The Next Hurrah

A Thanksgiving Hurrahpertif

It's quiet time now at The Next Hurrah. Pleasantries and kitchen talk, saving our strength for today's Olympics of Gluttony, and the Great Debates to follow.

In a pre-emptive attack on Avian Flu, we have assembled a quail stuffed in a squab, stuffed in a chicken stuffed in a duck, stuffed in a turkey, stuffed in an emu stuffed in an ostrich, sizzling in the virtual oven ... and we've got a pool going on how many hours to give it. The kitchen herbivores are sculpting a competing  creation in tofu.

On a sobering note (and it's good to have a sobering note before we hit the cranberry sauce), Wampum reminds us:

The corn that kept the Alden-Standish party alive during the eight weeks they spent on the Cape ... was taken from a Wampanoag granary (Corn Hill). Stealing burial goods was the next logical step ...

Today we give thanks:

• That our Murtha's and our McDermott's are singing from the same page ... a consensus to be cemented further by earnest family discussion all around the nation today.
• For buttered mashed potatoes. (This story may change your outlook forever.)
• That Scott "Dilbert" Adams has started a blog.
• For winds of change, raising hopes that pigs will soon be put to flight and turkeys will relinquish their Presidential Medals of Freedom.
• For Merlot cranberry sauce.
• For good and wise and diverse companions on the blog, and in comments, and in our background cabal (if you only knew!) ... and even in real life.

Happy Thanksgiving! This is an Open Thread.

"I'll take 'History' for all the marbles, Alex"

by RonK, Seattle

George W. Bush is in Jeopardy!, and he's staked his fortunes to a tortured reading of recent history, namely:
1. You had the same intelligence I did.
2. Two official reports cleared me of wrongdoing.
3. Everybody said Saddam was a threat.
4. And all you suckers fell for it!

A credibility showdown in History? It's not exactly George's strong suit. Given the public record (and investigations pending), you'd expect Team Bush to drop this line faster than Kay Bailey Hutchinson's "what's a little perjury among friends?" trial balloon.

But they mean to play this for keeps. Fine-tune the talking points, rehearse the surrogates, and release the hounds. Redouble the stakes by attacking fact-checking journalists.

There's a purposeful strategy behind this apparent lunacy. It's big, and it's bold ... and it's massively destructive.

Wargate Flashback: the "Story Driver" Story

by RonK, Seattle

Bush chose Veterans Day as the occasion for another "bring 'em on" speech -- this one directed at his domestic critics.  OK, George, it's on ... and your side is going down. You took us to war on the wings of a lie, and that story that won't go away no matter how many nails you pound into its coffin and how much dirt you throw on top.

In fact, it's been "on" all along. Reproduced below -- for the encouragement of those who wanted a pony for Fitzmas and only got a Scooter -- is a piece I published on DailyKos back in June 2003, shortly before Joe Wilson went public.

It's a story about "story drivers". As I wrote then:

The story runs in multiple theaters. ... Each story driver is a little vortex with its own energy source and its own angular momentum. Each turns whether the media cyclops is watching or not. The little vortices will feed off each other in complex patterns of energy exchange ... orbiting, colliding, dispersing, resolving and merging until they produce one hellacious turbulent whirlwind.

In retrospect, I probably overestimated the pace of Tony Blair's slide, but the Reaper is coming for his political skin. I neglected one important driver: every "insider" has only part of the story, and wants to know more at the same time they want deniability of what they already know. Every step they take in both regards will leave tracks.

Below the fold, from Sunday, June 22 2003, WMD -- the Mosaic Speaks:
[Edited to restore dead links, but otherwise intact.]

Questions Hang in the Public Square

by RonK, Seattle

While we wait impatiently for the next day of Fitzmas,

here's a little    Hallowe'en     treat ...

themed on the    White House (of) Horrors   .

To the tune of your favorite things-go-bump-in-the-night music:

Questions hang in the public square.
The piper pipes a morbid air.
He will be paid, and foul is fair,
And the story won't stay buried.

The Next Harrumph (Harriet Miers edition)

"All in all, she was just another brick in the wall." Harriet Miers goes back to stonewalling as W's White House Counsel.

Ann Coulter sez: "Her letter today is the most eloquent and powerful thing I've seen written by her."  Heh. Indeed.

The nomination lies dead on the floor. Murder on the Orient Express: too many suspects, too many clues -- none leading to Democratic Caucus chambers. Searchlight Harry took down the big pot without ever having to show his cards.

In a trice, Bush has been shot down in bids to place a sycophantic crony on the Supreme Court, upend Davis Bacon in Hurricane Alley, and fund nuclear bunker busters. The White House is now objectively pro-bunker.

