A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He's talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes.
As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask.
"Chalabi good good," the Iraqi man says in halting English.
Whom are you going to vote for? "The Shiite alliance, of course," the Iraqi answers. "It is the duty of all Shiite people." When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast - not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: "We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn't even get that many." He shrugged.
From CNN, Haggard has been forced to resign from New Life Church. Church board said they've concluded without a doubt that he'd engaged in "sexually immoral conduct."
[he'd previously stepped down as head of the National Assocation of Evangelicals.]
I grew up not far from Tweety in Somerton (far Northeast Philadelphia). The neighborhood's certainly tougher than Radnor or Princeton, but it is not especially blue-collar. Most of the residents are Catholic and work for the city. My neighbors were a judge, a police captain, and an aide to Councilman Cohen. Down the block was Billy Meehan, the Republican boss of Philadelphia. Across the street was the Trainer family, the owners of American Roller Bearing Company, who owned a huge estate with a flock of sheep and a mule (now a Catholic retreat called Cranleith).
So it's not just Tweety's macho fetishism that bothers me. It's the pretense, common to Matthews, Russert, O'Reilly, Hannity, and Limbaugh, that they're the underdog. They believe that their white male bitterness is legitimate because they're descended (often at a great distance) from immigrant laborers. It's working-class anger divorced from the actual material conditions that justified it.
Of course, Brown, Casey, and Webb _do_ represent a return to New Deal liberalism. Brown made his name by opposing trade agreements like NAFTA. But television commentators like Tweety always have trouble distingushing between policy, persona, and biography.
This isn't just another instance of "the buck stops here" accountability. This is an instance of direct, personal intervention by the president who countermanded the advice of his experts and ordered something to be done that resulted in nuclear secrets, written in arabic, landing on the internet.
He did this because he listened to the crew of childlike idiots, both in the congress and on the radio and internet, who comprise the heart of his political movement. It illustrates something I don't think I've ever fully understood before. Bush listens to the 101st keyboarders and believes their delusionary drivel. In essence, the nation is being led by Limbaugh, Powerline and Michele Malkin.
If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, I don't know what will.
We all know about Tweety's bizarre fetish for manly manly working men. It's so powerful that when he comes across a politician he likes he has to fit them into his rugged blue collar construction worker pinup model fantasy. He had this to say about Sherrod Brown, who when he enters the Senate will probably be one of the most progressive senators in the country.
MATTHEWS: Let‘s go to Ohio where I made the comment earlier that I think Sherrod Brown looks like the kind of Democrat that should be running nationally. Looks like a working guy, looks like he he‘s actually had some physical labor in his past. And he has a little bit of talking out of the side of his mouth, which works with most Americans. he doesn‘t look like one of these Ivy league guys that keep getting crushed nationally. I‘m going through the Gore, Dukakis, Kerry hit list of infamy, politically. Why don‘t they run guys like Sherrod Brown and Bobby Casey? I know I‘m talking from my own kind here, OK, guys? But I really think these guys—what are you doing, Charlie? What‘s wrong with Sherrod Brown? He‘s going to do something awful in Ohio. He‘s going to win.
Sherrod Brown was born in Mansfield, Ohio in 1952, the youngest of three sons. His father Charles was a physician. His mother Emily hailed from Georgia and was an early supporter of the civil rights movement, introducing her boys to political activism at an young age. Sherrod was elected president of his high school student council. "He caused people a lot of headaches because he was such an activist," says his mother. "The principal didn't really care for him at all."
In 1970, he and his friends organized a march in Mansfield for the first Earth Day. "We did this really cool march and we had a really big crowd," says Brown with pride. "But we get down to the square and none of us had thought about what you do when you get down there. We didn't have any speakers, and it was like, 'Oh, shit.' So we just disbanded."
Brown enrolled at Yale, where he split his time between Russian Studies and campaign work for liberal candidates, including George McGovern. He so impressed Don Kindt, his local Democratic County Chairman, that the next spring, when Brown was back at Yale finishing up his senior year, Kindt called Brown and asked him to run for state representative. "I remember him calling me," says Sherrod's older brother Charles, who was in Yale Law School at the time. "'You just can't believe this, this is the most exciting news. Don Kindt wants me to run!'"
Sherrod graduated and moved back home, where his father, a Republican, was initially skeptical. "My dad says, 'I'm not voting for you, you're too young,'" says Sherrod. "But he helped a lot." Mrs. Brown recruited neighborhood kids to lick stamps and stuff envelopes in the basement of their house, and Charles spent nearly the whole semester in Mansfield running the campaign. By the time the election rolled around, Sherrod had knocked on 20,000 doors, nearly half the households in the district. In a stunning upset, he beat the Republican incumbent. She never saw it coming.
In 1982 at age 29, after eight years in the state House, Brown was elected Secretary of State. He spent two terms in Columbus, where his signature effort was voter registration outreach. He convinced McDonald's to print voter registration forms on their tray liners. "You could see voter registration cards with ketchup and mustard on them," he says, "and we accepted them."
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against people from less than elite backgrounds achieving something, but this story Tweety tells himself about "his own kind" and their rugged manliness is absurd.
New York-Three days before midterm elections, the numbers haven't changed much according to the November 2-3, 2006 Newsweek Poll. If the election were held today, 54 percent of likely voters would vote for the Democratic candidate in their district, versus 38 percent who would vote for the Republican. Ninety percent of Republican likely voters say they would support the Republican candidate; 95 percent of Democrats would support the Democratic candidate. But among independents, 51 percent would vote for the Democrat, compared to 26 percent who would vote for the Republican.
