This can't be happening. David Petraeus and Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack and Joe Lieberman and John McCain and all those really smart and well-informed bloggers on the right have already told us that the surge is working, and that Iraq is a different place now than it was six months ago, and that there are real signs of progress, and that Iraqis are happy because they know the Americans are there to help them, and- and- I mean, CNN is lying, right?
About eight million Iraqis -- nearly a third of the population -- are without water, sanitation, food and shelter and need emergency aid, a report by two major relief agencies says.
Oxfam and the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Coordination Committee in Iraq have issued a briefing paper that says violence in Iraq is masking a humanitarian crisis that has worsened since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
The paper, called "Rising to the Humanitarian Challenge in Iraq," is the latest documentation of the misery faced by Iraqis.
"Eight million people are in urgent need of emergency aid; that figure includes over two million who are displaced within the country, and more than two million refugees. Many more are living in poverty, without basic services, and increasingly threatened by disease and malnutrition," said the relief agencies' report. The population of Iraq is 26 million.
It said that not addressing the needs of Iraqis in urgent need of water, sanitation, food and shelter would further create more unrest in the country.
"Despite the constraints imposed by violence, the government of Iraq, the United Nations, and international donors can do more to deliver humanitarian assistance to reduce unnecessary suffering. If people's basic needs are left unattended, this will only serve to further destabilize the country."
The report found that about 43 percent of Iraq's population endure "absolute poverty," and that more than half "are now without work."
Child malnutrition rates have jumped from 19 percent before the invasion four years ago to 28 percent now, and there are two million internally displaced people, many of whom have no or little access to food rations.
The number of Iraqis "without access to adequate water supplies" is 70 percent, up from 50 percent since 2003. The country continues to suffer a "brain drain."
Will someone please tell CNN that the Iraqi people are much better off now than they were before March, 2003?
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Yikes:
Chief Justice John Roberts suffered a seizure Monday, causing him to fall while at his summer home off the coast of Maine, the Supreme Court said.
Roberts has "fully recovered from the incident," and a neurological evaluation "revealed no cause for concern," the Supreme Court said in a statement.
Doctors called the incident a "benign idiopathic seizure," similar to one suffered by the chief justice in 1993, the court statement said. An idiopathic seizure is one with no identifiable physiological cause.
A source close to the chief justice told CNN that Roberts fell five to 10 feet after the seizure.
Roberts, 52, was conscious after the fall, which caused only minor scrapes, the Supreme Court said.
I'm far from John Roberts' biggest fan, but I do wish him a speedy recovery. Aside from simple human decency, let's be honest, were he to die, Bush would find a way to appoint someone far worse. It's what Bush does.
One thing this does highlight, though, is why it's pointless to assume that the age of a Supreme Court justice is indicative of how long they'll serve. Roberts could serve forty years -- or this could be a sign of something awful. I myself would happily split the difference -- Roberts could serve two more years, and then live another fifty.
Seriously, none of us -- not you, not me, not John Roberts nor Ruth Bader Ginsburg knows how long we have left. All any of us can do is the best we can in the time we have. On that front, I have some criticism of Roberts. But that's no reason to wish him poor health, and I certainly don't; in all seriousness, I hope he recovers completely.
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Last weekend, while we were at dinner with Mama and Papa Shakes, I began a discussion about which movie, if forced to watch over and over on a loop, would constitute our personal Hells. (That is not, by the way, the QotD, but it will make a good one some other day, probably tomorrow.) I said Barry Lyndon, which Mama Shakes said she hadn't seen, although she had seen Paper Moon, the connective thread being Ryan O'Neil. "I haven't seen Paper Moon," I said, "but I do know you're like a doll with a paper ass!" which sent us both into fits of giggles.
(The nonsensical phrase is one that one of my childhood friend's grandfathers would use—without, evidently, any notion that the phrase was not in common usage—to describe an unreliable woman: "Well, you know how Delores is—she's like a doll with a paper ass!" He was a rather colorful fellow, to put it politely, who would also describe a real fury as being "so mad I was shittin' little green buttons!")
Anyway, recalling that her granddad used to threaten: "I'll hit you so hard, your shirt will roll up your back like a shade," Mama Shakes then suggested that a good QotD would be What weird or funny expressions did your family use that you'd never heard anywhere else?
