brainrow

GrrlScientist has a TV exchange between Diane Sawyer and Tony Snow:

Diane Sawyer: Why not let Karl Rove go up there and show he has nothing to hide? Testify, under oath, and with a transcript? Let everyone see it?

Tony Snow: This is what I love, this Karl Rove obsession. Let’s back off. First, the question is: Do you want Karl Rove on TV, or do you want the truth?

Diane Sawyer: Why can’t you have both?

I’m surprised. Apparently Diane Sawyer doesn’t know who Karl Rove is.

Via Bob Geiger’s weekly round-up of political cartoons, here’s Nick Anderson’s look back at four years in Iraq. This group covers 2002-2005.

Via Atrios, Iraq War veteran and Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy:

We had a saying in the army: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Well, the past four years, the Republican-led Congress followed.

They had their chance, and they followed lock-step as this president led our country into an open-ended commitment refereeing a religious civil war.

For the last four years this Republican Congress followed lock-steps as my fellow soldiers continued to die in Iraq without a clear mission, without benchmarks to determine success, without a clear timeline for coming home.

…

To those on the other side of the aisle who are opposed, I want to ask you the same questions that my gunner asked me when I was leading a convoy up and down Ambush Alley one day. He said, “Sir, what are we doin’ over here? What’s our mission? When are these Iraqis gonna come off the sidelines and stand up for their own country?”

So to my colleagues across the aisle: your taunts about “supporting our troops” ring hollow if you are still unable to answer those questions now, four years later.

Trex takes the long view and says maybe we shouldn’t be hasty: (Warning: strong language.)

Given that the Republican Party has roughly the same prognosis as Terri Shiavo in the upcoming elections and that we may see the GOP brand sullied and disgraced for a generation as a result of the Bush Administration, I think we may be acting a bit hastily on this proposed roll-back of Executive Powers. … Just think what President Obama could do with those powers. …

Or let’s say President John Edwards has just been sworn in and he decides it’s time for a little payback. He picks up the phone and calls his people at the NSA and says, “I need to see all of Bill Donohue’s cell-phone records, taxes, credit card transactions, and checking account records for the last ten years. Oh, and freeze his assets. I think he may be involved in terrorist activity.”

…

“But please!” Donohue would beg, “Let me speak to an attorney! Let me at least know what charges are being brought against me!”

Nope. Too bad, so sad, but all that went out the window when the Bush administration gutted habeas corpus.

Or say that President Hillary Clinton is tired of Tom DeLay’s lip. So she decides to have his money-laundering trial moved to a military tribunal at the Detention Facility at Guantanamo Bay. No jury, no cameras, no witnesses, and the tribunal won’t kick off until, oh, 2012, or whenever we get around to it. It would be perfect.

See? Life with a Democrat Unitary Executive could be great! President Kucinich could rule by decree … He could have Bush and Cheney imprisoned in an undisclosed location indefinitely! And wouldn’t that be fun?

So, please … lay off on the challenges to Bush’s god-like powers of the Imperial Presidency. He’s only going to be around for a few more months, and then once he’s gone, we’ll be in charge. And what use will due process, checks and balances, and the Constitution be to us then?

Democrats, embrace you inner autocrat! You have nothing to lose but your souls!

And it might just be a way to get more Republicans to stand up for Constitutional rights.

George W. Bush today denounced a House vote to limit the Iraq War as an act of political theater.

If there’s anything George W. Bush hates, it’s political theater.

This looks interesting: NBC war reporter Richard Engel’s video diary of the war in Iraq, on MSNBC tonight at 10:00pm EDT. Should be lots of repeat showings, if you miss the first one.

Boy, I love it when the TV reporters do their homework, and get air time to connect the dots. Crooks and Liars has video.

Since the House Judiciary Committee released over 3000 emails last night, new details are starting to emerge about the behind-the-scenes scheming by the DoJ to handle the prosecutor purge backlash in Congress and in the media. David Shuster reporting for Hardball connects the dots and reveals the myriad inconsistencies.

Watch the video. That’s journalism!

Think Progress says Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson is still lurking about:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales planned to install his former aide Kyle Sampson as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s environment division even after Sampson’s “resignation,” NPR reported today. …

In fact, Gonzales “started to set up a new office for Sampson” in the Justice Department, and Sampson only resigned on Tuesday when “the scandal surrounding eight fired U.S. Attorneys continued to grow.”

The truth is like kryptonite to these guys. Even a tiny sliver could be fatal.

