Jon Stewart Grills Doug Feith

I missed this when it aired, but, on my husband's recommendation, I went looking for video. Jon Stewart proves once again that he is one of the only actual journalists in broadcast news. In this interview, he really puts Doug Feith's feet to the fire the way "real news professionals," let alone Congress, failed to in the run up to our invasion of Iraq.

Flying the Unfriendly Skies

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Remember when flying was fun? Remember when flight attendants... attended? Not anymore. Now, apparently, their comfort comes first. Remember this waitress in the sky who forced a woman off the plane because she wouldn't drug her fussy toddler? Now comes a story of Jet Blue attendant who consigned a passenger to the bathroom because she didn't care for her jump seat.

Gokhan Mutlu, of Manhattan's Inwood section, says in court papers the pilot told him to "go 'hang out' in the bathroom" about 90 minutes into the San Diego to New York flight because the flight attendant complained that the "jump seat" she was assigned was uncomfortable, the lawsuit said.

. . .

The pilot told him 1 1/2 hours into the five-hour flight that he would have to relinquish the seat to the flight attendant, court papers say. But the pilot said that Mutlu could not sit in the jump seat because only JetBlue employees were permitted to sit there, the lawsuit said.

. . .

The aircraft hit turbulence and passengers were directed to return to their seats, but "the plaintiff had no seat to return to, sitting on a toilet stool with no seat belts," court papers say.

. . .

Mutlu's lawsuit, filed Friday in Manhattan's state Supreme Court, says JetBlue negligently endangered him by not providing him with a seat with a safety belt or harness, in violation of federal law.

Populist or Panderer?

A good explanation from Jonathan Chait of Hil and Bill's corporate friendly, or conservative, "populism."

Conservative populism and liberal populism are entirely different things. Liberal populism posits that the rich wield disproportionate influence over the government and push for policies often at odds with most people's interest. Conservative populism, by contrast, dismisses any inference that the rich and the non-rich might have opposing interests as "class warfare." Conservative populism prefers to divide society along social lines, with the elites being intellectuals and other snobs who fancy themselves better than average Americans.

Consider this analysis recently offered by Bill Clinton in Clarksburg, West Virginia: "The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules." This is precisely the dynamic that allows multimillionaires like George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly to present themselves as being on the side of the little guy. A more classic expression of conservative populism cannot be found.

. . .

Likewise, Bill Clinton recently declared, "The people in small towns in rural America, who do the work for, and represent the backbone and the values of this country, they are the people that are carrying her through in this nomination." The corollary--that strong values and hard work is in shorter supply among ethnically heterogeneous urban residents--is left unstated. Hillary Clinton's statement about "hard-working Americans, white Americans" simply made explicit a theme that conservative populists usually keep implicit.

Here's a bit more from the Big Dog's mouth:

Per ABC News' Sarah Amos, this is what the 42nd president of the United States said Friday in Ripley, W.Va.:

"Hillary is in this race because of people like you and places like this and no matter what they say," Clinton said. "And no matter how much fun they make of your support of her and the fact that working people all over America have stuck with her, she thinks you're as smart as they are. She thinks you've got as much right to have your say as anybody else. And, you know, they make a lot of fun of me because I like to campaign in places like this, they say I have been exiled to rural America, as if that was a problem. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be here than listening to that stuff I have to hear on television, I'd rather be with you. There is a simple reason: You need a president a lot more than those people telling you not to vote for her."

I'm so glad team Clinton is moving away from all the divisive rhetoric.

Hillary Clinton: Not Ready for Prime Time

Who's Tom Morrow?

A hat tip to Talking Points Memo on a couple of insightful perspectives on Hillary's hard-working white people gaffe. First from one of Bill Clinton's most ardent defenders and co-author of "The Hunting of the President," Joe Conason.

There is indeed a pattern emerging -- and it is a pattern that must dismay everyone who admires the Clintons and has defended them against the charge that they are exploiting racial divisions.

. . .

But this time she violated the rhetorical rules, no doubt by mistake. It was her offhand reference to "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" that raises the specter of old Dixie demagogues like Wallace and Lester Maddox. Was she dog-whistling to the voters of Kentucky and West Virginia?

