Rightwingers freaking out

Juan Cole has some fun in Salon describing the great rightwing freak-out.

Bushies Whining about Obama's Inaugural Address

On the plane ride back to Texas, some Bushies complained about Obama's inaugural speech taking shots at the departing administration.

The Bushies are right. That was one hell of an inaugural address:

From Peter Baker in the Times:

... (T)he context of some of (Obama's) remarks was lost on no one. He criticized ‘our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.’ He promised to ‘restore science to its rightful place.’ He rejected ‘as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.’ He assured the rest of the world ‘that we are ready to lead once more.’

Some writers, including David E. Sanger of The New York Times, concluded that it was the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover in 1933, that an incoming president used his Inaugural Address to so evidently repudiate his predecessor as he headed for the door.

But just wait, they ain't seen nothing yet. That accountability-responsibility thing that Bush used to BS about. Well, a legal reckoning is coming and a popular mandate will be there to provide all the support the administration will require.

Someone to go to the well with

President Lyndon Baines Johnson nationalized the old Texas sentiment of confidence and respect: "He’s someone to go to the well with."

As we approach the end of the Bush-Cheney administration and the promise of President-elect Obama, we are presented with the consequences of eight years of nihilistic politics, greed-and-crony finance, and feeding of hatreds and division among our brothers and sisters.

That catastrophic bequest is the lack of confidence and uncertain liquidity in our financial system that threatens to squander our life savings, and kill innovation and the common effort.

Hard work and innovation with a common effort deserve the kind of respect that led LBJ to recognize that the civil rights movement in more ways than one restored the promise of America for all Americans.

The legacy of Bush-Cheney is the loss of that confidence and respect, the belief that we’re all in this together with men and women who are people we would go the well with.

That's what electing Obama means for us. The guy actually believes that our government should serve us; that the loss of much of our life savings can be recouped, that education is not for the few.

So as the GOP smirks at voting rights today, as the GOP warns Obama to go slow, let's look to the bleak near future of the economy with the same commitment and guidance that the civil rights movement offered all of us: We're in this together and we respect and value our fellow citizens.

And with a common effort, nothing can stop us as we go to the well together.

Someone to go to the well with

President Lyndon Baines Johnson nationalized the old Texas sentiment of confidence and respect: He’s someone to go to the well with.

As we approach the end of the Bush-Cheney administration, we are presented with the consequences of eight years of nihilistic politics, greed-and-crony finance, and feeding of hatreds and division among our brothers and sisters.

That catastrophic bequest is the lack of confidence and fading liquidity in our financial system that threatens to squander our life savings, and kill innovation and the common effort.

The legacy of Bush-Cheney is the loss of confidence and respect, the belief that we’re all in this together with men and women who are people we would go the well with.
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-via mal contends

Obama Won't Back Down, Debate One: Obama

Update: No doubt about it: Obama won the debate
The political assessment of the show:

A condescending, patronizing, old man insulted a younger, smarter, more knowledgeable candidate whose respectful nature and command of the issues saw Obama stand his ground and become the change candidate surpassing the commander-in-chief barrier many causal voters have been waiting for.

McCain used the terms doesn’t “understand” repeatedly, but the facts aside, McCain came across as ungraceful and arrogant, even a bitter man seeing his self-perpetuating myth dissipate.

We’ll see if this assessment is reflected empirically in the coming days.

Dump the GOP House

Bush's statement is banal, signaling to Wall Street that negotiations will be successful.

From CNN:

"House Republicans will not take part in negotiations scheduled to resume at 11:30 a.m. ET Friday, according to the leading House and Senate Democrats on the issue."

The problem for House Dems is that the bailout is not popular but needed.

McCain and the House are playing three sides of the street in an effort to parley the crisis into a politically winning posture for November, opposing their own president, the Democrats and the deal while trying to leave Democrats in an untenable position for attempting to do the right thing.

And Bush will/may let Republicans and McCain get away with it.

Bush and the House

Bush is making a statement this morning as the markets slide early.

Bush should and will not condemn the House Republicans for playing politics as the country stares at a financial meltdown.

Bush ought to say that McCain and Republicans are betraying their offices on a level unprecedented in American political history.

Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson's Statement in Response to I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's Announcement That He Is Dropping His Appeal

If this president does it, it's not against the law. Attempts to justify the outing of Valerie Plame still ring pathetic.

