and a meme is born

for the record

via steve benen @ the washington monthly:

IF CANTOR REALLY WANTS TO GO THERE.... house majority leader eric cantor (r-va.), shortly after president obama's remarks on [the death of] osama bin laden, issued a related statement. it included this gem:

"i commend president obama who has followed the vigilance of president bush in bringing bin laden to justice."

there's a fair amount of this rhetoric bouncing around this morning, and it's not especially surprising — republicans aren't going to credit president obama, regardless of merit, so it stands to reason they'll try to bring george w. bush into the picture.

if this is going to be a new gop talking point, we might as well set the record straight.

in march 2002, just six months after 9/11, bush said of bin laden, "i truly am not that concerned about him.... you know, i just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you."

in july 2006, we learned that the bush administration closed its unit that had been hunting bin laden.

in september 2006, bush told fred barnes, one of his most sycophantic media allies, that an "emphasis on bin laden doesn't fit with the administration's strategy for combating terrorism."

and don't even get me started on bush's failed strategy that allowed bin laden to escape from tora bora.

i'm happy to extend plenty of credit to all kinds of officials throughout the government, but crediting bush's "vigilance" on bin laden is deeply silly.

update: donald rumsfeld added this morning that obama "wisely" followed bush's lead. he either has a very short memory, or he's lying and hopes you have a very short memory.

meanwhile, from every birther's favorite faux-wingnut talking hairpiece:

i want to personally congratulate president obama and the men and women of the armed forces for a job well done. ... i am so proud to see americans standing shoulder to shoulder, waving the american flag in celebration of this great victory.

we should spend the next several days not debating party politics, but in remembrance of those who lost their lives on 9/11 and those currently fighting for our freedom.

god bless america!

after months of flinging racist birther-poop at obama, the donald once again demonstrates, through well-timed magnanimity, that he knows how to separate himself from the crowd.

still waiting

well, it's been a whole week. i certainly hope mccain hasn't turned into some kind of sore loser, because i'm still waiting — along with the rest of the world, i'm sure — for him to tell us just how to win wars and how to catch bin laden.

dubya foreign policy 101

josh marshall:

even more interesting is another argument president bush is poised to make: namely, that vietnam is more than just an analogy. he will argue that the terrorist threat we face today is in some measure the result of our withdrawal from vietnam, as it emboldened the terrorists to attack us. the president will also make the argument that withdrawing from vietnam emboldened today's terrorists by compromising u.s. credibility, citing a quote from al qaeda leader osama bin laden that the american people would rise against the iraq war the same way they rose against the war in vietnam, according to the excerpts. i'm not sure i've ever seen a better example of president bush's comically inept strategic thinking. actually, lack of strategic thinking. i'm sure you've noticed how, as the president's policies go further and further down the drain, he more and more often cites the authority of osama bin laden as the rationale for his policies. in this case, we must stay in iraq forever wasting money and lives and destroying our position in the world because if we don't we'll have proved osama bin laden right. it's like a very sad version of a sixty year old falling for that dingbat head fake ten year olds used to play when i was a kid in elementary school in which: kid a says he wants the football kid b says, 'fine, but if you take the football, you're gay.' and then kid a stalks off hopelessly bamboozled and unable to parry this paralyzing riddle. apparently we have permanently ceded our foreign policy to the whim of osama bin laden's taunts.

josh's schoolyard analogy is amusing, but it's actually not quite accurate, especially if the football is intended to represent u.s. withdrawal from iraq.

bush clearly intends to stay in iraq until the end of his term, if no one forces him out, an event which, at this late stage, seems less and less likely. so bush clearly doesn't want the football. it's the other kids in the yard, the good, sensible, tired, restless public, who really want the football and have been badgering poor dubya to get it for them.

bush's vietnam analagy is just one more in an endless (at least until january 2009) series of lame excuses for not getting the football that everyone else wants but dubya has no intention of delivering.

nevada debate preview

so, will fox viewers be watching this:

or, at long last, this?

