Open Thread

Have fun.

Pickled

I've tried to lay off the Pickler recently, as I believe she had a wee bit of cancer unpleasantness, but what the fuckity fuck...

I look forward to a match between the Pickler:


and the Bowler:

Long Hard Slog

Bill Frist's America.

Open Thread

Because there is never enough thread.

Open Thread

Enjoy.

Strib

Link:

The comments that were criticized came late in a long, thoughtful speech on the Senate floor in which Durbin reflected on the United States' obligation to be better than reprehensible regimes of the past. He talked at some length about mistakes American presidents made in previous wars (repealing habeas corpus during the Civil War, interning Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, taking over the steel industry during the Korean War), and he urged President Bush to recognize and rectify his mistake in prisoner treatment during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Durbin's entire speech is too long to reprint, but lengthy excerpts can be found on the page opposite.

Durbin was spot on in his assessment of Guantanamo. That's why he was so roundly attacked. He told the truth. And his message is of vital importance; the United States is better than this.

The issue of whether Durbin's rhetoric crossed a line is small potatoes compared with the undeniable truth that American treatment of its prisoners has crossed many, many lines -- of morality, of international law, of practical benefit.

But instead of discussing what goes on at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other prison camps, the right would prefer to get into a senseless argument about whether "we" are better than the Nazis or Saddam Hussein or the Soviets or Pol Pot or whomever a critic of Guantanamo might raise as a comparison. It's a tactic the group running Washington now has used again and again: They're quite deliberately changing the subject -- from Guantanamo to words spoken on the Senate floor.

It's not too late, as Durbin said of Bush in his speech: The senator should stop apologizing and keep up the criticism of the hellhole America's military has created at Guantanamo. He has no reason to be defensive; he's telling the truth. It's a truth Americans need to hear, and its tellers must resist intimidation.

What kind of America do you want to live in? I don't want to live in Hugh Hewitt's America or Trent Lott's America or Bill Frist's America or Assrocket's America. I don't want to live in an America in which I read that FBI report and think -- Fuck Yeah! That's America.

Apparently they do.

Well fuck their anti-American shit.

Holwer

Link:

Durbin asked an obvious question: If you’d read that report, would you ever have thought that it was describing American conduct? Or would you have thought what Durbin said—that it must describe an evil regime, the type we have long denounced? The answer to that is perfectly obvious—and so is the state of our fallen culture, the culture being trampled under by the Russerts, the McCains and the Wallaces.

But we’ve now reached a miraculous point in the crumbling of our discourse. We’ve reached the point where citizens are mocked by major scribes for wondering if we were lied into war—and where United States senators are told to apologize for denouncing the conduct described in that report. But then, lunacy has spread throughout our discourse over the course of the past dozen years. And your fiery “career liberals” have known to be silent. They looked away again and again. Now we see what that has bought us.

Remember: If you’re troubled to think that we may have been lied into war, that makes you a “wing nut” to today’s “mainstream” press corps. And if you think that FBI report sounds un-American, you need to apologize to the Senate! McCain, Russert, Kristol, Hume, Wallace? They’ve turned their backs on sanity itself. Everyone has to fight this spreading press culture—and you have to ask more from those who kept quiet while this culture of insanity was born.

Fristed

Frist is indeed the worst majority leader ever. Nonetheless I'm confused -- I thought on the previous cloture vote he had voted against cloture so that he would be allowed to bring up the cloture vote again. This time around the only Republican to vote against cloture was Voinovich -- wouldn't he have to be the one to bring up the vote?

Open Thread

Have fun.

There Are No Moderate Republicans

Regarding Graham, Yglesias says:

Look, it's nice that Graham is saying smart, dissenting things about the direction of national policy. But he keeps voting for the policy. Just like Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, and the rest of the gang, he has done nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to correct the situation. Instead, he's actively collaborated in generating the problems he cites. The things he claims to regret would have been somewhat mitigated had Graham lost his race to become a U.S. senator. He could help improve the situation tomorrow by resigning his seat and letting Mike Easley appoint a replacement.


A smaller step might be to use his votes on various committees to help restart the process of congressional oversight. But he hasn't done anything like that and he won't. I don't know exactly what's wrong with these people, but they deserve to be attacked more, not less, harshly than your ordinary party-line Republicans. Voting for bad policies you agree with is bad. Voting for bad policies that, when asked, you say are bad is ridiculous. Liberals should direct nothing but scorn at this crew unless and until they start doing something instead of offering nice remarks to film screening audiences.

Precisely. (well, except, as storwino points out, Easley is North Carolina's governor... but, otherwise.)

What We Know

Henry writes:

In many countries (including my home country, Ireland), police have a reputation for stitching people up; they seem prepared in some instances to commit perjury in order to get people convicted for crimes. Now in some cases, this is a completely cynical exercise – the police have no idea of whether the accused is guilty or not, but need to get a conviction for political or other reasons. But in others, it’s because the police think that they know who committed a crime, but don’t have the necessary evidence to get the person convicted in court. Therefore, they perjure themselves and lie about the evidence in order to get the conviction.

