Several bloggers today have pointed to this obviously disturbing article from Army Times, which announces that "beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st [Brigade Combat Team] will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North" -- "the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities."
...From the Jeff Stein article:
For more than 100 years -- since the end of the Civil War -- deployment of the U.S. military inside the U.S. has been prohibited under The Posse Comitatus Act (the only exceptions being that the National Guard and Coast Guard are exempted, and use of the military on an emergency ad hoc basis is permitted, such as what happened after Hurricane Katrina). Though there have been some erosions of this prohibition over the last several decades (most perniciously to allow the use of the military to work with law enforcement agencies in the "War on Drugs"), the bright line ban on using the U.S. military as a standing law enforcement force inside the U.S. has been more or less honored -- until now. And as the Army Times notes, once this particular brigade completes its one-year assignment, "expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one."
It’s amazing what you can find if you turn over a few rocks in the anti-terrorism legislation Congress approved during the election season.
Take, for example, the
Signed by President Bush on Oct. 17, the law (PL 109-364) has a provocative provision called “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.”
The thrust of it seems to be about giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating responses to Katrina-like disasters.
But on closer inspection, its language also alters the two-centuries-old Insurrection Act, which Congress passed in 1807 to limit the president’s power to deploy troops within the United States.
That law has long allowed the president to mobilize troops only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”
But the amended law takes the cuffs off.
Specifically, the new language adds “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident” to the list of conditions permitting the President to take over local authority — particularly “if domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.”
Since the administration broadened what constitutes “conspiracy” in its definition of enemy combatants — anyone who “has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States,” in the language of the Military Commissions Act (PL 109-366) — critics say it’s a formula for executive branch mischief.
Yet despite such a radical turn, the new law garnered little dissent, or even attention, on the Hill.
One of the few to complain, Sen.
It “subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law,” he said in remarks submitted to the Congressional Record on Sept. 29.
“The changes to the Insurrection Act will allow the President to use the military, including the National Guard, to carry out law enforcement activities without the consent of a governor,” he said.
Moreover, he said, it breaks a long, fundamental tradition of federal restraint.
“Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.”
Nothing unusual in Bush disregarding the Constitution.
So what is the rationale? We saw a hint perhaps in the activities of law enforcement agencies before and during the Republican convention, as detailed previously. Could the Administration expect a higher level of public unrest, say in the wake of the elections? Or worse? There might be reasins for unrest if the election result does not seem to reflect opinion polls - and they are swinging in favour of Obama. But they have ways - and lots of new ones.
Bobby: "There are about 30 scams the Republicans are deliberately using, particularly in the swing states to get Democratic voters off the rolls. These scams originate in the so-called Help America Vote Act which was passed after the Florida debacle in the year 2000. It was originally suggested by Democrats and Republicans but it was passed by a Republican congress with a Republican senate and a Republican president. And instead of reforming what happened in Florida it basically institutionalized all the problems that happened in Florida. And institutionalized a series of impediments that make it very difficult for Democrats to register, for Democrats to vote and then for Democrats to have their vote counted.
Some people might not be impressed and want to voice their objections. But would they get very far?
Not forgetting the bailout - wherein the Administration wants to hand over a shipload of taxpayers' money to, at best, reckless fat-cats, and without accountability. A note - some have referred to this as "financial socialism", but think on who is to get the benefit and recall Mussolini also bailed out Capital. Perhaps the wrong "ism" is being used. And if you put together all we have seen over the past nearly eight years ...
Time to recall the words of Thomas Jefferson:
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.The time has come.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure."
14 comments:
Naomi Wolf on Palin as the figurehead.
Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.
You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand "Palin Power." A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections -- but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you don't have freedom.
I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit -- but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.
Then I saw and heard more. Palin is embracing lawlessness in defying Alaskan Legislature subpoenas -- this is what Rove-Cheney, and not McCain, believe in doing. She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women's shelters -- Rove's style, not McCain's. I realized what I was seeing.
They'd do it they can get away with it.
a real shocker ...
.. and some new words; Ponerology & Pathocracy
-=*=-
G'day Bob,
well, you - actually, your cited article by Naomi Wolf - got my attention.
