Daily Archives: 16 Nov 04

The stench of the Bush administration

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Molly Ivins [via Molly L.]: “Do you know how to cure a chicken-killin’ dog? Now, you know you cannot keep a dog that kills chickens, no matter how fine a dog it is otherwise.

Some people think you cannot break a dog that has got in the habit of killin’ chickens, but my friend John Henry always claimed you could. He said the way to do it is to take one of the chickens the dog has killed and wire the thing around the dog’s neck, good and strong. And leave it there until that dead chicken stinks so bad that no other dog or person will even go near that poor beast. Thing’ll smell so bad the dog won’t be able to stand himself. You leave it on there until the last little bit of flesh rots and falls off, and that dog won’t kill chickens again.

The Bush administration is going to be wired around the neck of the American people for four more years, long enough for the stench to sicken everybody. It should cure the country of electing Republicans.

(…)

So, fellow progressives, stop thinking about suicide or moving abroad. Want to feel better? Eat a sour grape, then do something immediately, now, today. Figure out what you can do to help rescue the country — join something, send a little money to some group, call somewhere and offer to volunteer, find a politician you like at the local level and start helping him or her to move up.

Think about how you can lend a hand to the amazing myriad efforts that will promptly break out to help the country recover from what it has done to itself. Now is the time. Don’t mourn, organize. Nobody has gone away: MoveOn.org, ACT, The Democratic Party, Democracy for America, among others. Keep the candle burning!”

Sticky Sticky Rice

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Condi brings a record of failure to the State Dept. (Center for American Progress) A seriously flawed national security advisor, considered by some one of the weakest ever in that role, her sole asset is her loyalty to Bush, “whose sentences she can finish.” (New York Times)

Rice, recall, was inattentive to terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s urgent warnings about the severity of the terrorist threat prior to 9-11, and she was one of the primary perpetrators of the misleading dysadministration spin — a.k.a. lies — justifying the Iraq invasion. Since then, she has been a prime facilitator of the scare-’em-to-death stranglehold by which the dysadministration has sucked in the voters, perpetuating the notion of an imminent terrorist threat. Another former security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has roundly criticized her for her egregiously politicizing a previously credible advisory role. Also recall her smarmy and evasive testimony to the 9-11 commission after the dysadministration lost the battle to prevent her from testifying altogether.

Come to think of it, she is actually very good at her job, only it is not really that of a security adviser. She should much more properly be described as an insecurity adviser par excellence.

Bush’s new appointments have the flavor of circling the wagons, surrounding himself with his closest circle of advisors. I think the narrowing of viewpoints this will inevitably precipitate is dire news, as if there wasn’t enough already. Throughout the first administration, Bush and, perhaps more so, Cheney, were adept at filtering out concepts and evidence that did not fit preconceived notions and agendas. (It was this filtering out of what they did not want to hear at the top, rather than the faulty intelligence which is commonly blamed, that shaped the threat assessments leading to the invasion of Iraq.) Bush boasted that he makes his decisions by gut instinct instead of thinking. Now, the barriers to a completely thoughtless exercise of power are being swept away even more completely.

A Progressive View of Judicial Nominations

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“As right wing groups line up to try to stack the courts with activist judges straight out of the 19th century, progressives must use all legitimate means to protect the impartiality and fairness of our judicial system. President Bush’s stated desire to have judges who “strictly interpret the constitution” means only one thing – judges who seek to shift the courts to the right by imposing narrow ideological limits on fundamental rights and the ability of Congress to advance the interests of the American people. How do we get to a more principled understanding of the nomination process? The Center for American Progress offers the following guidelines.”