Tag: obama

Decline and Fall

We can see a lot of the decline and fall of the MSM at the hands of those damnable innertube world wide web log, or “blog” startups what with their cursing and pajamas and whatnot in last night’s press conference.

First, we have the Huffington Post’s Stein:

“Today, Senator Patrick Leahy announced that he wants to set up a truth and reconciliation committee to investigate the misdeeds of the Bush administration. He said that before you turn the page, you have to read the page first. Do you agree with such a proposal? And are you willing to rule out right here and now any prosecution of Bush administration officials?”

Of interest for being the first non-plant blogger called on at one of these thing. Let’s compare and contrast to the performance of the MSM, in this case the Washington Post’s Michael Fletcher asked:

“What’s your reaction to Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?”

I think we can all agree that that’s pretty much exactly what anyone given one question would ask the sitting President. At least it failed to include the traditional four-paragraph lead-in. Been nice knowing you, MSM.

The Year We Make Contact


Interesting results from the folks over to Gallup. Turns out that, despite major (and continuing) assistance from the MSM, ‘Merica is seeing right through this shit.

Seemingly forgetting the downright ruly 2-million person mob at their doorstep on Inauguration Day, seemingly forgetting that, in many cases, Obama carried their own districts by large, double-digit figures, seemingly forgetting that, you know, the economy is in freefall and that most everyone in America places blame squarely at the doorstep of the GOP; most of all, seemingly forgetting 2010.

On behalf of the mob

Ezra opines on the scene:

This is, in other words, no time for moderation. And on the Mall today, you could believe it. The press was seated directly before the podium – I had a second-row seat to history, you might say – and behind us stretched the long lawn. And all we could do was gape. It was a sea of people. Millions of people. A mass of moving, yelling, dancing, joyous humanity, filling every patch of green and surrounding the Washington Monument. The image richly recalled the iconic photographs of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. And the assembled politicians knew it. Up on the podium, you could see senators snapping pictures on their digital cameras, pointing at the crowd, shaking their heads in disbelief. They weren’t pretending to be blase about the scene. This was different. This was dramatic. It was a screaming, laughing, cheering rejoinder to those who would constrain the scale of Obama’s ambitions, or question his political assets.

And, as somebody out there moving, yelling, dancing, and actively being humanity: I agree on all points. You’d think the members of both the “loyal” Democrats as well as both the vigorous/healthy and the lunatic, nothing-will-move opposition from the GOP side would look out and have exactly the same moment…and, upon hearing Obama’s own “the ground has shifted beneath them” line would combine the two streams of information and move out accordingly in the coming days and months. Instead, Jay Boehner gives us this:

I’m not sure that anyone knows exactly what [Obama] was trying to say.

Indeed, the meaning of the various threads at work on the day were quite muddy. I guess we know what we have to look forward to.

File under: Yep.

Nice to hear, not unexpected quote from the National Governors Association meetings:

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, the incoming head of the DGA, was more blunt: “Just to have an administration, a president, a vice president, who listened, engaged, and came to meeting prepared – it’s a brand new idea.”

Competence! What a fucking concept. Next: It is discovered that Obama doesn’t hold the very notion of “government” in contempt. Remarkable!

Somehow I thought it would be “BarackO!”

In which we learn about a newly minted Senator’s first encounter [warning: FOXnews, so NSFW] with the Presidentiary:

Four years ago, Obama and other newly elected members of the Senate were invited to the White House for a breakfast meeting with Bush, who pulled the young Chicagoan aside.

“Obama!” Bush exclaimed, according to Obama’s account of the meeting in his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope.” “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours – that’s one impressive lady.”

The two men shook hands and then, according to Obama, Bush turned to an aide, “who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.”

Bush then offered some to Obama, who recalled: “Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.”

Okay, that’s more than a little weird. Was the President also wearing Kleenex boxes as shoes? How were his fingernails? Anywho, just when you think it’s peaked as a story:

The president then led Obama off to one side of the room, where Bush said: “I hope you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice.”

“Not at all, Mr. President,” Obama told the commander-in-chief.

“You’ve got a bright future,” Bush said presciently. “Very bright. But I’ve been in this town awhile and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention like you’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it won’t necessarily just be coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be waiting for you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.”

