Bury Me Broken

A Slight Hiatus

I am retooling so I am taking a hiatus. A restart on January 1, we will focus on politics in the state of Florida, politics and issues germane to the African American community and finally, a portal to national politics with links to news stories and a small set of blogs.

posted by niteskolar @ 10:21 PM 0 comments

Why I'm Not Dancing

Everything's going my way. The Bush administration is finally revealing its true self to America. Even Fox News has low Bush approval numbers. Libby has been indicted; Rove, like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, is a weaker, shadow of his former self. Delay, Abramoff, Scanlon and Reed are being revealed. Frist is being investigated for his fake blind trust. War numbers, down. Social Security, wait til 08 says Sen. Grassley plus all of the other points in Novak: Bush is radioactive.

What's the problem?

The problem is that I read too much of the kool-aid swilling ilk and it sickens me, especially as it has been dispensed as refreshment, tarnishing this Veteran's Day.

The propagandists are hard at work spinning lies to disseminate Bush’s blasphemous exploitation of Veteran’s Day with his ‘war offensive.’ Sullying an occasion of remembrance and reflection, Bush followed by his propagating minions babble the latest catchphrase “revisionist history” while Republican after Republican strategizes and straddles the fence.

Instapundit:

The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way -- and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base, that it's deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad.

I know it has been said a million times before but I am so tired of them playing the ‘troops card.’ Our troops have been hurt by being rushed to war, by having to fight the war with whatever they saw fit to equip them, by attempting to cut pay, by forced extension of their duty, by utilizing nonmilitary while instructing soldiers to make prisoners conducive to revealing info to save American lives at Abu Ghraib, no postwar strategy and not enough manpower.

He continues:

UPDATE: Reader Kathleen Boerger emails: "Could you do me a favor and define 'patriotism' please?"
I think it starts with not uttering falsehoods that damage the country in time of war, simply because your donor base wants to hear them.

Talk about beholding the speck in your brother’s eye and not seeing the beam in your own.

I think it starts with not uttering falsehoods that damage the country …

Stop. Let me finish that for you. “… by speciously taking us to war.”

Instapundit refers to himself previously saying journalists are focusing on Judy Miller:

Meanwhile, journalists, most of whom were reporting the same kind of WMD stories that Miller did (because that's what pretty much everyone thought -- including the antiwar folks who were arguing that an invasion was a bad idea because it would provoke Saddam into using his weapons of mass destruction), now want to focus on her so that people won't pay much attention to what they were reporting themselves.

That is revisionist history. That the “antiwar folks” is one homogeneous body chanting “don’t mess with Saddam or he’ll drop the bomb” as they waved mushroom cloud placards with flowers in their hair.

And the ultimate kool-aid induced stupor I’ve read thus far is his quoting of Bob Krumm:

So, Democrats, stop running against the war. You serve only to unite an otherwise disenchanted Republican base. If you take the war off the front page by winning it, Republicans will have to depend on their domestic record for victory. And, unfortunately, there's little there to rally the base.

As I said earlier in a comment:

Newsflash - if we could win the war, we would. Winning the war, in their minds, means that the violence in Iraq stops or slows down enough so that we can push the last of the instant democracy checklist items and bug out.

• If we could stop being maimed and killed by IEDs, we would.
  
• If we could stop innocent Iraqi men, women and children from being maimed and killed by IEDs, we would.
  
• If we could stop Iraqi police officers from being killed, we would.
  
• If we could train enough Iraqi police officers so that the number of ready Iraqi batallions would increase, instead of decrease, we would.
  
• If we could get the electricity running in Iraq, surely by now, we would have.
  
• If we could erase the images of Abu Ghraib from the minds and hearts of the Arab world as well as the rest of the globe, we would
  
• If we could rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, protect those rebuilding and utilize tax dollars effectively, we would.

posted by niteskolar @ 6:20 PM 0 comments

Disenfranchisement: Republican Tactic Nationwide

Once upon a time in a land far away, America had two major parties and each party put forth a candidate and the people decided. I am reminded of the Robert DeNiro line from Untouchables:

“You got an all-out prize fight, you wait 'til the fight's over, one guy's left standing and that's how you know who won.”

Well not anymore. It is rubbing irritants on gloves to blind the opponent, stepping on feet, holding the rope with the arm away from the ref and groin shots, pure and simple.

From Dailykos:

King County is the latest setting for the newest series of Republican dirty
tricks.

Using the 2004 gubernatorial election saga as an excuse, the Republicans have
filed challenges to nearly 2,000 voter registrations within King County - Washington State's most populous county, and a Democratic stronghold.

