Tullycast

Tip O'Neill is twirling in his grave

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TULLYVISION

Just an abdication of any sense of journalism. Tip O’Neill is twirling in his grave.

Three things that are most troubling about this goddamned case lately: 1: Lawrence O’Donnell at the end of this summer, all of a sudden declares on Olbermann’s Countdown program that it’s all over(the Fitzgerald case) and that it was much ado about nothing (possibly in reference to Armitage’s confession/reveal that he was blabbing about Valerie Wilson as well around that time) 2: Bob Woodward’s complete skullduggery about this sickening political payback/blowback and his public, blatant disregard for honest disclosure about his direct involvement in this possible illegal act while simultaneously mocking it in the press. 3: That Washington Post Op-Ed after the Armitage reveal. Worst day in their history.

Disgusting.

JT

New York Herald Sun

50,000-70,000 troops

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Yesterday, President Bush announced his intention to increase the “overall size” of the Army,
acknowledging that the current forces were “stressed.” The Washington
Post reports he’s considering an increase of 50,000-70,000 troops.

On June 3, 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) — campaigning for the presidency — proposed expanding the Army by 40,000 troops. Bush quickly slammed the proposal as unnecessary and counter-productive:

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Our path to ‘victory’ ends in defeat:

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Our path to ‘victory’ ends in defeat:

Our path to ‘victory’ ends in defeat – Mark Morford Wednesday, December 13, 2006 The good news is, we’re all back in harmony. All back on the same page. No more divisiveness and no more silly bickering and no more nasty and indignant red state/blue state rock throwing because we’re finally all back in cozy let’s-hug-it-out agreement: The “war” in Iraq is over. And what’s more, we lost. Very, very badly. Sure, you sort of sensed from the beginning that we couldn’t possibly win a bogus war launched by a nasty slew of corrupt pseudo cowboys against both a bitterly contorted Islamic nation and a vague and ill-defined concept that has no center and no boundaries and that feeds on the very thing that tries to destroy it. It was sort of obvious, even if half the nation was terrifically blinded by Bush administration lies and false shrieks of impending terror. But now it’s official. Or rather, more official. Now it’s pretty much agreed upon on both sides of the aisle and in every Iraq Study Group and by every top-ranking general and newly minted defense secretary-designate and in every facet of American culture save some of the gun-totin’ flag-lickin’ South. We lost. And what’s more, we have no real clue what to do about it. After all, it’s not easy to accept. It’s the thing we cannot easily hear, the thing most Americans, no matter what their political stripe, just can’t quite fathom because we’re so damned strong and righteous and handy with a gun, and because we are the superpower and the God among men and the bringer of light to the world and therefore we never lose. Except, you know, when we do. It’s not like we were overpowered. We weren’t outmanned or outgunned or outstrategized, hence we weren’t defeated in any “traditional,” kick-ass, take-names, sign-the-peace-accord way. It wasn’t because our can’t-lose military didn’t have the latest and greatest killing tools of all time, the biggest budget, the most heroic of baffled and misled young soldiers sort of but not really willing to go off and fight and die for a cause no one could adequately explain or justify to them. We still have the coolest, fastest planes. We still have the meanest billion-dollar technology. We still have the most imposing tanks and the most incredible weaponry and the badass night-vision goggles with the laser sights and the thermal heat-seeking readouts and the ability to track targets from 2 miles away in a dust storm. It doesn’t matter. What we don’t have is any idea what we’re doing, not anymore, not on the global stage. We lost this “war” and we lost it before we even began because we went in for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong planning and with all the wrong leadership who had all the wrong motives based on all the wrong greedy self-serving insular faux cowboy BS that your kids and your grandkids will be paying for until about the year 2056. Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you say, “Wait, wait, wait, it’s not over at all, and we haven’t lost yet. Isn’t the fighting still raging? Can’t we still ‘win’ even though we’re still losing soldiers by the truckload and thousands of innocent Iraqis are being brutally slaughtered every month and isn’t Dubya still standing there, brow scrunched and confounded as a monkey clinging onto a shiny razor blade, refusing to let go and free us from the deadly trap, ignoring the Iraq Study Group and trying to figure out a way to stay the course and never give in and “mission accomplished” even as every single human around him, from the top generals to crusty old James Baker to the new and shockingly honest secretary of defense, says we are royally screwed and Iraq is now a vicious and chaotic civil war and it’s officially one of the worst disasters in American history?” Oh wait, you just answered your own question. Yes, technically, the war is still on. The fighting is not over. And, yes, you can even say we (brutally, tactlessly) installed ourselves with sufficient ego to give us a modicum of violent, volatile control over the gulf region’s remaining petroleum reserves — which was, of course, much of the point in the first place. But the nasty us-versus-them, good-versus-evil ideology is over. Ditto the numb sense of Bush’s brutally simpleminded American “justice.” Any lingering hint of anything resembling a truly valid and lucid and deeply patriotic reason for wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives and roughly an entire generation’s worth of international respect? Gone. What’s left is one lingering, looming question: How do we accept defeat? How do we deal with the awkward, identity-mauling, ego-stomping idea that, once again, America didn’t “win” a war it really had no right to launch in the first place? After all, isn’t this the American slogan: “We may not always be right, but we are never wrong”? It’s still our most favorite idea, the thing our own childlike president loves to talk most about, burned into our national consciousness like a bad tattoo: We always win. We’re the good guys. We’re the chosen ones. We’re the goddamn cavalry, flying the flag of truth, wrapped in strip malls and Ford pickups and McDonald’s franchises. Right? Wrong. If Vietnam’s aftermath proved anything, it’s that we are incredibly crappy losers. We deny, we reject, we evade, ignore and refuse responsibility until it becomes so silly and surreal that even the staunchest warmonger has to cringe in embarrassment. At this point, it seems nearly impossible for America to accept defeat with anything resembling perspective and dignity and the understanding that maybe, just maybe, we ain’t all that saintly or perfect and maybe God really isn’t necessarily on our side after all, because if God took sides, she wouldn’t actually be, you know, God. But what happens to a country if it loses the thing that supposedly defines it most? If we don’t have our bogus “victory,” if we don’t always win, if we don’t have a sense of righteousness so strong and so inflated and so utterly impenetrable that even when it seems like we’ve lost, we still stumble through some sort of offensive end zone victory dance, well, what’s left? What, conscience? Humility? Humanitarianism? Or how about the realization that we could maybe, just maybe, learn to be defined by something other than rogue aggressiveness and the vicious need to win? Something like, say, a mindful, flawed, difficult but oh-so-incredibly-essential move toward that most challenging and rewarding of human ideals: peace? Yeah, right. Who the hell wants that?

