The Next Open Thread: Gonzo Edition

by DemFromCT

Andrew Cohen, writing for washingtonpost.com, has been right on the money in his 'The Great Gonzo' series (my title, not his):

Believe Who? The President or Your Own Eyes?

The art of politics, I suppose, is the art of trying to convince someone of something that you yourself don't really believe; to convince someone that they ought to believe you and not their own lying eyes. I know this but I still cringe whenever I hear a politician say something totally at odds with objective reality. I cringe because I consider it a waste of my time to be listening to it and a waste of the speaker's time in saying it.

Don't that just sum it up? And...

House to Vote Today on Iraq Pullout

The House has scheduled a vote today on a bill that would require U.S. troops to begin pulling out of Iraq by Oct. 1. Democratic leaders predict they will have enough votes to pass the legislation and send it on to President Bush for his promised veto.

Several House members said they would go along with the bill negotiated with the Senate in a bid for party unity despite their desire for an earlier, binding withdrawal date.

They can't get a bill. Well, they can but it'll never pass the Senate. Well, it passed the Senate, but they don't have the votes to pass the conference bill. Well, it'll get passed but it will get vetoed (a clear defeat for Democrats). Well, Republican lawmakers are on the defensive and not Dems, but...

What's on your mind today?

Comments

[DemFromCT]

more from Cillizza on corruption:

Look at exit polling from 2006. Roughly four in ten voters (41 percent) said "corruption and scandals in government" were extremely important. Of that group, Democratic candidates won 59 percent, while Republican candidates won 39 percent. Those for whom corruption was a big deal tended to strongly favor Democrats as the party of change. So corruption was a key ingredient in that deadly mixture for Republicans last November, but it would be a mistake to call it the only or even the main ingredient.

[Melanie]

Lieberman on CNN about the great progress in Iraq. Dem, what were the people of Connecticut thinking?

[tekel]

What's on your mind today?

Whether sexual intercourse in the privacy of the home between adults competant to give consent is a constitutionally protected "Fundamental Right" in the framework of Griswold v. CT, or whether it is simply a "Liberty Interest," as the right to choose an abortion during the first trimester of preganacy has been styled, or whether it is neither, because the State has a legitimate rational basis for restricting intercourse in the name of public health and safety (and Kennedy's delicate morals).

If Souter resigned, could they overturn Lawrence v. Texas, the same way that L v. T overturned Bowers v. Hardwick?

That's what's on my mind.

[tekel]

Oh, and also: why give Monica Goodling immunity? Can't we at least torture her a little bit first? She surely doesn't need all of those teeth. Or fingers.

Oh, my head is going to explode.

[John Forde]

Why immunize Goodling? SPEED.
Scandals must snowballl and that takes velocity. As long as Rove can slow walk things won't spin out of control for him.
We need Goodling's testimony ASAP. But I think it needs to be behind closed doors. That way every way for Rove looks like a perjury trap.

[Mimikatz]

But immunizing Monica is going to be very slow too (see second update).

I'm not necessarily a great fan of Rahm Emmanuel, but this is a great speech. One good line:

The Bush Administration has redefined the famous challenge of President Kennedy’s inaugural address. Instead of “Ask not what your country can do for you,” it has become “Ask what your government can do for our party.”

The whole thing is good. He really pulls it all together.

[John Lopresti]

I had an old prof who said you can't legislate morality. Some folks can pontificate about it though. Following the recent trial liveblogged from FDL about Libby, we got to see a few redacted documents. I visited a prof's website at GU and noticed the cover on his book looks like some of emptywheel's redacted documents, book cover. I thought of this in response to the comment, above, about privacy and morals, though I think rarely about those matters with respect to politics. It turns out the cover is on a book written by a person who argued some of the lurid cases about private behavior, Prof. Barnett.

Since the thread is open, I have a few items in the inbasket. When Goodling resigned, there was that radio report; listen around 2:20 into the audio, describing Goodling's replacement. I am so reluctant to listen to media that hearing the direction that story was going was enough; but I always wondered if there was more depth for discovery there. Especially: considering the commentator is a respected expert in government affairs.

Another loose thread I located in the attorney purge story was this solid bit of research about the Griffin as Cummins replacement in AR, along the lines of DiFi's disruptive of civic corruption prosecutions comment. Friedman is an excellent writer on electoral law, which is how the Griffin appointment came into his purview, as Griffin has a history of getting chalk on the cleats trotting close to the margins of elections rules. About which: read that article by one of the leading attorneys who brought the suit to nullify the DeLay regerrymander, which ultimately brought the supreme court into action to restore at least one voting district's rights, in TX.

[radish]

But immunizing Monica is going to be very slow too (see second update).

Which, among other things, will probably give Scott Bloch enough time to issue some subpoenas of his own.

