You’d think no one would still listen to Newt Gingrich, given that he predicted the collapse of the economy due to Clinton’s 1993 tax plan, and predicted a boom under Bush; we all know how that turned out.  But listen they do; everyone expects the Republicans to utterly deny the legitimacy of any Democratic government, and nothing they say in service of that accepted goal is considered to be too dumb, false, or hypocritical for public consumption.  Take Bill Kristol, please, who insisted that sectarian violence in Iraq was some kind of “pop psychology” liberal theory that would never happen, and now says, minus a necessary laugh track, that health care reform will inevitably lead to Republican triumphs.  Could anything be less valuable to the national conversation be imagined?  Well, yes.  They could put on a surly, drunken John Boehner to holler “Hell, no,”  and some other unintelligible drivel about Armageddon.  The reason, I think, that Republican craziness, lies, and stupidity are tolerated on television and newspapers is that nobody can find a Republican to spout anything else.

Ever since Watergate, Reaganomics, et al, Republicans decided that they no longer could sell any of their ideas honestly, so they completely set aside rational arguments and upfront advocacy for slogans, smears, dogwhistles, flim-flam, and Dark Predictions.  Even “Morning in America” hinted unsubtly at gloomy days ahead were the party in power tossed out, which was a neat way to distract attention from the deep recession caused by Reagan’s tax and spending policies that led to unemployment higher than today and and presidential approval ratings in the 30′s.  Morning didn’t turn out so bright afterward, either, when the stock market collapsed in 1987, the deregulated S &L’s vaporized, and the economy was still a mess when Bush pardoned all the Iran/Contra criminals on the way out the door.

I guess when your promises don’t turn out so great, it’s time to bring out the threats.  And, if you’ve already threatened economic catastrophe about a hundred times but are nonetheless responsible for the two largest ones in the past century, the upside is that the public is rightly scared of them, and will be inclined to be worried when you start ranting.  The same goes for terrorist attacks; if you ignored warnings and fumblingly mishandled the largest attacks in history, this sort of record could make you a potential Senior Terrorism Analyst, where you could gleefully gin up terror fears to your heart’s content, and not just on Fox, either.

I often complain that the media sit idly by and tolerate lies from the Republicans to be accepted as legitimate opinion, whatever it is they’re threatening on a given day, but maybe they aren’t to blame.  It is simply impossible to find a Republican whose record is unsullied by perpetual error, much less one who will tell the truth… about anything, and the media long ago stopped worrying about it.  The health care debate has been no different; it started and has ended with one party attempting to negotiate a policy, and the other party throwing a tantrum.  When the tantrum failed, the toddlers involved cursed and swore and called everybody poopyheads, and the media duly covered their tearful vows to take their toys and go play with their new friends, the teabaggers.   Poor Karl Rove hasn’t had such a meltdown since his “math” proved lacking in 2006 and 2008, a fact which naturally escaped the bobbleheads but surely not the audience.

More power to ‘em, I say.  If anyone can prevent the death of the Democrats in the next few elections it will be the repeated threats of discredited retreads like Kristol, Gingrich, Boehner, Rove, and the various Cheneys, along with the spectacle of dimwitted nutjobs like Palin, Bachmann,and Steele, attempting to dance on their graves.  If this is your Death Panel, you can probably look forward to a long and prosperous life.

Outside of Wolf Blitzer’s pathetic show, Liz Cheney’s McCarthy Palooza against the Obama DOJ isn’t going quite as planned, despite the enthusiastic boost it received from the LA Times.  Numerous prominent conservatives have branded Cheney’s insultingly ignorant fear-mongering as reminiscent of or worse than McCarthy, and even Condi Rice called the campaign, “unfortunate.”  When you’ve lost Condi Rice, you’ve lost America, Liz. I always thought it was odd that any credence and or airtime would be given to A) the unqualified daughter of the most despised politician in America, and B) the dumbest and most often wrong Neocon flak of that same dark and repudiated era, but the US media is an odd place, where no show is too unpopular to take on the road, once again.