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Eschaton:

So, let’s do a recap on the Very Serious junior senator from Connecticut. About a year ago Lieberman wrote: Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. In March Lieberman was still claiming that things were getting better. In June he said: I believe, that we will be able to withdraw a significant number of our men and women in uniform from Iraq by the end of this year and even more by next year. And I express that optimism based on the election and formation of the new Iraqi unity government, the increasing capacity of the Iraqi security forces to protect their own people, and the commitment of the new government to disarm the sectarian militias. In July he said: So I am confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year, we will begin to draw down significant numbers of American troops, and by the end of the next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home. A little later in July he said: BRIDGEPORT — U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman believes the U.S. will withdraw a “solid” contingent of its military forces in Iraq by the end of the year because of gains made by the Iraqi armed forces. “There really has been progress made by the Iraqi military,” Lieberman said Tuesday during a meeting with the Connecticut Post’s editorial board. “Two-thirds of it could stand on its own or lead the fight with our logistical support.” The three-term U.S. senator said he believes a complete withdrawal is possible by late 2007 or early 2008. Apparently all of that is no longer operative and now he’s standing with St. John McCain calling for more troops. Joe Lieberman, wrong about everything, yet still a very serious person. -Atrios 11:50 AM

You link to it, you OWN it

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Canadian Cynic: You link to it, you OWN it. Deal with it.:

