Confidence!!!

"I don't think Hillary will have me."

— Former Republican presidential candidate Tommy Thompson, in response to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's question about whether he would want to serve in the next president's cabinet.

Dick Cheney as Saruman

Whenever lib'ruls like me claim the Iraq war is about oil/rich guys or whatever, we're always told that we're moonbatty conspiracy theorists no one should take seriously. It would be a lot easier to accept that attitude if Republicans weren't always acting like a secretive conservative Legion of Doom.

Via a commenter at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

UPDATE: Via Digby, I see the plot thickens. A split like this would be disaster for the Republicans in 08. Obviously this is merely a guess, but I would see this trip as an effort to convince the fundies that whoever wins will toe the Christianist line just fine. Eventually, the limitations of associating with rigid, fundamentalist religionists was bound to show itself, and now it might just finally be happening. In any case, it's fun watching the conservatives eating themselves.

An Opportunity Denied

I see that Newt Gingrich is declining to run for President. That's too bad indeed.

As a committed lefty blogger of no consequence, I am truly disappointed. A Newt Gingrich Presidential run is a Christmas gift for those on the left. For me, it combines all the personal animosity I feel for his hand in foisting the Monica Lewinski "scandal" on me with the opportunity to rip apart his colossal ideas that the media is so infatuated with. He has it all, in abundance-hypocrisy, lunacy, cliche right-wing ideas masquerading as innovation, jowls-a lefty blogger's wet dream. If he had won the nomination, and been thumped as solidly in the general election as I'm certain he would have been, it would have left a whole pile of "conservative ideas" mouldering as a dung pile for years and years to come. As soon as I heard he was publicly making a play for the nomination, I started gathering ammunition. I know I was not alone.

And now it's over. Curse you, Newt!

As for this:

Rick Tyler said Gingrich realized he couldn't run a political action committee -- his American Solutions group -- and form an exploratory committee to run for president as well.

This sounds an awful lot like horseshit to me. Newt's self-regard is boundless. If he felt that he could manage to win, he wouldn't give it up to keep a comparatively small-time position leading a political action committee.

I think it probably has more to do with this. Scroll down and check out Newt's numbers. Newt may want to kiss himself, but the rest of the country will politely decline. I think his handlers got wind of the political realities and, realizing he might outdo even Fred Thompson for a sluggish campaign, put an end to things, lest this embarrassment give Newt's ego a terminal hematoma.

9/11 Forever

So, when Rudy takes a dump, is it because of 9/11?

Democracy at Work

Could this really, actually happen? I guess so...

Faced with the prospect of losing a committee vote, Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Richard J. Durbin Wednesday backed down a bit from their opposition to a Republican nominee to the Federal Election Commission accused of stymieing minority voting power.

Feinstein of California and Durbin of Illinois had expressed serious reservations over Republican Hans von Spakovsky’s nomination to a 6-year term on the FEC. And Feinstein, chairwoman of Senate Rules Committee, seemed to be setting the stage to vote against his nomination, signaling she would take the unusual step of seeking individual votes in her committee for von Spakovsky and three other pending FEC nominations – a Republican and two Democrats.

But Feinstein and Durbin on Wednesday joined a unanimous vote to move von Spakovsky’s nomination and those of the three others to the full Senate without recommendation.

Lithwick's article lays out most of Spakovsky's crimes. Spakovsky is one of the masterminds behind the "Voter Fraud" fraud, which was used to give intellectual cachet to the idea generally that voter fraud was widespread, and that specifically voter identification laws, targeted at minorities that usually vote Democratic, was the solution:

In support of his position that voter-ID laws did not unconstitutionally suppress the votes of poor and minority voters, Hearne cited the decision of the DoJ to approve the pre-clearance of Georgia's voter-ID law, and a law review article supporting such laws, written under the pseudonym Publius. Hearne didn't reveal that the decision on Georgia was made by political appointees of the DoJ over the strong objections of career attorneys there who believed the law was indeed discriminatory. Nor did he explain that (as I discovered and blogged about a few years earlier) Publius was none other than Hans von Spakovsky, then serving as one of the political DoJ officials who approved the Georgia voter-ID law. (President Bush later gave von Spakovsky a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission.)

There is simply no way the Democratic Senate can let this slide. Spakovsky is a walking, talking affront to democracy. The Democrats approving this would be akin to a mass neutering. Of course, after that gutsy vote to condemn MoveOn.org for their ad in the New York Times, there's no telling what decision they might make.

My tax dollar at work

There is really nothing to say about this. Well, yes there is. It's stupid. What a colossal waste of time. One of my own Senators, Herb Kohl, voted Yea on this dog, instead of walking out, laughing, as he should have.

I guess I can expect to see John Cornyn pushing legislation condemning ads that impugned the character of Vietnam Vets John Kerry and Max Cleland coming right around the corner, right? Not something I would bet on.

