Lenin has many more pictures and links to YouTube footage of yesterday’s Stop the War Demo in London, though from the virtual UK news blackout you’d’ve never known it had happened at all.
Madness of King George
Bizarro Bush
I just heard George Bush’s press conference on the radio and it was a scary thing. He sounded dangerously close to total meltdown, insisting repeatedly that roadside bombs in Iraq are planted by Iranian forces and naming by deliberate omission the Iranian president as having given the order.
In press questions he came across as becoming progressively more hysterical, insisting over and over in a increasingly belligerent yet whiny rising tone that what he, the commander-in-chief, said was just plain true and they should just take it on faith.
When an obviously gobsmacked member of the press challenged him about the veracity of the intelligence and asked why he was contradicting his own commanders and that of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,, he lost his cool completely and almost shouted that he knew it was the Iranians and he would ‘ tell his commanders to hunt them down to protect American troops’.
Somehow Mark Urban, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, construed this deeply worrying display of emotional instability and trigger-happy aggression in a world leader as meaning that Bush is backing off war with Iran and the Korea deal could be a model for the Iran situation.
Uh? WTF? Did we hear the same broadcast?
I construe this not as some mythical rapprochement but as bloody scary. Bush sounded like a man dangerously out of even the slightest modicum of self-control, both angry and petulant, with an itch to go to war and his finger on the nuclear trigger. He’s just looking for an excuse, any excuse. He is a danger to everybody around him and a liability to his country.
If I thought it might not get me shipped off to Gitmo I’d be asking the same question Henry II asked of his knights re Thomas A Becket. In a purely satirical way, obviously.
Whither the Democrats?
(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words)
It’s hard to decide what to quote from this excellent Mike Davis article about what the left can expect from the Democrats after their November victory, but I think the following two paragraphs are best at showing the juxtaposition between expectations and reality:
The fate of New Orleans, of course, is one of the great moral watersheds in modern American history, but most Democrats shamelessly refused to make federal responses to Hurricane Katrina or the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the Gulf Coast central issues in the campaign. Although President Bush himself had declared in his Jackson Square speech that ‘we have a duty to confront this poverty [revealed by Katrina] with bold action’, the Democrats have shown no greater sense of ‘duty’ or capacity for ‘bold action’ than a notoriously hypocritical and incompetent White House. Their priorities were exemplified by the six-plank national platform in November that stressed deficits and troop buildups but failed to mention either Katrina or poverty.
[…]
But Nancy, Harry and Hillary do have one domestic crusade whose importance transcends other dogmas and constraints: the promotion of the ‘innovation agenda’ that the Democrats hope will dramatically solidify their support among hi-tech corporations and science-based firms across the country. If you wanted to find the missing urgency and passion that the Democrats should have focused on Katrina and urban poverty, it was evident last year in the rousing speeches that Pelosi and other leading Democrats delivered in tech hubs like Emeryville, Mountain View, Raleigh and Redmond.
It seems to me that what happened in November is that the grassroots groundswell of anger and frustration aimed at the Republicans has been co-opted by the Democratic Party’s Washington establishment. While the party’s base has always been strongely opposed to the Patriot Act, the War against Terror and the War on Iraq, it’s leadership has largely prefered to go along with Republican plans, either out of calculation or fear. According to the netroots (including myself) this attitude was the reason for the Democratic defeats in 2002 and 2004, with the gains in November last year as a vindication of the netroots’ vision. In reality however, the Democratic leadership hasn’t changed its stance on these issues; it’s still largely supportive of the War on Iraq and only willing to offer symbolic opposition rather than real opposition. From their point of view, their strategy of triangulation, of playing to the supposed centre worked. They didn’t need to radicalise
themselves in order to win Congress back form the Republicans, they just needed to wait and let the Republicans destroy themselves. In other words, the netroots have largely failed to move the party to the left, or even to get them to be more aggressive in opposition.
