corrente

Here.

I never did buy into the idea that Bush was exactly stupid (though He obviously suffers from a severe case of recto-cranial inversion).

And now there's proof!

In the lexicon of lying, there are white lies and bare-faced lies. Facts can be fudged, forged or shaded. There are fibbers, fabricators and feckless fabulists. By whatever clinical term, the truth simply is not in some people.

Now scientists have an anatomical inkling why.[Continued at the renovate Corrente]

Is it my imagination or did CNN just state that Miller has had the necessary waver to testify for more than a year?

Boy, doesn't the New York Times look silly now?

UPDATE Oh, it's Libby's fault now because he didn't call her on the day she went to jail and say "the waver I signed was really a waver."

Right.

UPDATE 2 I've been out of the loop for a bit. As usual Digby got it just right.

Don't immediately go read Krugman's latest column, "That's the way it is." And don't check out the comments from alert readers here either.

I've been noticing two distinct camps over at dKos and I've been struggling to come up with what to call them. The only thing I could think of is "Liberal Elitists" vs "The Rabble". I hate to use a term culled from Republican Propaganda but it fits like a glove. If anyone can come up with something better let me know.

The recent discussions about Senator Obama's post about John Roberts and debate over the Anti-War Protests brought this into focus for me. RenaRF's post today in response to Obama was brilliant and passionate. But she's catching some flak from the Liberal Elitists.

The Beltway Democrats

In his post, Barack Obama made obvious he has internalized many of the principles espoused by Beltway Democrats:

Elect Us Now, We'll Stand up for You Later

[Continued at the New and Mightier Corrente Building because I don't know how to continue posts below the fold with Blogger and because the New Corrente Building is newer and mightier.]

In the event anyone asks: I won't be posting with Corrente any longer. Or migrating to the new address. It's time for me to go away and do something else [ie: farm runoff. So I prepared - uh, butchered - the following adaptation of an old song for you. A farewell song of sorts. A corny old time farewell song. Because I like that kind of corny old time crap.

Here we go:

Fond memory paints the scenes of other years
Green be their memory still
And bright amid the joyous words appears
This harbor upon a hill

To all that stand upon this hill
I never no never can forget
Here happy days they gather round me still
I never no never can forget

Here hangs that swing up on the maple tree
Where you and I once swung
Here flows a spring forever flowing free
As when we all were young

To those who stand upon this hill
I never no never can forget
Here happy days they gather round me still
I never no never can forget

There climbs the vines and there the berries grow
Forever prized so high
And there the ripen glistens in the glow
Of brisk September skies

To those who stand upon this hill
I never no never can forget
Here happy days they gather round me still
I never no never will forget

Sorry 'bout that. I told you it was cornball crap. That adaptation is from an old tribute called "Schoolhouse on the Hill" (circa 1933) by the Carter Family. Because I learned a hell'uva lot of good stuff here at Corrente.

So there ya have it. Thanks for the berries.

crush the infamous thing ("I stand by all the misstatements that I've made." ~ Governor George W. Bush to Sam Donaldson, 8/17/93)

That's all.

While you're waiting for the 5:00 horror:

Alert reader Alice Marshall alerts us the following:

The Federal Election Assistance Commission closes the public comment period on their proposed Voluntary Voting System Guidelines at 5 p.m. this Friday, September 30, 2005.

Please send the following phrase or whatever you would like to
express on the proposed guidelines immediately to votingsystemguidelines@eac.gov. Many technical people are submitting detailed comments, but all you have to do is rewrite the following a bit, so it doesn't look like Astroturf:

"I want Section 6.8 to require a voter-verified paper audit trail for ALL voters and voting systems. It should be mandatory." The current proposal does NOT require voter-verified paper audit trail.

Free and fair elections in 2006!