As usual, anyone wishing to see what I mean should read the whole article - chilling, extremely so - but in this case, also some of the comments (choose the view option 'expand all'), then search down for "Pathocracy Now". Then seven in a row ort'a do it.
G'day Phil, Glenn Greenwald with more on Palin .. and, as with the Wolf, some interesting comments.
And Palin is being given the "right" things to say ... text of a speech.
Count the lies when you read it .. and some examples:
We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator’s intentions and to call for action to thwart him.
How many times has Ahmadinejad's limited power to be stated before they stop using this lie? They probablly never will. Bush is demonstrably;ly far closer to being a dictator.
He dreams of being an agent in a “Final Solution” — the elimination of the Jewish people.
They know what he dreams???????
The United Nations Security Council has demanded that Iran suspend its illegal nuclear enrichment activities.
Actually, the UNSC has demanded Iran suspend legal activities.
Just a few of the easiest one's to refute. But some keep on lying, regardless.
At least, according to this report, some sanity has prevailed.
25/09/08 "The Guardian" -- - Israel gave serious thought this spring to launching a military strike on Iran's nuclear sites but was told by President George W Bush that he would not support it and did not expect to revise that view for the rest of his presidency, senior European diplomatic sources have told the Guardian.
The then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, used the occasion of Bush's trip to Israel for the 60th anniversary of the state's founding to raise the issue in a one-on-one meeting on May 14, the sources said. "He took it [the refusal of a US green light] as where they were at the moment, and that the US position was unlikely to change as long as Bush was in office", they added.
The sources work for a European head of government who met the Israeli leader some time after the Bush visit. Their talks were so sensitive that no note-takers attended, but the European leader subsequently divulged to his officials the highly sensitive contents of what Olmert had told him of Bush's position.
Bush's decision to refuse to offer any support for a strike on Iran appeared to be based on two factors, the sources said. One was US concern over Iran's likely retaliation, which would probably include a wave of attacks on US military and other personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on shipping in the Persian Gulf.
The other was US anxiety that Israel would not succeed in disabling Iran's nuclear facilities in a single assault even with the use of dozens of aircraft. It could not mount a series of attacks over several days without risking full-scale war. So the benefits would not outweigh the costs.
What McInsane or Palin as figurehead would do is the big question. The latter might even think it a step towards the End Times. And be encouraged in that thought.
Not to be deterred by a little sanity, a new nipartisan group .. an article by Justin Raimondo which includes more rebuttals of the standard lies.
If the NIE was supposed to blast the neocon war campaign out of the water, then its authors did not take into account the persistence – indeed, fanaticism – of the United for War With Iran crowd. The sheer relentlessness of the effort suggests its essential character as a lobbying campaign on behalf of a special interest – in this case, a very special interest. Corporate and professional lobbyists are notably impervious to facts, and tend to cherry-pick according to the interests of their clients, and foreign lobbyists certainly fall into this category. Yet the latter have a certain edge to them, lacking in the others – and Israel's lobby has the sharpest edge of all.
No one even pretends anymore that the Israel lobby isn't behind the effort to drag us into another Middle Eastern war. You don't have to be me, or Mearsheimer and Walt, to make this case: you have only to listen to the public pronouncements of Israel's leaders, who are openly demanding that either we strike, or else they will – perhaps, as has been suggested by Benny Morris, with nuclear weapons.
In the U.S., AIPAC, the scandal-rocked central command of Israel's amen corner, has come out of the shadows, where they remained during the run-up to the Iraq war, and taken the lead in calling for harsh sanctions and a military blockade of Iranian ports. Now we have this bipartisan ad hoc committee taking out full page newspaper ads and speaking in the implied names of both major party presidential candidates.
Cherry pick, make up, etc ...
G'day Phil, and more sanity and AIPAC learns that you can't win them all.
In a significant and highly unusual defeat for the so-called "Israel Lobby," the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives has decided to shelve a long-pending, albeit nonbinding, resolution that called for President George W. Bush to launch what critics called a blockade against Iran.
House Congressional Resolution (HR) 362, whose passage the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had made its top legislative priority this year, had been poised to pass virtually by acclamation last summer.
