Posts from ‘November, 2007’

If you follow politics you’ve heard the rap, especially from independents reveling in their disgust with both major parties: “Democrats, Republicans — not a dime’s worth of difference between them.

. . . In his latest book, “Broken Government,” John Dean blows this quadrennial exercise in know-it-all stupidity to smithereens.

The clear implication missing from the Times story is that Lott felt the equal rights and greater acceptance in all aspects of life African Americans have gained since the late 1940s were not right, fair, necessary and an overall advancement for American society, but instead just made for “all these problems all these years.”

One of corporate media’s most fair-haired boys, figuratively speaking, having ridden the wave of neoconservative ascendency he helped propel, has had an epiphany.

We’re referring to Mark Halperin, late of ABC News and now with Time, whose belated burst of lucidity resides in a New York Times op-ed.

President George W. Bush might believe he’s on a mission from God to clear away evil despots and spread democracy throughout the Mideast, but the Archbishop of Canterbury isn’t buying it.

Here, we want to take a moment to focus on the sort of people Giuliani appoints to important positions. This is a vital aspect of any presidency, but is of special concern after seven years of mostly horrible appointments by President Bush.

right-wing noisemakers trumpeting the humungous, stupendous, glorious, mainstream-media-ignored reduction in Iraq violence are going past hype to absurd overreach.

Exibit A, the happy-Thanksgiving post at Riehl World View.

By way of follow-up, Scott McClellan’s publisher says people shouldn’t take the ex-White House spokesman’s statement about unwittingly misleading the public in 2003 to mean President Bush had misled McClellan.

The right-wing party line tells us Iran is the most dangerous nation on Earth, about to get nuclear weapons, and when that happens President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will only have to make a phone call to get the U.S. East Coast vaporized.

That seems to assume Ahmadinejad has the kind of power Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei actually has, which Ahmadinejad does not.

Beyond the obvious unfairness, what could be worse for retaining experienced, battle-hardened troops than this asinine Pentagon policy? For that matter, what could be worse for recruiting new troops, because word gets around from soldiers who’ve been screwed over.

McClellan fingers President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, then chief of staff Andrew Card Cheney’s No. 2 Scooter Libby and, of course, Karl Rove, as deliberately misleading the public about their role in the outing of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

Which is to say, Plame’s outing was the doing of those ruthless, vindictive, lying SOB’s.