When Tea Partiers Attack -- Each Other: New York Candidates Beat Each Other Up Claiming The Mantle

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It's always kind of amusing watching Republicans fight over that cherished Tea Party endorsement the way dogs fight over a bone. As they apparently are in upstate New York's congressional District 26 -- the district where Christopher Lee most recently posed as a Republican congressman -- where there's now a disgruntled ex-Republican candidate named Jack Davis running as a third-party Tea Party candidate against a Republican who likewise claims various Tea Party endorsements.

Seems things have gotten down to the usual thuggishness and pettiness:

A 15-second video shows a tea party congressional candidate in New York scuffling with a Republican Party volunteer who questioned his absence from a debate.

The video posted on YouTube shows candidate Jack Davis asking the volunteer Wednesday whether he wants to “punch it out” after a campaign event in Greece, outside Rochester.

Davis was responding to the man’s repeated calls for him to explain why he backed out of a debate held Thursday in Buffalo.

Davis announced Wednesday he’d changed his mind about participating in the debate with the two major party candidates in the May 24 special election for the 26th District seat. Instead, he said he’d speak to voters directly via an electronic town hall meeting May 21.

In the video, the 78-year-old candidate steps toward the volunteer, who was holding a camera and asking, “Why did you back out of the debate? Why did you back out of the debate?”

“Do you want to punch it out?” Davis asks before swiping at the camera with his right hand.

Davis then laughs as he walks to his car while a man who appears to be a Davis campaign aide approaches the cameraman. As the camera shakes, the cameraman groans out of view as if he has been struck and then resumes asking Davis, “Why did you back out of the debate?”

It turns out that the videographer is in fact the chief of staff for the Republican front-runner.

Of course, the national Tea Party organizations are disowning Davis and claiming he's a Democrat in disguise. Even though he in fact ran as a Republican candidate and earned the endorsement of the western New York Tea Partiers.

This should be entertaining to watch, if nothing else.

Remind Us Again Why Anyone Takes The Nutcase Tea Partiers Seriously

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It's not just the racist outbursts and the intense adoption of bizarre conspiracy theories about the president's birth certificate that pretty clearly identifies the Tea Partiers as truly a bunch of loons. Then there are the costumes.

We got a prime example earlier this week in D.C., when a group of "Tea Party" spokesmen got up in front of reporters dressed in Revolutionary War costumes and intoned a raft of nutty stuff about fomenting a new American revolution.

What they were really on about was their contempt for House Speaker John Boehner as a "Republican In Name Only" who was selling them out on their key monetary issues. The press conference was indeed about attacking Republicans in the House and warning them they face defeat in the 2012 primaries if they fail to live up to their demands. And the key demand this week is that Republicans refuse to raise the limit on the national debt.

The presser seemed to have been organized by WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah, who spoke second. But it was led off by a Georgia preacher named William Temple, dressed up as a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He explained:

TEMPLE: We do this colonial outfit to remind the current government of the first revolution. And we are in a revolution, the American people, right now.

Temple went on to claim, among other things, that he had led "1.9 million people" in the September 12 "March on Washington" last year that he claimed propelled Republicans to power. Um, right. In the real world, you see, he was one of about 90,000 people who mostly came to hear Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

Of course, part of these people's delusion is that they believe they are far more powerful than they really are. So there they were, demanding that Republicans step up and toe their line on raising the debt ceiling -- even, of course, if it means the United States is forced to default on its full faith and credit.

Later, another colonial impersonator -- this time doing George Washington -- stepped up to the podium and made more vague threats against wayward Republicans:



And the funny thing is, Republicans really believe this stuff. They are completely cowed by the Tea Partiers. That's who owns them now.

Right-wingers' Panties Get In A Knot Over Obama Calling Them Out On Immigration -- Especially Because Every Word Was True

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Republicans inside the Beltway were all bent out of shape this week over the fact that President Obama, in his speech on immigration earlier this week, called them out over their absurd gamesmanship on the issue:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: So, here’s the point. I want everybody to listen carefully to this. We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done. But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I’ve got to say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time.

You know, they said we needed to triple the Border Patrol. Or now they’re going to say we need to quadruple the Border Patrol. Or they’ll want a higher fence. Maybe they’ll need a moat. (Laughter.) Maybe they want alligators in the moat. (Laughter.) They’ll never be satisfied. And I understand that. That’s politics.

This caused quite the huff among Republicans, who have been nothing if not crassly and openly partisan in their handling of immigration issues during Obama's tenure, abandoning all the pretense of bipartisanship they had adopted during the Bush years (see especially John McCain in this regard).

And it gave an excuse for the last of the "bipartisan" crowd, Sen. Richard Lugar, to join the Tea Party element in opposing the DREAM Act:

In a statement, Lugar spokesman Mark Helmke blamed Democrats for turning immigration into a partisan issue.

"President Obama's appearance in Texas framed immigration as a divisive election issue instead of attempting a legitimate debate on comprehensive reform," wrote Helmke. "Ridiculing Republicans was clearly a partisan push that effectively stops a productive discussion about comprehensive immigration reform and the DREAM Act before the 2012 election."

Actually, the shoe is on the other foot: As long as Lugar's fellow Republicans insist on calling the DREAM Act "amnesty for illegals" and denouncing any effort to do something that is so clearly a no-brainer in the Right Thing To Do Department, then it's clear Obama can count on having a productive discussion about these issues from Republicans for the foreseeable future -- that is, until at least sometime after the 2012 elections.

Even more noteworthy is that Obama wasn't really saying anything controversial -- he was pointing out the cold reality on the ground.

There was a remarkable exchange in this regard the other morning on Fox News, when Alisyn Camerota -- filling in Megyn Kelly on America Live -- had a following conversation with reliable RightWingabot Monica Crowley on the subject. And Camerota (uncharacteristically for most Fox hosts) wanted to know exactly how Republicans could respond to Obama's salient points here.

And Crowley sputtered. At first she tried to deflect the answer into the familiar ground of "he's talking up immigration to help his re-election chances," but Camerota kept pushing -- and Crowley pretty much came up blank, sputtering an incoherent garble of whatever fake "facts" she could grasp out of the thin air:

CAMEROTA: OK, so to his point: More deportations, more boots on the ground, reinforcing the fence, and they're never satisfied. What do Republicans want?

CROWLEY: Well, I'm sure that that bit of sarcasm there with that bit about the moat with the alligators will go a long way to getting Republican support for whatever he wants to do. He's looking at his poll numbers, first and foremost, because, as I said, there's no way the the DREAM Act or any comprehensive immigration reform is gonna make it through, certainly before 2012. And what's happening, when he's looking at his core constituency, he's seeing a pretty significant dropoff among Hispanic voters. He won the Hispanic vote by two thirds in 2008. It is now down among Hispanics, his support is down to low to mid-50s, Ali, so what he's seeing is a need to shore up that core constituency, because he cannot win re-election without it.

CAMEROTA: OK, but to his point -- what more do Republicans want than what he has done?

CROWLEY: The ... [sigh] ... He deserves credit for what he has done so far. However, that does not solve the problem. The chaos on the border has actually gotten worse over the last many years than better. And so if you look and you talk to law-enforcement officials, where they're on the front lines, you talk to folks who are living on the front lines in Arizona and New Mexico and Texas -- they will tell you that the violence spillover -- 35,000 people have been killed in recent years over the border -- that violence spillover -- illegals coming across the border still at an unprecedented rate -- a lot needs to be done.

In reality, of course, there has been a sharp decline in border crossings in recent years, particularly as the U.S. economy his spiraled downward in a recession and unemployment has skyrocketed. But then, reality has never stopped people like Crowley from misreporting fake "facts" on Fox. It's a feature, not a bug.

Look, we'll never, NEVER be able to have an honest conversation with right-wingers about immigration, because they refuse to argue it honestly. Their recent tactic has been to demand that "first we secure the border, then we can talk reform." And then when all their demands are met, they just keep changing the goalposts. And then when they get called out on that, they claim we're just being unfair and uncivil.

Screw that. It's time to figure out how to move on without them.

Donald Trump's Unbelievable Candidacy: Its 15 Seconds Are Just About Up

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It's incredible. Unbelievable. That Trump presidential bid is going big, baby -- as in the biggest, fastest collapse of a candidacy in history. Oh yeah.

