Another Bush flip flop

President Bush thinks it's wrong to "rile up people’s emotions" with misinformation.

This startling admission follows six years of his pandering to the worst human instincts for the purpose of forcing one party rule on the world's oldest democracy.

The Extinguisher in Chief

President Bush fights forest fires in Georgia so we don't have to fight them over here. This just in from the White House:

I’ve just had an extensive briefing on the fires here in Georgia and Florida. You can see on the map back here, the fire covers a lot of area; a lot of timberland is being burned down. A lot of people's livelihoods are being affected. A lot of good country is being destroyed. And a lot of good people are fighting the fires.

And a lot of Americans are getting a lot tired of the President when he sounds like a third grader doing show and tell.

Memorial Day

I can't think of a major US holiday more drained of meaning than Memorial Day. As commercialized as Christmas has become, most Americans still know its origins. Meanwhile, Memorial Day has become a three-day weekend, with a whiff of military history thrown in that few Americans can tell you about.

Memorial Day grew out of the American Civil War, as was first recognized in 1868. By 1890, all the northern states recognized it as a day to remember and honor the Civil War war dead, north and south. The southern states stubbornly held their own remembrance day until after World War One, when the holiday officially honored all of America's war dead.

Originally, Memorial Day was always on May 30. It was changed to the last Monday of May when Congress passed the Uniform Holiday Act of 1971.

I would argue that Memorial Day is our most important federal holiday. Thanksgiving is a celebration of revisionist history. Christmas is a state-sponsored marketing tool. Labor Day is a redundancy - don't we already get days off from work?

But Memorial Day gives us pause to reflect on our species' worst instints, and that is important in times such as these. When our own government tries to ban photographs of flag-draped coffins, and media propagandists attack news outlets for reading the names of our war dead, we can at least turn to Memorial Day to remind ourselves about some awful truths.

And we can listen to men like Kenneth Rice, an 86-year-old Michigan man, who was held prisoner by the Japanese for three terrible years:

Over the weeks, Nichols Field's detail shrunk to 135 men as prisoners died or were transferred because of illness. That's how Rice escaped Pete's tyranny.

The Japanese sent the Marine, ailing with appendicitis, back to Cabanatuan after two months. There, doctors removed his appendix without giving him an anesthetic.

Six months later, the Japanese reinserted him into the labor force, sending him to his longest and last destination.

Nagasaki.

Read the whole story.

The best antidote to the sound of trumpets is a strong dose of reality. That's what Memorial Day is all about.

Hitch on Falwell

And he says it so well. I take back everything I wrote yesterday:

The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called Reverend.

Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?

People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.

OK, not everything. But there is a difference between churlish, ad hominem attack and valid criticism. Hitch's comments easily fall into the latter category.

Falwell

Jerry Falwell is dead. The leader of the moral majority, the man who blamed 9/11 on homos and the ACLU. The clown prince of American Christiandom. Falwell was to reason and tolerance what Yogi Berra was to English syntax: "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being." "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals." "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country." Falwell failed to surpise years before his death.

But now he's dead, and I hope in a place where that kind of bigotry is not tolerated.

It's time for liberals and progressives to get past Falwell. His star was eclipsed last November, when the American public kicked the Republican theocrats out of power. He has been irrelevant ever since.

So why all the anger? The comments at various liberal blogs are lit up with the worst kind of bile. "While you're in hell, tell Hitler he's an asshole for me, ok Jerry?" says Jason at Crooks and Liars. "Hell for this guy should be having to tortured by everyone killed at the WTC as he explains how their deaths were brought about by homosexuals in the US," opines SupremeCommanderThor at Atrios. In all fairness, both blogs asked readers to be civil, but to little avail. The anger was just too great.

Let him go. Any psychologist will tell you that anger and fear are two sides of the same coin. Falwell can't hurt us anymore. He's gone.

It's time to stop being afraid. The grown ups are in charge now.

Hey look! News!

I am sensitive to the suffering caused by California wildfires, and the terrible drought in south Florida, and so, apparently, is NBC News, by the significant airtime that Bryan Williams gave these events last night. But I don't understand the media silence on two recent developments that impact the whole country.

Exhibit A is an interview yesterday by Lawrence Wilkinson, a Retired Army Colonel, the former Chief of Staff at the State Department from 2002 to 2005 under then Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Vietnam War veteran, the former Acting Director of the Marine Corps War College at Quantico, and currently a teacher of national security at William and Mary College. He said what too many others are only thinking: that President Bush and Vice President Cheney need to be impeached.

