Douchebags

This is funny:

Yes, they do exist.

Via Big Media Matt.

Update: Some of them seem to be worth something to someone, though.

John Bolton Is Published in the New York Times for Some Inexplicable Reason

Thomas Ricks comments about a NY Times op-ed by "John Bolton AND John Yoo" (his emphasis). "Frankly, I'd rather be waterboarded," he says. Nice snark by newbie blogger (and excellent military reporter) Tom Ricks.

In that spirit, I'd like to post one of my all time favorite Daily Show interviews--with none other than John Bolton:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

John Bolton

Barack Obama Interview

John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video

Funny Election Video

Lots of Evidence: No WMD and the Administration Knew It

Steve Benen lists several sources of evidence contradicting Cheney's arguments asserting a pre-war WMD intelligence failure. 

There are a number of them that he doesn't list:

• Leveraging a reliable, high level Iraqi defector, CIA man Tyler Drumheller told Bush, Cheney, and Rice that Iraq had no WMD program.
  
  
• Reporter Ron Suskind learned that "British intelligence agents met with the head of Iraqi intelligence in a secret location in Jordan, and that the Iraqi conveyed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." The Iraqi was offered asylum and had no reason to lie. To cover up this debacle, Suskind's sources told him that the administration had a letter forged in the Iraqi defector's handwriting.
  
  
• Reporter James Risen reported that "some 30 family members of Iraqis made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all of them reported that the [WMD] programs had been abandoned."
  
  
• On top of this you have circumstantial evidence involving the obvious pressure that the OVP and their neocon bureaucratic partners--armed with unvetted, shoddy intelligence--brought to bear on the intelligence community during the runup to the war.
  
  
• Then you have Cheney's office's obvious panic and sloppiness during the Plame affair. Why were they so concerned? (Of course the Washington press rarely, if ever, connected any of the above backstory to the Plame coverage when it was ongoing.)
  

Wingnut Welfare's Manifesto: Irving Kristol's "New Class"

When beganeth serious wingnut welfare? For a long time I wasn't sure. But so many things point to the work of Irving Kristol. One day, shortly before the Reagan era, Irving Kristol pronounced:

[The] New Class is not easily defined, but may be vaguely described. It consists of a goodly proportion of those college educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a 'post-industrial society'... We are talking about scientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their career in the expanding public sector, city planners and the staffs of the larger foundations and upper levels of the government bureaucracy, and so on. It is by now a quite numerous class; it is an indispensable class for our type of society; it is a disproportionately powerful class; it is also an ambitious and frustrated class.

Wow. Scientists? Teachers? Journalists? That's a lot of suspect professions.

... they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call 'the welfare state' toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfil many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left.

Yes. Administrators. Public Sector Workers. City Planners. Scientists. Teachers. All commie hippies.

This required action! The question is, how far are you willing to go in taking a stand against "THE LEFT!!!1!" (as you've defined it)? Just how far are you willing to distort reality, and circumvent "the reality based community"?

The answer, as we've learned over the past decade, is pretty far. So far that even conservatives themselves are worried about the fallout. As Jim Sleeper commented on Sam Tanenhaus's talk at the American Enterprise Institute a few months ago:

In Tanenhaus’ telling, Kristol showed conservative business and political leaders that New Deal managerialism had bred a liberal “new class” of academic, think-tank, and media experts who trafficked in words more than in deeds or missions accomplished. He counseled conservatives to outdo liberals at this game in order to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy for the kind of capitalism and politics conservatives can profit from and enjoy...

Through lavishly-funded initiatives such as those I encountered in New York City’s Manhattan Institute and on college campuses, and in vast private ventures such as Rupert Murdoch’s “journalism," conservatives generated a parody of the liberal “new class,” an on-message machine of talkers, squawkers, power brokers, and greedheads which Slate's Jacob Weisberg dubbed “the Con-intern.” Their social ideas resemble Margaret Thatcher’s more than Disraeli’s, driven by a corporate capitalist materialism that's as soulless as the Marxist dialectical materialism of their elders’ nightmares...