From Public Policy Polling:

Donald Trump has had one of the quickest rises and falls in the history of Presidential politics. Last month we found him leading the Republican field with 26%. In the space of just four weeks he's dropped all the way down to 8%, putting him in a tie for fifth place with Ron Paul.

Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are at the top of the GOP race with 19% and 18% respectively. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are further back at 13% and 12%, followed by Trump and Paul at 8%, Michele Bachmann at 7%, and Tim Pawlenty at 5%.

As Trump got more and more exposure over the last month Republicans didn't just decide they weren't interested in having him as their nominee- they also decided they flat don't like him. Only 34% of GOP voters now have a favorable opinion of Trump to 53% who view him in a negative light.

Maybe this is why Trump was on Fox last night with Martha MacCallum and complained bitterly about how he's being treated in the press. Apparently, it's bad for the country to criticize great leaders like Donald Trump, even when they make utter buffoons of themselves by trumpeting easily disproven conspiracy theories:

MACCALLUM: ...You know, when you go home at night and you talk to your wife and you think about all this, how does get -- this hammering, in your words, how does that get factored into the decision?

TRUMP: Well, I think it's very bad for the country. And it doesn't affect my decision because I think I have a pretty thick skin. But I think it's very bad for the country because the kind of people -- and I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about generally speaking. The kind of person you need to run this country has to be somebody that really has accomplished a lot because he's got to accomplish -- he or she has to accomplish a lot for the country.

The guy is so completely out to lunch that his Republican fans are fleeing him in droves. Ah, Donald, we hardly knew ye. Because there was so little to know.

Makes you wonder why the hell Trump got trotted out for public consumption in the first place. And then I remembered: He was always a stalking horse who'd make the rest of the Republican presidential field look sane and intelligent by comparison.

That, and he had one other good use. Eric Boehlert caught this one a couple of weeks ago, when Andrea Tantaros told some accidental truth on O'Reilly's show:

Let the man speak. He's got a bigger megaphone than Romney, Pawlenty, Gingrich, than all of them combined. And you know what; he can drive up Obama's negatives more than any of the other of those GOP candidates.

Sure. He can self-immolate like the flaming gasbag he is on his own good time. But what he may have done instead is accidentally drive up Obama's positives: They got one look at a real comparison between the two men last week, and it wasn't even a contest.

Mississippi Floods Are Already A Slow-mo Disaster -- And It's Going To Get Worse

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Those floods along the Mississippi River that have already displaced thousands of people are predicted to get even worse in the coming weeks:

The swollen Mississippi River carried its dangers of flooding and damage into the Delta on Wednesday morning as residents in three states including Louisiana prepared for weeks of battling the river’s growing energy.

The river crested just inches below its record stage of 48.7 feet in Memphis, Tenn., on Tuesday. But, by Wednesday morning, the river had passed its record in Natchez, Miss., reaching 58 feet and growing, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters predict the river will crest in Natchez on May 21 at about 64 feet.

At Vicksburg, Miss., the river is expected to crest at 57.5 feet on May 19, about 1.5 feet above the record crest of 1927, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. In Helena, Ark., the river on Wednesday was at more than 56 feet, about 12 feet above flood stage.
“The flood crest along the Mississippi is forecast to move slowly downstream towards New Orleans during the next three weeks,” the weather service said in a posting on its website Wednesday morning.

“The White River, the Arkansas River, Big Black River are just a few major tributaries that may be impacted by the Mississippi main stem flooding. Interstate 40 west of Memphis between Hazen and Brinkley is closed in both directions due to the White River overflowing its banks. At this time there is no anticipated time for reopening the road," the statement said.

The swollen river has forced thousands of people along the watery route to seek higher ground, hundreds going to shelters. Crops have been washed away, hundreds of millions of dollars in damage has already been reported and more is expected. As the floodwater moves south, officials worry about the impact on Mississippi’s casino industry and later on Louisiana’s petroleum facilities.

There's also lots of concern in the Delta, where these waters are headed:

RENA LARA, Miss. (AP) — Crews are working to shore up levees along the swelling Mississippi River, as the crest continues to move south.

Dump trucks have been hauling gravel to a levee in the small Mississippi community of Rena Lara, where people are uneasy. Public officials are assuring them that they expect the levee to hold, and that they will give them plenty of notice if they need to leave.

But one woman there says, "It's getting scary." She says residents aren't being allowed up to the riverbank.

In Louisiana, inmates are filling sandbags to protect Cajun swamp communities. The areas could be flooded if engineers open a spillway to protect the Baton Rouge area.
The river reached its peak yesterday in Memphis, Tenn., just inches short of the record. Some low-lying neighborhoods were inundated, but high levees protected much of the rest of the city.

Officials say the river level has decreased slightly today in Memphis. But some homes were left with polluted floodwaters near their first-floor ceilings, and others are completely submerged.

Here's an excellent explainer from CNN.

And here are some ways you can help flooding and tornado victims:

The Salvation Army continues to provide services across the south. It has served more than 165,000 meals, provided 54 mobile feeding units, and Salvation Army officers, employees and volunteers have served a total of 40,371 hours. Click here for ways to donate.

United Way is working with private, public, faith-based and community partners to assess the long-term recovery needs of each community. It is also helping in the provision of food, shelter, emergency health and transportation for those affected by the floods. The United Way of the Mid-South (Memphis, Tennessee) and United Way of the Capitol Area (Jackson, Mississippi) have each established disaster relief funds.

The American Red Cross is helping flood victims forced from their homes. In Memphis, 400 Red Cross volunteers are helping to run Red Cross shelter and are providing food and water to residents and first responders. In Jackson, Mississippi, more than 50 volunteers gathered to assemble relief kits. Click here to donate to the Red Cross. You can also make a $10 donation by texting the word "REDCROSS" to 90999.

AmeriCares has been delivering medicines, medical supplies and aid to people across the South since the tornadoes struck. Click here to donate.

CNN has compiled a comprehensive list of organizations helping victims across the South. For more information on the organizations and how to donate, click here.

Eventually, climate change is going to be brought into this conversation, because these kinds of floods -- featuring unusual volumes of water being delivered into river systems from the atmosphere -- are in fact exactly what climate-change scientists predicted would occur as a result of global warming. And as sure as night follows day, the right-wing denialists will be attacking any such observations.

Stossel Thinks There Shouldn't Be Any Government Farm Loans -- Then You Wouldn't Have Racist Discrimination

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

John Stossel went on Bill O'Reilly's show last night to discuss his little weekend shoutfest with the would-be victim of Breitbart's long-running "Pigford" smear, attorney Al Pires.

Stossel concluded of course that their intended pinata had been smashed to pieces at his own hand because he had resorted to personal attacks -- this, from a guy who ran a chryon Pires as a "freeloader" throughout his, and who attacked him personally throughout the segment as a "scam" attorney.

On O'Reilly, it was once again a session smearing Pires as a rich, money-grubbing leech lawyer out to rip people off, even though the closest Breitbart and Co. can get to "proving" this characterization is with an endless string of dubious insinuations. Stossel just made it clear that Pires should creep people out -- but he won't suggest there was anything illegal about what Pires did, nor in fact can he even point to any unethical behavior. This kind of sliming of their targets is itself deeply slimy.

And then, almost comically, Stossel admitted that in fact Pires' case in court was sound, and his legal victory was a matter of simple justice. But then he reverted to his libertarian prism and tried arguing that these farmers shouldn't have been in the position of asking the federal government for a loan in the first place -- because, in Stossel Land, there shouldn't be such programs at all!

O'REILLY: Now, in a situation like this, where you have a class-action suit against the federal government, the federal government usually folds. But in this case, you say there was some evidence they denied loans, legitimate government loans, to people based on the color of their skin?

STOSSEL: Yes -- and this is another reason: why is the government giving out farm loans in the first place? OK? They shouldn't, but they are.

O'REILLY: Well, it's affirmative action, isn't it? I mean, to try to help people in certain areas. That's under that banner.

STOSSEL: It's also farm -- Agriculture Department pork. You should go to a private bank and get a loan. Then if a bank is racist, they lose money to a bank that isn't racist, because they get the good business from the minorities. But -- the government was giving out the money, and some of the loan officers were racist.

