Blogging Against the Right: An Unfortunate Necessity

This just about sums it up:

This is what I hate about blogging. The premise that the troops hate Obama is so stupid that it is laughable, but you have to push back. Yet, the moment you push back, you are now engaging the idiots like Red State and Uncle Jimbo as if they have something legitimate to say. Really, the only response is to just mock these morons.

Not that I “hate” doing it; I think it’s amusing to read about how the loony wingers think.  But yes, their point of view is so detached from reality that to give it any sort of public platform is a disservice to anyone who reads it with the intent of learning something.

Anti-Obama Paranoia Already in Full Swing

This is just too ridiculous not to post:

Who can stop the Obama agenda? Only an unprecedented idea-based Resistance from freedom-loving citizens can prevent the full implementation of Obama’s march to the Left. That’s why Grassfire.org is seeking to identify and mobilize grassroots citizens who will join “The Resistance”- an alliance of patriotic, resilient and determined conservatives who will not forsake their principles. Our goal? One million citizens joining together by Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009.

The whole website is just a joke.  The bold red menacing letters at the top say “Obama’s Nation Has Begun”…okay he hasn’t even taken office yet.  Join the resistance – are you serious?  As if these people can be equated with the French revolutionaries?  Right…  An idea-based Resistance?  Read the entire page – not a single alternative idea is proposed.  Just more “You’re gonna steal my guns and make me abort my baby” paranoia from the right.

Obama won the election in a landslide.  It was a real mandate, unlike the one Bush claimed to carry after 2004 when he won by a whopping 3%, less than half of Obama’s margin of victory.  So these fanatics on the right need to get used to the next eight years, and stop trying to demonize a man who, to the chagrin of every other Limbaugh out there, isn’t a Communist boogey man.  In the words of a certain California senator, “elections have consequences,” so deal with it.

Bush: I Don’t Care What History Thinks

Some more disconcerting news from our outgoing president:

For a man on a bon voyage tour, Bush has tried to sound unconcerned about how history will judge him.

“I’ll be frank with you. I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history,” he told Gibson. “I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”

The line is an echo of his famous response to Bob Woodward’s question about how history would judge the Iraq war. Then, as now, Bush replied: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

Coming from someone with a Bachelor’s degree in History, this sounds a little strange.  But really, this kind of approach towards governance – to be unafraid of how your administration will go down in the history books, is a telling sign of just how dangerous this president is.  The cynical truth is that Bush may very well be gone before he can personally witness the effects of his Iraq policy on that country and the Middle East as a whole, but did he pursue the invasion of Iraq as a part of some personal short-term agenda, or as part of a bigger mission involving the security of the country over which he presides?  We’ve been told to believe the latter, but these comments by Bush seem to imply otherwise.  This selfish, insensitive, and cold manner of approaching his responsibilities as leader of the free world are not becoming of the office of the President and only remind us of just how asleep at the wheel Bush has been over the last eight years.  While approval ratings, polling, and PR can bestow upon a politician a sense that he or she is doing right by his/her country, the true test, as I see it, belongs in the hands of the people who get to witness firsthand how certain policies play out generations later.  Without this sort of deterrent of history, without the worry of how history will evaluate your presidency, the expectations are set pretty low, and, to quote a soon-to-be former president, if that’s not false bigotry, then I don’t know what is.

A Special Holiday Message from the White House

Take a look at President Bush’s wish list this Christmas:

Bush Still Trying to Tie 9/11 to Iraq

Why has public support for the war in Iraq waned? According to Dubya, it must be the American people’s fault.  That’s right, the same people he’s claiming to protect!  They just don’t see the same connection between 9/11 and Iraq that he sees.  Why don’t you educate us, o wise one?

President Bush lamented this week that the farther the nation gets from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the harder it is “for people to see the connection between Al Qaeda in Iraq and their own security.”

“One of the real difficulties of the presidency has been to keep in people’s mind the notion that we are in a war,” Bush said in an interview with RealClearPolitics released Friday. “The farther we got away from September the 11th … the harder it was for people to see the connection between Al Qaeda in Iraq and their own security.”

So let me get this straight – we need to be vigilant about Al Qaeda in Iraq so that we can prevent another 9/11-like lapse in national security?  But wasn’t Al Qaeda in Iraq nonexistent before we invaded that country?  What it boils down to is that we’re fighting in a war to protect ourselves from…ourselves?  How’s that for a national security strategy in a post-9/11 world?

