Must Reads

Frank Rich: Gay Bashing at The Smithsonian

Ishmael Reed: What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama

Matt Osborne: When Commitment to Jane Hamsher Supercedes Critical Thinking

Carlos A. Ball: Right-Wing Hypocrisy on "Judicial Activism"

Bob Cesca: Are Progressives Losing Touch With Reality?

Karoli: Recipe for Broken Government

Gail Collins: The Crying Game

The Rude Pundit: Kyl and DeMint: Baby Jesus Doesn't Want Us to Pass the START Treaty Right Now

Eric W. Dolan: Sen. Durbin blasts GOP horror at $1.1 trillion: ‘That’s exactly the amount they asked for’

Must Reads

Frank Rich: All The President's Captors

Gail Collins: Arizona Strikes Again

Thom Hartmann: Tax Cut Lies: The Day The News Died

The World Is Watching

Yesterday, I recommended Frank Rich's latest column on my Facebook page. While pointing out that the Obama administration has not gotten the credit it deserves for its accomplishments, Rich also makes a case for the lack of enthusiasm the administration has had for pursuing the Wall Street crooks who almost collapsed the global economy, or lack of cohesive White House messaging to the point of being blamed for the bank bailouts even though they happened before Obama took office. We also know the difficulty they've had in touting their accomplishments, or at least touting so that people will listen.

Well a friend of mine, a native German currently living in Munich, read the Rich piece and sent me a message:

I'm hoping so badly for your country that the voters will keep their faith and their hope in real change as they did when they initially voted for Obama. I can only assure everyone that the outside reputation of your nation has improved by several hundred percent. Don't throw all that away! President Obama said from the start that it wouldn't be an easy task and he was right, wasn't he? Note that real chang takes time. Please be faithful and more patient. And know that many, many other nations (including mine) would be more than glad to have a leadership that works so hard for the benefit of its people instead of corporate and private interests.

Albrecht

Thank, Al, for helping us keep perspective. I hope that that mindset pervades the voters who are thinking of staying home on November 2nd, because they've lost that overall viewpoint.

Quote of the Week

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

~ Frank Rich

Quote of the Day

"What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching."

~ Frank Rich

Must Reads

Digby: It's Official ---Bart Stupak Is A Moron

Troubadour: The Problem With Elena Kagan Is That She's Not You

Frank Rich: A Heaven-Sent Rent Boy

Quote of the Day

Frank Rich: "So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the [Arizona "Paper's Please"] law, rode to the rescue by suggesting 'they will look at the kind of dress you wear.' Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!"

Quote of the Day

Frank Rich:

“I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time,” said Alan Greenspan as he testified last week on Capitol Hill. Greenspan — a k a the Oracle during his 18-year-plus tenure as Fed chairman — could not have more vividly illustrated how and why geniuses of his stature were out to lunch while Wall Street imploded. No doubt he applied his full brain power to that 70-30 calculation. But the big picture eludes him. If the captain of the Titanic followed the Greenspan model, he could claim he was on course at least 70 percent of the time too.

Quote of the Week

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

~ Frank Rich, March 28th, 2010 New York Times Op-Ed

Quote of the Day

Frank Rich: "The fact-checking siege of 'Going Rogue' — by the media, Democrats and aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike — is another fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions. The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause."

Must Reads

John Cole: Fair Questions

Steve Benen: False Positives

David Michael Green: Big Bad Government Is Coming To Get You

Scott Ritter: McChrystal Doesn't Get It - Does Obama?

Abby Zimet: Everybody Is Supposed to be Equal In This Country

Frank Rich: The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York

Sunday Must Reads

Armadillo Joe recommends...

Frank Rich: Obama’s Squandered Summer

Alex Koppelman: Conservatives march on Washington

Must Reads

Joan Walsh: "Beer summit" won't stop racists like Limbaugh

d r i f t g l a s s: When Harry Met Crazy

Glenn Greenwald: More detainee victories and what a majority of Congress tried to do and GE's silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's sleazy use of Richard Wolffe

Bob Herbert: Anger Has Its Place

Danny Schechter: AS OBAMA’S SUPPORT ERODES, THE RIGHT IS RESURGENT - Will Progressives Respond To The Attempt to Overthrow The President?