With the US Senate feeling its institutional oats, and W's shot selection presumptively in doubt ... what now? Will W find an acceptable winger? Will Dem's F-Bomb trump the GOP's Nuclear Option? (With Deadwood Dick Cheney as triggerman???) Will Bush use the classic lube for a stuck nomination, naming a US Senator? Does Laura get a vote?

This is an Open Thread.
by RonK, Seattle

Fitzmas, Wargate and Beyond: A Plea for Balance

by RonK, Seattle

The goose is cooked, the ox is gored, the chickens are coming home to roost. The kiddies are giddy with visions of sugarplums, marching frogs, TV specials, seasonal trappings and wrappings piled so deep you can't find the dog in the living room.

Fitzmas is coming -- all holidays rolled into one! The extravagance of Mardi Gras plus Thanksgiving plus Boxing Day plus Purim plus Halloween ... the weightier meditations and rededications of 4th of July, Yom Kippur, New Year's Eve, Good Friday, Memorial Day and Pesach (not to mention St. Swithin's and Groundhog's Days, with their traditional over-reading of omens).

Most of us celebrate the shallow Fitzmas, a fireworks-and-mincemeat festival of over-indulgence. Sweet revenge, fat targets, overcooked intelligence. Eat, drink and be merry, tomorrow we diet.

But I beg your indulgence for a note of perspective, a look at the deeper meanings of Fitzmas. Sure, the Big Day looms big ... until you look at the monumental developments that surround it. Fitzmas is not the beginning nor the end, just one spike in a sawtooth chain of events that lashed back and wrapped around the ankles of reckless vandals who came to DC to tear the town a new one. (They'll wish they'd stuck with ordinary hatchets.)

Gephardt on Iraq: "I was wrong"

Former House Minority Leader the Hon. Dick Gephardt was in Seattle last week on several accounts -- a victory lap for his mediation of the Boeing strike, a business seminar for the DC law firm where he hangs his hat, and a funder for Rep. Jim McDermott's Legal Expense Trust. [We'll hear more on this as Boehner v McDermott reaches critical junctures in DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and in the political arena as some of the original cast of heavies -- Gingrich, DeLay, Boehner -- prepare to test their chops in an XTREME ETHICS Cage Match Spectacular: "Moral Equivalence" .]

At this odd-couple tag-team appearance -- "Baghdad Jim" McDermott and "Rose Garden Richard" Gephardt -- the inevitable question was voiced: "Why did you support Bush on the Iraq War, and what would you do differently now?".

Rep. Gephardt's response is reproduced here from my verbatim notes, with his confirmation and concurrence, as a perspective that deserves attention both to fill gaps in the first draft of history and to smooth cracks in the road to progressive political unity.

Democrats for Roberts, and the Contrast Principle

If you always smile, nobody will know when you're  happy. Always frown, and nobody knows when you're sad. And if you shout all the time, how will anybody know when you're really outraged?

Judge Roberts will soon be confirmed as Chief Justice, with many Democratic 'Aye' votes ... and so there is wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in progressive quarters.

Are our frantic exhortations all for naught? Are our party leaders utterly lacking in brains, or hearts, or spines, or testicles, or situational awareness, or moral compasses? Are they lost in the beltway bubble? Have they sold us out? Is there no hope? Are we doing something wrong? Are we doing everything wrong? Doesn't anybody listen -- the voters? The media? Elected officials? Doesn't anybody care?

The psychic torment is genuine, but our message is undeliverable, our anguish is misplaced, nobody cares -- and it's OK.

Moved the goalposts, eh? Is that a crime?

Sometimes, in fact, it is. Rather often, really. Here, for instance:

Vandals put goalposts across the path of a London-bound express train just 24 hours after the fatal Potters Bar rail crash ... A hunt is under way for a group of children, believed to be aged between 10 and 11, seen running across the rail tracks at Hinksey, just outside Oxford.  ...

There's more.

"Impeachment"? No. Let's Talk "Exit Strategy".

by RonK, Seattle

George W. Bush.
Worst. President. Ever.

How bad is that? Bad enough to animate a lively "Impeach Bush" community. Bad enough that 42% of voters polled might sign on if they knew Bush lied his way into Iraq.

One word of strategic advice to the impeachniks: Stop!

The situation at hand is too serious for impeachment. "High crimes" are at best incidental to the major case against Bush, and "Impeachment" talk drives us farther from every plausible goal, in almost every plausible set of circumstances. It is almost comprehensively anti-strategic.

Bush is bad, but how bad is bad enough? It's an important question. Somebody has to be Worst, and Worst isn't necessarily bad enough to justify jumping democracy's routine feedback cycle.

"How bad is Bush?"
"How bad is bad enough?"
"And what do we do if Bush is bad enough?"

Make these questions -- and not your immediate answers -- the core topic of our national conversation, and we may get somewhere.