Fortunately for Kristol and Cheney, but unfortunately for the party they think they’re boosting,  only FOX-addled Americans and overpaid media gasbags sit around worrying about terrorism anymore…  the rest of the country has its own problems, which have the advantage of being real.  The fact that they’re playing the terror card this early simply shows that they don’t have anything else, which is pretty foolhardy, since most Americans realize that Obama is as far to the right as any President could go on terror without getting hauled into the Hague.  Worse than that, these cynical, fear-based campaigns remind Americans of the worst aspects of Bush’s disastrous Presidency, something any smart Republican ought to be running from as fast as they can.

But they aren’t, of course.  A party which offers nothing but war abroad and police-state repression at home can only sell itself through fear, and as the recently released RNC PowerPoint starkly revealed, that’s what they’re going to do.  Of course, since Cheney and Kristol are more interested in papering over their shameful pasts than they are in getting Republicans elected in the future, they’re peddling the same fears from the glory days of 2002-2004, striking a dissonant note when the new, improved fears are supposed to be about creeping socialism and whatnot.  Micael Steele ought to tell Cheney to shut up, but he obviously doesn’t know what that means.

If the Republicans think, seriously, that such tired, discredited strategies will do anything but play right into the hands of the feckless Democrats who, having few good alternatives either, have already picked the Bush years as their opponent in 2010, they will remain in the minority for a long time.  The Bush years were not just about ruinous economic policies, reckless spending, and corruption at all levels, but more importantly they were about a manipulative and sleazy method of governing by fear, smear, and innuendo.  And while the former have remained stubbornly unchanged, America is happy to be free of the latter.

Liz Cheney utterly fails to recognize this, and after having successfully harangued the DOJ into making public the names of the perfectly mainstream lawyers she vilely called the “Al Qeada Seven,” is still beating her dead horse:

Cheney, for her part, shows no signs of relenting. Hours after her organization was able to browbeat the DoJ into releasing the names of the seven officials who previously represented detainees, it put out a statement demanding even more disclosure.

“We regret that they still refuse to tell the American people whether any of these lawyers are currently working on detainee issues inside the Department,” said Aaron Harison, the executive director of Keep America Safe. “The American people have a right to know whether lawyers who voluntarily flocked to Guantanamo to take up the cause of the terrorists are currently working on detainee issues in President Obama’s Justice Department.”

“Flocked to Guantanamo to take up the cause of terrorists?” Really?  How dumb and blindly hateful does Liz Cheney think we are?  Americans fell for fear in 2002 and 2004, and, unlike the media, remember what it got them.  They also remember that almost all of it was unmitigated horshshit, much of it coming from someone named Cheney.  Liz should be glad she didn’t inherit her father’s looks, but sadly, she did get his personality, and that’s good news for Democrats.

UPDATE: Mistakes were made, apparently, at CNN:

On Friday, Blitzer apologized for the graphic and called DOJ lawyers “patriotic.”

“CNN had no intention of suggesting that the Justice Department supports terrorism. Lawyers at the Justice Department are patriotic Americans and we certainly regret any confusion that may have been caused by our graphic.”

Not by his insultingly ridiculous reporting, natch, but it’s something.

This morning, Glenn Greenwald had an excellent post about the despicable fear-mongering ad Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol had slapped together to smear not just the Obama DOJ, but basically the entire tradition of western jurisprudence, the evenhandedness of which seems to offend vermin like them.  Watching the ad and considering its source, I didn’t really give it much more thought; surely such spurious McCarthyite smears have long passed their due date, and surely no non-Fox journalist would ever take them seriously.  Well, no they haven’t, and yes they would, and stop calling the Los Angeles Times Shirley.

Behold:
Reporting from Washington – Nine top political appointees at the Justice Department previously worked as lawyers or advocates for “enemy combatants” confined at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prompting new questions from Congress and conservative critics about the integrity of the administration’s handling of detainees.

Ooh, sounds scary, and “new,” to boot.

The Justice Department insists that the officials have not involved themselves in matters dealing with enemy combatants. But the department has revealed the names of only two of the nine appointees, making it difficult to independently assess the claim. And one of the named officials — Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer in the national security division — sits on a task force weighing the future of Guantanamo prisoners. She is a former senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, which worked on behalf of ensuring constitutional rights for detainees during the George W. Bush presidency.