But an unexpectedly strong lobbying effort by a number of grassroots Iranian-American, Jewish-American, peace, and church groups effectively derailed the initiative, although AIPAC and its supporters said they would try to revive it next year or if Congress returns to Washington for a "lame-duck" session after the November elections.
Congress, which may still adopt a package of new unilateral economic sanctions against Iran – some of which the administration has already imposed – over the weekend, is expected to adjourn over the next several days.
''We'll resubmit it when Congress comes back, and we'll have even more signatures,'' the resolution's main author, New York Democrat Rep. Gary Ackerman, told the Washington Times, adding that the resolution currently has 270 co-sponsors, or some two-thirds of the House's entire membership.
Still, the decision by the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Howard Berman, to shelve HR 362 marked an unusual defeat for AIPAC, according to its critics who charged that the resolution was designed to lay the groundwork for the Bush administration or any successor administration to take military action against Iran.
"This was a joint effort by several groups to really put the focus on the dangers presented by such a resolution over the opposition of one of the most powerful lobbies in the country," said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).
Will others take note and stand ujp to the pressures that are applied?
The psychology of the issue.
More on Palin and what it says about some Americans.
G'day Phil, as the bailout of Wall Street is discussed and people question whether it is redistributing taxpayers' money to the fat-cats, the latest annual redistribution of taxpayers' money to the MIC was passed with hardly a murmur ... from Tomdispatch, Chalmers Johnson.
From Tom's introduction:
Let's start with the money the Bush administration has already thrown at the war in Iraq. According to the June congressional testimony of William Beach, director of the Center for Data Analysis, the war has cost $646 billion so far. The new defense budget for 2009 tacks on another $68.6 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming year. However, military expert Bill Hartung of the New America Foundation puts a conservative estimate of the costs of a single week of the Iraq War at approximately $3.5 billion (or about $180 billion a year).
In other words, the war in Iraq will cost far more in the next year than the Iraq portion of that $68.6 billion Congress is about to pony up in the defense budget, and so will be funded, as has long been true, through supplemental war bills submitted by the Bush administration (and then whatever administration follows). In other words, sometime in 2009 the direct costs of the war the Bush administration once predicted would cost perhaps $50-60 billion in total will stand at more than $800 billion, or $100 billion above the cost (if all goes well, which it won't) of the bailout of the financial system now being proposed in Washington.
Estimates of the true long-term costs of the President's war of choice, including payments of health care and veterans benefits into the distant future, soar into the budgetary stratosphere. They range from the Congressional Budget Office's $1-2 trillion to an estimate by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes of up to $4-5 trillion. So we're talking somewhere between one-and-a-half and seven bailouts-worth of taxpayer dollars flowing into the morass of disaster, corruption, and carnage in Iraq.
And here's another curious bit of information: Just the other day, the website ThinkProgress pointed out a strange glitch in Iraq planning. The Bush administration, deep into negotiations with the Iraqi government, evidently managed to wheedle an extra year's time for the prospective withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq; its negotiators pushed the date from 2010 -- the year suggested by both Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- to 2011. According to Maliki in an interview with an Iraqi TV station, this change came from the administration's concern over the "domestic situation" in the U.S. (that is, the needs of the McCain campaign).
"Actually," said Maliki, "the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the [U.S] domestic situation so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date." So we're talking about another perhaps $150-180 billion in 2011 -- or approximately the full suggested initial payout in the Washington bailout plan of at least one key Democrat. This gives the phrase "presidential politics" new meaning. Now, just imagine for a moment the situation we might be in if there had been no Iraq War. We could have bailed ourselves out many times over.
G'day Phil, will one combat brigade of the mysterious ways come to pass? There is news - and more to come - on election rigging.
here.
COLUMBUS -- A high-level Republican consultant has been subpoenaed in a case regarding alleged tampering with the 2004 election.
Michael L. Connell was served with a subpoena in Ohio on Sept. 22 in a case alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, is a website designer and IT professional who created a website for Ohio’s secretary of state that presented the results of the 2004 election in real time as they were tabulated.
At the time, Ohio’s Secretary of State, Kenneth J. Blackwell, was also chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio.
Then there is this.