Colorado Jyms is thinking about learned helplessness. What do we do when all the disasters are more than we can handle?

Back in the 80’s there was a song called ‘walk the dog’ by Laurie Anderson. The important lyric is, “When I came home, you were on fire, the house was on fire… so I decided to walk the dog. Walking the dog… walking the dog.”

When I think of the complete and utter disaster in Iraq, the end of oil around the corner, global warming and the fact that Zefrank is stopping his show… I wonder just how true these lyrics are. How much can we take before we simply snap and decide that the best thing to do is to walk the dog, not put out the fire?

The psychological term is ‘learned helplessness’. There was a bunch of sick scientists who discovered they could shock a dog so often that when the door out of the room that is shocking the dog is open, he doesn’t see it.

Are we there? Are we so used to being shocked that we cannot see an open door out? Why are the democrats SOOOOO afraid of issuing articles of impeachment for the lies this administration told to bring us to war? How can we put out the fire if we are not even willing to see it.

I’m ambivalent about impeachment. It’s never been more justified than it is today, but there simply aren’t the votes for it. There are better ways to use our time and energy. We need to fully expose the crimes and incompetence of the whole right-wing machine, so the whole country learns to help itself and keeps throwing the bums out.

Okay, mistakes were made. But four years into the war in Iraq, things are getting better, right? Josh Rosenau looks at the trends:

Err… not so good. Well, at least terrorism is down, right? From Daily Kos:

There are always birth pangs. But things are looking up for the future of Iraq, right?

Hundreds of thousands of children no longer attend school. Others have been forced from their homes to camps, while others have fled the nation with family.

For those that remain behind, there is the constant fear of being killed and the mental toll that warfare takes on its most vulnerable victims.

“Our children are surrounded by violence,” said Dr. Saied al Hashimi, a professor of psychiatry at Baghdad’s Mustansriya University. “Most of them are traumatized.”

He says mass displacement, the death and murder of family members and the constant presence of heavily armed troops, militias and death squads have a long-term impact on the children, especially those in and around Baghdad where violence is most intense.

“I call them the silent victims. Our Iraqi children are the silent victims,” he told CNN.

Our military is strained:

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.

More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a “death spiral,” in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.

Sure hope nothing unexpected happens:

For decades, the Army has kept a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division on round-the-clock alert, poised to respond to a crisis anywhere in 18 to 72 hours.

Today, the so-called ready brigade is no longer so ready. Its soldiers are not fully trained, much of its equipment is elsewhere, and for the past two weeks the unit has been far from the cargo aircraft it would need in an emergency.

Instead of waiting on standby, the First Brigade of the 82nd Airborne is deep in the swampy backwoods of this vast Army training installation, preparing to go to Iraq. Army officials concede that the unit is not capable of getting at least an initial force of several hundred to a war zone within 18 hours, a standard once considered inviolate.

E.J. Dionne says the war has changed the way we think:

To understand how much the Iraq war has transformed the way most Americans think about foreign policy, consider what passed for shrewd analysis four years ago.

The words on the “in” list included “unilateral,” “bold,” “robust,” “transformative” and “sole remaining superpower.” The words on the “out” list included “multilateral,” “nuance,” “patience,” “diplomacy,” “allies,” “history” and “prudence.”

Today, the “in” and “out” lists would be almost exactly reversed. The new “out” list includes such additions as “reckless,” “arrogant” and “incompetent.”

…

Foreign policy hawks fear an “Iraq Syndrome” involving a pathological wariness about the use of American force and an unhealthy mistrust of every word coming out of the White House.

On the contrary, this botched war is far more likely to lead to what might properly be called the Post-Bush Awakening. It is an awakening to the danger of viewing critics as traitors, to the costs of making everything about politics and to the sad tendency of establishmentarians to seek refuge within the boundaries of prevailing opinion.

It is also an awakening to the wise skepticism of everyday Americans toward ideologues who believe that optional wars of their design can miraculously change the world.

I hope it’s not cockeyed optimism to hope that one good thing might come out of the Bush presidency: an utter rejection of Bush and his policies.

Wow. It’s been four years since the start of the Iraq War. Time flies whether you’re having fun or not.

Asserting that the war in Iraq “can be won” with U.S. resolve, President Bush appealed to the American people today for patience as he pursues a plan to tamp down violence in Baghdad, and he warned that national security would suffer a “devastating” blow if U.S. troops were to withdraw from Iraq next year as demanded by congressional Democrats.

That old familiar tune.