(with apologies to charles schulz)

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update: well, it looks like democrats have decided to go for what's behind door number two:

senate majority leader harry reid and the nevada democratic party announced today that they are backing out of a fox news-sponsored presidential debate in august following fox president roger ailes's recent remarks comparing democratic senator barack obama to al qaeda terrorist osama bin laden. fox news did not answer calls seeking reaction to the decision. democratic presidential candidate john edwards had already announced that he would not participate in the fox debate. his party followed suit today, under pressure from the more than 265,000 people who signed a petition calling fox "a mouthpiece for the republican party, not a legitimate news channel" and urging nevada officials to cancel. danny coyle, a moveon.org member who serves on the executive board of the carson city democratic central committee, yesterday offered a resolution calling on the state party to drop fox, and it passed overwhelmingly among the grassroots democrats in attendance. "i am glad and relieved that the nevada democratic leadership has come to its senses," coyle said. "any kind of relationship with fox is bad for the party." at first, senator reid defended the decision to work with fox, reasoning that it might help democratic candidates reach out to right-leaning fox viewers. but party activists argued from the start that any connection with fox was a mistake. robert greenwald, director of the movie outfoxed, called the final decision a "victory for truth and journalism." some 280,000 people have viewed greenwald's new youtube film "fox attacks: obama" — located with the petition at www.foxattacks.com. "by standing up to fox's right-wing smears," greenwald said, "the patriotic grassroots, netroots, senator reid, senator edwards, and the nevada democrats have all worked together to protect one of the most important elements of a free society — the press." and eli pariser, executive director of moveon.org civic action, said he hoped the decision would "set a precedent within the party that fox should be treated as a right-wing mis-information network, not legitimized as a neutral source of news."

america's most wanted

or maybe not.

president bush, september 17, 2001:

q: do you want bin laden dead? bush: i want justice. there's an old poster out west, as i recall, that said, "wanted: dead or alive." q: do you see this being long-term? you were saying it's long-term, do you see an end, at all? bush: i think that this is a long-term battle, war. there will be battles. but this is long-term. after all, our mission is not just osama bin laden, the al qaeda organization. our mission is to battle terrorism and to join with freedom loving people. we are putting together a coalition that is a coalition dedicated to declaring to the world we will do what it takes to find the terrorists, to rout them out and to hold them accountable. and the united states is proud to lead the coalition. q: are you saying you want him dead or alive, sir? can i interpret — bush: i just remember, all i'm doing is remembering when i was a kid i remember that they used to put out there in the old west, a wanted poster. it said: "wanted, dead or alive." all i want and america wants him brought to justice. that's what we want.

president bush, march 13, 2002:

q: but don't you believe that the threat that bin laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive? bush: well, as i say, we haven't heard much from him. and i wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. and, again, i don't know where he is. i — i'll repeat what i said. i truly am not that concerned about him. i know he is on the run. i was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. i was concerned about the fact that he was basically running afghanistan and calling the shots for the taliban.

president bush, september 5, 2006:

bin laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as lenin and hitler before them. the question is: will we listen? will we pay attention to what these evil men say? america and our coalition partners have made our choice. we're taking the words of the enemy seriously. we're on the offensive, and we will not rest, we will not retreat, and we will not withdraw from the fight, until this threat to civilization has been removed.

fred barnes, editor, the weekly standard, september 14, 2006:

host: alright fred, you and a few other journalists were in the oval office with the president, right? and he says catching osama bin laden is not job number one? barnes: well, he said, look, you can send 100,000 special forces, that’s the figure he used, to the mountains of pakistan and afghanistan and hunt him down, but he just said that’s not a top priority use of american resources. his vision of a war on terror is one that involves intelligence to find out from people, to get tips, to follow them up and break up plots to kill americans before they occur. that’s what happened recently in that case of the planes that were to be blown up by terrorists, we think coming from england, and that’s the top priority. he says, you know, getting osama bin laden is a low priority compared to that.

one year later

almost one year ago, clinton administration jetsam dick morris washed up on fox news and made this bold prediction about hurricane katrina's impact on bush's popularity:

y'know, george bush basically believes the federal government should do two things: fight wars and help people recover from disasters and now he's got both on his plate. i think that his ratings are gonna soar! not necessarily in the next three days, but over the next year he's gonna look so good doing all this stuff.

