On–air admission from Chris Matthews: MATTHEWS: What I keep doing here is asking people on and off camera who come on this program, high-ranking officers, enlisted, former officers. I get sometimes, not all the time, two different versions, the version they give me on the air and the version they give me the minute when we’re off the air. The … Read More
Ann Coulter: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
I love her: To expiate the pain of losing her firstborn son in the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan decided to cheer herself up by engaging in Stalinist agitprop outside President Bush’s Crawford ranch. I don’t think she went to Crawford to "cheer herself up". But note that we’re only one sentence in, and we have more amature psychology from the … Read More
Lessons Not Learned
Paul Begala is talking here about the smears of the right wing against Sheehan (although it is hard to tell). He’s nailed it: It seems to me the American people never really forgave the Democrats for being right about Vietnam. The left was right, of course, about Vietnam. Even my CNN colleague Bob Novak, who was extraordinarily hawkish on Vietnam, … Read More
The Chickenhawk Counterargument
TBogg examines one neo-con’s attempt to defuse the chickenhawk meme: Rusty at The Jawa Report attempted a statistical study on chickenhawkedness and didn’t get enough reponses to make a valid judgement…so he went and make a wholly unsupportable one anyway: An oft heard accusation is that of chickenhawk being leveled at supporters of the Iraq War who have no prior … Read More
Can Dish It Out But . . .
… can’t take it, apparently. It has been 10 days since I first posted on Cindy Sheehan, and after sticking my neck out and taking massive amounts of ongoing abuse and ridicule for giving her the scrutiny she deserves, I am more than happy to let others pick up the slack. Then she links to others who continue continue slamming … Read More
Sheehan Bigger Than Schiavo
From Blogometer (a good daily resource by the way): Each time this week we’ve visited Technorati, the popular blog search engine, the "Top Searches This Hour" feature has placed "Cindy Sheehan" at the very top. At one point this a.m., "Sheehan" was also #5. The Blogometer is trying to remember the last time this happened, but no person or event … Read More
Bush Administration Ignored The State Department About Lack Of Post-War Planning
No doubt because the State Department primarily deals with diplomacy, and the Bushies don’t do no pansy-ass diplomacy. One month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, three State Department bureau chiefs warned of “serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance” in a secret memorandum prepared for a superior. The State Department officials, who had been discussing the … Read More
Iraq: Worse Than What Is Reported?
Conservatives like to bitch and moan about how the media never reports the good things in Iraq. They claim it just proves media bias, but of course, we all know the real reason. To the extent that there ARE good things to report in Iraq, the media doesn’t report it because it’s too fucking dangerous for them to venture far … Read More
Chickenhawk Wankers
Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, 26, a Marine recruiter in Pittsburgh, went to the home of a high school student who had expressed interest in joining the Marine Reserve to talk to his parents. It was a large home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned the yard. The prospect’s mom greeted him wearing an American … Read More
Wankers Of The Day
The British police. It seems that the young Brazilian electrician who was shot because he was thought to be a terrorist subway bomber . . . (a) was not wearing a heavy jacket, (b) paused to pick up a newspaper on his way to the tube, (c) used his travelcard to pass the barrier, (d) did not run from the … Read More
1787 or 1861?
Neo-cons like to imagine that the New Iraq is something akin to our own country’s historic period of 1787, when our constitution was ratified and a new democracy forged. But I’ve come to believe that the ethnic strife going on over there renders the U.S. Civil War (Iraqi style) a better analogy. Harold Myerson says the same thing: It looks … Read More
Perspective
Mithras at Fables of the Reconstruction has been crunching the numbers: As of this moment, Iraq Body Count says that between 23,589 and 26,705 Iraqi civilians have died since the United States invaded Iraq. Let’s average that out, even though their method for counting deaths is extremely conservative and there is, I think, good reason to believe that the actual … Read More
Another Grieving Mom
Courtesy of The Green Knight, here’s a picture of another grieving Mom: Green Knight adds: …this man went to his death voluntarily and heroically. He was an adult when he did it. Apparently, according to the modern pro-war right, most of which thinks it’s Christian, his mom shouldn’t have been unhappy about it. Green Knight, with apologies to Cenk Uyger … Read More
WaPo Bows Out Of 9/11-palooza
Good for them. The Washington Post announced tonight that it cease its co-sponsorship of the Pentagon-organized Freedom Walk next month. The paper’s involvement had drawn heat from within and outside the paper, with a guild committee today calling for the link to end. The newspaper told the Department of Defense that it was pulling back on its offer of free … Read More
Wingnuttia Of The Day
A.W. at Freespeech.com has been on trial lately (he says), so he’s been a little late in playing the Cindy Sheehan smear game. But what he lacks in punctuality, he make up for in both verbosity and wingnuttery: I’ll lay out my evidence shortly, but here are the pertinent points in my book. The proper reaction, I think, should be … Read More