Congressman: Gas At $9 a Gallon if US Leaves Iraq

As reported here: I suspect that if gas were indeed $9 a gallon, people would walk more, carpool more, and utilize mass transportation options more often for their travels. Bicycle sales would probably skyrocket as well.

Radio Host Adam Corolla Hangs Up on Ann Coulter

Republican Party Headed Towards Electoral Carnage in 2008

That was pretty clear before the Craig scandal erupted onto the scene earlier this week, but as this article indicates, it is becoming more and more likely that Republicans will suffer huge losses in the 2008 elections. Rove and company pretty much shot their load in 2004 to get W re-elected, mistaking their bitter, divisive, razor thin victory for a broad mandate, trying to govern from the right, and have gotten smacked in the chin by voters since. Add to the mix the intractable quagmire that Iraq has become--and which the Republicans under Bush own as their own, plus these incredibly embarrassing scandals (Craig, Vitter, Abramoff, Foley, Stevens) coming from the party of 'family values' and you've got a toxic brew of electoral catastrophe that Republicans will be forced to choke down in November 2008.

exit strategy

Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) Chastises Bill Clinton

Case Study Example 1A on Why Republicans got land slided in 2006 and may very well be obliterated from the electoral map in 2008:

Romney Tosses Craig Under Bus--Quickly

Prior to yesterday, Craig was one of Romney's major supporters in Washington. As The Politico reports, that's all changed. I guess he didn't know him very well, after all.

Senator Craig: Another Bible-Thumping, Family Values Hypocrite Republican Exposed

Senator Craig immediately joins the ever growing list of other Republican family-values hypocrite stalwarts that includes among others Rush Limbaugh, William Bennett, David Vitter, and of course Mark Foley. Apparently the incident in June where he was caught soliciting gay sex in a Minnesota airport's bathroom was not an isolated one, either, as this blog reports. Craig is up for re-election in Idaho in 2008, and his seat was considered a safe one for Republicans. He will probably resign very soon, but the seat is anything but 'safe' for Republicans anymore. It's hard to overestimate the extent of the electoral devastation that is looming out there for the Republicans in 2008.

Owen Wilson Tries to Kill Himself

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Miss Teen USA South Carolina 2007 with Subtitles

Let's remember, this is a country that re-elected George Bush in 2004...

$20K 'Quick Shippers' Swelling Army Ranks

This article reports on how a desperate US Army has basically begun resorting to out and out bribery to get fresh recruits to join their ranks for the hapless Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns.

Mike Huckabee, Perfect Stranger

Before the end of the nominating process on the Republican side, Mike Huckabee will be heard from. He has nearly impeccable Republican social conservative credentials and was a widely acclaimed successful governor of Arkansas. Time magazine explores his campaign to date in this story.

Rove, Rest of GOP Praying for Hillary Victory

Amazing as it may seem, the Republicans could very well hold on to the White House in 2008 if the Democrats nominate someone as polarizing as Hillary Clinton...

Heroin Business Booming in Afghanistan

It's almost as if Afghanistan is the 'forgotten' war in comparison to Iraq, but make no mistake about it, it is just as much--if not even more, of a catastrophic failure. Since the American led invasion and occupation, heroin production has skyrocketed--as this New York Times article illustrates. It is only a matter of time before American forces withdraw from the country, and it's becoming increasingly clear that, as with Iraq, the country will be left in much worse shape than before US troops came. Missions accomplished indeed.

Fox News' Hannity Defends Ted Nugent

Broder on Possible Bloomberg/Hagel Ticket

If they did this, money certainly wouldn't be an issue. The question is whether people truly are fed up with only two choices come election time. Voters invariably say this election after election yet vote overwhelmingly for either a Republican or a Democrat. Bloomberg's cash and smarts and Hagel's bipartisan appeal could finally provide the electorate with a credible alternative.

Swift Boated by Bin Laden

Tom Friedman, New York Times, August 26,2007

Doha, Qatar

One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush team’s war effort in Iraq and against Al Qaeda is this: How could an administration that was so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroad?