Earlier in comments, Grumpy Old Man made a point by quoting his granddad: "If bullshit was music this guy would be a one man brass band." That's a good one.
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Don't worry...no spoilers.
I went to see the latest installment of Harry Potter film series with my friends Bob and the Old Professor. Bob seemed to like it, I enjoyed most of it, and the Old Professor thought it was a crashing bore.
As is the case of all films in a series, there has to be an assumption of knowledge on the part of the audience of what's gone on before so that you don't have to spend an hour or so recapping what went on in the first four films. The problem with that, however, is that it may have been a while since you've either read the book (I read Phoenix during Hurricane Katrina in 2005) or seen the last film in spite of HBO re-running Goblet of Fire over and over again. So I spent a bit of time rebooting the database to catch up with the story. But once I did, it moved along, and I remembered most of the story as it was told. The screenwriter, Michael Goldenberg, did a good job of paring the book, which is 734 pages, down to a manageable running time on the screen and tightening up the narrative. One of my chief complaints about Ms. Rowling as a writer is that her narrative gets a bit long-winded and her dialogue is clunky. However, she's richer than the Queen of England, so what do I know? So all in all, I think the translation from book to screenplay went well.
I continue to be impressed with the ability of both the story and the actors to maintain a strong sense of continuity from installment to installment. Harry Potter has grown, in more ways than one, into the role life has handed him yet he still has that sense of innocence, wonder, and self-doubt that infused him in the first film. He has been tested and beaten down, but he still strives on when others, especially teens, would have said something along the lines of "I'm outta here!" to the place the world has put him. Obviously he can't give up -- there are still two more books to go at this stage -- but his sense of perseverance and strength is very powerful and I think that's what makes him worth watching. (Daniel Radcliffe, the actor portraying him, has also grown; he's getting buff in his late teens, which may make the rest of the films hard to pull off. Harry Potter in his twenties with a six-pack and stubble might be hard to sell.)
The rest of the company is also aging well. Rupert Grint as Ron and Emma Watson as Hermione aren't nearly half as annoying as they were in the first two, and Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman are worth the price of admission alone.
I have no idea why the fundamentalists are up in arms about the Harry Potter books. These are stories about good versus evil and honor and right versus treachery and darkness. The fact that Harry is a wizard and that he is learning witchcraft is almost beside the point; those are devices and gimmicks to infuse the stories with a different interesting angle, but the real story has nothing to do with magic any more than Star Trek is about space flight. It's about our basic human nature and how we face the tests of being human. In other words, it's all allegory and parable, which, in case the fundamentalists haven't noticed, is what most of the bible is. What I think irritates them isn't that there's magic in these stories -- as opposed to changing sticks into snakes, parting the Red Sea, and making Merlot out of tap water. It's that the stories have captured the imagination of billions of children and adults and it makes them jealous; they don't see kids standing in line and waiting up all hours for the latest Left Behind book. (With good reason. I read one. It makes a Harlequin Romance sound like Faulkner.)
By the way, there was one unintentional laugh. There's a scene where the dreaded Dolores Uxbridge, played with delicious sugar-coated evil by Imelda Staunton, is proctoring the OWL exams in the Great Hall, sitting like a pink-coated queen on a dais. Someone in the theatre said loudly, "George Bush in drag!" Even the actors on the screen grinned at that.
Okay, I'm going back to reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.
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Every time we have a discussion around here about how women's bodies are treated as public property, female Shakers always provide a plethora of examples of having been subjected to everything from inappropriate touching to sexual assault on public transportation. And every time, there are always a couple of guys who are totally shocked, because it's just completely removed from their experience as men. (And a few times, we've had a guy or two who was dubious, once even outright accusing women of lying, because the stories were so plentiful that he couldn't believe this whole world of abuse existed without his knowing about it.)
So, I thought I'd pass on this little tidbit with a nod back to those previous conversations:
After conducting a month-long citywide survey, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer has released findings that nearly two in three subway riders have been sexually harassed in the New York City subway system. Two-thirds of the 1,790 respondents to the questionnaire were women, but the findings reported both women's and men's responses. Women comprised 99 percent of the 10 percent of respondents who reported having been sexually assaulted and of the 63 percent who reported having been sexually harassed.
Think about those numbers for a moment. If 99% of the people who said they'd been sexually harassed were women, and 2/3 of the entire group had been sexually harassed, and 2/3 of the entire group were women, that means that virtually
every single woman who took the survey had been sexually harassed at least once on the subway. But almost no men had.