morris' hosts — even bush apologist-in-chief sean hannity — were understandably skeptical:

morris: ... the people who said this storm is gonna hurt bush's presidency are just wrong. he can get all the money he wants out of congress 'cause of this disaster, the people will be solidly behind him, the media will cover it like crazy, and he's gonna look like santa claus. colmes: so if you're advising democrats now, how would you advise them to react? morris: to shut up and stop harping — colmes: ha! "shut up" ... ! morris: — and screaming and hollering and pointing fingers, and start amassing national credits by showing the same liberal democratic compassion bush did. colmes: so they should just agree with him and say he's doing a great job. morris: yeah, they — just like right after 9/11, they hurt themselves by any kind of carping. ah, bush — this speech was fantastic! [ snip ] morris: ... you have a president that doesn't think government should do a lot. but he believes they should fight wars and that was the first term, and they believe they should recover from disasters and that's the second term. man, is this guy fortunate! hannity: [chuckling] fortunate to have a disaster? morris: fortunate to be able to be president at a time when he can respond without violating his principles.

with bush's approval at 41% (according to a fox news poll released on the day of the broadcast), dick probably thought his analysis was not completely ludicrous, since bush seemed to have nowhere to go but up:

today, 41 percent of voters approve and 51 percent disapprove of president bush’s performance, which is the lowest job rating he has received in a fox news poll. the president’s approval rating is down 4 percentage points from two weeks ago (45 percent, august 30-31), around the time the magnitude of katrina’s damage was becoming clear. before the hurricane, 47 percent approved and 44 percent disapproved (july 26-27).

well, after a year of bush's "liberal democratic compassion", dick may have been at least half-right — bush had nowhere to go. nowhere but down, that is, and he's dragging his republican-led congress down with him:

the new poll finds the [sic] 36 percent of americans approve of president bush’s job performance and 56 percent disapprove. these results are in line with the ratings the president has received for the last couple of months. moreover, for the past three surveys the gap between approval among republicans (76 percent) and democrats (10 percent) has been 66 percentage points. the assessment of the job congress is doing continues to be abysmal, as more than twice as many americans say they disapprove (58 percent) as approve (24 percent).

to be fair, dick's fawning pronouncements would not necessarily have been so pathetically absurd had he been prognosticating about any other president than the dismal one we are presently stuck with. to vindicate dick's wet dreams of republican munificence, all nero bush needed to do was to roll up his sleeves and simply deliver on dick's assurances of timely and tangible material support to katrina's victims.¹ compassion — if bush actually has any to give — without assistance is nothing more than contempt.

it was sickening enough that dick neglected to acknowledge the federal government's own culpability in the disaster that so fortuitously befell louisiana. but did dick truly believe that this potemkin administration ever intended to provide new orleans with more than a white wash and red tape? did he truly believe that the destruction of a major american city ever meant more to bush than just an opportunity for another series of woefully ineffectual photo-ops in bush's non-stop dog-and-pony tribute to himself?

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¹ and of course, while he's at it, bush would also need to pacify iraq and lower oil prices and catch osama bin laden and jump-start the economy and ...

red alert

boys, it's time to duct tape the windows, strap on your diapers and man the keyboards — the islamo-irani-talibani-qaeda-o'fascists have taken connecticut!

chuck roberts, anchor @ cnn headline news:

how does this factor into the lieberman/lamont contest? and might some argue, as some have already argued, that lamont is the al qaeda candidate?

tony snow, press secretary @ the white house:

... the real question for the american people to ask themselves is, do you take the war on terror seriously? with all the developments around the world — and, if so, how do you fight it to win? there seems to be two approaches, and in the connecticut race, one of the approaches is ignore the difficulties and walk away. now, when the united states walked away, in the opinion of the osama bin laden in 1991, bin laden drew from that the conclusion that americans were weak and wouldn’t stay the course and that led to september 11th.

dick cheney, vice president @ the white house:

the thing that's partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the american people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task. and when we see the democratic party reject one of its own, a man they selected to be their vice presidential nominee just a few short years ago, it would seem to say a lot about the state the party is in today if that's becoming the dominant view of the democratic party, the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won't — we can't be.

bill o'reilly, talking head @ the o'reilly factor:

i believe this is a chilling indication of what lies ahead in american politics. iran’s betting we americans have no will to restrain their jihad, and judging from the connecticut vote last night, they might be right.