Apparently Stossel doesn't believe in the Federal Farm Credit system -- which tells you that he's never been a farmer, either. Nor is he even being logical, since the farm-credit system doesn't cost taxpayers a thing. As the FCA's site explains:

All Government financial assistance was repaid, with interest, by 2005. FCA itself does not receive any Government appropriations; rather, FCA operations are funded through assessments paid by FCS institutions.

Y'see, before passage of the Federal Farm Loan Act, farmers were entirely at the mercy of banks when it came to getting loans for their crops or other needs. Since 1908, government loans have been part of American farmers' bedrock, their means for surviving when private banks turned against them. Stossel wants to return us to the good ol' days of Pottersville, evidently.

Similarly, his astonishing assertion that the magic of the banking marketplace would solve any racism issues among private bankers should any discriminate against race is laughable in the context of the historical reality of the old South, where every banker was either an active racist or was cowed into denying loans to black people because they would suffer business losses if they did so. (That was what the White Citizens Councils were about.) Evidently, Stossel is similarly eager to return us to those good ol' days, too.

Even more ironic is that one of the real legacies of that tradition of threatening to destroy successful black people in the South was the decades of discrimination against black farmers, particularly in the South, which kept thousands of people from farming. And Stossel thinks it's a travesty that those people should get remuneration now. Guess we can see which side the "libertarians" fall on, can't we?

Breitbart Gets Pwned By 'Pigford' Attorney, Targeted In His Latest Smear Campaign

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

John Stossel devoted his show this past weekend to an attempt to defend his report on "freeloaders" -- which not only was riddled throughout with false "facts," outright falsehoods, gross distortions, and misleading sound bytes, it was nakedly racist in its depiction of minorities who are the beneficiaries of government largesse as cheaters and chiselers.

So who did he invite on to help make this case? Why, Andrew Breitbart -- liar, prevaricator, and misleader extraordinaire -- of course. Breitbart, you see, was Stossel's chief source for the segment on black farmers who are supposedly ripping off the government in the Pigford case -- the non-story that Breitbart has been assiduously, obsessively pursuing as a way of trying to cover his tracks for his grotesque performance in the Shirley Sherrod matter.

He also invited on Al Pires, one of the lead attorneys for those same farmers, to serve as their pinata for the segment. Except it turned out that this pinata had his own big stick -- and went right after Breitbart for the fact that his reportage on the Pigford case has been a wanton exercise in legal (and agricultural ignorance:

PIRES: I don't know who Mr. Breitbart is. He's obviously not a farmer and he's not a journalist -- none of that's even remotely true.

...

Who are you? Making fun of people who have the guts to take cases against the government. You don’t know anything about farming and litigation. You’re some gadfly from Hollywood. I looked you up. You’re some guy who didn’t have a job for ten years.

...

Yeah, I know who you are. You’re some gadfly from Hollywood. You’re the son of a rich family, you never worked for a living in your life. You go around making fun of poor people, you go making fun of Indians and Blacks and Hispanics and women and I’m not putting up with it. I feel bad for you. You’re a sad, sad person. Why don’t you go get a job?

I especially got a kick out of Stossel trying to pretend that no, really, Breitbart is a journalist! Sorry, dude -- you actually have to practice journalism -- which entails a balanced search of facts and truth -- and not thesis-driven propaganda to earn that title.

Mind you, Pires could have been far more effective if he had just started listing the times Breitbart and Co. have been caught deceptively editing videos and lying about their subjects. But that's OK.

Sometimes it's satisfying to just see guys like Breitbart get slapped down on every imaginable basis -- and with this particular lying liar, even personal rips like these are fully deserved. Especially when the entire segment is devoted to an ad-hominem smear of their victim as a rich conniver. Can't blame him for tossing the same game back in their faces.

The Foxheads/Cheneyites Claim That Torture Works, So America Should Become A Torture Nation

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The right-wingers keep claiming -- contra reality -- that Osama bin Laden's death was made possible by torture, proving that torture works. But even if you ignore reality and admit for argument's sake that it does work, the question then goes begging: Should the United States be doing it?

Following the weekend's steady drumbeat, the meme that "the torture worked" was again the main topic on Fox yesterday, this time bouncing off Chris Wallace's wankery on Sunday. Both Bill O'Reilly (as Karoli notes) and Sean Hannity built their entire shows around this single snippet.

The most appalling performance came from Liz Cheney on Hannity's show:

HANNITY: All right. On the next segment, what I mentioned with Dick Morris, so we are going to play this tape of FOX News' Sunday host Chris Wallace. I thought he asked a really good question of the White House National Security adviser, about, you know, enhanced interrogations are contrary to American values. Well, is that worse than putting a bullet in the brain of bin Laden? I mean, I thought the answer was weak. We'll show in the minute, but go ahead.

CHENEY: Yes, you know, I think you are exactly right. And I thought it was a great question that Chris asked. Because this administration, you know, even before they came into office worked hard to try to score political points by making allegations that simply weren't true about the enhance interrogation program. And trying to act as it though it was somehow counter to American values. Now, I don't think, you know, probably most people watching tonight have no problem at all, I certainly don't, I know you don't, with the fact that the Navy SEALs killed Usama bin Laden. But, if it is OK to go after terrorists to do targeted assassinations, which I believe it is, and the administration seems to believe it is.

Then it is very hard to understand how it is not OK from their perspective to subject terrorists to the very same techniques that our own people have to go through in SEAL training. And a very specific example of this is Chip Burlingame who was the pilot of American airlines flight 77 who was killed by the terrorists exactly. And he himself was subjected to these techniques. So, I think it is pretty appalling that the administration is trying to score political points here, trying to sustain a position that is unsustainable. And frankly, that makes us less safe because it means if we do in fact capture somebody as a result of this treasure trove, there's no really effective way we've got in place right now to interrogate them.

But then we get to what this is all really about: Vindicating the torture conducted under the Bush regime:

HANNITY: Do you believe what happened in the killing of bin Laden vindicates -- your father was a fierce, strong advocate is to this day of enhanced interrogations, black sites, rendition policies, all of the things that President Obama cancelled -- go ahead.

CHENEY: I think that it certainly shows that those programs worked. I think it is one more piece of evidence. We knew that those programs were effective before. We now know that they helped lead us to the information that ultimately led to bin Laden. And I think once again, you know, it shows that the administration, as were you saying in the last segment, they ought to stop this investigation, stop this threat of prosecution of those Americans who in fact, bravely carry out these programs. It is really an abomination that they are continuing to live under the threat of indictment and the threat of prosecution for something that led to the death of bin Laden.

There's only one little problem with Cheney's and Hannity's love of torture: It's illegal, immoral, unethical, and depraved. OK, make that a few little problems.

The most succinct answer to this palpable load of utter rubbish came from Matthew Alexander, the former military-intelligence interrogator who has been a consistent and thoughtful critic of the use of torture. He was on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman a few days ago (via mcjoan) and offered a careful explanation of why torture is never, ever right -- even beyond the fact that it wastes resources and really doesn't work:

ALEXANDER: My argument is pretty simple, Amy. I don’t torture because it doesn’t work. I don’t torture because it’s immoral, and it’s against the law, and it’s inconsistent with my oath of office, in which I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. And it’s also inconsistent with American principles. So, my primary argument against torture is one of morality, not one of efficacy.

You know, if torture did work and we could say it worked 100 percent of the time, I still wouldn’t use it. The U.S. Army Infantry, when it goes out into battle and it faces resistance, it doesn’t come back and ask for the permission to use chemical weapons. I mean, chemical weapons are extremely effective—we could say almost 100 percent effective. And yet, we don’t use them. But we make this—carve out this special space for interrogators and say that, well, they’re different, so they can violate the laws of war if they face obstacles.

And that’s an insult to American interrogators, who are more than capable of defeating our enemies and al-Qaeda in the battle of wits in the interrogation room. And American interrogators have proven this time and time again, from World War II through Vietnam, through Panama, through the First Gulf War. And let’s go back to the successes of American interrogators. You know, American interrogators found Saddam Hussein without using torture. We found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda Iraq, which helped turn the Iraq war, without using torture. And numerous other leaders that we have found and captured—another guy named Zafar, that I describe in my book—all these successes have come without the use of torture.

