brainrow

From the Washington Post:

“The evidence we have today indicated we have been deceived and betrayed for a number of years by a highly respected and trusted individual,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the NRCC chairman.

Could it be? Are Republicans finally catching on to George W. Bush?

Sadly, no:

The former treasurer for the National Republican Congressional Committee diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars — and possibly as much as $1 million — of the organization’s funds into his personal accounts, GOP officials said yesterday, describing an alleged scheme that could become one of the largest political frauds in recent history.

For at least four years, Christopher J. Ward, who is under investigation by the FBI, allegedly used wire transfers to funnel money out of NRCC coffers and into other political committee accounts he controlled as treasurer, NRCC leaders and lawyers said in their first public statement since they turned the matter over to the FBI six weeks ago.

Hey, over in the Republican Party, this is known as “an entrepreneurial spirit.”

You have to feel sorry for John McCain:

Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.

McCain has based his presidential campaign on the notion that “the surge is working.” It was a brave position to take early on, when it just seemed like more of the Bush policy of “keep doing what doesn’t work.” The surge looks better now, with violence down and Iraqis stepping up to fight al Qaeda murderers in Iraq.

But Iraqi politicians have failed to achieve — even to pursue — political reconciliation during this period of reduced violence. When the surge ends, does the deadly chaos in Iraq return to pre-surge levels? If so, what’s the solution? Oh, that’s right — John McCain has said he’s fine with keeping U.S. forces in Iraq for 100 years.

U.S. troops giving their lives to establish order in Iraq hasn’t motivated Iraqi politicians. I wonder: will the prospect of having those troops withdrawn motivate them to make the deals necessary to hold their country together?

General Petraeus testifies to Congress next month. I’m not alone in guessing that he’ll say we need “another six months” to fully assess the situation. Let’s see — just two hundred more of those six-month extensions and John McCain gets his wish.

Encouraging words from America’s most discouraging human being:

President George Bush has attempted to restore confidence in the US economy, amid the deepening financial crisis.

Speaking at the Economic Club of New York the President acknowledged that growth had slowed but said that the economy is basically sound.

Omigod! Sell! Sell! Sell!

Geraldine Ferraro resigned from Hillary Clinton’s finance committee yesterday. She said she “wanted to get this off the news.” She said this during a live interview on the NBC Nightly News. It was only one of a series of TV appearances on Wednesday. She wants to “get this off the news?” For some reason, I don’t believe her.

She says her remarks that “if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position” are divisive only because the Obama campaign has “played this type of a race card.”

They’ve got it right on Daily Kos:

[T]he Clinton campaign is in no hurry to stem the bleeding. Clearly, they’ve made a calculated decision that this is good politics in certain parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky, so why put the brakes on it?

What I hope is that this year something fundamental has changed in our politics. What I hope is that the divisive techniques that have succeeded in so many past elections will fail because voters in all fifty states — Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike — will smack the practitioners down and say “Enough!”

Back in the ’80s and part of the ’90s, I often said that the best Senator in the U.S. Senate was from Ohio. He was Howard Metzenbaum, who died Wednesday:

Former Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, an Ohio Democrat who was a feisty self-made millionaire before he began a long career fighting big business in the Senate, died Wednesday night. He was 90.

We don’t have politicians like him anymore. He was a tough, fighting liberal. I am proud to have voted for him. He made me proud to be an Ohioan.

On September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated. He was a leader of the Northern Alliance, fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

I heard about his death on the nightly news, but I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. However, the assassination set off alarms in certain corners of the U.S. intelligence services, who had already seen many indicators that something big was coming.

Two days after Massoud was murdered, terrorists hijacked four planes, flew three of them into buildings, and killed thousands of Americans. The killing of Massoud had been done by al Qaeda, a pre-emptive stroke designed to remove an enemy who might have interfered with the terrorists’ plans and become an effective ally for the U.S. when we responded to the attacks.

Ever since that time, there’s been a part of my brain that looks suspiciously at “minor” news stories, always on the look-out for early warnings of big trouble ahead.

So, while everyone has been obsessing over New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s resignation today, I’m worried about yesterday’s resignation by Admiral William Fallon as head of Central Command.

