“Is the military’s top spokesman in Iraq a loose cannon who routinely fires off angry, impetuous e-mails to bloggers who criticize the war and the spin surrounding it? Or is Col. Steven Boylan, instead, an innocent victim — an online wallflower whose identity has been hijacked by a pro-war hacker who has managed to break into the most well-fortified space on the planet in order to taunt lefty critics? Neither scenario paints a comforting picture of the situation in Iraq — and even though the e-mails in question are coming from military servers in Iraq, the military seems strangely uninterested in solving the mystery of who is writing them.” Speaking of ominous “snowflakes” emanating from the Pentagon, Salon‘s Farhad Manjoo summarizes the recent bizarre and troubling behavior by Col. Steven Boylan, most notably his unsolicited letter and subsequent denial to Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald. Hmm…perhaps Boylan is a drailer?
Category: Politics (2007-2008)
Clinton vs. the Mad Men.
“[I]n spinning away her unsteady performance at Tuesday night’s debate, a Clinton advisor tells the Washington Post: ‘Ultimately, it was six guys against her, and she came off as one strong woman.’” I’m just a girl? In a not-very-subtle appeal to her strong female base, the Clinton camp makes an unsightly resort to gender politics to explain away her opponents’ criticisms in Tuesday’s debate. “[I]magine for a moment that it was Barack Obama who stumbled in the face of criticism and pointed questions Tuesday night. Would his campaign dare to declare that it was ‘ultimately five whites and a Hispanic against him, and he came off as one strong black man’? And how would America be feeling about him today if it did?
Honestly, this makes me ill. Suggesting all political opposition to Clinton is a “pile-on” grounded in male hostility is as unsavory and disingenuous a tactic as the earlier claim that Obama and Edwards had abandoned “the politics of hope” for even daring to disagree with her in the first place. And neither strategy makes me very enthused about pulling the lever for Clinton, should she become the nominee. Surely, given her gimongous lead in the polls, Clinton can find more honest and substantive ways to address the ripostes of her Democratic opponents. If you’re the frontrunner, you’ll be attacked — that’s how it works, regardless of sex. Update: Obama calls out Clinton’s use of the gender card. Update 2: As does NARAL’s Kate Michelman.
Judges for sale…
“‘The reputation of the American judiciary is in the hands of the state courts,’ Breyer said. The rising demands on judges to raise money for their expensive campaigns — plus the spending of outside groups — could lead to the impression that the courthouse door ‘is open to some rather than the door is open to all.‘” Having managed to corrupt thoroughly our other two branches of government, unchecked torrents of campaign cash now work to undermine elected judgeships. “The spending increases in large part reflect a decision by business groups to get involved in the contests. The National Association of Manufacturers announced in 2005 that it was establishing the American Justice Partnership to promote tort reform in the states, and the resulting battles between trial lawyers and business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce have led to some of the most expensive campaign battles.”
…and the Dems, Bought and Paid For.
“The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans earn more than 21 percent of all income. That’s a postwar record. The bottom 50 percent of all Americans, when all their wages are combined, earn just 12.8 percent of the nation’s income…If the Democrats stand for anything, it’s a fair allocation of the responsibility for paying the costs of maintaining this nation. So far, neither the Democratic candidates for president nor the Senate Democrats have shown much eagerness to advocate this fundamental principle. It seems the rich have bought them out.” Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich laments the cooptation of the Democrats by the super-rich. “It turns out that Democrats are getting more campaign contributions these days from hedge-fund and private-equity partners than Republicans are getting. In the run-up to the 2006 election, donations from hedge-fund employees were running better than 2-to-1 Democratic. The party doesn’t want to bite the hands that feed.“
Mukasey Closed.
