Ten Years Ago . . .

[The following is a re-posting of what I wrote a decade ago on this blog in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the botched Federal response to that catastrophe.  I think it is important to occasionally look back on stuff like this, not only to remind ourselves of what happened, but to see how far we've come since . . .]

We Needed a Great President Last Week, But We Didn't Get One

What's that old Rumsfeld line again? I think he said, "You go to War with the Army you have." Last week, America experienced one of its greatest catastrophes, and we had to go into that disaster with the president we have. Unfortunately, we had George Bush in the White House.

Actually, he was nowhere near the White House. He was on vacation. It's a shame that Terri Schiavo's body wasn't still kept alive and maintained in New Orleans when Katrina hit. Bush did, after all, interrupt one of his vacations last March to fly -- in the middle of the night -- all the way back to Washington D.C. to sign legislation to keep Schiavo's body on life support. Had Schiavo been in New Orleans during the Katrina aftermath, Bush would have sent an entire division in on Monday evening to rescue her body, and perhaps some of those troops could have remained and helped the people who were actually still alive.

Oh, I'm sorry -- did I write that Bush was on vacation? I guess that on the day Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, our president cut his vacation short so he could -- well, deliver a speech in California regarding how great a job he was doing in Iraq. Or was he still technically on vacation when he delivered that speech? Unfortunately, we may not know the answer to that and other questions until Bush enters retirement and writes his much anticipated book on travel and leisure.

Dick Cheney, the one who actually runs the show, was nowhere to be found during the Katrina aftermath. Cheney's excuse for avoiding Vietnam was that he had "other priorities." I'm looking forward to hearing what his other priorities were this last week. I'm sure they had something to do with GOP fund-raising -- if he wasn't on vacation, that is. We do, however, know where Condi Rice was. She was buying a shit-load of expensive shoes in NYC. She also attended a Broadway musical on Wednesday night. Good for her.

Perhaps Condi stayed away from D.C. because of all the in-fighting that was going on there. Administration officials who weren't on vacation were debating for days about who was actually in charge of the Katrina response. Meanwhile, people were dying needlessly in New Orleans. Where's Alexander "I'm In Charge Here" Haig when you need him?

The thing I find the most remarkable -- from a purely political standpoint -- is the opportunity the Bush Administration pissed away. The Katrina aftermath gave Bush the perfect chance to revive his faltering presidency. Sure, he still would have had to contend with the fact that his tax cuts for the rich and his misadventure in Iraq pulled important funding away from the flood control programs in Louisiana, but how many Americans really pay attention to minutiae like that? Hell, over 40% of the U.S. still believes that Iraqis were flying the hijacked planes on 9-11.

Bush, with the help of his Congressional friends, could have easily weathered any political shit-storm that emerged from the funding-cut issue. And all he needed to do to get that help in Congress was appear on the ball and in charge before, during, and after Katrina hit.

Instead, Bush fumbled the ball, and his Congressional allies are now going to have a much more difficult time covering up for him. Indeed, political expediency may force some of Bush's supporters in Congress to discontinue their efforts to prop up an Administration that is now widely seen as incompetent and out of touch. The 2006 mid-term elections are, after all, just around the corner, and there are a lot of angry voters out there.

Bush's big problem, of course, was that he couldn't control the images coming out of New Orleans like he could with the Iraq Debacle. It is, for example, pretty easy for the commander-in-chief to enforce an order that no pictures be taken of caskets returning from a war zone. Bush's failure, however, to move quickly in response to the Gulf Coast disaster allowed the media to go in there and give the world an unobstructed view of the horrors left in Katrina's wake. As a result, many attempts by BushCo and its apologists to "focus on the positive" were met with angry responses from on-the-scene television personalities who just weren't buying it.

This country has often had the good fortune of strong leadership during times of crisis. We had Lincoln during the Civil War, FDR during the Great Depression and World War II, and Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. No such luck this time. I've often referred to Bush as arguably the worst American president of all time. There doesn't seem to be a need for argument on that point anymore.

"Conciliatory Rhetoric As A Ruthless Strategy"

Last year, I wrote this about Obama:

By adopting conservative positions, the President has backed the Republican Party into a corner and forced it to become increasingly radicalized in its quest to opposed All Things Barack. In other words, he took the GOP's Achilles Heel, namely, the intense hatred within its ranks for America's first Black president, and fully exploited it to the long-term detriment of the Republican Party.

Although I stand by that statement, I was also among the group of people who thought Obama gradually adopted this strategy only when it became apparent that the GOP was going to obstruct him on everything.  But this excellent post by Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly makes it clear that this was Obama's strategy from day one:

[T]he historical record shows that he wasn’t unaware of Republican plans from the outset. In his book The New New Deal, Michael Grunwald points out that, during the negotiations over the initial stimulus package (which was signed by President Obama 28 days after he was inaugurated), a couple of Republican Senators informed Vice President Biden that the plan was to obstruct anything the President tried to do. So, at minimum, we know that Obama was not uninformed.

Obama then took this awareness of the Republicans' plan and used it against them, knowing -- of course -- that the GOP will oppose everything he proposes, including ideas that Republicans once supported. LeTourneau writes:

The scenario that played out over and over again on everything from health care reform to budgets was that President Obama would put his ideas on the table and then ask Republicans to do the same. Most of the time, they simply refused. As the President demonstrated that he was willing to meet them more than halfway, the demands they did articulate became more and more extreme - leading to things like a possible default over raising the debt limit.

Knowing that the Republican position was simply to obstruct, President Obama offered pragmatic conciliations, recognizing that the closer he moved to what had traditionally been “sensible” Republican policies, the more difficult that would become. Their options were to either work with him on solutions (his preference) or continue to obstruct - painting themselves into an ever-more extremist corner.

LeTourneau closes her article by stating that it might be too soon to say whether or not “conciliatory rhetoric as ruthless strategy” is a success. But I think the strategy has been enormously successful.  Just listen to what the Republican candidates for president are saying right now: some support banning abortion for 10-year-old girls who conceive because they were raped, many support mandatory deportation for all illegal aliens as well as their children who were born in the U.S., most support mandatory perpetual warfare in the Middle East and mandatory rejection of climate science, and on and on and on.

Well played, Mr. President.

Christ, What's Next -- Death Camps?

After Mitt Romney was crushed in the 2012 General Election, the Republican Party issued an autopsy report which proposed certain fixes for the GOP.  Here is an excerpt from that report, released in 2013:

"If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence. It doesn’t matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think that we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In essence, Hispanic voters tell us our Party’s position on immigration has become a litmus test, measuring whether we are meeting them with a welcome mat or a closed door."

Wow, what a difference a couple years makes. Here is what Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner [!!!], is saying now about illegal immigration:

Trump’s plan, which is detailed on his website, calls for construction of a wall along the Mexican border, vowing to “make Mexico pay” for it; an end to birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants; the defunding of sanctuary cities; the strengthening of immigration enforcement; and more. In an interview on NBC News, Trump added that he would rescind President Obama’s executive actions shielding millions from deportation, and deport all illegal immigrants: “They have to go.”

If you think Trump is the only one in the GOP race saying shit like this, then you'd be wrong. Scott Walker now supports mass deportation as well, as do other Republican presidential candidates.

Look, I know I'm on the record saying that the GOP's days as a national party are numbered, but even I find these latest developments astounding. The Republican Party's relationship with Hispanic voters was bad enough prior to Trump's ascendancy -- radicalized elements within the GOP basically prevented the passage of the bipartisan immigration reform bill, and the GOP is now actively trying to thwart President Obama's attempt to fix the system on his own.

But Donald Trump has taken Republican hatred for Hispanics to a whole new level, and there is no way this can end well for the GOP.  I guess now I know why the 2013 report on the Republican Party's health was called an "autopsy" -- the folks who wrote the report could read the writing on the wall.

