FRANK RICH: Operation Freedom From Iraqis

Operation Freedom From Iraqis
by FRANK RICH
NY Times, Sunday, May 27, 2007

WHEN all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization has now become America’s sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.

However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle East. From “Stuff happens!” on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war’s dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming “aliens” from Mexico.

Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”

It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A “secure” Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.

But his silence about Iraq’s mass exodus is not merely another instance of deceptive White House P.R.; it’s part of a policy with a huge human cost. The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.

Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden, which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000 Iraqis this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to 7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more administration propaganda). A bill passed by Congress this month will add another piddling 500, all interpreters.

In reality, more than 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who also, in Senator Kennedy’s phrase, have “an assassin’s bull’s-eye on their backs” because they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past four-plus years. How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of the administration’s most fervent hawks, the former United Nations ambassador John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem had “absolutely nothing to do” with Saddam’s overthrow: “Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”

Actually, we haven’t fulfilled the obligation of giving them functioning institutions and security. One of the many reasons we didn’t was that L. Paul Bremer’s provisional authority staffed the Green Zone with unqualified but well-connected Republican hacks who, in some cases, were hired after they expressed their opposition to Roe v. Wade. The administration is nothing if not consistent in its employment practices. The assistant secretary in charge of refugees at the State Department now, Ellen Sauerbrey, is a twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor of Maryland with no experience in humanitarian crises but a hefty résumé in anti-abortion politics. She is to Iraqis seeking rescue what Brownie was to Katrina victims stranded in the Superdome.

Ms. Sauerbrey’s official line on Iraqi refugees, delivered to Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” in March, is that most of them “really want to go home.” The administration excuse for keeping Iraqis out of America is national security: we have to vet every prospective immigrant for terrorist ties. But many of those with the most urgent cases for resettlement here were vetted already, when the American government and its various Halliburton subsidiaries asked them to risk their lives by hiring them in the first place. For those whose loyalties can no longer be vouched for, there is the contrasting lesson of Vietnam. Julia Taft, the official in charge of refugees in the Ford administration, reminded Mr. Pelley that 131,000 Vietnamese were resettled in America within eight months of the fall of Saigon, despite loud, Dobbs-like opposition at the time. In the past seven months, the total number of Iraqis admitted to America was 69.

The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began during the Vietnam War, told me that security worries then were addressed by a vetting process carried out in safe, preliminary asylum camps for refugees set up beyond Vietnam’s borders in Asia. But as Mr. Holbrooke also points out in the current Foreign Affairs magazine, the real forerunner to American treatment of Iraqi refugees isn’t that war in any case, but World War II. That’s when an anti-Semitic assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, tirelessly obstructed the visa process to prevent Jews from obtaining sanctuary in America, not even filling the available slots under existing quotas. As many as 75,000 such refugees were turned away before the Germans cut off exit visas to Jews in late 1941, according to Howard Sachar’s “History of the Jews in America.”

Like the Jews, Iraqis are useful scapegoats. This month Mr. Bremer declared that the real culprits for his disastrous 2003 decision to cleanse Iraq of Baathist officials were unnamed Iraqi politicians who “broadened the decree’s impact far beyond our original design.” The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is chastising the Iraqis for being unable “to do anything they promised.”

The new White House policy, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has joked, is “blame and run.” It started to take shape just before the midterm elections last fall, when Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memo (propitiously leaked after his defenestration) suggesting that the Iraqis might “have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.” By January, Mr. Bush was saying that “the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude” and wondering aloud “whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.” In February, one of the war’s leading neocon cheerleaders among the Beltway punditocracy lowered the boom. “Iraq is their country,” Charles Krauthammer wrote. “We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.” Bill O’Reilly and others now echo this cry.