I was against the war, though I didn’t leave much of a paper trail to prove it. I didn’t have a blog at that time, but a few friends and co-workers knew how I felt.

It felt dangerous, opposing a war that had so much popular support. One friend, usually liberal and anti-war, supported the war and told me more than once to “shut up” when I criticized it in a public place. Just before the war started, apparently in the spirit of friendly advice, he told me I was going to look pretty stupid in a couple weeks if I kept saying the war was a bad idea. I thought he was probably right about that.

Atrios sums up the line that’s served the TV talking heads so well for the last four years, and which is still in use today:

All you anti-war people sure will feel stupid in six months when things are better.

Still waiting.

But I don’t feel particularly brilliant, either. I wanted to support the war. Smart people — people I respected — were supporting it. I firmly believed that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, but I thought war called for evidence, not just belief. I kept hoping for some argument or some missing piece of information that would let me change my mind.

I expected Colin Powell’s appearance at the United Nations to be the turning point for my thinking. Powell was someone I respected, and he was putting his reputation on the line. But when I watched his presentation on TV that night, I couldn’t help thinking, “Am I stupid? Am I blind? Is there a case here? I’m not seeing it.”

I’m still not seeing it. But the blindness and the stupidity — I’m no longer assuming that’s my fault.

The AIDS battle in Gambia:

At the only hospital in the capital of this tiny West African nation, a 3-year-old AIDS patient named Suleiman receives his daily dose of medication — a murky brown concoction of seven herbs and spices served out of a bottle that once contained pancake syrup. …

This has become the treatment for HIV/AIDS patients here since early January, when Gambian President Yahya Jammeh announced he had discovered a cure for the disease that has wreaked havoc across Africa. He made that announcement in front of a group of foreign diplomats, telling them the treatment was revealed to him by his ancestors in a dream.

His concoction has stirred controversy and anger among health officials who say the president’s claims will bring false hope to the nation’s more than 20,000 HIV/AIDS patients. They are also afraid that it could cause patients to stop taking the anti-retroviral drugs that have been proven to prolong life and improve quality of living.

Some patients and government doctors say the dream cure is working.

CNN … sought medical reports of the HIV/AIDS patients to see whether they are indeed on the mend. The material was not provided. The government would also not release the concoction to CNN for testing.

Let me get this straight… the President gets guidance on scientific matters from dreams, and uses that to make life-and-death decisions of public policy. Meanwhile, scientists and doctors grapple with spectres.

Oh, I get it — this is all some kind of symbolism, right?

Cartoonist Mark Fiore has an animated performance review for Attorney General Gonzo.

I haven’t politicized Justice. We simply had to let Justice go for performance-related reasons.

Like truth and the American way, justice has been a thorn in the side of the Bushies right from the start.

For a limited time only, the Daily Show on Cheney’s Clout. (Warning: crude humor.)

Why does this man still have any clout at all?

Some things are easy. Some things are difficult.

Some difficult things are difficult because that’s a fundamental part of their nature. There’s no easy way to win the Tour de France. If it ever became easy, that would be the end of the Tour. Wars can be like that, too.

Some things become difficult — or even impossible — because of incompetence, ignorance and stupidity.

If you’re in the Bush Administration, when things go badly for the United States — in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in North Korea, at the United Nations — you may feel justified in saying, “Hey, war and diplomacy and stuff are hard!” You would be right. And yet…

Zbigniew Brzesinski last night on The Daily Show:

The real problem is that we have had a policy lately that has been dividing our friends and uniting our enemies and should be the other way around.

Well, Bush said he was a uniter. He never specified who he would unite.

Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, is on the move:

U.S. oil services firm Halliburton Co. is moving its headquarters and chief executive to Dubai in a move that immediately sparked criticism from some U.S. politicians.

Texas-based Halliburton, which was led by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995-2000, did not specify what, if any, tax implications the move might entail. It plans to list on a Middle East [stock market] once it moves to Dubai — a booming commercial center in the Gulf. The company said it was making the moves to position itself better to gain contracts in the oil-rich Middle East.

“This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years,” said judiciary committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.

Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, might hold a hearing on the implications, an aide to Waxman said.

Halliburton has drawn scrutiny from auditors, congressional Democrats and the Justice Department for the quality and pricing of its KBR Inc. (KBR.N) unit’s work for the U.S. army in Iraq.

They take the big-ticket no-bid contracts; they repeatedly fail U.S. soldiers and taxpayers in Iraq; they take the money and run. They have no respect for or loyalty to the United States or the American people.

That Cheney sure is a bad influence.