Re-Writing History is Hard -- Part 2

U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno won't let Jeb Bush blame Obama for the current instability in Iraq:

Ahead of his official retirement on Friday, Odierno, the former highest-ranking officer in Iraq and one of the architects of the 2007 troop surge there, sought to set the record straight.

“I remind everybody that us leaving at the end of 2011 was negotiated in 2008 by the Bush administration. That was always the plan, we had promised them that we would respect their sovereignty,” Odierno said during his final press conference at the Pentagon.

Gen. Odierno brings up a good point, one that the Republican Party wants everyone to forget: The U.S. launched the invasion to bring freedom to the Iraqi people -- at least that is one of the reasons BushCo gave for the invasion.

The invasion itself was actually dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and even the idiots in the Bush Administration knew that if you give an invasion a title like that one, then you sure the fuck better follow through on the whole "freedom" part.  That is why the words "freedom" and "democracy" dominated BushCo's post-invasion rhetoric.  Here is an example of that from 2005:

"It took a four-year civil war and a century of struggle after that before the promise of our Declaration (of Independence) was extended to all Americans," Bush said. "It is important to keep this history in mind as we look at the progress of freedom and democracy in Iraq." * * *

The president said Iraq's path to democracy would not be a smooth one and highlighted what he called three milestones the nation has achieved. Those were: handing over sovereignty to the Iraqi leaders on June 28, 2004, two days ahead of schedule; holding elections in January 2005 and adopting a democratic constitution.

And that whole "freedom and democracy" thing is what George Bush tried to do in December 2008 when he signed the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq.  These are Bush's own words at the signing ceremony:

"The agreement provides American troops and Defense Department officials with authorizations and protections to continue supporting Iraq's democracy once the U.N. mandate expires at the end of this year. This agreement respects the sovereignty and the authority of Iraq's democracy. The agreement lays out a framework for the withdrawal of American forces in Iraq -- a withdrawal that is possible because of the success of the surge."

Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi democracy -- that's what Bush's efforts near the end of his presidency were all about.  The Surge -- and the subsequent Status of Forces Agreement -- constituted BushCo's last shot at getting a flower to grow out of the steaming pile of excrement it deposited in the Middle East, and needless to say, it failed miserably.

What I find most humorous about the Republican Party's attempt to re-write history on Iraq is that Jeb and the rest of the GOP apparently wanted the United States to subsequently reject the Status of Forces Agreement signed by George W. Bush in 2008 and thus act more like a conquering invader than a liberator. If that's the case, then they should have called the invasion something other than "Operation Iraqi Freedom."  I think "Operation Free Iraqi Oil" and "Operation Crush The Brown People" were available.

Re-Writing History Is Hard . . .

. . . especially recent history. Just ask Jeb Bush:

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush was heckled during an Iowa speech over his brother George W. Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq. Bush criticized the haste of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq under the Obama administration. “The Iraqis want our help,” he said. “They want to know that we have skin in the game, that we’re committed to this.”

“We had to get out in 2011!” the heckler yelled. Despite the interruption, Bush kept his composure. “We didn’t have to get out in 2011,” he retorted.

“Your brother signed the deal!” the heckler continued.

“It could have been modified, and that was the expectation,” Bush said. “Everybody in Iraq and everybody in Washington knew that this deal could have been expanded. And now what we need to do–”

“Your brother signed a bad deal!”

“–now we have to do something else,” he finished.

This isn't going to end well for Jeb, because folks not only remember the clusterfuck his brother created in Iraq -- they are still really pissed off about it.

Quote Of The Week

"In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party's right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump."

- Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone.

Taibbi is definitely on to something here.  Indeed, I've long thought that the GOP's weird obsession with Benghazi!! had more to do with frustration over the Bush Administration's failures than anything else.

Remember: Bush/Cheney was a dream come true for right wingers -- not one but two tax cuts for the rich, not one but two wars against brown people, sweeping deregulation, etc. -- and the whole thing ended in disaster.

Can you imagine how Republican extremists (i.e., the entire GOP) then felt when an uppity . . . gentleman named Barack Hussein Obama won the White House in 2008 and then had the temerity to not only prevent another Great Depression but to also kill Osama bin Laden a mere two years into his presidency? The Bush Regime wasn't able to do that, and it had eight years.

The GOP psyche just couldn't handle it. The passage of the Affordable Care Act and a second Obama term probably didn't help much either.  The result, of course, is that the Republican Party has gone completely insane.  And I can't get enough of it.

The Most Hilarious Article I've Read On The Campaign So Far . . .

It reminds me of Dr. Frankenstein trying to talk down his monster. I don't know if that even happened in the book or the movie, but it still reminds me of it.  Yes, it's that hilariously fucked up.

And by the way:  I don't like it that Megyn Kelly is getting death threats from Trump supporters over her debate questioning.  She seems like a decent person who was just trying to . . .

Oh, fuck it . . . it's all hilarious.

UPDATE:  As usual, The Rude Pundit nails it:

You know who was right down in the trenches of the war on Sandra Fluke? Fuckin' Megyn Kelly, that's who. The conservative "feminist" we're supposed to defend now because Donald Trump said some bitchy things about her couldn't get enough of attacking Fluke. Indeed, you could make a case that it was Kelly's targeting of Fluke that pleasured Roger Ailes and got her the primetime slot she's in now.

Fox News created Trump -- it is really that simple.

Donald Trump Is "The Great Evil" from The Fifth Element

The more I watch Donald Trump's candidacy unfold, the more I realize that he is The Great Evil that everyone was trying to stop in the movie The Fifth Element (the relevant scene starts at 10:10 and ends at 14:00):



In the movie, a powerful warship (Fox News) is sent out to destroy a gigantic evil space blob (Donald Trump) that is attacking the universe (the Republican Party). The warship repeatedly fires its most lethal projectiles into the evil blob, only to find that the more it attacks the blob, the more powerful the blob becomes.

That's Donald Trump's relationship to the GOP in a nutshell.  I stated in a previous post that Fox News tried to torpedo Trump in the recent debate, no doubt thinking that it could put an end to his Evil Presence once and for all.

No such luck.  As noted today by Josh Marshall:

Numerous commentators speculated over the weekend that Trump's public spat with Fox News host Megyn Kelly might finally spell the end of his surge in the polls. Top Republicans openly cheered his apparent downfall. But NBC's weekend poll suggests that assumption was misplaced.

The poll in question shows that Trump has the post-debate support of 23% of Republican voters, with Ted Cruz at 13%, Ben Carson at 11%, Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina tied at 8% and Jeb Bush and Scott Walker at 7%.  Yes, you read that right -- Trump enjoys a double-digit lead despite all of Fox's efforts to knock him out of the sky.  Nothing seems to be able to stop Trump, not even Megyn Kelly.

In The Fifth Element, the activation of certain "element stones" finally brings down The Great Evil.  I think there is one weapon that will ultimately bring down Trump's run for the GOP nomination, and that is the passage of time.  I agree with the pundits who say that Trump is probably locked into around 25% support in the GOP -- he won't go much below that no matter what he says, but he also won't be able to go much above it.

Once folks start dropping out of the GOP field, support for the other candidates still in the race will go up and Trump's position in the polls will eventually drop.  But until that happens, just sit back and enjoy the rest of the film.  It should be a good one.  I'm also looking forward to the inevitable sequel, which will be titled: Trump Launches Independent Bid For The Presidency.

I Think John Kasich Would Make A Good President

The Republican Debate was fairly entertaining, Trump was more or less what I expected (the Fox News people really hated him, though -- I think it's because they want to get rid of him). Bush was surprisingly flat, as was Walker. Rubio, Christie, and Cruz did okay, Huckabee and Carson had some funny moments. Rand Paul, whom I like on a lot of issues, seemed out of his element at times.

But as far as substance was concerned, most of the candidates were completely full of shit on most every issue. I hope that some of the answers they gave tonight are not the answers they'd give in a debate if they won the nomination -- a Democratic opponent would tear them to shreds.