You link to it, you OWN it. Deal with it.  Back here, we have a thoroughly exciting comments section going, where “Strong Conservative” Jonathan Strong finally just plain pisses me off when he writes: Miscommunication, I didn’t personally link Condit stuff, I was just linking Gateway, that was my intent. I don’t give a fuck what your intent was. I am thoroughly tired of people who link elsewhere, get called on what they linked to, then throw up their hands with, “Hey, I didn’t write that, I was just linking to it,” as if that absolves them of any and all responsibility. I don’t think anyone has put it as well as Glenn Greenwald in his sixth update here: Tiger Hawk claims that the other Reynolds — Glenn — merely linked to, but did not endorse, Hinderaker’s reprehensible argument, an excuse which Reynolds quickly embraces. Are there really still people left who don’t understand that Reynolds links to extremist arguments all the time in order blatantly to promote them, only to then claim that he “only linked to it, not endorsed it” once the argument gets exposed, as it so often does, as deceitful, inaccurate or hateful garbage? As Robert Farely said just yesterday when pointing out the utter incoherence in a Victor Davis Hanson article promoted by Reynolds: “I swear to you, the first person to write ‘but Reynolds just linked; he didn’t say that he approved of Hanson’ in comments gets permanently banned.'” If you knowingly promote an argument like Hinderaker’s — which disgustingly asserts that it was to be expected that Foley harassed underage pages because he’s gay — then it is incumbant to make your objections clear (as Tiger Hawk did when linking to my post, or I did when linking to Hinderaker’s). Otherwise, it amounts to: “Hey, I just linked without comment to that white supremacist article, knowingly sending tens of thousands of readers to read it, but I wasn’t endorsing it.” That is Reynolds’ modus operandi, and virtually everyone has caught on. Once and for all, Jonathan, did you catch that? I mean, really, did you catch that? If you link to someone else’s article in any kind of supportive and unqualified way, then you fucking own that article, lock, stock and barrel. All of it. So grow the fuck up and stop being such an infantile whiner. If you have a case, make it. If you can use your own words, terrific. But if you choose to link elsewhere, then that stuff becomes your problem as well. If you can’t handle that, then I suggest you find a less dangerous avocation than blogging. Because you just don’t seem prepared for it. posted by CC

Government Of the Corrupt, By the Corrupt and For the Corrupt

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Government Of the Corrupt, By the Corrupt and For the Corrupt

By: Pachacutec

wall-street-skylt.jpg

Your government, looking out for the not-so-little guy:

The Justice Department announced new rules yesterday that will make it harder for prosecutors to bring criminal charges against companies, bending to intense pressure from business groups that claim the government has overreached in its pursuit of financial malfeasance.

In presenting the revised rules, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty called the changes a substantial and direct response to a lobbying drive by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, among others.

Since devastating bankruptcies at Enron and WorldCom prompted Congress to pass a stringent corporate accountability law four years ago, business interests increasingly have pushed back on efforts to police their operations, arguing that the government has imposed too many costs on companies with too few benefits for investors.

I’m sorry, did you mention the US Chamber of Commerce?  Let’s have a look at the US Chamber’s CEO, Tom Donahue:

If it were possible to pick one person as the representative for American business in Washington, Thomas Donahue is that man.  He is the President and CEO of the United States Chamber of Commerce, the most important business lobbying group in the country.  He is also on the Board of Directors and the Audit Committee of Sunrise Senior Living, and was caught selling stock ahead of the revelations of accounting problems.  That is a serious no-no for any board member or any business executive.  It’s deeply unethical and possibly illegal, because it’s stealing from investors.  If there’s any indication that the business lobby under Republican rule became unbelievably corrupted, look no further than Thomas Donahue, the man that the business community picked to represent them to the Republican power structure.

I’m a small businessman, and the big business lobbies of big pharma, the US Chamber of Commerce and all the rest do not represent me.  They work against my interests and pump a steady stream of lying economic happy talk out through the media.  Net neutrality is good for me, but the telcos and cable companies want to sell me out to extract extra money from big corporate citizens who can pay for better access and accessibility online.  American big business is against universal health care while those of us doing the hiring and growing in the grass roots business community are much more for it.  Big business wants to stifle innovation to protect its markets from little business guys like me. To hell with them.  You want to see what their big corporate welfare does for American jobs and prosperity?  Look no further than the US auto industry.

We don’t need less accountability on our big multinational corporations.  We need more.  Milton Freidman is dead.  Companies have more stakeholders than just shareholders.  Companies that do business in the US are not just global citizens, they are accountable to US citizens.  In earlier times, you had to have property to have a say in government.  That supposedly changed.  But now, government is owned almost outright by multinationals writing laws against the interests of the people in the dark of night for bad actors in Congress – Democrats and Republicans –  to pass as is, without debate, in exchange for campaign contributions and lucrative lobbying jobs for their families, friends and even themselves.

It’s up to us to stop it.  What’s happening to the little guy?  I’m guessing there’s a clue in the fact that late mortgage payments increased in the third quarter of this year.

toohotfortnr

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tooho:tfortnr Since you been gone, I can breathe for the first time

Hey, Frank, great editing, buddy. You really are a credit to the magazine, and I’m a total dick. Here’s what you let Bob Kagan write for you this week: