During his two terms as president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin managed to cut the country’s economy almost in half. He invaded Chechnya, leading to the worst human rights abuses in the brief post-Soviet history; he dissolved the Russian parliament — in fact he attacked it with tanks — and he allowed friends and associates . . . → Read More: I’d raise a glass to Yeltsin if he’d left anything to drink
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I’m not sure where MAF ranks in the right-wing crazies pecking order but if the email is any indication, they’re making serious headway on the insanity axis if not the influence one. Melanie says that thanks to our habit of burning US troops in effigy and our determination to surrender to the forces of Islamic terrorism, we have so alienated moderate lefties that they’re throwing money at her organization — so much money that MAF was able to produce this acclaimed YouTube video (“At YouTube the patriotic Move America Forward television ad that takes the anti-war crowd (including Cindy Sheehan and Martin Sheen) to task has become a hit – earning a 4.5 star rating out of 5 stars!”) Continue reading Move America Forward, one zany email at a time We mentioned on January 16 that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes is slated to receive the First Amendment Leadership Award from the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF). On March 8, Ailes will join past recipients such as Katherine Graham, the Washington Post publisher who presided over the paper’s Watergate reporting; First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, who helped defend the New York Times when the Nixon administration attempted to quash the publication of the Pentagon Papers; Ted Turner, who founded CNN and brought a new world of extended news coverage to the country; and Don Hewitt, who originated 60 Minutes, the first and for many years the finest major network investigative news magazine. The RTNDF press release announcing the award said Ailes earned it by bringing his right-wing Continue reading As Fox smears Obama, Ailes receives First Amendment award Much attention was paid yesterday to the introduction of Bush capo Karl Rove as the villain behind Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s legal predicament. A Google News search for the names of the two men returned some 1500 results (and counting). But don’t be fooled: Libby v. Rove is a sideshow aimed at diverting the jury’s attention from the central question in the case: whether or not Libby deliberately lied to investigators and the grand jury about his role in outing former covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson as the president and vice president scrambled to defend themselves against allegations from her husband that the White House knowingly misled the country about the strength of their case against Saddam Hussein prior to the invasion of Iraq. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald made clear that he intends to show that Libby learned Wilson’s name and occupation from his boss, Dick Cheney. The reason Fitzgerald regards the Libby-Cheney connection as central is that Libby’s defense relies on the claim that Libby was too busy to recall conversations he had about Plame with the reporters and at least one former White House official — the now immunized Ari Fleischer — who will testify during the trial. Fitzgerald hopes to show that Libby was unlikely to forget those conversations because they took place over the space of a few days at the behest of the vice president. The last time former Nixon defense secretary Melvin Laird popped up in the pages of the Washington Post, it was to chide the retired generals who were unloading on Donald Rumsfeld. They didn’t have the big picture, he said, and anyway they had plenty of opportunities to speak up within the chain of command when they were on active duty. Only history could grade Rumsfeld’s performance, and meanwhile the generals were confusing the public, dispiriting their former colleagues and emboldening the enemy. That was in April of 2006; history has since arrived, no doubt much sooner than Laird anticipated, and enthusiastically endorsed the low marks awarded Rumsfeld by the generals. But Laird, like most people afforded regular access to the nation’s premier opinion pages, is not one to let past stupidities discourage him from future ones. Accordingly, he’s back in the Post, this time to chide congressional Democrats for not rescuing president Bush. “Democrats are positioned to offer a plan for Iraq,” he says, “but cutting off funding is not a plan. Holding hearings to excoriate the executive branch is not a plan. Emotional oratory about casualties is not a plan. Such is the stuff of dinner-party debates and protest rallies.” He’s right, of course. Cutting off funding isn’t a plan; it’s a tactic in service of a plan to get us out of this mess with the least awful consequences. Hearings aren’t a plan either; they’re a vehicle for illuminating the administration’s cluelessness and perfidy. Neither is oratory a plan; it’s a tool for further isolating the administration and bringing additional pressure to bear on them. Laird is either compulsively dishonest in his characterization of the current dynamic or delusional about it, or both. He’s at pains to point out that he spent 16 years in Congress and four with Nixon, so it’s even money which, but the evidence points toward the last. Continue reading In which Melvin Laird doesn’t even try to make sense The National Review is