But there was one answer I found very interesting.  Megyn Kelly asked Ohio Gov. John Kasich about his decision to accept Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, and he responded:

"First of all Megyn, you should know that President Reagan expanded Medicaid three or four times. Secondly, I had an opportunity to bring resources back to Ohio. To do what? To treat the mentally ill. Ten thousand of them sit in our prisons. It costs $22,500 a year to keep them in prison. I would rather get them their medication so they can lead a decent life. Secondly, we are rehabbing the drug-addicted. Eighty percent of the people in our prisons have addiction problems. We now treat them in prisons, release them in the community, and the recidivism rate is 10 percent. And everybody across this country knows the tsunami of drugs is threatening their very families. So we are treating them and getting them on their feet. And finally, the working poor, instead of having them come into the emergency rooms where it costs more where they’re sicker and we end up paying, we brought a program in here to make sure that people could get on their feet. And you know what, everybody has a right to their God-given purpose."

That was the most presidential thing I heard all night. He also had a thoughtful answer with regard to his opposition to same-sex marriage.  I may not agree with him on a lot of issues, but Kasich came off as a serious-minded person, which (of course) made him stand out from the rest of them.

I know it's early and it's hard to tell anything about a candidate after a single debate -- especially given that he shared the stage with nine other people -- but I think Kasich has a real shot at the nomination if Bush continues to under-perform.

Could This Spell The End To Donald Trump's Candidacy? (Updated)

This is hilarious, but also has the potential to be incredibly sad:

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men.

Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

This news is hilarious because it means that Bill Clinton might have had a hand in causing the GOP's Trump Catastrophe. But it also could end up being incredibly sad because Bill Clinton is hated by the GOP almost as much as Obama.

Republicans -- especially the ones who like what Trump has been saying -- might not take too kindly to The Donald cozying up to the The Big Dog.  Indeed, the "Trump Is A Clinton Plant!" Conspiracy could end up eclipsing Jade Helm 15.

And speaking of Trump, there is one question I'd like to hear him answer in tonight's debate, and it is:

Mr. Trump: You contend that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president because you believe he was not born in this country.  One of the men on stage with you tonight -- Ted Cruz -- admits he was not born in the U.S. Why aren't you insisting that Senator Cruz drop out of the race?"

I know -- the question will not be asked. But I'd love to hear Trump try to answer it.

UPDATE:  Kevin Drum has more on the "Trump Is A Clinton Plant!" Conspiracy.

If Obama Is Neville Chamberlain, Does That Mean Iranian Hardliners and U.S. Republicans Are The Nazis?

President Obama, in defending the Iran nuclear deal today, launched a brutal attack on those Republican motherfuckers who lied this country into Iraq twelve years ago. It was fun to watch.

After stating that the decision facing Congress next month on the nuclear deal will be the most significant since the vote to invade Iraq, Obama then made repeated reference to that disastrous decision during the rest of his speech. This approach, of course, allowed the President to continually push the GOP's nose into the pile of excrement now known as the Iraq Debacle, the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history. Here's a good example of that:

"I know it's easy to play on people's fears. To magnify threats. To compare any attempt at diplomacy to Munich. But none of these arguments hold up. They didn't back in 2002 or 2003. They shouldn't now. [Applause]  The same mind-set, in many cases offered by the same people who seem to have no compunction with being repeatedly wrong, led to a war that did more to strengthen Iran, more to isolate the United States, than anything we have done in the decades before or since. It's a mindset out of step with the traditions of American foreign-policy, where we exhaust diplomacy before war, and based matters of war and peace in the cold light of truth."

I took issue recently with the Republican attempt to re-write the history of the Iraq War. So it was good to hear the President go after those GOP bastards by not only saying the invasion was a huge mistake, but by also pointing out that it actually strengthened Iran's position in the region (i.e., "you assholes caused this mess -- I'm just trying to clean it up.").

One thing that has bothered me about Obama of late was that he really didn't hit back very hard when 47 GOP senators -- in an act of treason -- sent an open letter to Iran's leaders, warning that any agreement reached with Obama without legislative approval could be reversed by the next president. He fixed that problem today when he said:

"Just because Iranian hard-liners chant 'Death to America' does not mean that’s what all Iranians believe. Indeed, it’s those hard-liners who are most comfortable with the status quo, and who have been most opposed to this deal. They're making common cause with the Republican caucus."  

Obama has jokingly used that "common cause" line before, but this one had a bit more bite to it, especially given how many Republicans have recently compared the President to Neville Chamberlain, which was weird because they usually compare Obama to Hitler.

Why Am I Enjoying The GOP's Donald Trump Debacle So Much? (Updated Yet Again)

Because it's causing shit like this to happen:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) on Saturday invoked the specter of the Holocaust to criticize President Barack Obama for his decision to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program.

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven," Huckabee said in an interview with Breitbart News.

The one thing I like about Huckabee is that he always doubles down on the stupid shit he says, so don't expect any apologies from him over his "Obama Exterminates Jews" remark.  I fully expect him to evoke more Holocaust imagery in future attacks on President Blackenstein.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, Republican presidential candidates who decide to run a normal campaign just won't be able to compete in this Trump-infused environment, so they will be forced to attempt to "trump Trump" by saying and doing some really crazy shit during the last half of July.  Huckabee acting out during the Breitbart interview is a good example of this.  Here's another:



More please.

UPDATE:  Here is what Mike Huckabee said in 2008 about Iran:

"We cannot live with al Qaeda, but we might be able to live with a contained Iran. Iran will not acquire nuclear weapons on my watch. But before I look parents in the eye to explain why I put their son's or daughter's life at risk, I want to do everything possible to avoid conflict. We have substantive issues to discuss with Tehran."

Yes, that's right -- Huckabee was for negotiating with Iran before he was against it.

You just can't make this shit up.

UPDATE II:  It's Ted Cruz's turn:



For some reason, this sort of reminds me of those "pork-infused bullets" designed to "send Muslims straight to hell."

Donald Trump's Major Weakness Is His Extraordinarily Thin Skin

From TPM:

Donald Trump attempted to punish the Des Moines Register on Friday for publishing a critical editorial calling for the real estate mogul to to drop out of the presidential race.

The Iowa newspaper claimed on Friday that Trump barred one the paper's reporters and columnists from attending a Saturday event. Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told the paper that it had been denied press credentials because of the paper's Monday editorial, according to the Des Moines Register.

This is Trump's Kryptonite.  He responds to criticism and mockery by lashing out wildly against his critics. Indeed, his single biggest "gaffe" so far -- attacking John McCain's service to our country -- was triggered by McCain's criticism of Trump.

We've seen Trump's thin skin on display before. Back in 2011, Obama hilariously mocked The Donald during a speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and Trump was none too happy about it.  He was reportedly "ticked off by the mocking he took from the podium" and his "'mood shifted from playing along to unvarnished anger.'"

That is how you get Trump -- you mock him.  He hates that.  If I were a Republican candidate for president, I would hire a comedy team to produce at least three videos hilariously mocking Trump, and would release these videos in the days preceding the first GOP primary debate.  And - of course - I would release the most hilarious one on the morning of the debate.

Some would say that such a strategy won't work against Trump, even if it does cause him to lose his shit and say potentially campaign-damaging stuff.  After all, The Donald's attack on McCain didn't seem to hurt him in the polls.  One commentator stated the other day that Trump is "gaffe proof" and that "there is no way he can damage himself by sticking his foot in his mouth."

That may be so.  But there is only one way to find out, and that is to continually mock Trump in order to get him to say outrageous stuff.  Even if this strategy does not work, at least it'll be good for a few laughs.

Bonus Quote Of The Week

"We might as well demand that Iran give us a unicorn that we can ride all the way to Candy Mountain."

- Max Fisher, responding to the GOP argument that any nuclear deal with Iran should require a binding commitment that no one in the Iranian political system say bad things about the United States or Israel.