Here's a touching little vignette from Philly's own City Paper about our own Senator Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum:

Here at the Carlisle courthouse, the College Republican rally draws to a close. The Santorum campaign is filming the event for a campaign commercial to be aired sometime next spring as the election heats up... [Continued here at the renovated Corrente Building]

Yes, Judy "Kneepads" Miller has finally agreed to testify, and it turns out her sources was Iraq Working Group (back) disinformation artist "Scooter" Libby.

So, I wonder what Fitzgerald's really got? We'll probably know on Friday, a little after 5:00:

After nearly three months behind bars, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released Thursday after agreeing to testify about the Bush administration's disclosure of a covert CIA officer's identity.

Miller left the federal detention center in Alexandria, Va., after reaching an agreement with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. She will appear Friday morning before a grand jury investigating the case.

"My source has now voluntarily and personally released me from my promise of confidentiality regarding our conversations," Miller said in a statement.

Her source was Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, reported The Times, which supported her contention that her source should be protected.
(via AP)

DéLay and Rove... In one week? We can dream!


NOTE And from the Department of Absurd Understatements:

The news media is in a less-than-ideal position in the Plame probe.

The reporters' sources — rather than being whistle-blowers exposing wrongdoing and facing retaliation if identified — are government officials whose motives in leaking appear to have been to undermine the credibility of a critic of the Bush administration.

Prompted by a question by Ian Welsh in comments.

Corrente is, to quote Samuel L. Jackson, "going through a transitional period right now".

They don't tell me everything because I'm just the Jolly Green Goblin that lives in the Attic, but this is what I hear when I put my ear to the floorboards:

We are in the process of moving to a new Web site that has more functionality and that will allow us to escape the thrall of Blogger's massive sucktitude. One of the immediate benefits I can think of is that comments aren't dissapeared into the void by Haloscan's massive sucktitude.

So for now we're living in both places, like someone who's moving two blocks from his previous residence, as I did last year. We're almost done with the move, one of the last things to iron out is what color to paint the walls. Then there will be Exodus, Movement of Jah People.

The Editors is on fire today, like a man attempting to digest a giant Taco de Lengua (Beef Tongue) con Extra Salsa Picante. He's taking on the Wingnuttosphere's response to the DeLay indictment as it is served to him piece by piece from La Cocina de el Enferno.

I don't know where The Poorman (and SadlyNo! and Mon General for that matter) get the intestinal fortitude to stomach looking at RightWingnut sites all the time. But it's funny as hell. And it gives the Left Blogosphere instant recon of enemy activities.

Am I Mexing metaphors yet?

I was honored and humbled to meet The Editors in person at the latest BARBARian drinkfest. I encourage people to go to meatworld meetups. Not surprisingly, people who are funny, smart and interesting on the internets tend to be the same in person. And like protests they give you a feeling that you are not alone in this fucked up world.

Legal Warning: this is not dating advice. By reading this disclaimer you agree not to hold me responsible for any freaks/perverts/nerds/smelly/despicable people you might meet on the internets for dating purposes.

In honor of The Hammer's very, very special day we present the following recipe for Pork Delay.

1. Procure one well-fatted Republican. [Continued on the meta-flip, at the renovated Corrente Buildling]]

Tom DeLay, indicted on one count.

House GOP rules say any member indicted must immediately step aside.

Comin' over the TV, no link yet....

Yes, it is just fine to sing, celebrate, dance in the street. Drinking before noon is up to you.

As Leah earlier noted, I was at the anti-war march in D.C. on Saturday, but some problems kept me from posting about it before last night. The piece is up over at the new CorrenteWire, here. Consider it my manifesto. (Also posted at IMCT, because that's where it all started.)

Oh no. He's getting me started again:

"We can all pitch in ... by being better conservers of energy," Bush said after hearing a briefing at the Department of Energy. "I mean, people just need to recognize that the storms have caused disruption and that if they're able to maybe not drive ... on a trip that's not essential, that would be helpful."
(via Arizona Republic)

Stop it! Ah ha ha ha ha! It's too much, you're killing me! [snort] "We" didn't get invited to the Bush campaign rallies! "We" got thrown out or arrested or beaten up for wearing the wrong button! "We" didn't get invited to the Social Security rallies! "We" don't get any Homeland Security money for the ports, or protection from loose nukes! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Bush says We?!?! It's almost too rich! "We" have to wait in line for hours to vote! "We" have our votes stolen! [chortle] [snort] Oh no... Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Thirty years of Republican propaganda against the very idea that the very idea of "we" is socialism and now.... Ah ha ha ha ha ha!