Ever the friend to Our Burden, I guess. Mostly this interchange reminds me of the time a very special Aqualish named Ponda Baba ended up with no arm. Perhaps Bush is wanted in twelve planetary systems as well?

Back to Our Story:

Bush then noted that he and Obama had something in common.

“We both had to debate Alan Keyes,” the president said. “That guy’s a piece of work, isn’t he?”

This is clearly an issue we can reach across the aisle on. But things take a turn for the dramatic when:

Obama laughed and even “put my arm around his shoulder as we talked,” he recalled, although he added the gesture “might have made many of my friends, not to mention the Secret Service agents in the room, more than a little uneasy.”

I can see the headlines now: an unidentified United States Senator was wrestled to the ground today when he groped the President unexpectedly. Mr. Bush was unavailable for comment, still ensconced several stories underground in what insiders somewhat elliptically refer to as the White House’s ultra-secret Hyperbaric Purel Chamber.

But then it’s back to business:

Despite this display of bonhomie, Obama said the president’s demeanor turned downright frightening when he laid out his agenda to the freshly minted lawmakers.

“Suddenly it felt as if somebody in a back room had flipped a switch,” Obama wrote. “The president’s eyes became fixed; his voice took on the agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption; his easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty. As I watched my mostly Republican Senate colleagues hang on his every word, I was reminded of the dangerous isolation that power can bring, and appreciated the Founders’ wisdom in designating a system to keep power in check.”

When I quoted from this passage to Bush during an Oval Office interview, the president seemed irritated to learn he had been taken to task by the senator he once counseled.

I thought I was actually showing some kindness,“ Bush said indignantly. "And out of that he came with this belief?”

The president added with a bit of a scowl: “He doesn’t know me very well.”

Oh, I think he knows you pretty goddamned well. We all do. We. All. Do.

Why He Won

I think this pretty much captures the essence of the entire Obama Campaign: Professional Division:

Prologue…Obama is paying a visit to the Googleplex:

The politicians visiting auto plants could control what was said during the event. Today, candidates must place themselves at the tender mercies of the audience. Those who go to Google sit exposed on the stage, without the protective lectern provided in a debate, answering questions for 45 to 60 minutes. But without the escape hatch of a timekeeper’s buzzer, and as the only speaker, the candidate cannot evade uncomfortable questions. Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, for example, asked Senator Obama for his views on Iran, Pakistan, and Guantánamo — and that was a single question.

Fine. But then, Act Two: A Sudden Turn:

Mr. Schmidt asked […] “How do you determine good ways of sorting one million 32-bit integers in two megabytes of RAM?” [Obama replied] “A bubble sort is the wrong way to go” […] the quip brought down the house.

And that, my friends, is a prepared candidate.

In Aid of A,B,C

The lipstick on a pig thing is indeed the greatest issue facing the country since John McCain spent several years as a guest of The Red Menace.

But it’s worth noting that there’s another scandal of phenomenal proportions out there, just waiting to give us its money:

Palin’s [gubernatorial] office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.

Those requests for the study of wildlife genetics and mating habits seems pretty antithetical to the long-standig views of Palin’s running mate, John McCain.

“We’re not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana,” McCain said earlier this year, referring to a request from Montana for federal money to study the endangered grizzly bear. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money.”

My stars, she wanted to study crab fucking? How old were those crabs? Were they instructed on how to use crab condoms? Were there any crab abortions planned as part of the research? And, won’t somebody please think of the seal DNA!?! This is before we get to her tacit approval of dread science and knowledge. Jesus, shouldn’t she be in some kind of jail cell right now awaiting verdict?

Of course, we’ll hear about none of this. Why? Well, fortunately Joe Scarborough told us why in this little moment in which the truth slipped out:

MATTHEWS: Now, [the lipstick on a pig flap will] die, as we said, it’ll jump the shark. Two days ago, no, we’re all talking about – you’re waving the tabloids around, come on. Two days from now – I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?

SCARBOROUGH: Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive.

To quote Steve Benen:

As far as I can tell, the story has to a) have video; b) be exceedingly simple and easy to summarize in a few seconds; and c) be good for John McCain.