Quotes of the Week

"In the debate over this deal, we’re hearing the echoes of some of the same policies and mindset that failed us in the past.  Some of the same politicians and pundits that are so quick to reject the possibility of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program are the same folks who were so quick to go to war in Iraq, and said it would take a few months.  And we know the consequences of that choice and what it cost us in blood and treasure.

"So I believe there’s a smarter, more responsible way to protect our national security -- and that is what we are doing.  Instead of dismissing the rest of the world and going it alone, we’ve done the hard and patient work of uniting the international community to meet a common threat.  Instead of chest-beating that rejects even the idea of talking to our adversaries -- which sometimes sounds good in sound bites, but accomplishes nothing -- we’re seeing that strong and principled diplomacy can give hope of actually resolving a problem peacefully.

"Instead of rushing into another conflict, I believe that sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way must always be a last resort, and that before we put their lives on the line, we should exhaust every alternative. That’s what we owe our troops.  That is strength and that is American leadership."

- Barack Obama, from a speech he gave yesterday at the VFW National Convention regarding the nuclear deal with Iran.

And here's a good one from Hillary Clinton, responding to Mitch McConnell's assertion that he wasn't sure arguing "vote for me because I'm a woman" is enough:

"Wow -- if that’s what he said, Mitch McConnell really doesn’t get it. There is a gender card being played in this campaign. It’s played every time Republicans vote against giving women equal pay, deny families access to affordable child care or family leave, refuse to let women make decisions about their health or have access to free contraception." [...] These aren’t just women’s issues, they are economic issues that drive growth and affect all Americans. Anyone who doesn’t get that doesn’t understand what our lives are like."

Readers of this blog know that I'm not a big Hillary fan, but I am impressed with the way she is handling her campaign so far.  One thing candidates must do when attacked by the other side is to respond and then aggressively counter-attack, and Hillary seems to have taken this notion to heart.

Donald Trump Swift Boats John McCain (Updated)

I'm trying to figure out if this is The Greatest Thing Ever or merely in the Top 5 of greatest things ever:

Billionaire eccentric Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Sunday that he did not owe Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) an apology after stating that the senator is only viewed as a war hero because he was held captive and that Trump likes “people who weren’t captured.”

“No. Not at all,” Trump responded to ABC’s Martha Raddatz when asked if he owed McCain, who was held for five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, an apology.

Later in the interview, Trump demanded an apology from McCain for the senator stating that the billionaire candidate was firing up the “crazies” with his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

I love it. God help me, I do love it so.

UPDATE:  Steve Benen has some suggestions for Republicans in the wake of the vicious GOP response to Trump's attack on John McCain:

[I]f Republican leaders want to argue that attacks on Americans’ military service are simply beyond the pale, perhaps party officials can take this opportunity to apologize to John Kerry, who was smeared by Swiftboat lies in the 2004 cycle – lies that were celebrated at the time by 2016 candidates like Jeb Bush and Rick Perry – and who saw the spectacle at the Republican National Convention of party activists mocking Purple Hearts. While they’re it, Republicans can express some regret for related smears directed at former Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.).

And let’s also recall the time Rush Limbaugh said that any U.S. serviceman or woman who supported ending the war in Iraq is a “phony soldier” – a smear that did literally nothing to undermine Limbaugh’s standing as one of the most powerful voices in Republican politics.

If the rule is that Democratic veterans should expect to have their service and their patriotism questioned, while Republican veterans must be celebrated without question, GOP leaders should come right out and say so. If the RNC is right, and there is “no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably,” can Republicans explain why this principle took root just 48 hours ago?

Trump does appear to be some type of operative for the Democratic Party -- he has a way of exposing GOP dirty laundry (entrenched racism, Swift Boating) and doing so in hilariously entertaining fashion.

UPDATE II:  Ed Kilgore adds this:

The one thing we won’t hear is any Republican apology to Kerry. After all, he just played a central role in the greatest diplomatic betrayal since Munich—no, since Eve-and-Satan!-unleashing the most terrifying military superpower in the history of the world, Iran! Yes, in their account, John Kerry has been stabbing his country in the back for more than four decades, and just can’t stop. You know, like Republican smear-masters.

Amen.

Forget Iran -- A Successful Obama Presidency Is What Republicans Fear Most

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told NBC's Lester Holt the other day that the landmark Iran nuclear deal "is not only a threat to us -- we think this is a threat to you as well."  In other words, we should all be soiling ourselves in fear right now.  What horse-shit.  The bottom line here is that Netanyahu -- along with the entire Republican Party -- are terrified that this deal will succeed.

One of the themes of this blog in the last few years is that total Republican opposition to "All Things Barack" is based upon -- more than anything else -- the need for the GOP to de-legitimize America's first Black president.  But I do admit that some GOP opposition to Obama isn't based entirely on the President's race, and one example of this is the overwhelming Republican opposition to the recent nuclear deal with Iran.

GOP hardliners have long opposed deals such as this.  E.J. Dionne gives us some history here:

When President Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in November 1985, he whispered to the Soviet leader: "I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands.” Reagan had a point. His inclination to negotiate with the Evil Empire left many of his conservative friends aghast.

In an otherwise touchingly affectionate assessment of the 40th president’s tenure, my Post colleague George F. Will said that Reagan had “accelerated the moral disarmament of the West . . . by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.” Further right, the conservative activist Howard Phillips accused Reagan of being “a very weak man with a very strong wife and a strong staff” who had become “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda.” Wow!

Wow indeed. Don't forget -- Ronald Reagan currently enjoys a higher approval rating with Republicans than does Jesus Christ, so it is pretty hard to imagine that members of Reagan's own party opposed him on anything.  But there it is.

Much of the GOP opposition to the deal with Iran is based on the notion that we can never negotiate with our enemies. Dionne notes:

There is no way of knowing if this deal will lead to a dramatic transformation inside Iran, and there are some legitimate doubts that it will. But then, Reagan’s conservative skeptics were also insistent that the Soviet Union could never change, and surely never fall. They were wrong and Reagan’s bet paid off. Obama is now making a comparable wager.

But as Steve Benen observes, there is a big difference between the Reagan Era and the Obama Era, namely, Reagan -- in deciding to negotiate with the USSR -- at least had some support within the GOP and very little opposition from the Democrats.  The same cannot be said for the current president:

Three decades later, Democrats are terrified of supporting a popular nuclear agreement and the number of Republican elected officials who’ve endorsed international talks with Iran – not just the final agreement, but the talks themselves – is roughly zero. Reagan mocked the contingent of “hard-liners” in his party who always oppose nuclear talks, but a generation later, isn’t it fair to say the GOP is made up entirely of “hard-liners”? What was once a faction of the party is now, for all intents and purposes, the party?

Benen concludes that although it is possible some Republicans are secretly impressed with the international agreement reached this week, the fact that they feel the need to remain silent for fear of a partisan backlash "says quite a bit about the state of Republican politics in 2015."

I believe the one thing the GOP fears most is that this nuclear deal with Iran will succeed.  It's akin to Obamacare in this regard.  Clearly, such a success would make this the greatest diplomatic accomplishment for America in well over three decades; and the chance that history will give the President credit for such a success cannot possibly sit well with Republicans, particularly given that they have spent the last six years trying to destroy the Obama Presidency.

Quotes of the Week

"He's a belligerent, loudmouth racist with not an ounce of compassion for less fortunate people, In other words: He's exactly the kind of person the Republican base consists of and identifies with."

- Paul Krugman, describing Donald Trump.

And here is what Benjamin Netanyahu had to say today about Obama's historic nuclear deal with Iran: “From the initial reports received, it is already possible to say that this agreement is a historic mistake for the world,”

Netanyahu really has a knack for being on the wrong side of history when it comes to important U.S. foreign policy decisions.  Here is what he had to say on Sept. 12, 2002, during testimony before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, on whether Bush and Cheney should invade Iraq: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

You really nailed that one, Bibi.