lauding Democratic (sic) Senator Joe Lieberman for warning against “excessive partisanship and rancor” in response to president Bush’s escalation of the Iraq war. Kathryn Lopez posted Lieberman’s enthused endorsement of Bush’s new policy in its entirety, with a note of thanks to Connecticut voters for sending the Senator back to Washington. No doubt Lieberman is referring to the harsh words coming from his colleagues across the aisle, including Republican senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who told Condoleezza Rice today that escalating the conflict represents “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it’s carried out;” Gordon Smith of Oregon, who calls the president’s policy absurd and possibly criminal; Sam Brownback of Kansas, who wants to partition Iraq and says the US “should not increase its involvement” until Sunnis and Shiites stop shooting at each other; Susan Collins of Maine, who says “I don’t think more troops is the answer to the violence;” and Ohio’s George Voinovich, who says “I’ve bought into [Bush's] dream and at this stage of the game I just don’t think its going to happen.” Continue reading Lieberman blasts Senator Chuck Hagel as rancorous, partisan
It’s hard to choose exactly the right television reference for the administration’s New Way Forward — a very Soviet-sounding designation — in Iraq. I was torn between The Outer Limits, on the strength of its opening narration and close tracking of the administration’s history, and WKRP in Cincinnati, on the strength of one of the most memorable lines in television history: “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.” The White House circulated a fact sheet prior to the president’s speech tonight, along with a link to highlights of the administration’s answer to the Iraq Study Group, the Iraq Strategy Review (Acrobat document). It’s the latter that reminds me of the WKRP Thanksgiving episode, “Turkeys Away,” that culminates in Gordon Jump’s shell-shocked pronouncement, mostly because of one slide — this is a PowerPoint presentation — featuring “Key Assumptions” broken down into two categories: “Previous” and “Now.” The difference between Gordon Jump’s character and president Bush, aside from the millions of lives the latter has squandered and wrecked, is that Bush continues to think that one of those turkeys really will fly if he just keeps heaving them out of the helicopter. Imagine if you will a portrait of George W. Bush wearing a bibulous nose, an Alfred E. Neuman expression and a helmet made of Jack Kemp’s epoxied hair. And then imagine it captioned with the memorable phrase, “The Colossus of Crawford.” If you can’t, which is perfectly normal, not to worry: the original is here, attached to a Pajamas Media item entitled “2006: A World Awash in Fear and Fascism.” The column describes how Bush bestrode the 2006 world stage like, well, a colossus. It also names him the country’s “first ‘Quasi-Freeranger’ President,” which is meant to indicate that the president is stapled to neither major political party (!) but, for those not familiar with the Pajamas Media lexicon, might instead conjure visions of a genetically modified turkey deceptively sold under an organic label. It will now, anyway. The “Colossus of Crawford” reminded me of the Illuminatus! Trilogy, which among other things that seemed absurd at the time (mid-1970s) featured a money laundering operation called the Colossus of Yorba Linda Society (COYLS), which was ostensibly raising funds to build an Abu Simbel-sized monument to Yorba Linda’s favorite son, Richard Nixon, but was instead funneling the money to a shadowy, centuries-old conspiracy of demented pranksters. Continue reading The Colossus of Yorba Linda versus The Colossus of Crawford The circus execution of Saddam Hussein has managed to resurrect a man who had become irrelevant to the daily lives of Iraqis. The timing of the event and the atmosphere of it suggest that it was intended by Iraqi prime minister Maliki as a straightforward propitiatory human sacrifice to the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, whose famous uncle and other close relatives were murdered at Saddam’s behest. In that it apparently succeeded; otherwise, it managed to make a mass-murdering despot look like a fallen statesman. The predetermination of Saddam’s supporters, genuine and of convenience, to cast him as a martyr has been made much simpler now. The Financial Times, whose correspondents and editorial board are often baffled by events in Iraq since the occupation, says that the execution “may allow Mr Maliki a window of political opportunity” because it provides “evidence that his former ruling Ba’ath party, which has a strong role in the insurgency, can no longer dictate events.” Continue reading How to make Saddam look good in one easy lesson |
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Earlier this week I received an email thanking me for my part in helping to discredit the anti-war movement. It was from the woman pictured at left: Melting Melanie Morgan, the chairman of Move America Forward. 
“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission … sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. “
Housekeeping Notes
Through a combination of ill health, low spirits and technical befuddlement (all on the part of the proprietor — our other contributors are not to blame), BTC News has been variously moribund or inaccessible for much of the past two months. We’ve trashed the previous design, which was probably the source of the mechanical . . . → Read More: Housekeeping Notes