This is significant, as Wilkinson is so far removed from the George Soros - Move On universe. Just because he runs the Marine Corps War College doesn't make him a clueless academic.

Speaking on National Public Radio (where else?), Wilkinson said:

"Thlanguage in (the constitution), the language in those two or three lines about impeachment is nice and precise – it's high crimes and misdemeanors. You compare Bill Clinton's peccadilloes for which he was impeached to George Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors or Dick Cheney's high crimes and misdemeanors, and I think they pale in significance.

"I think we went into this war for specious reasons. I think we went into this war not too much unlike the way we went into the Spanish American War with the Hearst press essentially goading the American people and the leadership into war. That was a different time in a different culture, in a different America. We're in a very different place today and I think we essentially got goaded into the war through some of the same means."

Ouch!

In even more hopeful news, the Iraqi Parliament is sounding more and more like the US Congress, proving that George Bush's war to make them just like us is working!

A majority of Iraq's parliament has signed a proposed bill that would require a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Iraq and freeze current troop levels, a sign of a growing division between Iraqi legislators and the prime minister that mirrors the widening gulf between the Bush administration and its critics in Congress.

The draft bill would create a timeline for a gradual departure, much like what some Democrats in the United States have demanded, and require the Iraqi government to secure parliament's approval before any further extensions of the U.N. mandate for foreign troops in Iraq, which expires at the end of 2007.

"We haven't asked for the immediate withdrawal of multinational forces, we asked that we should build our security forces and make them qualified and at that point there would be a withdrawal," said Baha al-Araji, a parliamentarian allied with the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters drafted the bill. "But no one can accept the occupation of his country."

And this isn't news, why?

This was inevitable

Two in five Americans favor the I-word

A few months ago, the Republican response to calls for impeachment was "bring it on". The GOP narrative was that the "I" word is such a nutty idea, that the Democrats would fatally wound themselves with the great majority of Americans, most of whom deep down really loved their bumbling President.

But that was then and this is now. A recent poll by conservative Human Events shows that 39% of Americans favor impeachment of both the President and Vice President.

Anti-war Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania is prominent among some Democrats in his use of the "I" word -- impeachment -- about President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Murtha made his comments on CBS's "Face the Nation" and elsewhere.

Few serious observers think things will ever get to actual impeachment. And yet the American public seems more open to the concept than many imagine, according to a new national poll. The implications of this public sentiment could be huge for the 2008 presidential elections.

There's much for Republicans to hate about this poll: independents, who are likely to decide the 2008 elections, favor impeachment by 42 percent.

Life of the party

The Presidential candidates are starting to comment on SCOTUS' partial birth abortion ruling today, and responses are predictable. Recovering liberal Rudy Giuliani applauds the justices 5-4 decision to uphold a federal law that bans the procedure. So does Saint John McCain. Meanwhile, Obama and Edwards warned that Roe was next.

Republicans love to run as the "party of life", yet in recent years a majority of Americans favor safe, legal abortion with some restrictions. Republicans seized on partial birth abortion because, well, the name is so gruesome. The same people who have trouble feeling sympathy with a cluster of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence are sure to have an emotional attachment to a late term fetus that could, theoretically, live on its own outside the womb.

Doctors call the procedure intact dilation and extraction, or IDX. Republicans tried to ban the procedure in 1995 and again later, but couldn't overcome President Clinton's veto. Congress passed another law in 2003, which was upheld today.

Politically speaking, the ruling is probably a good thing for Democrats. IDX is hard for politicians to defend to most people, and now they won't have to. It also takes away a potent wedge issue from the Republicans, who would much rather talk about collapsed fetal craniums than the President's collapsed foreign policy.

V Tech

The full horror of the Virginia Tech massacre hasn't hit me yet. I'm sure it will when the breathless survivor stories are told, and we know more about the gunman. Right now I'm too busy being disgusted by the media coverage, which included custom graphics and theme music before the bodies were counted.

Brian Williams was particularly appalling on the NBC Nightly News last night, with his fawning interviews of students and paramedics. "Virgina Tech will always be known as the site of this horrible massacre" said Williams, thus making sure the Virginia Tech will always be knows as the site of this horrible massacre.

