We Will not Negotiate with Terrorists

Liar! Rumsfeld has now admitted that we are meeting with terrorists. The significance of this is articulated here thusly:

Under pressure to show progress on Iraq, President Bush appears to be softening his once-firm line against dealing directly with insurgents - now willing to engage something besides military force, CBS News Correspondent Joie Chen reports.

I would have been a bit more aggressive with my choice of words, but you get the point.

The funny thing is that I was watching Rummy talk to some reporters on C-SPAN last night (not during an official press conference) and when a reported asked him about the reports of meetings which has initially appeared here his response was something like "Do you believe whatever you read in a British paper?". Idiot.

Bad Strategy

I've heard the argument that we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here several times. But ever since opinion polls have gone south on the war effort and Bush has turned to selling it more and more, I've heard that argument more and more. Here's a case in point from today's White House press briefing:

Q: Scott, how concerned is the administration about the potential for Iraq to become a sort of training ground for Islamic extremists who may go back to their home countries and use these techniques to destabilize their governments? There's a new report on that recently.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, let me mention a couple things. As the President has said for some time now, Iraq is a central front in the war on terrorism. Wherever you stood before the decision to go into Iraq, I think we can all recognize that the terrorists have made it a central front in the war on terrorism. That's why, as the President said earlier today, we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here at home. And that's where things are. And that's why the terrorists understand how high the stakes are ...

I'm sorry, but this just doesn't strike me as a very good strategy. . . kinda like a boxer's who's fight strategy is to block the other guy's punches with his face until the other guy gets tuckered out.

Having fun with College Republicans?

I know, I didn't think it was possible either. Apparently the trick is not is not to try to have fun with them but to have fun at their expense. As the General illustrates here, here and here, with this approach it's actually quite easy.

More Hits

From today's NYT's:

The cumulative effect of his difficulties in the last few months has been to pierce the sense of dominance that he sought to project after his re-election and to heighten concerns among Republicans in Congress that voters will hold them, as the party in power, responsible for failure to address the issues of most concern to the public.
"The political capital he thought he had has dwindled to very little, and he overstated how much he had to begin with," said Allan J. Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University in Washington. . .

. . . Mr. Bush and his administration now find themselves with little or no support from Democrats and with a Republican Party that has proved reluctant to support him on a number of fronts.
"Their domestic agenda is really stalled, and they're pretty much looking for an exit ramp," said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. "They seem to have been unwilling to shift from the politics of a first-term president who has to run for re-election into the clear-eyed policy of a second-term president who wants to be able to point to substantive achievements." . . .

. . . "While it's been a rough 45 days, Bush can and will get back on track, and all those jitters will go away," said Scott W. Reed, a Republican consultant who managed Bob Dole's 1996 campaign for president.
But Mr. Lichtman said history suggested that it was difficult for second-term presidents to regain their clout in domestic policy once they had dissipated it."Second terms have never been redeemed by domestic policy," he said. "It's very difficult once you've had problems in domestic policy, as they almost all do, to come back. To the extent you've had them come out successfully, it's because of foreign affairs."

Liar!

Condi tells a whopper.

More Hits

The Christian Science Monitor has a piece on Bush's political failings of late. I found this interesting: "The 2006 campaign has already begun, creating an incentive for Republicans to put protecting themselves ahead of loyalty to the term- limited Bush." Partly in response, the article points to the Bush adminstrations new tactic of criticising Democrats for doing nothing. I don't think this is going to do it though.

Anti-Syria has it

The final stage of the election has been won easily by anti-Syrian candidates. [link]

Beating a Dead Horse (no pun intended)

Jeb Bush is now launching an inquiry into whether there was foul-play involved in Schiavo falling into a coma because there was some inconsistency in statements that her husband had made years ago and what he had said more recently. Specifically:

In a letter faxed to Pinellas-Pasco County State Atty. Bernie McCabe, the governor said Michael Schiavo testified in a 1992 medical malpractice trial that he found his wife collapsed at 5 a.m. on Feb. 25, 1990, and he said in a 2003 television interview that he found her about 4:30 a.m. He called 911 at 5:40 a.m."Between 40 and 70 minutes elapsed before the call was made, and I am aware of no explanation for the delay," Bush wrote. "In light of this new information, I urge you to take a fresh look at this case without any preconceptions as to the outcome."

Felos, his lawyer, made this response:

Felos said it's impossible that 70 minutes elapsed before Michael Schiavo called 911. "She would have been dead before they (paramedics) got there," he said.

At this point I don't even understand what Jeb's motivations is. I mean it's obviously political, but it just seems like a bad move politically.

Liar!