That's the difference between being a man and a woman. That's privilege.
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The WaPo has a big cover story today about Gonzo and how he's a useless gobshite whose recent testimony has been about as helpful to the Bush administration as an extra anchor on the Titanic. There's really nothing left I could possibly say about the lying sack of crap who steadfastly continues to occupy at the president's pleasure the highest law enforcement office in the nation, but I did just want to make a passing comment on this bit of the story, seven paragraphs in:
Whether Gonzales has deliberately told untruths or is merely hampered by his memory has been the subject of intense debate among members of Congress, legal scholars and others who have watched him over the years. Some regard his verbal difficulties as a strategic ploy on behalf of a president to whom he owes his career; others see a public official overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibilities.
Now, I know there are professional administration fluffers who
say that Gonzo is just a poor wee victim of a faulty memory, but is the
WaPo honestly asserting that there are people who genuinely
believe that horseshit? Because there aren't. There are those who say it because they're mendacious scumbags who don't care a whit for the truth and there are those of us who think they're soulless, intellectually and ethically bankrupt idiots, but no one actually exists who sincerely believes that Gonzo just plumb can't remember what happened back when the administration was plotting this travesty of justice or that one, aw shucks.
Even people who might earnestly believe that Gonzo is "overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibilities" don't think he's got a bad memory; they think he's a patent moron who's too dumb to cover his tracks with credible lies.
But
no one thinks he's just a hopeless fool, a victim of cronified circumstance, who would otherwise, given the right job requirements for his facilities, have been a good boy who never faltered from the straight and narrow.
Does the
WaPo really not know that?
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Last Thursday, CNN sports anchor Larry Smith appeared with Nancy Grace to comment on NFL quarterback Michael Vick's arrest for running a dogfighting ring:
SMITH: Yes, well, that’s — he’s been in a lot of trouble lately, when you think about all the other incidents, and this is just the worst one of all. Keep in mind, too, that while Kobe Bryant is a situation we can sort of compare this to, this really is much worse. Not only can you argue that the crimes are much worse in terms of, you know, killing dogs and that kind of thing, but as an NFL starting quarterback, you are the most visible face in that city. I’ve said all along, in fact, you know, if you go through and, you know, very quickly name 10 mayors of major cities in the country…
GRACE: Larry Smith, did I just hear you say…
SMITH: … you could have a harder time doing that…
GRACE: … mistreatment of…
SMITH: … than naming 10 NFL starting quarterbacks.
GRACE: Did I just hear Larry Smith, CNN sports correspondent and anchor, state that crimes on a dog are much worse than crimes on a woman? Did I hear that?
Technically, I believe what we heard was Larry Smith suggest that crimes against women and dogs are
comparable. Presumably, Smith would think killing a woman was as bad as killing a dog, but killing is worse than rape, so submitting dogs to a dogfight where they
could be killed is worse than raping
humans women.
And, you know, there are a lot of people who will agree with him.
In fact, there are none too few assenters in the comments section at the ThinkProgress link above, which is rather ugly, and I really don't recommend reading it, though it does give some insight into how detached some men truly are from the experience of womanhood and the seriousness of rape. Take, for example, commenter Pitman,
responding to a commenter with the moniker Rape Survivor who notes that dog fighting does not compare with the rape of a woman: "Who in the hell are you trying to kid rape victim? I’ll take my chances with getting raped with follow-up counseling and psychiatric help and eventually staying alive. Have you ever watched a video of a 5 hour dog fight as these poor creatures are enslaved and forced to rip themselves slowly apart in absolute torture and SLOWLY DYING. Get the hell out of here rape victim." Pitman, it seems, can more readily and fully empathize with dogs than with human women who have been raped.
(The question never asked of him by the commenters who proceed to engage him in a flame war is why
he has watched a video of a five-hour dogfight in the first place, nor is it ever pointed out to him—or anyone else—that the experience of being raped itself is often not so very different from the experience of a dogfight by the losing dog.)