What you mean "we", Bush man?

C'mon by the New Corrente Building for the full, pagan inspired, irreligious post. I hope I get a flame war, truly, I do:

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health.

I dare you to smote me, Oh Mighty Sky Father! Smote, smote away. This pagan feminist nonbeliveing ass is waiting.....

I love this Quick Time video from Truth Out.

The above is a link to footage from the protest in front of the Lily White House, including a very reasonable request that George Bush vacant the premises.

Let's make someone hear us everyday until the war ends.

+++

CHICAGO - President Bush’s top economic adviser said Tuesday that the massive federal cost of recovering from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita should not deter the White House from its goal of halving the federal budget deficit by 2009.

“Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective,” White House economic adviser Ben Bernanke told the National Association for Business Economics annual meeting.
(via MSGOP)

Does anybody, anyone, any idiot on this planet believe this line of bullshit?

Wolk is apparently just an administration tool or he would eviscerate this liar Bernanke for what is so obviously a bald-faced lie.

Digby made me go to the warporn post at Americablog. Not really. I thought I should check out what he was talking about for myself. And I did make a point of looking at every single horrifying image. With a head full of kind bud. I feel physically sick. Jeebus H.

My first conscious reaction was "everybody should see these" (hold your horses, gentle reader, read on before you do). To paraphrase John at AmericaBlog, this is what war looks like. It's not like the movies, not some at all, to use a Louisiana expression I learned this weekend at dKos.

--- Warning! Gruesome descriptions ahead! --

This rant goes on forever so I've stuffed it into my attic room in the New and Mightier Corrente Bldg.

+++

O' foul and scabrous demon
Flung to northern patches, unleashed
and burning hearts for heat
Away to empty cages, ribs split like wood
in shocking sleep He rides to you
The master of the elder tribes
To hind parts clenching tearing torn
The limpid flesh of failing men

Embrace the conquerors' lavish feast:
a table of the animals
a place of broken things
and friends made meat
Oh, John, sit this night in sacrifice
the nails of certitude drive through your head
The angels of iron and death

Come forth, lord whimsy
let us all laugh and sing of despair
and hopeless sightless loveless eyes
it is a trick of The Bad Magician
that dreams once conjured
do not abate
and sorrow's ease will not arrive

In darkness the howls of vanquished men
echo upon echo in gaping jaws
In John shall be the night thunders
in shadows too thick for walls:
Made like casket toys for children, singing
Singing to John: my gift is
the lyrics, made your curse
unwrapped in the bleak time
the alone time
men of stature to dust unmourned
aught but shards
the splinters of a mind deceased

+++

This cursed episode of The Bad Magician inspired by General JC Christian's post on a sulphuric slag heap of what has been rumored to have once been a human being.

Sleep tight, Johnny. Sleep tight.

+++

It's almost too much!

Bush, who finished a three-day, three-state “fact-finding” trip Sunday ....
(via The State)

Ho ho ho ho! A Bush "fact finding" trip! Stop! I can't take it! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Bush, facts! Aaaugh! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! No more! No more! Heh heh heh. Oh my God. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Am I the only one who finds it creepy that Bush is turning to the Army as the only government institution that works in emergencies?

And am I the only one who wonders how broad Bush's defintion of "emergency" is going to end up being?

"I want there to be a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people," [Bush] said.
(via CNN

Frogs in the pot... [Crossposted at the renovated Corrente Building.]

NOTE Actually, the creepiest part of this quote is Bush's use of the word "assets" for the troops.

Casey Sheehan—not a dead son, an "asset."