While I still cannot believe she actually intended any such nefarious meaning, she seemed to be equating "hard-working Americans" with "white Americans." Which is precisely what Wallace and his cohort used to do with their drawling refrain about welfare and affirmative action. This is the grating sound of Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, even though Tricky Dick would never quite stoop to saying such things in public.

As Conason goes on to point out, Bill Clinton has a proven track record on race issues in Arkansas. It's hard to imagine that the Clintons themselves are racist at all. The problem here, as per Conason, is one of being incautious with language, on issues where caution is paramount.

Not surprisingly, Peggy Noonan is less charitable in her assessment.

White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? "Even Richard Nixon didn't say white," an Obama supporter said, "even with the Southern strategy."

If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

"She has unleashed the gates of hell," a longtime party leader told me. "She's saying, 'He's not one of us.'"

Whether it is incautiousness or a cold political calculus and deliberate race-baiting, Noonan is right in her assessment of how Hil's comments read. The point is essentially moot. Language matters in politics. And while all politicians find themselves in bad moments and make stupid gaffes -- like Obama on "bitter" voters -- the stakes on the issues where Hillary has been grossly impolitic are so sensitive as to require the greatest of care. How is it that with her many years of "experience," Hillary is so completely unready for prime time?

Scarier still, because of the direct impact on matters of national security, was Hillary's ghoulish commentary on Iran. Or as Joe Conason put it:

In this protracted and often dispiriting prelude to the general election, few remarks have been as poorly chosen as Senator Hillary Clinton’s threat to “totally obliterate” Iran. What she obliterated with just those two words were her own boasts of superior diplomatic experience—and she managed at the same time to tar America’s international image with all the subtlety of the man she hopes to replace.

Context cannot excuse her, even though she uttered that gaffe in response to an intentionally provocative question: What would she do, as president, if the Iranian regime ever strikes Israel with nuclear weapons? First she could have noted that the question’s premise is wrong, at least according to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, which found that Iran neither possesses nuclear arms nor is likely to acquire them anytime soon. Then she might have answered as all presidents (or aspiring presidents) should when asked about such hypothetical military scenarios: “Our adversaries know very well that we have the power and the resolve to respond if one of our closest allies is attacked.”

Alluding to the potential use of justified force is far smarter than blustering about an act of genocidal brutality. So why wasn’t that distinction obvious to Mrs. Clinton?

Hillary has become completely embarrassing. From her surreal "victory" speech, as her Indiana win was dwindling almost to the point of slipping away, to the mounting number of dangerously sloppy attempts at talking points. Won't someone please take the mic away from this woman before she does serious damage to something more important than her own reputation?

The Vast Clinton Conspiracy

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Any residual sympathy I had for the Clintons as targets of the "vast right wing conspiracy" was expended in the umpteenth chapter of "The Endless Saga of the Eternal Primary." This because team Clinton insists on borrowing heavily from the very playbook they so famously decried. The tactics should be familiar to those who've watched the machinations of that very VRWC: insinuations of guilt by association, reliance on the media of the right wing noise machine, faux populism and disingenuous charges of elitism, and, of course, blatant distortions of reality. With a self-righteous arrogance befitting the Bushes, it seems the Clintons are operating from the belief that it's only wrong when other people do it. And in their Bush-league hypocrisy, the charges of motes they hurl only make them seem totally oblivious to the many beams in their own eyes.

Witness their exploitation of the Ayers red herring. As per Clinton biographer Carl Bernstein:

Which raises the question: Is the Clinton campaign's emphasis on the Ayers-Obama connection significantly different or less spurious than the familiar (McCarthyite?) smears against Hillary, particularly those promulgated and disseminated by the forces she labeled "the vast right-wing conspiracy" in the 1990s?

Like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton has (at least so far as this reporter and biographer has been able to determine) consistently rejected the ideological rigidity of the radical Left and -- especially -- the notion of revolutionary violence as a means of political change in contemporary America, despite claims to the contrary by the VRWC. Like Obama -- and John McCain for that matter -- she has valued her friendships with individuals who figured in the Left-wing and anti-war movements of the 60s and Vietnam era. And like Obama and McCain, she has never wavered from her belief and faith in establishment politics, within the two-party system.