It also bothers me that violent death by crazed gunmen happens everyday in Baghdad, but doesn't warrant a tenth of the US media coverage. Thirty-two dead students is "Another bloody day in Baghdad" the talking heads will tell us, then quickly move on to more Panda videos, or a story about Prince Harry's jilted girlfriend.

Update
ABC News shows off its math skills.

The number of dead is almost twice as high as the previous record for a mass shooting on an American college campus. That took place at the University of Texas at Austin on Aug. 1, 1966, when a gunman named Charles Whitman opened fire from the 28th floor of a campus tower. Whitman killed 16 and injured 31.

Actually, 32 is exactly twice as many as 16. Is ABC hedging on whether to count the shooter among the dead? Strange.

Mother and daughter

Mrs. Heraldblog and our daughter, Natalie, hamming it up.

Good riddance to Imus

It wasn't the government or even political correctness that brought Imus to his knees. It was the advertisers who support the show. They, ultimately, have the say, and some really big names put NBC on notice that they would advertise elsewhere if the network didn't clean house. Plus, there are more African American decision makers in the nation's major corporations.

Yeah, Imus is gone. What's the problem? On the list of pressing free speech issues, I'd put Northshore Ned's right to act like Dr. Dre alongside the right to keep and bear sniper rifles.

Gwen Ifil was dead on this morning on Meet the Press. Politicians from both sides of the aisle have been quiet about the I Man's dismissal. Over the years, Imus has hosted free speech advocates, bigots, liberals, theocrats and independents, and from them the silence is deafening.

Down the Hatch

In follow up to my Sunday Meet the Press post, I've learned that San Diego USA Carol Lam 1) never fundraised for President Clinton 2) was never a law professor and 3) has 15 years experience as a prosecutor.

On the other hand, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Confabulation) told Tim Russert last Sunday that Lam 1) was a Clinton fundraiser 2) was just a law professor and (3) had little or no prosecutorial experience.
I love a good mystery, and the mystery here is why a sitting US Senator would go before millions and tell back to back to back whoppers. I'm not talking about little white lies here, or highly questionable opinions stated as fact. Hatch's three assertions are not only false, they are demonstrably false. It's like saying Orrin Hatch quit the Klan last month to spend more time with his start-up porn business. Acutally, Hatch's lies were worse, because they don't involve proving a negative.

So why would Hatch subject himself to such exposure. Here are some explanations.

First, he thought the media would be too distracted by Britney's shiny, lumpy cranium to notice.

Second, he was just repeating the talking points that his chief of staff heard at the last GOP We-Don't-Have-A-Prayer breakfast with Karl Rove.

Three, he's advocating for Gonzales, which means he has no business sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee. And he's a liar.

h/t Josh

Update: Josh sheds more light on Hatch's prevarications. The Senator has issued an explanation for his MTP moment: Everything he said was true, except that he wasn't really talking about Carol Lam. He meant to say Alan Bersin, the previous San Diego USA under Clinton.

Bersin was a law professor with little prosecutorial experience who was appointed in 1993 because he was friends with Clinton at Yale and raised money for the Clinton campaign. So take out "Bersin" and insert "Lam" and voila, a senior-sleaze moment.

This is about what we could expect from Orrin Hatch, a former drifter/drug addict who entices young men into his apartment for sexual perversion, murder, necrophilia and cannibalism. He is an embarrassment to the country, and deserves to be clubbed to death in the prison weightroom.

Update: The above paragraph is factually accurate, except that I accidentally used Hatch's name instead of Jeffrey Dahmer's. But I still stand behind everything I wrote.

April is Poetry Month

To An Athlete Dying Young
by A. E. Housman

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

Smell the fear

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Lickspittle) is losing it on Meet the Press over the attorney general scandal, while Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy looks on.

Hatch is calling the Democratic investigation a tempest in a teapot. He admits the White House didn't handle the situation well, but insists there isn't a shred of evidence that anything untoward has happened.

Did Russert just say "Horrin Hatch"? OMG.



Hatch said Carol Lam, the former USA from San Diego, should have been fired three years ago. Other USAs weren't aggressively prosecuting pornography, or illegal aliens, or tearing the tags off mattresses. Funny that none of these issues were brought up in private emails prior to the firings.

Now Hatch says he likes AG Alberto Gonzales because he's Hispanic, and a nice guy. He is "incapable of lying."

Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy is masterful: "Sen. Hatch says Gonzales has always been truthful. Unfortunately, he was not truthful to the US Senate, and that is why he is coming back."

Stay tuned.