Does This Mean That All The Confederate Flags Can Go Back Up Now?

From HuffPo:

Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old from South Carolina who is accused of killing nine people at a historic African-American church in Charleston last month, never should have been allowed to purchase a weapon, the head of the FBI said Friday.

A flaw in the background check system operated by the FBI, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, didn't turn up a record of Roof admitting to drug possession, the FBI director told reporters, according to reports.

“We are all sick this happened,” FBI Director James B. Comey said Friday, according to The New York Times. “We wish we could turn back time.”

Donald Trump Supports Mandatory Abortion For U.S. Victims of Mexican Rapists

"Don't you see what these rapists are doing?  They come into this country, rape the first woman they see, and impregnate their victims just to get more Mexicans into this country.  These quasi-anchor fetuses must not be allowed to become quasi-anchor babies.  When I become president, I'll order that all rape victims who become impregnated be asked if a Mexican illegal immigrant was the perpetrator, and if that's the case, then any such fetus must be aborted."

- Donald Trump.

Okay, Trump did not really say this -- at least not yet . . .

No Way To Lose On This One

From Greg Sargent:

The Hill notes that the fate of Obama’s executive actions on deportations will be argued over today in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the government is probably going to lose.

This is a major setback. But this is probably going to the Supreme Court — where arguments could take place next year, meaning Republicans will again renew their opposition to deportation relief right when the presidential race heats up.

As Sargent implies in that last sentence, this whole debate centers not on whether the Democrats lose on this issue, but on how they play the game.  The entire point of this exercise is to draw out the GOP in order to demonstrate Republican hatred for Hispanics.  Looks like this strategy is working quite well.

GOP's Refusal To Govern Pays Off Big Time . . . For Democrats (Updated)

I was telling my wife the other day that I think Donald Trump is actually an operative for the Democrats and his mission is to destroy the GOP from within.  Just look at the damage he's doing to the Republican Party right now.  After Trump announced that only Mexican rapists are illegally entering the U.S., just a handful of the 47 GOP candidates currently running for president criticized him for the racist remark and the criticism was tepid at best.

I can understand why Republicans are reluctant to attack Trump on this issue.  After all, a good percentage of Republicans are racist, and a lot of these racist Republicans undoubtedly vote in the primaries.  But what I find hilarious is that this problem could have easily been avoided had Republicans in Congress simply set aside their intense hatred for America's first Black president and passed immigration reform in 2013 and 2014.

But they refused to do so, and now they have Donald Trump and his particular brand of racism to deal with.  The really cool part about all this is that the first GOP presidential debate is just around the corner, and only the top ten Republican presidential candidates can participate in it.  What this means, of course, is that the candidates polling just outside the Top 10 have only two choices:   (1) they can run a normal campaign and not move up in the polling, or (2) they can attempt to "trump Trump" by saying some really crazy shit during the last half of July in the hope of appealing to the Radicalized Right and maybe cracking the Top 10 as a result.

Needless to say, I'm hoping that a lot of them choose the latter course.

UPDATE:  Sean Illing at Salon goes back even further and blames the rise of Fox News for the GOP's Trump Disaster:

Fox News – and the conservative media-industrial complex – have created a Frankenstein. His name is Donald Trump, and his political success is now a huge problem for the Republican Party. In so many ways, Trump’s political existence was inevitable. For years, Fox News and the conservative talk radio machine have played to the populist Tea Party id: fomenting fear, demonizing immigrants, and enabling every nativist anxiety imaginable. Now they’re paying the price. ***

The wonderful irony of all this is that the conservative media have ruined conservative politics, far more than liberals ever did. And the results speak for themselves. It’s true that Fox News has promoted the conservative brand and very likely energized grass-roots conservatism in some sense, but at what cost? The GOP, increasingly, is no longer a national party – it’s confined more and more to the South and to pockets of rural America. ***

Illing also notes that it'll be hard for Fox to dump Trump because he is "a boon for ratings" and the "delightful dolts on Fox and Friends can’t get enough of him."

Ironically, the Democratic Party also can't get enough of Donald Trump.  The Democrats could spend a billion dollars on ads attacking Republicans and still not do as much damage as Trump is doing to the GOP right now.

This Pretty Much Sums It All Up

[click to enlarge]

Bill O'Reilly Displays His Intense Hatred for Gay People

Watch the Radicalized Right have a meltdown over the Rainbow White House:



Charlie Cook: "Republicans need to do some soul-searching about their future and their relationships with voters of generations to come. Vibrant parties change with the times, adapt themselves to changing conditions and circumstances. Maybe this past week will help the GOP do this."

Or maybe it won't.

Quote of the Week

"[Y]ou might wonder why a law that works so well and does so much good is the object of so much political venom — venom that is, by the way, on full display in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, with its rants against “interpretive jiggery-pokery.” But what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.

"That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing."

- Paul Krugman.

If you think Krugman's "great conservative nightmare" language is a bit over the top, just look at what conservative Bill Kristol wrote back in 1993 when he argued in a memo that health care reform would be a political disaster for the GOP.

Kristol wrote over two decades ago that a successful Clinton health care bill would "relegitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation" and would "revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Paul Krugman and Bill Kristol actually agree on something. Who'da thunk it?

If You Are a Republican And Are Looking To Move To Another Country . . .

. . . well, I guess I couldn't blame you.

As I recently wrote, what a horrible week for the GOP. Yesterday, the one person Republicans hate the most -- President Obama -- won a huge victory on his health care reform law, cementing his legacy and handing the GOP a demoralizing defeat.  Radical right-wingers are watching in horror this week as confederate flags come down across the country.  And as if to add insult to injury, the Supreme Court upheld gay marriage this morning.

Well, all is not lost, Republicans. As I posted last year, there is a place for folks like you who no longer feel comfortable here in the United States. It's a place where they hate gay people, a place where government refuses to lift a finger to help its citizens acquire health care, a place without abortion, and yes, a place where the free market reigns supreme without any pesky regulations to hold it down.

That place is Ghana, and it sounds like a Republican paradise:

Conservative gun lobbyist Larry Pratt recommended during a recent radio broadcast that U.S. blacks could get a better “attitude” if they paid attention to “Africans from Africa” who he said were more “happy.”

On the Gun Owner’s News Hour show last month, American Thinker writer Selwyn Duke told Pratt, who is the executive director of Gun Owners of America, in a shocked tone that he had discovered that the best Catholic priests were from Africa.

“Africa! Intelligent Men with PhDs,” Duke noted. “And generally the African from Africa is a very pro-American person, a very happy person,” Pratt opined. “I know several. And they always just happy with a joke, pleasant smile on their face. And they clearly don’t identify with the surliness that’s all too frequently the attitude of their fellow African-Americans here.”

“And they’re very conservative politically,” he continued. “The country of Ghana, it’s still illegal to commit an abortion, it’s illegal to be a homosexual. Very conservative social laws and very free market oriented as well.”  Duke agreed and pointed out that the types of Africans that could afford to come to the U.S. were of “a better stripe.”

Republicans who now hate America more than ever should relocate to Ghana immediately.  As I wrote last year:

The only drawback for the Radical Right is that Ghana is full of black people.  But, according to Pratt, they are happier, more intelligent, less surly black people, so that should be okay, right?

Have a nice trip, folks. Please forget to write.

CORRECTION:  Well, you better stop packing your bags, Republicans.  I wrote above that the government of Ghana "refuses to lift a finger to help its citizens acquire health care."  That statement was not factual.  Ghana, it turns out, has a universal health care system in place.  I apologize for the error.

Needless To Say, I'm Watching Fox News Right Now

What a horrible week for Republicans.  Confederate flags are coming down all over the country, and the GOP just lost its bullshit Obamacare lawsuit. The America-hating pieces of shit at Fox News are beside themselves in anger.  I love it.

