I Don't Like You Either.

In Support of the Kos Boycott

Diarists  at Kos---which I admit I rarely look at---who support Hillary Clinton have decided that enough's enough.  Good for them.  It's about time Clinton supporters start speaking up against the abuse and insults of the Hillary-hating  O-bot contingent of the Obama supporting wing of the Democratic party. 

Here's an excerpt from Allegre's last post, taken from where it's cross-posted at No Quarter----I refuse to link to Kos.

DailyKos is not the site it once was thanks to the abusive nature of certain members of our community. 

I’ve decided to go on "strike" and will refrain from posting here as long as the administrators allow the more disruptive members of our community to trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record without any fear of consequence or retribution.  I will not be posting at DailyKos effective immediately.  I will not help drive up traffic or page-hits as long as my candidate – a good and fine DEMOCRAT - is attacked in such a horrid and sexist manner not only by other diarists, but by several of those posting to the front page.

No Quarter Compiles a Little List of Obama's NAFTA-gate Statements

I couldn't love No Quarter any more than I do----first, for providing expert information on intelligence and national security issues without requiring me to believe that torture and acts outside the limit of the executive branch's authority are essential to the job; second, for its work on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Here's the list, courtesy of the indispensable SusanUnPC:

1. 2/27/08 – ‘No conversations have taken place’ with the Canadian government on NAFTA. “Earlier Thursday, the Obama campaign insisted that no conversations have taken place with any of its senior ranks and representatives of the Canadian government on the NAFTA issue.” [CTV, 2/29/08]

2. 2/27/08 – Obama advisor just said ‘hello.’ “Goolsbee: Canada’s consul general in Chicago contacted him ‘at one point to say ‘hello’ because their office is around the corner.” [ABC, 2/29/08]

Oil Scandal in the Pipeline

AT BN-POLITICS---BY D CUPPLES. Let me see if I understand.  Oil companies are not only gouging consumers at the gas pumps, they're also cheating us taxpayers out of royalty payments owed for the privilege of drilling on government-owned lands?  Well now, isn't that patriotic.

Are We Being Gouged at the Gas Pumps?

Gas prices are schizophrenic. Last summer, prices hit an alarming high. Before the November 2006 election, they dropped. Since January 2007 gas prices have gone up almost every week and hit a record-high in May 2007. A Washington Post photo of a San Francisco gas pump (May 11) boasted $4.33 to $4.53 per gallon.

Price fixing is a concern, not just from OPEC, but also from American oil companies. See cross-posting at Buck Naked Politics.

Quote[s] of the Day. Does Karl Rove Not Believe in Himself, Then? In Other News, Hitchens Reveals Himself to be A Man of Faith After All.

So.  It seems Karl Rove is an atheist.   

[quote begins from New York Magazine by Boris Kachka, Are You There God?  It's Me, Hitchens]

I know something which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”

[quote ends]

Actually---speaking as someone "fortunate enough to be a person of faith"--- I find this a little bit reassuring, as it proves God isn't really behind this Administration's schemes and dreams.  Just as I suspected, the little man behind the curtain is, and always has been, Karl Rove.  The question, of course, is whether Bush knows it.  Hitchens thinks YES.

[quote begins from New York Magazine by Boris Kachka, Are You There God?  It's Me, Hitchens]
I think it’s false to say that the president acts as if he believes he has God’s instructions.

[quote ends]

Hitch, unlike---he says---Richard Dawkins, doesn't have complete contempt for persons of faith. 

[quote begins from New York Magazine by Boris, Kachka, Are You There God?  It's Me, Hitchens]

I don’t think Richard Dawkins would mind me saying that he looks at religious people with this sort of incredulity, as if, “How possibly can you be so stupid?” And though we all have moods like that, I think perhaps I don’t quite.

[quote ends]

And Hitch still thinks the war in Iraq was "just."