David Sirota: Health Care Tyranny by 13 Obstructionists

Gore Vidal: America the Great ... Police State

Frank Rich: Small Beer, Big Hangover

Frank Rich: They Got Some ’Splainin’ to Do

As political theater, the Sonia Sotomayor hearings tanked faster than the 2008 Fred Thompson presidential campaign. They boasted no drama to rival the Clarence-Anita slapdown, the Bork hissy fits or the tearful exodus of Samuel Alito’s wife. There was rarely a moment to match even the high point of the Senate’s previous grilling of Sotomayor — in 1997, when she was elevated to the Second Circuit. It was then that Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri previewed the brand of white male legal wisdom that would soon become his hallmark at the Bush Justice Department. “Do you believe there’s a constitutional right to homosexual conduct by prisoners?” he asked. (She aced it: “No, sir.”)

Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent.

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

Rumsfeld's Bible Thumping

What the fuck?!

Frank Rich: This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

Read the entire article.

Frank Rich Agrees (sort of)

by Armadillo Joe

Frank Rich in today's NYTimes:

EVEN among pitchfork-bearing populists, there was scant satisfaction when the White House sent the C.E.O. of General Motors to the guillotine.

Sure, Rick Wagoner deserved his fate. He did too little too late to save an iconic American institution

[...]

Yet few disputed [...] that Wagoner was a “sacrificial lamb,” a symbolic concession to public rage ordered by a president who had to look tough after being blindsided by the A.I.G. bonuses. Detroit’s chief executive had to be beheaded so that the masters of the universe at the top of Wall Street’s bailed-out behemoths might survive.

[...]

Those on Wall Street who took the money and ran are beyond the reach of the guillotine. Most of their successors are too new to their jobs to merit beheading

[...]

Change is hard. Change is traumatic. Sending a juicy C.E.O. — or six — to the gallows is at most a crowd-pleasing opening act to the heavy lifting of reform and rebuilding we still await.

To which I'd like to add: "No really, go ahead. Try to please us."

The Op-Ed also included this cartoon, further proof of the "pitchforks & torches" zeigeist these plutocratic cockroaches have no idea swirls around them. It could consume not only the Wall Street Masters of the Universe who drove our economy onto the rocks, but their enablers in the Obama Administration and perhaps the Administration itself, if this crowd doesn't get a little retribution:

Must Reads

Mike Barnicle: McCain At Sunset

Margaret & Helen: Sarah Palin is a bitch.... there I said it. and Yep. I called her a bitch and I am not taking it back.

Frank Rich: He Just Can’t Quit W

Must Reads

Frank Rich: The Candidate We Still Don’t Know

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

...Most Americans still don’t know, as [Josh] Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

Robert Scheer: McCain's Warped Worldview

The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news, like reports of the 10 French soldiers killed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and the U.S. government’s imminent nationalization of much of the American mortgage-lending industry, would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

There you have it encapsulated, the McCain campaign for president, an irrational mélange of patriotic swagger and blindness to reality that is proving disturbingly successful with uninformed voters.

Good Reads

Frank Rich: McCain Can Run, but Bush Won't Hide

Digby: The Wisdom of the Ancients and Practically Lactating

Glenn Greenwald: High Standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed Page

d r i f t g l a s s: The Clintonian Blue

Bob Franken: Hillary: We Really Don't Care

Howard Kurtz, WaPo: Feud Fuels Bill O'Reilly's Blasts at GE

Frank Rich on Clinton's Hallmark Town Hall

...However boring, this show was a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities. What’s more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come.
For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web “chats” and then planted questions at its earlier town-hall meetings, a Bush-style pseudo-event like the Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. What’s remarkable is that instead of learning from these mistakes, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.