Since everybody knows that only people with a demonstrated desire to kill all Arabs indiscriminately should ever be allowed to work at the Justice (!) Department.

The other named official is Neal Katyal, the principal deputy solicitor general, who argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Salim Ahmed Hamdan and won a 2006 ruling that Bush’s military tribunal system violated the rules of military justice and the Geneva Conventions. Hamdan, a former bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, later was released and returned to Yemen.

According to congressional sources, one of the other seven appointees is Tony West, an assistant attorney general who heads the civil division. In 2002, he was part of the California-based legal team that represented John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban.

I have a list of names, said the drunken sociopath from Wisconsin….

These kinds of backgrounds and connections “raise serious questions about who is providing advice on detainee matters,” a group of Republican senators told Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. last week.

“Some say.”  Can you believe this?  Who?  Michelle Malkin?

One of the sharpest critics is a group called Keep America Safe, run in part by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. It has derided the unidentified appointees as the “Al Qaeda 7,” and in a video on its website Tuesday asked, “Whose values do they share?”

Ah, finally a disinterested observer willing to go on the record.  It gets worse, though, when the pussies at DOJ, instead of calling such fascist propaganda what it was and giving this un-American cabal a little needed history lesson, this lame capitulation comes forth:

In a Feb. 18 letter to the senators, Ronald Welch, an assistant attorney general, said five Justice Department lawyers provided legal counsel to detainees and four filed friend-of-the-court legal papers on behalf of detainees or advocated on their behalf. He identified them only as working in Holder’s office, for the deputy attorney general and in other top positions at the department.

“To the best of our knowledge,” Welch wrote, “during their employment prior to joining the government, only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.”

Others, he said, “came to the department from law firms where other lawyers represented detainees.”

In naming Katyal and Daskal, Welch said both appointees had been careful not to overstep rules governing professional conduct.

He said Katyal, after joining the Justice Department, had “participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained” at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He said Katyal also has participated in litigation involving Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was arrested in Illinois and accused of being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell agent.

Welch said Daskal had “generally worked on policy issues related to detainees” but that “her detainee-related work has been fully consistent with advice she received from career department officials regarding her obligations.”

In referring to all of the political appointees, Welch said that none “would permit or has permitted any prior affiliation to interfere with the vital task of protecting national security, and any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false.”

Wait a minute.  Did one or more shriveled but still rule of law supporting gonad actually threaten to descend?  Quick, bring in somebody else….

In addition, Tracy Schmaler, a department spokeswoman, said Tuesday that “department attorneys are subject to ethics and disclosure rules as required under both department guidelines and the administration’s own ethics rules, which are the strongest in history.” She added that “it should be clear that fighting terrorism and keeping the American people safe is our No. 1 priority.”

That’s more like it.  Naturally, the right-wing nutjobs who dreamed up this little putsch couldn’t have been more delighted, or more theatrically outraged, at a pathetically weak response as that, and went on, and on.

Nevertheless, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said the Justice Department had not given a full accounting of who and how many top appointees might have conflicts.

Sessions said the issue was whether “the attorney general believes that treating terrorists like civilians enhances or damages our ability to gather crucial intelligence.” He said that issue could not be answered until the other seven names were released.

“It’s time for these policies to meet the light of day — and for the public to get the answers they deserve,” Sessions said.

Good job, LATimes.  And always give the last word to the scariest neoconfederate sore loser in the Senate, those types always have a lot to contribute to an informative discussion of human rights and such.  This genius article was typed by:

richard.serrano@ latimes.com

I think I ought to pour a little something and write to him.

UPDATE: (whatever unlikely replies will be eagerly appended….)