So far, the conservative “new class” has excused the displacement of the liberal counterculture with a degrading over-the-counter culture; of the New Deal’s oft-lampooned make-work programs with the public non-response to Katrina; and of the dreaded “Vietnam syndrome” with the worst strategic blunders in American history. Beneath their civic chimes and patriotic bombast, the spirit of republican vigilance writhes in silent agony, forsaken by conservatism itself.

Update: This is Tanenhaus more recently, after the past election:

What seems to have impressed [Republicans] is Mr. Obama’s attunement to the problems afflicting the country and the hope he offered that they might be solved. [Really? Solving problems?]

If so, then Republicans may have to jettison some of the most familiar items on their agenda. “The issues that have provided conservatives with victories in the past — particularly welfare and crime — have been rendered irrelevant by success,” Michael Gerson, the Bush speechwriter turned columnist, wrote last week. “The issues of the moment — income stagnation, climate disruption, massive demographic shifts and health care access — seem strange, unexplored land for many in the movement.”

In fact these “issues of the moment” have been with us for years now, decades in some instances, but until recently they were either ignored by conservatives or dismissed as the hobby-horses of alarmist liberals or entrenched “special interests.”

The key word in Mr. Gerson’s analysis is “movement,” a term more applicable to moral or spiritual crusades than to the practical matters of governance, particularly governance in a two-party system, where success almost invariably requires compromise, consensus and a mind open to all manner of workable solutions.

These have not been, historically, the strength of “movement conservatives,” who prefer arguments built on first principles often expressed in supercharged rhetoric.

Oh, you mean like, literally, yelling?

Good luck convincing people that way, by the way.

"With Us or Against Us"

From the Wall Street Journal (not the Edit Page, of course):

It’s hard to tell what’s more striking about Raghuram Rajan’s 2005 presentation at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium — the way many of the dangers he laid out came to pass, or the way he was attacked, and then discounted...

Mr. Rajan came to the conference, dedicated to soon-to-retire Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, with strong bona fides as a pro market advocate. He and University Chicago colleague Luigi Zingales wrote a 2003 book, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists,” that argued at length that free-market capitalism is the best way to organize an economy, and that free financial markets – through their ability to direct funds to where the economy needs them most – are crucial to the system’s success. But when he suggested at Jackson Hole that markets could get it badly wrong sometimes, and that central banks should consider responding to that, he was lambasted as nostalgic for the old days of highly regulated banking.

Fed Governor Donald Kohn – who for years has played the role of providing intellectual ballast to the central bank’s decisions and now serves as its Vice Chairman – said that for central bankers to enact policy’s aimed at stemming risk-taking would “be at odds with the tradition of policy excellence of the person whose era we are examining at this conference.” Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said the premise of Mr. Rajan’s paper was “misguided.”

“This is a common feature of people when they come across dissent – they want to put you in a box and label you and dismiss you,” says Mr. Zingales. “He is definitely not anti-market. That’s the most mistaken characterization of Raghu.”

The episode suggests one reason that the crisis went unchecked: A dangerous all-or-nothing orthodoxy had come to dominate the policy debate, where one was either for free markets or against them.

I'm trying to figure out where I've heard that kind of thing before... Maybe, here? (Here's Naomi Oreskes on climate change denialism:)

The Fab Four

(Action starts at about 30 seconds...)

Why Do They Make It So Easy?

A Republican Noise Machine instant classic.

Endorsements

There's an old story about segregationist/proto-movement- conservative George Wallace when he spoke at Harvard. When he was boo'ed (which he repeatedly was) he'd say, "I accept your nomination!"

Well us "Moveon.org bloggers" (whoever we are--Moveon doesn't have bloggers) accept their nomination. Paul Krugman does too.

Gore on Charlie Rose

Here is the best recent interview I've seen with Al Gore on his current book tour:



Speaking of Gore's book tour, there have been quite a few ironies that he's encountered, involving an oblivious media that seems out to prove his book's thesis for him.