Although I predicted this exact result in the Supreme Court, I also held out hope that I would be wrong and that the Court would strike down the Obamacare subsidies for the folks living in states relying on the federal marketplace.  The resulting shit-storm within the GOP would have been a glorious thing to behold. Oh well.  Republicans can act out as much as they want right now over this decision, but the bottom line is that they really dodged a political bullet here.

The one thing that is undoubtedly enraging Republicans the most is that Obama won big today.  I think this whole lawsuit was more about the GOP's intense hatred for America's first Black president than anything else.

The Push-Back Begins . . . (Updated)

Here we go:

Some Spartanburg County lawmakers support removing the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds, but state Sen. Lee Bright, R-Spartanburg, characterized the movement to remove it and other Confederate monuments as a “Stalinist Purge.”

Shortly before Gov. Nikki Haley called on lawmakers to work together to have the flag removed, Bright said the flag doesn't symbolize hate to him but instead recognizes those who had fought with honor during the Civil War. People throughout history have misused symbols, and the Confederate battle flag is not an exception, Bright said. Just because a symbol may be abused doesn't mean it should be banned, he said.

Other radical right wingers are starting to come out of the woodwork to criticize Gov. Haley's call to take down the flag.  One conservative tweeted yesterday: "I hope the voters remember this and send her ass packing." Republican Alabama Rep. Gary Palmer stated yesterday that calls to remove the flag came from "people that have an agenda seeking to exploit a tragedy," and he concluded: "to me, that’s beyond contempt."

Even some Republicans who now support the effort to remove the flag are saying that the flag's symbolism was co-opted by a bunch of radical racists.  Of course, such an attempt to re-write history is complete bullshit.

John Oliver said it best the other night when he responded to Sen. Lindsey Graham's statement that the confederate flag has been used by some folks "in a racist way"  Oliver's response:

"Yeah, it has -- in fact, I believe the first time the confederate flag was used in a racist way was the exact second they finish sewing the very first one -- it was right around that time."

Anyway, I stand by my statement that South Carolina will not take that flag down. The racists in South Carolina who designed the original "compromise" to take the flag off the capitol dome -- and move it to an even more prominent place in front of the statehouse -- anticipated that future attempts would be made to take the flag down entirely.  And that is why they made it very hard to do so: it would require a two-thirds vote from both houses of the General Assembly.

Good luck with that.

UPDATE:  Go here to read more on why the flag will not be coming down.  Read this as well.

Why All The Talk Of Taking Down The Treason Flag Is Complete Horse-Shit

After I posted on Friday that there is no way South Carolina would take down the confederate flag currently flying in front of its statehouse, I noticed a lot of movement on the issue.  One Republican assemblyman even stated that he would introduce a bill in December to take the flag down.

Well, it's easy to engage in such talk when last week's massacre is still fresh in everyone's memory.  But I guarantee you that once the shock of the neo-confederate terrorist act starts to wear off, so will the fervor surrounding the flag.  Why do I say this?  Because it's South Carolina we are talking about.

One need look no further than a few feet away from where that flag currently waves. Right next to that fucking flag pole is a monument honoring terrorist Ben Tillman.  As Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly recently noted, an inscription on that monument honors Tillman's “life of service and achievement … In the home loving and loyal, to the state steadfast and true for the nation.” But as Will Moredock notes here, Tillman was an evil, hate-filled asshole:

Ben Tillman’s long and bloody public career began in 1876 at what would ultimately be called the Hamburg Massacre.

The then 29-year-old Tillman led the members of the Sweetwater Sabre Club, a.k.a. the Edgefield Redshits, against a local militia group, all black. Several African-American militia men were killed in a pitched battle with red-shirt-wearing white terrorists. After the militia surrendered, five of them were called out by name and executed. A few weeks later, when vigilantes captured a black state senator named Simon Coker, Tillman was present when two of his men executed the prisoner while he was on his knees praying.

Later, the terrorist leader Tillman explained his intentions on that fateful July 8 day: “It had been the settled purpose of the leading white men of Edgefield to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson; as it was generally believed that nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from Negro and carpetbag rule.” In a 1909 speech at a Red Shirt reunion in Anderson, Tillman reiterated this point, noting that he believed in “terrorizing the Negroes at the first opportunity by letting them provoke trouble and then having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”

He added, “That we have good government now is due entirely to the fact that Red Shirt men of 1876 did all and dared all that was necessary to rescue South Carolina from the rule of the alien, the traitor, and the semi-barbarous negroes.”

If this guy is so beloved in South Carolina that they gave him a monument in front of the state house, does anyone think the state will make any legitimate effort to remove the confederate flag from the premises? Not bloody likely, particularly given that President Obama said the other day that the flag should be taken down and put in a museum.  I suspect most Republicans in the South Carolina General Assembly will opposed the flag's removal on that basis alone -- they are sure the hell not going to let a some uppity Black man tell them what to do.

Indeed, I expect to soon see at least one bill in front of the General Assembly requiring that the height of the flag pole be increased and the monument honoring Terrorist Tillman be made larger. And why do I think that will happen? Because it's South Carolina!

South Carolina's Confederate Flag Quandary

Jon Stewart, in last night's excellent Daily Show monologue, told his audience that he had no jokes for them in the wake of the recent terrorist attack on the Black Church in South Carolina. I agree that it's pretty hard to find anything funny about nine people being gunned down in a place of worship by a white supremacist.

But I have to admit that there is one thing I find somewhat hilarious about all this, and that is the Catch-22 South Carolina currently finds itself in due to its long love affair with the fucking confederate flag:

After Dylann Storm Roof allegedly shot up an AME church in Charleston, S.C., killing nine people, two flags were lowered more than 100 miles away in Columbia, the state’s capital. Atop the South Carolina State House, the U.S. flag and South Carolina’s palmetto flag flew at half-staff as the manhunt for Roof ended with his capture in North Carolina and prayer vigils were planned. The show of respect would have been appropriate even if one of the state legislature’s own — state senator Clementa C. Pinckney — had not died in the attack.

But a third flag within view of the State House — the Confederate stars and bars — flew as high and as proud as ever, flapping in the breeze on a sunny day.  This looked bad.

Fucking-A it looks bad, particularly given that the shooter in question displays a confederate flag license plate on his vehicle.  But there is not a goddam thing South Carolina can do about it. The flag will have to stay right where it it, flying proudly in the racist breeze, no matter how bad it looks.  And that's what I find hilarious.

They certainly can't take it down because that would be an admission that the flag is in fact racist, something that its advocates strongly deny. Even if the governor thought it was a good idea to take it down, she couldn't do it because "only the General Assembly can do that," and it would require a 2/3rd vote by the Assembly to do so. But I doubt Gov. Haley would want to remove the flag, My understanding is that any politician who openly advocates removal pays a heavy political price.

Yes, that flag is there to stay, particularly given that there are no doubt a lot of people in South Carolina who think that now -- i.e., immediately after nine Negroes have been gunned down in cold blood -- is the best time to have that rag flying because they do indeed view the confederate flag as a symbol of white supremacy.  We know that the gunman undoubtedly feels that way, and does anyone out there really think he's the only person in that state who does?

No doubt there are a good number of South Carolinians who want the flag to remain right where it is in order to show their support for what Dylan Storm Roof did the other day. After all, the flag "was first raised over the Capitol in 1962, largely to express defiance of the civil rights movement." Killing Black Folk is certainly one way to express such defiance.

Why not compromise and fly the flag at half-mast you ask? Well, they can't do that  because it is not on a pulley system, but is "held in place by a padlock."  I have no doubt that a chain also helps secure the flag. After all, a padlock isn't much good without a chain. Perhaps it is a chain that was actually used on slaves back in "the good old days."

That wouldn't surprise me one bit.

The Real Reason Republicans Hate Obamacare . . .