GOODMAN: You say that the use of torture was al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool.

ALEXANDER: Yes. When I was in Iraq, I oversaw the interrogations of foreign fighters. And those foreign fighters, the majority of them, said, time and time again, the reason they had come to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse of detainees at both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. And this is not my opinion. The Department of Defense tracked these statistics. And they were briefed, every interrogator who arrived there, that torture and abuse was al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool.

That's a simple and unambiguous answer to the Foxheads and Cheneyites out there who want torture to be a legitimate tool of government agencies.

Media Talkers' Favorite False Equivalencies About Extreme Rhetoric Won't Fly On Maher's Show Anymore

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Bill Maher has been on something of a jihad against the growth of false equivalencies in the media narrative, and bless him for that. Friday night on HBO's Real Time, he laid into Irshad Manji and David Frum for playing that game, with an able assist from Michael Eric Dyson.

It started out when Manji tried to claim that vicious demonization is just part of the political game played nowadays:

MANJI: But that's politics, dude! That's politics.

DYSON: Yeah, but that's not politics. Your side is wrong, my side is right is politics. But when you get into demonizing other people and making them monsters, that's a different kind of thing. And don't forget --

MANJI: I agree, and I would have said that to Keith Olbermann, by the way, when he had his, you know, 'Worst Persons of the Day' or night or whatever it was. I mean, he was just as bad as --

MAHER: That was a joke.

MANJI: Oooh, it's just -- of course it was.

MAHER: Stop it.

MANJI: Demonizing? Caricatures?

MAHER: OK. first of all, 'Worst Persons' -- I think we know that that's a joke. That we don't really think that it's the worst person in the world. It's called hyperbole. Satire.

MANJI: But the point is, it's like sex -- everybody does it. Everybody does it. So why the double standard, and, you know, sort of pointing out that one sides does it, but when the other side does it, that just a joke?

DYSON: I don't think it's hyperbole on the side of the folk I would say are the right-wingers who I would say are demonizing people. That's not hyperbole. They actually believe it. With religious fervor, they believe it.

MANJI: My friend, I know so many people on the left who believe their own BS as well. They completely dehumanize people on the right.

MAHER: No one's even arguing that. That the Democrats or the progressives or the liberals are perfect -- they fall way short. But you are professing something that I think is even more dangerous: false equivalency. Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are not the same thing.

[Applause]

Good for Maher. We've been saying the same thing at this site for a long time.

Then David Frum tried to theorize that the nastiness has just been getting progressively worse since the 1980s -- and bases it on the laughable claim that George W. Bush had it worse than Bill Clinton!

FRUM: I'll concede to you that it's true, that the kind of vitriol that President Obama encounters is worse than what President Bush encountered. That's true. It's also true that what President Bush encountered is worse than what President Clinton encountered. And what President Clinton encountered is worse than what President George H.W. Bush --

MAHER: Bush got worse than Clinton? He got impeached!

FRUM: In terms of the --

MAHER: No seriously.

Evidently, Frum has wiped from his memory cells the wild cottage industry in conspiracy theories that sprang up around Clinton: the he-and-Hillary-killed-Vince Foster theory, the Mena-drug-running-clan theory, the "Clinton Body Count" that was in everyone's e-mail, the "black love child" theory, and of course the many and voluminous "New World Order" theories in which military transport movements were circulated out of fear of an impending United Nations takeover of America. And those are just a few. More to the point, many of them were circulated and promoted by mainstream conservatives in the mainstream media. They weren't merely the work of fringe nutcases.

In contrast, Bush had to put up with relatively little conspiracism during his tenure -- the main example being the 9/11 Truthers, who started out as and have largely remained a symbiotic far-left/far-right conspiracy fringe, with the far right (think Alex Jones) playing by far the dominant role in recent years. But these theories largely remained on the fringe -- and the overwhelming majority of the people who opposed him did not believe them, either. Those people opposed him because they had real-world, rational issues with Bush: his conduct of the wars, his handling of the economy, his very real abuses of the Constitution.

Contrast that, if you will, with the people who hated Bill Clinton and now hate Barack Obama -- because, as Maher points out, they believed them at base to be illegitimate:

FRUM: I don't mean what is said on television, and the talkers and the ranters. But what I worry about is the normalization of paranoid theories in our politics. And that is worse in every cycle. It's true it's worse now than it was then.

MAHER: I fundamentally disagree with that. When Democrats get elected, Clinton and Obama the last two -- there was a view on a lot of people on the right that the election is just illegitimate from the get-go. And that whatever we do to remove this person, whether birth certificate bullshit, or finding him with Monica Lewinsky or Whitewater, is justified, because we know what's right for this country, and therefore any way we can get him out is the right thing. And I do not think that happens on the other side.

The illegitimacy is the key to the puzzle: Because these people are right-wing authoritarians, they are systemically inclined to follow authority, and so literally cannot handle the prospect of a person they see as left wing in such a position. This leads inevitably to a worldview that the left-wing politician in question is a mere interloper, a pretender to authority who must be resisted, not obeyed, and it becomes vital to build a case against their legitimacy. At that point, logic, reason, and factuality become secondary if not entirely disposable altogether -- what matters is proving illegitimacy. So building such a case inevitably entails embracing falsehoods and conspiracy theories -- and these become untouchable truths, the fundaments of their realities, and no amount of reason can dent them.
It is, in other words, a recipe for mass insanity.

Frum and Manji aren't the only people in denial about this. There are all kinds of well-meaning conservatives who want to rescue their movement from the insane Tea Partying populists who have taken over the Right since Obama's election, including David Brooks, who in attacking the Limbaughs and the Becks nonetheless insisted that "everybody does it": "The White House understands, you've got 10 percent of the country over here on the wacky right, 10 percent on the wacky left, that's not what they can pay attention to. And they're not going to pay attention to it."

As we noted at the time:

Brooks' percentages are off -- it's more like about 5 percent on the left and 30 percent on the right side, and this latter fact is actually what he identifies as the problem; the right has been so overwhelmed by its wingnutty elements that they have largely taken over the GOP at this juncture in time. And there's no prospect of the David Brookses ever getting it back -- in no small part because they refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of what they're up against.

Mind you, this is also a major theme of our book, Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane:


As we observed in the last chapter, describing the descent of conservatism into madness:

It’s particularly ominous for the state of our national discourse. As we have seen through the long and sordid history of right-wing populism in this country—particularly the way it has relied on scapegoating, smears, conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and unhinging rhetoric, all of which inevitably unleash violent, extremist rage—the foundations of democracy suffer at the hands of these movements.

As Democratic representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon observed to PolitiFact in the aftermath of Palin’s “death panels” lie: “It’s a sobering prospect that political discourse is going to resemble hand-to-hand combat for the foreseeable future.”

Blumenauer added that such a prospect bodes ill for involving average citizens in the democratic process: “I think they’re losing their appetite to wade through the vitriol, and I’m in the same boat. We are moving to a point where we drive normal people away, and everybody else gets their news and increasingly opinion prescreened, going for days never hearing an opposing viewpoint. That gives me pause.”

I also tackled the issues of false equivalencies in The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right:

Ironically, Malkin has also been a leader in the contingent of the conservative movement that insists that it is liberals, not conservatives, who have been “unhinged” in their rhetoric and driving the national discourse over a cliff. This retort is standard to any mention of the Right’s proclivity for eliminationist rhetoric. Malkin, in fact, wrote an entire book to support this thesis.

The increasingly nasty tone of liberal rhetoric in recent years, especially on an interpersonal level, is also important to note. Some of the examples Malkin cites are ugly, indeed, as are some of the examples of bile directed toward George W. Bush in recent years.

However, most of the examples Malkin and her fellow conservatives point to involve anger directed at a specific person—most typically, George Bush or Dick Cheney—and often for reasons related to the loss of American and civilian lives in Iraq. Few of them are eliminationist—that is, most do not call for the suppression and eradication of an entire class or bloc of people. Rather, the hatred is focused on a handful of individuals.