How could the Bush team Swift-boat John Kerry and Max Cleland — authentic Vietnam war heroes, whom the White House turned into surrendering pacifists in the war on terror — but never manage to Swift-boat Osama bin Laden, a genocidal monster, who today is still regarded in many quarters as the vanguard of anti-American “resistance.”

Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today, or even in Europe and Africa, and it won’t take 30 seconds before the words “Abu Ghraib” and “Guantánamo Bay” are thrown at you. Yes, both are shameful, but Abu Ghraib was a day at the beach compared to what Al Qaeda and its Sunni jihadist supporters have been doing in Iraq, yet none of their acts have become one-punch global insults like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

Consider what happened on Aug. 14. Four jihadist suicide-bombers blew themselves up in two Iraqi villages, killing more than 500 Kurdish civilians — men, women and babies — who belonged to a tiny pre-Islamic sect known as the Yazidis.

And what was the Bush team’s response to this outrage? Virtual silence. After much Googling, the best I could find was: “ ‘We’re looking at Al Qaeda as the prime suspect,’ said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman.” Wow.

Excuse me, but what exactly are we fighting for in Iraq, or in this wider war against Islamist extremism, if the murder of 500 civilians can be shrugged off? Even if we don’t know the exact perpetrators, we know who is inspiring this sort of genocide — Al Qaeda and bin Laden — and we need to say that every day.

Ask yourself this: If Osama bin Laden were running against George Bush for president, how would Karl Rove and Karen Hughes have handled the Yazidi murders? Within an hour, they’d have had a press release out saying: “This genocide of Iraqi civilians was inspired by bin Laden. We accuse bin Laden of the mass murder of 500 women and children. Bin Laden has killed more Iraqis and Muslims than any person alive. Support bin Laden and you support genocide against Muslims.” And they would have repeated that point on every network, every day.

Why should we care? Because bin Laden and his sidekick Ayman al-Zawahiri care! Read their statements. They care about their image. They do not want to be labeled as “genocide perpetrators.” They want to be known as the “resistance,” because it affects their street appeal and therefore their ability to recruit and operate.

Sure, some Sunni tribes in Iraq, who are directly threatened by Al Qaeda, have turned against it, but in the wider Arab-Muslim world bin Laden has out-maneuvered Mr. Bush. The man who Swift-boated John Kerry and Max Cleland has been Swift-boated by bin Laden. Mr. Bush is losing a P.R. war to a mass murderer. Yes, it is not easy breaking through the innate, anti-American tilt of the Arab media, but we have barely tried.

I spent Friday hanging around the newsroom of Al Jazeera here in Doha, on the Persian Gulf. I asked Arab reporters here what would be the results of a popularity poll in the region between Mr. Bush and bin Laden. Mr. Bush wouldn’t stand a chance, they said. One big difference between them, though, added one journalist, “is that Bush’s term is about to come to an end and bin Laden is staying in office.” An Egyptian analyst here added that liberals in the Arab world who supported the U.S. democratization effort in Iraq are now dismissed in the Arabic press as “intellectual marines.” U.S. marine is now a term of insult.

Bin Laden has created a situation in which the U.S. occupation in Iraq is viewed as entirely “illegitimate” and therefore any violence there by Sunni jihadists against Americans or Iraqi civilians is considered entirely legitimate “resistance.”

As The Economist magazine just noted, “This is profoundly mistaken.” Yes, military attacks against foreign soldiers who have come uninvited into your country can be called “resistance.” “But the mass murder of Iraqi civilians can make no such dignified claim. Under all established norms and laws of war (and by most accounts under Islamic law, too), the deliberate targeting of civilians for no direct military purposes is just a crime.”

So why don’t we say that? If you can’t win a P.R. war against bin Laden, you have no business fighting a real war anymore in Iraq.

Ted Nugent Goes Bonkers Onstage--Threatens Hillary, Obama, Senators with Machine Guns

Bush's Vietnam Blunder, and The Importance of the 22nd Amendment

Jim Hoagland from the Washington Post reports on the lunacy of Bush's speech earlier this week comparing Vietnam--a war he actively avoiding serving in while it was raging, to Iraq. The George W. Bush presidency has highlighted the brilliance, sheer necessity, and absolute importance of the 22nd Amendment to the American Constitution, which limits the term of any president to 8 years or two terms. The Bush presidency has been an awful one of historic proportions: he has proven himself to be incompetent, insolent, stubborn, and clearly unworthy of and unqualified for the position. He was elected under extremely dubious circumstances in 2000--indeed one might argue it was a fluke of history--then shockingly reelected in 2004. If it weren't for this law, unfathomable as it might seem, he could theoretically run and win again in 2008.

