President Obama’s balancing act

Despite receiving a thumbs up from a number of conservative foreign policy observers, and the public at large, for his handling of the current Iranian domestic turmoil, the wingers seem to have settled on a narrative that President Obama has been too timid in his response to same.

It was a theme dutifully picked up by the MSM at Tuesday’s presser at the White House. Asked by CBS’ Chip Reed about John Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran McCain’s criticisms, Obama swatted him down, reminding him about who is president. When pressed by MSNB’s Chuck Todd about why he wouldn’t identify specific consequences, Obama replied that unlike the reporters, he’s not lashed to the wheel of a 24 hour news cycle. (Snap!) And when Fux News reporter Major Garret rudely demanded to know why it took him so long to ratchet up his condemnation of violence against protesters, O pointed out that his rhetoric has evolved in phase with– “tracked”– unfolding events.

After eight years of self-defeating Dick swinging, cowboy diplomacy, it’s obviously going to take some time to re-introduce the press to the idea of a measured, tempered response to international events. Events over which the US, despite all its military might and self-importance, has little, if any, ability to influence; and can make a whole lot worse by indulging the kind of rhetoric that flows unhindered from the McCaniac id.

Noted Middle East scholar Professor Juan Cole in his blog yesterday reminds us how the Rethugs responded to US protesters when they were running things and the legacy they left behind:

At the Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul,  250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium. Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, ‘protest zones’ were assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations outside designated ‘protest zones’ would be illegal in New York City, apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil damages.

The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.

I applaud the Iranian public’s protests against a clearly fraudulent election, and deplore the jackboot tactics that the regime is using to quell them. But it is important to remember that the US itself was moved by Bush and McCain toward a ‘Homeland Security’ national security state that is intolerant of public protest and throws the word ‘terrorist’ around about dissidents. Obama and the Democrats have not addressed this creeping desecration of the Bill of Rights, and until they do, the pronouncements of self-righteous US senators and congressmen on the travesty in Tehran will be nothing more that imperialist hypocrisy of the most abject sort.

Cole recommends the following:

American politicians should keep their hands off Iran and let the Iranians work this out. If the reformers have enough widespread public support, they will develop tactics that will change the situation. If they do not, then they will have to regroup and work toward future change. US covert operations and military interventions have caused enough bloodshed and chaos. If the US had left Mosaddegh alone in 1953, Iran might now be a flourishing democracy and no Green Movement would have been necessary.

Bombing Iran back into the stone age has been a longtime dream of the warmongering denizens of the wingnut universe. Naturally, they have seized on the current turmoil inside the country as a means of pushing that agenda forward.

While the increasingly brutal repression of the Iranian people is something the whole world should condemn (and is), Obama has additional concerns– preventing a war between Israel and Iran, the closing of the Persian Gulf to 25% of the world’s oil supplies, stopping nuclear weapons proliferation throughout the Middle East, and (per Bob Baer)  preventing a new cold war that would pit the US against an anti-US Russo-China-Iran coalition.

When walking a tightrope, sometimes you have to lean a little one way or the other. Right now the president is striking the proper balance between confrontation and cooperation.

Madam Lindsay Graham hobnobs with the rotting corpse of John McCain at GOP headquarters, Sunday.

WASHINGTON D.C. — A puffy but erect Lindsey Graham appeared at the Washington DC GOP Headquarters, Sunday, with the obviously deceased, desiccated, and decaying Arizona Senator John McCain, where the duo attacked President Obama for not doing enough to lead the free world.  Clearly frustrated, Graham said the president had been “timid and passive” more than he would like, and that the president was “S’pose teh lead the free world, not foller it.”  When asked what specifically he wanted the president to say, Graham stroked his tie briefly and said President Obama should just be more “aggressive” and “hands on.”

McCain, officially deceased since election day ‘08, was held upright by the ever-solicitous Graham, but appeared to have difficulty collecting any thoughts worth speaking, but eventually said the prezdint could be “stronger,” and then mumbled “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” to the cadence of the Beach Boys song, “Barbara Ann.”

The news conference was cut short when the wind shifted, wafting the virilent stench of nearly four decades worth of Republican trash talk, which litters the entire headquarters grounds and averages over forty-seven feet deep in recent years.  The Republicans, long oblivious to the gastly sight and horrendous odor, actually take great pride in the fact that all their trash talk is kept on premises and continually recycled.

Demonstrating an “enhanced interrogation technique”

In 1999, Bush’s family biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, reports that W. told him he was intent on invading Iraq, saying that his status as a war time president would give him enough political capital to push through his conservative domestic agenda.

(That would include the privatization of social security whose blood rich corpse would be served up to his Wall Street vampire buddies to feast upon. Not to mention the Oedipal angle of wanting to do his daddy one better by “finishing” the job of deposing Saddam Hussein.)

