Just another day

Just another day down at the old watering hole:

And here we thought that ungulates were sorta wimpy...

Robert Kennedy

I had forgotten that June 5, 1968 was the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Here is one man's remembrance:

It was still dark outside when I felt my mom’s hand shaking my shoulder. “You need to get up,” she said and started out of my room.
“What’s going on?”
My mother hung her head. “Bobby Kennedy’s been shot,” she said softly and walked out.
I was out of bed at warp speed and parked in front of the TV in the den. There the flickering pictures proved my mom’s information true. Another Kennedy assassinated. Another senseless act of violence on a man who asked only for peace and justice for those less fortunate than himself.
For me, the “last, best hope” gone.
I became a cynic in my political thinking, indifferent to a system that killed its best. I devoted my energies to rock and roll and wretched excess in the ensuing years. Except for a spite vote for McGovern in 1972 to piss off my Nixon loving father, I took no interest in politics, especially Presidential politics, until 1992 when an Xer friend shamed me into finally standing up again. I voted for Clinton because he reminded me a little of that hero of my youth - Bobby Kennedy.
And every June 5th I stop for a few moments and remember how I believed in what America could be once - try to get some of that belief back - and, to use an old Boomer chestnut, “keep on keeping on.”
And I ask Bobby to forgive me - and my generation - for failing to pick up his torch.

No mercy

In children's sports, there is often what is called a "mercy rule" -- if one team is ahead by an extraordinary amount, like, say, by 10 runs in the 4th inning, then the game is called 'over'. In retrospect, I'm not sure if the mercy is for the kids or for the parents, but certainly by the time a mercy rule applies, the parents are quite happy to show "mercy" to the losing team. Good game, good try, too bad, better luck next week, see ya!
In politics, there are no mercy rules.
Republicans are asking for one now, starting to plead for one. They think they should just be able to agree that its too bad the Bush presidency is such a failure but its really not their fault, nobody's fault really, no hard feelings, see you on the diamond next year when we'll have a new pitcher.
Not so fast.
This is starting to get fun.
TRex:

Well, we knew this day would come, and yet, who knew that it would taste quite so sweet? You see, my pretties, it seems that Peg Noonan was right when she said that the Right Wing base is cracking under the unbearable strain of the Bush administration's pro-corporate/anti-nativist stance on immigration. At this very moment, our enemies on the Other Side are fragmenting, breaking apart into a jillion little tiny glittering shards of impotent rage, and all right before our very eyes. Isn't it beautiful? . . . Ace has a message for us:

Message To The Left: I'm not saying you should impeach him, I'm just sayin', you know, go with your hearts.

Oh, nooooooo, not when he's making you all this unhappy. He's only there for another year and a half or so. I think we should leave him twisting in the wind for as long as possible just so he can continue to heap handful after handful of dirt on the coffin lid of conservatism.
I know I shouldn't enjoy your pain, Wingnut bloggers. It's spiteful and cruel of me; petty, bilious, and adolescent. And yet, seeing you all running around screaming like somebody kicked in your ant-hill, well...
Yay.

James Wolcott:

Bush is not a liberal, never was; he's a messianic narcissist of mediocre abilities who needs hacks around him to keep his ego from collapsing like a dam wall. He isn't spurning his conservative base on immigration because he's longs to make nice with Ted Kennedy, he's spurning them because they disagree with him and he can't brook disagreement. If he didn't listen to his own father, a former president no less, do you really think he's going to lose winks at night over what Laura Ingraham or the NRO gang has to say? His head hits that pillow like a rock and there's no reasoning with a rock.

Glenn Greenwald:

The great fraud being perpetrated in our political discourse is the concerted attempt by movement conservatives, now that the Bush presidency lay irreversibly in ruins, to repudiate George Bush by claiming that he is not, and never has been, a "real conservative." This con game is being perpetrated by the very same conservatives who -- when his presidency looked to be an epic success -- glorified George W. Bush, ensured both of his election victories, depicted him as the heroic Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and celebrated him as the embodiment of True Conservatism.
This fraud is as transparent as it is dishonest. . .

