Chris Matthews: Not An Iraq War Critic

While watching Bill Maher last week, I caught a blatant attempt by Chris Matthews to cast himself as a principled opponent of the War. Matthews' anger at Fusion TV's Jorge Ramos is palpable and shocking if you didn't know how mixed up inside Matthews must be in order to depict himself as having opposed the Iraq War.

Perhaps most famously, when Bush claimed “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, Matthews went into full on fan-boy mode, claiming Americans loved having a President who had “a little swagger”, that regardless of whether he had actually flown, he looked like a fighter pilot, and that women loved him. This sort of cheerleading had a great effect on selling the White House's narrative of a War for Good and a Mission Ordained by God. It kept people in the dark about the horrors of the war and about Iraqi resistance to US forces. The fact that this was all done on the supposedly liberal-leaning MSNBC makes Matthews' misleading warmongering all the more heinous. Matthews gave cover to Bush on his left flank and planted seeds of doubt among moderates and liberals. Matthews' attempt to be “balanced” overlooked the fact that airbrushing over a politician's weak points is like leaving a movie halfway through and claiming that you know what happened.

Throughout Bush's regime Matthews continued to speak warmly of Bush. In 2006, he said that there might not be an alternative to George Bush's warmongering. He In 2005, Matthews praised a speech by Bush, calling it “brilliant” on two occasions and terming critics of the speech “carpers”. Also in 2005 Matthews tried to cow critics of the President by claiming that if elections in Iraq went successfully, Bush deserved a place on Mt. Rushmore. In 2007, he gushed over Bush's foreign policy even while the country continued to turn more against a war that was widely hated by Americans at that time.

Matthews cynical support for the ouster of Phil Donahue comports with the actions of someone who didn't want to seem opposed to the War in Iraq. His actions show him to be an opportunist and someone more concerned with his own job security than in taking a principled stand on the most important US foreign policy issue since Vietnam.

McCain, Reagan, and bankers, oh my!

Just an assemblage of fuckery from right-wingers...that is to say, another day.

• And you think George W. Bush's Vietnam evasion was shameful. Well, Joe Conason highlights the insanity that was Saint Ronald of Reagan's belief that he was actually present at the liberation of Auschwitz when in fact he had been in Hollywood FOR THE DURATION of the Second World War. And yet this man is venerated by prominent Repubs. This is so completely delusional, as was his belief that he didn't trade arms for hostages and his belief not only in astrology but also in the occult.



• There's good ol' John McCain always wrong about everything. Here he says that we should crack down on the flow of illegal immigrants into the US-as he did in his goofy ad-but apparently once they've breached the border, well, I guess ol' Johnny thinks it's OK for employers to milk immigrants illegally for every penny they can get out of them. So to re-cap: illegal immigration=bad, illegal exploitation of Mexicans=meh. And now, ol' Johnny is soliciting comments from anti-gay groups condemning and fear-mongering the possible repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Really, he's just wrong about everything.



• Dean Baker on how there's one standard for most employees, but a totally different onefor the banksters. Dean Baker has been right about everything economically for the last 10 or so years-and perhaps longer, that's just as long as I've been reading his work, so if you're more interested in what he does, check out his Center for Economic Policy and Research.



• And just to cheer things up a bit, before you go off on BP too hard, just remember that there have been many seconds during the company's existence when oil has not been gushing into the ocean from one of their oil wells.

George W. Bush, economist

Investment? We don't need no stinkin' investment!.

the hypocrisy of supposed small-government "tea partiers"

I have no problems with conservatives. However, I don't believe the vast majority of Tea Partiers have much connection to lower-case "c" conservatism. Eisenhower, a Republican, warned the country about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, not about the threat posed to America by brown people, in his final speech as President in 1961. However, Tea Partiers have shown themselves not at all concerned with the expansion of the American empire-itself the elephant in the room regarding the ballooning debt which these so-called patriots claim to be concerned. Tea Partiers have a positive opinion of George W. Bush-a leader who had very little concern for keeping government's footprint small.

Regarding government regulation-we haven't heard much Tea Party criticism of the absence of regulation which allowed for the mining accident in West Virginia last month in which 29 people died. Indeed, the CEO of that company, completely not coincidentally, was recently at a rally in which he, Sean Hannity, Ted Nugent, and others railed at Obama, cap-and-trade legislation, supposed green "extremists", and regulation. Indeed, his company sponsored the rally. But apparently, hoping that workers don't die in industrial accidents is not a Tea Party value.