If that doesn't give you a clear window into the Republican soul, nothing will.

That "We" is bracketed because not all of us who oppose the Bush policies in Iraq were there. Corrente was represented by Riggsveda, and I'm sure we'll hear more first-hand reporting from her when the pain subsides from her broken toe, (not sure if this was a result of demonstrating, but as all who read her know, she is nothing if not intense, particularly about this demonstration).

I should admit right up front that I was somewhat skeptical of this demonstration. First, I have a real problem with ANSWER, even though I agree that it is outrageous that it is only the left that is ever called upon to renounce their idiot contingent; compare the actual power in the world of Ramsey Clark to that of Dr. Dobson, or Pat Buchanan, who has a permanent berth of sorts at MSNBC, and I'm not even mentioning all those certifiable racist loons who are waiting for the confederate South to rise again, and who show up all over the place where Republicans gather. Second, I always worry about lack of focus, as well as a dangerous sort of moral superiority that can develop in demonstrators, a topic for a later post. In spite of all that, had I not been a full continent away from Washington, I would have been there.

Max speaks, and able to report first-hand what he saw, makes short shrift of my compunctions. In addition, he has a joyous discussion, including pictures, of who was there that convinces me something real was happening.

The picture above is courtesy of Max Sawicky; he has lots of others, too.

The rest you can find at the new Corrente by clicking here.

Juan Cole has changed his previous stance of supporting only a limited pullout of US troops. Read the whole thing. The Good Professor (as opposed to the Ol' Perfesser AKA Instacracker, and also as opposed to the Bad Magician) drops the sweet sounds of science: facts, research and logic.

I conclude that the presence of the US ground troops is making things worse, not better.

Let's get them out, now, before they destroy any more cities, create any more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, provoke any more ethnic hatreds by installing Shiite police in Fallujah or Kurdish troops in Turkmen Tal Afar. They are sowing a vast whirlwind, a desert sandstorm of Martian proportions, which future generations of Americans and Iraqis will reap.

The ground troops must come out. Now. For the good of Iraq. For the good of America.

It looks like someone noticed the Ugly Ducklings. Juan Cole:

The hundreds of thousands of protesters who came out throughout the world on Saturday were demanding a US and British withdrawal from Iraq.

The protesters are right that we have to get US ground troops out of Iraq.

Tin foil hat tip to Tin Foil Hat Boy for revealing his obsession with this subject in comments here.

UPDATE: Per alert reader Tom Scudder, the Good Professor is a Tricksy Professor:

Note the qualifier: "Ground" troops. It's the same pull-back-to-the-air-bases plan as he's been pushing for the last two weeks or so.

But it seems to me Juan Cole is gradually moving away from his original position. As of Saturday 9-24:

The point of the US air forces and special ops is simply to support the Iraqi army; the special ops would have to be there to rescue any US crews that were shot down. The air bases could be in Kuwait in the south and in Kurdistan in the north. They would not be permanent.

That's almost close enough to GTFO for me. Prof. Cole thinks the aftermath of a withdrawal will be more like Bosnia than Vietnam. So we could treat it the same way, by bombing the bejeebus out of any faction that goes too far. I have some issues with this plan: without US ground troops there will be no Iraqi army left to request air support, the Serbs had a government and infrastructure that we could punish from the air while most of the Sunni area has been turned to rubble already and there is no official Sunni government or army, and also the bosnian operation had an international mandate. But that's just my less-informed comment.

We suggest this be filed under the "Department of No! They Would Never do That Here...Would They??"

(via AP via Jackson MS Clarion-Ledger)

China said Sunday it is imposing new regulations to control content on its news Web sites and will allow the posting of only "healthy and civilized" news.

Only "healthy and civilized news and information that is beneficial to the improvement of the quality of the nation, beneficial to its economic development and conducive to social progress" will be allowed, Xinhua said.

"The sites are prohibited from spreading news and information that goes against state security and public interest," it added.

Online dissidents who post items critical of the government, or those expressing opinions in chatrooms, are regularly arrested and charged under vaguely worded state security laws.

