The Political Chase

Olbermann Blasts Hillary on RFK Assassination Comment

(Updated below)

The original post on Olbermann’s comment was somehow accidentally deleted. I can’t remember (or recover) what I might have added to Keith’s commentary, however, it would pale in comparison to the disapprobation Olbermann levied on Hillary Clinton.

Here’s the video.

The transcript follows the jump.

Update 5/25, 8:57 PM ET:  I found the content of the original post. Here it is for whatever it’s worth:

"Keith Olbermann blasted Hillary Clinton Friday night on Countdown for her comment saying the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968 was one of the reasons why she should remain in the race to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States."

More. . .

Continue reading ‘Olbermann Blasts Hillary on RFK Assassination Comment’

Peggy Noonan’s perspective on Obama and Wright

I rarely reference or highlight Peggy Noonan’s writings and today is one of those rare occasions. In her Wall Street Journal piece, Noonan focuses on Jeremiah Wright in a rather nuanced way. She is critical of Wright, but doesn’t employ the same bitterness and rage that Wright turned on Americans, nor does she resort to the vengeful, condemning rhetoric of the Rush Limbaughs, Bill Kristols, and Hillary Clintons. More importantly, Noonan demonstrates her intelligence by not declaring Obama guilty by association.

Instead, Noonan posits just the opposite. Her take is, Obama’s values and attitudes are reflected in his actions and history, per se, and are not remotely indicative of Wright. She further emphasizes voters should judge Obama on his merits and not the actions or beliefs of Jeremiah Wright.

Noonan’s writing style does not lend itself to quick sound bites and small excerpts, which is why the quote is rather long. In spite of the amount quoted here, it’s best to read the entire piece.

Mr. Obama reveals many things in his books, speeches and interviews but polarity and a tropism toward the extreme are not among them. What happened with Mr. Wright should not determine the race. Mr. Obama’s stands, his ability to convince us he can make good change, his ability to be "one of us," that great challenge for a national politician in a varied nation, should determine the race….

I have seen Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, the Black National Anthem, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Louis Farrakhan. I came to see their radicalism as, putting the morality of policy based on rage aside, essentially unhelpful and impractical. It wouldn’t work as an American movement, not long-term. Hatred plays itself out, has power in the short-term but is nonsustaining in the long. America, and this is one of its glories, has a conscience to which an appeal can be made. It may take a long time, it may take centuries, but in the end we try hard to do the right thing, and everyone knows it. Hatred is a form of energy that does not fuel this machine and cannot make it run.

And all the time I was watching the old days of rage, blacks in America were rising, joining the professions, becoming middle class, assuming authority, becoming professors and doctors. No one is surprised anymore to meet a powerful man or woman who devises systems by which others should live – that would be a politician – who is black.

I came to think all the talk of radicalism and extremism amounted to little, and was in the end rejected by the very people it was meant to rouse. They didn’t buy it.

This week I talked to a young man, an Irish-American to whom I said, "Am I wrong not to feel anger about Wright?" He more or less saw it as I do, but for a different reason, or from different experience.

He said he figures Mr. Wright’s followers delight in him the same way he delights in the Wolfe Tones, the Irish folk group named for the 18th-century leader condemned to death by the British occupying forces, as they say on their Web site. They sing songs about the Brits and how they subjugated the Irish and we’ll rise up and trounce the bastards.

My 20-year-old friend has lived a good life in America and is well aware that he is not an abused farmer in the fields holding secret Mass in defiance of the prohibitions of the English ruling class. His life has not been like that. Yet he enjoys the bitterness. He likes going to Wolfe Tones concerts raising his fist, thinking "Up the Rebels." It is good to feel that old ethnic religious solidarity, and that in part is what he is in search of, solidarity. And it’s not so bad to take a little free-floating anger, apply it to politics, and express it in applause.

He knows the dark days are over. He just enjoys remembering them even if he didn’t experience them. His people did.

I know exactly what he feels, for I felt the same when I was his age. And so what? It’s just a way of saying, "I’m still loyal to our bitterness." Which is another way of saying, "I’m still loyal." I have a nice life, I’m American, I live far away, an Englishman has never hurt me, and yet I am still Irish. I can prove it. I can summon the old anger.

Is this terrible? I don’t think so. It’s human and messy and warm-blooded, as a human would be.

The thing is to not let your affiliation with bitterness govern you, so that you leave the Wolfe Tones concert and punch an Englishman in the nose. In this connection it can be noted there is no apparent record of people leaving a Wright sermon and punching anyone in the nose. Maybe they’re in search of solidarity too. Maybe they’re showing loyalty too….