Admiral Fallon had rankled senior officials of the Bush administration in recent months with comments that emphasized diplomacy over conflict in dealing with Iran, that endorsed further troop withdrawals from Iraq beyond those already under way and that suggested the United States had taken its eye off the military mission in Afghanistan.

Did Bush and Cheney remove an effective leader who might have interfered with some plans they have in mind?

Josh Marshall says Fallon was “apparently too sane for the Bush White House.”

By all accounts, the points of contention between Fallon and Bush administration officials centered on three points: 1) his belief that the indefinite occupation of Iraq is a disaster for the US military, 2) that diplomacy has a central role in American foreign and national security policy, 3) that war is not a credible policy for the US to pursue in dealing with Iran. The last of these was believed to be the key issue.

…

It is widely believed in media and political circles that despite the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is back under some kind of adult/mainstream management. In other words, that we’ve left the Cheney/Rumsfeld era behind for a period of Gates/Rice normalcy and that Iran regime change adventurism is safely off the table. But put together what the disagreements with Fallon were about, the fact that the president chose him as someone he thought he could work with not more than one year ago, and the almost unprecedented nature of the resignation and it becomes clear that that assumption must be gravely in error.

Esquire’s profile of Adm. Fallon (strong language) was apparently the last straw for the Bushies. So Fallon is out of the picture, and I’m expecting more war from a White House that doesn’t know how to do anything else.

This time, lots of people are hearing the alarm bells.

What do you know? Ramesh Ponnuru, who wrote a book calling Democrats The Party of Death, says that Geraldine Ferraro is right in saying that Barack Obama is succeeding only because he’s black.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

I just saw a PBS American Masters program about Pete Seeger. I learned that Pete has this written around the face of his banjo:

This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.

Stephen Foster wrote this song in 1854. This version is sung by Nanci Griffith.

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh Hard times come again no more.

Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.

There’s a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o’er:
Though her voice would be merry, ’tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more.

Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh hard times come again no more.

As everyone knows, all wisdom is contained in the movie The Empire Strikes Back. Naturally — it’s got Yoda.

One of the big slam-bang wisdom scenes in the movie occurs when Luke Skywalker tries to levitate his crashed spaceship out of a swamp. Luke grimaces and strains, and manages to raise the ship a few inches, but then he collapses and the ship sinks even deeper into the muck. “It’s too big,” he gasps.

Yoda tells Luke that size doesn’t matter. “My ally is the Force,” he says. It is a field created by all living things. It’s particularly strong in the swamp, which teems with life. “And a powerful ally it is,” collectively much bigger and more powerful than Luke, or Yoda, or the sunken spaceship. Then he raises the ship and moves it to dry land.

Luke failed because he thought he was doing it himself.

In last week’s debate, Hillary Clinton said, “The question that I have been posing is, who can actually change the country?” She says she can.

Remember Hillary’s tongue-in-cheek Christmas campaign ad, where she was wrapping up “universal health care,” “alternative energy,” “bring troops home,” and “middle-class tax breaks” as the gifts she was giving to the American people? It bothered me. I still like to imagine we have government by the people, not by the president.

In a speech last month, she said, “It’s about picking a president who relies not just on words but on work, hard work, to get America back to work.”

Just words? Obama has inspired millions of Americans who were sitting on the sidelines to get involved in building a stronger and better America — an involvement that doesn’t end on Election Day, but only begins then.

If Clinton thinks that doesn’t matter — that his message is “just words” — if she thinks that solutions to the country’s problems can be her gift to us; if she thinks she can grimace and strain and make the change America needs by the force of her will, then I think she is not a Jedi yet.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling brings us the thrilling story of Super Delegate.

Oh, my God — Mary Worth is… Hillary Clinton!

“My one weakness is that I care too much.”

Update: It has been observed that Mary’s “I’m too busy doing stuff to worry whether I’m right or wrong” sounds more like George W. Bush than Hillary Clinton. I can’t deny it. The thing in the second panel about “a successful track record of helping people,” though — how could that be Bush?

Now the Democrats don’t have to fudge the distinction between George “Read My Lips” Bush and George “I’m the Decider” Bush. John McCain has picked up the worst endorsement of them all.

I guess McCain feels he’s already got the November election wrapped up.

Update: Cartoonist Clay Bennett points out that appearing alongside Bush has an upside for McCain.