Here, in this shattering new interview, Stephen Spoonamore goes into harrowing detail about the Bush regime's election fraud, past, present and--if we don't spread the word right now--to come. Since he's the only whistle-blower out there who knows the perps themselves, and how they operate, we have to send this new piece far and wide.
Here Spoon tells us that McBush's team--i.e., Karl Rove and his henchpersons-- have their plan in place to steal this next election: by 51.2% of the popular vote, and three electoral votes.
He also talks about the major role played by the Christianist far right in the electronic rigging of the vote.
And he defines our electronic voting system as a major threat to US national security, calling for it to be junked ASAP, in favor of hand-counted paper ballots.
Since Spoon is a Republican and erstwhile McCain supporter, as well as a noted specialist in nosing out computer fraud, his testimony is essential--not only for its expertise, but, no less, for the impact that his views will surely have on those Republicans who have been loath to see what Bush & Co. has done to our election system.
That whole story's just about to break. In fact, tomorrow there will be a number of articles appearing, on a recent breakthrough in the lawsuit that Spoon's testimony has enabled, and on other aspects of that all-important case.
You might recall material I have previously posted on this site and elsewhere - a large quantity of material - on the matter,. And the name Mark Crispin Miller was part of that.
So eyes wide open for more revelations. They have history. And ponder this from the above piece:
Spoonamore says that the GOP wanted e-voting to steal elections but now foreign governments will be hacking and the winner will be determined by the best hackers. He says that if the GOP wins the hacking competition, McCain will win 51.2 percent with three electoral votes over Obama, and it will be a stolen election.
G'day Phil, the campaign trail seems to have little mention of the Iraq war, perhaps not so much a case of "don't mention the war" as it has been forgotten. From Tomdispatch Ira Chernus.
In 1932, in the midst of a disastrous economic meltdown, Franklin D. Roosevelt made "the forgotten man" the centerpiece of his presidential election campaign. Far more than we suspect, this year's election may turn not on a forgotten man, but on a forgotten war in a forgotten country.
Even before the present financial meltdown hit the news, the Iraq War had slipped out of the headlines and off the political stage. Now, as investment houses totter and bailout plans fill the headlines, it will be even harder for Iraq to get major media attention. Yet the war remains just beneath the surface of the presidential campaign, and so is sure to affect the outcome in ways too complicated to fully grasp.
Think of that war not as one, but two currents, affecting the coming election all the more powerfully because they are out of sight, out of mind, and -- interacting in unpredictable ways -- out of anyone's control.
Someone else has noticed that combat brigade.
And it's not good enough - send a message.
To paraphrase "The ghost of Thomas Jefferson is rapping at the door."
G'day Phil, others warned of undue influence ... Justin Raimondo - "A Dial Marked 'War'".
The unlikeliest was no doubt Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the hero of the 1950s "isolationists" (i.e., the good guys), who wanted to nominate him for president on a third-party ticket opposing another general by the name of Eisenhower. MacArthur was, however, even more of a reluctant politician and declined to run for public office, in spite of efforts by conservative backers of Sen. Robert A. Taft to put his name on the ballot. This was perhaps due, in part, to such sentiments as the following:
"It is a part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war."
And:
In the early Fifties, America stood at the threshold of its imperial destiny, and one writer, Garet Garrett by name, not only saw it coming [.pdf], but also saw how it would end. His remarkably concise and pungent commentary on the rise of empire, in a pamphlet of the same name, is still the best single statement on how and why we lost our old republic. In it, he remarks,
"The bald interpretation of General MacArthur's words is this. War becomes an instrument of domestic policy. Among the control mechanisms on the government's panel board now is a dial marked War. It may be set to increase or decrease the tempo of military expenditures, as the planners decide that what the economy needs is a little more inflation or a little less – but of course never any deflation. And whereas it was foreseen that when Executive Government is resolved to control the economy it will come to have a vested interest in the power of inflation, so now we may perceive that it will come also to have a kind of proprietary interest in the institution of perpetual war."
Let there be no doubt as to our rulers' response to the stinging repudiation of the bailout, which was supposed to save their necks and those of their cronies and backers. On their panel board is a dial marked War, and it is conveniently within reach.
Just so. But can they get away with it again?
Warning - the .pdf doc referred to is 173 pages.