Dear Mr. Serrano,
Have you ever read the Constitution?  What about the Magna Carta?
Heck, did you ever watch Sesame Street?  Considering what you wrote
today about the flagrantly un-American attacks a discredited
neofascist like Liz Cheney made on not just the Obama DOJ, but the
entire idea of western jurisprudence, I can only conclude not.
I’ll type slowly for you…  We have, in those parts of the world that
are nominal democracies, what’s known as an adversarial system of
justice.  All alleged (do you know what that word means?) criminals
are entitled to legal representation, whether or not they are
citizens, and whether or not some chickenhawk nutjob has
extrajudicially pronounced them guilty.  This is kind of a big thing
and has been since 1215 or so, but  maybe you’ve been busy with other
things.
I know that those of you in the withered shell of our media are
desperately afraid of being called “liberal,” but when “liberal” means
not accepting medieval despotism, it would be sort of your duty as an
American to go ahead and risk the scarlet letter.  Who knows?  If such
a thing caught on, people might start reading newspapers again.
It’s worth a try, since the way you’re going about it is having the
opposite effect.
I only want to help.

Cocktailhag

Portland, Oregon

Reply

Serrano, Richard to me

show details 2:58 PM (3 minutes ago)

Cocktailhag,
You say you will type slowly for me. Why don’t you not type at all.

Regards
Rick.

Boy, did he show me, I tell you.  I’m so glad I get to call him Rick.

That’s what’s so remarkable about the situation we’re in right now; pretty much all of our problems that we face as a country stem from the simple fact that we spend HALF of our money each year trying to (often successfully) kill people we don’t know, in case they might try to kill us, and getting a lot of our own people killed in the process.  Is that smart?  Is this a country, or a mink farm?  As usual, in both wars, arms we sold to our last best friend got turned against us, so we showed them what’s what by buying a whole lot more.  Children conduct snowball fights with a more sophisticated strategy, and snow is, unlike the weapons we employ, free, and nobody dies.

Murtha, unlike his many Republican critics that suddenly emerged when he “prematurely” called out the Iraq War as a fraud and a disaster with no conceivable goal in sight in 2005, was an actual combat veteran in Vietnam, and although defense contractor dough had long since gummed up his spending priorities, he still could spot a deadly, pointless meat-grinder when he saw one, and then by defending himself against their cowardly attacks repeatedly revealed the neocons as the chickenhawk pussies they were and are.  And he did.  Sadly, the Democrats, who owe their 2006 and 2008 victories in part to outspoken antiwar Democrats like Murtha, clearly didn’t listen to him, or to the rest of the people who are quite aware that war costs a whole lot of money that might be better spent elsewhere, no matter what nonsense you read in the Washington Post or hear from David Gregory.

As a country, we’ve simply been sold a pig in a poke so obvious that we have to either admit our error now or literally go down the tubes trying to apply lipstick.  Sarah Palin has some experience in that area, and look… here she is.  She says Iran ought to be next, and didn’t even have to write that one on her hand, which I find rather disturbing.  Evidently, the current wars haven’t bankrupted us quite enough for the evergreen Republican Utopia to look good by comparison, so Sarah has spit out the teabaggers and reached for the Kristol Pistol and the Cheney Dick.  For Sarah, this is pretty much a lateral move, but for the teabaggers, not to mention normal Americans, it sucks.  (I hereby promise not to carry that metaphor any further…  CHNN has had a run on barf bags lately…)

Wars are now bipartisan again, just as they were when Murtha opened his jowly mouth, and worse, the right has decided that even two couldn’t possibly be enough, and no Democrat has yet called them insane.  If you ask me,  Murtha picked a good time to die.

In response to the well-deserved disrepute our media has so richly earned from the public for such unforgivable lameness, the solution has not been to improve quality and try not to misinform so, but rather to bring in new “talent” to serve up the same old swill.  Fortunately for, say, David Gregory, the media defines “talent” rather loosely.  Unfortunately for the long-suffering news consumer, the trajectory of “talent” is always downward; witness the NYT’s slide from Safire to Brooks to Kristol to Douthat…  who’s next, Drudge?  Britney Spears?  The LA Times dropped Robert Scheer to make room for Jonah Goldberg’s substantial bulk, and look how that turned out.  Desperate measures make for desperate times, but count on these lame rags to blame Y2K or el nino for their troubles.