Time for national health care

Republicans hate the very idea of publicly-funded national health care, but the fact is, we already have it. Dr. Edwin Leap explains the inconvenient truth:

The system is set up so that those who pay, cover their own bill and the bills of others. Fair or not, it’s the way it works. But it’s not unheard of. It’s similar to the way the costs of shoplifting are passed on to other consumers in retail stores. Someone is going to pay, because the store can’t absorb all of the cost of stolen items. Not that I’m equating non-payment with theft; it’s just a financial analogy. But there’s a parallel. When someone says to me that they wanted to see their doctor, but owe them money, and the same person drinks alcohol every weekend and smokes two to four packs per day, has a camera phone and a fresh tattoo, it’s hard to believe they simply can’t pay a bill. In that sense, the theft analogy may hold some water. But in the end, two facts remain; health care is expensive, and someone has to pay or else the system will not survive.

Read the whole thing.

Drowning in the mainstream

Republicans used to get away with calling Democrats "out of the mainstream". It worked when the mainstream was stocked with plump social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and school prayer.

There may have been a time when Democrats weren't mainstream for opposing the Iraq War. But those days are gone. Today, 59 percent of Americans say they support the August, 2008, Democratic withdrawal date for Bush's War. And while 33 percent oppose the bill, I can't help but wonder if some of those folks simple want the withdrawal date to be set even earlier.



But facts rarely get in the way of the Bush Administration's fantasies. Today, White House spokesblonde Dana Perino called Congress "out of the mainstream" for passing a spending bill that sets time limits on a troop withdrawal from Iraq.

“Now, their proposal is well outside of the mainstream. This is not a moderate bill. It is contrary to the Baker-Hamilton report. It’s contrary to the judgment of the President’s military advisors, and it’s contrary to the unanimous judgment of our intelligence community.”

There is so much wrong with these four sentences. First, since when does Bush care about the Iraq Study Group recommendations? The Democrats are more inline with the ISG than Bush. Second, two out of three Americans want Congress to set a withdrawal date from Iraq. Bush stamps his tiny feet and says "no", then calls Congress out of the mainstream.

Which means that a majority of Americans are also "out of the mainstream."

Let's get real. Bush doesn't care about the mainstream, whatever that means. He's said over and over he doesn't care about polls, or what the newspapers say. No, our President is playing to future generations of historians, and the grateful crowds who line George W. Bush Memorial Parkway on Uniter Not a Divider Day, to cheer the passing Christian-themed floats and military bands. They stand in awe of the President who brought Western-style freedoms to the heathen Muslims, thus vanquishing the terrorists who brought bedlam to our shores.

He knows this will happen, in the same way a chronic gambler knows the next roll will be lucky sevens.

A show about nothing

Here's Senator Leahy's response to President Bush's lame offer to let Rove and the rest dissemble off the record about the USA firings.



Kudos to the Senator from Vermont for not taking the bait.

DeLay on Meet the Press

Tom DeLay (R-Prison Bound) just said we are fighting the 9/11 terrorists in Iraq.

Richard Perle hopes the surge will win the war in Iraq.

Now Delay says it's better to fight the terrorists in Iraq than "over here".

Democratiic Rep. Joe Sestak, who actually fought in Iraq, is being much to nice to DeLay. "Shouldn't you be in prison or something?" He didn't really say that, but he should.

300 ways to hate 300

This guy really, really doesn't like 300.

The Persian army is depicted as an army of monsters. They are all less than human: they're all horribly mutated in one way or another, hunchbacked and grotesque. They're not white. They're sexual perverts! (And while we get jokes about boy-loving men [this from Spartans, mind you—Spartans who are all dressed in very manly and heterosexual giant leather jockstraps], of course what we see is women engaging in some form of pantomime lesbianism—because why not titillate while also casting moral judgment?) Obviously, they deserve to be brutally slaughtered. It must be the will of God.

Never has a film made me feel so physically ill to be in the theater watching it. And it wasn't all the beheadings, although those were copious. I felt like I was being made to watch a Leni Riefenstahl movie, or the very worst bits of Birth of a Nation. And then there was even more to feel sick about, like the fact that the sole female character's only role seemed to be to allow herself to get raped by her husband's rival—and this was presented as heroic. What a vile, vile piece of trash.

I don't get out to the movies a much as I'd like, so the next time I do go, it probably won't be 300.

Update: The classical scholars at Obsidian Wings and their readers are all about ancient Sparta and triremes.