G'day Phil, it seems the Obama team think a landslide is possible ... but there's an old saying about not counting chickens before they hatch ... perhaps we can amend that to votes before they are cast. But - if they are right in theory, then in practice the fix will have to be so large as many people won't miss it, even if the Dummos do. So what's happening? Well:
This.
It is normal for states to periodically review lists of voters and remove any who have moved, died, or been convicted of felonies. However, with no national standards to control this process, it has become "chaotic," "riddled with inaccuracies," and "vulnerable to manipulation" for partisan purposes.
Those are the conclusions of a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice obtained by CBS News. Brennan Center Executive Director Michael Waldman told CBS, "Officials are making tons of errors, and it's all happening in secret, without public accountability."
And this.
Our elections are in peril once again. Mike Connell of GovTechSoutions, who is now John McCain's chief technical officer, is now working together with Karl Rove to electronically purge voter registration lists and manipulate vote totals on Election Day.
Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog http://www.bradblog.com) and Velvet Revolution (http://www.velvetrevolution.us), and author Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com) have been tracking various vote manipulations for a number of years. This year, they have already reported efforts to purge voter registration lists in Louisiana, New Mexico, Colorado and Ohio this year.
Although there are slightly fewer voting machines without paper trails (DRE's) in '08 than '04, this year's presidential election is predicted to be fraught with just as much if not more behind-the-scenes manipulation than in '04.
Meanwhile.
The GOP's top computer expert, Michael Connell, CEO of GovTech Solutions, was subpoenaed on September 22nd to testify under oath in a federal lawsuit in Ohio regarding his knowledge of election rigging and vote manipulation in past elections and the upcoming election. Mr. Connell, using the Karl Rove playbook, immediately moved to quash the subpoena and stated that he would not comply because he needs to maintain the confidentiality of his Republican clients. Cliff Arnebeck, the attorney representing the opposing parties, says that he will quickly move to "enforce the subpoena."
Michael Connell, after hiding under the radar for almost two decades as the GOP's secret IT weapon for manipulating elections, has now been thrust into the limelight by other GOP whistleblowers, most notably world renowned cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore, who identified Mr. Connell as the person with the most intimate knowledge of GOP computer networks including those in the White House and Congress. Mr. Connell, who has worked for the Bush political network since 1986, has been at the scene of virtually every electoral scandal of the past decade-- running Florida computers during the 2000 election and Ohio election computers during the 2004 election, helping to create Swift Boat Veterans for Truth IT network, putting his computer servers in control of the most sensitive Congressional IT networks, and setting up Karl Rove's off grid White House email system used in the firing of the US Attorneys for political purposes.
More on the matter as it appears.
G'day Phil, a piece by Glenn Greenwald on the poor hard done by ... well, that's what they think they are. I'm sure you'll recognise the behaviour.
The Right in this country -- meaning the faction that followed George Bush for the last eight years -- long ago ceased being a movement of political ideas and is driven by two, and only two, extreme emotions: (1) intense, aggressive rage towards their revolving door of enemies, and (2) bottomless self-pity over how unfairly they're being treated. As their imminent defeat looks increasingly likely (potentially on a humiliating scale), these two impulses are in maximum overdrive, feeding off one another in endless self-perpetuation (the more they lose, the more victimized they feel, the more they rage against their enemies who oppress them, etc.).
The Right's rejection by the public can't possibly be due to anything they have done. It can only be due to some extremely vicious enemy that oppresses them uniquely and so very unfairly. For the moment, they're only losing because The Leftist Mainstream Media hates them and is deeply biased against them. Blue Texan points out just some of the painfully obvious idiocy at the heart of this specific strain of woe-is-me-ism:
It's pretty clear that [Instapundit] and the drooling Malkinites in wingnutland are getting ready to blame the corporate media when Obama wins.
The problem with this narrative is that:
a) the GOP has dominated national electoral politics for a decade, in spite of said "liberal media" conspiring to elect Democrats, and;
b) the wingnut bloggers themselves spend lots of time and energy obsessing over the idea that the mainstream media has an ever-diminishing influence/relevance (how many posts has [Instapundit] done this year of the New York Times stock price/circulation figures?)
I'm not sure how they square all of this in their little brains exactly, but it makes my head hurt.