It just points out again, the absurdity of claiming that Tea Partiers are conservatives. Conservatives who truly believe in limited government would have an issue with the bill in Arizona which privileges state government over federal government on the issue of immigration. The fact that the Association of Arizona Police Chiefs opposes the bill on the grounds that immigration is better dealt with at the national than at the state level does not restrict Tea Partiers from offering empty praise to police.

As one pundit put it, Tea Partiers have an issue with small government until it interferes with "warring, wiretapping, or waterboarding."

George W. Bush-man of the people

George W. Bush visits Haiti and his disdain for Haitians is symbolic of how he treated the world for 8 years.

I'm not a Truther....

I'm not I'm not I'm not. I don't think the government is competent enough to perpetrate such a massive cover-up and some of the claims about even more widespread conspiracies are completely incoherent, and consequently, for my money, not credible.

That said, I know when someone's b.s.ing me. If the US had nothing to hide about 9/11, why did Bush and Cheney first resist a 9/11 Commission so passionately, why did they then nominate a man linked with some of the most egregious examples of secretive governance Henry Kissinger to head the Commission, and finally, if Bush and Cheney had nothing to hide, why would they initially refuse to testify and only agree when they were allowed to testify together? Given what we know about Bush and Cheneys' disinclination to adhere to laws they didn't want to respect, do you not think they would shout from the rooftops if they were truly innocent of some charges?

Anyway, with that proviso, lemme say, I was listening to "Background Briefing" this past week and heard a discussion with former CIA agent John Kiriakou. He says (about 50 minutes in) that when the CIA re-claimed some documents from the Taliban embassy in Peshawar, they found a file folder of phone calls, in English, of 163 calls made from the embassy to a large number of destinations in the United States until September 10, 2001. These calls resume September 16, 2001.

This seems extremely problematic. If there are multiple calls being made to the US which include a gap coinciding just before September 11 and ending just after, suspicions are raised. At a bare minimum, it would seem we should investigate whether there is a material connection between the phone numbers where those phone calls went and folks suspected of terrorism. If there is no fire where the smoke is, fair enough. On the other hand, if the recipients of the phone calls were suspected terrorists or were under investigation for something, such investigation should continue.

Again, some of things I've heard from Truthers are not substantially supported by documentation, or are speculative. But that does not mean that we have been told the whole story. There's a lot of daylight between some conspiracy theories and claims that Bush and Cheney did nothing wrong with regard to September 11. Given Bush and Cheney's furious protestations of their innocence, do you not think that if they truly were innocent, that they would proclaim that from the rooftops? I don't. Again, I'm not a Truther but I know we haven't been told the whole story either.

manipulation of Tea-Partiers

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post up about how the GOP is once again masking as big backers of limited government. During W's tenure, they didn't hesitate to advocate any measure which might increase the size of government via wars, intrusion into civil rights, limiting the free speech of those who spoke out against them, etc. Anyone who criticized Bush was told that we are at war so please be quiet and be a good American. Now of course, with W and Cheney among the least popular figures in American political history, the GOP is trying to re-position themselves as the party of more limited government, which they legitimately were through about 1970 and so now they're making nice with the Tea Partiers, attempting to co-opt their energy and anger against the Obama administration as though Bush & Co. were not much, much more intrusive. But this matters not to the GOP who knows their brand is in the toilet and so they attempt to co-opt the intellectually dishonest claims that Obama is grasping at totalitarianism. They're trying to re-write history in an attempt to salvage their political party.

Obama legitimates Bush

Obama's speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize was another step in President Obama diminishing the space between himself and President George W. Bush. While he campaigned as a reformer, his promises, particularly on foreign policy, were so vague as to be meaningless. Hence these actions are not particularly surprising. However they are nonetheless disappointing as he confirms my worst suspicions about the course of his presidency. President Obama said in his remarks accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that America has underwritten security for the world over the past 60 years. I guess the President forgot to ask Mohammed Mossadeq, Guatemala, Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among others. President Obama also claims waging war is a means of securing future peace. So eight years in Afghanistan isn't long enough to secure peace in Afghanistan so perhaps 35 years will be enough? Would one more death in Iraq secure greater security there? No. Is there a compelling national interest for continued US presence and troops in Afghanistan? No. Is the US presence there ensuring further, understandable antagonism toward the US in the future? Yes. I never believed Obama was an agent of change because he was Wall Street's favorite son. Until there is campaign finance reform, none of this will change.

complacent Obama fans

There are many WASP-y Obama supporters out there for whom the election of President Obama was not particularly significant insofar as he represented a rebuff to the insular, secretive, big-business friendly W presidency but too much, because he wasn't George W. Bush. Too many people voted for President Obama simply because they were so (understandably) sick of the increasingly brazen corruption which typified W's leadership.

