I am stealing this from Bob Cesca because I have never read more truer words. Andrew Sullivan:
To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.
Instead the Republicans act like the President is some sort of enemy of the state or they just try to strip him of any credit and give it to others. They really are the lowest of lows in the political spectrum.
I’m going with Andrew Sullivan on this one:
Her latest interview on the Today show again reveals a total obtuseness. Yes, as was obvious from the original clip, it was clear she was referring to what happened after the incident occurred and the system does seem to have worked from then on. But before that? This was a massive failure by DHS, and you will notice she takes not a smidgen of personal responsibility for it.
Does she not realize how sick we are of government officials responding to obvious mistakes, errors and failures by bragging about what they did get right?
She is responsible for homeland security and scores of human beings nearly died because of her failure and survived solely because of luck and courage and the incompetence of the religious extremist.
This attitude was what enraged people about the Bush administration. If Obama wants to show he is not like that, he needs to fire Napolitano now, and explain why there are no excuses in his administration for failing to perform a core government function like ensuring that airline security is as fool-proof as possible. The rest of us have had to go through hell for years in airports only to see this happen.
If she won't resign, fire her.
Yesterday Napolitano said the system worked. Today she says it ‘failed’. This is the exact same lack of responsibility we saw during Katrina and our nation can not use another Brown leading a department that can directly affect rather people live or die. This was her first big test and she failed miserably, in a position where failure is synonymous with death. She either needs to resign or Obama needs to shit can her. Anything else is unacceptable.
Needless to say, President Obama is coming under fire for his trip to Asia this weekend. The right really hates seeing a President travel, well unless that President is going for months on end to play cowboy in Texas.
While Obama has traveled a lot, he has also used those trips to help strengthen U.S. relations around the world. This is something really important given the question of; “what to do in Afgranistan?”
President Obama’s trip this weekend also includes some heavy reading material:
As Mr. Obama left Thursday for a weeklong trip to Asia, he took his Afghanistan review with him. The president asked his military and civilian advisers not to present entirely new options, administration officials said, but rather to help choose from what he believes are the most promising elements. The discussions are not fixed on troop numbers alone, the officials said, but on underlying strategy and performance measures.
So the President isn’t going on some little leisure trip. Instead he is working to strengthen our ties with Japan and contemplate Afghanistan in his extra time.
Andrew Sullivan points out that this is what it’s like having an adult President:
What we are seeing here, I suspect, is what we see everywhere with Obama: a relentless empiricism in pursuit of a particular objective and a willingness to let the process take its time. The very process itself can reveal - not just to Obama, but to everyone - what exactly the precise options are. Instead of engaging in adolescent tests of whether a president is "tough" or "weak", we actually have an adult prepared to allow the various choices in front of us be fully explored.
Andrew Sullivan takes Malkin to task on her alarmist tone over the DHS report:
Why, one wonders, would Michelle Malkin read a DHS report on fringe, far-right extremism that could lead to violence or Oklahoma-style domestic terrorism and think ... they're talking about her?
Rightwing nut-jobs have been the number one purveyor of domestic terrorism in this country. Rather it be the abortion clinic bombers or Timothy McVeigh, there is no arguing that the right will take to violence much quicker than the left.
The actions of the right is also messing with operations in our capital:
Local reports indicate that the practice of mailing actual tea bags to legislators has repeatedly raised security concerns, and sometimes forced the evacuation of congressional offices in anthrax-like scares.
Brian Sperry, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service, told the Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune that tea bags in the mail "cause us some concern. ... They could pose a problem if the tea bag is mailed in a regular envelope instead of a padded bag."
These tea bags are coming from the same party that spawned Chad Castagana, the right wing follower of people like Malkin and Coulter who resorted to sending fake anthrax letters to notable liberals. Of course their only mention of him was to deny any involvement.
I found this story via Andrew Sullivan, who is going after Belief Net’s Rod Dreher.
Terry Caffey can still taste the blood and gunpowder.
He can hear the staccato gunfire, the shrieks of terror and the plaintive wail of his 13-year-old son – "Why? Why?"
He can feel the heat and suffocating smoke from the fire that rolled along the floors and up the walls of his cabin tucked in the piney woods of East Texas.
And he can see his wife – a humble woman whose fingers danced and spirit soared at her church's piano – slumped at the foot of the bed, her neck slashed so savagely that a coroner's report would say she was nearly decapitated.
The story is rather long and does deserve a read, as the story is very tragic, but I want to focus on one part that Dreher focused on, and resulted in Sullivan calling him “clinical”, a highly appropriate response:
Penny home-schooled the children soon after the family moved from Celeste, population 800, to Emory, population 1,200, about three years ago.