Fast forward to 9/11/01. The dust of the collapsed Trade Towers hadn’t even settled when W. ordered his terrorism Czar Richard Clarke to find a link to Saddam in the attacks. Clarke was dubious, but ordered a review anyway, producing a dry hole (something which Bush the failed oil tycoon was all too familiar with).

Meanwhile, US troops were sent to Afghanistan to hunt down Usama bin Laden. SECDEF Rumsfeld complained that there were no good targets left to bomb there and rapidly warmed to the idea of invading Iraq.  Special ops troops that were originally set to finish off Al Qaeda in Tora Bora were instead reassigned to prepare for Iraq, allowing them to escape and regroup in the hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan (where they have grown even stronger and now threaten to bring down the nuclear armed government of Pakistan).

Despite efforts to provoke Saddam into providing an overt rationale for an invasion, he lay low, forcing the Bushies to explore other means around which a rationale for war could be devised— fixing the facts around the policy, as the Downing Street Memo so artfully put it.

Discussions were had with the Brits to paint a UN logo on a drone and send it flying lazily over Iraq air space where it could be shot down. Ahmed Chalabi was paid $300,000 a month to produce ex-pat informants like “Curveball” to ‘prove’ that Saddam was actively engaged in producing WMD.  Ex-military “consultants” (with monetary ties to defense contractors ready to make a killing supplying product and services to the war effort) flooded the network and cable news shows warning of dire consequences if we didn’t depose Saddam.

Neocons like Richard Perle and Bill Kristol, administration officials like Condi Rice and Darth Cheney, egged on by war mongering talking heads too numerous to mention, took to the airways wielding images of mushroom clouds and cartoons of mobile bio-weapons labs to create an aura of dread in the American people.  Homeland Security helped keep fear alive with their color coded threat charts, displayed so helpfully on the evening news.  Cable news networks ratings soared as they created “war rooms” tricked out with state of the art graphics and martial theme music, eagerly awaiting the latest nosecone videos of missiles slamming into buildings in an orchestrated spectacle of “shock and awe.”

Which brings us to the latest dot in the narrative, the so-called “torture memos.”  The lead story in today’s NY Times reveals that the methods, further detailed in a now declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY used what are euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were originally developed by the ChiComs and North Koreans in the 1950s, and used as a training regime called SERE (Search, Evade, Rescue, Escape) by our own military to help captured troops resist interrogation.

Apparently, some genius in the Bush Administration figured that adopting those same techniques for offensive purposes would mitigate objections that they constituted torture. “Hey, we use them on our own guys, and they don’t suffer any long term effects.” Three major problems with that theory: [Read more →]

You just know Cindy McLame is making having Carmelita make her husband’s famous chicken wings today, using a recipe of Alton Brown’s, stolen off the internets an old McCain Family Recipe.

“The greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.”

So says psychology professor Robert Altemeyer, who provided Wateregate whistle-blower John Dean with forty years of study on the authoritarian personality type that roughly 28 percent of Americans proudly call their modus operandi.

John Dean:

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidates, have shown themselves to be unapologetic and archetypical authoritarian conservatives. Indeed, their campaign has warmed the hearts of fellow authoritarians, who applaud them for their negativity, nastiness, and dishonest ploys, and only criticize them for not offering more of the same.

The McCain/Palin campaign has assumed a typical authoritarian posture: The candidates provide no true, specific proposals to address America’s needs. Rather, they simply ask voters to “trust us” and suggest that their opponents – Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden – are not “real Americans” like McCain, Palin, and the voters they are seeking to court. Accordingly, McCain and Plain have called Obama “a socialist,” “a redistributionist,” “a Marxist,” and “a communist” – without a shred of evidence to support their name-calling, for these terms are pejorative, rather than in any manner descriptive. This is the way authoritarian leaders operate.

In my book Conservatives Without Conscience, I set forth the traits of authoritarian leaders and followers, which have been distilled from a half-century of empirical research, during which thousands of people have voluntarily been interviewed by social scientists. The touch points in these somewhat-overlapping lists of character traits provide a clear picture of the characters of both John McCain and Sarah Palin.

McCain, especially, fits perfectly as an authoritarian leader. Such leaders possess most, if not all, of these traits:

* dominating

* opposes equality

* desirous of personal power

* amoral

* intimidating and bullying

* faintly hedonistic

* vengeful

* pitiless

* exploitive

* manipulative

* dishonest

* cheats to win

* highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic)

* mean-spirited

* militant

* nationalistic

* tells others what they want to hear

* takes advantage of “suckers”

* specializes in creating false images to sell self

* may or may not be religious

* usually politically and economically conservative/Republican

Incidentally, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney also can be described by these well-defined and typical traits — which is why a McCain presidency is so likely to be nearly identical to a Bush presidency.