Frist is full of shit when it comes to his past statements on the Schiavo affair: [link]

Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader and a heart surgeon, acknowledged yesterday that Terri Schiavo had suffered devastating brain damage and said his assertion three months ago that she was "not somebody in persistent vegetative state" did not amount to a medical diagnosis.
Frist (R-Tenn.), appearing on three network TV shows, agreed with this week's autopsy conclusion that the Florida woman had suffered severe, irreversible brain damage. "I never, never, on the floor of the Senate, made a diagnosis, nor would I ever do that," he told NBC's "Today" show.

The Hits keep on Coming

It seems the Bush has taken lots of political hits lately, and I don't mean just the calls for Gitmo to be closed or demands for an exit timeline, but really even smaller political hits. For example, he wasn't able to get a ban on importation of prescription drugs attached to new trade agreements. Also, provisions of the Patriot Act allowing the Feds to search library and bookstore records that the President wanted renewed were rejected.

More to come.

Heh

From the Late Show's Top 10 list:

Top Ten Ways George Bush Can Regain His Popularity

10. Dip into social security fund to give every American free HBO

9. Use diplomacy to bring peace to Brad, Jen and Angelina

8. Try fixing Iraq, creating some jobs, reducing the deficit and maybe capturing Osama

7. Figure out a way for the Yankees to win a game

6. Replace his "country simpleton" persona with more lovable "hillbilly idiot" image

5. Use weekly radio address to give Americans a Van Halen twofer

4. Get Saddam to switch to boxers

3. Ditch the librarian and make Eva Longoria First Lady

2. Resign

1. Jump on Oprah's couch while professing his love for Katie Holmes

Autopsy Results

The Shiavo autopsy results are in, and it turns out that Randall Terry and that Nobel Peace Prize for Medicine nominee were wrong and all the people that believe in science had have some common sense were right. One thing that I didn't see coming was the finding that she was blind. This debunks all the claims that she was responding to visual stimuli and that stupid video where they edited it down to make it look like she was actually tracking a ballon.
On C-SPAN on of the reporters asked if the report changes the President's opinion on the case, and all Scottie said was "No, it doesn't".

Stoopid

This is just fucking stupid. Especially this:

...the memo is not the smoking gun that some liberal politicos and bloggers see. No matter what Richard Dearlove said in the memo about fixing the facts, it was still merely one man's analysis of the situation.

And especially when it is followed by this:

The memo is important not only because it suggests Bush made up his mind well in advance of the actual invasion, but because it undercuts Bush's postwar response to questions about whether he made a mistake in going to war with Iraq

Isn't this precisely what people were pointing to the memo as evidence of? I guess the term "suggests" here is really a team of art here. After all, if it did anything even slightly more than merely suggest that Bush had made up his mind and all that then it would be a fucking smoking gun then wouldn't it?

Lynching Bill

So the Senate has finally passed a measure formally apologizing for it's previous inaction in the face of wide-spread lynchings throughout the south. [link] Something like 80 Senators co-sponsored the bill, but something like 20 Senators did not show up to vote. The reason for this is so that they can pay both sides of the field in the sense that they can tell their constituents the they didn't vote for the bill, without suffering the outrage that would surely follow from actually voting against it. Unless those's a damn good reason for not voting, then I see no principal difference here from actually voting against it.

More on Lebanon

In a previous post I had noted that a victory in the southern region by a pro-Syrian candidate was not necessarily proof that pro-Syrian's would win out generally. But now recent developments indicate that this was not a one-time thing. From the WaPo:

A former army general who returned to Lebanon last month after 15 years in exile appeared headed for a sweeping victory in the third round of legislative elections Sunday as anti-Syrian candidates braced for significant losses.

Again, I think all those on the right that were certain the ouster of Syrian forces and a demand for election meant that Lebanon would be U.S. light jumped the gun. This is par for the course. They've said the same thing about Egypt, but from all accounts, the elections there are more for show. More significantly, they said the the elections in Iraq would calm everything down, but that hasn't happened either.
I think this article speaks to the problem outlined here nicely. Of note:

Elections are proceeding in many places across the Arab world, just as President Bush and his advisers had hoped. But there's a hitch: Sometimes militant Islamists are winning.

I also found this statement really strange.

Bush's representatives occasionally have suggested that the president believes the ballot box can redeem even terrorist groups.

I think there's some truth to the notion that a once unelected political group or whatever might change their mode of operation after they have been elected, but I think that has more to do with the fact that they no longer need to, say, blow stuff up and kill people to get their way often times. Bush, however, seems to think that there is some magical process that happens when something like a democratic process takes place. I think this is pretty damn silly.
What I think is perhaps most interesting about all of this is that it seems to legitimize these terrorist organizations. Think of the message that is sent--"you can blow up all kinds of stuff, and if you keep it up someday people will be calling you Senator". Surely this was not the result that the Bush adminstration was shooting for. See:

Hezbollah, a Shiite militia allied with Iran that has been responsible for some of the deadliest attacks on U.S. interests in the Middle East, also poses a challenge for Bush. Its strong showing in elections Sunday, the second of four rounds, gives it an opportunity to participate in Lebanon's government for the first time. That is not the outcome the United States hoped for when it and France pressured Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon and end its political meddling.
Bush could face a choice over providing aid to the new Lebanese government or demanding that it first disarm Hezbollah. But Hezbollah, buoyed by the election results, seems less willing than ever to disarm.