In contrast, right-wing rhetoric has been explicitly eliminationist, calling for the infliction of harm on entire blocs of American citizens: liberals, gays and lesbians, Latinos, blacks, Jews, feminists, or whatever target group is the victim du jour of right-wing ire. This vile form of “anti-discourse” has been coming from the most prominent figures of movement conservatism: its most popular pundits and its leading politicians. And the sheer volume and intensity of the rhetoric dwarf whatever ugliness is coming from the liberal side of the debate.

More 'Isolated Incidents': Wave Of Racist-right Crimes Hits Spokane Area -- But It's Not Alone

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Last weekend, my old friend Bill Morlin wrote a major Sunday piece for the Spokane Spokesman-Review describing how the old scourge of white-supremacist hatred and the violence that always accompanies it has been on the rise again:

There’s also been a spike in racist activity and hate crimes in Spokane and other Pacific Northwest communities – indeed, almost everywhere in the United States.

Racist graffiti, acts of malicious harassment and distribution of hate literature in 1980 marked the emergence of the Aryan Nations in North Idaho, recalls Marshall Mend, a founding member of the human relations task force.

For nearly three decades, the Aryans and their splinter-group associates were responsible for a series of crimes, including murders and bombings, throughout the United States.

The Aryan Nations held annual gatherings of hatemongers, burned KKK crosses and even got permits for disruptive parades down Sherman Avenue in Coeur d’Alene, all of which severely tarnished the region’s image.

Most local hate activity disappeared with a multimillion-dollar court verdict in 2000 that bankrupted the Aryan Nations. Four years later, Aryan founder Richard Butler died, and some wishfully thought hate, too, had disappeared in this region.

Now, though, there are two new self-proclaimed Aryan leaders in North Idaho – Gerald O’Brien and Paul Mullet – who are fighting each other for power. There are two competing Aryan Web sites. Another splinter faction, the Aryan Nations Revival, based in New York state, dissolved last week and, according to a Web posting, threw its support to O’Brien’s faction.

Meanwhile, almost a dozen hate crimes have been reported in the past 14 months to authorities in Kootenai and Spokane counties.

The region’s spike in hate crimes follows a national trend that started after the country elected its first black president in 2008. Besides more hate groups, experts say they also are seeing an increase in secretive, anti-government militia activity.

Sure enough, in the week that followed, there were three major stories involving white-supremacist violence in the Inland Empire.

First came the arrest of a Pullman white supremacist who apparently was leading hate-crime attacks on taco-truck drivers. No, really:

A Whitman County man who bragged online about being involved with racist taco truck protests in Kootenai County was arrested on a federal gun charge Wednesday.
Jeremiah Daniel “J.D.” Hop, who describes himself as an anti-race-mixing activist on the racist website Vanguard News Network, is accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Investigators spent most of Wednesday searching Hop’s home near Pullman, as well as another property in Whitman County associated with the suspect, said Don Robinson, supervisor for the FBI’s Coeur d’Alene office.

Hop, who was arrested Wednesday morning, is not a member of the Aryan Nations but is involved in racist circles, Robinson said. Hop was convicted of third-degree rape of a child in 2005.

The guy is obviously a genius. I thought everyone loved taco trucks. And the child-rape conviction just reminds us, once again, that a lot of these people have, well, issues.

Such as Kevin Harpham, the neo-Nazi arrested for planting a lethal backpack bomb along the parade route of this year's MLK parade in downtown Spokane. He was further charged with federal hate crimes this week. Meanwhile, the Spokesman's Meghann M. Cunniff reported on what Harpham's online postings revealed about his mindset -- and his politics:

He also wrote of being influenced by writings and podcasts by Edgar Steele, the former Aryan Nations lawyer who is currently awaiting trial on federal charges that he hired a man to kill his wife. Harpham promoted a speaking engagement by Steele in Florida in 2006 and wrote in 2007 that he “finally broke down and had to go out buy some silver,” because of Steele’s influence.

Harpham eventually became an active supporter of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination; he urged others to make individual rather than group contributions to help avoid any links between white supremacists and Paul’s candidacy. Harpham claimed in 2007 to have made two contributions, one for $50 and another for $25, to the Paul campaign but contradicted himself in other posts, saying he supports the campaign but wouldn’t spend money on it.

“I don’t care about getting America back on its feet, what I want is for Ron Paul to provide the conditions for us to build White communities with our own businesses and schools,” he wrote on Christmas Eve 2007. “We could do very well under these conditions and start amassing great wealth to expand.”

But as Paul’s presidential prospects faded and the U.S. economy tanked, violent themes began emerging in more of Harpham’s online comments.

Harpham last posted on Jan. 16, a day before the bomb was discovered. Ten days earlier, he had offered to let fugitive white supremacist Craig Cobb stay at his home. It’s unclear whether Cobb, who faces hate crime charges in Canada, took him up on the offer.

Oh, yes, and speaking of Edgar Steele -- he was found guilty of plotting to murder his wife and mother-in-law this week too. And it seems the wife, who has remained loyal through it all, is now denouncing the verdict:

A murder-for-hire trial comes to an emotional end. A federal jury convicted Edgar Steele on Thursday of plotting to kill his wife and mother-in-law. But Steele's wife vows to set the record straight. The Boise jury found Edgar Steele guilty on all four counts.

The trial was moved to Boise for fairness at the request of the defense. Despite those efforts, Cyndi Steele said her husband's trial was some kind of federal government conspiracy.

"They took our life and turned it into an ugly story, it is farthest from the truth," said Cyndi.

The story began when a mechanic found a pipe bomb under Cyndi Steele's car. Investigators said a hired hand, Larry Fairfax, planted the bomb at the request of her husband, Edgar Steele.

"I am the wife, the proud wife of Edgar J. Steele, and I am here to tell you that this is a cover-up, a frame-up to cover-up Larry Fairfax's crime against me," said Cyndi.

I have a hunch she's going to be showing up on Fox News to plead her case.

In any event, these are obviously all just "isolated incidents" that have no larger significance whatsoever. Move along, please.

When Teachers Push Back, All Of A Sudden Glenn Beck Loves The Unions -- At Least, The Idea Of Them

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Glenn Beck is obviously a profoundly confused guy. He wants to portray himself as a defender of the average working guy -- even though nearly every one of his programs is a propaganda hour for corporate power, including that of the corporation he works for. (For the time being, anyway.)

Yesterday he invited some teachers into his studio, selected from a group of people who were dissenting from business as usual at their schools. He was astonished to discover -- after having spent much of the show acting as though the unions hated these people and might bomb their cars -- that most of these teachers nonetheless were happy to defend their unions, and pushed back against his portrayal of the teachers' unions as being riddled with far-left radicals who wanted to destroy America.

Faced with this, Beck resorted to a defensive position in which he spewed out a line of pure gobbledygook that had NOTHING to do with anything he had ever said previously on any of his shows

BECK: I'm not against -- believe it or not -- I just talked to my mother-in-law -- I've told this story before -- was arrested on a union march with Jesse Jackson! And I just told her just the other day, she said, 'Man, our union' or uh -- ' our school is out of control.' And I said, 'Mom, I will march with you' -- she works at Yale. They treat their employees like garbage.

Unions -- I'm not against unions! I'm against corporations being so wildly out of control with no one watching over them. There's not stop! Right now, call the police on GE. Who you gonna call? Who you gonna call? All the way to the White House! There's no one to call! Because they're all in bed. OK?

If somebody's abusing the system in a corporation or in schools or whatever, and there's no union -- who you gonna call? What, are you gonna get another job? You're not gonna get another job! You know what I mean? So, it's the balance of things. When unions become too powerful, they get out of control. When business becomes too powerful, out of control, it's 'do the right thing'. And that's what's not being taught anymore.

Can you make any sense of that? I sure can't. Especially because it has nothing whatsoever to do with the sustained attacks on unions that have been part and parcel of Beck's show for the past year and more.

Here are a couple of examples from the past month:



As you can see, Beck's has attacked unions for being infiltrated throughout by conniving evil radicals who want to destroy the American way of life. Controlling corporations has never been mentioned previously. Indeed, Beck starts out defending his position initially by referring to all of his "proof" that the unions are far-left radicals -- and then, when faced with the real world concerns of teachers, he suddenly shifts gears and starts claiming that he loooooves unions and wants to march with them because they're the only counterweight to corporations -- even though this has not a thing to do with teachers' unions, who are not doing battle with corporations directly at all.

