Damien, Demons, Dubya, and Dowd.....

Heres Dowd...a day late....
More later....

June 7, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Damien, Demons and Dubya

By MAUREEN DOWD

washington

As I write this on 6-6-06, with a new Damien demonically wheeling through movie theaters trying to kill his mom in a remake of "The Omen," let us now speak of famous bogeymen.

The Bushes have always been good at using bogeymen to their political advantage.

Lee Atwater, the devilish strategist for Bush Senior, turned an obscure criminal named Willie Horton into the Candyman in 1988, whipping up the fear that if Michael Dukakis were elected, hordes of swarthy skels would be freed on weekend parole and swarm into your neighborhood.

W.'s supporters beat back the McCain threat in the 2000 South Carolina primary by spreading gossip that the Arizona senator had fathered a black baby — a creepy distortion of the fact that he and his wife had adopted a little girl from Bangladesh.

Karl Rove, an Atwater acolyte, had a closetful of bogeymen whisking W. past the finish line in 2004: terrorists who might strike again, gays who wanted to get hitched, stem cell research, Darwin, Dan Rather, and a Swift-boated John Kerry.

W. prefers tactical bêtes noires to real ones. (Hillary followed his lead by joining conservatives to support a constitutional ban on flag burning.)

The president had a truly terrifying bogeyman in Osama but instead conjured up a fake nuclear villain in Saddam. He has played down bin Laden, first diverting the resources needed to capture him and now diverting the money needed to protect against his likely targets, letting homeland security funds be moved from New York and Washington. (Jon Stewart has said that Omaha got a lot of homeland security money because it was under threat by the "renowned Midwestern terrorist Omaha bin Laden.")

As Mike Crowley of The New Republic notes, the F.B.I. does not even mention 9/11 in its "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives" profile of Osama. The poster, updated in November 2001, says bin Laden is wanted in the bombings of the United States Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 200 in 1998, and "is a suspect in other terrorist attacks." No word of the nearly 3,000 killed on Sept. 11.

Fearing that their monopoly on Washington power could be coming to an end, with voters grumpy at Republicans over Iraq, gas prices, Medicare, Social Security, corruption, wild spending and general incompetence, Bush strategists have revived the gay marriage Frankenstein to scare the base into turning out for midterms. (That bride of Frankenstein had better be female.)

Same-sex marriage is far less spooky than the 17 severed heads recently found in a village northeast of Baghdad, or the terror suspect accused of conspiring to behead the Canadian prime minister.

W. ignored the gay marriage issue in the 19 months after he used it to help him stay in the White House. To reprise it now, knowing it has no chance of passing, is so transparent that surely even the most blinkered "values" voters see through it.

When pollsters ask Americans their top priorities, gay marriage does not leap onto the list. In a new ABC News poll, only four in 10 surveyed were in favor of rewriting the Constitution.

Even as W. gave a speech here promoting a constitutional amendment designed to demonize and discriminate against a group of Americans who have done nothing wrong, his heart did not seem in it. A Democratic strategist noted on CNN that the president looked as cowed as "a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs."

Wrestling with Iraq and Iran have worn down W., and he knows, as we do, that a couple of middle-aged guys who want to tie the knot in Provincetown is not the worst threat America faces.

With our marines needing refresher courses in "core values" and with Dick Cheney promoting values like torture, government snooping and pre-emptive war, it rings hollow to opportunistically proselytize on family values. (Mary Cheney, the gay daughter of the vice president, told interviewers recently that her father opposed the marriage amendment.)

As a Times reader who sometimes e-mails me put it: "The 'values' voters turn out to be opinion voters. They believe that God hates homosexuals, that superstition trumps science every time, that all those foreigners ought to be sent back where they came from, and that all government programs are wasteful and immoral, except, of course, for the government programs which benefit them. Those are opinions, not values, and willfully ignorant opinions at that."

I know Republicans are desperate. But does it make sense to use gay love to hatemonger here when we have so much real hate coming at us from abroad?

I HATE ANN 'THE NAZI' COULTER

I have been brimming with things to say for two days; bubbling over with thoughts, irony, ideas, and insight. But, Blogger was down for a while, or I couldn't get on today, and I ended up partially blogging into Word and not quite finishing up because I have been on the phone and then out of the house doing stuff, driving around, buying stuff, putting out fires...Oh well....

The thing that has snuck up on me this evening what has been looking at me every time I turn on the TV for a few minutes to see if anything good (can you say:Rove indictment!?) has happened, is Mr. Ann Coulter spewing hate speech that would be against the law if it was about Black people or Jews.
What was done to that scary trannie to make her so mean and crazy? I can only imagine that somehow she feels like its a reflection of her superior intelligence and beauty that people hate her.