And yet . . . it doesn’t get my blood up. It doesn’t hurt my heart. It doesn’t make me feel I need to defend my country. Because I don’t see it as attacked, only criticized in a way that is not persuasive.

Mr. Wright seems to me to be part of the great "barbaric yawp," as Walt Whitman called the American people fighting, discussing, making things and living. I like the barbaric yawp. I don’t enjoy it when it makes me wince, but at least when I am wincing, I know the yawp is working.

One of Herbert’s better columns

The New York Times’ Bob Herbert s is not one of my favorite columnists, but he makes a good point today. Briefly summarizing, Herbert writes that Barack Obama’s choice of words weren’t the best and he can stash the experience in his lessons-learned file. But, Herbert continues, "there is something perverse in the effort to portray Senator Obama — who has tried hard to promote a message of unity and healing — as some kind of divisive figure."

I have by no means captured all the salient points, so I suggest giving it a read.

Olbermann: Bush is a fascist

Keith Olbermann (MSNBC Countdown) blasted George Bush tonight by calling him a fascist and a liar in a Special Comment on FISA and telecom amnesty.

Expressing outrage, Olbermann said, “If you believe in the seamless, mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it. There is a dictionary definition. One word that describes that toxic blend. You are Fascist! Get them to print you a t-shirt with Fascist on it!”

Olbermann also reversed the rhetoric on Bush and declared that Bush had made America less safe by refusing to sign the FISA revision not granting immunity. Further challenging Bush he condemned him for not providing any evidence to support his fear-mongering claims.

Watch it.

Tom Toles Cartoon

Tom Toles’ 9/19 editorial cartoon in the WaPo is worth taking a look at if you haven’t already seen it.

Olbermann: The President of Hypocrisy

In response to President Bush’s ignominious press conference yesterday, Keith Olbermann blasted the president in a Special Comment on Countdown last night. Olbermann accused the president of polticizing the military by pimping General Petraeus, “reducing a four-star hero to a political hack,” and intentionally diverting criticism.

Click To Play

Send Frank Rich to Congress tomorrow

While there’s no doubt Petraeus will get a bit of drilling before Congress tomorrow, much of it will be subdued by the genteel atmosphere and diplomatic pleasantries normally dispensed in a Senate congressional hearing. Crumpets and tea, General?

Tomorrow, someone in Congress needs to take the gloves off as Frank Rich has done this week, and numerous times in the past.

The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information “war room” conceived in the last throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News producer. White House “facts” about the surge’s triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we’re being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush’s pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend’s precisely timed “surprise” presidential junket: Mr. Bush took the measure of success “on the ground here in Anbar” (as he put it) without ever leaving a heavily fortified American base.

A more elaborate example of administration Disneyland can be found in those bubbly Baghdad markets visited by John McCain and other dignitaries whenever the cameras roll. Last week The Washington Post discovered that at least one of them, the Dora market, is a Potemkin village, open only a few hours a day and produced by $2,500 grants (a k a bribes) bestowed on the shopkeepers. “This is General Petraeus’s baby,” Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell told The Post. “Personally, I think it’s a false impression.” Another U.S. officer said that even shops that “sell dust” or merely “intend to sell goods” are included in the Pentagon’s count of the market’s reopened businesses.

….In this new White House narrative, victory has been downsized to a successful antiterrorist alliance between Sunni tribal leaders and the American military in Anbar, a single province containing less than 5 percent of Iraq’s population. In truth, the surge had little to do with this development, which was already being trumpeted by Mr. Bush in his January prime-time speech announcing the surge.

….No doubt General Petraeus, like Dick Cheney before him, will say that his own data is “pretty well confirmed” by classified intelligence that can’t be divulged without endangering national security. Meanwhile, the White House will ruthlessly undermine any reality-based information that contradicts its propaganda, much as it dismissed the accurate W.M.D. findings of the United Nations weapon experts Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei before the war.

….What’s surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that even after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war its fictions can still infiltrate the real news. After Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, two Brookings Institution scholars, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed article in July spreading glad tidings of falling civilian fatality rates, they were widely damned for trying to pass themselves off as tough war critics (both had supported the war and the surge) and for not mentioning that their fact-finding visit to Iraq was largely dictated by a Department of Defense itinerary….Anchoring the “CBS Evening News” from Iraq last week, Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O’Hanlon. As “a snapshot of what’s going right,” she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against “Al Qaeda.” Channeling the president’s bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls “Al Qaeda in Iraq” and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11.

….When the line separating spin from reality is so effectively blurred, the White House’s propaganda mission has once more been accomplished. No wonder President Bush is cocky again. Stopping in Sydney for the economic summit after last weekend’s photo op in Iraq, he reportedly told Australia’s deputy prime minister that “we’re kicking ass.” This war has now gone on so long that perhaps he has forgotten the price our troops paid the last time he taunted our adversaries to bring it on, some four years and 3,500 American military fatalities ago.

