Here is a story that is just weird. The White House insisted that a press briefing given by Vice President Cheney not name him as the source of the briefing. That would be odd enough, but the Vice President commenced to refer to actions he had taken during his trip, and to himself in the first person, making the entire affair seem like an episode from the Twilight Zone. The only thing lacking was a monkey tearing up the wing of Air Force Two… hey wait a minute! Air Force Two did experience technical difficulties **cue Twilight Zone music-dudu dudu-** during this trip.

So we have Vice President Cheney anonymously briefing the press and saying stuff like:

The reason the president wanted me to come, obviously, is because of the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border

And

Let me just make one editorial comment here. I’ve seen some press reporting (that) says, ‘Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.’ That’s not the way I work.

How is a reporter supposed to present this if they have to keep the source anonymous? And why would Cheney not just give an on the record press briefing? Well considering his recent meltdown during his interview with Wolf Blitzer, I suppose keeping him off the record is the best policy actually.  (more…)

While we should celebrate the breadth and diversity of Left and Democratic blogdom and decry the seemingly “scripted” nature of the Republicans there is more to the picture. (more…)

Someone is trying to kill Mitt Romney, or at least his credibility. It’s been recently revealed that some of his ancestors may have had more than one wife (and as many as 12, meow!). It’s horrifying at an Anna-Nicole level. And then his strategy is leaked. He has (gasp!) “plans” that involve him setting himself apart from his opponents, downplaying his faith, and blaming everything on the Democratic party. And they’ve got a Power Point to prove it.

I’ll not be participating in that wing’s primary, but for the love of Krishna the Blue, could it just stop? I realize that someone(s) with very deep pockets and a crucifix on their wall is paying someone else(s) to sniff out the stinky spots on Mitt’s boxers to try to sabotage the campaign of a god-forsaken Mormon. The self-assassination of the right wing befuddles me.

One religion has people who believe that it’s okay to have multiple wives. One has people who believe they’re going to get sucked into the sky to meet their Jesus and that this is going to happen very soon.

The Christians are pissed at the Mormons because the Christians had a perfectly good religious tradition, canonical texts, and established doctrine solidly in place, about 2000 years in the making. And then some prophet shows up. You got new texts, new rules, new ideas, and the Mormon faith, all shiny and new, is just a tainted, bastardized add-on of an already-lovely religion.

Now wait, that sounds familiar.

Let me switch some stuff up here and - wow, only 4 words - go!

The Jews are pissed at the Christians because the Jews had a perfectly good religious tradition, canonical texts, and established doctrine solidly in place, about 2000 years in the making. And then some prophet shows up. You got new texts, new rules, new ideas, and the Christian faith, all shiny and new, is just a tainted, bastardized add-on of an already-lovely religion.

Mommmm! Joseph Smith won’t stop copying me!

Somebody needs a spanking.

Ricky Shambles also blogs at Cause for Concern. 

As I posted last week, we should be keeping a very close ear out for resignations among the top brass in the military. When we hear about this, it will be probably about as much advance notice as the Bushies will give us.

By law, top brass can’t just say no if ordered to war. They must resign, as I noted was the case for Joint Chief of Staffs chairman Peter Pace, or fulfill the orders to war. The London Times is reporting that we may see a slew of generals soon resign with the expectation of Bush’s latest war: Iran.

Tuesday’s big stock market dive got spun almost as hard, almost as fast as the assassination attempt on Vice President Dick Cheney in Afghanistan. Some say the big sell-off was entirely a “glitch” on Wall Street, others say it’s the Asian market’s fault while still others label it “nothing more than a small correction” on recently heightened prices.

My take: we’ll have to wait and see exactly what happened on Tuesday. However, our concern should lie beyond Wall Street. Consider these points:

• while the Bushies rave about the strong economy, increasingly fewer others seem to think the U.S. economic climate is good for anyone but a relatively small set of rich 
• whenever Wall Street nose dives, jobs seem to disappear
• Former Reserve chief Alan “Cult of Personality” Greenspan came out the other day and warned that we are perhaps headed into a recession
• the American dollar that has been in serious trouble for years now, almost as long as President Bush has been in office
• there is some evidence that, if we cut out of the stats those who have soared to the top of the money pyramid and then examined the rest of America, our current economy would be considered not a recession, but a depression based on the number of loan defaults, foreclosures, ever-declining savings for the middle class, etc.

This may sound strange, but I was not at all surprised that, according to the Taliban, they sent a suicide bomber into Bagram air base in Afghanistan while Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting to try to harm or kill the man. I mean, everyone else is fair game according to the Bushies/Neocons so why should “Duck, it’s Dick!” be different? If anything, were I an Afghan or Iraqi really pissed with what is going on, I might even consider such a move. This administration has been terribly non-chalant with their lives, after all.