Millions of dollars for seal DNA and crab fucking clearly have A and B, but not enough C. Back to porcine cosmetics, then.

Why not try this on for size: John McCain must hate Israel since he wants to de-fund our support to it. Sarah Palin quotes an anti-Semite in her speeches; she must hate Israel even more (and that’s rather charitably assuming she’s aware of its existence). AIPAC much? They were never that into politics anyway. But they probably just realize that this one only has A and lacks B or C. Lets face it, Israel’s just too boring and complicated for the media. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what the McCain campaign decides to talk about.

Chartsengrafs

This is a start, at least:

Let me make a point about efficiency, because my Republican opponents – they don’t like to talk about efficiency,“ Obama said.

"You know the other day I was in a town hall meeting and I laid out my plans for investing $15 billion a year in energy efficient cars and a new electricity grid and somebody said, ‘well, what can I do? what can individuals do?’ Obama recalled.

"So I told them something simple,” Obama said. “I said, ‘You know what? You can inflate your tires to the proper levels and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level, we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil we’d get from John McCain drilling right below his feet there, or wherever he was going to drill.’”

“So now the Republicans are going around – this is the kind of thing they do. I don’t understand it! They’re going around, they’re sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea as if this is ‘Barack Obama’s energy plan.’

"Now two points, one, they know they’re lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they’re making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.

Fine. But what we really need in this fight are Ross Perot style charts and graphs. Hard numbers. Hit McCain right where he’s most vulnerable: his total lack of understanding of anything numerical. He’s already said he doesn’t get economics, is unaware of the computer, knows nothing of the innertubes. The simplest pie chart will strike him like a bolt from the distant future; and he’s guaranteed to do us the honor of saying so on national television. Every one of these idiotic GOP-lead, media enabled "ain’t it funny?” lines needs to be systematically dismantled beyond the point of comfort.

Brazen, prideful stupidity and its media enablers must be exterminated from the public discourse. Starting now. Because it’s only going to get worse, and because McCain is counting on a bunch of silly issues like this sopping up all available debate time. If they actually were to, you know, debate three or four times, well, let’s just say that would be a GOP disaster.

After 9 or 10 years of this non-stop nonsense, we’re so steeped in it we don’t even notice anymore. It’s going to take 15 or 20 years to march it back. Start now.

Clarity

Let’s just make clear that I agree with the point of this paragraph in its entirety:

As for FISA, while in principle I think legally restricting government spying is a good thing, in practice I’m skeptical it makes much difference. As someone who has had a foot in the harder “left”, the one that gets spied on, the old FISA rules didn’t stop government infiltrators or all sorts of violations of privacy. […] I see FISA as a nice issue to huff and puff about, but it’s a pretty minor issue compared to just ending the war [and] shutting down torture…

It’s not about “making a difference” in a strict “the government shall never spy on its citizens without due process” sense. It’s about making a stand. It’s about the political optics of the vote. It’s about letting your opponent flail about with a bunch of vague claims as opposed to clear, quantifiable, and antithetical viewpoints from you and your campaign over the course of a very few months.
Is this so hard to understand? Is there no Democratic policy adviser that can understand these simple facts? You are the Change Candidate and you choose to side with the least popular President in history? To hand the GOP a bill that they couldn’t pass when they held control of both houses of Congress? This is Change we can Belive In?

Let the illegal, warrantless wiretaps expire in August. Tell America why you did so. We still would have the secret FISA court, and plenty of low-barrier, almost-never-denied secret warrants out there avialable for when bin Laden makes that so-frequently-heralded call to somebody in this country. We already know these things were approved on the least scrap of probable cause. That bit of non-action accomplished, you set about prosecuting anyone and everyone who took part in these illegal wiretaps.

But don’t take my word for it. Check out this quote:

“This Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. When I am president, there will be no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens; no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime; no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. Our Constitution works, and so does the FISA court.”

That would be Obama, back in 2007. I guess he thinks it’s better to wait until he’s President to live up to those words rather than to do so yesterday when it really mattered.

9/11 didn’t happen because law enforcement couldn’t tap a phone. Broadly speaking, it happened because when presented with a memo titled “bin Laden determined to strike in US” Bush said “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now” Period.