My Mom was just telling me that she went to a talk in the village a few years ago that Greta Van Sustern gave to a bunch of lawyers, and that Ann Coulter sat in the front row. Van Sustern was definitely seething and when Ann interjected something Van Sustern proceeded to eviscerate her. It is so easy to be smarter than Coulter, that even someone like Matt Lauer could do it!
I wish my Mom remembered what it was about, but its not important because the content of what Missy Ann is talking about is usually spew, and its not hard for anyone to fight her down, thought there is no relief in being right because she goes away with a sociopath's sureness of path and leaves people shaking their heads in disbelief.
Who actually listens to her and takes what she says seriously? Who is her audience and how does she sell books? What sponsor would advertise on a show that she would do?
Well after her second appearance on NBC (actually MSNBC's bizarre Tucker Carlson show which seems to have devolved into a Jerry Springer-ish oddity show, which actually might be an acceptable platform for her to sell her book had she not also been interviewed seriously by Matt Lauer on the Today show,) I wrote the shows each a letter letting them know, in no uncertain terms, that I will organize a boycott if they give her any more airtime because she is just spewing hate and lies. There is little difference between her spew and what you might find at a white supremacist rally. She is just full of hate and would seemingly say anything ...anything at all...
Even Imus was joking around about her this morning and saying that Charles (his Republican newsman) likes her and all, but that he hadn't heard the clip. Well, they played the clip and Imus was incensed by not only what she was saying and how over the top she is, but by her anger and snotty tone.
I'm tired of liars, I'm tired of hate, I'm tired of killing and war and death. I hate the Ann Coulters who have risen out of the gutter with this disgusting atmosphere of corruption and destruction of everything that America is.
So, join me in writing to the Today Show at (Today@NBC.com )and to the Situation (Tucker@MSNBC.com) and let them know what you think of any major news channel giving this monster airtime.
Its not a matter of free speech because she has every right to write and talk about this crap, but it is about who gets airtime and who is interviewed by the top anchors.
This woman is a clown. Stop giving her air time!
Oh and, thanks again to Keith Olberman for his great reporting on this
and for representing the majority of America with his show that is in turn cut to the bone truthful and wacky! (Tucker is laughable in his blatant attempts to mirror this show....No way ever Tucker....Just give it up!)


RIP Billy Preston

Rich...lets just bring 'em home!

Here is Frank Rich and I will try to write a bit later on...until then, just have a look at my new birddog movie below!


June 4, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Supporting Our Troops Over a Cliff
By FRANK RICH

THE sunlight was brilliant in New York City on Memorial Day weekend, and the sailors deposited in town by Fleet Week looked brilliant in it. Nothing, including the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Haditha, has shaken American affection for the troops. Nothing should. These men and women go to war so we can party on. Since 9/11, our government has asked no sacrifice of civilians other than longer waits at airline security. We've even been rewarded with a prize that past generations would have found as jaw-dropping as space travel: a wartime dividend in the form of tax cuts.

"It shocked me that the country was not mobilized for war," said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who retired after his stint as a commander in Iraq and became an outspoken critic of Donald Rumsfeld. He told The Wall Street Journal that "it was almost surreal" that the only time some Americans "think about the war is when they decide what color magnet ribbon to put on the back of their car."

Should we feel guilty? Yes. The sunshine of last weekend, splendid as it was for a cookout, could not eradicate the dark reality that we keep sending our troops into a quagmire. At Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, the president read a poignant letter that First Lt. Mark Dooley, killed by a bomb last September in Ramadi, wrote to his parents. What Mr. Bush did not say was that now, nine months later, insurgents rule Ramadi. As he spoke at Arlington on Monday, the Pentagon was preparing to announce that 1,500 emergency reinforcements were being sent from Kuwait to Anbar province, home to Ramadi, Haditha and Falluja, to try to stanch the bleeding.

There is more than a little something wrong with this picture. The president reiterated his Plan for Victory in Iraq as recently as his appearance with Tony Blair on May 25: "As the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down." He said then that the Iraqis were "taking more of the fight" and "more territory" and "more missions." The State Department concurred: Iraqi security forces are participating in "more than 80 percent of operations."

So let's do the math. According to our own government, more Iraqis are standing up — some 263,000 at latest count. But we are not standing down. We are, instead, sending in more American troops. Where have we seen this shell game before?

There was another plan for victory, too, you may recall. On the third anniversary of the invasion, in March, the president celebrated the new strategy of "clear, hold and build" by citing the example of Tal Afar, "today a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq." Last month 17 people were killed by a suicide bomber in an outdoor market there. The Tal Afar mayor has told The Los Angeles Times it will be at least three years before Iraqi security forces can secure his city of 150,000 without American help. To clear, hold and build in, say, Baghdad, with its population of six million, we'd have to throw in countless more troops still.