However, voting for someone because they aren't the worst guy ever isn't much of an endorsement of the new guy. It's not saying much to remove us from the seventh circle of hell and improve things a little bit. If those are the standards by which we define success, well, our "leaders" will continually fail to reach the standards of ethical, responsible leadership which the people of America should expect. But worse than the damning with faint praise is the fact that President Obama has doubled down on the secrecy of the Bush administration by abrogating his promise that he would veto any bill upholding telecom immunity. Obama has empowered the same financial advisors who facilitated the treasonous too big to fail bailouts at the end of Bush's second term. And we continue to bomb our "ally". With friends like that, who needs enemies? That brings me to this. Too many of my nice, urbane, yuppie college friends are not sufficiently upset, if they bought into the claims of Obama that he would change things, that he is much too content with same as it ever was. He hasn't empowered people, but is run by the same interests that have run politics in the US for a long time. Fine, if you want to criticize Bush, totally reasonable, but is Obama living up to the hype? When you promote yourself, and win awards for a campaign promoting change, you should be more than just talk.

liveblogging Tony Snow on the Late Show with David Letterman

Tony Snow is quite tall. He's taller than Letterman by an inch or so and Letterman is 6'2. Wearing a light shirt, open collared, dark jacket. But of course, once he starts talking, he's largely full of it.

Letterman asks him if any reporters who were trying to start stuff and he said there was one who was always trying to instigate nuclear match-ups (David Gregory?) between countries. Now how could a reporter, asking a question, be responsible for two countries pointing nukes at one another? That's what countries do. Policy determines whether people point nukes at one another. If you have a nutjob as leader, perhaps he might force a confrontation. Otherwise, it's not going to happen. Certainly not because of a reporter.

Letterman wonders whether Bush's approval rating (he says/asks, what is it, 30 something; Snow agrees) bothers the White House. Snow says it could be better. How to make a 33% approval rating appear not so bad.....yeah, and the sky could be higher up. What does that mean? Snow babbles on about how a wartime President isn't popular. Uh huh....so Monkey Boy wasn't popular after initially hitting Afghanistan...through '03.....starts to slow down. Yeah, it has nothing to do with a quagmire in Iraq or a storm in New Orleans. And, uh, FDR (not sure if there were opinion polls then, but he was certainly very popular). Ike I believe was at least not too unpopular, even through the political minefields of high level political service. George Washington....very popular. Kennedy, popular in the very early days of Vietnamese involvement. Bush's daddy very popular during the Gulf War in '91. So it helps if the war is perceived to be for a somewhat noble cause. Yeah, I hate those unfortunate facts interfering with Tony Snow's unpaid PR work. I guess once a hack, always a hack.

Oh yeah, then when Letterman throws him a bone noting-perhaps this is a regurgitation of a right-wing talking point-that Bush is in person a decent guy (cough cough as long as you agree with him in everything cough cough) Snow notes that there are lots of practical jokes done in this administration. Well that's reassuring eh?

Rush Limbaugh goes wawee wawee wawee

• You know, I wouldn't be surprised if aliens have reached and contacted Earth, just not the US. They might have contacted people in other countries and established relations with them, on the grounds that we don't have interact with those crazy Americans.
  
  Yes that's right, Rush Limbaugh is at it again. It's not enough that he refers to soldiers who don't agree with him as phony, but when Harry Reid rightly criticizes him, he comes back like a third-grader who's just been hit in the head at dodgeball. Say it to my face? He could say it to your face, but it'll be a ways from you because of that big belly between you and the Senator. If you wanna see a couple good smackdowns of this pomposity, here's one from a vet, and here's another from the veteran advocacy group Vote Vets.org. This is all despicable. These guys, most especially Limbaugh, play rhetorical games while soldiers die. Forget the fact that the policy itself is a disaster, let's argue about how polite we are in talking about how disastrous the policy is.