Instead, as Ilya suspected last Tuesday, the Democrats have courted those segments of business who’ve become unhappy with the Republican focus on war and the accompanying corruption. The war may have been kind to Halliburton and Exxon, but has it for companies like Microsoft? The credit for this split in elite opinion lies mostly with the Iraqi resistance who’ve managed to shatter the dream of a obedient Iraqi client state, but also with the anti-war movement, which for the moment has made it harder for politicians to be openly pro-war…
What we’ll probably see in the next few years then is a tug of war between the Bushites and the corporate elites that profit from them and the Democrats, with the former trying to keep the full war going while the latter will argue for a withdrawal with residual force. In both cases, expect more use of airpower to keep American casualties down at the expense of Iraqi civilians.
Read more about:
War on Iraq, Mike Davis, Democratic Party, US politics
Are You Tonkin To Me?
It’s getting so I want to turn off all the radio and tv and cut the internet connection: there is no escape from this feeling of sick inevitability that the US will launch a nuclear strike against Iran.
Any idiot with half a brain can see that the US is concocting a trumped up case for war, no matter how much they deny it and attempt to dissemble:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates insisted again Friday that, despite persistent reports to the contrary circulating in Washington and around the world, the United States is not planning military action against Iran.
“I don’t know how many times the president, Secretary Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran,” an exasperated Gates told reporters at a NATO meeting in Spain. In fact, he said, the administration has consciously tried to “tone down” its rhetoric on the subject.
Does this rhetoric sound very toned down to you?
“Iran is going to have to understand that the United States will protect its interests if Iran seeks to confront us.”
Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs
Or this?
My Coup-Ca-Choo
When I asked if Cheney had “found” a fourth branch of government in position that until a decade or so ago was considered a seat warmer for a presidential run and the designated state funeral stand-in for the president, I didn’t realize they were actually setting this forth as a legal argument. Dear God.
This means that he considers himself even more “unitary” than he considers the president, beyond all reach of either branch, answerable to no one.
Cheney is refusing to comply with a presidential executive order. What do you suppose the Empty Codpiece feels about this? Does he know that his Vice president believes he has an independent office that doesn’t answer to him or anyone else?
Digby has been writing for some time about Dick Cheney’s manipulation of US constitutional law to put himself beyond the scrutiny or oversight of any branch of government, including the judiciary. In effect Cheney and his lawyer accomplices have created a virtual dictatorship with unlimited and unaccountable powers that even usurps the presidency. That he planned to do this is something that has been obvious from the outset, as many law-bloggers have pointed out.
But some of Digby’s commenters seem taken aback. Have they been walking around with their eyes shut? Why are people so damned surprised at this? Juan Cole was warning of this explicitly in 2004:
In short, has there been a Cheney coup-by-default? Is W. so disengaged that he is taking dictation from the former CEO of Halliburton? And, we now know that LBJ used to spend his mornings on the phone to business cronies doing private business. How much of Cheney’s time is spent on the phone to old business associates in the corporate world (seeking to know what legislation they would like to have)? Who pushed Bush into the second, disastrous round of tax-slashing, which was a way of selling our children into indentured servitude?
It may well be that the US has not a presidency but a Duumvirate a la ancient Rome.
As they started so they’ll finish. Immediately post-election the White House promised “a cataclysmic fight to the death” with Democratic opponents. Well, they’re just doing exactly what they said. They may be evil bastards but at least they’re consistent evil bastards.
I’m not expecting anything at all from the Democrats: they are bought and sold and it’s all about the Presidential race now anyhow (which will be horribly ironic when Cheney cancels the election under the special emergency powers that he issued to himself in secret). From what I’ve seen of the Democrats in Congress so far it appears that, with honourable exceptions like Feingold, the leadership’ve already given up this fight – unless they’re playing a particularly abstruse long game that us mere mortals are unable to see. I know I can’t see it and I’ve been watching American politics for decades. But if there is no plan and Democrats don’t act, we’re all screwed. So why don’t they?