Meanwhile, commenter Pops notes that it's simply a matter of "the capacity to return to normalcy after such a traumatic experience. I would take an educated guess (and cite no evidence for the lack of it) that more rape victims are able to return to normalcy (not disputing absolute normalcy, but a comparable degree) than dogs partaking in these fights. Further, I would estimate the survival rate to be higher among rape victims. Considering it from this standpoint, it is thus not ludicrous to arrive at the idea that such crime to a dog is more heinous to the rape of a human being." When Pops' assertion is summarily disputed, he then retorts: "With all due respect, I’m considering this from an objective standpoint. I addressed your last concern specifically in my post, where I stated 'a comparable degree of normalcy,' which in effect would mean regaining a degree of trust in other human beings, etc." Not only is he's talking about women and dogs as if they have the same intellectual and emotional capacity, and thusly as though women are zoo animals—"Oh, look! She's begun to trust the other humans again!"—but he continually insists on maintaining a ridiculous level of so-called "objectivity" to assert that crimes against women and dogs are equal because all life is equal, though, unless he were a sociopath, he would clearly not consider some random dog's life equal to his own daughter's.
And that's really the problem with the whole discussion, from the very starting point of Larry Smith's statement. A lot of men (and women) look at the conflation of dogfights and raping women and think of their sweet-faced, loyal little pooch who's as much a member of the family as any other—and, between poochy's being hurt or killed and "some woman somewhere being raped," blithely determining the former is worse is terribly easy. Because rape, you see, is always a crime that happens to someone else. No one considers the comparison by invoking their own wife, daughter, mother, sister*—in which case, most people would very unhappily but understandably choose to save the woman they love from being raped than save the dog from a dogfight.
(And those that wouldn't are probably the kind of people who would explain it as a choice between their dog getting killed or their wife/daughter/mother/sister "having sex with" some guy.)
It's just always so convenient to talk about rape as this thing that happens somewhere else, mostly to women, who probably deserved it or are lying, anyway, and to talk about it in some abstract way, as this unreal and intangible thing that is experienced by people You don't know and therefore isn't something You have to think about, except as a theoretical, a hypothetical, just another issue about which You can speak with the cool detachment of someone unaffected as You weigh the evidence about whether it's worse than dogfighting. And, maybe, if pushed into a corner where it's Your Woman we're talking about, instead of "women"—so vague, so big, so useful in maintaining that uninvested aloofness You call objectivity that it's even easy to forget Your Woman is one of the "women"—You'll admit that, yeah, Your Wife Your Daughter Your Mother Your Sister being raped would be worse than even Your Dog being subjected to a dogfight, even as You note quite firmly that both are bad as if rape survivors don't know, as if they can't empathize with the dogs as well as any humans on the planet, and aren't You a great humanitarian for Your Wise Words about how crimes against women and crimes against dogs are both pretty bad.
The "women" thank You for Your Magnanimity.
What's most distressing about this whole scenario is that rape and dogfighting are regarded by men like the ones referenced above (including Smith) as outside human experience, which is why he compared them so flippantly—and without any backlash—in the first place. Such extreme Othering is attributable to the constant depersonalization of women's issues** that inevitably results from treating male experience as the default human experience—and that, in turn, allows a discussion of "which is worse" wherein some men will identify more with another species than other humans who simply have different genitals than they do. We might as well be another species for all they can relate to us. Or regard us as equals.
All of us, I mean. Not just Their Women.
---------------------------
* I left out "self" here, because sacrificing oneself to save another is decidedly different.
** Rape is still regarded by men like Smith as strictly a women's issue, aside from the occasional prison rape joke. It's important to note that, although rape apologists talk about "rape victims" without specifying sex, they always, eventually, reveal that they are speaking uniquely of women.
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Ok, slight paraphrase. But if anyone was planning to visit the White House, you should remember to pack your polos and khaki pants (emphasis mine):
(CBS) WASHINGTON New signs are posted around the White House indicating a new strict enforcement of the dress code, the Washington Post reported Thursday. The code applies to all visitors and staff members, including tourists.
Some tourists are finding the strict clothing restrictions at the White House un-American.
The forbidden items include jeans, sneakers, mini-skirts, t-shirts, tank tops and absolutely no flip flops.
Why? Because they didn't like the look of the tourists coming though. They just didn't dress "appropriately" enough for the Bush Administration. In a related announcement, Dolores Umbridge was hired as White House Tourist Inquisitor.
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Nan A. Talese, former editor and publisher of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey:
As for Frey's use of fictitious elements in his ostensibly factual account of addiction and recovery, Talese said: "When someone starts out and says, 'I have been an alcoholic. I have lied. I have cheated.' ... you do not think this is going to be the New Testament."
