMEBODY WOULD DECLARE THERE'S A POLITICAL VIEW BEHIND THAT. IT SIMPLY MEANT THAT IT WAS GOING TO BE DIFFICULT TO INTEGRATE HER BACK IN AS A REPORTER.

EXCERPT #5

CR>>THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, WE DEALT WITH THAT ISSUE. SO SHE REALLY DID RETIRE.

AS>>AS YOU KNOW, WE TALKED EARLIER, ABOUT BUYOUTS IN THE NEWSROOM, AND WE HAD THEM. THERE WAS A BUYOUT PROCESS IN PLACE THAT JUDY TAPPED INTO. AND THE TRUTH IS, THIS IS THE RIGHT TIME. SHE'S BECOME TOO ENTANGLED WITH THE STORY. SHE KNEW IT. WE KNEW IT.

CR>> WHAT DOES ‘TOO ENTANGLED’ MEAN?

AS>> I SHOULDN'T HAVE USED THAT WORD.

EXCERPT #6

AS>> RIGHT NOW, "THE WASHINGTON POST," WHICH RAN A WONDERFUL SERIES OF A WONDERFUL FRONT-PAGE PIECE TWO OR THREE DAYS AGO ABOUT CIA CAMPS AROUND THE WORLD, HIDDEN, SECRET, PRISON CAMPS THAT WE HAVE ESTABLISHED, APPARENTLY, AROUND THE WORLD. THAT'S IMPORTANT FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO KNOW. IT'S IMPORTANT FOR TO US UNDERSTAND WHY WE'RE DOING THAT. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO RUN A SECRET CAMP IN EASTERN EUROPE? HOW DO WE TREAT OUR PEOPLE THERE, THE PRISONERS THERE? WHAT ARE THEY ACCUSED OF? HOW LONG ARE THEY GOING TO BE THERE? WHAT'S THEIR RIGHT TO A DEFENSE? ALL OF THESE CORE BELIEFS THAT WE CONSIDER SO INTEGRAL TO OUR DEMOCRACY. AND WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN NOW, I FEAR, IS THAT RATHER THAN THE GOVERNMENT SAYING, ALL RIGHT, WE KNOW AMERICA AN EXPLANATION ON THIS, THEY'RE GOING TO CREATE A SPECIAL COUNCIL. ALL OF A SUDDEN, YOU'RE GOING TO SEE A "WASHINGTON POST" REPORTER OR TWO OR THREE WHO ARE GOING TO BE ASKED TO GIVE UP THEIR SECRET SOURCES. THIS IS WHAT'S AT STAKE.

The next big step down the slippery slope that was what could be called the great American experiment in democracy: Kansas' vote this month to, in effect, teach "intelligent design" state-wide and, at the same time, effectively undercut the concepts of science and emiricism. With the bonus of undermining for students the whole concept of, well, learning: why learn anything if facts are irrelevant and all that matters is what you believe.

An aside: I love Woody Allen's line in the midst of his problems with Mia Farrow including dating (and eventually marrying!) one of her daughters: "The heart knows what the heart knows." Beautiful, poetic and true. But it's not a wonderful rule for running an educational system and that's the message from Kansas: you don't have to know anything.

So, thanks, Kansas, for another great step for mankind -- backwards and downwards.

"Birthright Citizenship

"The latest great idea from the anti-immigrant crusaders, not granting citizenship to people born in this country to people who are here illegally, is a presposterously bad idea. The lack of birthright citizenship, or in the case of France a somewhat weaker version of it, is part of why the native/immigrant relationships are so screwed up in parts of Europe. Of course, this country has its own reasons for screwed up immigrant/native relationships but we don't need to import a whole bunch of new ones.

"I guess that pesky 14th amendment still drives them crazy:

"'1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.'"

They're vile, evil in their dementia and dishonsety, deliberately lying.

Or why France is burning.

From Atrios:

"Connerly's France

"Just to add on a bit to what Juan Cole wrote to reiterate a couple of things. France's approach to multiculturalism and race is essentially that of Ward Connerly you simply make it officially not exist. A couple years back Connerly pushed for a ballot measure in California which would've made it illegal for the state government, in most cases, to make any racial classifications by race. While I'm not entirely unsymapthetic to the notion that such classification systems are problematic for various reasons, the alternative is simply having no information at all about race.

"This is France's system. This is the conservative approach to race and society. This is what they've spent the last week mocking.

"They're such idiots."

Following neo-con lunacy, err, beliefs: a system for assured disaster. But of course the neo-cons are reality-based in word only, if at all. (I. feeling generous so I'm giving the wingnuts the benifit of the doubt.)

Ali is slow, he's not an idiot. Parkinson's slows (to say the least).

At the 11/9/05 Medal of Freedom ceremony per The Washington Post:

"Bush, who appeared almost playful, fastened the heavy medal around Muhammad Ali's neck and whispered something in the heavyweight champion's ear. Then, as if to say "bring it on," the president put up his dukes in a mock challenge. Ali, 63, who has Parkinson's disease and moves slowly, looked the president in the eye -- and, finger to head, did the 'crazy' twirl for a couple of seconds."