Lance Mannion:

The Bush Leaguers have poisoned and broken and just plain fucked up everything they've touched because they are an administration of flunkies. You don't get a job in that White House unless you know it's your first and only duty to see to it that nothing the Government does inconveniences Bush's base or costs them a dime they don't want to spend or makes them feel the least little bit guilty about exercising their privileges.
The supply of intelligent, talented, diligent, responsible people who would willingly devote their lives to being flunkies and making other people rich, while unfortunately not miniscule, is limited. Cheney and Rove have had to fill in all over the place with the stupid, the naive, and the desperate for work because they are incompetent, the Michael Browns and Monica Goodlings, the Tim Griffins and Douglas Feiths of the world, who can't help but poison and break and fuck-up everything they touch . . . They've made a mess everywhere, from the Smithsonian to the FDA to FEMA to the Justice Department, from New Orleans to Baghdad, and it should be the next President's job to fix it, but the Insider Media has decided that the most important issues of the upcoming election are Hillary's ambition, Bill's decades old sex scandals, John Edwards' haircuts, and Obama's middle name.

Digby:

Listening to these phonies whine now about how Scooter didn't mean it and Lurita Doan never followed through and how the Democrats are "criminalizing" politics moves me not at all. In a world where Republicans hadn't impeached a president for purely partisan reasons, stolen elections, started unnecessary wars, pillaged the treasury and degraded the constitution I might be inclined to be compassionate toward someone like Doan, who was probably just doing what Karl Rove expected. Sorry, I'm fresh out of compassion for Republicans. As far as I'm concerned, Waxman should ruthlessly go after every single case. It is a moral hazard to allow these people to continuously get away with things of which they accuse others. It's got to stop.

Sadly, No!:

None of these former Bush cultists can admit that Dear Leader was the bee’s knees, gave them exactly what they wanted, was a living God, was the acme of conservatism. Because to admit that is to admit the fact that what they believe in — their ‘principles’, their ideology, all of which Bush personified — sucks and is a menace to humanity. It’s our job to deny them their grip, to kick them off the cliff along with Dear Leader. Because if we don’t, they’ll just find another Dear Leader, and the Cult will be restored. No mercy. Fuck these people.

Exam humour

See them all at They didn't study

Steve Gilliard is gone

I learned so much from reading Steve Gilliard over the years and I am grateful. Jane Hamsher provides a vivid portrait:

...An inveterate reader, he carried an enormous backpack filled with books and couldn't fathom that I was trying to negotiate New York City in a rental car. We spent the afternoon together eating antipasto and shellfish, wandering the streets looking for WiFi, drinking coffee and gabbing.
It was a crisp blue day, the five year anniversary of 9/11 and it made Steve extremely somber. He was very much affected by the experience of 9/11 and resented those who wanted to appropriate it for their own purposes, and didn't think that anyone who wasn't there that day could ever understand what it was like to have their whole existence shaken in such a profound way. Like many New Yorkers, he felt quite proprietary about that day and it very much shaped who he was and fueled his passion for blogging. He'd spent most of the morning grumbling online at those he felt could not possibly know what they were talking about.
Steve was unique, and it struck me as odd how someone could be such a pragmatist and a purist at the same time. He was eloquent, fierce, irascible, passionate, brilliant and brave. And I'll just shut up now before I let the cat out of the bag and tell everyone how gentle and caring he came across in person. He'd no doubt be furious with me for blowing his cover.
Eventually I had to get back to Connecticut and the last time I saw Steve he was walking away carrying that backpack, off to lay his hands on another military history book he hadn't been able to locate. I offered to drive him but Steve, being the consummate New Yorker, looked at me like I was insane and walked off into the chaos of the city that somehow seemed to center him.