Just goes to show: Not only is Beck a pathological liar, he's a two-faced weasel to boot.

Cue The Waaaahmbulance: Brent Bozell Whines That Bush Didn't Get Any Credit For Getting Bin Laden -- Or 'Winning The Iraq War'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]


Sean Hannity was busy all week flogging the torture-apologist line, claiming (falsely) that the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad produced the intel that led to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Last night he had on his buddy Brent Bozell of the wingnut Media Research Center to continue flogging this line:

HANNITY: And none of it would have happened but for George W. Bush, enhanced interrogation, rednition, black sites -- they don't touch it! They don't mention it, Brent Bozell. Why?

BOZELL: Think about this, Sean, what Barbara Walters just said. 'But it was Obama who had the courage and the guts and the coolness.' Oh, George Bush didn't have courage and guts and coolness? You know -- even Bill Clinton! He didn't have courage and guts. Only Osama bin Laden -- I mean, [giggles], Barack Obama -- had the courage and the guts and the coolness?

Look, you want to praise the man for -- the president for what he did? I'm all for that. He did a great job. But my God, where were they when George Bush won us the war in Iraq? Where were they praising him? And why can't they -- why can't they give him the most minimal praise?

It is because of this man's techniques -- that they condemned all these years -- it's because of those techniques that that man is dead today.

Ah, yes, the "Bush deserves credit" line that Fox & Friends trotted out on Monday. Actually, Bozell was quick to jump on that bandwagon, complaining earlier this week that Obama himself snubbed President Bush in his speech announcing the raid:

Unfortunately, while the president spoke for the whole country in remembering the pain of 9/11, his remarks left a gaping hole. He made no generous bow to all the efforts of his predecessor George W. Bush as well as his team. My one regret is that Bush 43 didn't get this scalp. He deserved it more than anyone.

Instead, Obama played subtle and wholly undignified games. He underlined that Osama had “avoided capture” under Bush and “continued to operate” during his tenure. But “I directed” CIA director Leon Panetta to make getting Osama the “top priority” (as opposed to?), and “I” gave the go-ahead to the final mission. Obama also avoided Bush in a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday afternoon. Even in a Monday night “bipartisan” event at the White House, Obama honored the “military and counter-terrorism professionals” and “the members of Congress from both parties” who offered support to the mission....but no credit for Bush.

If the roles had been reversed, you know Bush would have been more generous. It’s what Bushes do.

Oh, we remember what Bushes do, all right. The last one ran the presidency like a hung-over, coked-out spoiled preppie out careering through the skies in a Texas Air National Guard F-102, half asleep at the wheel. And when he eventually had to unceremoniously bail out just as he crashed the economy, he and his conservative apologists somehow managed to blame it on minority lending practices.

[Later in this Hannity episode, Bozell adds that "the far left is not happy that Osama bin Laden is dead." Oh really, Brent? Do you have any evidence of that?]

But there's a problem: Bush really deserves very little credit at all for the success of this operation -- because the death of Bin Laden, as every serious foreign-policy person understands, is a direct result of Obama's decision to adopt a completely new strategy against Al Qaeda:

Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader this week lies a profound discontinuity between administrations—a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists. From his first great public moment when, as a state senator, he called Iraq a “dumb war,” Obama indicated that he thought that George W. Bush had badly misconceived the challenge of 9/11. And very quickly upon taking office as president, Obama reoriented the war back to where, in the view of many experts, it always belonged. He discarded the idea of a “global war on terror” that conflated all terror threats from al-Qaida to Hamas to Hezbollah. Obama replaced it with a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.

This reorientation was part of Obama’s reset of America’s relations with the world. Bush, having gradually expanded his definition of the war to include all Islamic “extremists,” had condemned the United States to a kind of permanent war, one that Americans had to fight all but alone because no one else agreed on such a broadly defined enemy. (Hez­bollah and Hamas, for example, arguably had legitimate political aims that al-Qaida did not, which is one reason they distanced themselves from bin Laden.) In Obama’s view, only by focusing narrowly on true transnational terrorism, and winning back all of the natural allies that the United States had lost over the previous decade, could he achieve America’s goal of uniting the world around the goal of extinguishing al-Qaida.

Bush had also portrayed al-Qaida and terrorism in general as a millennial threat; he and his top aides especially liked to compare the conflict to the Cold War. “This is the great ideological struggle of the 21st century—and it is the calling of our generation,” Bush said in 2006, in a dramatic rendezvous-with-destiny speech timed to the fifth anniversary of 9/11. “Freedom is once again contending with the forces of darkness and tyranny”—the terrorists who would seek to impose what he called a “totalitarian Islamic empire.”

But the comparisons to the Cold War or the fight against fascism in the 1940s were silly. Al-Qaida, even in its best days, never represented anything like the ideological threat from the Soviet Union or the hegemonic threat of Hitler’s Germany. As Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison wrote in a little-noted article in The Atlantic in September 2004, on the eve of 9/11, al-Qaida was a small, fractious group whose members could not even agree among themselves what its goal was. Quoting a remarkable series of letters he found on Ayman al-Zawahiri’s old computer in Afghanistan, Cullison wrote that jihadis who were members of Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad—the biggest component of al-Qaida—still wanted to make Egypt the main enemy. They wanted to focus on the jihadis’ old adversary, the “near enemy” of the repressive Arab regimes, rather than endorse bin Laden’s rather grandiose effort to take on the “far enemy,” the United States.

By invading Iraq, the Bush administration resolved the debate for al-Qaida, turning America into the “near enemy.” Years of relief followed for al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan as Bush dealt with the Iraqi insurgents, lumping them together with the “terrorists” of 9/11 as though one static group of global bad guys existed whom Americans would be fighting at home if they weren’t in Iraq. The 43rd president, in effect, concocted a new war in the middle of a half-finished one, sapping our military, our credibility, our economy, our morale, and our moral standing; alienating much of the world; and diverting our attention from destroying the chief culprit of 9/11.

The Bush approach remained scattershot throughout his two terms in office and was conceived “piece by piece,” in the words of one European diplomat in Washington. There is no evidence that Bush ever held a grand strategy session with his principals, in which all of the variables were laid on the table: the price of the global war on terrorism, the strategic goal, and the real costs, in dollars and lives, of an Iraq invasion.

The lack of clarity in strategic conception led directly to the imbroglio in Afghanistan and Pakistan today. There is no longer any question that the diversion of U.S. troops and, in particular, intelligence assets and special forces to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 produced a Taliban and Qaida resurgence in South Asia. It also made the Pakistanis—who even in the best of times were playing a double game—hedge about their own strategic shift away from support for jihadis as a counterweight to India. In 2007, Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States at the time, suggested that this was when Washington began to lose some of his country’s support. After 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi in March 2003—just as Bush was invading Iraq—“al-Qaida was almost destroyed in an operational sense,” Durrani told me. “But then al-Qaida got a vacuum in Afghanistan. And they got a motivational area in Iraq. Al-Qaida rejuvenated.”

Fortunately for the United States, Osama bin Laden made his share of mistakes in the past decade as well. And now, at long last, with America’s focus once again back where it belonged, he has paid for them. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once famously lamented that “we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.” Neither he nor other senior members of the Bush administration ever developed those “metrics.” But by any metric, Barack Obama has just tallied a major victory.

Pre-debate Tea Party Gathering In Greenville: Chock Full O' Nuts!

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[Photo via Judd Legum at ThinkProgress]
Seems there was a very good reason Tim Pawlenty decided not to show up for that pre-debate Tea Party rally in Greenville, S.C., last night: It was being run by some of the wingnuttiest, far-right elements in America:

According to [its] official program, the pre-debate “Freedom Rally” is sponsored by several extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers militia group and the radical anti-communist John Birch Society. You can see a picture of the program here.

And the speakers were straight out of casting central for rattle-eyed nutcases -- right along side GOP stalwarts like their new governor:

The rally also featured a cadre of high profile speakers, including Judge Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who lost his job after refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building, and Nikki Haley, South Carolina's first female governor.

