July 25, 2003
California Insider weblog
Via Tim Porter's First Draft we learn that Sacramento Bee politcal columnist Dan Weintraub has got a blog called California Insider:
Weintraub started the blog in April. Even though he self-identifies as a member of the "dreaded mainstream media," he inspires bridge the gap between David Broder and Mickey Kaus, "hoping that the combination produces the best of both worlds and not the worst."
The sore losers
People keep asking me what I think about this recall. I've never been a fan of Gray, Grey, Gumby, Eraserhead, Gravy Davy, or whatever else you may wish to call him, but I am uncomfortable with the growing willingness of the Republican Party to push at least to the limit of the letter of the law in the service of always winning, even going so far as to attempt to overturn or rewrite decisions that have gone against them.
I trace this at least to Clinton's election back in the day when Republicans believed they had an electoral college "lock" and didn't realize until too late that they were losing their Reagan Democrats and that Perot was giving them a halfway house and running interference for their return to their blue collar party roots.
Because he won in 1992 with only a popular vote plurality, right-wing zealots never fully accepted the legitimacy of Clinton's presidency. This contributed in no small part to the no hold's barred legal assault on him for eight years, starting ironically with savings & loans, a topic Dukakis gave the Bush family a pass on in 1988.
The tactics used in Florida in 2000, The Texas redistricting shenanigans this year, the recall effort, they all smell of a piece to me, the actions of a miltant, politically energized right-wing movement that may be on the verge of completely overstepping its bounds.
July 24, 2003
Keep your eye on that yellowcake
Matthew Yglesias asks even if the documents purporting to show that Saddam tried to purchase uranium in Niger in the last five years were forged, shouldn't we still be worried about who else might take an interest in obtaining that yellowcake stuff?
al-Qaeda Who?
CalPundit sums up a few more speedbumps on Bush's road to reelection (Shit, Meet Fan), the 9-11 Report's implication of no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda and a shitstorm brewing between the CIA and the neocons in the White House.
Me, I'm trying to put together a political blogroll for this site. So far I've got three categories: Fanatical Left, Tactical Left, and Intellectually Honest (but Still Evil) Right.
As I skim through the sites I'm considering listing, I'll probably pluck a few more entries to quote and comment on.
The incredible shifting blame
Kos sees confusion in the White House's constantly shifting blame for the 16 little words:
Except I thought that was supposed to be Tenet's fault. But then it wasn't Tenet. So it was Hadley. Case closed!
Except ... wouldn't Rice have responsibility for reviewing her deputy's work? I mean, we're talking SOTU here.
And let's not forget the pictures of Bush, carefully reviewing every word of the speech. Except for those 16 words, of course. Those were all Hadley's fault.
July 23, 2003
Noticing Oliver
The Boston Globe has published an article ('Blogs' shake the political discourse), in which Oliver Willis' outsized influence is noted:
But he has a political platform of his own, a website called oliverwillis.com, which he runs from his sparsely furnished apartment in Dedham. And when he posted an essay there, promoting former Vermont governor Howard Dean for Democratic nominee, he drew a flood of comments from people he had never met. When Oliver Willis talks, it turns out, the blogosphere cares.
Willis links back at Bask In My Glory.
July 22, 2003
The noose tightens
I suspect that U.S. and allied forces must be closing in Saddam himself, given the cornering and destruction of his sons. No matter how reptilian Saddam may be personally, it's hard to imagine him keeping his morale up after this, despite the apparent marginal success of the Stalingrad tactic (which Bill Safire recently all but blamed on liberals - is he becoming a crypto-Coulterite on issues of dissent and militarism?).
The Washington Post looks at the death of the two through the lens of the stock market: Dow Reverses Losses After Hearing News of Hussein's Sons.
Raised by a monster to be monsters they died violently and took far too many others with them in their long descent toward Hell.
Decisive action, it feels like a relief after this creeping picking-off insurgency of the last few weeks. This brings me back to the remaining items on my litany of questions about the war on terror:
Where is Osama?
What's happening in Afghanistan?
Has al Qaeda been neutralized?
Where is Saddam?
Where are the weapons of mass destruction?
Who lost them?
Who has them now?
How was this permitted to happen?
Why was risk of sabotage against the oil pipelines dealt with more forthrightly
than the risk of looting from a nuclear research sites?
July 18, 2003
Loyal opposition grows a spine
Oliver Willis has summarized the recent history of the Democratic party, vis-a-vis the second Bush administration, in The Return Of The Democrats, noting how the tactical politicization of national security has made the opposition realize they cannot remain supine and fulfill their responsibilities as Democrats.
Oliver talks about the whining from the right. I've noticed that no matter how much those guys win, they continually play the sore loser (never accepting Clinton as legitimate, trying to rewrite congressional boundaries mid-decade, turning on their own Supreme Court appointees, complaining about personal attacks from liberals, and on and on), like the worst sort of victimologists.
July 17, 2003
Ugly smear rumors
According to Capital Games (a Nation column), the White House may have punished Ambassador Joseph Wilson for undermining their deniability in the Yellowcakegate scandal:
Soon after Wilson disclosed his trip in the media and made the White House look bad. the payback came. Novak's July 14, 2003, column presented the back-story on Wilson's mission and contained the following sentences: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate" the allegation. Wilson caused problems for the White House, and his wife was outed as an undercover CIA officer.
If true, this recklessness in the interest of political tactics is seriously troublesome.
A blogger in the White House?
Howard Dean is the first serious candidate for national political office who seems to really "get" blogging, particularly its power to lower barriers between people and pop the bubble that so often surrounds high-powered candidates.
Posting to his official Blog for America weblog, Dean writes:
[O]one of you asked if there would be a White House blog. Why not?
Can't tell the liars without a scorecard
Tim Dunlop wonders if Bush's latest blatant counterfactual untruth ("We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in") - that's a lie, son - was really just a hazing prank played Scott McClellan on the occasion of his succeeding Ari Fleischer, "one of the most accomplished liars on the planet" as White House press secretary.
Maybe the idea is to confuse us all with a stampeding blizzard of lies. Thank you sir, may I have another?!
Bush lied, right-wing pundits cried
Adam Felber has a funny take on the spin or antispin from the comfort-the-comfortable sector of punditry online and off about Yellowcakegate in Bush Camp: Nothing to See Here, Folks, contrasting that with the feeding frenzy from the left (oh, and from the Democrats):
My treasonous colleagues and I are sputtering with outrage.
And they say pinkoes have no sense of humor.
July 11, 2003
Stirring the hornet's nest
Maybe the Republicans shouldn't have questioned war hero Max Cleland's patriotism. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, whose panel he sits on, recently elicited this analysis from a professor at the Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore: Iraq war may have made terror threat worse.
July 9, 2003
About the new name
Someone, I'll have to look it up,* in the last century called politics "the art of the possible." I want to focus on positive things that can be done or addressed, and not a project of demonizing 50% or more of America for being selfish or deluded or whatever. If anyone is deluded it's the left.
I also want to reclaim the word liberal, hence the subtitle. Call me a liberal. Bring it on. I defy "anti-idiotarians" to defend their illiberal biases.
Conservative is a word that means many things to many people. There are conservative impulses in all of us, often entirely justifiable, especially when trying to protect one's family, one's tribe, one's own well being. We need to work with these impulses and not try to deny them. The left is in denial, folks.
But in my mind, the only good conservative is a liberal conservative.
* R.A. Butler (thank Google).
July 8, 2003
Bite Media moving to Movable Type
As soon as the import is done, this site will have comments, trackbacks, and other groovy MT features. The URL may change too, but if so there'll be a redirect and no backward-breakage.