What has surprised quite royally, however, is all the ways this story has spun since it was first reported. First, the Army raced to negate eyewitness reports that Cheney was within 1500 feet of the suicide bomber when he detonated, insisting it was more than a mile between the two. That they chose a spokeswoman who stumbled badly in her assurances of this was.. uh.. odd. Now, I’m very accustomed to this Administration lying to me but many overseas sources, including some with reporters in that area, stand by the claim of how close it got. 

The second surprise was hearing First Lady Laura Bush lament how the media spins one little bitty bomb in places like Iraq and Afghanistan a day into making these places sound dangerous. Er… Laura, stop sitting with the White House French pastry chef and read!

But the third and largest surprise was that I heard - in person, online, on the phone - today with the reactions of Americans to this story. Fully thirteen of the sixteen people who mentioned this attempted assassination of the vice president to me said, to paraphrase, “Damned shame they missed.” One of the remaining three said, “Too bad Bush wasn’t there, too.”

WOW! That was not my reaction, and I despise the man; I would love to see them brought up on charges of treason but I do not believe in assassinations of any type. And lest you think I only spoke with extreme radicals, no. At least five of these folks have told me in the past that they voted for Bush and Cheney. In fact, among the former Bush-supporters, I heard the strongest remarks wishing Cheney had been closer. [Note, however, that while the media focused on poor Dick, more than 12 besides the bomber died in that melee today; one U.S. soldier and the rest, Afghan natives.]

I couldn’t resist (”Crash the Gate” was the title of Kos’ and Armstrong’s book on the blog phenomenon). Here is where the image originally appeared, with h/t to Skippy International.

Every time I hear one of the network “talents” use the phrase the “War on Terror” it grates like fingers on a blackboard. I think Gore Vidal first made the point that you cannot wage war against a tactic then Maureen Dowd and several others reiterated the point. An exploration of our government’s use of the word “terrorism” yields only the confusion we have come to expect from the Bush Administration. Back in WWII the government produced a series of propaganda films titled “Know Your Enemy.” I’m not sure they could–or more pointedly would–do that today. To ask “Why not?” is to uncover an old Republican tactic in new clothes. (more…)

Let me piggyback briefly on Ricky Shambles’ post on how much farther Democratic candidates get on the Web over their Republican counterparts and, with it, take it beyond the domain of the candidates themselves.

In the blogosphere, for example, I think Dems - and liberals and progressives of all stripes - operate very, very differently than GOPers. Check out any 10 of the right-most blogs, and you usually get the exact same message. The Republican Party elite of the last 10-25 years all seem to operate off talking points, whether it’s to carry water for the Bushies, set an agenda, fling feces at someone to the left of Attila the Hun, or whip up fear for the masses.

Democratic/progressive/liberal blogs - and especially outside the mega-blogs like DailyKos and Atrios, as examples - largely function as very independent animals. I belong to a number of blogging groups, for instance, but I’ve YET to see an email or mass communication that tells us all to rally around one single issue “and here’s what you need to say” (while I know for certain this happens around some of the right-most blogs on a very regular basis). Read a “lefty” blog, and you’re by and large going to get an independently considered opinion, observation, or analysis.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather read what different people are thinking than I would going to 10 different blogs and reading the same thing everywhere I go. But it’s not just about possible repetition; it’s about netroots, or very different folks coming together to accomplish good things, make a difference, and tell Washington where it’s going right v. wrong.

This really cracked me up!  A little jab at kos (s/b small k, in my view) from Blue Gal at the end of the post Heeding the Call:

“Cross-posted everywhere except Kos”

Keith Olbermann has quite an analysis - as accurate as I’ve seen - of Secretary of State (and chief Bush enabler) Condoleeza Rice’s turn on the Sunday pol talk shows. Olbermann’s remarks were delivered last night as one of his so-scathing-they-make-a-progressive-cheer Special Comments. I encourage you to read it.

What I heard Condi (sorry, to me, she deserves none of the respect of her fancy title - or any of her other titles) say, besides getting post-World War II history completely and egregiously wrong, is, “Bush and Cheney will continue to do whatever the hell they please, in Iraq, in Iran, or wherever else, and we don’t give a damn about Congress and even less about the American people.”

Now, for this crew, such words are nothing new. But if voters said anything in November, it was, “We MUST have checks and balances on an administration that is terribly out of control.”

Yet all we’ve heard from the Bushies since November’s mid-term elections is, “Fuck you.” Cheney and Bush both sneer when they tell us we’re wrong (never, of course, that they are wrong).

If that’s world leadership, then any bully on any school playground is, I suppose, a world leader. But we’re America, and we’re supposed to be about more than bullying, about more than the wildly out-of-control military industrial complex General-turned-Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about, and about more than making the Middle East more of a brutal, hateful miasma than it already is.

That’s the very big question posed by the excellent Seymour Hersh’s latest piece in The New Yorker. Sadly, but all too predictably - to anyone paying attention - is that the answer is indeed, yes.