The message is clear enough: These ungrateful losers deserve everything that’s coming to them. The Iraqis hear us and are returning the compliment. Whether Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is mocking American demands for timelines and benchmarks, or the Iraqi Parliament is setting its own timeline for American withdrawal even while flaunting its vacation schedule, Iraq’s nominal government is saying it’s fed up. The American-Iraqi shotgun marriage of convenience, midwifed by disastrous Bush foreign policy, has disintegrated into the marriage from hell.

While the world waits for the White House and Congress to negotiate the separation agreement, the damage to the innocent family members caught in the cross-fire is only getting worse. Despite Mr. Bush’s May 10 claim that “the number of sectarian murders has dropped substantially” since the surge began, The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the number of such murders is going up. For the Americans, the cost is no less dear. Casualty figures confirm that the past six months have been the deadliest yet for our troops.

While it seems but a dim memory now, once upon a time some Iraqis did greet the Americans as liberators. Today, in fact, it is just such Iraqis — not the local Iraqi insurgents the president conflates with Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda in Pakistan — who do want to follow us home. That we are slamming the door in their faces tells you all you need to know about the real morality beneath all the professed good intentions of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though the war’s godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world of another Hitler, their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to be saved.

Southern Christians Don't Believe in Evolution but they Do Enthusiastically Practice Sadistic Cruelty to Animals, Especially Bunnies

Civilized Yet? Jacksonville Florida Baptist Christians Gleefully Once More Prove Bill Maher (Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO) and the (obnoxious-but-valid-about-this) Christopher Hitchens' Point that "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything"

I realize this does not represent ALL Christians (just too many of them). This particularly vile brand of 'Teaching while Promoting Evangelical Fundamentalist Christianity' Vomits Forth Yet Again Its Unhideable Despicable Inherent Nature of Corruption, Violence, Brutality, Immorality, Sadism, Cruelty, Lack of Empathy, Psychopathy and Sociopathy in the name of - cough - Science, Biology, Nature ... (but mind you, NOT evolution)
A Jacksonville Florida Baptist Christian teacher, school (Trinity Christian Academy, "Where Values are a Must", part of Trinity Baptist Church), administration, community and students enjoyed displaying (and apparently videotaping) their sadistic cruelty and violent savagery toward a helpless bunny rabbit when a Christian Science/Biology teacher at the fundamentalist evangelical religious Baptist school scheduled a group-watch to teach students that hungry captive pythons will eat captive, trapped, domesticated rabbits in front of barbaric human onlookers.

From News4Jax.com
POSTED: 4:22 pm EDT May 24, 2007
UPDATED: 10:14 pm EDT May 24, 2007

Students Watch Python Eat Bunny In [Jacksonville, FL] Westside Classroom

Parents Voice Concern After Watching Video Of After-School Demonstration
Some parents have been voicing their concern after a group of students stayed after school to watch a python devour a rabbit.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Whether an after-school activity was an educational lesson or a disturbing demonstration is being debated at a Westside school where a group of students watched as a python devoured a bunny.

Cameras rolled inside a Trinity Christian Academy as a python struck, killed and ate a rabbit in a classroom crowded with students.

The video was posted on YouTube.com, showing the supervised demonstration at the school with students wearing miniature, fake snakes around their necks.

After placing a large python on floor, a man removes a rabbit from a cage and baits it for the snake, moving it from side to side and then releasing it seconds before the snake strikes out at the smaller animal.

"This was the biology teacher, and he asked the kids if they wanted to see it. Everyone said yes, the kid brought in the snake and they did it. There was nothing wrong with it," said student Brittney Brown [in a stunning display of Faith-based blissfully cruel and sadistic ignorance.]. Some Trinity parents said they were disgusted after viewing the footage, and they let the administration know. [again, proof that they're not all stupid empathy-deprived barbarians.]

According to the school's administrator, several angry e-mails came into the school about the video.
However, some argue that what the students witnessed in the school's classroom was just nature at work. [with a huge dose of human manipulation and intervention.]

"It might be something uncomfortable for people to watch, particularly animal lovers. However this is a natural phenomenon. The way the animal ate is completely normal," said Kristen Key of Jacksonville Animal Care and Control. [More evolved, civilized insights from a 'Really enlightened person' in a key public position (sarcasm intended).]