[quote begins from New York Magazine by Boris Kachka, Are You There God?  It's Me, Hitchens]

Do you consider yourself a hawk?
I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

                               

So one day we’ll all see just how right you all were about Iraq?
No, I don’t think the argument will stop, perhaps forever. But when it does become the property of historians rather than propagandists and journalists, it’ll become plainer than it is to most people now that it was just. Most of what went wrong with it was that it was put off too long. What a lot of people wish is that the thing could have been skipped.

[quote ends]

Ah  Hitch.  Oh God, how I wish I had your faith.

Note to Joe Lieberman: "Stand, Fight, and Win" is an INCOMPLETE SENTENCE.

This Washington Post article by Lieberman (linked here and quoted below) contains the sort of rhetoric I most distrust:  it sounds persuasive, but is riddled with logical fallacies.
"One choice---stand, fight, and win."  I loathe catchphrases partly because they provoke visceral responses without filling in the blanks.  Of COURSE we all like to "win."  Furthermore, I don't know a single soul from either party who thinks we should, say, surrender to Al-Quaeda, or give up doing everything in our power to protect our people.  But among the ways of addressing with this pressing problem, "going to war in Iraq" was never at the top of the list of rational solutions.

"Stand, fight, and win"?  Okay, "fight" I understand, but what about the notion of "standing"?  To fight Al-Quaeda, we don't necessarily have to be in Iraq;  as the Bush Administration itself is wont to say, Al-Quaeda is a worldwide problem.  When Lieberman talks about standing, he means against Al-Quaeda and implies that the only way or place to do it is in Iraq.  Why? 

And if we "win," what exactly do we win?  What is it we are fighting for?  If it's the elimination of the baddies, the Iraq connection is a connection we created ourselves by opening up a power vacuum.  If we stand, fight, and win in Iraq against AQ, the organization won't disappear, even though some of the individual operatives do. So won't they  just carry the fight elsewhere?

As for fighting to secure the "freedom" of the "Iraqui people" (a diverse group with extremely divergent goals all of whom interpret "freedom" differently), this is not something I think you can do for other people.   We owe them something, having incurred a debt, but it can't be paid off with freedom or democracy.  Those are things people have to want.   You can't pay the price of freedom for someone else, not really.  If they ask you to help, you can help---but only up to a point. 

Or is this what we "win"?  "We fight them there so we don't have to fight them here,"  people tell me.  But that's bad logic as well, unless the plan is to go on fighting them in perpetuity.  Furthermore, fighting people tends to make not only them but also their friends and relatives very, very angry. And tearing up a country's infrastructure and killing civilians----even when it's in a good cause---makes them angry as well.  So if we fight in Iraq to stop them from bringing the war over here, we certainly need to make up our minds to stay there forever because if we ever stop----or if we ever win or "win"----we will, according to that reasoning, have to fight them here.  Which would by definition mean we hadn't won at all.  

I am so sick of the elisions and evasions and glib slogans.  Reid was wrong to say we've "lost" in Iraq because there was never in fact anything to win; and Leiberman is wrong to tell us that we have only one choice because one choice means no choices, and that's clearly not the case.    We can make other choices.  Whether we should or not is the question. 

I didn't want the damned war in the first place, but since we started it, I do  feel a certain sense of responsibility to the Iraqui people.  At this juncture,  I am not convinced that the best way we can serve them is doing more of what we're doing instead of, you know, SOMETHING ELSE.   I am not even sure anymore how to measure "progress" of the sort Lieberman refers to because I don't understand what it is we're supposed to be accomplishing.  Even assuming progress, I doubt it will be an unbroken line (<understatement of the year).  In any case, I'm not likely to listen to or take seriously any member of the party that cynically manipulated the country into this war for a variety of hazy/endlessly reframed objectives that don't bear thinking about.  And I'm not likely to listen, either, to that party's enablers.  Fool me once, etc.

CONTRA. Since writing this, I found this excellent posting in the blog Maverick Views which perhaps reflects the view of those who see Lieberman's point.  I like it because I think it nails down what I'd call a centrist view of the Iraq situation (one I don't think I share any longer). 