This, it seems to me, is what happened in the lead-up to Iraq. The Bush administration, like others, probably did genuinely believe that Iraq had an active nuclear program. But it didn’t have the necessary evidence to prove this, either to its allies or to its own people. It therefore cooked the evidence that it did have in order to make its claims more convincing. It didn’t deceive the public about its basic belief that there were WMDs in Iraq. But it did deceive the public about the evidence that was there to support this belief, in order to convince them that there was a real problem. In other words, it did “consciously mislead” the American people (and its allies). When the police are caught perjuring themselves to get convictions, they should (and frequently do) suffer serious consequences, even if they believe that they’re perjuring themselves in order to get the guilty convicted. That’s not what the police should be doing; they haven’t been appointed as judges, and for good reason. If the police persistently lie in order to get convictions, the system of criminal law is liable to break down. Similarly, when the administration lies about a major matter in order to get public support, it shouldn’t be excused on the basis that it thought that it was lying in a good cause. It’s still betraying its basic democratic responsibilities.

There's a lot of truth here, although I think there are additional points that need to be made. We need to distinguish between the "WMD" and "the threat." Without a real investigation we'll never know to what degree they hyped WMD claims they thought were false instead of simply hyping claims they did not know were true. Some of us with our faulty memories remember Donald Rumsfeld saying things like:

We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

And George Bush saying:

He's a man who has told the world he wouldn't have weapons of mass destruction, yet he does.

And Ari Fleischer:

We know for a fact there are weapons there.

And Poodle:

We know that he has stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons[.]

All of these things can fall in Henry's basic frame - they believed he had certain weapons and while they were dishonest about their evidence and certainty of this, they still believed it.


But what they did do, without a doubt, was hype the degree to which such weapons, even if they existed, posed any kind of threat to the United States or even to Iraq's neighbors. We have a bit of a language problem, calling anything nasty a "weapon of mass destruction" when frequently we're talking about things which are very unlikely to produce a mass casualty event. A true "weapon of mass destruction" is capable of killing massive amounts of people. So, we're talking nuclear or a nasty plague or poisoning of an urban water supply or something which can actually succeed in killing massive amounts of people. Something like the much hyped Ricin doesn't even come close to deserving the label of WMD.

So, maybe they believed all the stuff about WMD (I'm still rather dubious about that too), but they certainly didn't believe the degree to which they hyped those WMD as posing any kind of genuine threat to us, and they certainly had no legitimate evidence of a nuclear program that had proceeded any further than my own nuclear program.[[UPDATE: Let me add here that the one thing I really don't believe is that they thought Saddam really had an active nuke program. Bad guy with lust in his heart, sure, but that describes every shitty dictator in the world.]]

They said he had WMD and, under the shitty definition of that word we've embraced, it's possible they believed it even if they didn't have the evidence they claimed to have (which was obvious at the time and one of many reasons I opposed this thing). But the kinds of weapons they believed they had were, for the most part, only useful as a deterrent to invasion, which appears to be the reason Saddam let the rumors about his evil laboratories persist. They just wouldn't be useful either for direct military uses or even for terrorist blackmail.

Believed in WMDs they hyped? Perhaps. Believed in the threat they hyped? Nope.

Some Thoughts from Lindsey Graham

Steve Clemons passes on some things he heard Lindsey Graham say at a recent screening of Seven Days in May:

Graham said that there were similarities between the political gamesmanship at play today and in what the film depicted some 40 years ago. He said that one of the reasons he worked to undermine those who wanted to trigger the so-called "nuclear option" over judicial nominations in the Senate is that he believed that one branch of government was trying to subordinate other branches.

He said that this was a time in politics -- particularly in the Congress -- in which policy decisions were tilting towards the loudest, often uninformed voices -- and that reasonable politics were being undermined.

He said that he worried that America today was vulnerable to a new generation of demagogues who would come in and "push all the buttons" on "9/11, terrorism, Guantanamo, and the like" and try and wreck the system of checks and balances that characterize America's style of democracy.

Drinking Liberally

Don't forget, locals, Drinking Liberally every Tuesday 6-9ish at Ten Stone at the corner of 21st and South.

For those of you around the country, find your own local chapter or start your own.

New people, don't be shy. I'd say the ratio of regulars to non regulars is about 60/40 these days, and we always welcome the addition of more regulars.


Jim says Chuck Pennacchio, candidate for U.S. Senate, is planning to drop by.

Keyloggers

Well, I can't vouch for this but it certainly sounds creepy.

(via Toughenough)



...never mind. One more hoax to not worry about.

Young Republicans Reject Ad

Don't want to waste their beautiful minds.

31

Recall, bitches!

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suddenly ranks among the most unpopular governors in modern California history, as residents grow increasingly unhappy about the action hero-turned-politician's budget plans and his call for a special election, according to a new Field Poll.

Less than a third -- 31 percent -- of the state's adults approve of the job the governor is doing in Sacramento, down from 54 percent in February. The numbers are only slightly better among registered voters, 37 percent of whom are happy with Schwarzenegger's performance and 53 percent dissatisfied.

(tip from dave)

Correction

Toles:

Denigrating the Jurors

I'd missed this but Tim Rutten had a good column a week back talking about the cable TV reaction to the Jackson trial. He points out that there's something more than a little unhealthy about the pundits and pundettes belief that its appropriate for them to declare open season on the jurors who are just private citizens doing their civic duty.

Open Thread

Play nice.

Open Thread

Because there is never enough thread.