It’s lamentable that after being regarded as possibly the most unpopular president in American history, this president still won’t own up to the biggest foreign policy failure of our time – to invade and occupy a country whose existence mattered naught to our national security.  What’s worse is that he’s STILL trying to forge a relationship between Iraq and 9/11, when only two weeks ago he was denying that any such link exists.  And in 2003 he stated, “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th.”  The 9/11 commission investigating the attack also definitively established that no link between the Iraqi government and the events of 9/11 exists.  It’s no longer a matter of opinion or PR spin; it’s an agreed upon fact.  What we’re seeing here is a desperate attempt on the part of Bush to grab onto anything that may help create a positive legacy for himself, but to his chagrin, in the words of another former president, facts sure are stubborn things.

What Bush Cronyism Is All About

When people are going off on anti-Bush rants, the word “cronyism” usually pops up.  And I know what they’re referring to, but I never realized how extensive of a defintion that word really carried with it.  Tonight Rachel Maddow read off a very well constructed list of all the former criminals employed by Bush & Co:

The Best of Sarah Palin

Courtesy of The Daily Show:

Bobby Jindal – Culture Crusader? The GOP Still Doesn’t Get It

Step aside, Pat Buchanan:

Jindal focused on culture and family during a speech to an audience of 800 at a fundraiser for the socially conservative Iowa Family Policy Center.

“It all starts with family and builds outward from there,” said the first-term Jindal, who was making his first visit to Iowa. “As a parent, I’m acutely aware of the overall coarsening of our culture in many ways.”

The governor said technology such as television and the Internet are conduits for corrupting children, which he also believes is an issue agreed upon across party lines.

“As governor, I can’t censor anything or take away anyone’s freedom of speech – nor do I want to if I could,” he said, “but I can still control what my kids watch, what they hear and what they read.”

The governor also noted efforts in his home state of Louisiana to crack down on sexual predators.

The governor was not entirely successful in avoiding words on politics when he said “most voters” think the Republican Party has become one of “corruption in Washington.”

During a stop at the Rapid Recover Breakfast in Cedar Rapids earlier Saturday, Jindal said America’s culture is one of the things that makes it great, but warned that its music, art and constant streams of media and communication have often moved in the wrong direction.

“There are things we can do as private citizens working together to strengthen our society,” he said. “Our focus does not need to be on fixing the (Republican) party,” he said. “Our focus needs to be on how to fix America.”

As an Indian-American whose parents are from India, when I read about Bobby Jindal lamenting the “coarsening of our culture” because of TV and music, I’m not all that surprised, as my parents, as well as many elders in my culture, do not hesitate to rail against fowl language and explicitly sexual scenery in movies, TV, and music (although Gov. Jindal himself was born in the US, so wouldn’t he be a little more socially liberal?).  But in any case, from a political perspective there is still no reason to be surprised by this news.  The Republicans just got through an excruciatingly painful beating at the polls a few weeks ago, and what better way for them to recover than to return to fundamentals and take a sip from their fountain of youth: the culture wars, right?  For Mr. Jindal himself, talking to Iowa Republicans about social matters may be a smart way to position himself for 2012; don’t forget that Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses in the last cycle, beating back serious contender Mitt Romney, who outspent Huckabee by a margin of nearly 20 to 1, by appealing to Iowa’s tightly knit community of evangelicals, and home-schoolers in particular.  If Jindal wants to be taken seriously by the true believers of his party, who at this point are showing no signs of backing away despite this year’s losses, he’s got to milk them for support, and it starts with getting them to look away from his Indian heritage in a party of older white men, and earning the trust of the evangelical community.  The fact that Huckabee himself is also running around in Iowa and planting seeds for 2012 doesn’t exactly help Jindal, but he’s making his rounds now and making them early.

