born live love die

The Washington Post has a story up about Bush exhorting the Iraqi leaders to ‘get governing’.

President Bush urged quarreling Iraqi leaders yesterday to set aside disagreements and forge a coalition government that will rein in illegal militias. His comments signaled increased frustration with the political deadlock in Baghdad more than three months after landmark parliamentary elections.

What seems to escape our esteemed leader is that there is no upside to those leaders for following his suggestion.

Jim Van De Hei gets it wrong. In the Washington Post he says:

A few weeks ago, President Bush’s spokesman dismissed talk of an impending staff change as “inside Washington babble.”

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.’s resignation yesterday suggests that Bush was listening.

This Administration is going to continue doing what they are doing. Bolten is a continuation of business as usual.

Assemblyman Kaloogian, a Republican candidate to fill the seat vacated by now felon Duke Cunningham, says he went to Baghdad and it was peaceful. The picture on the Assemblyman’s website seems to have been taken in Turkey. The blogosphere is having some fun with this. Jesus’ General has this picture in response.

Crooks and Liars has the video of Andrea Mitchell, otherwise known as Mrs. Allan Greenspan, saying that George Bush was set on going to war. The true conservative base is turning against this President. Soon, all he will have left are the loonies.

Alec Baldwin shines a light on it.

Pornography is the lurid and detached exploitation of something that is essentially good, even necessary, in order to make money, while simultaneously shaming and disgracing all of those who are involved. Instead of the basic force of sex, “political pornographers” exploit the good and necessary love of country that men and women seek to express and exercise on both sides of the aisle. Hannity is such a pornographer. He taunts and goads his listenership to express their political views in lurid, yet detached, ways. They do it in anonymity. They stress themselves to reach out and touch people in their lurid and detached way who they do not even know. Like pornography, they exert themselves to reach a state that gives them the release that they consciously avoid through a healthier, more personal involvement. Like pornography.

Read the whole thing.

Can we get these two bozos to go back to England? Why do we give a whit about what they say? Sullivan doen’t make sense, has never made sense and may never make sense. All he has are words. Lots of words. Words that overwhelm and stultify. In this tortured post, he tries to make hay about Medicare and drugs. His pattern in simple: start with big, bombastic thoughts, then talk long enough that it appears that he has made his point or we have become so confused with trying to parse his voluminous output that we nod in agreement and stagger off. His is not the way of ideas, but the way of endurance. Note the bombast in the title: Bush’s Gift To The Left , as if there is a Left in America. There is no Left here. Just stages of Right. What passes for Left in America would still be Right just about anywhere else. Anywhere else that has free elections, that is. This article by him is fairly short, but he manages to assert that the Medicare prescription drug entitlement would lead to the collapse research and development in the pharmaceutical industry. Did I mention fear, that he always seems to hit the fear buttons?

But think about that conclusion for a minute. Does that pass the sniff test? Would these large companies stop research and development? What Sullivan doesn’t talk about are the marketing campaigns that drug companies have maintained over the years. When individual doctors, bound by the patent of perscription drug laws, were the only way for consumers to get drugs, drug companies spent lavishly developing sales with doctors. Doctors could count on free samples from salesmen, along with lots of free dinners, free trips to the golf course, free just about what ever the doctor wanted. Now that HMOs have opened up the market for doctors, drug companies have started marketing directly to consumers. Sullivan trots out the old meme about how the poor drug companies have to spend so much on research and development, but doesn’t get close to the story about how much they spend on marketing.

Lewis Lapham writes with a certainty that is total: rectitude, morality, justice, it is all there. His writing is clear and sometimes cold, straight and sometimes caustic. When he puts PAID on something, it is paid. He make a case for impeaching George Bush. He does it without histronics.

The Case For Impeachment
Why We Can No Longer Afford George W. Bush

On December18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration’s intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency’s illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press-nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant tight. The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind; and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.

“To take away the excuse,” he said.. “that we didn’t know.” So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush Ad- ministration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that “somehow it escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

Read the rest.

Via Wolcott and TomDispatch , Nick Miroff tells the tale about Marxism in Central and South America.

Bush has presided during one of the most significant political re-alignments in the history of the Western Hemisphere. By this summer, every major Latin American nation but Colombia is likely to be run by elected leaders with stronger backgrounds in Marx than free markets. If Cold War-era domino theory has been a bust elsewhere, it’s working in Latin America.

Read the whole thing.

How long has it been since Rumsfeld made the deadenders remark? From the Washington Post

On Wednesday, armed insurgents burst into the classroom of Khidhir al-Mihallawi, an English teacher at Sajariyah High School, accused him of being an agent for the CIA and Israeli intelligence and beheaded him in front of his students, according to students, fellow instructors and a physician at a local hospital.

One teacher, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared retaliation from insurgents, said that most students ran from the classroom but that some stayed to watch. Many stopped coming to school after the incident, he said. Another teacher, who said he moved his mathematics class to his home to accommodate frightened students, said Mihallawi had earlier been threatened because he worked as a translator for U.S. forces in Ramadi, a hotbed of the Sunni Arab insurgency.

Mihallawi “looked at us just like he was telling us that we do not have to be scared. Even as we were running out of the door, his looks were still telling us that nothing will happen and we do not have to be scared,” said a student, whose father asked that his name not be used. “I heard him screaming for a few seconds, then stop screaming.”

The father said his son has had trouble sleeping since the incident. “He always has nightmares and he always wakes up screaming and shaking, talking in his dreams,” he said.

March 8, 2002

Impeach Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld now.

Bush has said repreatedly that he didn’t want to go to war. Really? More details on the Downing Street Memo have surfaced. From the New York Times

In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush’s public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

Here is the meat of the memo:

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”

It also described the president as saying, “The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam’s W.M.D,” referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.

If only they could have gotten Saddam in a gay marriage scandal, the Bushistas could have pulled this off.