Wanted: GOP demagogues; 4 month temp. position, pays well

So this is the kind of rabid, revolting talk that Americans are going to be subjected to for the next 4 1/2 months - fear mongering at its worst about a would-be Obama administration. What a surprise.

Here are a few despicable examples of the many that have been broadcast over the airwaves in recent weeks. Listen to the video clip above as conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt leaves no demagogic stone unturned when talking about an Obama victory in regard to the USC/Ohio State game on Sept. 13. (Too bad the game isn't on Sept. 11 - that would have been too perfect.) An excerpt:

And none of the USC people will give up their tickets to me. I'd pay fair price. They — they know Ohio State's gonna slaughter the Trojans. They know that they're gonna slaughter the Trojans, and therefore they do not want me there at the bloodbath, since it's probably the last football game we'll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama. I — I would like to see Ohio State slaughter USC. This is what I'm living for right now.

And they said that Jerry Falwell is dead.

But wait, there's more.

John Gibson of Faux News fame recently entertained former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton on his radio show. Wild comedy ensued when the two began fear mongering discussing a possible (probable) Obama Presidency. Take a listen to this claptrap...

GIBSON: The Obama team is going back to some of the old complaints about the war and the war on terror... that the left has been articulating for a long time now, and not really coming up with anything new.

BOLTON: Yeah I think honestly that's an optimistic view of it, that it will simply be a replay of the Clinton administration. It will simply have more embassy bombings, more bombings of our warships like the Cole, more World Trade Center attacks. That would be the best outcome from that perspective.

Does Bolton have any credibility at all? Did he ever as our ambassador to the UN? Many who look at his record would probably strongly conclude that he has none. My favorite Bolton bon mot - speaking about the UN in 1994, he is purported to have said, "There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States. [...] The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost ten stories today, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

Quite naturally, Bush nominated him to be our UN ambassador. And Bush wonders why he couldn't get Bolton confirmed in the Senate. In fact, Bush had to use a recess appointment to get him to the UN in the first place. That one ranks right up there with appointing Michael Brown as head of FEMA, a man who had as much experience at handling natural disasters as I do.

Someone needs to give Bolton a little history lesson...

• The September 11 attacks happened on Bush's watch

• The 1993 WTC attack happened a mere 36 days after President Clinton took office

• The attack on the USS Cole happened on Oct. 12, 2000, and the FBI's final report was issued on Jan. 19, 2001. Just imagine those headlines from the right-wingnuts in the media had Clinton responded in the waning hours of his presidency: Bill Clinton retaliates for Cole attack to deflect attention from presidential pardons!!! would have screamed Faux News, etc.

• The embassy bombings? Yes, they happened on President Clinton's watch, and when the U.S. military retaliated on Aug. 20, 1998, Repubes in Congress, who were busy impeaching him for a blow job, cried that he was trying to deflect attention away from the Lewinsky witch hunt scandal.

I'm not absolving President Clinton of all blame for the terrorism that rocked U.S. locations around the world in his second term (and the first WTC attack early in his first), but to blame him for these attacks is absurd, and in the case of 9-11, utterly laughable.

The myth that Clinton did nothing to combat terrorism in the 1990s has been thoroughly debunked, so I'm not going to waste a whole lot of time on it here. All I'll add is that it's been refuted by people who were there, such as Richard Clarke and George Tenet.

My point is that trying to blame Clinton for every bad terrorist attack is absurd, but we've seen these plays called by Republicans before, most recently before the 2006 election. Let's hope they keep trotting out this cliché time and again before November. I don't think a majority of voters could possibly be naïve enough to believe it.

ABC = All But Caving? (To right wingers)

Predictably, this is a story that's not going away anytime soon. Former Clinton administration officials are pissed, as they should be. Many people are deriding ABC for "interpreting" and "dramatizing" events on 9-11. As if 9-11 requires dramatizing.

Clinton's staff fired off a letter to ABC demanding certain portions of the movie be changed, including one scene depicting Clinton as being too distracted by the Lewinsky scandal to go after Islamic terrorists who blew up embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Clinton's former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, and former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke are similarly outraged.

To wit, Clarke's response:

1. Contrary to the movie, no US military or CIA personnel were on the ground in Afghanistan and saw bin Laden.

2. Contrary to the movie, the head of the Northern Alliance, Masood, was nowhere near the alleged bin Laden camp and did not see UBL (that's Usama bin Laden, as Clarke refers to him - RJ).

3. Contrary to the movie, the CIA Director actually said that he could not recommend a strike on the camp because the information was single sourced and we would have no way to know if bin Laden was in the target area by the time a cruise missile hit it.

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There you have it, from Clarke, who was counterterrorism chief under Bush I, Clinton and Bush II until shortly after 9-11, when he quit in disgust.

Another amusing anecdote, this one from Tucker Carleson, a conservative that I normally admire (I occasionally watch his show on MSNBC). As reported in Media Matters today, Tucker wants this argument both ways. Well, he can't have it.