cal thomas, columnist @ the washington times:

the narrow primary defeat of veteran sen. joe lieberman in connecticut's democratic primary is more than a loss for one man. it is a loss for his party and for the country. it completes the capture of the democratic party by its taliban wing. they used to be "san francisco democrats," a phrase coined by former u.s. ambassador to the united nations jeane kirkpatrick to describe the party's 1984 convention. but they have now morphed into taliban democrats because they are willing to "kill" one of their own, if he does not conform to the narrow and rigid agenda of the party's kook fringe.

joe lieberman, sore loser @ the new york times:

if we just pick up like ned lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in england. it will strengthen them, and they will strike again. i'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to american security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as nazism and probably more dangerous than the soviet communists we fought during the long cold war. how the heck can we be in a battle in which we are fighting as democrats and republicans against each other, when these terrorists certainly don't distinguish based on our party affiliation? they want to kill any and all of us.

our worst fears

elizabeth dole is afraid. very afraid. the country is headed toward disaster.

as in a terrorist attack? another katrina-sized storm? an incurable pandemic? financial collapse?

not exactly — but the enemies are at the gates.

as in osama? zarqawi? iran? north korea?

not exactly —

associated press: washington — the head of the senate republican committee paints a dire picture of democratic congressional control, warning that the opposition party would "put the war on terrorism on the back-burner" and maybe even impeach president bush. in a fundraising appeal this week, sen. elizabeth dole, r-n.c., asks for immediate financial help "to prevent the most left-wing democrat party in history from seizing control of the united states senate" in the november elections. ... in the fundraising letter, dole rails against liberal democrats in the senate and warns that if they prevail, "our worst fears" will be realized. she argues that empowered democrats would "increase your taxes, call for endless investigations, congressional censure and maybe even impeachment of president bush, put the war on terrorism on the back-burner" and "take over the white house in 2008!" she assured the recipients of the fundraising letter that she was working around the clock "to help our country avoid this disaster."

all hyperbole aside, while the country might not be on the edge of extinction, senate republicans most certainly are, and who would know better than their own nervous staffers, whose continued well-being depends wholly on their bosses' uninterrupted incumbency, as related by one purported congressional insider:

as many of you know, when congress is in session, most of my working days are spent on the hill. i have contacts on both sides of the hill and both sides of the aisle on both sides, people i have known for years and chat with. the republicans on both sides of capitol hill are running scared right now. very scared. the staffers i know on more than one committee have been told that if the republicans lose the majority in november, they will lose their jobs, so now is the time to start making connections with representatives and senators in safe seats, republican organizations, friendly lobbyists and the like and putting together resumes. there is a mood of despondency in republican circles, and the conventional wisdom in some of those circles is that loss of at least one house is inevitable. the conventional wisdom is also that loss of one chamber will be disastrous because the resulting investigations will bring the whole house of cards crashing down around the party's ankles.

if i were looking at not just unemployment, but probes and trials and sentences, i'd be scared too. come november, a lot of republicans may be grabbing their ankles.

gobsmacked

it's not easy defending positions you've never actually thought about.

sully erna, frontman of top-of-the-charts grunge metal band godsmack, attempts to explain to jay babcock of arthur magazine why he doesn't have a problem with licensing his songs to the military for their recruitment videos:

jb:	well i have a quote from you here: "we've always been supportive of our country and our president, whereas a lot of people i thought" — and you said this in 2003 to mtv news, you said — "a lot of people i thought lashed out pretty quickly at what we did and i thought the government did everything pretty cleanly and publicly as possible."
se:	yeah ... ?
jb:	well, what are you talking about?
se:	that was my opinion at the time. the whole war thing, and trying to keep us up to date like ... if you remember, back in other wars, we didn't have the opportunity to follow it through the media, and cnn, and the news — live updates and that kind of thing. and i thought that for the most part you know we were allowed to follow it as best we could through the media sources that were feeding us information.
jb:	[incredulous] you didn't think the media was being controlled by the military?!?
se:	well, it could be. i don't know.
jb:	you didn't look into it?
se:	listen, are you a fucking government expert?