Yep, that would be the same Roy Moore who flirted with a presidential bid under the banner of the militia-friendly/far-right Constitution Party. And while the local press reported that Haley "fired up" the Tea Partiers while mostly sticking to "policy issues" in her speech, she couldn't help brushing up against the nutcases everywhere she turned:

She followed John Birch Society president John McManus, who equated neo-conservatives with socialists, and Greenville Republican activist Dan Herren, who urged the tea party to try to work within the GOP to make it more conservative.

On top of that, she spoke with that huge Oath Keepers banner right behind her. That's one of the rally's chief sponsors -- and it's one of the most bizarre, paranoid and extreme -- not to mention potentially dangerous -- of the Tea Party factions.

After all, let's recall the 10 points that Oath Keepers proclaim as their oath:

• 1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.
• 2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people.
• 3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to military tribunal.
• 4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.
• 5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.
• 6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.
• 7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.
• 8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control."
• 9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.
• 10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

As Mark Potok of the SPLC told Bill O'Reilly:

But the reality about the group is that what it's really about is the fear that martial law is about to be imposed, that Americans are about to be herded into concentration camps, that foreign troops are going to be put down on American soil. The Oath Keepers says specifically, we will not obey these orders, we will refuse orders to put Americans into concentration camps. Now, is that dangerous? It seems to me the danger is that these are men and women, in the case of police officers, who are given a real power over the rest of us, sometimes the power of life and death. They make very important decisions. And if these men and women are animated by the idea that, you know, foreign forces are about to come into this country and put us under martial law and throw us all into concentration camps, I think there is a certain danger associated with that. ... They're operating on the basis on crazy theories that may cause one of them to draw a gun one day.

The Oath Keepers are also extensively involved in the Tea Party movement, having helped co-sponsor their national convention in Tennessee last year, as well as a host of local Tea Party gatherings, such as that full-bore Patriot gathering I attended in Montana.

Then there's the John Birch Society -- whose paranoiac fantasies spun over many long decades have given birth to many of the paranoid fears trotted out by folks like the Oath Keepers and Alex Jones: they're the true godfathers of American right-wing extremism, and the true godfathers of the Tea Party movement as well.

Rachel Maddow exposed them a little while back and they didn't like it one bit. That's too bad: after all, the Tea Partiers often betray their true Bircher lineage in polls, as well as in the overt agenda of their movement leaders. Indeed, movement icons like Glenn Beck promote Bircherite conspiracy theories on Fox News. In the past year, it seems, they've become mainstream Republican again.

Which tells you just how insane the Right really has become.

Once Again, Senate ConservaDems Prove Suckers For Republican Voodoo Economics

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[Video via MoveOn.org]


Dean Baker has a question for Claire McCaskill:

Why Does Senator McCaskill Want to Bankrupt Our Children?

That is what people should be asking Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill along with her fellow senators who are advocated strict caps on government spending. The idea being pushed by Senator McCaskill, together with Tennessee Senator Bob Corker and several other prominent senators, would limit federal spending to 20.6 percent of GDP. It would require difficult-to-obtain super-majorities to exceed this cap. Spending would be cut across a variety of programs if the cap is not reached.

This proposal is hugely deserving of ridicule for a variety of reasons. First, it operates from a blatantly wrong premise -- that government spending has grown out of control.
Those familiar with arithmetic know that government spending had increased by little as a share of GDP prior to the downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. In 2007, the last year before the onset of the recession, spending as a share of GDP was 19.6 percent. That is 1.1 percentage points less than the 20.7 percent share 30 years earlier in 1977. So the idea that there is a long-term trend of out-of-control spending is simply not true, or what they call outside of Washington, a "lie."

Robert Reich calls it "lipstick on a pig":

Republicans figure that if they can’t sell the pig, they’ll just put lipstick on it and find some suckers who will think it’s something else.

That’s the proposal emerging in the Senate from Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee and also Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri. It would get the deficit down not by raising taxes on the rich but by capping federal spending.

If Congress failed to stay under the cap, the budget would be automatically cut.
According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the McCaskill/Corker plan would require $800 billion of cuts in 2022 alone. That’s the equivalent of eliminating Medicare entirely, or the entire Department of Defense.

Obviously the Defense Department wouldn’t disappear, so what would go? Giant cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and much of everything else Americans depend on.

It’s the Republican plan with lipstick. It would have the same exact result. But by disguising it with caps and procedures, Republicans can avoid saying what they’re intending to do.

Why is it that ConservaDems think that suckering for right-wing voodoo economics is some kind of "bipartisanship," anyway?

Sarah Palin's Tribute To The Military Becomes A Nasty Attack On Obama

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Well, the black hole we feared might open due to the critical mass of wingnuttery in one location didn't quite occur Monday night in Colorado, but Sarah Palin's "Tribute to the Troops" speech certainly gave us a look at the black hole that is her mind.

Her speech was full of all kinds of classic Palinisms -- such as her insistence that American troops never be placed under foreign command. (In reality, of course, U.S. soldiers have served under foreign commanders numerous times in the past century, including in critical theaters of World War II.) Or her bizarre formulation for world peace.

But what really stood out was the fact that Palin's speech -- delivered less than 24 hours after the death of Osama bin Laden was announced, and full of all kinds of congratulations and praise to the troops and commanders who made it happen -- deliberately omitted, in about as obvious and as graceless and clumsy a fashion imaginable, President Obama from the congratulations.

Indeed, she instead congratulated George W. Bush. And then she went on to attack Obama for his foreign policy -- and worse yet, imply to the gathered soldiers that he was undeserving of their loyalty -- without, in fact, ever once even enunciating his name.

Here's how her congratulations went:

PALIN: Last night -- thank God, last night -- all of us hearing the news that one evil leader -- [applause] -- one evil leader of Islamic extremists who was responsible for the murders of thousands of innocent Americans had finally met justice, at the hands of America's finest. [Applause] It is my honor to get to speak of those finest in uniform today. We get to pay tribute to those finest United States military.

I know that we'll probably all remember as individuals where we were that September day when the horrific thoughts and ambitions and plans of this terrorist cut short the thoughts, ambitions and plans of beloved innocent Americans who were heartlessly murdered on September 11, 2001. God bless all the brave men and women in our military and our intelligence services who carried out the successful mission to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. And all those who had laid the groundwork over the years to make that victory possible.

This historic action that was announced last night, it was the result of the diligence, and the hard work, and the character of countless American warriors.

...

Yesterday was a testament to the military’s dedication in relentlessly hunting down an enemy through many years of war. And we thank our president -- we thank President Bush for having made the right calls to set up this victory.

Then, as the Denver Post reported, she went on to attack Obama's foreign policy:

Striking a more political note, Palin said American troops need clear leadership. She cited the Obama administration's policy in Libya as an example of "a lack of clarity."

"We can't fight every war," she said. "We can't undo every injustice in the world.

"We don't go looking for dragons to slay."

Then she wrapped up on a truly scurrilous note:

PALIN: We need leaders who embody the same standard as to which the men and women in uniform hold themselves.

Remember: the true soldier fights because he loves what is behind him. Behind him here is tradition, it's patriotism, it's -- it's not a need for a fundamental transformation of America! It's for a renewal of all that's good about America!

Does that sound to you like she's telling these soldiers that President Obama is undeserving of their loyalty? It sure does to me.

By the way, we haven't gotten word yet on what Jerry Boykin's speech contained. Considering that he's been promoting the theory that President Obama and the radical liberals are working hand in glove with Bin Laden and the Islamic radicals to destroy America, well, let's just guess that major portions of it had to be rewritten. We'll report back when we learn more.

A Retrospective: What Was The President Thinking At That Saturday Night Dinner?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Looking back at Saturday night's White House Correspondents Dinner, it's clear now that some of the jokes were more than little pungent -- considering that the president at that point had authorized the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

For example, there was this bit from Seth Meyer's ribbing of various entities, including the president and C-SPAN:

MEYERS: Every time I tune into C-SPAN it looks like they just had a fire drill. C-SPAN is one unpaid electric bill away from being a radio station.

People think Bin Laden is hiding in the Hindu Kush. But did you know that every day from 4 to 5 he hosts a show on C-SPAN?

You can see that Obama enjoyed that joke quite a bit. You have to wonder what he was thinking just then.