Key said there is abolutely nothing criminal going on in the video and that Animal Care and Control would not be pressing charges. [But let's not quibble over the oxymoron of Christian Morality.]

"There is nothing illegal we can tell from what we've seen. It's not illegal to own a python in Florida," Key said. [And apparently it's not immoral, violent, sadistic, cruel, barbaric or serious indication of a disturbing, deep psycopathic tendency or mental illness or soul sickness if it's not illegal. Aren't you relieved?]

Legalities aside, some are questioning why students would watch the graphic demonstration.

"This is something that we are just beginning to become aware of," said Trinity Christian administrator Clayton Lindstam.

The administrator said he has not yet seen the video [now unavailable on YouTube].

He said he knows some details about the classroom demonstration but because graduation was coming up, he would wait until Friday to begin an investigation.

"We have an incident after school, and I'm going to find out about it," Lindstam said [while barely suppressing a smirk and chuckle on camera].

He has called a school meeting to talk about what happened, but students who saw the python told Channel 4 they didn't have a problem with watching the feeding. [Kinda like the the repugneocons outmaneuvering each other to prove who is more in favor of torture.]

"No one felt threaten by it," said student Corey Stevenson. "It was pretty much, 'Hey, this is going to happen if you want to be there.' More people showed up than they thought would. Anyone who felt threatened by it left." [And like the Nazis and so many other sadistic murderers have taught us: if everyone else does it, if it's done in God's name and if the authority figures say it's A-Okay, well, it must be.]

Singer & Miller Insights from http://www.bravebirds.org/violence.html:

"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all man were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right."

In this passage, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer gets right to the heart of the connection between violence against animals and violence among people: the principle that might makes right. Even people who are pacifist in every other aspect of life will condone violence against animals with no better justification than "because we want to and we can."

Killing in self-defense is one thing; killing for pleasure is another. ...

A different, more subtle, form of child abuse occurs every time a child's natural empathy for animals is supressed by parents or care givers...Psychologist Alice Miller (who writes about and grew up from the depths of Nazi cruelty) has shown that children who have been taught not to feel empathy [can easily] grow up to be adults who can [behave as cruelly as and gladly] follow the orders of Nazis. Thus, in forcing children to participate in violence against animals, parents [and teachers and preachers] endanger not only their children but the world."

The 'school notes' from PrivateSchoolReview.com indicate that:

Trinity Christian Academy was founded in 1967 to meet the academic, spiritual, physical and social needs of our students. It is the goal of our dedicated faculty and staff to equip students enrolled in TCA with the academic skills and character training necessary for success beyond their school careers.

I guess they also greatly enjoy instigating, watching, justifying, rationalizing, taping and worshiping animal sacrifices; how very Old Testament of them.

If anything, this Baptist fundamentalist 'Christian' teacher and his adherents have actually proved once more that some humans are recently if barely descended from primates -- and that is a major insult to monkees, chimps, apes and other primates.

Of note: this cruelty is exposed in the news on the same day Mitt 'the fundamentalist flip-flopper' Romney received a warm churchly welcome in Jacksonville.

Footnote: Apparently youtube is chock-full of current and future sociopaths, serial killers and psychopaths who get their rocks off watching small animals being killed and/or ingested by all manner of other life forms; pythons eating bunnies seems to be a particularly popular subgenre with at least 48 entries.

Trinity Christian Academy & Trinity Baptist Church
800 Hammond Blvd
Jacksonville, FL 32221
school phone: (904)596-2432
church phone: (904)596-2400
administration email: tcainfo@tbc.edu

As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: In their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right. - Isaac Bashevis Singer: Enemies, A Love Story

Clinton Campaign Theme Song Idea: Defying Gravity

I hear Senator Clinton is looking for a campaign theme song these days.*
For today my vote goes to "Defying Gravity" from the broadway sensation Wicked. It's a great match -- told from the POV of the Witches of Oz, especially giving new insights into the always vilified Wicked Witch of the West -- what could be more fitting?