Earlier this month, a French media watchdog group said e-mail account information provided by Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. helped lead to the conviction and 10-year prison sentence of a Chinese journalist who had written about media restrictions in an e-mail.

Authorities in Shanghai have installed surveillance cameras and begun requiring visitors to Internet cafes to register with their official identity cards.

Hey, we hated the evil Commie Ruskies, but when they were beating us in the space race we announced we had to teach math the way they did (many of us never recovered from the tribulations of set theory) in order to compete better. We hated the Japanese when they were making cheap economical cars and beating the pants off Detroit's steel stegosauruses (stegosauri?) (maybe that should not be phrased in the past tense) and from them we learned to site auto plants in crappy nonunion southern states in order to compete better.

Now that its the evil Commie Chinese who we are supposed to be learning from (and who coincidentally have a death grip on our national testicles via holding great whacking chunks of our hot national debt) I'm sure we will be looking to the East for wisdom in other matters too. And people wonder why I look distrustfully at Yahoo News....

Come over to the New Corrente Building and read more about what your tax dollars are paying for today.

It shouldn’t be a news flash that neither one of these Shiite forces is led by “good guys.” It’s a mafia-style war between two descendants of Iraq’s leading ayatollah-led families, the Sadrs and the Hakims, who don’t exactly express affection for each other. Beginning in the 1950s, with the overthrow of the king of Iraq in 1958, the Sadr and Hakim clans mobilized Iraq’s Shiites in a struggle against Iraqi nationalists, the Baath Party, and the communists. It was then that the Sadr-Hakim mafia founded Al Dawa, the militant, terrorist-included theocratic party which still exists, out of which Prime Minister Jaafari emerged. In more recent years, the Sadr faction and the Hakim faction became like Hatfields and McCoys, feuding—with guns.

and of course, a little metaphor, rhetoric and my usual melodramatic flair:

My sad vision of Iraq is akin to a rich, dying old woman, raped and battered by her “friends” and children, kept alive artificially by “well meaning” neighbors, who lies mute on a bed of pain as lawyers, priests and politicians rip her estate apart like jackals, each faction seeking ultimately only her money, and caring nothing for her dignity, comfort, or helpless young grandchildren who stand by her bedside weeping in rage and fear for their future.

You know, I like to write fiction, but in these times I just don't feel motivated- the daily truth of this world is more than enough.

Gag me with a spoon:

LOS ANGELES When someone dials Leah Balecha's mobile phone, it doesn't ring. It jams with the sounds of 50 Cent, OutKast, Gwen Stefani and Kelly Clarkson.

Like a growing number of mobile phone users, the 30-year-old videographer and student has taken to customizing her handset, sometimes paying more than $3 for just a snippet of a single song to turn it into an audible fashion accessory.

"I love the reaction I get when people hear my phone ringing," Balecha said. "All of my girlfriends have a different ring."(AP)

You wouldn't "love the reaction" if you were playing your audible fashion accessory in the middle of my commute. Put that stupid thing on vibrate, bitch! Yeah, I'm talking to you! 'Cause I can hear you yammering away about nothing even through my fucking headphones!

At a state hospital!?!?!

Welcome to Wingerworld, land of the demon-haunted!

What next? A "conscience exemption" for Wingerworld shrinks? Hey, what about pharmacists? Can a pharmacist refuse to fill a prescription because he or she believes the client is possessed by demons?

LARNED — [Larned State Hospital] Psychologist Rex Rosenberg believes in demons.

He believes its possible to measure demonic influence with a survey he created. [Read more at the renovated Corrente building.

Digby's comment on the latest torture scandal:

It's pretty clear that even our own highly disciplined military can lose their humanity without a whole lot of provocation. These weren't dipshit national guard hicks either. This was the 82nd Airborn. No excuses.

Because I am fond of repeating myself I'm going to repeat myself: "Don't blame the low-level individuals, blame the powerful officials all the way up the chain of command."

