brainrow

Oh, I just knew Karl Rove was involved somehow.

The New Republic website reports that Mark Foley was going to cash out — quit Congress and get a high-paid job as a lobbyist — but GOP congressional leadership and the White House wanted to hold onto a safe seat, so they kept pulling him back in:

According to the source, Foley said he was being pressured by “the White House and Rove gang,” who insisted that Foley run. If he didn’t, Foley was told, it might impact his lobbying career.

“He said, ‘The White House made it very clear I have to run,'” explains Foley’s friend, adding that Foley told him that the White House promised that if Foley served for two more years it would “enhance his success” as a lobbyist. “I said, ‘I thought you wanted out of this?’ And he said, ‘I do, but they’re scared of losing the House and the thought of two years of Congressional hearings, so I have two more years of duty.'”

I’ll bet Foley’s happy now — he can pursue those high-paid lobbying opportunities after all.

From cartoonist Mark Fiore: GOP 2.0. It’s not your father’s Republican Party.

Let’s review, shall we?

The Bush administration hires unqualified people for important jobs, which they screw up big time, in ways that cost people’s lives.

When Congress passes a law attempting to set some minimal qualifications for certain jobs, Bush says he will ignore that part of the law, because it rules out too many people he wants to appoint.

Some high-profile failures are awarded presidential medals in a White House ceremony.

If you’re talented, you work hard, you tell the truth, and do your job well, you lose your job.

Wow. Just… wow.

No matter what happens in November’s congressional elections, Bush and Cheney are here until January 20, 2009, at least. (At this moment, Alberto Gonzales is probably preparing a signing statement that says we can’t have any more elections until the war on terror is over, so I’m not holding my breath for Inauguration Day 2009, either.)

Oh, you might want democracy in your country, but trust me — you don’t want Bush and Co. bringing it.

Via Colorado Jyms, Will Ferrell as George W. Bush on global warming.

Right-wingers put together a made-for-TV movie that said 9/11 was all Bill Clinton’s fault, while Bush and Co. were all over al Qaeda like stink on a pig, right from day one.

Now that North Korea’s got nukes, that’s all Clinton’s fault, too. Josh Marshall summarizes:

So Clinton strikes deal to keep plutonium out of the North Koreans’ hands. The deal keeps the plutonium out of reach for the last six years of Clinton’s term and the first two of Bush’s. Bush pulls out of the deal. Four years later a plutonium bomb explodes.

Clinton’s fault, right?

Six years after he left office, Clinton’s still messing stuff up.

Why are we certain Bush hasn’t made any missteps? Because he talks to himself then declares his decisions are God’s will.

Wired has a YouTube video ad for the ultimate collectible. (Warning: strong language and something to offend everyone.)

Via Boing Boing: the smile helmet:

A helmet for people in jobs which demand an unusual amount of smiling, such as air-stewards, receptionists and politicians. A sensor in the front of the helmet detects anybody within a 2 metre range, at which point the mouth is pulled into a broad grin by a small servo motor and some concealed fishing wire. The helmet addresses the facades of social interaction and explores our responses to affected expressions.

There’s video of the helmet in action.

Hey, it made me smile.

It seems a core tenet of Bush administration policy is that we can’t negotiate with countries that act against U.S. interests — that diplomacy is appeasement. Glenn Greenwald writes about
what’s left once diplomacy is eliminated:

It is this “reasoning,” as much as anything else, that has placed us in the weak and vulnerable position we are now in. Where a country like North Korea is engaged in conduct that we would like to stop, we have three options:

(1) wage war against them;

(2) engage in diplomacy and attempt to reach a negotiated solution; or

(3) do nothing.

If we remove option (2) from the list — as Bush followers want to do in almost every case and as the administration repeatedly does — it means that only options (1) and (3) remain. And where option (1) is not viable — as is the case with the U.S. vis-a-vis North Korea (mostly because we already chose option (1) with two other countries and are threatening to do so with a third) — then the only option left is (3) — do nothing. That is exactly what we have done while North Korea became a nuclear-armed power, and we did nothing because we operated from Rubin’s premise that diplomacy and negotiations are essentially worthless, which left us with no other options.

The chickens are coming home to roost.

Glenn Greenwald on Thomas Sowell and the virtue of seriousness:

The same people who are now demanding that corruption and sex scandals are frivolous distractions from the Very Serious Wars we must fight were the same ones who spent the 1990s protesting that missile attacks on Al Qaeda distracted attention away from the all-important Starr Report, Vince Foster “suicide,” and investigations into Arkansas air strips. Thomas Sowell had a weekly column that was widely read and, like so many of his ideological comrades, he spent the bulk of the last two years of the 1990s (at least) — not one or two columns, but most of his columns — writing about investigations into presidential semen stains and Susan McDougal’s real estate deals.

…

But now, people like Sowell are here to tell us that a tawdry sex scandal involving teenage Congressional pages being freely used as sexual playthings with the knowledge and acquiescence of virtually the entire House leadership (who thereafter repeatedly lied, and continue to lie, about their knowledge and involvement) is an irrelevant and frivolous distraction from what Really Matters, and only the most Non-Serious person would talk about something like that.

…

I watched the very serious Dick Morris last night gravely discussing with the very serious Sean Hannity — while scary film footage of North Korean marching troops and rolling tanks played over and over and over — about how Americans are now going to realize just how irrelevant the Foley scandal is because nothing matters except The North Korea Nuclear Threat. They compared it to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Morris said that ignoring this threat would be like allowing Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia without consequences. They proclaimed that nobody can talk about any other issues now because the “North Korean crisis” now so predominates, and Americans will realize that they don’t have the luxury of talking about something as petty and frivolous and irrelevant as some sex scandal. Our Very Survival is at Stake and We Need Protection and Must be Serious.