Clearly, Sarah Palin also has some qualities typical of authoritarian leaders, not to mention almost all of the traits found among authoritarian followers. [Read more →]

In one of the more surreal moments of an already surreal campaign, John McCain got into the spirit of the holiday by appearing in an amazingly creepy “Underdog” costume, while standing next to someone else dressed as Underdog.

WASHINGTON — As we stagger through the final hours of Halloween this election cycle, John McCain and Barack Obama are pulling out all the stops in their efforts to sway comatose “undecided” voters.

Barack Obama is blanketing Tee Vee Land with his main message, that the United States must change the ruinous course we’re on.  John McCain continues to slander Barack Obama with everything vile and foamy in the Karl Rove Book ‘o Slime, and to his eternal disgrace, McCain has saved the Wright Stuff for last.

Dressed in a bizarre “UnderDog“ costume for some stupid fucking reason, Halloween, McCain howled to several hundred people,

“The pundints [sic] have written us off, just as they’ve done several times before. We’re a few points down, but we’re coming back.”

“My friends, My opponent, Barack Obama, is urging Americans to “share the wealth” tonight, by giving candy to strangers. When I’m president, we’re not going to let that happen.”

Although momentarily stunned, the crowd eventually cheered wildly, breaking into a chant of “Socialist! Socialist!”  McCain then pantomimed flying in a circle, supposedly as a grounded, waddling Underdog might; the other Underdog joined in by running circles around John “Underdog” McCain.

However, the latest CBS-NY Times national poll has Obama-Biden at 52 percent, McUnderdog-Palin at 39 percent.  Other national polls show Obama with a substantial lead nationwide.

Meanwhile, McCain’s trick or treat robocalls continue to pummel Americans across the battleground states, including Obama’s home state of Illinois, in McCain’s continuing efforts to link Obama with convicted felon Tony Resco, or anything that anyone might consider scary or questionable. (No such calls linking McCain to convicted felon and nutball, G. Gordon Liddy, have been made by anyone.)  One McCain robo-message claims Obama dresses up as a Druid at least once a year, and roams Chicago neighborhoods looking to cast spells over innocent men, women, and children.

Yeww.  The folks at LIAR may have crossed the line, this time.
But I don’t really think they give a rat’s ass.

Todd Palmer and Rob Pringle.

Palin: “Where does a lot of that earmark money end up, anyway? [...] You’ve heard about, um, these — some of these pet projects they rilly don’t make a whole lotta sense, and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothin’ to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not!”

It’s hard to know where to begin deconstructing this statement. This was a speech on autism, and Palin’s critics have pounced on the fact that a recent study of Drosophila fruit flies showed that a protein called neurexin is essential for proper neurological function— a discovery with clear implications for autism research.

Fruit flies are more than just the occasional vehicles for research relevant to human disabilities. They are literally the foundation of modern genetics, the original model organism that has enabled us to discover so much of what we know about heredity, genome structure, congenital disorders, and (yes) evolution. So for Palin to state that “fruit fly research” has “little or nothing to do with the public good” is not just wrong — it’s mind-boggling.

Evolution? Nope. Sarah believes in Creationism. That means she believes that Noah had a little fruit fly cage aboard the ark, where he kept Mr. & Mrs. fruit fly alive, right next to millions of other little cages with married insects in them.  But. Sarah is clearly jealous of the little critters.  They’ve been to Paris, after all;  she hasn’t.

What else does this blunder say about Palin and her candidacy? [Read more →]

Our economic woes have pushed the two wars we’re still waging out of the headlines. But our sons and daughters are still still fighting and dying;  our treasure continues to be wasted on Dick Bush’s legacy of war crimes.

Terrorists who would do us harm must be hunted down, but these unnecessary wars must end.  Only Barack Obama will end them.  Bullets must give way to Ballots.

Remember that when you vote.

Yeah, people behind me were pretty cool about my arrow. (click it.)

DENVER — There was no time for blogging today! as Dr. Zaius says, because the main man was in Denver, and a few of us got together to wish him well, Tuesday after next.  Like so many in that crowd,  I never layed eyes on Barack. The distance between where he’s standing in the foreground and where the tip of that arrow touches my soft spot is over two hundred yards. Over 100,000 air-breathers in close proximity to each other can be very exhilirating, especially when you’re listening to the next president of the United States; a man and a country facing perhaps the greatest set of challenges we’ve ever known.

Still, you come away from an event like this with a reknewed sense of hope, and purpose. You know— what McCain supporters call “communism.”  That hope will be very important in the coming months, as we finally get an honest appraisal of our floundering ship of state from a President-elect Obama.