Take a listen; press the pink button.



If only the the Senator, the dems in general, and all women in power weren't so afraid of and didn't have to deferentially contend with the unending misogyny, sexism and homophobia relentlessly enacted and pursued by the right and casually engaged in by almost everyone else, even so-called 'allies'.

Notice that campaign theme songs are almost never by women, unless of course it's classic Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie as the core voices from the fantastic Fleetwood Mac (Bill Clinton Defying Gravity himself in the 90s) or Babs Streisand covering "Happy Days are Here Again" for the democratic party over the years, especially the (Bill) Clinton years. Definite points to the dems for those two 'concessions'.

Okay, so my current second choice might be "For Good" also from Wicked, especially if Clinton stumbles or is ultimately not the candidate of the dems -- if she is not electable in the general election (it's still too soon to tell; and it depends mostly on how soured the country's mood really is on the republicans/bushies by the time the election rolls around).
Either way, the dems have LOTS of work to do, oftentimes involving simply getting out of the way of repugs while they continue on a path of national and international destruction.


Meanwhile Clinton also seems to be searching for just the right formula for becoming "Popular"...




The entire cast recording of Wicked the CD featuring the sublime voices and harmonies of Idina Menzel (Elphaba, the Wicked Witch and Kristen Chenoweth as Glenda/Galinda) is on sale now for half off -- only $9.99; it qualifies for Amazon's FREE Super Saver Shipping.

*You can listen to the options presented by Senator Clinton's Campaign and vote at her website here.

Krugman Restates the Obvious about the GOP Repugneocons

PAUL KRUGMAN: Don’t Blame Bush

NY Times, May 18, 2007

I’ve been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we’ve all been too hard on President Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.

But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.

Now, Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have done a few things other Republicans wouldn’t. Their initial domestic surveillance program was apparently so lawless and unconstitutional that even John Ashcroft, approached on his sickbed, refused to go along. For the most part, however, Mr. Bush has done just what his party wants and expects.

There was a telling moment during the second Republican presidential debate, when Brit Hume of Fox News confronted the contenders with a hypothetical “24”-style situation in which torturing suspects is the only way to stop a terrorist attack.

Bear in mind that such situations basically never happen in real life, that the U.S. military has asked the producers of “24” to cut down on the torture scenes. Last week Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, circulated an open letter to our forces warning that using torture or “other expedient methods to obtain information” is both wrong and ineffective, and that it is important to keep the “moral high ground.”

But aside from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, “where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo.” His remarks were greeted with wild applause.

And torture isn’t the only Bush legacy that seems destined to continue if a Republican becomes the next president. Mr. Bush got us into the Iraq quagmire by conflating Saddam with Al Qaeda, treating two mutually hostile groups as if they constituted a single enemy. Well, Mr. Romney offers more of that. “There is a global jihadist effort,” he warned in the second debate. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda with that intent.” Aren’t Sunnis and Shiites killing each other, not coming together? Nevermind.

What about the administration’s state of denial over Iraq, its unwillingness to face up to reality? None of the leading G.O.P. presidential contenders seem any different — certainly not Mr. McCain, who strolled through a Baghdad marketplace wearing a bulletproof vest, accompanied by more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees while attack helicopters flew overhead, then declared that his experience proved there are parts of Baghdad where you can “walk freely.”

Finally, what about the Bush administration’s trademark incompetence? In appointing unqualified loyalists to key positions, Mr. Bush was just following the advice of the Heritage Foundation, which urged him back in 2001 to “make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second.” And the base doesn’t mind: the Bernie Kerik affair — Mr. Giuliani’s attempt to get his corrupt, possibly mob-connected business partner appointed to head the department of homeland security — hasn’t kept Mr. Giuliani from becoming the apparent front-runner for the Republican nomination.