From Gawker's live-blogging of the Frey flogging on Oprah with Talese in attendance:
Oprah's people were contacted by someone from the Hazelden clinic days after the book was picked. This person questioned the book, so Oprah had her people contact Talese. Talese's team backed it up and said Frey's book was "non-fiction."
I'm actually glad Talese has dragged l'affair Frey back to public consciousness; those were good times.
(Cross-posted.)
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Paul Krugman says that the worst thing that could happen -- for the Republicans -- is that a government-supported health care program like SCHIP could actually work.
Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.
And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.
This sounds like a caricature, but it isn’t. The truth is that this good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition to health care reform. Thus back in 1994, William Kristol warned against passage of the Clinton health care plan “in any form,” because “its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.”
In other words, the GOP and the president are willing to let a program that has proven to work end in order to prove a
misguided political philosophy.
It must be about philosophy, because it surely isn’t about cost. One of the plans Mr. Bush opposes, the one approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the Senate Finance Committee, would cost less over the next five years than we’ll spend in Iraq in the next four months. And it would be fully paid for by an increase in tobacco taxes.
Oh, that's the problem: raising the tobacco tax. May the FSM forbid that we should actually ask the people who are going to be needing the health care system -- both public and private -- the most in the future to pay for it.
There are arguments you can make against programs, like Social Security, that provide a safety net for adults. I can respect those arguments, even though I disagree. But denying basic health care to children whose parents lack the means to pay for it, simply because you’re afraid that success in insuring children might put big government in a good light, is just morally wrong.
These are the same people who weep and carry on about the oxymoronic "lives of the unborn" and label the Democratic Party as "baby killers" for being pro-choice. On the other hand, why should the Republicans worry about poor sick kids? Everyone knows they end up voting for the Democrats, so the less of them around, the better, right?
Cross-posted from
Bark Bark Woof Woof.
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No one should be surprised by George Bush's exposed scheme to have Delta Black Ops Team Bravo Commando Force take out selected PPK leaders in exchange for Turkey not sending waves of troops across the border into Iraq. This was inevitable, given Bush's predilection for military solutions - when your only tool is a hammer, you treat every situation like a nail - and the desperate need to forestall an outright Turkish invasion of northern Iraq.
The truly interesting question which no one has yet posed involves the Iraqi Kurds. There has to be more than one quid pro quo at work here. Unless Bush and his minions are completely untethered from reality, they must have made some offer, some promise, some outright bribe to the oft-betrayed Kurds in order to buy a level of acquiescence.
So what have we offered the Kurdistan Regional Government?
And whatever it is, has anybody told the Shi'a and Sunnis?
(Cross-posted.)
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None of the front-runners is sufficiently retrofuckified to suit them. So they're making threats:
[James Bopp Jr., an influential conservative lawyer and general counsel to the National Right to Life Committee], who has signed on as an adviser to the Romney campaign, said that a Republican nominee who supported abortion rights "would essentially be at war with the base, and that would manifest itself in a lot of different ways."
Oooh. Worse yet:
[Richard Land, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention] is also warning that the party cannot assume it will hold the anti-abortion vote in a general election if it nominates a supporter of abortion rights.
“If there is no difference on that issue, then all of a sudden a lot of other issues start getting oxygen,” Dr. Land said.
ZOMG! Say it ain't so! If the GOP stops pandering to the retrofuck anti-choicers, they
might stop being asinine one-issue voters and start giving their votes due consideration?! Heavens to Mergatroid! Why—that could mean anti-choicers actually notice they're often voting against their own best interests on
just about every other issue or even (OMG) that
Democrats don't really "promote" abortion! Don't do it, anti-choicers! Retain your focus—otherwise, you might just become—
horror of horrors!—sensible people!
"Give us what we want, or we swear…we'll
behave reasonably!"
Granted, that doesn't say too much for anti-choicers, but think about how little it says about the GOP, too. Anti-choice leaders
know the GOP has
fuck all to offer their base except the gossamer promise to criminalize abortion. They're so intellectually and morally bankrupt, that some conservative leaders are now plainly saying, "We can't deliver the base to you without the abortion issue,
because you've got nothing else."
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I saw Fanny and Alexander once. I didn't get it. Of course, Wikipedia wasn't around then.