Now, Mr. Jindal may be playing the social issues card to his advantage, but the fact that someone as high-profile and as promising for the GOP as Bobby Jindal is trying to rally his troops into one more GOP-led culture war in 2012 is not good news for his party.  Now, I know Jindal has said in recent weeks that his party needs to become a party of ideas, but whether or not he will take that argument to the voters of his party seems to be at issue here.  To say that “our focus does not need to be on fixing the party,” as he said above, points to a serious misunderstanding on Jindal’s part of what exactly took place this past November 4.  For the last eight years, during which for the most part Republicans controlled every single branch of the federal government, they were given the chance to prove the primacy of their ideas on governing, and they utterly failed.  The economy has tanked.  Jobs are being lost left and right.  The public’s mood on Iraq has turned permanently sour, and the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is begging for attention before it’s too late.  With the results of their eight year experiment finally pouring in for everyone to see, the issue for their party right now, despite what Mr. Jindal says, is precisely to go back to the drawing board and give their brand a complete makeover, and yes, that involves personal admission of fault.  He’s exactly right when he says America needs to be fixed; this country faces serious economic and national security obstacles that threaten to derail any chances of attaining a future of peace and prosperity.  America is sick, but a call to arms for another culture war, even if it reinvigorates a despondent party, is not what the doctor ordered.  For the sake of his party, a woeful GOPer should pray that Jindal will lay down the culture arms soon and start truly rebuilding the Republican brand, one idea at a time.

Why I’m Not a Fan of Hillary as SoS

Because of reports like these:

Both sides were engaged in a delicate public and private dance, maneuvering for position and reputation in case the deal falls through. Aides in each camp have grown increasingly sour toward the other in recent days as the matter played out publicly.

In their public signals, the Clintons are trying to take the former president’s activities off the table as an issue, in their view eliminating any excuses for Mr. Obama not to give Mrs. Clinton the job. Some in the Obama camp are bristling at what they see as strategic leaks by the Clintons aimed at boxing in the president-elect and forcing him to offer the post.

The tension could foreshadow a complex relationship burdened by suspicion and enmity should Mrs. Clinton become secretary of state. By putting her in the cabinet, Mr. Obama could remove a potential thorn in the Senate on issues like health care and a potential rival for the nomination in 2012 if his term proves rocky. But he could also face a rival power center within his own administration with her on his team.

I don’t care how big they are within the party – the Clintons = drama, and I think that in the primaries the Democrats made it resoundingly clear that the party needs to shed the drama and move forward.  Skilled in policy details and respected around the world she may be, but I don’t see the benefits of having her at State outweighing the dramatic fallout that is already building up around another Clinton, and she hasn’t even been selected yet.

Bush Prepares to Take One Last Dump on the Country

Mr. 25% has no shame at all:

Whether it’s relaxing pollution control standards for power plants or allowing loaded weapons into national parks, the Bush Administration is scrambling to approve or change as many federal rules as it can before it hands off power to President-elect Barack Obama.

What’s worse is that undoing these last-minute policy changes isn’t so easy:

While executive orders and rules that are not yet in effect can swiftly be reversed or altered by Obama’s appointees or his own executive orders, rules that go into effect before he takes office will be extremely difficult to undo. Rescinding a rule would require the new administration to re-start the rule-making process, which can take years and prompt legal challenges. Another strategy that has been talked about lately – getting Congress to disapprove the rules through the Congressional Review Act — carries political risks and has been used only once before.

“The problem with what the Bush administration is doing is that these rules are extremely cumbersome to adopt, and they are every bit as cumbersome to undo,” said David Vladeck, an administrative law professor at Georgetown University. “It condemns the next administration to spend years fighting on the old administration’s agenda.”

…

Getting rid of a rule that is already in effect is enormously difficult, because it must be replaced with another rule. That process can take months or even years and could leave some of the Bush rules in place in the meantime. It can also lead to lawsuits.

So despite the fact that Democrats won big on November 4, the ghost of George Bush could potentially linger on for years to come, no matter what President Obama’s intentions may be.  And we’re not talking about minor bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t affect everyday folks.  Here’s a nice list being assembled of Bush’s last-ditch attempts to fuck up the state of our nation even more.  Uranium mining near the Grand Canyon?  Sure, why the hell not!  That won’t affect the Colorodo River, which serves as a source of drinking water for Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, will it?  Oh, and we can go ahead and let pharmacists refuse to dispense Plan B to a promiscuous teenager who clearly doesn’t fear Jesus enough to have known better.  I know it’s common practice for the outgoing administration to try to ram through their last-minute pet policies through federal agencies; Bill Clinton did it too in 2000.  But the point here is that George Bush is now the most unpopular president in the history of Gallup polling, and the last thing he can do to salvage any respect and at least attempt to leave the White House with some sort of positive legacy is to keep his dangerous and out-of-the-mainstream right-wing desires to himself and not hamper the incoming administration with a burden that it won’t have the time to deal with.  It’s high time that President Bush start acting like a team player.