What we need to realize is that the infamous “Bush bubble,” the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar.

FRANK RICH's NY Times Column: Earth to G.O.P: The Gipper Is Dead

Earth to G.O.P: The Gipper Is Dead

By FRANK RICH
The New York Times
May 13, 2007

OF course you didn’t watch the first Republican presidential debate on MSNBC. Even the party’s most loyal base didn’t abandon Fox News, where Bill O’Reilly, interviewing the already overexposed George Tenet, drew far more viewers. Yet the few telling video scraps that entered the 24/7 mediasphere did turn the event into an instant “Saturday Night Live” parody without “SNL” having to lift a finger. The row of 10 middle-aged white candidates, David Letterman said, looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

Since then, panicked Republicans have been either blaming the “Let’s Make a Deal” debate format or praying for salvation-by-celebrity in the form of another middle-aged white guy who might enter the race, Fred Thompson. They don’t seem to get that there is not another major brand in the country — not Wal-Mart, not G.E., not even Denny’s nowadays — that would try to sell a mass product with such a demographically homogeneous sales force. And that’s only half the problem. The other half is that the Republicans don’t have a product to sell. Aside from tax cuts and a wall on the Mexican border, the only issue that energized the presidential contenders was Ronald Reagan. The debate’s most animated moments by far came as they clamored to lip-sync his “optimism,” his “morning in America,” his “shining city on the hill” and even, in a bizarre John McCain moment out of a Chucky movie, his grin.

The candidates mentioned Reagan’s name 19 times, the current White House occupant’s once. Much as the Republicans hope that the Gipper can still be a panacea for all their political ills, so they want to believe that if only President Bush would just go away and take his rock-bottom approval rating and equally unpopular war with him, all of their problems would be solved. But it could be argued that the Iraq fiasco, disastrous to American interests as it is, actually masks the magnitude of the destruction this presidency has visited both on the country in general and the G.O.P. in particular.

By my rough, conservative calculation — feel free to add — there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously — an all-time record.

Wrongdoing of this magnitude does not happen by accident, but it is not necessarily instigated by a Watergate-style criminal conspiracy. When corruption is this pervasive, it can also be a byproduct of a governing philosophy. That’s the case here. That Bush-Rove style of governance, the common denominator of all the administration scandals, is the Frankenstein creature that stalks the G.O.P. as it faces 2008. It has become the Republican brand and will remain so, even after this president goes, until courageous Republicans disown it and eradicate it.

It’s not the philosophy Mr. Bush campaigned on. Remember the candidate who billed himself as a “different kind of Republican” and a “compassionate conservative”? Karl Rove wanted to build a lasting Republican majority by emulating the tactics of the 1896 candidate, William McKinley, whose victory ushered in G.O.P. dominance that would last until the New Deal some 35 years later. The Rove plan was to add to the party’s base, much as McKinley had at the dawn of the industrial era, by attracting new un-Republican-like demographic groups, including Hispanics and African-Americans. Hence, No Child Left Behind, an education program pitched particularly to urban Americans, and a 2000 nominating convention that starred break dancers, gospel singers, Colin Powell and, as an M.C., the only black Republican member of Congress, J. C. Watts.

As always, the salesmanship was brilliant. One smitten liberal columnist imagined in 1999 that Mr. Bush could redefine his party: “If compassion and inclusion are his talismans, education his centerpiece and national unity his promise, we may say a final, welcome goodbye to the wedge issues that have divided Americans by race, ethnicity and religious conviction.” Or not. As Matthew Dowd, the disaffected Bush pollster, concluded this spring, the uniter he had so eagerly helped elect turned out to be “not the person” he thought, but instead a divider who wanted to appeal to the “51 percent of the people” who would ensure his hold on power.