Anyway, the director responsible for my confusion has passed away at 89.
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Mark Leibovich at the New York Times has come across a series of letters that Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote to a friend between 1965 and 1969.
Ms. Rodham’s 30 dispatches are by turns angst-ridden and prosaic, glib and brooding, anguished and ebullient — a rare unfiltered look into the head and heart of a future first lady and would-be president. Their private expressiveness stands in sharp contrast to the ever-disciplined political persona she presents to the public now.
“Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me,” Ms. Rodham wrote to Mr. Peavoy in April 1967. “So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”
Befitting college students of any era, the letters are also self-absorbed and revelatory, missives from an unformed and vulnerable striver who had, in her own words, “not yet reconciled myself to the fate of not being the star.”
I imagine that FOX News will dig through these with unrestrained glee and probably hire actors to read passages out loud while Iron Butterfly (
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida) plays in the background, looking for anything that they could use against her in her presidential campaign.
The letters contain no possibly damaging revelations of the proverbial “youthful indiscretions,” and mention nothing glaringly outlandish or irresponsible. Indeed, she tends toward the self-scolding: “I have been enjoying myself too much, and spring and letter-writing are — to the bourgeois mind — no excuses!”
She reports in one letter from October of her sophomore year that she spent a “miserable weekend” arguing with a friend who believed that “acid is the way and what did I have against expanding my conscience.”
In a previous letter from her freshman year, she divulges that a junior in her dorm had been caught at her boyfriend’s apartment in Cambridge at 3:15 a.m. “I don’t condone her actions,” Ms. Rodham declares, “but I’ll defend to expulsion her right to do as she pleases — an improvement on Voltaire.”
Ms. Rodham’s notes to Mr. Peavoy are revelatory, even intimate at times, but if there is any romantic energy between the friends, they are not evident in Ms. Rodham’s side of the conversation. “P.S. thanks for the Valentine’s card,” she says at the end of one letter. “Good night.”
The most damaging thing that could possibly come out of this is that Senator Clinton was -- gasp! -- a self-absorbed college student. Perhaps the most stunning revelation in these missives for her opponents is that she is human, with all the foibles, flaws, and shocks that we all have been through growing up. What a shock. I defy anyone who grew up at that time -- myself included -- to pull out the letters they wrote at the time and not either die of embarrassment or laugh their ass off.
I'm guessing this will cause some buzz and some deep psychological examination by some pay-per-view shrinks who will parse the daylights out of each letter. So I think that perhaps we should do a little digging and come up with some of the letters that some other people might have written back in those days. (We already know what George W. Bush wrote from Yale: "Hey Poppy send $.")
So how about it, Shakers? Any other newly-found correspondence from the rest of the field?
Cross-posted from
Bark Bark Woof Woof.
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In a candid interview today, Vice President Cheney's defibrillator, Fibby, shared a few thoughts about how tough a job it has in keeping its host alive:
I'll tell you that it hasn't been easy. After talking with some of the other guys, I thought it would be a shoe-in. You know - hang around and listen to tunes until the heart takes a dive. Then, a little zap here and there and the host is back to work. No problems, right?
Well, with this Cheney guy, it's been a real pain in the ass. All of my iTunes downloads getting interrupted because I have to keep zapping this fucking guy like every other day! Sure, you know about that incident last year, and another more recent one, but there are plenty more.
I've been working so hard that my friggin' battery's going already! Can you imagine how embarrassing it is for me to have to phone in divine assistance to cover for me?
At interview's end, Fibby said that it would soon be setting up a petition online to request a transfer to a new host where it could get some more rest. Fibby can be a great defibrillator and companion for the right person.
Let's hope that Fibby's battery transplant goes off without a hitch. For Fibby's sake.
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In which David Brooks reports from New Hampshire and realizes that the public isn't buying the GOP talking points that Hillary Clinton is the Devil incarnate, and that the Republicans are up Shit Creek in 2008.
The biggest story of this presidential campaign is the success of Hillary Clinton. Six months ago many people thought she was too brittle and calculating and that voters would never really bond with her. But now she seems to offer the perfect combination of experience and change.
She’s demonstrating that it really helps to have lived in the White House. She can draw on a range of experiences unmatched by her rivals. She’s dominated most of the debates. She’s transformed her position on Iraq without a ripple. Her measured, statistic-filled speeches rarely inspire passion, but always confidence.