• Hadn't found a translation of Bush's comments to then Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar as printed in El Pais so hadn't commented about this, but it's pretty dreadful. Well, it's really not too surprising I guess; it's about in keeping with what he said to Blair last year in terms of his awarness of the world and international relations. At that time, as Juan Cole says so well above, he displayed the lack of mastery of international relations which bedevils our relations with the rest of the world, suggesting that the Syrians "need to cut this shit out." It's as though he was telling his 8 year old son to stop poking his seven year-old sister or something. Ah, yeah, cut that shit out-thanks W-now we know how to stop this gruesome hemorrhaging in the Middle East. If no one had told us that before, we would just have continued bombing and killing each other. But now we know.....why didn't someone tell us that in 1949? So many lives could have been saved.....
  
  And here Bush goes again, this time with then Spanish PM Aznar, saying that waiting for Saddam was like "Chinese water torture", that there was "no guarantee" Saddam wouldn't be assassinated as an alternative to going into exile (which he had offered to do), said that he was running out of patience with Saddam and said that he didn't think he could wait for the UN too long. He also says makes the sort of thuggish, bullying suggestions for which he is now known, suggesting not-so-subtly that those world beaters Angola, Chile, and the Cameroon, if they attempt to hold Bush back, might be dealt with punitively. This is a 6th grader pounding on a 2nd grader. And then when Aznar mentions waiting until March 14, Bush demurs, saying maybe he can handle the 10th. This guy's megalomania, while well-established, becomes just more appalling by the minute.

Katie Couric

Well, it seems things are not bad enough for Katie Couric to call out the Bush administration on the war. In this interview with Marvin Kalb of the Kennedy School of Government, Couric says that "unless something is really egregious", it's not her role to call the government on it. I'm just wondering how many dead soldiers, how many lies, how dire the Civil War, how corrupt the Iraqi government, how degraded and insecure the Middle East, how downright FUBAR the whole situation must get before Ms. Couric does her job.

It's pretty ironic because she did admit just recently that she felt some heat-though really, is that all it takes to dissuade corporate journalists (rhetorical question, don't really expect answer) from asking some questions? (And has Katie Couric ever really done a tough interview? I think that is a Kafkaesque question). And with regard to the Petraeus report, she said recently that she saw what the military wanted. So she admitted several weeks ago that she had been propagandized. Then in this more recent interview Couric says that unless things are "egregious", she won't report on them. But this suggests the Platonic story of the cave. If you're in a hole and you know you're in a hole, how can you question the severity of what is going on outside? You've already admitted that you're not getting an unvarnished view, so how can you question whether you truly understand whether what you're seeing is untainted or unmediated by outside influences? Katie Couric does not ask tough questions, and I really don't expect a whole lot more at this point. I'm jaded enough that my expectations are quite low. But to have to tolerate the dog-and-pony show of her distortions and half-truths is intolerable.

The hits keep coming

For a guy who's this headstrong, the signs, well, hell, who cares about the signs. Still, I think Barney must have made his public stance on Iraq clear recently. Now, it turns out his daughter Jenna parts with her father on family planning. His family planning: only do it when you want a child; hers-be smart, be educated. Imagine that. Well, she may have learnt it at home because apparently her mother thinks similarly. Well, Bush's stubbornness was about Iraq but we can see a dry drunk who views every policy through the lens of ideology doesn't see things rationally. How can you, when you put party over policy, or over country?

And then, this from Nancy Pelosi. See, we've come to know George W. Bush is a tool, a douche, a fucktard, a hoser, a dope, etc. But one would expect more from the (alleged) opposition party. But not only is Pelosi adamant at the end of the video that impeachment has always and will always be off the table regarding Bush, as long as she is speaker, but she claims fatuously that this is the Republicans' war and that she could not have facilitated an end to the funding for the war-as if she and her majority whips had no resources or mettle by which to end the war. She has plenty of pull as the Speaker of the House and she could have used it. She obviously doesn't care. And for her to get all pissy with Wolf Blitzer is truly the height of pique. I think her botox nearly exploded there. This is really the worst kind of CYAism (Cover Your Ass) and it's a shoddy job at that. For her to attempt to attribute this war to the Repubs is completely untenable. Dems have too often sold their souls and I sure hope Cindy Sheehan can beat Pelosi. Pelosi is doing the worst sort of covering, and for an almost unbelievably immoral administration. It's not just their war. And the more you, Nancy Pelosi, claim it is, the less it is.

smorgasbord of bad things....