If there had been an explicit policy coming straight from the top (meaning the Commander in Chief and the Sec Def) that US soldiers were to follow the Geneva Convention to the letter and that any deviations would be severely punished, none of this would have happened. Soldiers follow orders. That's what they do. In Iraq they were ordered to "soften up" detainees. The word from the top was to "take the gloves off". If they had been ordered to treat detainees humanely at all times, they would have followed that order as well.

The "decorated former Captain in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division" quoted in Time (via Digby):

I witnessed violations of the Geneva Conventions that I knew were violations of the Geneva Conventions when they happened but I was under the impression that that was U.S. policy at the time. And as soon as Abu Ghraib broke and they had hearings in front of Congress, the Secretary of Defense testified that we followed the spirit of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan, and the letter of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq, and as soon as he said that I knew something was wrong.

More:

The Human Rights Watch report describes the Captain, in particular, as deeply frustrated by his attempts to report the abuse to his own superiors, who repeatedly instructed him to keep quiet, to ignore what he'd seen and to consider the implications for his career.

"I approached my chain of command." Eventually, the captain says, he approached his company commander, battalion commander and representatives of the Judge Advocate Corps (the military justice system), trying in vain to get clarification of rules on prisoner treatment and the application of the Geneva Convention. At one point, the Captain asserts, his Company commander told him, in effect, "Remember the honor of the unit is at stake," and, "Don't expect me to go to bat for you on this issue ..."

From day one, the White House tasked the Ashcroft Justice Department and Abu Gonzalez to find legal justifications for torture. Why would they do that if their intention was to prevent torture and abuse?

Digby again:

As much as Katrina revealed the ugly underbelly of poverty and race in the country, 9/11 revealed the ugly underbelly of sadism and blind fury. This is a sick culture.

I understand the impulse to focus one's moral revulsion on the perpetrators. And I agree they should be held responsible and punished.

But putting ALL the blame on the low-level soldiers is wrong.

The idea that US soldiers might be more sadistic and furious by nature than other countries' soldiers or than any other human being is wrong.

The Stanford Prison Experiment proved, scientifically, that even a sample of smart, presumably at least middle-class civilian college students will engage in torture and abuse if given the right conditions. Read the linked article. It looks like the same conditions were present in Iraq. So it has nothing to do with the Abu Ghraib perpetrators being "hicks".

And "our sick culture" has nothing to do with it either. Humans were torturing each other long before Internet Porn and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. If Digby is talking about our collective responsibility for what happens in Iraq, he might have a point. But that's not my culture, it's Republican/Neocon culture.

The responsibility of decent Americans is to pin the blame where it belongs: on the people giving the orders and setting the policies. It has less emotional appeal but it has the added bonus of inspiring Americans to force the Neocons out of office and force the Democrats to represent the decency and righeousness most Americans posess.

UPDATE: Unless you take a reality-based approach to the torture issue (that pattens of behavior by those employed by the US Government are the result of policies set by those in charge of the US Government), you fall into the trap of Right-Wing ideology: devolving all responsibility for everything to the individual.

This exempts the GOP government from any blame and it helps them to divide and conquer the masses. Pitting leftists and liberals against the soldiers who aren't in Iraq by their own volition. Fomenting tribal paranoia in the educated liberal/lefty set: "the soldiers and the redneck hordes are different from Us: they are innately violent, ignorant and racist". Change will only come about if US Citizens unite against the current leadership. When liberals/lefties talk about other groups of US citizens as if they were intrinsically incapable of intelligent or moral action, it accomplishes nothing. There are good and bad people in every group of humans. The bad people running the US government are the real problem.

A few reads:

Tic toc, tic toc... Newsweek's "A Washington Sand Trap"

Billmon takes a look at The Porn of War as laid out in The Nation. A porn site segues into images of human destruction in Iraq: 101st Keyboarders can now whack off to human carnage. Writes Billmon (who thinks out loud in this posting, and tries to divine what is right and what is wrong with withdrawl from Iraq): It left me with the conviction -- or at least an intuitive suspicion -- that an open-ended war in Iraq (or in the broader Islamic world) will bring nothing but misery and death to them, and creeping (or galloping) authoritarianism to us. If he had doubt, it vanished in the horrors of the real.