Okay, I was thinking that the Foley scandal was Karl Rove’s “October Surprise,” designed to divert attention away from Iraq. Sure, it’s not good news, but the death toll is lower.

Now I’m thinking — what? — that North Korea’s nuclear explosion is the October Surprise, distracting us from the Foley scandal?

Jeez — there’s still a lot of October left, and I’m not sure I could stand whatever it is that’s supposed to distract us from the Bush administration’s failures with North Korean nukes.

Karl, if you’re listening — I know you want a headline to change the subject. How about “Bush Resigns?” That would work. Seriously.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen:

On the day that The Post carried a story about how President Bush had characterized the present difficult period in Iraq as “just a comma,” Matt Mendelsohn called me. He is a photographer who took the pictures for a new book by his brother Daniel, “The Lost.” It is an attempt to find out what happened to six members of the Mendelsohn family who perished in the Holocaust — the family of great-uncle Shmiel Jager, “killed by the Nazis,” of which almost nothing else was known. There: You went right by it. Shmiel lived between the commas.

In between those commas, of course, is the life of a man. He was scared and he was brave, he was proud and he was shamed, he headed a family and ran a business and then hid from the Nazis until he, along with four daughters and his wife, was betrayed and shot right on the spot. Don’t think of the bullet as a period. It was, worse, a comma.

…

Wars are fought with commas. They are essential. Here and there is a world leader who does not care about human life, but most do. The only way they can function is to plant commas around the misery they cause, to subordinate the loss of life to a supposedly greater cause. This is what Bush is doing. If he did not think he is on his way to something grand, that he is doing immense good, then he could not face what is between those two commas — almost 3,000 American lives and immense suffering. He is not a man given to introspection. Still, he could not live without the succor of cliches: breaking eggs to make an omelet and all of that. In between his commas are all those broken eggs. As yet, there is no omelet.

…

Most of us yearn to escape our commas, to become something more than a profession (longtime lawyer) or resident (Washington native), to make our mark on the world. A president who has ineptly waged a foolish war instead seeks the solace of commas. It is not so much where he has deposited the wounded and dead but where he hopes he can hide from history. It can’t be done, though: George W. Bush comma — and then his failure in Iraq. The comma is his epitaph.

Via This Modern World, here’s NBC News correspondent Jane Arraf:

Some readers and viewers think we journalists are exaggerating about the situation in Iraq. I can almost understand that because who would want to believe that things are this bad? Particularly when so many people here started out with such good intentions.

I’m more puzzled by comments that the violence isn’t any worse than any American city. Really? In which American city do 60 bullet-riddled bodies turn up on a given day? In which city do the headless bodies of ordinary citizens turn up every single day? In which city would it not be news if neighborhood school children were blown up? In which neighborhood would you look the other way if gunmen came into restaurants and shot dead the customers?

Day-to-day life here for Iraqis is so far removed from the comfortable existence we live in the United States that it is almost literally unimaginable.

It’s almost impossible to describe what it feels like being stalled in traffic, your heart pounding, wondering if the vehicle in front of you is one of the three or four car bombs that will go off that day. Or seeing your husband show up at the door covered in blood after he was kidnapped and beaten.

I don’t know a single family here that hasn’t had a relative, neighbor or friend die violently. In places where there’s been all-out fighting going on, I’ve interviewed parents who buried their dead child in the yard because it was too dangerous to go to the morgue.

Fidel Castro’s recent illness reminds us that no matter how this particular health crisis turns out, before long the Castro dictatorship in Cuba will be over. Its end will be a tremendous opportunity for a rebirth of freedom and justice there. But when the Bush administration sticks its nose in, I fear they’re going to blow this opportunity. Hold on, Fidel! Just a little longer!

This administration has screwed things up so badly in so many places that even a good idea is poisoned by their support.

The problem is that the Bush administration so thoroughly exhausted its credibility by insulting old allies and mishandling Iraq that countries do not want to be seen as kowtowing to Bush’s Cuba policy, even when his administration makes proposals that are eminently sensible.

Remember the Axis of Evil?

Nearly five years after President Bush introduced the concept of an “axis of evil” comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the administration has reached a crisis point with each nation: North Korea has claimed it conducted its first nuclear test, Iran refuses to halt its uranium-enrichment program, and Iraq appears to be tipping into a civil war 3 1/2 years after the U.S.-led invasion.

Each problem appears to feed on the others, making the stakes higher and requiring Bush and his advisers to make difficult calculations, analysts and U.S. officials said. The deteriorating situation in Iraq has undermined U.S. diplomatic credibility and limited the administration’s military options, making rogue countries increasingly confident that they can act without serious consequences. Iran, meanwhile, will be watching closely the diplomatic fallout from North Korea’s apparent test as a clue to how far it might go with its own nuclear program.

Heckuva job, Bushie.

Bush and the rubber-stamp Republicans in Congress say only they can keep America safe. But, honestly — could Bush do a worse job if he were actively trying to fail?

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson had one of those Homer Simpson moments where he said out loud what he was supposed to think silently.

From the Huffington Post, Out of the Mouths of Twits:

CARLSON: The deep truth is that the elites in the Republican Party have pure contempt for the evangelicals who put their party in power.

Marty Kaplan:

I’m open to the notion that W is sincere in his identification with evangelicals. But from Rove and Frist on down, the Republican elite — as Tucker testifies — is connected to its base not by beliefs, but by contempt; is allied to its constituents not via core values, but by pure opportunism. The corporate party, the tax-cutting plutocracy, comes to power, and holds power, only by faith-based bamboozlement.

Via Swing State Project::