That's even more the case in his pwnage of Donald Trump:



Josh Marshall pointed this one out:

OBAMA: But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. (Laughter.) For example -- no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice -- (laughter) -- at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil' Jon or Meat Loaf. (Laughter.) You fired Gary Busey. (Laughter.) And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. (Laughter and applause.) Well handled, sir. (Laughter.) Well handled.

That was already a cutting and sardonic appraisal. Given the weight that Obama was carrying that night, it now appears in retrospect to be flatly devastating.

The Torture Apologists Have To Rewrite All Kinds Of History

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

We know Republicans seem to have a deep-seated belief that only torture will keep us safe from the terrorists, even though the people who do real intelligence gathering can tell you that just wrong: It's ineffective and counterproductive -- not to mention morally depraved. Not that any of this seems to deter conservatives.

So the spectacle of every right-winger on the planet rushing to claim that it was torture that provided the intelligence leading to the killing of Osama bin Laden was nothing if not predictable. And of course, it turned out to be wholly wrong.

For instance, here were Rudy Giuliani and Sean Hannity last night on Fox. Most of the segment was devoted to claiming that it was "aggressive interrogation techniques" that provided the key intelligence to finding Bin Laden, though at one point Hannity actually commended President Obama -- and then lied about him:

HANNITY: But we needed the intelligence to confirm that right. Does this now bring this debate back to the forefront? And by the way, and I give President Obama a lot of credit here. Because I thought it was a gutsy choice.

GIULIANI: It was.

HANNITY: A gutsy choice, not to drop a 2,000-pound bomb but to send these guys in, so we can confirm that it's him.

GIULIANI: When you consider everything that could have gone wrong and how President Obama would look today if it did, it took a lot of courage to do that and I do admire that. And I think there's a good day the last two days for both President Obama and President Bush. Because I think President Bush set in motion all of the things that led to this. And then President Obama picked up on it and carried it out. And I give both of them a tremendous amount of credits.

HANNITY: And I do too. And this is a good day for this country and we'll going to talk to Todd Beamer's dad who's going to be on the program. And -- is going to be on the program tonight. And General Tommy Franks is on tonight. But as I look at this, would President Obama not now realize that without the intelligence, he wouldn't have had the ability to make this decision, I would hope that it might change his mind.

GIULIANI: Maybe it will. And the reality is he also at that very last minute when he's made the decision had to know that intelligence had to know, 50/50. I mean, you never know.

HANNITY: You'll never know.

GIULIANI: They were going in there to get Osama Bin Laden but who knows if it wasn't somebody that just looked like him or was like him. The better your intelligence, the more accurate your decision making and the safer we are. And the reality is, and I was glad to hear the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton say this. This is not the end, we are in the middle of this, and we can't let down our guard. We shouldn't be leaving Afghanistan as a result of this. We shouldn't be leaving Iraq, we should remain there to get the job done.

HANNITY: I agree but this is where I find myself a little conflicted here because this is almost the opposite of what candidate Obama said he would do. And maybe for the first time he's grown in office.

Oh, yeah, it was almost the opposite: -- if by "almost" you mean "the opposite of":

Now, you can argue that Hannity and Giuliani couldn't have known that they were 100 percent wrong in their speculation, since John Brennan didn't officially shoot it down until today.

But in fact, we already knew that waterboarding had nothing to do with this intelligence. It had already been reported by the Associated Press:

Mohammed did not discuss al-Kuwaiti while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He acknowledged knowing him many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

It took years of work before the CIA identified the courier's real name: Sheikh Abu Ahmed, a Pakistani man born in Kuwait. When they did identify him, he was nowhere to be found.

Once again, smart, lawful intelligence gathering made the difference here. I gather that this is anathema to the conservative mindset, however. No wonder they're so incompetent.

Fox & Friends Wants To Be Sure Everyone Gives George W. Bush Credit For Bin Laden's Death

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Fox & Friends had wall-to-wall coverage of the celebrations inspired by news of Osama bin Laden's death this morning, and had on lots of analysts to discuss the Obama administration's big victory in the so-called "war on terror".

To do that, strangely enough, they had on all sorts of commentators, including various politicians, such as Karl Rove, and featured statements from the likes of Dick Cheney. Oddly enough, not a single segment managed to include a Democratic politician or even one person from the Obama administration.

Instead, what we heard all morning was how George W. Bush deserves credit too! They even ran a segment featuring Bush vowing in 2001 he would eventually get Bin Laden, with the longest time frame being a year from then.

As Steve Benen puts it:

There's a fair amount of this rhetoric bouncing around this morning, and it's not especially surprising -- Republicans aren't going to credit President Obama, regardless of merit, so it stands to reason they'll try to bring George W. Bush into the picture.

If this is going to be a new GOP talking point, we might as well set the record straight.
In March 2002, just six months after 9/11, Bush said of bin Laden, "I truly am not that concerned about him.... You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you."

In July 2006, we learned that the Bush administration closed its unit that had been hunting bin Laden.

In September 2006, Bush told Fred Barnes, one of his most sycophantic media allies, that an "emphasis on bin Laden doesn't fit with the administration's strategy for combating terrorism."

And don't even get me started on Bush's failed strategy that allowed bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora.

I'm happy to extend plenty of credit to all kinds of officials throughout the government, but crediting Bush's "vigilance" on bin Laden is deeply silly.

But it's what we expect from Republicans. And especially the crew at F&F.

Sarah Palin Gets Her Message Across On Fox, All Right: She's Dangerously Clueless

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It's been quite a whirlwind the past couple of weeks, watching Donald Trump wow the Republican world with his dazzling mixture of aggressive ignorance and utter crassness. He's like Sarah Palin on steroids.

But Palin herself remains a potent spokesperson for the forces of ignorance. And while a lot of her apologists and defenders like to claim that Palin is unfairly victimized by quick sound bites, she really makes a much bigger impression -- as someone so utterly clueless they should never be permitted near any public office again -- in longer formats, such as her wide-ranging and rambling interview yesterday with Fox News' Bret Baier.

It produced little exchanges like this one, on increasing the debt ceiling:

PALIN: Hells no. I would not vote to increase that debt ceiling. Otherwise it just shows the American public we're not serious yet. We're still gonna incur more debt. No. And we don't have to increase the debt ceiling here in the next few weeks. It turns my stomach to hear this assumption articulated that, well, we have to despite the fact that we're raking in, the federal government, six billion dollars a day.

Take that money and service our debt first! And pay down some of that debt. Make sure that we're showing the international financial markets and our lenders that we're serious about getting our debt and our deficit problems under control.

BAIER: So, what would you say to the Republicans who do vote for it, on the advice of some experts on Wall Street and around the country who believe that not increasing it would really hurt the economy and create a disaster?

PALIN: I would say, before you seriously think about voting to increase the debt limit and incur more unsustainable, immoral, unethical debt that is really going to ruin our country, to continue down this path -- prioritize, service the debt first, pay for the very essential services that are constitutionally mandated.

Let the states take care of a whole lot of these services and projects, and if a state wants to do something a little bit special, like some extra roads or some extra museums and monuments and cowboy poetry, let that state figure out how they're gonna pay for it.

Palin also sort of weighed in on the other presidential candidates, though you'll notice she actually says nothing at all about any of them, other than that she respects them because they're good Republicans and by golly she loves to see them running; and then remains firmly noncommittal about her own prospects for running.

Then she wraps it all up by suggesting that President Obama had foreign money flowing into his campaign accounts in the 2008 election -- which would, of course, be a crime. Baier asks her:

BAIER: Before I let you go, are you suggesting that the FEC may find that foreign money got into the Obama campaign in 2008?

PALIN: Am I wrong to bring up the fact -- and maybe, Bret, at this point you have more information than I do on where a lot of those dollars were that were unaccounted for. Remember that we saw much proof of a lot of the donations to Obama's campaign -- credit-card contributions under fake names, addresses that perhaps weren't even real addresses in the U.S.

You know, I hope that we don't just give up on making sure that we have free and fair elections -- not just Obama's! Heck, some on the GOP too! Uh, on the GOP side. Let's make sure that rules are being followed. We are a land of laws.

Methinks she's been dipping into Pam "Atlas Wanks" Geller's beandip again.