But it isn’t just the divisive Bush-Rove partisanship that led to scandal. The corruption grew out of the White House’s insistence that partisanship — the maintenance of that 51 percent — dictate every governmental action no matter what the effect on the common good. And so the first M.B.A. president ignored every rule of sound management. Loyal ideologues or flunkies were put in crucial positions regardless of their ethics or competence. Government business was outsourced to campaign contributors regardless of their ethics or competence. Even orthodox Republican fiscal prudence was tossed aside so Congressional allies could be bought off with bridges to nowhere.

This was true way before many, let alone Matthew Dowd, were willing to see it. It was true before the Iraq war. In retrospect, the first unimpeachable evidence of the White House’s modus operandi was reported by the journalist Ron Suskind, for Esquire, at the end of 2002. Mr. Suskind interviewed an illustrious Bush appointee, the University of Pennsylvania political scientist John DiIulio, who had run the administration’s compassionate-conservative flagship, the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bemoaning an unprecedented “lack of a policy apparatus” in the White House, Mr. DiIulio said: “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

His words have been borne out repeatedly: by the unqualified political hacks and well-connected no-bid contractors who sabotaged the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq; the politicization of science at the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency; the outsourcing of veterans’ care to a crony company at Walter Reed; and the purge of independent United States attorneys at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department. But even more pertinent, perhaps, to the Republican future is how the Mayberry Machiavellis alienated the precise groups that Mr. Bush had promised to add to his party’s base.

By installing a political hack, his 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, at the top of FEMA, the president foreordained the hiring of Brownie and the disastrous response to Katrina. At the Education Department, the signature No Child Left Behind program, Reading First, is turning out to be a cesspool of contracting conflicts of interest. It’s also at that department that Bush loyalists stood passively by while the student-loan industry scandal exploded; at its center is Nelnet, the single largest corporate campaign contributor to the 2006 G.O.P. Congressional campaign committee. Back at Mr. Gonzales’s operation, where revelations of politicization and cover-ups mount daily, it turns out that no black lawyers have been hired in the nearly all-white criminal section of the civil rights division since 2003.

The sole piece of compassionate conservatism that Mr. Bush has tried not to sacrifice to political expedience — nondraconian immigration reform — is also on the ropes, done in by a wave of xenophobia that he has failed to combat. Just how knee-jerk this strain has become could be seen in the MSNBC debate when Chris Matthews asked the candidates if they would consider a constitutional amendment to allow presidential runs by naturalized citizens like their party’s star governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (an American since 1983), and its national chairman, Senator Mel Martinez of Florida. Seven out of 10 said no.

We’ve certainly come a long way from that 2000 Philadelphia convention, with its dream of forging an inclusive, long-lasting G.O.P. majority. Instead of break dancers and a black Republican congressman (there are none now), we’ve had YouTube classics like Mr. Rove’s impersonation of a rapper at a Washington journalists’ banquet and George Allen’s “macaca” meltdown. Simultaneously, the once-reliable evangelical base is starting to drift as some of its leaders join the battle against global warming and others recognize that they’ve been played for fools on “family values” by the G.O.P. establishment that covered up for Mark Foley.

Meanwhile, most of the pressing matters that the public cares passionately about — Iraq, health care, the environment and energy independence — belong for now to the Democrats. Though that party’s first debate wasn’t exactly an intellectual feast either, actual issues were engaged by presidential hopefuls representing a cross section of American demographics. You don’t see Democratic candidates changing the subject to J.F.K. and F.D.R. They are free to start wrestling with the future while the men inheriting the Bush-Rove brand of Republicanism are reduced to harking back to a morning in America on which the sun set in 1989.

GOP ManDate (get it Man-Date?)

Equality: What a Quaint Concept!
True Brilliance by Matt Wuerker of Politco.com

Regarding the Repugnacon GOP Presidential Debates and Field of Candidates:

Not only does he blatantly skewer the claims, contradictions (as in contradicted by REALITY) and the unrelenting Hypocrisy of the Republican Big Tent -- it's still really the same 'Old Boys Club' where women are not allowed, not welcome and in fact are FEARED. Further, by employing an indeterminate Janitor of Color, Wuerker effectively evokes today's invisible, (usually silent) racism and still harkens us back to then-very-visible racist labels of the 50s on bathrooms, water fountains, restaurants indicating "Whites Only" and "Colored" -- labels and divisions which the southern conservatives, fundamentalists and true believers of the Reagan-forward-through-Bush Repug Party dearly wish still existed today.