Miss you, Steve.

Sgt. Pepper Day

People my age talk about when they first heard Sgt. Pepper, like we talk about where we were when we heard that John Lennon died.
Tristero explains why the Beatles made such an impact:

...to you kiddies out there who want to know what all the brouhaha about The Beatles was all about, I strongly suggest you - hell, everyone should have it - grab the four Complete Ed Sullivan Shows with The Beatles . Now here's the thing: you have to watch one a night, all the way through, including Miitzi Gaynor sing what she calls "real music," and Frank Gorshin doing Kirk Douglas impressions. You will learn two things. First of all, that life in mainstream white America in 1964 was bereft of any positive cultural merit whatsoever. And secondly, this is the ideal society your average Republican politician has in mind for America, sans Beatles of course. It truly is hard to believe. You must see these shows in their entirety to understand how much this country has changed.

Great line of the day

From Digby:

Chris Matthews reminds everyone daily that voters want to vote for the man who seems the manliest (competence is for eggheads) but I can't help but suspect that the rest of the country is no longer so convinced that the right way to pick a president is to ask yourself whether he resembles a member of the Village People. We've just spent six years with the fake cowboy and look how well that's turned out.

Get real

The Washington pundits have to get real. Now they're all excited about Fred Thompson, an actor who was senator for a few years. Last week, they were all excited about Rudy Guiliani, a lawyer who was a mayor for a few years.
Pathetic.
Just try to picture either of these guys standing at a podium on a stage next to Gore, or Obama, or Edwards, or even Hillary...

Just the flu

Well, I think I have survived.
On Friday morning, I woke up sick, sick, sick, with a persistent pain in my chest, spasms and impossible to keep anything down, even water. But over the course of the day it got better. Then last night it struck again, such pain I couldn't lie down or sleep, finally dozed a bit between 4 to 6, then violently ill again. So I went to see the doctor, and ended up spending the day in emergency getting checked for gall bladder attack. Luckily, it turned out that I did not have gallstones, just some kind of infection that led to this awful flu. And now finally the pain has faded -- I can breathlessly report that I can drink gingerale now, and I even had a cup of coffee!
The writer Jessamyn West talked about how endlessly fascinated we are with our own pain, how we calibrate it and, as it begins to lift, we anxiously poke at it "this hurt five minutes ago, does it still hurt now?" She was plagued by migraines, and she wrote about how the world disappeared as she dealt with the pain, then it gradually resumed focus and meaning as the pain went away. "The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate."

Kicking it down the road

One Friedman Unit after another.
Did someone say something about September being some sort of deadline for "progress" in Iraq? Why, perish the thought!
They're now kicking the Iraq "deadline" to 2008! Here's Bill Kristol this morning:

. . . Petraeus and Odierno assume that if they can sustain the surge through the beginning of 2008, at that point, maybe there will be enough Iraqi forces that we can begin to drawdown.

Or maybe they meant September, 2008 all along? Yeah, that's right...

Great line of the day

From Atrios:

A very frustrating thing over the past few years has been our elite leaders' failure to understand what was going on in Iraq. Bush had declared over and over again that leaving was losing, and it was crystal clear that Iraq was a complete disaster, yet they still clung to the belief that either the pony would appear or that Republicans would force George Bush to start getting out. Neither has happened, neither is going to happen, and those are perfectly obvious things to this dirty fucking hippie.

It is increasingly bizarre to see blogosphere debates like this one over how us Librulls will defend ourselves in the future for the disasters which will occur when the Democrats force Bush to leave Iraq precipitously.
The disasters which will occur because Bush stays don't seem to be discussed: war between Iran and Israel; war between the US and Iran; deaths of millions of Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria; destruction of the US fleet and/or US army by Iran's airforce; oil going to $150 a barrel; Kurds declaring independence and the Turks invading; Saudi Arabia invading southern Iraq; all of the above ...
And in the end of course, Republicans will blame all these on the Democrats, because after all, the Dems should have forced Bush to leave before all these disasters occurred ...