oh shit, another one of these friggin' experts! man, i couldn't get outta high school fast enough to get away from these geeks!

se:	so i just feel, well, you know, whatever we can do to say 'thank you for protecting our country' is what we try to do. i'm not trying to make this a big political issue.
jb:	okay. have you done anything to prevent people from joining the military?
se:	no.
jb:	to maybe educate them as to what's in store for them?
se:	i don't have enough education in the military to educate them in anything.

besides, it's not like there's any possible reason you wouldn't jump with both feet on gettin' your song in a recruiting vid, right?

se:	we just simply — an opportunity came up, they wanted to use some music for a recruit commercial. what are we gonna say, no?
jb:	yeah. how hard is it to say 'no'?
se:	why would we, though?!?
jb:	because —
se:	is it because you don't feel the same way about the government that we do, makes you right and us wrong?
jb:	yeah. what do you feel about the government? tell me what —
se:	aw, that's crazy, man! that's just an opinion.
jb:	i can back my opinion up from here to tomorrow if you would like to talk to me all day long.
se:	well, obviously you've done a lot of research and you've —
jb:	that's right, because —
se:	— got a different opinion. we don't know that stuff that you know, so —
jb:	why don't you do some research before you get involved with these sorts of things? you're talking about young kids' lives. you're talking about kids —
se:	[yelling] would you rather not have us be protected so they can come and overrun our country?!?

because, after all, if we were to actually do some research, the terrorists would win! but if you like your fuckin' research so much, they still got libraries in iraq!

jb:	you know what i'd like, sully? a department of defense. not a department of offense that attacks other countries — sovereign nations — who do things in a different way than us, who we have no right to go over and invade and change their governments. would we want someone else to do that to us?
se:	i'm not saying —
jb:	how hard is that to think about?
se:	i'm not saying that we were right on every war that we've created. i know that we've been damn wrong at times about stuff —
jb:	when have we been wrong?
se:	[yelling] but they have also been wrong too!
jb:	when have —
se:	i don't trust someone like fuckin' sadaam and osama to come in here and try to control —
jb:	[incredulous] when did sadaam try to come in here and control our country?
se:	dude, [yelling] why don't you go live in iraq then if you have such a problem with america? why are you here?

because, you know, you can love it or leave it, you osaddama-lovin' geek! love it or leave it!

now, if you'll excuuuse me, i have some recruiting song$ to cut.

now i could care less whether sully erna supports the troops, or how he chooses to demonstrate his support. there's a broader issue on display here.

the issue here, which jay babcock clearly illustrates, is that sully's position is completely bankrupt because he's made no effort to think about it in anything but the shallowest terms.

whatever your beliefs, especially if you actively promote them in order to influence the behavior of others, you have a responsibility to learn what all the facts are. because sully hasn't made any effort to learn anything about the military or the war, he's unable to offer any credible or coherent rebuttal to jay's arguments. all he has are cheap slogans.

sully obviously has no interest in the military beyond indulging himself in some kind of feel-good give-em-hell rock-and-roll fantasy that he's getting paid to promote. and not being in the military himself makes him not just an idiot but a hypocrite.

the only thing we have to fear

(cross-posted at daily kos)

less than 200 days before judgment, the state teeters on ruin. the masses, having reiterated their anemic approval — a glum 32% — begin to gather their pitchforks and torches. brass-plated generals, once dutifully mute, parade forth in open mutiny. on the hill and in the provinces, caesar's retinue draws fewer invitations. meanwhile his beleaguered aides, having retreated to their washington stronghold, resign themselves to a carefully stacked round of russian roulette.

yet the left, despite their opponent's pathetic flailing and reeling, insists on keeping a cautious distance, seemingly unable to cast off a debilitating malaise, born of fear of a regime cornered like an wounded animal. wary of a rove free of distracting policy tasks, the left waits transfixed in dread of what sorcery might spew from the white house belfry.