(updated at bottom)

I've been seeing so many bad things over the last couple of months and I've been wanting to consider them for some time so some of these are dated. That said, these issues have been knawing at me for some time and it's important to give them ass much daylight as possible so all, uh, 0 readers of this blog, can know about them. Anyway, herewith, some large portions of my head the last couple months:

• If one of the most horrific casualties of the last 6.5 years of Clusterfuck of America isn't Jose Padilla, I don't know who is. It would appear from this transcript of Democracy Now that Jose Padilla has undergone Stockholm Syndrome and was concerned about possible ill effects that his testimony might have on the Bush administration. That is to say, he had been so brainwashed that he had been convinced of the justness of the Bush administration and the persecuting tendencies of an allegedly hostile media and society. I listened to the show and it's frequently heartbreaking, but this one was sad to an even greater extent. Given that Padilla had been held for over 3.5 years without ANY access to anyone. He was kept in extreme isolation, to the extent that he was denied access even to a lawyer for all that time. Reading his lawyer's reflections and thoughts about Padilla's state of mind and his experience in detention, it is truly tragic that a man against whom charges were diminished significantly as the Bush administration attempted to avoid the embarassment of one of its allegedly key victories in the war on turrr amounting to nothing, has of course been most grievously affected by such unjust and finally unjustified treatment. To hear his lawyer reflecting on Padilla's experiences and his state of mind now which seems to have been irreparably harmed by his detention experiences is one of the saddest, and most tragic things I have ever read.



• The recent surge "debate" has also been one of the weirdest things I have ever seen. Really, it's no wonder Americans like movies which are completely incoherent and just a clusterfuck of ill-conceived and irrational premises. I'm not averse to the occasional escapist movie, but it doesn't seem to matter how stupid or ridiculous a movie is, it's described by too many viewers as awesome or kick-ass, or whatever. When I point out the complete severing from reality and physical laws, I see eyes glaze over and/or the old canard, aw shoot, it's just one movie. But yet all these ridiculous movies make a lot of money. My point is Americans seem to have a high tolerance for bullshit. They can claims simultaneously that they are attached to reality while enjoying movies like "Saw" and its sequel, all the Scary Movie movies, "Hostel" (when I've been to Mexico and met Americans who didn't even know what a youth hostel was!!!!! (unthinkable for a young European traveller), and numerous others.
  
  So it's not surprising that they'll tolerate bullshit from Tony Snow about the supposed, well at least not failure, and possibly success, of the surge, regardless of the fact that casualties have actually gotten larger overall in Iraq. Yeah, perhaps they've gotten smaller in Baghdad. That's where most of the surge troops were posted. It's just that the violence migrated to other parts of the country instead.



• Well, on a positive note, I should include some wonderful music videos which I found recently. The first one is an incendiary-seriously, make sure your computer isn't too hot when you play this because this performance might just ignite the battery-performance by the late, great, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Stevie Wonder, back in '86. Stevie Ray had asked to visit Stevie Wonder and Stevie obliged and you get the whole performance, live and uninterrupted. The second one is Stevie Wonder doing "Higher Ground" back in the day, just a live bass, rhythm section, again, make sure you are using your computer in a freezer because the heat of this performance might just set your computer off. And the third one is a bit more Stevie Ray Vaughan, this time at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1988, tearing through an old favorite, "Willie The Wimp."



• OK, one more hit. Ahmadinejad was in New York today, speaking at the United Nations and Columbia. Of course the media gets its knickers in a twist over "such a controversial" figure being here. And yeah, Ahmadinejad's views on the Holocaust are disgraceful, his view that there are no gay people in Iran is disgraceful. But again, we have helped people like Laurent Kabila, Mobutu Sese Seko; we've supported people like Carlos Menem who went along with the IMF dismantling of the Argentine economy and has been investigated for some time over corruption charges; we've supported people like Fujimori of Chile who is under investigation for financial abuses and human rights violations. And now, Ahmadinejad, who is clearly the other side of the same coin from W, is using official American antagonism toward Iran (it ain't comin' from me-no Iranian ever hurt me) to strengthen support for his leadership. And really, when someone is backed into a corner, is it surprising that their people will stick to their side?.
  
  Still an' all, what has Ahmadinejad done to America yet? They tried to reach an agreement with us in 2003 in order to avoid conflict in the Middle East. Ahmadinejad has claimed that Iran is conducting nuclear development in order to increase their industrial capacity which is well within their rights. They are adhering to IAEA guidelines on the development of nuclear power. So really, there is no problem except Bush being pestered by his right wing and some of the religious fanatics in his group to hit Iran. That's it.

UPDATE: added spaces between links to three music videos.