Just days before this Tuesday's general election, thousands of voters have received letters in the mail informing them that their right to vote is being challenged by the Republican Party of King County. The story broke a few days ago and has been since covered extensively by the local media

Also from Dailykos:

Married women in Arizona are being denied the right to vote by the new Voter ID law, according to the LA Times -- which doesn't quite say so, but we know how to read between the lines. It reports that the "stringent voter identification law being put into effect in Arizona -- designed to keep illegal immigrants from voting -- is also preventing thousands of legitimate voters from casting ballots" in this Tuesday's election.

Much attention in many states has been given to the Voter ID laws' disenfranchisement of minorities, who tend to vote Democrat.But it turns out that the Voter ID laws also disenfranchise women -- the majority of the Democratic voters for decades in presidential elections as well as many state and local elections.

See http://www.latimes.com/

Now that is just two diaries from a single website. Those of us in Florida know this story all too well.

[Update 06 Nov 2005 2210hrs - Another Republican dirty trick is posted on the front page at Dailykos]

posted by niteskolar @ 6:33 PM 0 comments

Ignatius in Wonderland -or- David the Conjurer

Right wing pundit's sleight-of-keyboard sorcery knows no bounds and David Ignatius was no exception in his PC prestidigitation, "Meet the New Elite".

With the nomination of Princeton and Yale Law grad Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, I'm beginning to sense a theme in the Bush administration's rocky second term: We are witnessing the rise of the Republican A students. The preppy frat boy is gradually assembling a government of GOP meritocrats.

Alito is as pedigreed a member of America's new aristocracy of brains as you could hope to find. After Princeton and Yale, he punched all the right tickets: circuit court clerk, assistant U.S. attorney, assistant to the solicitor general, Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, U.S. attorney and then a spot as an appellate judge.

The president's new court nominee follows his supremely credentialed choice for chief justice. John G. Roberts was a grad of Harvard and Harvard Law, then made the grand tour of elite law jobs as a Supreme Court clerk, associate White House counsel and deputy solicitor general. What was striking during Roberts's confirmation process was that all of Washington's other A students, Republican and Democratic, seemed to know and like him.

Ignatius pauses in his conjuring of Bush's second term strategy of nominating those of exceptional scholarship for a brief paragraph on the failed Miers nomination with apologia:

You can argue that this is excellence by default, and that the president's first instincts were shown in the nomination of Harriet Miers. But Miers herself was no slouch in the resume department, with a trailblazing role as the first female president of the State Bar of Texas. In fact, the only job she arguably wasn't qualified for was the Supreme Court.

So as long as he is nominating A students, whether they are qualified is immaterial. Okay. Moving on.

He then lists other second term appointments nominating for their impressive scholarship

• Robert Zoellick, #2 at State, in that he was Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore and magna cum laude from Harvard Law.
  It couldn't have anything to do with the Brotherhood of the Neocon Quest, Zoellick being a signee of Project for a New American Century [PNAC] 1998 letter to President Clinton for military action against Saddam Hussein and whose organizational membership included Bush administration officials Cheney, the indicted Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, now at World Bank, Rumsfeld and Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.

• Gordon England, #2 at Defense, in that he "studied electrical engineering at the non-Ivy University of Maryland, but his brains catapulted him to positions on the Defense Science Board and as executive vice president of General Dynamics."
  Never mind the fact that he just argued against what he said to be the theme he sensed for the second Bush term.

• John Negroponte, a "a graduate of Yale and former ambassador to everywhere."
  Bush graduated from Yale so we are really moving away from the 'sensed theme' of A students.
  

To his credit, Ignatius highlights Fed chairman choice, Princeton economist Bernard Bernanke and says the selection"pleased even the Bushophobic Paul Krugman, a fellow Princeton professor. In choosing Bernanke, Bush went for the smart guy with the fancy resume in preference to more reliably conservative economists."

Well Ignatius the Great, I would differ with you as to strategy of Bush appointments and nominees. As with Porter Goss, John Bolton and John Negroponte, we are seeing Bush's patriarchal mantle as reformer. As with Alberto Gonzalez, Condoleeza Rice, Karen Hughes, again Porter Goss and a host of others, it is Bush's rewarding his loyalists and surrounding himself with those that not only do not dissent, but find extraordinary, law stretching ways to author assent. Still with others, such as FEMA director Michael Brown or former FDIC director Powell named to head long term hurricane disaster recovery efforts, it is cronyism because "ya dance with them what brung ya."

And many of those roles and reasons stem from the first term successful Bush strategy of being as malleable as silly putty and the perfect instrument with which to play out the Right Wing coup de grace of neocon dominance, Republicans as the "permanent major party," and middle and less than middle class in this country as America's permanent pack mules.

Ignatius the Stupendous ended with absolutely nothing up his sleeve:

President Bush -- despite his own Andover and Yale pedigree -- still does a surprisingly good job of sounding like an outsider.

Puhleeze.

posted by niteskolar @ 7:46 PM 0 comments