"When you open up the strategy for victory, there's nothing inside," Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and Marine veteran, argued in a speech last month. What the White House has always had instead of a strategy for victory is a strategy for public relations. That, too, fell under siege over Memorial Day weekend.

Call the P.R. strategy "attack, clear and hold": the administration attacks the credibility of reporters covering the war and tries to clear troubling Iraq images from American TV screens so that popular support might hold until a miracle happens on the ground. This plan first surfaced when the insurgency exploded in spring 2004: Ted Koppel was pilloried by White House surrogates for reading the names of the fallen on "Nightline" and Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that "a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors."

Upon being told that 34 journalists had been killed in the war up to that point, Mr. Wolfowitz apologized, but the strategy was never rescinded. Mr. Bush routinely chastises the press for reporting on bombings rather than "success" stories like Tal Afar. His new top domestic policy adviser, Karl Zinsmeister, has called American war correspondents "whiny and appallingly soft," and he declared last June that "our struggle in Iraq as warfare" was over except for "periodic flare-ups in isolated corners." That's the news the administration wants: the insurgency is always in its last throes. We'd realize that this prognosis was "basically accurate," Dick Cheney has explained, if only the non-Fox press didn't concentrate on car bombs in Baghdad.

Now more than 70 journalists have died in Iraq, more than in any modern war, including two members of a CBS News crew killed in the bombing that injured the correspondent Kimberly Dozier. This tragedy also took place on Memorial Day, which Ms. Dozier was honoring by trying to do one of those Iraq "good news" stories that the administration faults the press for ignoring: the story of an American soldier who, despite having been injured, was "fighting on in memory of those who have fallen," as she had e-mailed colleagues. Once that good-news story died in the bombing, so, one imagines, did the administration strategy of pinning the bad news in Iraq on the reporters who risk their lives to hang in there. Or so, in the name of simple decency, we might hope.

Those reporters, at least, have the right to leave. Not so the troops. General Batiste's observation about the "almost surreal" disconnect between the home front and the war is damningly true, even in Washington. As the violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan spiraled before and after Memorial Day, Congress kept its eye on its own ball. In a bipartisan display of honor among thieves, Democrats and Republicans banded together to decry the F.B.I. for searching the office of a Democratic congressman, William Jefferson, who had been accused of hiding $90,000 in questionable cash in his freezer. Even more ludicrously, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — a man who damaged our troops incalculably by countenancing an official policy of torture — finally threatened to resign on principle. The principle he was standing up for, however, was not the Geneva Conventions but the F.B.I.'s right to raid Mr. Jefferson's office.

Contrast these clowns with J. W. Fulbright, a senator who convened hearings to challenge presidents from both parties during Vietnam, changing the nation's course. The current Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, has proudly put on this month's legislative agenda constitutional amendments to stop same-sex marriage and flag burning. "Right now people in this country are saying it's O.K. to desecrate that flag and to burn it," he said on Fox News last Sunday, though it's not clear exactly who these traitors are. A Nexis search turns up only one semi-recent American flag-burning incident — by a drunk and apparently apolitical teenager in Mr. Frist's home state, Tennessee, in 2005.

The marriage-amendment campaign will be kicked off tomorrow with a Rose Garden benediction by the president. Though the amendment has no chance of passing, Mr. Bush apparently still thinks, as he did in 2004, that gay-baiting remains just the diversion to distract from a war gone south.

So much for the troops. For all the politicians' talk about honoring those who serve, Washington's record is derelict: chronic shortages in body and Humvee armor; a back-door draft forcing troops with expired contracts into repeated deployments; inadequate postwar health care and veterans' benefits. And that's just the short list. Now a war without end is running off the rails and putting an undermanned army in still greater jeopardy. "Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy," Nir Rosen, who has covered Iraq since the invasion, wrote in The Washington Post last weekend.

We can't pretend we don't know this is happening. It's happening in broad daylight. We know that "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down" is fiction, not reality. We know from the Pentagon's own report to Congress last week that attacks on Americans and Iraqis alike are at their highest since American commanders started keeping count in 2004. We know that even as coalition partners like Italy and South Korea bail out, we are planning an indefinite stay of undefined parameters: the 104-acre embassy complex rising in the Green Zone is the largest in the world, and the Decider himself has said that it's up to "future presidents and future governments of Iraq" to decide our exit strategy.

Actually, the current government of Iraq already is. On Thursday the latest American-backed Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whom Mr. Bush is "proud to call" his "ally and friend," invited open warfare on American forces by accusing them of conducting Haditha-like killing sprees against civilians as a "regular" phenomenon. If this is the ally and friend we are fighting for, a country that truly supports the troops has no choice but to start bringing them home.