First time

..by which I mean, the first time somebody said something that implied you were "old".
Just heard from my daughter, who went to a huge rave in Toronto last weekend. She told some teenager there that she was 26, and this child said "You sure look good for 26!"
I remembered how I felt when, at the age of 35, I was referred to by some young chit as "women your age".
Yeah, yeah, I know, you're not getting older you're getting better, yada yada yada....

Liberating

Stupidest sentence of the day, from ABC News:

Just this week, the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill Lybrel, for the first time giving women the option not to have a period. Period.
It's unclear whether women will embrace this new pill. . .

Emphasis mine. And amid gales of derisive laughter, I ask -- unclear to whom?
ABC seems to think there is something emasculating about women not having periods anymore:

As 21st century women dominate the universities and continue to climb the executive ladder, and metro-sexual men explore their feminine side, it's harder to define what it means to be a woman.

Its not a zero-sum game, guys -- just because women become more "liberated" doesn't mean men are less "manly".
Besides, so what else is new? For years, decades, women have been taking birth control pills continuously to skip their periods, and getting their doctors to prescribe the pill for this purpose "off-label". Amanda and feministing have more.

The Seven-Day-In-May Scenario

No wonder US policy on Iran has seemed sort of schizoid lately. It is.
And is anyone surprised that Cheney is behind the game-playing? Steve Clemons at The Washington Note describes what has been going on. And it sounds uncomfortably close to a Seven-Days-In-May scenario:

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.
On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney's team and acolytes ...a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.
This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.
The thinking on Cheney's team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran's nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).
This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf -- which just became significantly larger -- as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.
. . . the official actually hopes that hawkish conservatives and neoconservatives share this information and then rally to this point of view . . . to help establish the policy and political pathway to bombing Iran.
. . . Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake by aligning himself with the policy course that Condoleezza Rice, Bob Gates, Michael Hayden and McConnell have sculpted.
According to this official, Cheney believes that Bush can not be counted on to make the "right decision" when it comes to dealing with Iran and thus Cheney believes that he must tie the President's hands . . . Cheney is saying that Bush is making a mistake and thus needs to have the choices before him narrowed.

You know, in any other American administration, this would be treason.
This type of thing has happened in the past -- Truman fired MacArthur for trying to pull the US into a war against China; Iran-Contra was about the Pentagon running a foreign policy against Congressional funding restrictions.
But this is far beyond Iran-Contra. This is the vice-president running a foreign policy against the President.
Can anyone imagine Lyndon Johnson sneaking around behind Kennedy's back, trying to get Mexico to start a war against Cuba?
Or does anyone think Daddy Bush would have tolerated for one second Dan Quayle muscling Columbia into starting a war against Venezuela?
But it doesn't take any imagination at all to think of Cheney pushing Israel to start a war against Iran, to cut off Bush's options for avoiding another war in the Middle East.
And does anyone think that Bush has the spine to deal with this? Or will we see another "My Pet Goat" moment, where Bush sits frozen in fear and indecision while Cheney takes over running the country?

Murtha's explanation

Finally, an explanation from the Democrats about the war funding bill that makes some sense. From John Murtha:

. . . Some have suggested that since the president refuses to compromise, Democrats should refuse to send him anything. I disagree. There is a point when the money for our troops in Iraq will run out, and when it does, our men and women serving courageously in Iraq will be the ones who will suffer, not this president.
Patience has run out and I feel a change in direction happening within the chambers of Congress. While we don't have the votes right now to change the president's policy, I believe that come September we will have the votes from both Democrats and Republicans to change policy and direction . . .

I don't know whether I agree with him, but he is putting the responsibility for continuing the Iraq War where it belongs, with the Republicans.
At least he's not implying that he's afraid Bush will call him names.