e. j. dionne: here's the real meaning of the white house shake-up and the redefinition of karl rove's role in the bush presidency: the administration's one and only domestic priority in 2006 is hanging on to control of congress. josh marshall: the key is subpoena power. little of what's happened in the last five years would have been possible were it not for the fact that there was no political institution with subpoena power in washington not under the control of the white house. ... the white house and the entire dc gop for that matter is just sitting on too many secrets and bad acts. the bogus investigations of the pre-war intel is just one example, if one of the most resonant and glaring. keeping control of the house and the senate is less a matter of conventional ideological and partisan politics as it is a simple matter of survival. they have too much to cover up. they could not survive sunlight.

yes, the left has ample real reasons to harbor such dread, having impotently and angrily watched it crystallize during the last five years. bush's judicial coronation, his reichstag legislations and congress' potemkin investigations have all sparked in the loyal opposition a host of stifling fears.

fear that the bush regime in its desperation will stop at nothing to abort its impending emasculation. fear that it will steal or suspend elections. fear that it will revoke the constitution in part or in whole. fear that it will exile dissenters to fema prison camps. fear that it will stage deadly terrorist attacks, unleash virulent plagues and launch global nuclear armageddon — all in the name of retaining its slipping grasp on power.

but the left should not let even legitimate reasons cloud its ability to follow its irrational fears to their logical conclusions. while any attempt by the bush regime to realize those fears of course cannot be completely discounted, the successful fulfillment of any one of these strategeries does not resound with any ring of plausibility:

the "october surprise"

as the reasoning goes, a message from bin laden or a terror alert or attack will rally the country back into the comforting arms of big brother. but more likely, it will blow away any dangling shreds of his mantle as the "great protector", especially if an attack is both destructive enough and dramatic enough to influence the voting of millions of people. bush will not have the benefit of doubt afforded him after 9-11 as a relatively new and untested leader; worse, he'll be forced to again defend a proven record of failure. fortunately, bin laden's april message gives us (and the white house?) an opportunity to test this theory. it could even inoculate the electorate against the impact of an october message. however, pulling bin laden himself out of a hat could have a beneficial effect on his slide, similar to the effect of saddam's capture. but if all the public gets out of it is osama, with no accompanying relief from the violence, then the slide will inevitably resume.

martial law

as the reasoning goes, suspending elections and/or revoking the 22nd amendment, especially in the wake of an attack or an outbreak of disease, will legally lock the regime's stranglehold on the body politic into the forseeable future. but more likely, further attempts to subvert the law will only further inflame the masses, who have grown tired of the rationalizations, which have now become either too convoluted ("i'm not the leaker 'cause it's not a leak 'cause already i declassified what i leaked.") or too childish ("i'm the decider!").

in the face of ever-restrictive inventions of law dispensed by the justice department, progressives have missed no opportunity to equate the regime with genuinely militant fascist dictatorships [guilty as charged!] and have made no secret of their dismay at the apparent passivity of the man on the street. but are we to believe that a nation of 300 million will meekly accept the yoke of an overt dictatorship? not bloody likely. the active-duty forces would finally have a justifiable reason to openly defy the regime and a citizenry indoctrinated from the cradle in the worship of the very concept of freedom will not greet such a naked theft of birthright without the kind of resistance many will argue is obligated under the declaration of independence, the 2nd amendment and the star spangled banner. rockets red glare indeed!

however, i forsee no kent states, especially if the regime loses the military; once directly challenged on its lawlessness — a situation that has not yet been permitted by bush's congress — the regime will sensibly retreat.

election fraud

as the reasoning goes, the republicans could steal the elections the old-fashioned way, and more efficiently than ever with their new-fangled machines. but more likely, any instances of significant fraud will be quickly unmasked. irregularities in each of the elections since 2000 have been followed by claims of fraud, but all kinds of fraud has dogged elections since the birth of the republic. however, dismissing such claims becomes much harder as the gap between the projected and actual results widens. election tampering that might survive a challenge over a 2% margin between candidates, as in 2004, would be impossible to explain over today's 10% margin. and a washington post - abc news poll puts the margin at 15% — reporting that 55% plan to vote democratic and only 40% republican — representing more than 18 million votes if the turnout matches 2004. moving this many ballots would require chicanery of truly herculean proportions.

imagine the scandal: systematic nationwide election tampering and vote supression favoring republicans in all instances. now imagine the reaction: not quiet acquiescence but seething outrage and chaos dwarfing that following the 2000 races. "republican culture of corruption" would emerge as the central recount (revote?) meme and republicans would lose even more the second time around.