An excerpt from Lieberman's statement---reasonable seeming but wrong----is quoted below:

Quote O' the Day 2 for 26 April 2007. Bill Moyers on The Press as Enabler.

I haven't seen it yet, but I have seen the Washington Post article by Tom Shales.   "Moyers and producer Kathleen Hughes use alarming evidence and an array of respected journalists to make the case that, in the rage that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the media abandoned their role as watchdog and became a lapdog instead." 

Gee, you think?  I posted this note---Read all about it!  "Amazing"  "Revelations"- way back in 2005, when the mainstream press suddenly "discovered" all the things about the Bush Administration that the fearless warriors of Salon and the Huffington Post, and a few (a very few) real journalists from the mainstream press had been telling the doubters and skeptics among the population ALL ALONG. 

You know, you get the feeling sometimes that the mainstream press really IS just beginning to work this out.

[quote begins from Shales, The Washington Post, A Media Role in Selling the War?  No Question]
The show asks: Did the Bush administration benefit from having an effective collection of accomplished dupers -- a contingent that Washington Post investigative reporter Walter Pincus calls "the marketing group" -- or did the outrage of 9/11 made the press more vulnerable to being duped?

Pressures subtle and blatant were brought to bear. Phil Donahue's nightly MSNBC talk show was virtually the only program of its type that gave antiwar voices a chance to be heard. Donahue was canceled 22 days before the invasion of Iraq, Moyers says. The reason was supposedly low ratings, but the New York Times intercepted an in-house memo in which a network executive complained: "Donahue represents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time, our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

Dissent was deemed not only unpatriotic, Donahue recalls, but -- perhaps even worse -- "not good for business." Most of Moyers's report involves serious, respected journalists who let themselves be swept up in war fever and who were manipulated by the administration sources who had cozied up to them. Instead of investigating administration claims about al-Qaeda and WMDs and such, cable news offered up hours and hours of talking-head television.

[quote ends]

You know, turning the news into a money-making venture for big corporations really hasn't worked out too well for either journalists or the public.  I wonder if anything now will change.  I'm not sure it has.  There's not any great courage required to attack the president at this point. 

And if you think about it, we really should NOT have been overflowing with gratitude toward people who were "bold" enough to criticize the Administration during Katrina.  Isn't that what they're for?

Commentary from "Eat the Press" at The Huffington Post is here.

Let's All Give Rush Limbaugh WHAT HE WANTS. Yes. Let's Do That!

REVISED AND UPDATED 1:47 PM!:  We Dems and liberals and progressives always take the bait.  In fact, we masochistically dive into the murky sewers of the Far Right in search of bait we can swallow, preferably dangling from the most obvious hooks, judging by Joan Walsh's blog at Salon.  "I've been trying to track the worst explanations for the Virginia Tech massacre," she reports. Today's entry?  Wait, How Did I Miss Rush Limbaugh?  Oh, Joan. 

Rush Limbaugh yanked a lot of chains last week by asking---because he is Rush Limbaugh----if maybe, just maybe, a liberal arts education (which Limbaugh posits may teach people to become liberal and therefore to "hate") caused Cho to become a hating liberal, therefore a killer.  You know, not every bit of offensive commentary deserves a rebuttal.  Insults to Virginia Tech survivors, yes; but a generalized insult to the liberal arts and liberals, hate-mongeringly accusing them of hate-mongering? 

RATIONAL REACTION FROM LIBERALS:  ZZZZZZZZZ. 

ACTUAL REACTION FROM LIBERALS:  Of all the---!  What in the---?   What the----?! 

I mean, come on, he's RUSH LIMBAUGH.  He doesn't believe a word of what he is saying himself.  He says what he says to wind you up.  As for feeling that you have to go on record as opposing the things he says:  why?  Why do you have to?   OF COURSE you oppose it; that is the whole point.  Don't we all know this?  Is there any need to say so?  Do we need to enable him by linking our blogs and websites to his gibes?