The transition to a larger school district was bumpy.
"I guess you'd call it culture shock," Caffey said. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it's like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin's little girlfriend. And I was like, 'That ain't happenin'.' "
But after three years of home schooling and much discussion, the children re-enrolled in public schools in 2008. The boys seemed to thrive, but Caffey and his wife were concerned about Erin.
It says something that, challenged for posing in a photo with a man with a swastika-bedecked Obama sign, all she says in response is that far left people used Nazi imagery against "Bushitler" for years. This is true and she rightly disdained it. But ... so? Why is it ok now but not then? Was she aware of the sign? Or did she miss it? The fact that Malkin has not answered these questions seems the only apposite thing to note.
She hasn’t answered because she knows the answers will prove the fact that she is the number one hypocrite on the right. A simple example is how it is fine for her to stalk a 12 year old, yet people question a 30 year old, so-called plumber and they are violating his privacy. Or how it’s unpatriotic and you should be treated as a terrorist for questioning Bush, but it’s perfectly acceptable to question Obama.
Michelle Malkin is in the same class as Ann Coulter. She is a rabid, hypocritical racist bitch, and she is happy about that. As long as she is making money for it, then why not? I guess the good Christian thing to do is sell you soul to the devil for a profit. Coulter and Malkin are both prime examples of this. I wonder what their judgment days will be like?
Andrew Sullivan raises a great point by asking that very question. The right is in a frenzy over the article I posted earlier about the released Gitmo detainee that was involved in the U.S. embassy attack in Yemen. What they are trying to do is create a strawman here. If our prisons are so at risk for these people to escape, then we have much bigger problems. Terrorists go for these big glamorous attacks. They take a lot of planning and resources to pull off, meaning there is more time to catch them. That is actually a lot better than some serial rapist or mass murder who would escape and just go out and start doing his crimes all over again instantly.
I still believe there is some serious questions regarding the detainee released from Gitmo. First and foremost, it really casts a dark shadow on the intelligence community that Bush was supposed to have overhauled. Why did they let him go if he was really such a bad man? There is also a chance that he wasn’t so bad when caught. Perhaps this guy was actually innocent, but the treatment he received at Gitmo forced him over to the bad side. I would love to see the Obama administration really dig into this to find out, as I wouldn’t be shocked one bit if that did happen. We have been warned that could happen for years.
But there is still something to think about here. This guy didn’t escape Gitmo, like Frank Lee Morris of Alcatraz fame. Instead he was released. That is a key word that seems to be missing from the wingnut argument, like this one from Gateway Pundit:
Again, there are at least 61 former Gitmo detainees who returned to terror.
Barack Obama wants to close Gitmo.
Or this one on Pajamas Media:
Closing Guantanamo and the court decisions granting enemy combatants access to the US legal system will jointly make it impossible for the US to detain prisoners again.
These people are so dunk on the Bush/Cheney era Kool-Aid that they can not comprehend the most serious issue here. Our military, under the command of George W. Bush, let this guy go into the wild. So I need to ask again – was this a failure in our intelligence and military court system, or did our system actually create this guy through the treatment he received? This isn’t an attempt to take a jab at the former administration or Gitmo, but rather it’s a very serious question that should be asked so it doesn’t happen again.
Obama in no way said he was closing Gitmo and letting everyone go. On the contrary, he wants to investigate every legal option we have available to bring them to justice. The report by the New York Times is not bad news for the Obama administration. On the contrary, it is supporting evidence that our system under George Bush was flawed – fatally flawed. Obama wants to overhaul that system, and this report is just the proof he needs that the system does need overhauled.
And I do stand by my former statement that having all these people in the same closed facility is much more dangerous than having them separate and spread throughout the world. People learn to communicate in prison, regardless of any rules or separation. That means again reaffirms my earlier notion that this detainee could have actually been innocent, but became a “product of the system”. In other words – we created this terrorist by the very actions President Obama wants to get rid of and the right wants to keep.
(Updated below the fold)
Andrew Sullivan explains why Rick Warren is actually more Christian than the current pope.
The Republicans really need to listen to people like John Cole and Andrew Sullivan, two life long conservatives who ended up leaving the party. Sure these are mostly big names in the cyber world, but there are also names like George Will and Christopher Buckley out there now that should be listened to.
Cole gives some good advice for the GOP that they should listen to:
What the GOP needs to do is cool their heels. The frenetic nonsense of the last few years has gotten them nowhere, and talking about principles is pointless when you have none. The party of limited government talks a good game, but owns the $500 billion dollar deficit this year and $5 trillion in debt from the past two administrations. You don’t get to pretend you are the party of limited government when your crowning achievement of the last eight years is the Schiavo legislation. I suspect the only principles they honestly have left are the ones they know are so repellent to the public at large that they refuse to voice them. Every now and then they act on them, and the public swats them on the nose. See Frost, Graeme.