Did Pete Doherty Give his Cat Cocaine?

Needless to say, the mice in Pete's place didn't stand a chance...

Abortion Issue Dogging Romney

As reported here, talk about flip flopping! Somewhere, John Kerry is smiling.

Pigeon Shit Could Be Cause of Minnesota Bridge Collapse

If you had given me a thousand guesses for why that bridge collapsed, this wouldn't have been one of them.

Fox News' Drumbeat for War with Iran

Neocon Nutball Bolton Hopes US Attacks Iran

Story, video here:

90 Year old Indian Man has 21st Child

Mr Jogi, who attributes his remarkable virility to daily walks and plenty of meat, said: "I eat all kinds of meat - rabbits, lamb, chicken and wild animals."

article here

Are Kate and Pete Back Together?

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Karl Rove's Three Dimensional Chess

Just what is Karl Rove up to these days, calling Hillary the 'prohibitive favorite' to be the nominee as if the Democratic nomination was already over? The Politico examines.

Bush to Compare Iraq to Vietnam

The rationale for the Iraq invasion has now come to this: to prevent genocide among the Iraqi people, American soldiers must 'stay the course'. It's ironic Bush would compare his war to Vietnam, a war he actively avoided participating in. Perhaps if he had done so, or if Dick Cheney had served in Vietnam (he received 5 deferments) they would not have so recklessly and thoughtlessly launched this train wreck of a war.

Woman Takes Heat for Family Question to Giuliani

Call me crazy, but if a candidate's own son and daughter aren't supporting them for president, that's awfully weird and raises serious red flags. That's why is surprising, shocking really, that when a woman questioned Rudy Giuliani on this very fact and he exploded and basically told her to shut up and mind her own business, the questioner--not Giuliani took heat from the press over it.

Huckabee Raps Romney

As reported in today's The Politico, the Huckabee campaign and its populist message has decided to try and engage Mitt Romney by painting him as nothing more than a pampered, out of touch political scion of a wealthy, established Republican family. If you read between the lines, who does that remind you of? I'll give you a hint, the guy's initials are GWB. This is very deft politics by the Huckabee team: they are a minnow swimming among whales like Romney and Giuliani with regards to the money they have to spend on the campaign, and therefore have to rely more on their candidate's appealing background and personality to gain ground. Comparing Romney ever so subtly to George W. Bush just might strike a chord among Republican primary voters who are increasingly despondent over the president's dismal performance and popularity numbers.

Rush Limbaugh's Fixation with John Edwards Speaks Volumes

John Edwards is the declared candidate on the Democratic side that right wing Republicans like Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove fear most. We know that Limbaugh and Rove communicate frequently, and it is certainly no coincidence that Edwards, although trailing Hillary and Obama badly both in the polls and in fundraising, is the focus of nearly daily venom by Limbaugh on his radio show and website. It's all about electability in the general election: Edwards would throttle the Republican nominee in this environment, whereas Hillary and Obama could easily lose. The right wing smear machine is pumping up Hillary these days and focusing their artilary on Edwards. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see why.

Hillary: Karl Rove is Obsessed With Me

Rove's final act of political genius: helping get Hillary nominated.....

Bears Eat Serbian Man at Beer Festival

Not to be snide, but someone clearly should have cut this dude off a bit earlier on....

Jon Stewart on Karl Rove's Departure

Is Wills Getting Ready to Pop the Question?

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Stoned Dog Leads to Weed Bust

Suffice to say this particular marijuana grower was not also a Rhodes Scholar....