“All other considerations aside, any person who cannot say, plainly and unambiguously, that water-boarding is torture and is both immoral and illegal should not be the attorney general of the United States. Period.” After the nominee’s hemming and hawing about waterboarding, Slate‘s Frank Bowman makes the case against Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as AG. “If the Senate is foolish enough to ratify the replacement of a bumbling toady with an accomplished apostle of the gospel of executive supremacy, it will deserve every snub this and future presidents inflict. But the rest of us deserve better.“
Discarded Socks.
“‘In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list,’ writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. ‘But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.‘” So it seems Hillary Clinton, the erstwhile author of Dear Socks, Dear Buddy, apparently kicked Socks to the curb once the White House days were over. “Hillary’s insistence that we follow her example in pet ownership, when she really should be on Cat Fancy’s Most Wanted List, makes her a tiresome bore.” Well, it’s not exactly the silver bullet rival campaigns are looking for (I mean, the Clintons may abandon their pets, but Republicans seem to torture and/or eviscerate them), but it is rather sad.
Nothin’ could be finer than a Colbert Carolina.
“After nearly 15 minutes of soul-searching, I have heard the call.” Finally, the candidate we’ve all been waiting for…Charleston’s own Stephen Colbert announces he’s running for president in South Carolina, and South Carolina only, on both the Democratic and Republican tickets. (Sadly, Aragorn can’t vote in the Palmetto State.) In The Atlantic, Joshua Green handicaps his chances. “I can’t point to anything other than truthiness, but I believe the ‘drunken college student’ demographic is being overlooked. Anecdotal evidence lends support. ‘I’m surprised how many students seem to get their news from Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert,’ Blease admitted. ‘In the grand tradition of student mischief, you could see Colbert having a pied-piper effect.’” Update: But is he breaking the law?
The Neo-Con Hit List.
“‘We screwed up and left Saddam Hussein in power. The president [then George H.W. Bush] believes he’ll be overthrown by his own people, but I rather doubt it,’ he quotes Wolfowitz lamenting [in 1991]. ‘But we did learn one thing that’s very important. With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won’t come in to block us. And we’ve got five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us … We could have a little more time, but no one really knows.‘” According to Salon‘s Joe Conason, Wesley Clark’s new book suggests the existence of a smoking-gun 2001 memo that outlined in full the neo-cons’ delusional ambitions for the Middle East before the Iraq War. “‘Six weeks later, Clark returned to Washington to see the same general and inquired whether the plan to strike Iraq was still under consideration…”Oh, it’s worse than that,” he said, holding up a memo on his desk. “Here’s the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [then Donald Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We’re going to take out seven countries in five years.” And he named them, starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran.’ While Clark doesn’t name the other four countries, he has mentioned in televised interviews that the hit list included Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan.”
Bait and Switch?
“In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran…The President’s position, and its corollary — that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians — have taken firm hold in the Administration.” With that in mind, and with Secretary of State Rice citing Iranian “lying” about their nuclear program, here’s one from a week or so ago: The New Yorker‘s Sy Hersh evaluates the current prospects in the administration for a war with Iran. “I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the ‘execute order’ that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning…’They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,’ one recently retired C.I.A. official said.”
Better Dead than Red.
“As political scientist Jacob Hacker has argued, the basic obstacle was nothing less than the government’s failure to have adopted a comprehensive health insurance plan decades earlier. As a result, the system that emerged by 1994 entailed such a crazy quilt of private interests — corporations, small firms, insurers, doctors, unions, HMOs, and so on — that moving all Americans into a new framework without worsening anyone’s situation had become virtually impossible.” Slate and Rutger University’s David Greenberg summarizes the history of health care reform, and of the epithet “socialized medicine.” “[T]he idea of government-run health care dates to the Progressive Era. Originally called ‘compulsory health insurance,’ it enjoyed favor in the 1910s among many quarters, including the American Medical Association…But as the debate heated up, doctors began to worry that it would hurt their incomes, and they banded with business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers to oppose reform. American entry into World War I tabled consideration of the issue, and the postwar Red Scare, Starr notes, ‘buried it in an avalanche of anticommunist rhetoric.’“