Elton Beard edits David Gerlertner and his musings about a women's right to safe and legal abortions.

Crooks & Liars has the Viggo Mortensen/Charlie Rose interview. Viggo is currently an avatar of humanism in his quiet affirmation of both reason and heart. Rose has fallen into playing devil's advocate with a relish that reveals his increasingly brutish politics.


Chase a deer and end up everywhere!

Rumi

+++

I finally woke up early enough on a Sunday to catch Timmeh on the Teevee.

He invited Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, back to the show after his heart rending appearance three weeks ago when he described the slow death of one of his employees' mothers in a nursing home.

Timmeh confronted him with his manly confrontational style:

because MSNBC and other blog organizations have looked into the facts behind your comments and these are the conclusions,

Their learned conclusion is that Broussard's timeline wasn't accurate. He was off by a day or so on when the employees' mother died. So he's a liar trying to score political points by breaking down in tears on national tv.

But who are these shadowy "blog organizations" that Timmeh speaks of? A quick google search takes us to WuzzaDem.com (Wha?) by way of World Nut Daily.

Ah, the mighty investigative powers of the National Broadcasting Company News Department. I can imagine the editorial meeting in the wood paneled corporate offices..

"What are we going to do for MTP this Sunday? Any ideas?"

"Uh, let's see what World Net Daily has."

"Brilliant!"

Here are some headlines from World Nut Daily today:

Sex abuse, brainwashing exposed on campus!
--WND Exclusive--

WorldNetDaily Exclusive
Scouts targeted in San Diego
Homosexual, atheist activists to march on camp
--WND

It should be obvious from taking one look at WND that it is the equivalent of the National Enquirer for credulous religious right-wingers. Good enough for the professionals at NBC, apparently.

What's worse, when the MSM quotes utter horseshit from Right-Wingnut sites (and they always quote Right-Wing sites) then references them with "the blogs are saying" it gives the impression that even responsible Left-Wing blogs like DailyKos (or Corrente for that matter) are equally full of crap.

But what did Aaron Broussard do to incur WuzzaDem and Timmeh's ire? What was his crime? Were they simply offended by his unmanly display of tears? No, it was far worse:

Wuzza:

Aaron Broussard's crocodile tears came at the tail-end of a tirade against FEMA, [...]

Was Broussard (a Democrat) trying to score political points (and possibly deflect blame away from local government officials) by blaming federal agencies for failing to respond in a timely manner when people's lives were in danger?

Aha! He dared to place some blame on the Federal Government and by extension on Dear Leader. Unacceptable! He must be shamed in public!

The courageous and confrontational Timmeh uses the "blog organizations" as a proxy to say what he's too cautious to say:

Mr. Russert: Mr. Broussard, the people who are questioning your comments are saying that you accused the federal government and the bureaucracy of murder, specifically calling on the secretary of Homeland Security and using this as an example to denounce the federal government. And what they're saying is, in fact, it was the local government that did not evacuate Eva Rodrigue on Friday or on Saturday. And they're making that, in fact...

Then Broussard responds in the only way you can respond to a Right-Wing Slime Attack: forcefully, passionately, unequivocally. As opposed to, say, I don't know, John F'ing Kerry. The high-powered, professional Beltway Dems could learn a thing or two (or five thouseand) from this county official from the Deep South.

When somebody wants to nit-pick these details, I don't know what sick minds creates this black-hearted agenda, but it's sick. I mean, let us recover. Let us rebuild. If somebody wants me to debate them on national TV, hey, buddy, be my guest. Make my day. Put me at a podium when I got a full night's sleep and you will not like matching me against anybody that you want. That person is going to be in trouble.

Crossposted to the New and Mightier Corrente Building.