Needless to say, whether the excuse-making is coherent or consistent matters not in the slightest. The objective, as always, is to believe that they are weak and hapless victims being stomped on by some Evil, Unfair Force, and that self-pitying worldview can then explain away every last one of their failings. That is the mentality that lies at the heart of today's right-wing ideologue; more or less, it's all there is (for a long time, it was also the media and the Left's fault -- but not theirs -- that things were going so poorly in Iraq, even though they controlled all the branches of the Government).
Reward offered ...
G'day Phil, more from Glenn Greenwald on the fantacists.
There are few things that make political coverage more unbearable -- and more distorting -- than The David Brooks Syndrome: the extremely patronizing and ill-informed pretense, shared by media and right-wing elites alike, that they can study the Little Common People like zoo animals, and then translate and give voice to their simple-minded and ignorant though good-hearted, salt-of-the-earth perspectives. Rarely has this mentality been so transparent as in the wake of the Biden-Palin debate, as pundits and right-wing polemicists like Brooks, Peggy Noonan and Rich "Starbursts" Lowry rushed forward to proclaim giddily that Regular Americans would love Sarah Palin and this love could even help McCain win, despite -- or, really, because of -- her vapid, content-free telegenic presence.
Actual empirical evidence -- called "polling data" -- has almost uniformly demonstrated how false these condescending pats on the head are, as every single poll conducted thus far (at least that I'm aware of) found that Americans believed that Biden won and is the far more serious and knowledgeable candidate, and huge numbers continue to have profound doubts about Palin's fitness for office. And the first tracking poll to report a full post-debate day of polling -- the Research 2000 poll for Daily Kos -- finds Obama with a 13-point lead, his largest ever. This joint right-wing/pundit claim that Americans would swoon in the face of Palin's empty chatter, self-conscious folksiness and chronic, seizure-like winking says much more about those making the claim than it does about their Regular People subjects.
As polling data conclusively demonstrates, the mindset of the voting public is infinitely more rational and substance-based than the pundits and the Right fantasize when they lyrically praise the Regular American -- at least it is in this time of perceived (and actual) crisis. What's happening in this country, and in this election, is rather simple and easy to see: (1) the country is in total shambles -- possibly far worse than what people even realize; (2) we have lived for the last eight years under virtually absolute GOP rule; (3) the public knows this; (4) the Republican President and his party are therefore intensely -- historically -- unpopular; and (5) the voting public doesn't want to continue living under the rule of the same faction and same political party that has driven the country into the ground. Having Sarah Palin drop her gerund endings and desperately trotting out the standard, tired GOP attack ads to depict Obama as a radical, fist-pumping, America-hating, unhinged socialist -- when everyone can see with their own eyes that he isn't -- won't change any of that.
Previously, GG on GOP tactics.
Back in March, The Politico published an article -- reflecting conventional wisdom at the time (needless to say) -- which declared that the Iraq War would be a winning issue for . . . John McCain and the Republicans. The article, by David Paul Kuhn, claimed that public support for the war was surging; that this "promises to reshape the political landscape"; that "Democrats' resolute support for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces may soon position them at odds with independent voters, in particular, a constituency they need to retake the White House"; that "the steady upturn in the public mood [about the war] stands to alter the dynamics of races up and down the ballot"; and that "no candidate stands to gain more than McCain."
The article quoted Michael O'Hanlon who, with characteristic insight and prescience, bolstered the storyline:
How could Democrats possibly hand McCain a better issue than to let him run on his record of advocating a robust U.S. presence in Iraq with all the positive battlefield news that is filtering out of that country? . . .Thinking about where we were at the time of the congressional elections, it's ironic that the Iraq issue could actually be the one that most favors the Republican and most other issues -- including most foreign policy issues -- could most favor the Democrats
As I noted at the time, those claims had no basis in reality. After last week's McCain-Obama debate and last night's Biden-Palin debate, one thing is now crystal clear: in proclaiming that Americans would once again Love the War and it would become a winning issue for McCain and the GOP, The Politico and O'Hanlon were as wrong as usual.
In the real world, things do not look good for the Repukes.
Keep an eye on Mark Crispin Miller's site for news on "inconsistencies" in electoral matters.
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