From Egberto Willies at Daily Kos:

Republicans have had over five years to come up with something different that could reduce the deficit, provide health care, and remain completely private. The reason they cannot is that Obamacare used Republican tenets to build Obamacare, a private-based system. Had the president implemented Medicare for all (single payer) by getting rid of insurance companies that continue to skim up to 20 percent of premiums for false overhead and profits, they could demagogue and attempt to change it to a more inefficient system. That was the genius of Obamacare. It was built on the Conservative Heritage Foundation principles that most Republicans once supported along with a dose of progressive middle-class protections.

Willies' post also contains a video of Democratic Congressman Sander Levin's excellent response to Paul Ryan's bullshit attack on the ACA. Levin summed it all up with this line explaining the real reason the GOP is mad at Obamacare: "Your frustration is millions and millions and millions of people are benefiting, and have health care when they did not before."

I admittedly do not pray all that much, but I am praying that the Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court side with the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell and strike down the Obamacare subsidies for the folks living in states relying on the federal marketplace. Such a ruling would put the turd squarely in the pocket of the Republican-controlled Congress because it would force the GOP to make an effort to preserve health coverage for the millions who stand to lose it, most of whom reside in Red States.  I would really enjoy watching something like that unfold.

But I don't think that will happen.  Chief Justice Roberts had the chance to kill Obamacare while it was still in the crib, and he didn't pull the trigger.  I doubt he'll do it now, given how many millions of people would be hurt by such a ruling.  And I doubt Justice Kennedy would vote to strike down the subsidies, so I am predicting a 6-3 decision with Roberts and Kennedy siding with the liberals.

But I could be wrong, and I hope that I am.  If the Court does pull the trigger, then the resulting shit-storm within the GOP ranks would be a thing of beauty.

We're Gonna Miss You, Jon . . .

Yet another Iraq War Criminal is trying to re-write history, and Stewart is having none of it:

This Is The Kind Of Shit That Happens When You Listen To An America-Hating Idiot

Via Steve Benen:

As regular readers may recall, [Grover] Norquist is an anti-tax crusader who's convinced all kinds of GOP policymakers to sign something known as "the pledge" - in order to get ahead in their party, Republicans agree in writing never to support raising any tax on anyone by any amount for any reason.

But occasionally, far-right policymakers discover that the mindless, knee-jerk commitment stands in the way of actual governance in the real world. Louisiana's Republican-dominated state government, for example, is facing an enormous budget crisis, caused in part by Gov. Bobby Jindal's (R) tax breaks. Now the state can't get its fiscal house in order, and as TPM reported, it's asking Norquist to give Louisiana a break.

I can't help but laugh when I read stuff like this.  Of course, Norquist told the Louisiana Republicans to go fuck themselves, and some pretty hilarious blow-back has ensued.  As Benen notes, The Times-Picayune -- in slamming Jindal -- called Norquist "Louisiana's unelected governor," and one observer quipped:  “With all due respect to Grover Norquist, this is like begging your dealer for permission to go clean.”

Louisiana isn't the only state suffering from the effects of Republican fiscal malfeasance.  Radical right winger Sam Brownback is currently running Kansas into the ground with all his gubmint-hating fuckery.

But cheer up, Louisiana and Kansas -- I know things are tough now, but your suffering will help show the rest of the country once and for all that Republicans and their policies are bad for America.

The 2016 Democratic Nominee Must Be Someone Who Opposed The Iraq War

And unfortunately, that ain't Hillary. Greg Sargent explains it this way:

[T]he current line of questioning for Republicans and Hillary Clinton about Iraq — “would you have supported the invasion knowing what we know now?” — is deeply flawed, and risks whitewashing the real history of the run-up to the war. Now, however, it seems possible that this weak line of questioning might actually aid and abet the current GOP strategy for talking about Iraq. 

As Bob Costa notes, this whole history re-write thing by the GOP is ultimately geared toward blaming Obama -- and ultimately Hillary -- for what's going on in the Middle East right now:

The political endgame for Republicans is a general election where Clinton can be portrayed as someone who initially backed the U.S. mission but did not see it through. In that sense, foisting blame on Obama is only the first step in the GOP’s aims. Knowing their ownership of the invasion in the eyes of voters has not faded, they would like to distance themselves from the messy debate over weapons of mass destruction and make the Islamic State — how it rose and how to stop it — the central political battleground on foreign policy.

That's the whole problem -- Hillary supported the invasion of Iraq!  She is therefore in no position to call the GOP on all its recent history-rewriting bullshit, and neither is any Democrat who supports her run for the presidency.  And for Christ's Sake, we certainly can't count on the Mainstream Media to go after Jeb Bush and the rest of the GOP on this Iraq Re-Write Fuckery.

Indeed, perhaps the only folks who will ultimately be in the position to call bullshit on the GOP are the voters themselves, and that all depends on whether the American people have a good collective memory on how we got into Iraq in the first place.  But as I implied in my post yesterday, I think that memories might be fading in that regard.

UPDATE:  Obama chimed in on this debate today.  He said this (via Steve Benen):

"I'm very clear on the lessons of Iraq. I think it was a mistake for us to go in in the first place, despite the incredible efforts that were made by our men and women in uniform. Despite that error, those sacrifices allowed the Iraqis to take back their country. That opportunity was squandered by Prime Minister Maliki and the unwillingness to reach out effectively to the Sunni and Kurdish populations."

C'mon, Barack -- you can do better than that. Benen suggests the following:

I suspect, if I were in the president’s shoes, I might be tempted to say, “Wait, those guys who were wrong about everything and lied the nation into a catastrophic war that destabilized the region are trying to blame me? Are they insane?”

Fucking-A.

I Know I Seem to Be Beating A Dead Horse On The Matter of the GOP Iraq War Re-Write . . .

. . . but I am continually writing on this subject because the metaphorical horse in question appears to be far from dead.  As recently as two weeks ago, I honestly thought that the question of whether Bush and Cheney manipulated intelligence in order to get the war they wanted was answered long ago and the answer was that they most definitely lied this country into war.

But I spoke to a friend yesterday who will go unnamed (Dan), and he had read David Brooks' recent column on how the Iraq Debacle was basically an honest mistake and Dan more or less bought into Brooks' argument (Dan, by the way, was no fan of the Bush/Cheney Administration and keeps himself well-informed on the issues). In my friend's defense, why not buy into what Brooks had to say? After all, not only is he a New York Times columnist, but he is also one of the more thoughtful conservative writers out there.

No doubt the following paragraph from Brooks' piece sounded particularly convincing to Dan:

* * * There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.

That doesn’t gibe (sic) with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found “a major intelligence failure”: “The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers.”

Sounds pretty convincing, right? The only problem with what Brooks wrote is that it is complete, unadulterated horse-shit. Simon Maloy at Salon provides the one detail that Brooks either forgot about (unlikely) or intentionally ignored (very likely):

The Robb-Silberman report was not “exhaustive” – the commission was specifically instructed not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers. That task fell to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which found that George W. Bush and his closest advisers regularly made definitive statements about Iraq’s weapons programs and terrorism ties that were either unsubstantiated by available intelligence or didn’t reflect disputes within the intelligence community.

Yeah, you read that right -- Brooks used a specific report to support his position that there was no intelligence manipulation by policymakers, even though the writers of that report were specifically told not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers.  Given that I could not believe Brooks would be so duplicitous careless, I actually followed Brooks' own link to the Robb-Silberman report, clicked through to the report's actual text, and found this in the introduction:

"[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information."

I naively hoped that the GOP (with the exception of Dick Cheney, of course) had finally decided to stop lying about Iraq.  I had also hoped that the New York Times had learned something from the Judith Miller Fuckery and actually started paying attention to what its writers were writing, particularly on the issue of the Iraq War and how we got into that quagmire in the first place.  I am now forced to conclude that Republicans will never stop lying about the Iraq Debacle and that the New York Times still has a lot of work to do.

Now That The Iraq War Will Once Again Be An Issue In A Presidential Election . . .