Here's what Media Matters had to say:
During a discussion with Media Matters for America president and CEO David Brock on the September 7 edition of MSNBC's Tucker, host Tucker Carlson falsely claimed that when CBS chose not to air the 2003 biopic, The Reagans, he had "sort of agreed" that the move constituted "censorship," just as he now argues that it will be "censorship" if ABC is pressured into not running The Path to 9/11. In fact, in 2003, Carlson specifically denied that CBS' decision to pull The Reagans was "censorship," saying that the use of the word in the context of CBS' Reagan movie "devalue[d] the term" and defending CBS' decision to pull the film because it was "inaccurate."

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What the fuck, Tuck?!? You're better than that.

Oh, and one more thing - yesterday I wrote of the urban legend that persists that Clinton could have had bin Laden. The source of this bullshit is Fateh Erwa, a known liar. The Washington Times, one of the most radical right-wing papers in the country, had this to say about Erwa and his allegations:

"No one should believe these allegations" from "Fateh Erwa, a Sudanese intelligence officer known for his penchant to deceive, that there was an offer to hand bin Laden over to the United States."

Folks, if the Washington Times is saying it, trust it, because that paper never, EVER misses an opportunity to make Clinton look bad.

Enough said.

ABC needs to do the responsible thing, and pull or significantly alter this movie. My prediction? The network will puss out, because all of the major media outlets (excluding Fox News, for obvious reasons) are afraid of being labeled "liberal" and of getting attacked by the right wing distortion machine.

The movie's a disgrace, and so is Tom Kean for being involved in it.

Lies and distortions should be called out as lies and distortions, no matter when they happen. They can't just be bad when it's politically convenient, Mr. Carlson.

Clinton tops Bush in poll

"The man below is this much more popular than I am!"

A recent CNN poll finds that former President Bill Clinton still hasn't lost his mojo; his popularity endures. Like that's a difficult thing to do, considering this administration would screw up a two-car funeral. The poll of 1,021 adult Americans was conducted May 5-7 by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN. You can get the whole story Here.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not at all surprised by this poll. I'd have given my left arm for Clinton to have been able to run against Bush - he would have mopped the floor with Dubya's snide little smirk. The bumbling W would have been for no match for Clinton the master politician. Anyway, I laugh at what many Republicans will probably say that this is a "liberal network [CNN]" poll. Not so fast. Fox News recently reported that Bush's approval rating is hovering around 33%, and that was a few weeks ago, and it's even lower now. A few days ago, I heard 29% on TV, but I don't remember where I heard it.

Anyway, a few thoughts:

Clinton got a 2-to-1 margin in handling the economy: 63% to Bush's 26%. In foreign affairs, Clinton enjoyed a 56% to 32% edge; and in the handling of natural disasters, Clinton had a 51% to 30% advantage. (I question that last one - where the hell was that 30% during Hurricane Katrina? but I digress.)

I wish there would have been a question about terrorism. Clinton did more to combat terrorism than probably any other president, and I'm including Dubya here. I've been doing lots of political reading about terrorism lately, and my favorite misnomer about Clinton was that he "didn't do anything about terrorism," courtesy of right-wing hacks. Yea, right. Probably my favorite goes something like this, and I've read and heard people say some form of this about Clinton:

"The first World Trade Center attack happened on Clinton's watch, and 9-11 happened only 8 months after Bush took office."

Yah! Well, Clinton's administration only captured those responsible for the '93 bombing - Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah. They were convicted and are behind bars, serving life in prison. I wonder how tough they think Clinton was on terrorism? The person responsible for 9-11 was Osama bin Laden, and the prison where he's incarcerated is in... oh wait, he's still at large, almost five years later. But we got Saddam!

The '93 attack happened 38 days after Clinton took office, and 9-11 happened nearly 8 months after he left office, yet he gets blamed for both by myopic Republicans who refuse to acknowlege the facts. Amazing. It's well documented that the new Bush administration, leading up to the inauguration in January '01, thought that Clinton's team was "obsessed" with terrorism. I've read numerous accounts of this, most notably from Richard Clarke, who worked for both Clinton and Dubya. But, GOP amnesia quickly set in after 9-11.

One more quick example - some people to this day believe we did not retaliate following the August 1998 al Queda attacks on U.S. embassies in Nariobi and Tanzania in Africa. Clinton did all he could with a Republican Congress. He ordered a missile attack on one of bin Laden's compounds, and we just missed him by hours. However, when this missile retaliation occurred, it was right around the time he was testifying about oral sex, and virtually every Republican leader in Congress questioned the timing of the attack. Would this be the same thing as Reagan invading Grenada two days after the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983, when 241 Americans died? Reagan's response to the scum who killed the Marines? Cut and run from Lebanon.

Clinton attacked when the CIA told him they knew of bin Laden's whereabouts, period. The operation, called Infinite Reach, tried to get bin Laden, and it just missed. In addition, seven people have been jailed or remain in custody in relation to the embassy bombings. Others are still at large, but to say we did nothing is GOP-grade bullshit.

I actually feel less safe under Bush than I did under Clinton. The issue is a lot more complicated than I'm willing to get into here (my blog entries have been way too long lately!), but I feel our borders are wide open. This has gone largely underreported since 9-11, but the press is starting to take wake up and take notice (thankfully).

Something that enraged me on the actual day of 9-11 and in the days immediately after was when I heard some Republicans actually say out loud, "Thank God Gore isn't in there."

I wonder if they still feel that way now? I suspect even the most ardent of Bush supporters would hesitate to answer yes, and recent Bush opinion/popularity polls bear this out.