Inconsistent Memos

The NYT's is reporting that another memo, this time authored by a British Intelligence officer, suggests that the decision to go to war had not already been made. This, of course, is inconsistent with the Downing Street memo. This is so far the only thing that I am aware of that has undercut the legitimacy of the DSM. But note that it does not cast the authenticity of the memo into doubt. What we are left with are two memos that say the opposite things. The question then becomes which one should trump.

Update: Media Matters does a fine job of making sense (or better yet, nonsense) out of all this here. Note the fact, as pointed out by MMFA, that the DSM post-dates the document discussed in the NYT's article linked above.

The State of our Democracy

Many provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire, and amid calls by the President that they be renewed, there have been a number of hearings on the Hill about the act. I was watching one such hearing on C-SPAN last night, and I must say that I was absolutely amazed by what had happened. Most of the hearings, it turns out, have been stacked by those that support the Patriot Act, but the hearing that occured Friday was composed of witnesses hand-picked by Democrats.
As it turns out, those on the right were not particularly interested in hearing what people on the other side of the political spectrum had to say. Here's an article giving a very cursory overview of the events. Here's an article that goes a bit more in depth. And this may be helpful if you want to do your own reading on the subject.
In any event, this is really one of those things that you had to see it to believe it. I'm no expert on House procedural rules, but from what I've been able to gather they are in no way monolothic, and speakers have generally been alloted more time to at least finish a thought (within reason of course). But what happened here was really something I had never seen. The Chairman decided that it was time to be really a "by the book" kind of guy by strictly enforcing time limits and really hold his ground in the face of any objection.
After the microphones had been cut off, I think Zogby, on of the witnesses really hit the nail on the head. The entire thesis of his testimony had been that U.S. behavior of late had created a climate where we are not setting a good example for the rest of the world, and have in fact provided a some sort of justification for abuses globally. Zogby said that the behavior by the GOP at the hearing would serve the same purpose in the sense that the notion of a free and open government was something that could easily be disregarded. That is, the GOP had treated these hearings as merely perfunctory and so any oppressive regime could do the same.
You may disagree with the reasoning put forth here and argue that the causal relationship is too attenuated. That's fine. In fact, please do. I say this only because so much of what was said by the GOP at this hearing consisted of something to the effect of "saying the U.S. is bad will cause people to think we are actually bad."
You cannot (rationally, at least) both reject and embrace the notion that bad behavior sets an example. But this is precisely what the right would have us believe.

Rection to the Bush's Bad Numbers

This blog attempts to "take down" the new poll that has Bush in the tank. Read it for yourself if you like. I didn't have the energy to read the whole thing, but at any point do they give a ballpark figure as to what they think the various approval ratings would be? I mean from what I did read, and assuming its not complete bullshit and/or completely meaningless, it seems like the thrust of their criticism is that the demographics were slightly off. OK, fine. Maybe the numbers are low by a point or two...or maybe even a few. That means all that ink was spilled and the most mileage they could possibly get out of it is that they've made a half-way decent argument for the notion that Bush's ratings are just really bad instead of absolutely fucking terrible. Color me impressed.

New Poll Numbers on Bush and Iraq

I bet someone's not a happy camper today. The WaPo gives us the details here. Note that Bush's "Disapproval" rating is at 52%. When I typically heard reports that the President's approval ratings were at 40% or whatever, I was never sure that this meant that 60% disapproved. Maybe some folks were indifferent or whatever, with the upshot being that it could still be the case that more people like the guy than not. Here we know this is not the case.

Lebanese Elections

Pro-Syrian parties have won out in elections in the south. [link] It may just be the case that this will be exceptional merely because Hezbolla played such a key role in driving out Israel there. We shall see. At this point, I don't, however, think that it is too soon to say that all of the "freedon is on the march, and Lebanon proves it" crowd jumped the gun for sure.

Downing Street Memo

The Times UK has the text of the Downing Street memo here. I think it is just amazing that this is not the lead story on every network. That's not to say that I'm surprised that it isn't.

Sad, but true

I don't think it's a good sign when our government feels the need to go on the offensive against human rights groups. I'm not kidding. If you follow right wing media and talking points, you'd see that there is a campaign to undermine the Int'l Red Cross and Amnesty Int'l.

Bush is blasting Amnesty International [link].Watching Fox, and reading the summations of Bush's response, the argument seems to be something like "this is wrong because we say so" or "no, it's crazy to compare us to gulags, because gulags are bad and we're good".