"By dropping his appeal, Mr. Libby has finally abandoned the pretense that his conviction was a miscarriage of justice. Mr. Libby's decision suggests, however, that he may have received word that President Bush plans to pardon him shortly. Of course, a pardon is completely at odds with the president's earlier claim that he would not tolerate anyone on his team leaking a covert CIA officer's identity, but this is the kind of inconsistency representative of this administration."

Given the White House's extensive and continuing efforts to cover up how and why Valerie Wilson's identity was leaked to the press, the only way that remains to get at the truth in this sordid matter is through our civil suit against Libby, Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, and Richard Armitage."

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Bush's Stunning Hypocrisy

Anyone outside of Fox News knows Bush could not care less for human rights and democratic processes.

Bush is, in fact, antithetical to these rights, and depended on voter suppression at home and a corrupt Supreme Court to seize political power.

Now comes Gen. Pervez Musharraf, never a president and always a dictator (though one restrained by domestic forces) and his blatant attack on human rights activists and the rule-of-law professionals (the Bushies cannot stand these types at home).

For some good fun, read Frank Rich hammering away:

The Coup at Home
By FRANK RICH

AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t saythat waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency.

You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized “ally” came in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington to kick off his book tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a White House press conference, he said he was contractually “honor bound” to remain mum
until it hit the stores — thus demonstrating that Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the president. This didn’t stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his recently negotiated “truce” to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern Pakistan.

When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says “there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said, “I believe him.” Sooner than you could say “Putin,” The Daily Telegraph of London reported that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on this “truce.” Since then, the Pakistan frontier has become a more thriving terroristhaven than ever.

Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10 billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists. To rub it in last week, General Musharraf released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a prisoner exchange with a tribal commander the day after he suspended the constitution.

More at The Coup at Home.
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Republicans: Get Away Bush, You Pest

Stay no longer and get away fast is the message from Republicans for the fading President George W. Bush. [Bush is pictured at right.] But God still loves him.

From Der Spiegel, Gabor Steingart reports:

It's twilight at the White House. First it was voters and now it's the president's friends who are abandoning him. Thank God, says conservative luminary Newt Gingrich. According to Gingrich, Republicans can only hope to hold onto power by breaking their ties with Bush. The end of an era has many faces. One is that of a narrow-lipped president appearing on primetime TV, asking Americans for money and their confidence. Another is that of Utah native Nathan Barnes, 23, who didn't survive his deployment to Iraq and whose photo appeared in the obituaries section of his local paper.

My personal message to the ass-in-chief is: Take a long walk on a Baghdad street.

This is pretty much the message delivered by the UN listening to Bush's speech today, though you won't read it in the American papers. See L.C. Johnson at Daily Kos.
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Bush League Tonight

The Times reports that tonight's presidential national address to the nation will feature Bush announcing some limited redeployment as a means of uniting the American people.

Absurd, the president is looking to buy some political time in the run-up to the 2008 elections.

"With lawmakers openly skeptical of his troop buildup, Mr. Bush will cast his plan for a gradual, limited withdrawal as a way to bring a divided America together — even as he resists demands from those who want him to move much faster," writes SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and STEVEN LEE MYERS.

Sidney Blumenthal at Salon notes that Bush will also take credit for successes against al-Qaida in Iraq that have enabled this withdrawal.

Al-Qaida in Iraq. Get used to that phrase, you'll hear "al-Qaida in Iraq" repeatedly tonight, though not the fact there was no al-Qaida in Iraq prior to the illegal invasion; the fact that al-Qaida in Iraq would summarily be kicked out when/if we leave, and that al-Qaida in Iraq does not have the capacity to strike America over here, and that al-Qaida is a loose confederation of whackos bearing the mantle of the man who did organize the 9/11 attacks.

And it's not an American withdrawal of any substance. Well over 100,000 troops can be expected to remain in Iraq for years under the Petraeus plan.

So, not counting the one of three Americans who still believe Saddam attacked us on 9/11 (Republican dead-enders), it is up to the public to infuse the Democrats with some spine.

As the Times reports:

When top Democratic leaders visited him at the White House this week, President Bush told them he wanted to “find common ground” on Iraq. But when the president said he planned to “start doing some redeployment,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, cut him off.
“No you’re not, Mr. President,” Ms. Pelosi interjected. “You’re just going back to the presurge level.”

That's a start.