A majority of Americans, 53 percent, say that they would most like to see the Democrats win enough seats on Tuesday to take over Congress, according to the latest Newsweek Poll; 32 percent would most like to see the Republicans keep control.
In deciding their vote for Congress this year, registered voters say Iraq remains the most important issue. Thirty-two percent of registered voters told the Newsweek Poll that the situation in Iraq is most important; 19 percent say the economy is most important; 12 percent say that terrorism is; 11 percent say health care; 10 percent say immigration; 5 percent say abortion and 3 percent say stem cell research.
President Bush's approval rating remains low-35 percent; compared to 37 percent in the October 26-27, 2006 Newsweek Poll. Sixty-four percent say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States; only 29 percent say they are satisfied.
When the history of this tragic time is written, Colin Powell will receive the well-deserved universal condemnation that he deserves. Colbert King writes again about how Powell turned his back on his entire public identity in order to support this disaster.
Colin Powell was probably the only person in the world who could have stopped this war. Instead, he enabled it, along with the "liberal" pundits who put their trust in him. Margaret Carlson flashback:
ROSE: Where were you on the war?
CARLSON: I was, give diplomacy a chance. [Brightening] I was with Colin Powell the whole way along! Whatever Colin Powell—
Many of Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs, along with some Shiites and Kurds, are predicting a firestorm of violence if the court sentences the ex-president to death, as is widely expected. Bloodshed is already high, with police finding the bodies of 83 torture victims throughout the capital between 6 a.m. Thursday and 6 p.m. Friday.
...
But attacks are not limited to Baghdad. South of the capital, police in Kut found 13 more bodies Friday, seven pulled from the Tigris River. Elsewhere in Iraq at least nine others died violent deaths.
The U.S. military announced seven more deaths - four Marines and three soldiers killed Thursday - raising the death toll for November to 11. At least 105 U.S. forces died in October, the fourth highest monthly toll of the war.
New York, N.Y., November 3, 2006 — A group of neoconservatives led by former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee Richard Perle and former Pentagon insider Kenneth Adelman tell Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose that they blame the “dysfunctional” Bush administration for the “disaster” in Iraq and say that if they had it to do over again they would not advocate an invasion of Iraq.
Perle tells Rose that, “at the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.... I don’t think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.... [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him.”
Adelman tells Rose that when he wrote in 2002 that “liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,” he “just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”
Adelman also tells Rose that “the idea of using our power for moral good in the world” is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, “it’s not going to sell.”
Of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whom Adelman says he is “very, very fond of,” he admits, “I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”
Adelman adds that he “checked out” of this administration the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former C.I.A. director George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer—“three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots.” It was then, Adelman says, “that I thought, There’s no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq.”
Maybe one day brilliant sage Mark Halperin will understand the connection between his belief that Republicans are, as he claims, better at the "freak show" and his belief that "Matt Drudge rules our world." The former is true is large part because of the latter.
Something bubbles up from the fever swamps, shows up on Drudge, and soon pops up on MSNBC and CNN as a "controversy" or as unsourced reporting.
The responsible media, or at least those in the media who like to think of themselves as responsible, can't control talk radio and Drudge and Fox, but they can stop taking their cues from them and they can stop legitimizing them by running around going on their shows or having them on as guests. They can, if they want to, close off the puke funnel. They can, if they want to, take responsibility for what they choose to report on instead pretending they're just passive conduits for all this crap.
Today at an event in Hartford, at a senior center, Joe “volunteers” swarmed the “stand up for change” bus and pressed their bodies against the vehicle, not allowing the doors to open and anyone to exit.
When the bus moved and the door was partially opened for Ned and staff, Joe’s “volunteers” rushed the bus again, violently screaming in the door. Ned was never able to make it off the bus and into the senior center.
In October ‘04, Brent Bozell’s fake news service, CNS News, was leaked a number of alleged Iraqi Intelligence Service documents that allegedly proved the Bush Administration’s WMD claims and the story that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were in cahoots. CNS said that the translated docs were vetted by three unnamed experts, two of whom turned out to be Laurie Mylroie and Bruce Tefft (usual-suspect pseudo-experts with an agenda) while the third was almost certainly Bill Tierney, a right-wing loon par excellence with a storied career as a self-claimed US torture-interrogator, a Terri Schiavo hysteric, and paranormal WMD-inspector. Tellingly, although CNS News talked up the documents, they were very cagey about releasing them, claiming that they didn’t want them to be ‘altered or misrepresented’ by other parties on the Internet, whatever difference that would make with a solid primary source. Smart money said that they didn’t want anyone to see that they were holding a very weak poker hand. All the documents are now available in holographic form in the Arabic original, and by all reasonable accounts they don’t seem very interesting.
But there are supposedly 2 million or more of these docs archived in (I believe) Qatar and elsewhere, of which only a small percentage has been translated, and the story has been widely broadcast via the usual wingnut channels that somewhere amidst them is the vindication of every right-wing canard about Saddam Hussein and the stated reasons for the war. References to the docs have turned up frequently, and many people have pushed stories about them during the past year or so, including a veritable menagerie of the cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs wingnut community. Laurie Mylroie seems to appear with a sulfurous bang wherever they’re mentioned, and the Move America Forward foundation — the boldest and most flagrantly silly of the “nonpartisan” GOP front groups — picked up on the CNS News story, batted it around for awhile, and apparently couldn’t find much to do with it, absent any hard evidence to distort.
Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say
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