While the blatant hypocrisy of the Republican party is as aggravating as ever, it comes as no surprise. Intellectual and moral consistency is not a conservative hallmark. What I don't understand is why the Democrats let this come to a vote at all. The "outrage" over this ad and the way it dared to "impugn" the mighty colossus Petraeus is a sideshow. Letting it happen at all validates this nonsense. Actually voting for it gives the Republicans political cover. Do they think they're going to get some kind of political capital out of this crap? The only thing I can think of is that they were actually worried that people would see Petraeus' shiny medals and be hypnotized into supporting the war. If so, that was a grave miscalculation. Americans still hate the war. They still want to leave. Shiny generals and rants about advertisements haven't changed any of that. Even though they are the majority party and are on the right AND popular side of the issue, they still lead frightened.

These attempts at some kind of short-term political gain always come at the expense of long-term victory, which is one of the reasons why I think the Republicans can always bully Democrats into nonsense storylines. When you're trying to do something good but difficult, sometimes you have to take some early hits. Trying to defuse the usual Republican you're-all-traitors-lefties-hippies-weaklings-pussies-blah-blah-blah by voting on useless crap won't work, because they'll do it anyway and when you really need to do something useful later, you'll have no credibility and thus, no influence. The Democrats are still trying to play by Republican rules. That's a losing proposition every time.

Blogging again

Well, looking at my blog entries it seems I have not blogged since July 21. A long time, that. I have to assume that my 3 readers have long since left and I am in essence starting from scratch. Almost 2 months have passed since I have bothered to write my usual pablum, and thus I feel disengaged from current events. It's taking some time to catch up.

The war plods predictably on. Since I started poking around news outlets and blogs again, it seems that a drawdown of troops is in the offing, which the MSM claims is a change of course by the Bushies. Unfortunately, the drawdown was inevitable-it had to happen because there are no more new troops to bring in once the current surge troops are done with their tours. So, not really a concession. No change of course. There never will be, as long as he is President. Keeping troops in Iraq, and hopefully expanding the war to Iran, Syria, wherever, establishing permanent bases, kicking the can, make the war someone else's problem, in 45 years people will say we were right you'll see, blah blah blah...in the two months that I shifted focus to my personal life and travelled abroad, there has been lots of heat and noise, but no essential change in the situation in even the smallest way.

To address the so-called "Anbar Miracle"...I'll start by saying that initially I thought some progress of some kind was being made, hence this post. I was wrong. I was wrong in the sense that it would clamp down on the violence in a meaningful way-the dip in violence is questionable, and even if it is kind of occurring, it isn't really MEANINGFUL-but I was also wrong in a more essential sense. I hadn't really given thought to the fact that the very Sunni militia members we were arming to fight AQI were the same insurgents that we were fighting ourselves not so very long ago. I hadn't given thought to the fact that by doing this, we were arming Sunni insurgents who would fight Shiite insurgents once we were out of the way. I hadn't given thought to the fact that this switch of convenience could and probably would be switched back if AQI were controlled. I hadn't really considered how this might play out with the Maliki government, arming Sunni insurgents in this manner-and of course, they would be a direct threat to the government Bush touted so highly before. In short, I didn't really think...I grabbed at any piece of news that might have seemed good or positive. And, worse yet, I realize now I did it so I wouldn't be a constant naysayer about Iraq. I was worried that the escalation might work and that I would be caught on the wrong side of it. I wrote stupid, thoughtless crap (as I often do) and didn't really bother to get a broader picture. And worst of all, I did this even though I have been against the war from the beginning. I had made it a point to disbelieve everything the Andover Cowboy and his crew of criminals have ever claimed since 2000 and never been disappointed, but as soon as I started writing it down someplace I cowered. Over time my mistake became clear to me, but I now see how easy it is to get sucked into intellectually-challenged mush, out of ego or fear or lack of original thinking. Without the existence of blogs, political websites, online news and reliable news outlets like McClatchy, I don't know if I would be any more reality -based than the average fundy I am so dismissive of. It's not a good feeling. I'll have to be more careful in the future to check myself.

My wife and I just returned from our honeymoon in Ireland, a country uninvolved in our war. For the first time since 2001, no constant barrage of the Republican cudgel known as 9/11, no surge, no Petraeus, no war. No one even asked us about it. Their newspapers front pages were often devoid of Iraq coverage, which was what I was hoping for on my honeymoon. This disconnection from the day-to-day news, spin, counterspin, posturing, etc. gave me a new perspective when I came home. I knew the war was a tragedy and a travesty, of course, but from a distance in seems blindingly absurd. At the time I arrived home, the talk amongst pundits and politicians was, essentially, that the deteriorating situation was the fault of Maliki. Christ Almighty, what? The plan was to depose and replace him. Details aside, what are we talking about here? We destroyed their country, it's businesses, infrastructure, it's basic services for living, it's army. We let the country slide into chaos. We were in charge. This mess is ours, no one else's. Furthermore, this governemnt is one Iraqis elected, for better or for worse. We mandated this happen, it did, this is what they chose. Whatever weaknesses it has, we helped to create, and in any case, it is ostensibly their country. Iraq is not the 51st state, or an errant colonial territory. Deposing their leadership when it displeases us or it's politically convenient is the hallmark of an imperial country kicking a puppet government in a satellite country, akin to the actions of the USSR-a country I was brought up to despise for exactly that. Coming back home to that, and the dog and pony show that was the Petraeus report, was like some kind of dark metaphor that escapes me right now. Whatever. I'm ranting in unsubstantiated fashion. I should really, really stop for now, and get some sleep.