This is all about Republican politics tonight; Iraq has long been irretrievably lost as a client oil state of the United States'. How many American troops and Iraqi civilians die and are maimed for life is not a consideration in Bush's world. We hope that it will be the main consideration with the American people.

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Supreme Court of 1972 Protected the 4th Amendment

The Richard Nixon years (1969-1974) saw an acceleration of warrantless surveillance and presidential claims of executive power to wiretap and spy on American citizens under the umbrella of national security and the acclaimed inherent power of the presidency to engage in action deemed necessary to protect national security just as President Nixon perceived this obligation.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney make the same claims for themselves.

Such Nixonian claims led Congress to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, mandating the government to demonstrate probable cause and obtain a warrant before placing Americans under surveillance for national security rationales within the United States.

FISA negated claims of inherent executive power to engage in extra-Constitutional programs and action.

But last week FISA was gutted, and rendered inoperative for six months (sunset clause) under the guise of national security with the cooperation of many congressional democrats and virtually every single republican. [Only two Republicans in Congress voted “nay” on the gutting of FISA: Representative Walter Jones, Jr. (R-NC) and Timothy V. Johnson (IL). Wisconsin's entire delegation of congressional democrats voted nay, and all three Wisconsin republicans in congress voted yea.]

So, we just have to trust that the administration will use this power judiciously for six months, and that the administration that has politicized virtually every function of the executive branch, attacked and smeared prominent critics, and self-consciously lied the nation into a war costing over $1 trillion and 100,000s of lives will respect the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

As a New York Times editorial notes: The new bill allows the “director of national intelligence and the attorney general authority to intercept — without warrant, court supervision or accountability — any telephone call or e-mail message that moves in, out of or through the United States as long as there is a ‘reasonable belief’ that one party is not in the United States.”

Bush like Nixon attempts to codify and legalize an unconstitutional program, in this case violative of (among other liberties) the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and First Amendment right to engage in free speech critiquing the government.

UNITED STATES v. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, 407 U.S. 297 (1972)

In 1972, a unanimous Supreme Court shot down Nixon’s similar attempt to legalize his monarchical claims of his presidency through warrantless wiretapping.

In the vital decision UNITED STATES v. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, 407 U.S. 297 (1972), Justice Lewis Powell denounced the Nixon administration’s electronic surveillance, warrantless-wiretapping program not just on Fourth Amendment grounds, but as a betrayal of the sovereign rights of citizens in a democracy to criticize their own government.

History abundantly documents the tendency of Government - however benevolent and benign its motives - to view with suspicion those who most fervently dispute its policies. Fourth Amendment protections become the more necessary when the targets of official surveillance may be those suspected of unorthodoxy in their political beliefs. The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent. ... The price of lawful public dissent must not be a dread of subjection to an unchecked surveillance power. Nor must the fear of unauthorized official eavesdropping deter vigorous citizen dissent and discussion of Government action in private conversation. For private dissent, no less than open public discourse, is essential to our free society.- Justice Lewis Powell (UNITED STATES v. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, 407 U.S. 297 (1972))

Will the Supreme Court of today protect and defend the Constitution and American citizens from an out-of-control and corrupt executive branch?

Not likely.

Lewis Powell was an establishment Republican from Virginia, but today’s Republicans on the Supreme Court are more likely to be of the Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) variety—do and say anything to protect the administration no matter the cost to the Constitution, the American treasury and lives.

One can only wish that the Supreme Court of the early 1970s that reflected the consensus of popular movements of the American citizenry demanding their Constitutional rights were functioning today.

The fact is the current Supreme Court bears no resemblance to the Supreme Court of 35 years ago.

Only poplar movements made powerful by citizen action can prevent the dissolution of our Constitution through the actions of a fear-mongering administration that longs for the unchecked power of a monarch.

As Senator Feingold writes:

We should not delay passing a bill that will end Alberto Gonzales's six-month, oversight-free surveillance holiday. The president will undoubtedly oppose these efforts and the Republicans in the Senate will no doubt filibuster any efforts to reinstate judicial involvement and tighten the controls around the president's eavesdropping authorities. In the face of that expected opposition, Democrats will need to stick together this time to fix the mess that we just created. And at least some Republicans will have to be convinced to support the Constitution.

Clearly, this will be an uphill fight. But it's a fight worth having. Our constitutional rights should not be sacrificed to scare tactics. Congress must stand up to the president. The sooner that Democrats realize that standing tough on national security doesn't mean giving into the administration, the better off they - and the country - will be.