[...]
Clinton’s performance will also have an effect on the Republican race, though many Republicans are only now beginning to realize it. When you ask Republican presidential candidates about Clinton, a smile of professional respect comes over their faces.
But their world is transformed. The one thing Republicans had going for them was the head-to-heads. Bush, the war and the party could all be unpopular, but individual G.O.P. candidates beat Clinton because her negatives were so high. But she is changing that. People who’ve said they would never vote for her will take a second look once they see her campaign.
That means in 2008, Hillary won’t save the G.O.P. An orthodox Republican will not beat an orthodox Democrat. If Republicans want to have any chance next year, they have to go for broke.
Everything to David Brooks is a revelation; it's like he's hung around the Oracle of Delphi huffing the sulfur fumes and he's suddenly seeing the Cosmic Trooth. But then he realizes that he has to offer some shred of hope for the True Believers, so he offers flashes of brilliance for the gasping hopes of the GOP.
One occurred at a McCain event Wednesday. In Washington, the McCain campaign is considered dead, but somebody seems to have forgotten to tell the people up here. A man at one packed event rose to vent his outrage at Washington. He ignited something in McCain, who started talking about what he’d learned from the failure of immigration reform. McCain worked himself up, recounting one failure and disgrace after another, culminating finally with an angry bellow, “Nobody trusts us to do what we say we’re going to do!”
Uh, yeah, that's not exactly the kind of thing you want to use as a sales pitch: "Hey, we really suck, but give us a chance to do it again!" No wonder Sen. McCain's media team and the rest of his top advisers all got in their Edsel station wagon and took off.
This dearth of inspiration from the Republicans leaves the door open for [drum roll] the Savior: Newt Gingrich. This thrice-married and admitted adulterer who now proclaims himself as paragon of virtue and the rest of the GOP field as a pack of pygmies is just dying to enter the race so he can vanquish the last vestiges of the Clinton era, a task he failed at miserably in his last attempt in 1998 when, among other things, he tripped over his own self-righteousness, lost House seats, and provoked the raging ire of his own House leadership to the point that they not only forced him out of power as Speaker of the House, they ran him out of Congress. (What is it with the Republicans and P.R. with their own people? Between them it sounds like a Don Rickles/Buddy Hackett cage match.) So now ten years later he thinks he can run and win in the Republican primaries by demonizing Hillary Clinton? His sense of entitlement is only outweighed by his ego. The great fun this fall will be watching Newt Gingrich's attempt to capture the country's imagination collapse like a rotting pumpkin.
The other candidates are stumbling, too. Seeing it happen to John McCain is slightly pathetic; like watching King Lear as he rails against the storm and you feel sorry for him, but not too much, knowing that he brought all of this on himself. Mitt Romney, as Mr. Brooks notes, gets all introspective about how government works and what we can do with it:Romney had slipped away from the policy chunks of his stump speech and was talking about his success in business and in running the Olympics. He was talking about how you assemble a team of people with complementary skills. How you use data and analysis to replace opinion. How you set benchmarks and how often you should perform self-evaluation.
It wasn’t impassioned or angry (he doesn’t do anger). But it was Romney losing himself in something he really cares about, and it opened up a vista of how government might operate.
This is the kind of navel-gazing that the Republicans used to mock when they heard it from people like John Kerry and Jimmy Carter, and it also harks back to the disastrous idea of running the government like a business and hiring a CEO for president. Let me remind him that we've tried that and we've got a little less than eighteen months left to go with that little experiment.
This sounds like Mr. Brooks is warming up for a weekend of punditry -- he often recycles his Friday column into his talking points on The Newshour and anywhere else he lands on Sunday morning. But it also sounds like he's bracing himself for the inevitable news that he'll have to break to his readers: the Republicans are going to lose the presidential election in 2008. Remember, you heard it here first.
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
Political Wire:
A new Democracy Corps/Greenberg Quinlan Rosner survey finds young people "profoundly alienated from the Republican party and its perceived values."
Key finding: "Young people react with hostility to the Republicans on almost every measure and Republicans and younger voters disagree on almost every major issue of the day."
LOL!!! Awesome.
Congratulations, Republicans. You're officially the political equivalent of
the WaMu bankers' pen: If the Republicans hate it, the youth of America knows it's probably a good idea.
"Progress is poopy!"
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