He also addresses the underlying issue (growing gap) of "Haves and Have Nots" not only by the Janitor but by the 'Wealthy Privileged Moneyed Business MAN' entering the White Male Boys Club, a domain off-limits to anyone not in the frat-boy in-group; the source, origins and purveyors of truly disgusting, vile, dirty, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, hypocritical, power-privilege-and- greed-above-all-else in-the-sewer, gutter politics.

Republicans, right wingers, theocrats, fundamentalists and conservatives who believe in white male power, privilege and entitlement (as opposed to fairness, equality and justice) have made a cottage industry of scripting spin and talking points, unceasingly portraying themselves as perpetual, pitiful victims of 'Affirmative Action', the Civil Rights, Women's and Gay Rights movements of the 60s and 70s all the while for the past hundreds of years maintaining and extending their power, privilege and control in the Halls of Power, the Economy, Wall Street and everywhere they deem 'important' to control.

A truly brilliant political cartoon. One of the best ever.

Pres. Candidate Tommy Thompson Reverses Gay Discrimination Position

Post-debate appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher regarding his debate statement at the Reagan Library on MSNBC that it's "okay" to fire gay employees simply for being gay.

Republican Presidential Candidate Says He Misspoke at Debate: Hearing Aid Wasn't Working

He either flip-flopped or misunderstood the question or something...either way, Thompson, former head of Health and Human Services and former Governor of Wisconsin, says he opposes discrimination of any form in the workplace.

Let's see if that satisfies the right-wing nuts of the right-wing repugncon party or if he changes his stance again, claiming his hearing aid malfunctioned while being interviewed by Maher on HBO.

CBSNews.com Turns Off Comments on Obama Stories: Racism Prevails in USA

Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments. One site writes this pointed commentary:

Who said AmeriKKKa is ready for a President of Color or a Woman for President?
Not the troglodytes, knuckledraggers and poor, pitiful immature developmentally arrested whiney baby perpetual 'poor me' victim-mentality hypocritical republican WHITE MALE abusers, opressors and predators who have been complaining about their 'unfair treatment' for the past 50 years (since the Civil Rights & Women's Movements; how ironic is that? Conicidence—NOT).

Like Imus they refuse to grow up and insist that they are perpetual poor pitiful victims when in reality THEY CONTINUE TO BE THE MOST RACIST SEXIST HOMOPHOBIC VIOLENT OPPRESSIVE MEMBERS OF OUR CULTURE. (see the LATimes Op-ed in the prior blog entry.)

The right-wing and Republikkkan party continues to count on, exploit and perpetuate this hypocritcal, contradictory, disconnection from reality. But that's what oppressors and exploiters do: they twist and manipulate so that everything is self-serving and selfishly self-interested. There is no room for justice and equality in racism, sexism, patriarchy and especially not in developmentally arrested narcissism.

Couldn't have said it better myself. The CBS Public Eye story is here.

Wimps, Wussies and W: American OBSESSION with Hyper-Masculinity

Fantastic OP-ED in the LA Times. It shows that there really are a some (a few) men who actually 'get it.'

Wimps, Wussies and W.

How Americans' infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences.
By Mark Dery

MARK DERY is a cultural critic who teaches in the department of journalism at New York University.

May 3, 2007

SO THERE'S a smoking crater where Don Imus used to sit. That's fine with those of us who never understood the appeal of his grizzled-codger shtick, which always sounded like Rooster Cogburn reading "The Turner Diaries" anyway.