Update: See the Nation for more information.

Update II: Powell is from Virginia, not Minnesota.

Decider Decides Not to Decide

“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice … “

Lyrics are from the band called Rush; the song is Free Will from 1980; always hated the song (seemingly every station played it too often, killing it).

The too-often-played song from the Bush administration’s endless stream is that some other force is responsible for how to decide the dirty problems, even as Bush occasionally squawks that he is the decider.

But unaccountability, political-fealty-to-Bush, jump-on-the-grenade (it’s all the same PR scheme, keep the boy from getting splashed) from the beginning has been Bush’s magnum opus, calling out the tinhorned dictator’s little marching orders.

With Bush and company in the Nixonian zone of detestability, the Bushies tell us really it’s God, history, or Gen. David Petraeus—anything that will keep the Bush regime from being cast as the voice of its own administration—that now decides.

Iraq, the DoJ, the VA, you can pick at random a governmental charge from which Bush tries to hide from accountability, while the commissars endlessly promote the “policies and the programs” (from the Post today)of the man-child they struggle to project as the Holy decider and protector.

From Frank Rich today: We must “wait to see what David has to say,” Mr. Bush says. … The most credible person in the fight at this moment is Gen. David Petraeus.”

From the Times on Alberto Gonzales today:

President Bush often insists he has to be the decider — ignoring Congress and the public when it comes to the tough matters on war, terrorism and torture, even deciding whether an ordinary man in Florida should be allowed to let his wife die with dignity. Apparently that burden does not apply to the functioning of one of the most vital government agencies, the Justice Department.

The country is so sick of Bush and his sleazy machinations that even republicans today wish that Bush would just go away and give their nominee a shot at 2008.

But we are stuck with this unaccountable boy for another 18 months, though his self-conscious cry—the Bush-boy is holy, anything bad must not touch me—is already old, shrill and unchanging.

As Consortium News writes:

What a burden to have to face his many inadequacies—now held up to the light of day—whether it is his difficulty in speaking, thinking, reading, managing anxiety, or making good decisions. He will not change, because for him change means humiliating collapse. He is very fearful of public exposure of his many inadequacies.
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Wisconsin Boy Gone Bad, Blocks Health Report for Not Being ‘Political’

William R. Steiger, son of the late Wisconsin Congressman William A. Steiger (1967- 1978) and advisor to former Gov and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, is skewered in a page one Washington Post piece today as a political hack.

“A specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services,” reads the piece.

But like just about everything and everybody the hyper-political, anti-science Bush administration touches, Steiger was reduced to a political ward boss in service to the George W. Bush, censoring a public health report for not being political and for not extolling the virtues of George W. Bush.

Some highlights from the piece by Christopher Lee and Marc Kaufman:

Richard H. Carmona, who commissioned the "Call to Action on Global Health" while serving as surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, recently cited its suppression as an example of the Bush administration's frequent efforts during his tenure to give scientific documents a political twist. At a July 10 House committee hearing, Carmona did not cite Steiger by name or detail the report's contents and its implications for American public health. …

Carmona told lawmakers that, as he fought to release the document, he was "called in and again admonished . . . via a senior official who said, 'You don't get it.' " He said a senior official told him that "this will be a political document, or it will not be released."

After a long struggle that pitted top scientific and medical experts inside and outside the government against Steiger and his political bosses, Carmona refused to make the requested changes, according to the officials. Carmona engaged in similar fights over other public health reports, including an unpublished report on prison health. A few days before the end of his term as the nation's senior medical officer, he was abruptly told he would not be reappointed.

Richard Walling, a former career official in the HHS global health office who oversaw the draft, said Steiger was the official who blocked its release. "Steiger always had his political hat on," he said. "I don't think public health was what his vision was. As far as the international office was concerned, it was a political office of the secretary. . . . What he was looking for, and in general what he was always looking for, was, 'How do we promote the policies and the programs of the administration?' This report didn't focus on that." …

Public health advocates have accused Steiger of political meddling before. He briefly attained notoriety in 2004 by demanding changes in the language of an international report on obesity. The report was opposed by some U.S. food manufacturers and the sugar industry.

“(Steiger) is now awaiting a Senate vote on his nomination as Bush's ambassador to Mozambique,” reads the Post.
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