Is it that we need to explain to the people who actually do take him seriously all the ways in which he is wrong?  In case such people exists, do we really think setting the record straight = persuasion?   People who listen to his blowhard rhetoric seriously---if any such exist---- already believe everything he's saying.  But the right wingers I know of listen to him exactly because he makes them chuckle gleefully, "You tell 'em,  Rush! That'll get them going!"

And we always jump right in with out indignant/'carefully reasoned rebuttals.   

In short, we do what so many claim NBC has done for Cho and "GIVE [RUSH LIMBAUGH] WHAT HE WANTS?"  Talk about your sublime ironies. 

In short, let's stop rending our garments every time he says something insanely provoking and just grin and nod while we do some really slow clapping.

Let's not rebut his arguments.  Let's not give him the attention he wants.  Let's not link to him.  Slow  claps, people!  Slow claps.

As for this last piece of mock-speculation, it is so over-the-top that it isn't worth mocking.  It's its own rebuttal. .  And I am not going to bother to link to it because (1) I'm certainly not going to enable Limbaugh; and (2) You can find the link in the article linked in the linked article below if you haven't already heard it. 

Quote O' the Day for 13 April 2007. The New Republic: Johann Hari on Historian Andrew Roberts, Bush, and the Future of the "Anglosphere."

A REBUTTAL TO HARI'S REVIEW (EXCERPTS ARE FEATURED IN THIS POST)CAN BE FOUND AT AMERICAN HERITAGE.COM HERE.  They are included in the blog by Frederic Smoler.  I have commented on the rebuttal here.

In The New Republic (a columnist for The Independent) provides a fairly hair-raising assessment of  "a little-known British historian named Andrew Roberts," recently "swept into the White House for a three-hour long hug"and pronounced "great" ("rapturously lauded") by Bush himself.

He has, it seems, a very high opinion of Bush.  (Though that's  not the problem:  merely the context I'm providing for today's highlighted quote.)

[quote begins from Johanna Hari, The New Republic 04.13.07, Bush's Imperial Historian]

Roberts's latest work--A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900--sounds like a standard-issue neocon narrative. As a sequel to Winston Churchill's famous series, it purports to tell the story of how the "Anglosphere" (Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and friends) saved the world from a slew of totalitarian menaces, from the kaiser to the caliphate. It presents Bush as the logical successor to Churchill--only Bush is, of course, even better.

[quote ends; emphasis mine]

"Don't you dare mention Bush and Churchill in the same breath," said my British husband angrily.  Churchill is his hero.  Of course, he would be equally angry if I mentioned Churchill and Bill Clinton in the same breath , Churchill and FDR, or Churchill and Jesus, so this isn't particularly meant as a slur on Bush.

Anyway, here's what Johanna Hari had further to say about Andrew Roberts that interested me.  The data presented indicate that there may be some drawbacks to Bush's becoming the representative of the "Anglosphere" and to taking advice from him.  You be the judge.

[quote begins from Johann Hari, The New Republic 04.13.07, Bush's Imperial Historian]

Bush, Cheney, and--in a recent, glowing cover story--National Review, have, in fact, embraced a man with links to white supremacism, whose book is not a history but an ahistorical catalogue of apologies and justifications for mass murder that even blames the victims of concentration camps for their own deaths. The decision to laud Roberts provides a bleak insight into the thinking of the Bush White House as his presidential clock nears midnight.

Andrew Roberts describes himself as "extremely right wing" and "a reactionary," and, in Great Britain, the 44-year-old has long been regarded as a caricature of a caricature of the old imperial historians. He famously lauds the British Empire--and its massacres and suppressions--as "glorious" on every occasion....

In 2001, Roberts spoke to a dinner of the Springbok Club, a group that regards itself as a shadow white government of South Africa...   Founded by a former member of the neo-fascist National Front, the club flies the flag of apartheid South Africa at every meeting.   The dinner was a celebration of the thirty-sixth anniversary of the day the white supremacist government of Rhodesia announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, which was pressing it to enfranchise black people. Surrounded by nostalgists for this racist rule, Roberts, according to the club's website, "finished his speech by proposing a toast to the Springbok Club, which he said he considered the heir to previous imperial achievements."