Read the article…

Krugman Is Right

Paul Krugman is right. I have intended to bring this up for weeks — most acutely so after the Democrats just crumbled to Bush’s demands to revise FISA so he could do whatever he pleased.

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. After the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops, if he feels like it.

It is past time for the Democrats in Congress to decide what is more important — their oath and their responsibility to their constituents, or that George Bush and his minions will try to portray them as terrorist sympathizers. Bush and the rest of the uber-conservatives are going to accuse them of being terrorist sympathizers, or worse, regardless of what they do. And, the more they act like a bunch of wimps, the more their critics will resort to tactics that make them look like wimps.

Continued spineless actions and reactions by Democrats will do more harm to their reelection chances, which is what they fear most, than standing up to George Bush and doing what 70% of the country wants them to do.

Read Krugman’s article…

Olbermann: ‘You are lying Mr. Bush’

Keith Olbermann calls President Bush a liar in his special comment on Bush’s photo-op trip to Iraq on Labor Day and the revelation in Robert Draper’s recently released authorized biography on George Bush, Dead Certain, that Bush’s intention is to continue prosecuting the war in Iraq until his successor assumes the presidency.

Click To Play

O’Hanlon Publishes Another Advertisement

Michael O’Hanlon, an avid supporter of the war in Iraq, provides another advertisement, courtesy of the New York Times, supporting the Bush administration’s campaign to continue implementing Bush Democracy via a gun barrel.

While the recent Government Accountability Office report on the 18 benchmarks set out by Congress in May gave a very pessimistic view, our data above, culled from official Iraqi and American sources and press reports, support a more mixed picture.

…

Nonetheless, the military momentum appears real, despite the tragic multiple truck bombings in Ninevah Province on Aug. 14 that made that month the deadliest since winter. Overall, civilian fatality rates are down perhaps one third since late 2006, though they remain quite high. There are also signs that roughly six of Iraq’s 18 provinces are making significant economic and security gains, up from three a year ago. The story in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province is by now well known: attacks in the city of Ramadi are down 90 percent, and the economy is recovering. But there is progress in several regions with more complex sectarian mixes as well.

The New York Times editorial board deserves no accolades for its obvious agenda (and bias?) by publishing O’Hanlon’s op-ed today. It is hardly a coincidence that O’Hanlon had another op-ed in the Times just a month ago, which was extremely misleading, laden with inaccuracies and received the ultimate blow to its credibility from Glenn Greenwald.

O’Hanlon’s last piece was highly controversial, which of course spiked the Times’ readership, so why should they not repeat the same enterprising act as soon as possible?

I am beginning to question whose paying O’Hanlon’s salary, the White House, the New York Times, or the Brookings Institute?

Frank Rich on Bush and Petraeus

Indeed, I do look forward to Frank Rich’s weekly Bush bashing. This week Rich unleashes his wrath primarily on Gen. David Petraeus; however, Mr. Bush hardly goes unscathed.

These passages are not in sequential order; I laughed the most reading the first paragraph. The remaining are in order. The full article can be found here.

The president now hammers in the false litany of a “merger” between Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and what he calls “Al Qaeda in Iraq” as if he were following the Madison Avenue script declaring that “Cingular is now the new AT&T.” He doesn’t seem to know that nearly 40 other groups besides Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia have adopted Al Qaeda’s name or pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden worldwide since 2003, by the count of the former C.I.A. counterterrorism official Michael Scheuer. They may follow us here well before any insurgents in Iraq do.

Though General Petraeus wrote his 1987 Princeton doctoral dissertation on “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam,” he has an unshakable penchant for seeing light at the end of tunnels. It has been three Julys since he posed for the cover of Newsweek under the headline “Can This Man Save Iraq?” The magazine noted that the general’s pacification of Mosul was “a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency the right way.” Four months later, the police chief installed by General Petraeus defected to the insurgents, along with most of the Sunni members of the police force. Mosul, population 1.7 million, is now an insurgent stronghold, according to the Pentagon’s own June report.

By the time reality ambushed his textbook victory, the general had moved on to the mission of making Iraqi troops stand up so American troops could stand down. “Training is on track and increasing in capacity,” he wrote in The Washington Post in late September 2004, during the endgame of the American presidential election. He extolled the increased prowess of the Iraqi fighting forces and the rebuilding of their infrastructure.

The rest is tragic history. Were the Iraqi forces on the trajectory that General Petraeus asserted in his election-year pep talk, no “surge” would have been needed more than two years later. We would not be learning at this late date, as we did only when Gen. Peter Pace was pressed in a Pentagon briefing this month, that the number of Iraqi battalions operating independently is in fact falling — now standing at a mere six, down from 10 in March.