But if we're going to administer a ritual flaying to every blowhard who channels the ugly American id, why has a hate-speech Touretter like Ann Coulter escaped the skinning knife? She called Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot" at the Conservative Political Action Conference; insisted on "The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch" that Bill Clinton's "promiscuity" is proof of "latent homosexuality"; quipped on "Hardball Plaza" that Al Gore is a "total fag"; and wrote, in her syndicated column, that the odds of Hillary Clinton "coming out of the closet" in 2008 are "about even money."

Obviously, racism — slavery, lynching, institutionalized discrimination — has taken a much greater toll, in this country, than homophobia. According to the most recent FBI data (2005), most hate crimes (54.7%) were racially motivated; only 14.2% were inspired by the sexual orientation of the victim.

But there's another reason the media haven't given Coulter a prime-time water-boarding: Her problem is our problem. As a society, we view racial epithets as Class A felonies, whereas homophobic slurs are parking violations (if that). Coulter laughed off her Edwards crack, saying, "The word I used … has nothing to do with gays. It's a schoolyard taunt, meaning wuss."

Got that? The term "faggot," helpfully defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "offensive slang … a disparaging term for a homosexual man," really means "wuss," a schoolyard pejorative applied exclusively to guys — guys who are "unmanly," according to American Heritage. Not that it means you're a fag or anything. Which is just British slang for "cigarette" anyway. So why are you looking at me like that?

Coulter's chop-logic reminds us that homophobia is so ubiquitous as to be invisible in American society. Only people whose idea of formal attire is a white sheet with eyeholes would dare to use the N-word in public, but homophobic smears reverberate throughout pop culture. Little wonder: Asked in a 2003 Pew Global Attitudes Project study if homosexuality should be accepted by society, only a razor-thin majority (51%) of Americans answered yes, in contrast to 83% in Germany, 77% in France and 74% in Britain.

Our tradition of demonizing political opponents is founded on homophobic innuendo. Camille Paglia derided Al Gore for his "prissy, lisping Little Lord Fauntleroy persona" that "borders on epicene." John Kerry was deemed too "French" — meaning too much of a girlie man — to be commander in chief. Now Edwards is too heteroflexible; only Straight Guys with a Queer Eye get $400 haircuts, right?

George W. Bush learned an unforgettable lesson about the anxious nature of American masculinity when Newsweek branded his father a "wimp," a perception Bush 41 never really overcame. The resolve never to look like a wimp is the key to Dubya's psychology: the you-talkin'-to-me pugnacity at news conferences; the Top Gun posturing on the aircraft carrier, in a crotch-gripping flight suit that moved G. Gordon Liddy to swoon — on "Hardball," for Freud's sake — "what a stud."

Doesn't all this machismo and locker-room homophobia protest a little too much? What can we say about a country so anxiously hypermasculine that it produces Godmen, a muscular-Christianity movement that seeks to lure Real Men back to church with services that feature guys bending metal wrenches with their bare hands and leaders exulting, "Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!"

The trouble with manhood, American-style, is that it's maintained by frantically repressing every man's feminine side and demonizing the feminine and the gay wherever we see them. In his book, "The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity," clinical psychologist Stephen Ducat calls this state of mind "femiphobia" — a pathological masculinity founded on the subconscious belief that "the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman."

OK, so maybe I'm overstepping the bounds of my Learning Annex degree in pop psychology. But the hidden costs of our overcompensatory hypermachismo are far worse than a few politicians slimed by pundits. The horror in Iraq has been protracted past the point of lunacy by George W.'s bring-it-on braggadocio, He-Ra unilateralism and damn-the-facts refusal to acknowledge mistakes — all hallmarks of a pathological masculinity that confuses diplomacy with weakness and arrogant rigidity with strength. It is founded not on a self-assured sense of what it is but on a neurotic loathing of what it secretly fears it may be: wussy. And it will go to the grave insisting on battering-ram stiffness (stay the course! don't pull out!) as the truest mark of manhood.

Original source: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-dery3may03,0,2656290.story