The British High Commission in South Africa has accused the club of spreading "hate literature." Yet Roberts's fondness for the Springbok Club is not an anomaly; it is perfectly logical to anybody who has read his writing, which consists of elaborate and historically discredited defenses for the actions of a white supremacist empire--the British--and a plea to the United States to continue its work.....

How should this American Empire exercise its power? One useful tactic, Roberts believes, is massacring civilians. The Amritsar massacre is one of the ugliest episodes in the history of the British Raj. In 1919, British Brigadier General Reginald Dyer opened fire on 10,000 unarmed men, women, and children who were peacefully protesting, and around 400 died. Dyer was even repudiated by the British government. ....Yet Dyer has, at last, found a defender--Andrew Roberts. After the massacre, Roberts notes, "[I]t was not necessary for another shot to be fired throughout the entire region". He later comments: "Today's reactions to Dyer's deed are of course uniformly damning ... but if the Amritsar district, Punjab region or southern India generally had carried on in revolt, many more than 379 people would have lost their lives."

This is a recurring theme in Roberts's work...that nationalist sentiments can be successfully crushed with massive violence....    [D]ozens of...historians have shown that, far from successfully suppressing nationalist sentiments, the Amritsar massacre inflamed them...

Much of Roberts's advice to Bush is based on similarly skewed and surreal misreadings of history. For example, he has advised Bush to adopt "the whole idea of mass internment," saying: "I think it is the way the administration of Iraq should go." At his lunch with Bush, according to economist Irwin Stelzer, who was present, Roberts cited Ireland as a place where internment worked.

Every major historian of Ireland--across the political spectrum--says the opposite is the case. When internment was introduced in Northern Ireland in 1971, violence vastly increased--and it only fell when it was abolished. The decision by the British to grab Catholics on the flimsiest evidence and hold them without trial is universally regarded as the greatest recruiting gift the Irish Republican Army was ever handed.....

Roberts's raw imperialism informs the advice he offers Bush today. For one, he urges Bush to adopt a supreme imperial indifference to public opinion. He counsels that "there can be no greater test of statesmanship than sticking to unpopular but correct policies." The real threat isn't abroad, but at home, among domestic critics. Roberts writes, "The greatest danger to [the British and, by extension, the American] continued imperium came not from declared enemies without, but rather from vociferous enemies within their own society."

In this Bushian history, democratic debate--especially in wartime--is a sign of weakness to be suppressed. "Contrary to the received view of the Vietnam War, the United States was never defeated in the field of battle," he writes. It was Walter Cronkite, not Ho Chi Minh, who was the true menace:....Self-criticism is only ever interpreted in these histories as "self-hatred," which he says is "an abiding defect in the English-speaking peoples, and for some reason especially strong in Americans." It can only sap the "willpower" of any empire.

Could there be a worse adviser for George W. Bush right now?...Target civilians, introduce mass internment, don't worry about whether people hate you, bear down on dissent because it will sap the empire's willpower, ignore your critics because they're just jealous, and--above all--keep on fighting and you'll prevail.....

[quote ends]

Do Bush, Cheney, and The National Review know about any of this?   Shut up; I am not cynical enough to think the answer is yes.   

I am cynical enough to consider that we've reached the point at which it may matter very little what Bush and Cheney think anymore, though perhaps that is less cynical than "naive" (?)

04.17.07 UPDATE.   PERHAPS I am just as naive as I sometimes think I am.  It's important to remember that very little that is published today pretends to objectivity.   Today I am posting rebuttal excerpts.

Quote of the Day for 31 March 2007. M.C. Rove, Rapping.

I won't be quoting; instead, I'll just provide a link to this YouTube video:  Karl Rove dancing and rapping at the correspondent's dinner.  It's, um, amazing. 

I found this link through Slate Magazine, Zeitgeist Checklist:  Karl Rove Rap Edition by Christopher Beam.