Regardless of what Iglesias has said about his confidence in Bloch and his complaint having triggered the investigation, I suspect that Bloch's initial "target" is going to be the RNC rather than the White House. Those servers and emails are going to be seized, sooner or later, by somebody. It's way too late to prevent that. And when that happens, both the RNC and the WH are exposed to some very very serious legal jeopardy.

The choices for who does the seizing are Congress, DoJ, and Bloch. Somebody attached to DoJ would have been ideal before January, but, well, that ain't gonna fly now... Fortunately, Bloch is a confirmed wingnut and dominionist. Karl probably has a nice fat dossier on him, and a variety of back channels through which to coordinate the legal maneuvers, so Bloch an excellent second choice.

With Goodling immunized, the RNC end of the paper trail part of an "ongoing investigation," and Bloch selectively requesting only what the WH wants him to request, an awful lot of smoke and sand and fog can be generated. It probably won't help in the court of public opinion, because the "ongoing investigation" routine is so stale they might as well have put OJ Simpson in charge. But in court it will be critical to have excuses to limit Congressional access to the RNC servers and paper trail. Thus Bloch's "no stone unturned" investigation.

[greenhouse]

Yer right radish. Bloch is under investigation himself for retaliating against underlings who disagreed with his policies and tossing out legal whistelblower cases to reduce office backlog. It's like the fox guarding the hen house.

[freepatriot]

I was reading a BarbinMD post at DKOS about broder sounding like a crazed bushie

if she thinks broder is wrong, wait until she sees hitchens latest

I'm usually expecting hitchens to sound like he's drunk, but now he sounds like he's REALLY drunk, or maybe he moved up to mescaline

it's a tough story to follow, but apparently bush isn't responsible for starting the war in Iraq

Reading about the murder of more than 100 Iraqis last week, I was barely even annoyed when I saw the headline that an anti-war Web site put on it: Dozens more die in Bush's war was the general thrust of the thing. It was as if al-Qaida had played only a walk-on part in its own atrocities. We are sometimes told in weirdly neutral tones that the attendant sectarian mayhem has been "unleashed" or even "fueled" by the arrival of the coalition, terminology that has the same exculpatory effect.

Al Queda DID have a "WALK ON" part in Iraq, and george bush created the door Al Queda walked thru

but none of that really matters, as hitchens explains in the next paragraph:

if what Allawi says is true, then Iraq was headed straight for implosion and failure, both as a state and a society, well before 2003.

then hitchens asks a VERY interesting question:

How had a country that was bursting with oil wealth and development in the 1970s become a sweltering, violent basket case?

then the alcohol kicked in, and hitchens goes off mumbling about failed dictatorship and "Overseas Agression" (??? Saddam attacked someone "OVERSEAS" ???). Some how, the names of george herbert walker bush and ronald wilson reagan never came up in hitchens minimal disscussions of the causes of Iraq's impending implosion

hitchens must have passed out after that last part, but i think the general idea is that Iraq was gonna implode any way (for some mythical or unknown reasons) and Al Queda is out there lurking EVERYWHERE, so you can't really blame george bush for fucking up Iraq, cuz Iraq was gonna be fucked up one way or another

the question I got is HOW THE FUCK DOES HITCHENS HAVE A JOB THAT ALLOWS HIM TO BUY THAT MUCH ALCOHOL ???

sorry, had to say it ...

[Jodi]

freepatriot,

a little bit jealous are you?

By the way, where is the link/pointer/url to where the Attorney's complained about loyality oaths? Casper tried to shield you.

[P J Evans]

freepatriot, try this artilce by Gergory Cochran on for size:

http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_04_09/article.html
"Twilight Zone"

After reading it, I'm sitting there saying, 'Yeah, it does make sense that way.' Hitchens sounds like he belongs to that group, too.

[greenhouse]

Freepat,

I think Saddam was gonna switch to trading oil from dollar to euros to extricate Iraq from the UN sanctions and as an F@*! you to the US. Clinton knew it. So did Bush/Cheney, only Clinton didn't start a war.

[joel hanes]

> trying to convince someone of something that you yourself don't really believe

There's a technical term for this kind of speech ...
hmmm.
Oh, *I* remember -- Harry Frankfurt wrote an entire essay
about it (now available as a book):

http://web.archive.org/web/20040421060422/www.jelks.nu/misc/articles/bs.html

"For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony."

"The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor co conceal it."

"[the bullshitter] does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

[DemFromCT]

Jodi, if you think this is all small potatoes, reserve judgment a bit.

Explosion of Movement

The politicization of all government agencies by this WH is not only unethical, it is illegal. From global warming to Jack Abramoff, this is all of a pattern. 30 something political appointees have had free reign with WH and Rove backing to do the unthinkable.. finish the K Street project and turn the US Government into a patronage/spoils system for the GOP that rivaled anything the 19th century could offer.

There's so much more that's coming out now. See the WaPo today...
Political Briefings At Agencies Disclosed
White House Calls Meetings Lawful