Take Iran all by itself, for example. The more Bush and Cheney raise the rough-and-ready rhetoric about “all options on the table” for dealing with Iraq’s neighbor (and shades of Iraq, too, since “all options” were on the table, they told us, right up to two days before we blew toward Baghdad), Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s popularity and clout not just with neighbors but elsewhere in the world SOARS.

I encourage you to digest this article, but I must warn you that antacids offer no palliative comfort for these times. 

By the bleating whinnies of the right wing on their Executive Branch and talk radio monopolies, one might assume that the dirty hippie Democrats have taken over the web, particularly the blogosphere, by killing religion (right after all the babies) in a troop-demoralizing attempt to be a negative influence on the children of America.

Translation: Democrats are much more tech-savvy (Republicans: U-R-L? No, I feel fine.). Or at least they understand how Americans, especially the younger ones, communicate, or would like to be communicated to. And Republicans are ascared, like a child who has established his bed as “safe point” in a darkened room or, my favorite game, The Floor is Lava!

Think Progress has documented this jaw-dropping trend, and the early results have the Republicans with their heads in the sand.

The table lists every 2008 presidential candidate, Democrat and Republican. It marks (and links) them on: Website, Blog, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Flicker accounts.
Results:

• Every ‘08 candidate has a website.
• Except for Sam Brownbeck’s blog and Mitt Romney’s Facebook, no Republican is represented in the other five categories.
• Except for Dennis Kucinich (go Ohio!), every Democrat has a blog. All have at least one other account.
• Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, John “oops, Israelz” Edwards, and Bill Richardson are represented in every category.

Republicans are on the march - away from technology and information proliferation. I do believe they fear the negative comment, fear falling into a pic rate scheme where they will have 1/10 rating and no one will be their friend.

Future quote from…?:
“The Republicans understand national security, understand the importance of confidential information. Everyone on the Democrat ticket has their information and ideas out on the internets for anyone to see. That’s just what the terrorists want, to choose their candidate based on all available information. The Democrat party is weak on homeland security. Baby-killers. Thank you.”

Maybe the list will progress. Maybe the Republicans will hide themselves the way Haggard hid behind closet doors. But I guess, in that way, we all win.

Ricky Shambles also blogs at Cause for Concern.

As I listened to John McCain and the other Republican hopefuls supplicate themselves before the Religious Right, it occurred to me that each of them was trying extremely hard to show they had been “born again.” But of course none of them had the chutzpah to pull what the man the want to replace did when he courted Jerry Falwell and company–to actually claim he had been born again and that none other than Billy Graham himself had convinced him of the error of his ways.

How George W. Bush became president is certainly THE greatest make over story of our times and you must understand, as I think most Americans do, that the make over is the key. Make overs have been the stock-in-trade of television reality shows, women’s and men’s magazines and innumerable local newspaper contests.

Its antecedents lie in yellowing old comic strip ads of 98 pound weaklings having sand kicked in their face and faded black-and-white video tapes of you-can-look-like-a-movie-star hair permanent commercials. The contemporary make over artist is a modern necromancer who mutters some psychobabble mixed with just enough common sense and pseudo science that a wave of the magic product exacts a miraculous transformation worthy of the most venerated medieval saint.  (more…)

You can’t begin to imagine how very little I want to raise the name of the former Playboy centerfold who was the woman who somehow managed to arrive far too early at the hereafter without ever seeming to learn anything. But all the Anna Nicole Smith brouhaha keeps reminding me of our president (ouch, it always hurts to think of Mr. Bush as that).

Like Anna Nicole, he always seems to be shaking his brazen, figuratively augmented chest at us and like her, he can always be counted upon to seem dazed, confused (possibly even medicated) and yet somehow combative all at once.  Both depended on other people handing them money in exchange for highly questionable skills for their fortunes and both have exhibited extreme capabilities for complicating even the simplest of circumstances. Also, both seem to be inventions of handlers and media since they have nowhere in their curriculum vitae any real credits to explain their phenomenal “star” power.

Both are from Texas. Much like her, various reports of the man before age 40 (Vicki - Anna’s real name - supposedly was 39 when she died) indicate that both spent much of their first four decades in a paranoid state or an impermeably thick fog from a combination of drugs and alcohol. Both had people - called enablers in substance abuse parlance - who made excuses for them so they could continue their very dangerous and destructive behavior without any checks (and tragically for us and the world, Bush still has no checks). Bush reportedly “found” religion around age 40 and stopped drinking (he has never answered charges of his drug use); Anna Nicole found Hollywood (Florida).

Both Smith and Bush, in public life, also prove (past tense, of course, in her case) extremely reliable in creating a train wreck wherever they go, one so horrible that it’s hard to watch and listen because you just know it’s gonna be reaaaaaalllll bad.

With Anna Nicole, we could simply tune her out.  But how the hell do we tune out Bush? And why can’t the media accurately cover Bush’s debacle as capably and voluminously as they did the quintessential “dumb” blonde? But they don’t. Do they?