As Bernstein explains Hillary has carefully expunged much of her own idealistic interest in radical politics -- such as the Black Panthers trial -- from public accounts; even going so far as to bury her thesis on Saul Alinsky in unobtainable Wellesley archives. Yet her campaign has attempted to leverage Obama's even more tenuous link to radicalism. Notes Bernstein, with dismay:

One of Hillary Clinton's most winning attributes -- and Bill Clinton's too -- has always been their understanding of the complexity of American politics, and the danger of ideological demagoguery (witness their fight against the "vast right-wing conspiracy" and excesses). The resort by Hillary and her campaign to guilt-by-association--of which the Bill Ayers allegations are but one example: see Louis Farrakhan, or a comparatively-obscure African-American writer and perhaps -- communist party member named Frank Marshal Dixon, whom Obama knew in high school in Hawaii -- is, even for some of her most steadfast advocates, particularly dismaying. Like Gov. Bill Richardson and Senator Christopher Dodd, among others who have abandoned the Clintons, many old Clinton hands had hoped, judging from Hillary's triumphant and collegial senate years, that she -- and Bill -- had left behind such tactics when the Clinton Presidency ended in 2001 and the Right-wing threat to the Clintons' tenure in the White House had abated.

"The sad irony," noted Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, "is that these are the same [guilt-by-association] attacks used against her husband in the elections of the 1990s. The GOP tried to destroy Bill Clinton for his relationships (much closer than Obama's tangential connections) with Arkansas crooks, sleazy fund-raisers and unsavory women...

But, alas, no bit of Republican-style chicanery is too loathsome for the desperate Clintons to embrace. And, as this blogger was particularly dismayed to learn, a key architect of their new attack machinery is none other than Sidney Blumenthal.

Former journalist Sidney Blumenthal has been widely credited with coining the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" used by Hillary Clinton in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House where he worked as a high-level aide. A decade later, and now acting as a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton, Blumenthal is exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he's not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama's character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren't being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers -- including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists. One of the recipients of the Blumenthal email blast, himself a Clinton supporter, forwards the material to me and perhaps to others.

. . .

But, rather remarkably for such a self-professed liberal operative like Blumenthal, a staggering number of the anti-Obama attacks he circulates derive from highly-ideological and militant right-wing sources such as the misnamed Accuracy in Media (AIM), The Weekly Standard, City Journal, The American Conservative, and The National Review.

To cite just one recent example, Blumenthal circulated an article taken from the fervently hard-right AIM website on February 18 entitled, "Obama's Communist Mentor" by Cliff Kincaid. Kincaid is a right-wing writer and activist, a longtime critic of the United Nations, whose group, America's Survival, has been funded by foundations controlled by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife, the same millionaire who helped fund attacks on the Clintons during their White House years. Scaife also funds AIM, the right-wing media "watchdog" group.

Suddenly, Hillary's endorsement in longtime foe Mellon Scaife's paper seems not so terribly surprising.



Any reader of David Brock's "Blinded By The Right" will recognize, in Blumenthal's modus operandi, the familiar tactic of force-feeding propaganda from far right venues to more mainstream sources, and into the established media narrative. After years of defending against this very tactic, he seems to have learned it well.

Some Clinton supporters who also knew about Ayers have been discreetly trying to catapult the story out of the right-wing sandbox into the wider mainstream media. On April 9, Fox News' Sean Hannity interviewed fellow right-winger Karl Rove, who raised the Ayers-Obama connection. The next day, ABC News reporter Jake Tapper wrote about Ayers in his Political Punch blog. The following week, on his radio show, Hannity suggested to his guest, George Stephanopoulos, that he ask Obama about his relationship with Ayers at the upcoming Philadelphia presidential debate. Stephanopoulos, who was Bill Clinton's press secretary, replied, "Well, I'm taking notes." The following night during the April 16 nationally televised Presidential debate, Stephanopoulos dutifully asked Obama about Ayers, who is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Possibly more insulting is watching the Clintons turn to that mainstay of Republican politics: making fun of pointy-headed intellectuals. Is there anything more disingenuous than the obviously well-heeled pol insisting that it's the other guy who's part of the elite?