If they were smart, they would regroup, and decide what they stand for and present it to the American people. Instead, I suspect we will get several more months of infighting over tactics and appearances, and more purges of those who wish to engage in a debate over the party’s direction. It isn’t just that many of the folks leading the purge disagree with George Will and Peggy Noonan and Daniel Larison and Sullivan and Ron Paul about the direction of the future GOP- they want them destroyed for suggesting there needs to be a debate. That is how dead the party is, and Henke is right. They need some time in the wilderness, to figure out who they are and what they believe in and why and how it will be better for the country.
All day we have heard Republicans saying that this election was in no way a mandate and the country is still very much on the right. Andrew Sullivan posts this from a reader:
The Democratic presidential nominee has won the popular vote four out of the last five elections.
In 2000 Al Gore won the popular vote. We all know that. In 2004 Bush got the popular vote by about 3 million. Compare that to the 8 million Obama won it by, yet that 3 million in 2004 and loss in 2000 of the popular vote was something the spinsters are using as evidence this country is moving to the right. It's amazing how they try to rewrite history so much.
Wow did McCain bomb tonight. Holy shit! HuffPo has the rundown of the news networks, who all gave it to Obama (even FOX). Instead of spending time writing out my words on this, I am going to let Andrew Sullivan speak for me:
This was, I think, a mauling: a devastating and possibly electorally fatal debate for McCain. Even on Russia, he sounded a little out of it. I've watched a lot of debates and participated in many. I love debate and was trained as a boy in the British system to be a debater. I debated dozens of times at Oxofrd. All I can say is that, simply on terms of substance, clarity, empathy, style and authority, this has not just been an Obama victory. It has been a wipe-out.It has been about as big a wipe-out as I can remember in a presidential debate. It reminds me of the 1992 Clinton-Perot-Bush debate. I don't really see how the McCain campaign survives this.
I feel the exact same way. It seems as though many on the right are echoing those thoughts tonight. Markos has a great rundown of other conservatives who weren't impressed at all.
Another thing - should McCain thank Obama? Remember when McCain wanted to do all these town halls with Obama? Well we see what that may have looked like. Of course McCain maybe thought he needed practice before the big one tonight, which speaks badly in itself that a seasoned politician like McCain would need practice against the "inexperienced" Obama.
Andrew Sullivan dives into the latest exhibition of sexism by John McCain.
Andrew Sullivan has been doing some digging and noticed something very interesting:
I've noted the bizarre locution Bush used last night to describe the torture endured by John McCain. I hope the press corps will follow up. But one piece of evidence that the omission of the t-word by Bush was deliberate comes in Fred Thompson's speech as well. He went on at length about the hideous treatment handed down to John McCain in Vietnam. It was the longest section of the speech. Wanna guess if the word "torture" came up at all?
Now that sounds like a really well scripted convention. McCain is supposed to be such an advocate against torture, yet they won't even mention the word in his convention? I hope the media raises this issue - it seems like it's worth some spotlight.
The wingnuts are going nookular over Andrew Sullivan raising the questions of Palin's baby actually being hers. Wow - how dare people raise issues about a candidates personal life? That would be like the right pushing some smear that Obama is a Muslim.
Oh wait a minute..
That's exactly what the right did. For over a year now they have pushed this whole "Obama is a Muslim" meme. Even the mouth pieces like FOX News and Rush Limbaugh have continued pushing this propaganda. Now that it's happening to someone on their side they start crying foul. Hey - mommy said you made your bed, now lay in it.
I really don't think the rumors are true, and thing the story of Palin's piss-poor judgment in staying in Texas to deliver a speech then flying back while in labor with a child that had known special needs is much more scandalous than baby gate, but if the entire "Obama is a Muslim" smear has taught us anything, getting the idea out there is 90% of the battle. That's now being accomplished, and there will be some that wonder on Election Day "is she really the baby's mother, or do we have another White House scandal brewing if she is elected?" This is nothing more than the shoe being on the other foot, and the Republicans can't handle it. Oh well - just get over it.
John McCain just loves using that POW card
LENO: Welcome back, Sen. McCain, for one million dollars, how many houses do you have?MCCAIN: You know, could I just mention to you, Jay, and a moment of seriousness. I spent five and a half years in a prison cell, without—I didn’t have a house, I didn’t have a kitchen table, I didn’t have a table, I didn’t have a chair. And I spent those five and a half years, because—not because I wanted to get a house when I got out.
For a good take on McCain's POW syndrome, check out this post at Andrew Sullivan.