It isn’t going to be pretty, either.  He’s already starting to prepare the nation for bad news, by pointing out that all the change we need isn’t going to happen with a snap of his fingers.  But there’s time to gird ourselves for that struggle.  Right now, we have to take seriously the responsibility to get out the vote. If you’re not volunteering a little of your time with a campaign yet, consider that your citizenship dues are in arrears.  Get out there and pitch in this final week at a campaign headquarters near you.  You feel better about yourself and your country.

And vote early.  Make sure your neighbors do, too.

And keep your prayers on the front burner.

Use the force, Darth;  use all the force you want. (Click it.)

Going through yesterday’s junkmail,  I notice one piece that proclaimed, “This is the Story of William Ayers. . . Terrorist.  Radical.  Friend of Obama.”  On the flip side:  “I don’t regret setting bombs.  I feel we didn’t do enough.” The “quote” was sandwiched between a 1968 booking photo of Ayers, and a recent picture of Barack Obama.

“Barack Obama. Not Who You Think He Is.”

As if. . .  you can think.

Anytime my soul gets insulted by premeditated, intentional evil of this sort, I tend towards a feeling of virulent indignation.  The animal origin creature in me, so fully assured of its righteousness, wants the D. Vader power to close the throats of these ignorant fucks, until their lungs collapse into useless globs of jelly, and their neglected brain cells stop vibrating forever.

Of course, Darthian justice is just as fictional as all the spooge-covered smears pedaled by these repuglicans. These frenzied-up nocturnal emissions,  ejaculated in an ethical vacuum, that shamelessy shoves it’s middle finger right in God’s beneficent face.

These “guilt by association” fuckwads that link Ayers to Obama, live and breath “. . .in our greet [sic] country, our most viry viry patriotic cuntry [sic].”  They are among us. They have always been among us. But they have to publicly expose themselves in order to present this filth to the American electorate, and this time, there will be consequences;  there will be fire.

This time, the ugliness that violates every “value” they claim to be and represent, reveals the full depravity of their hypocrisy;  they are the blind that the Jesus they pretend to worship said would “lead the blind.”  And this time they are falling into the pit.  This time, we can, as John McCain says,  “make them famous, and you will know their names! You will know their names!”

There names are here:  www.COLOGOP.org

Dick Wadhams

Party Chairman

dickwadhams@cologop.org

That’s right; DICK WADHAMS.  And you thought God didn’t have a sense of humor.

Send Dick Wad an email;  tell him how this garbage makes you feel about him, and his “values.”

CC all the underlings, too.  Their names are here:

[Read more →]

The Republican plumbers are ready to work on our very strong planks.

Sarah did a sitdown phone interview with James Dobson.

(H/T to Chris Kelly) She may have even had some notes, but they didn’t have anything in them about the very very strong planks that form the floor foundation of the Republikin party. I can’t be sure if these are direct quotes, but ya know, I think they’re viry viry close.

I think this greet country of ours also is a strong platform around the planks in this platform that respects the life and respects the entrepreneurial spirit of this great pro-Amerrikin country and those things, also back to the social issues that are what Republicans, at least in hour viry greet past had articulated and tried also to stand on.

Are they reaching you yet?

Now, finally, we have viry solid planks in the platform that will allow us to build an even stronger foundation for our greet country. It’s all good and it’s encouraging. You would maybe have assumed that we would have gotten further away from those viry viry strong planks. But no, they’re there, they’re solid, we stand on them, we can jump up and down on’em, and they support us in return,  and also again I believe that it is the right agenda for the country at this time. Viry, viry clear and contrasted tickets in this election November 4th. People are going to see the clear contrasts, you just go to the planks in our platforms and that’s where you see them.

Now?

I am such a very strong believer that McCain believes in those viry viry strong planks and we do have good conversations about some of the detells of the diffrint strong planks and also what they represent. I’m viry heartened that John McCain . . . he doesn’t want a Vice President who will check the opinions . . . of me at the door and also we talk about some of these and they’re viry important.  It’s most important though, also as you’re suggesting, that our viry greet Amerrikins also know that John McCain is solidly there on those solid planks in our platform that build the right agenda for Amerrica.

Now??
It won’t get any better.

debate trivia

Senators Obama and McCain listen attentively as moderator Schieffer explains the death jars.

Seems like ages already, but it was just a week ago that moderator Bob Schieffer set the tone for the third and final presidential debate, by presenting ceremonial death jars to Senators Barack Obama, and John McCain.

The Egyptian jars were traditionally used to hold the stomach and intestines of deceased Pharaohs; Schieffer explained that if either candidate were intentionally or accidentally disemboweled during the debate, the  jar might save their political career.  And, as it turned out, when McCain had his ass handed to him by Obama, he quickly stuffed the remains into the jackal-headed orifice before leaving the stage. Obama returned his falcon-headed jar to Schieffer unused.  Now you know.