Over at FOX, the dilemma was a little different, as you’d expect.  But media-savvy little Rovettes that they are there, they knew they needed something big to appeal to that ever elusive under-70 crowd; Bill O’Reilly was too sober, and as Murdoch himself said, maybe Hannity was a bit “academic.”  Enter Glenn Beck stage right, and then some.  Now, as Q-ratings go, you wouldn’t think Beck would have been the most obvious choice; he’s pasty and pudgy, beady eyed and dumb-looking, and his voice sounds like Richard Simmons without the “accent.”  Besides which, he’s utterly uneducated, bereft of any journalistic experience, and, well, to call him histrionic would be like calling Ann Coulter “outgoing.”  But therein lies the Beck magic; the “rodeo clown” FOX needed to reel in younger dumb people, and as a bonus, to make the network’s universally abysmal “journalism” look almost respectable by comparison.  Win, win.

In such an post-journalism environment , it was inevitable that Sarah Palin’s high heels would come clicking onto the stage.  Since nobody was asking any questions anyway, why wouldn’t a politician not bother to have any answers, even scribbled on a 3 x 5 card like Reagan used to?  That gal can just waltz onto any FOX show and say something like this:

“Scares me the road that he [President Obama] has us on, not seeming to understand what it is that built up America’s economic system, the free enterprise principles, the shrinkage of government, not the expansion to allow the private sector to grow and to thrive and to do what it does best and our families keep more of what they earned, so that they can reinvest and prioritize instead of government doing it for them, which is a step towards socialism. So some of the steps we’re taking economically right now scare the heck out of me.”

I’m scared too, mostly that that woman has a driver’s license, but to Bill O’Reilly, that speech was all but Churchillian.  He was no doubt too busy loofah-ing her in his mind to notice the tumbleweeds behind her eyes, but honestly.  He may think his audience is dumb, but surely they speak English?  Disturbingly, the answer is probably yes, since Palin finished up thusly:

“. . . what Reagan did . . . he boiled it all down to this. He looked at our enemies, enemies around the world, and he said, we win, you lose. That’s what I want to see and feel and hear from our new administration, from President Obama.”

Alrighty, then.  You can just imagine that over in the next studio, Glenn Beck’s Red Phone to the President is ringing off the hook, offering her the cabinet-level position of Queen of the Department of Law.  Or something.

Please….  If politics is going to henceforth be a talent show, would it be too much to ask that it contain some, uh, talent?

I’m trying to think of a place where American bombs have resulted in anything but an embarrassing disaster for those who financed it, usually on credit, and I can’t.  When the bill comes, it’s nicer to have at least the unaffordable purchase to comfort the unwise spender.  ”I can’t afford heat, so it’s a good thing I got this mink coat.”  ”I just lost my health insurance, but at least I have a TV so big that Bill O’Reilly’s mouth looks like Lake Erie.”  Instead, we have wingnuts previously and subsequently utterly hostile to such ideas suddenly turning into feminists for Afghani women, ACT UP activists for Iranian gays, and “Fair Election” zealots who nonetheless helped Bush steal two elections and govern as though he’d won a landslide.  Bombing is good for this bunch, since it minimizes American casualties, which are the only ones that even slightly matter, looks good on TV, and makes a lot of defense contractors generous come election time.  Still, its popularity with the public remains a mystery.

Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Mogadishu, Iraq, Afghanistan…..  the list is long of pointless bombing campaigns that cost us dearly in terms of both money and moral standing, and delivered the precise opposite of their many shifting “goals.”  The last two are still costing us billions, slaughtering (albeit unimportant) things a sane person might call “people,” and doing exactly jack shit to help us, even if our only goals are grabbing power and money, which of course they are.

What’s the answer to this dilemma?  Bomb Iran.  The neocons are bored with their old war porn and need something else; we all know the feeling, but is Bill Kristol’s boner really enough to start a war for?  Sadly, a lot of dimwitted and dehumanized people seem to think so, and maybe they have a point.

By spending all our money bombing things, we won’t have any money for schools, roads, clean water and air, healthcare, or prosperity, and that immigrant problem will be solved in a big hurry.  Hell, some of the places we bombed might start to look good.  Mission Accomplished.

That’s the best I can come up with.