. . . shouldn't the Democrats give some serious thought to whether Hillary is the right candidate for 2016?  A couple days ago, I wrote:

When Republicans bring up her initial support for the Iraq Debacle (which they will certainly do), Hillary must push back by stating that the only reason Republicans are running with this issue now is because they are attempting to re-write the history of that war. She must point out that BushCo intentionally lied to Congress and the American people with regard to the threat Iraq posed, and she should go into great detail with regard to what these lies were.  And yes, she should explicitly state that these liars -- Cheney included -- should be serving time in prison right now for war crimes.

Hillary did chime in today on this issue by once again admitting her vote to authorize the Iraq War was a mistake, and then she said this:

"What we now see is a different and very dangerous situation. The United States is doing what it can, but ultimately this has to be a struggle that the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people are determined to win for themselves and we can provide support, but they're going to have to do it."

Not good enough, dammit. Her comment demonstrates why Hillary should not be the Democratic nominee in 2016. Given that she voted to authorize the war, she is not in the position to take on the Republicans as they desperately try to "revise" the history of the Iraq Debacle.

You say it is not fair for me to criticize Hillary when so many other politicians got it wrong?  Well, the fact is that lots of people saw that the plan to invade Iraq was bullshit well before hostilities began. Twenty-two Democrats in the U.S. Senate -- and one Independent -- voted against authorization. All Senate Republicans, however, voted for it.  Barack Obama, before he became a US Senator, said this during the run-up to Iraq War:

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

I think it was Winston Churchill who once said: "History is written by the victors."  The corollary is, of course, that the losers don't get to write shit. The Republicans, however, are trying to turn that truism on its head.

Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the losers who caused that massive clusterfuck in Iraq -- and the current crop of their GOP apologists -- are desperately trying to re-write history. We cannot, as a people, let them succeed.  All of their victims -- namely, the tens of thousands dead and injured American troops and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis -- deserve better.

What Paul Krugman Says . . .

"*** Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney didn’t sit down with the intelligence community, ask for their best assessment of the situation, and then reluctantly conclude that war was the only option. They decided right at the beginning — literally before the dust of 9/11 had settled — to use a terrorist attack by religious extremists as an excuse to go after a secular regime that, evil as it was, had nothing to do with that attack. To make the case for the splendid little war they expected to fight, they deliberately misled the public, making an essentially fake case about WMD — because chemical weapons, which many believed Saddam had, are nothing like the nukes they implied he was working on — and insinuating the false claim that Saddam was behind 9/11.

 "*** It was quite clear at the time that the case for war was fake — God knows I thought it was glaringly obvious, and tried to tell people — and fairly obvious as well that the attempt to create a pro-American Iraq after the invasion was likely to be an expensive failure. The question for war supporters shouldn’t be, would you have been a supporter knowing what you know now. It should be, why didn’t you see the obvious back then?"

Amen. Read Krugman's entire post here.

Quote of the Week (And Why We Cannot Let The GOP Re-Write Iraq War History)

"[Jeb Bush's] first answer to Megyn Kelly’s question was the most honest one. Yes, knowing what we know now, he would still have invaded Iraq and he has the team of dunces to prove it."

- Ambassador Joe Wilson, commenting on Jeb Bush's recent flip-flopping on the Iraq question, and noting that Jeb has now surrounded himself with some of the very same idiots who lied this country into a war with Iraq in the first place.

Wilson's op/ed addresses what has really been bothering me this past week concerning Jeb's recent Iraq fiasco, and it has little to do with what Bush said and more to do with how the GOP is using his misstatements in an attempt to re-write history.

The Iraq Debacle was not a failure in intelligence, as Republicans continue to claim.  As Ambassador Wilson states, "deliberate political abuse and fabrication of intelligence" are what actually got us in to that clusterfuck twelve years ago:

The deliberately cherry-picked intelligence was concocted in order to influence the decision that led to the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of Americans, countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the quagmire in the Middle East in which we have been enmeshed for the past decade. As the head of British intelligence reported back to his government after meetings in Washington in June, 2002: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Alan Foley, the Director of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) told his people in late 2002 or early 2003: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.”

Although I am certain the Republican Party wants us to forget all of this, here are some of the high points of the Bush/Cheney fuckery that got us into Iraq:

• Condi Rice said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," even though there was no evidence that Saddam had an active nuclear program -- Christ, Saddam's own son-in-law, prior to the U.S. invasion, told us after he defected that there was no Iraqi nuclear program and another high level defector similarly told the U.S. that Iraq had absolutely no active weapons of mass destruction program.


• Remember the "high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production" that Saddam reportedly possessed and that George W. Bush referred to in his 2003 State of the Union?  That was all horseshit, and BushCo knew it was horseshit at the time they made the claim.


• In a 2001 interview, Dick Cheney said, "It's been pretty well confirmed that (9-11 ring leader Mohammed Atta) did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in (the Czech Republic) last April, several months before the attack."  Such a meeting, however, did not happen, and Cheney knew that.


• The Bush Regime was constantly linking Saddam to al-Qaeda (and thus to the 9-11 Attacks), even though no such link existed and in fact Saddam and bin Laden were "natural enemies."

This is just a taste of the panoply of lies that resulted in the greatest U.S. foreign policy blunder of all time, and the last thing Americans should do is allow the GOP to re-write the history on this.  

As readers of this blog know, I've never really forgiven Hillary Clinton for voting to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  She has since admitted that her vote to invade was a mistake, but she needs to go much further on this.  

When Republicans bring up her initial support for the Iraq Debacle (which they will certainly do), Hillary must push back by stating that the only reason Republicans are running with this issue now is because they are attempting to re-write the history of that war. She must point out that BushCo intentionally lied to Congress and the American people with regard to the threat Iraq posed, and she should go into great detail with regard to what these lies were.  And yes, she should explicitly state that these liars -- Cheney included -- should be serving time in prison right now for war crimes.

Put the turd in their pocket, Hillary.

UPDATE:  Right on cue:

"The question was whether it was a mistake, and my answer was it was not a mistake. I still say it was not a mistake, because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ... [Bush] made the right decision based on what he knew at that time. We learned subsequently that information was wrong. My answer is, at the time, it appears the intelligence was wrong."

- Marco Rubio, on this morning's Fox News Sunday.

Pandering To Idiots

Greatest right-wing conspiracy theory ever?  You decide:

Over the summer, the U.S. military is launching a training exercise called “Jade Helm 15,” which ordinarily wouldn’t generate any headlines at all. It’s a series of training drills throughout the Southwest, from Texas to California, for about 1,200 special operations personnel, including Green Berets and Navy SEALs.

In some right-wing circles, however, “Jade Helm 15” is the basis for an extraordinary conspiracy theory. The idea gets a little convoluted – fringe theories often are – but the unhinged activists apparently believe the Obama administration, in conjunction with the U.S. military and Wal-Mart, is planning to impose martial law on much of the country. As they see it, the plan also includes gun confiscation and “secret underground tunnels.”

The "pandering to idiots" line -- which I believe should become the slogan for the Republican Party generally -- came from Todd Smith, a GOP veteran of the Texas legislature who retired in 2013. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Of Course) ordered the Texas State Guard to “monitor” the military exercises in order to keep tabs on the operation and to ensure Texans that “their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”  Former representative Smith was none too pleased by all the idiocy:

[Smith] said he is “horrified that I have to choose between the possibility that my Governor actually believes this stuff and the possibility that my Governor doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to those who do.”  He said he wrote because the thought that the U.S. military would be a threat to Texas is “embarrassing” and it is important “to rational governance that thinking Republicans call you out on it.”

“Is there ANYBODY who is going to stand up to this radical nonsense that is a cancer on our State and our Party?” Smith asked.

Both the Pentagon and Wal-Mart have issued statements dismissing these rumors, which should put an end to all this conspiracy talk.

I'm kidding, of course.

UPDATE:  Jon Stewart weighs in (at 5:35):

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