In the annals of sheer audacity, I never thought anything could top the mind melting hypocrisy of the scion of one of the wealthiest, most insulated families in the world -- an alumnus of both Yale and Harvard -- convincing blue collar voters that he was just plain folk. Okay, Dubya still wins the prize on the faux populism scale. But there also, Hillary refuses to be outdone. Exploiting for all it's worth, Obama's "bitter" faux pas, she has once again joined forces with the Republican competition. This time to paint the black son of a struggling single mother as an "elitist," and her Wellesley and Yale educated self, as someone who couldn't tell arugula from iceberg lettuce.

In her latest triangulation two-step, Clinton has partnered with McCain on an all out assault on voter intelligence, with the shamelessly pandering "gas tax holiday." To drive the point home, this woman, whom the Secret Service has protected from all concerns automotive since 1992, set out on her own blue collar comedy tour of gas station photo-op destinations.



Would you want to have a cup of coffee with this woman?

Steel Town USA

Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

The image of John McCain in Youngstown, in front of a dilapidated factory, talking about the wonders of free trade, is one of the most unintentionally funny things I've ever seen. It's like some sort of anti-politics. I have to wonder if he's running an experiment to see how badly he can campaign and still skate because everybody's focused on the Democratic food fight.

Hillary Clinton: Unfuckingbelievable!

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.



It's no secret that I hate Hillary. And everyday she gives me another reason. Her everything but the kitchen sink strategy continues and accelerates and now she's lobbed a toaster at Obama's head for stating the obvious.

"You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain. And all three of us would be better than George Bush," Obama said.

Says Hillary:

"We need a nominee who will take on John McCain, not cheer on John McCain, and I will be that nominee," she said.

Let me get in my time machine and go back a whole month and half.

Hillary Clinton told reporters that both she and the presumtive Republican nominee John McCain offer the experience to be ready to tackle any crisis facing the country under their watch, but Barack Obama simply offers more rhetoric. “I think you'll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain will be able to say,” she said. “He’s never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002.”

Oh my gods and goddess. The woman will say anything. No matter how completely unmoored from reality and reason it may be, she will say anything to win. Much like Bush, little things like recently recorded history will not get in the way of her narrative. That's why her Bosnian fish story stuck in many a craw; because that kind of revisionism is par for the course with this woman.

In other news Michael Moore dissed Hillary, saying:

Well, that sounded good last year, but over the past two months, the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting. I guess the debate last week was the final straw. I've watched Senator Clinton and her husband play this game of appealing to the worst side of white people, but last Wednesday, when she hurled the name "Farrakhan" out of nowhere, well that's when the silly season came to an early end for me. She said the "F" word to scare white people, pure and simple. Of course, Obama has no connection to Farrakhan. But, according to Senator Clinton, Obama's pastor does -- AND the "church bulletin" once included a Los Angeles Times op-ed from some guy with Hamas! No, not the church bulletin!

This sleazy attempt to smear Obama was brilliantly explained the following night by Stephen Colbert. He pointed out that if Obama is supported by Ted Kennedy, who is Catholic, and the Catholic Church is led by a Pope who was in the Hitler Youth, that can mean only one thing: OBAMA LOVES HITLER!

Yes, Senator Clinton, that's how you sounded. Like you were nuts. Like you were a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity. How sad that I would ever have to write those words about you. You have devoted your life to good causes and good deeds. And now to throw it all away for an office you can't win unless you smear the black man so much that the superdelegates cry "Uncle (Tom)" and give it all to you.

A-fucking-men! Moore sadly notes that he could not cast his vote for Obama, because like Floridians, Michigan residents were excluded by party rules from a real primary. What he does not say, is that he could have voted for Hillary and that if she has her way, that vote would count.

To shrink Obama's 800,000 popular-vote margin, the Clinton campaign argues for the inclusion of votes cast in Michigan and Florida. Those two states lost their right to send delegates to the convention by scheduling their contests earlier in the year than party rules allowed.