war with iran

as the reasoning goes, military action against iran will serve to invigorate bush's grumbling base, which has been steadily suckled on the same twin teats of propaganda and hate that nourished them for the iraq invasion. but more likely, conventional action will only provide a reenactment of the deathtrap in iraq and the vastly more dire repercussions of nuclear action will quickly rebound out of anyone's control. in both cases, the longed-for instant telegenic panacea of righteous blitzkrieg will turn into the bitter wormwood of yet one more unholy quagmire. without a draft, for which no meaningful support exists, ground operations remain the stuff of chickenhawk wetdreams. convention air operations are at best a blunt club. nuclear weapons do not carry any guarantee of success but do carry the price of worldwide opprobrium; america would be branded an international criminal and any lingering vestige of moral authority would be swept offstage by a tall bright column of ash. even if the regime exhibits no interest in courting the admiration of the international community, the majority of the nation does care about its image in the world mirror.

and unlike iraq, iran boasts the capability of striking back at its attacker, both with and without warning. its long shadow across the straits of hormuz and its purported international network of sleeper cells have been thoroughly dissected in other publications, so suffice it here to say that most americans would prefer that iran's boasts remain untested.

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it is already apparent to any member of the "reality-based" community that none of these gambits has any chance of success. but many still fear an attempt to implement them, convinced that the injured animal under the brush is both pained and crazed enough to risk a suicide bid. as loathsome as i find this regime, i remain unconvinced that they are possessed by some evangelical messianism or are otherwise insane. none of their actions cannot be explained by basic greed and cynicism and sheer venality. besides, in the end, as they walk out the door, to continue their larcenies in the private sector, they can simply sue to grant themselves pardons.

but it is far too late for this regime to save 2006 and 2008. bush's ratings have already dropped into the range of the worst presidents and the poisonous drip-drip-drip of scandal betrays no sign of abating. as long as the white house insists on treating its problems as a matter of perception, they will continue their pointless pantomine of leadership and never adopt the substantive remedies that might regain the public's trust. thus the drip-drip-drip will torment them to the bitter end.

josh bolten's new five-point "recovery plan" for the white house: deploy guns and badges: harass illegals make wall street happy: more tax cuts! brag more: more speeches! reclaim security credibility: harass iran court the press: rehire armstrong williams

what has wounded the regime the most is the exposure of its fundamental ineptitude. the king is naked and his reign is littered with tattered policies, discarded initiatives and, most odious of all, wasted sacrifices. if bush could do just one thing right he might win back some support, but that's the catch when it comes to incompetency. even if any of the desperate strategeries discussed had more than a snowball's chance of success, chances are more than certain this regime would blow it and blow it big. but today there aren't enough kool-aid drinkers left standing and the rest of the electorate is wary and suspicious but most of all very pissed.

unfortunately that anger extends to the other side of the aisle; progressives have grown weary of their leadership's aversion to confronting a political risk that diminishes with each day. against demonstrably corrupt opponents there is no danger in taking the high ground. while the pols have exhibited some ability to push back from behind the scenes, clearly the necessary tonic for the anxieties of their constituents is some grandstanding and good old-fashioned theater, at least until they regain some subpoena power. no one ever believes you have a spine when you refuse to exhibit it. the republicans know this too well.

booman tribune: if only we could trust the democrats to know how to take of advantage of the gop's obvious disarray. after all, we saw similar concerns back in the spring of 2004 with the torture scandal, yet come november somehow the evil empire pulled out another elctoral victory by hook or by crook. i'd like to believe this time will be different.

distrust of the democratic leadership only compounds the fear that the regime will escape unpunished for its sins. more medals than paddles have been dished out to its cronies. fatigued at seeing one unpunished crime follow another, the disenchanted become easily seduced by the fear that the theft of november is not beyond the republicans' reach. admittedly, to resist the fear and the fatigue, one must indulge in a little hope that the agents of justice will eventually catch up with the regime. i believe that the mechanisms of our legal system, the brazenness and incompetence of the criminals and the growing revulsion of the masses do warrant it. the only thing we really have to fear is that we stop trying.