Or should know: Absolutely full of crap, an almost constant liar. The pissant's Veterans Day message:

“It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began,” Bush said in a Veterans Day speech today to military families at Tobyhanna Army Depot near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. “More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate who had access to the same intelligence voted to remove Saddam Hussein from power,” the president said. (An apology for being a chickenhawk would have been more appropriate maybe.)

When has Congress ever had the same access to intelligence as the White House? (A rhetorical question but the answer is of course Never and certainly not in regard to Iraq.)

With the rarest of excptions, when has this administration told the truth or being truthful about anything? Never, of course.

Of course, the GOP has to lie be it's true positions are anathema to the overwhelming majority of voters. You know, like the lies about national security. They talk the talk but does anyone honestly have any concrete examples of them actually acting in any effective manner? Four years after 9/11, this homeland security crap is an utter farce. Four years after the 93 WTC bombing, under Clinton (and Monica!), the "weak liberal Dem," we were as secure as now -- four years pre-9/11. So four years without a domestic terrorist attack means nothing and significant of nothing.

Yeah, yeah....

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
-- George W. Bush, 5/24/05

See, the little monkey boy can be articulate.

I know: it's been obvious to those who can see that the Cheney/Rove/Bush administration are not predominantly neo-cons so much -- I was tempted to say Just cons -- hardcore acolytes of the Nazis.

Not a recent quote but one that reminds one of... well, it's obvious but also a good thing to keep in mind:

"If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm." -- Marcus Aurelius

Yas, yes, ancient history, but it explains it all.

From the Times magazine, October 17, 2004 [I'd give a link, but it's now only available to Times Select subscribers]:

Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND (NYT) 8405 words
Published: October 17, 2004

From the article:

The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret.

From the article:

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world's most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, ''By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.''

From the article:

The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the president finally arrived and gave his stump speech. There were Bush's periodic stumbles and gaffes, but for the followers of the faith-based president, that was just fine. They got it -- and ''it'' was the faith.

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

End of quotes; my comments:

This is simply anthetical to a democracy with civil liberties.

And the importance is that the great American democracy, the only thing ever like it, may well be over to all intents and purposes.

The next two or three election cycles will tell whether we can back to what we were or will be a democracy-manque like Iran and Singapore.

http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/11/more_offensive.html

[Dead link; you'll have to do a copy + paste.]

Actually, none of the candidates are as stupidly offensive as the offending shirt; a boy( and girl )cottmight be a better idea after all; you won't be giving your money to an asshole company.

And then there's the kind of story just about no one else in the MSM would do:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/international/middleeast/31reconstruct.html?emc=eta1 [free registration required]

The lack of progress in rebuilding Iraq.

No one knows what they're doing.

Not much is being actually accomplished.

No one knows what's actually being spent. One named source says because it's, you know, a war zone, people apparently are not and cannot be aware of what they're doing.

Oh.

And the preliminary planning all sucked.

Oh.

Okay, that's not news, but the alleged Paper of Record is at least noting it outside the op-ed page.

Still, flaws and all, an important piece.

Same issue, another probably-nowhere-else-but-in-the-Times, also page 1: How the NSA cooked the intelligence on the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin. Makes it pretty clear that LBJ relied on seriously cooked intel, cooked by mid-level agency staffers all on their own initiative, not at White House's request. One wonders, though. One wonders that even if LBJ was duped, would he have nonetheless ensured that we would have cranked up the war anyway. Did Lyndon have a mad-on to go to war in Vietnam the way the Bushies had a hard-on to go into Iraq? Note that the article is based on an NSA history, so.... (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/politics/31war.html. Reg. reqd.)

Anyone really think he'll be significantly worse than what we have, with Thomas and Scalia and Roberts?

Bonus: Is a 15 year track record really going to be analyzed and held against him?

My continuing life-long obsession with the Times continues....

Now that Judy Miller had kind of, sort of written a lawyer-approved confessional, when are Pinch and Keller going to do theirs?

It was pretty clear from theget-go that Judy's case did not present a situation of pedal-to-the-metal absolute protection of a journalist. At the very least, a little investigation and confirmation was clearly in order. It certainly was clear to me and I am well outside the loop.

Well, so apparently were Pinch and Keller.

But their jobs are, to say the very least, to be inside the loop.

As I've noted before, on Pinch's beat, we've had steady deterioration of the quality of journalism at the Times with the result of the paper's credibility ever dropping. (Not as low as the Cheney/Rove/Bush administration's to those with open eyes and ears, but stil....)

Hint for Pinch: The brand is not getting stronger, just marketed more. There's a difference.

As we've noted, Pinch's greatest mis-hits include, off the top of my head:

Whitewater
Wen Ho Lee
Election 2004 coverage: the hagiographer and the crtical bitch -- truly fair and balanced
Howell Raines, both as editorial page editor as well as executive editor
Gerald Boyd, whose decisions and published comments were on a level with Pinch's -- not a good thing
Jayson Blair
Judy's absolutely inept WMD coverage

From:

http://www.whitehouse.org/initiatives/posters/leaking-secrets.asp