Clinton and Obama agreed not to campaign in the two states, and Obama took his name off the ballot in Michigan. Clinton won both uncontested races, and now says they should count in the nationwide popular-vote calculations.

Florida voters ``expressed their views,'' Clinton told the Newspaper Association of America in Washington on April 15. ``They have had their vote certified by the Florida secretary of state; it's part of the popular vote.''

That's what we're dealing with, in Hillary Clinton. A woman who thinks it's perfectly fair to include the results of an uncontested primary into the tally. A woman who just makes up the rules -- and the facts -- as she goes along. Unfuckingbelievable.

Great Television I Won't Be Watching

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.

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The Sundance Award winning documentary "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo" debuted on HBO last night. I did not watch it, nor will I when it re-airs. It would only make me go all fetal. The documentary is described in chilling detail in the Washington Post.

Six rapists in the lush forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo: One in a green hood, another in a red baseball cap, another in military fatigues and a camouflage hat, another in black sunglasses. Their guns are pointed down. Smoking cigarettes, they swagger. They hold up their fingers, counting the number of women they have raped, violated, damned. Sexual terror as a weapon of war, perpetrated sometimes with sticks, knives, tree limbs.

The men seem unafraid to confess. They are bragging to an American filmmaker who holds a camera, recording their words.

. . .

Millions of women and girls have been tortured, mutilated, impregnated as a form of ethnic cleansing. It happened during the Rwandan genocide, the civil wars in Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Chad, the former Yugoslavia and Liberia, as well as during the ongoing conflict in Darfur.

What follows are selected quotes from the surivors, their rapists, the filmmaker, and others.

"He who rapes a woman rapes an entire nation."

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"This type of sexual terrorism is done in a methodical manner by armed groups."

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"We were raped by 20 men at the same time. Our bodies are suffering. They have taken their guns and put them inside us. They kill our children and then they tell us to eat those children. If a woman is pregnant, they make your children stand on your belly so that you will abort. Then they take the blood from your womb and put it in a bowl and tell you to drink it."

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"If she says no, I must take her by force. If she is strong, I'll call some of my friends to help me. All this is happening because of the war. We would live a normal life and treat women naturally if there was no war."

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"After we've been raped, our men don't want us anymore. We are considered half-human beings."

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"Women are suffering. We have forgotten what happiness is."

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"Well, those women were not taken by force. The thing is they were in a combat zone where most of the fighters relied on magic power. This magic potion worked in such a way that you've got to rape women in order to overcome the enemies who've invaded our country, the Congo. That is why all those things have happened."

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"They are forgotten women in a forgotten war."

Conduct Waivers Up... Way Up

From USA Today:

The percentage of recruits requiring a waiver to join the Army because of a criminal record or other past misconduct has more than doubled since 2004 to one for every eight new soldiers.

. . .

The percentage of active and Reserve Army recruits granted "conduct" waivers for misdemeanor or felony charges increased to 11% last fiscal year from 4.6% in fiscal 2004, according to Army Recruiting Command statistics. So far this fiscal year, which began last October, 13% of recruits have entered the Army with conduct waivers.

. . .

Carr and others say the military has granted waivers without hurting the quality of recruits. Exceptions are granted after examining recommendations from teachers, coaches and others. "We don't look at them unless their community stands behind them," Carr said.

No loss in quality, huh? Great. Well I'm sure that Iraqi family, murdered and their teenage daughter raped, at the hands of Pfc. Steven D. Green will be relieved to hear it.

Recruits who have come in with waivers generally perform better than peers who haven't needed special permission to join the Army, [military personnel official, Bill] Carr said.

Better? Well, then, the Army should have been granting these waivers all along. I don't know why they waited until we started breaking the military in Iraq. Any policy that improves the quality of recruits should be consistent policy, I'd think. Note to Mr. Carr: Good flacks, in the know, know the meaning of the word "overkill."

Saw That Charton Heston

died. Was tempted to make a joke about finally prying that rifle from his hands... Thought better of it.

R.I.P

October 4, 1924 – April 5, 2008

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