Who Really Took Over During That Colonoscopy - New York Times

Maureen Dowd Rips Tenet on New Book

Maureen Dowd’s two cents on George Tenet and his new book, At the Center of the Storm.

Poor Slam Dunk.

Not since Madame Butterfly has anyone been so cruelly misunderstood and misused. Slam Dunk says that when he pantingly told the president that fetching information on Saddam’s W.M.D. would be a cinch, he did not mean let’s go to war.

No matter how eager Slam Dunk was to tell W. what he wanted to hear while polishing the president’s shoes, the intelligence they craved did not exist. “Let me say it again: C.I.A. found absolutely no linkage between Saddam and 9/11,” the ex-Head Spook writes in his new book, self-effacingly titled “At the Center of the Storm.” Besides, Junior and Darth had already decided to go to war to show the Arabs their moxie.

The president and vice president wanted Slam Dunk to help them dramatize the phony case. Everyone had to pitch in! That Saturday session in December 2002 in the Oval Office was “essentially a marketing meeting,” Slam Dunk writes, just for “sharpening the arguments.”

Hey, I feel better.

Slam Dunk always presented himself as the ultimate guy’s guy, a cigar-chomping spymaster who swapped jokes with the president. But now he shows us his tender side, a sniveling C.I.A. chief bullied by “remote” Condi.

Read more…

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, George Tenet, CIA, At the Center of the Storm, Iraq

Frank Rich: Everybody Hates Don Imus

Frank Rich focuses on the Don Imus controversy this week. I think his view is appropriate for the public discourse.

FAMILIAR as I am with the warp speed of media, I was still taken aback by the velocity of Don Imus’s fall after he uttered an indefensible racist and sexist slur about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Even in that short span, there’s been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and self-congratulation from nearly every side of the debate, starting with Al Sharpton, who has yet to apologize for his leading role in the Tawana Brawley case, the 1980s racial melee prompted by unproven charges much like those that soiled the Duke lacrosse players.

It’s possible that the only people in this whole sorry story who are not hypocrites are the Rutgers teammates and their coach, C. Vivian Stringer. And perhaps even Don Imus himself, who, while talking way too much about black people he has known and ill children he has helped, took full responsibility for his own catastrophic remarks and didn’t try to blame the ensuing media lynching on the press, bloggers or YouTube. Unlike Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington, to take just three entertainers who have recently delivered loud religious, racial or sexual slurs, Imus didn’t hire a P.R. crisis manager and ostentatiously enter rehab or undergo psychiatric counseling. “I dished it out for a long time,” he said on his show last week, “and now it’s my time to take it.”

Among the hypocrites surrounding Imus, I’ll include myself. I’ve been a guest on his show many times since he first invited me in the early 1990s, when I was a theater critic. I’ve almost always considered him among the smarter and more authentic conversationalists I’ve encountered as an interviewee. As a book author, I could always use the publicity.

Read the entire column (PDF).

Frank Rich blasts Bush to smithereens

First, Nancy Pelosi primed W. with her blog post and then Frank Rich blasted W. to smithereens with his IED - a merciless pen. Crucifixion would have been less painful.

Rich begins his piece today with his classic style - you can see the smirk on his face as you read. That smirk quickly changes to stone-cold, grim reality. As I read this piece, I could feel Rich’s punches in my own gut as if I was W. If you are looking for the slap in the face followed by a chuckle that Frank Rich delivers so well, you will not find it here today.

Although, he doesn’t mention it, I can see that Frank has drawn heavily on his book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold. He has compressed some of the most significant elements of the book in this piece, such as the White House Iraq Group. Scooter Libby was in this group, which was the White House’s machine to create the war in Iraq. This small group bears 90+ percent of the responsibility for creating the mess this country cannot rid itself of.

EVEN by Washington’s standards, few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or will not pardon Scooter Libby. Of course he will.

A president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by encumbering them with “signing statements” and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn’t going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is “pretty much going to stay out of” the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr. Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans’ political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.

Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr. Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney’s Cheney knows too much about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing of Joseph Wilson. Though Mr. Libby wrote a novel that sank without a trace a decade ago, he now has the makings of an explosive Washington tell-all that could be stranger than most fiction and far more salable.

Continue reading ‘Frank Rich blasts Bush to smithereens’

Dick Cheney, George Bush, Op-Ed, Scooter Libby   Add a comment

Military Times Say Rumsfeld Must Go

The Army Times, The Navy Times, The Marine Corps Times, and The Air Force Times say Donald Rumsfeld should go.

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.