Bad News for Mike Huckabee: Rush Limbaugh Doesn't Like Him

Rush Limbaugh is far and away the most important and influential person to the far-right Republican base. Therefore it is of critical importance that he seems to not approve of the Republican du jour, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, hot off of his unexpected second place finish in this weekend's Iowa straw poll. Rush goes as far as comparing Huckabee to John McCain, the political equivalent to a right wing voter of calling him a sack of shit. The question begs to be asked, why? My hunch is that at the highest eschelon of the Republican party--people like Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, Matt Drudge, etc. have decided that Mitt Romney and his $250 million fortune give them the best chance to retain the White House in 2008 and are closing ranks behind him. Rudy Giuliani and his pro-choice, anti-gun, pro gay rights positions stands no real chance of being the Republican nominee.

Fox News Attacks John Edwards

Cheney in 1994: Invasion of Iraq would Lead to "Quagmire"

Exit Karl Rove

It was getting a bit hot in the kitchen, apparently, for Bush's notorious 'brain' Karl Rove, who announced he will be leaving the White House soon. With his boss floundering at record low poll numbers, and the attorney general firings scandal creeping closer and closer to him, Rove decided to finally fold his hand. He will be remembered as an incredibly ruthless, yet effective, political propagandist--a man unafraid to use the dirtiest, most underhanded smear tactics to bring down an opponent. From circulating rumors that Ann Richards was a lesbian in the 1994 Texas gubenatorial race, to circulating rumors that John McCain was insane and had fathered an illigitemate black child in the 1999 South Carolina primary, to most recently the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry, Rove incorporated a brand of cut throat politics this nation has rarely seen before. Regarding his involvement with George W. Bush, yes, Rove did get him elected twice--the second time in 2004 the political equivalent of Rove pulling a rabbit out of his ass, it was that incredible of a feat. But at what long term cost? Today it appears that Rove's game is up. The Republican party today is a sad, almost pathetic lot, having just gotten routed in the 2006 elections and poised for another cataclysmic defeat again 2008. Rove got his man elected twice, but it appears now that the American public have thoroughly rejected his type of truth-bending, divisive politics. His enemy, the Democratic Party, is the long term benefactor.

Did Paris Hilton Get a Boob Job?

Pictures, story here:

Shuffling Off to Crawford, 2007 Edition

FRANK RICH, THE NEW YORK TIMES, AUGUST 11, 2007

The cases of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch were ugly enough. So surely someone in the White House might have the good taste to draw the line at exploiting the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. But nothing is out of bounds for a government that puts the darkest arts of politics and public relations above even the exigencies of war.

As Jane Mayer told the story in last week’s New Yorker, Mariane Pearl was called by Alberto Gonzales with some good news in March: the Justice Department was releasing a transcript in which the long-incarcerated Qaeda thug Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to the beheading of her husband. But there was something off about Mr. Gonzales’s news. It was almost four years old.

Condoleezza Rice had called Ms. Pearl to tell her in confidence about the very same confession back in 2003; it was also reported that year in The Journal and elsewhere. What’s more, the confession was suspect; another terrorist had been convicted in the Pearl case in Pakistan in 2002. There is no known corroborating evidence that Mohammed, the 9/11 ringleader who has taken credit for many horrific crimes while in American custody, was responsible for this particular murder. None of his claims, particularly those possibly coerced by torture, can be taken as gospel solely on our truth-challenged attorney general’s say-so.

Ms. Pearl recognized a publicity ploy when she saw it. And this one wasn’t subtle. Mr. Gonzales released the Mohammed transcript just as the latest Justice Department scandal was catching fire, with newly disclosed e-mail exchanges revealing the extent of White House collaboration in the United States attorney firings. Had the attorney general succeeded in enlisting Daniel Pearl’s widow as a player in his stunt, it might have diverted attention from a fracas then engulfing President Bush on his Latin American tour.

Though he failed this time, Mr. Gonzales’s P.R. manipulation of the war on terror hasn’t always been so fruitless. To upstage increasingly contentious Congressional restlessness about Iraq in 2006, he put on a widely viewed show to announce an alleged plot by men in Miami to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and conduct a “full ground war.” He said at the time the men “swore allegiance to Al Qaeda” but, funnily enough, last week this case was conspicuously missing from a long new White House “fact sheet” listing all the terrorist plots it had foiled.

The Gonzales antics are, of course, in the tradition of an administration with a genius for stirring up terror nightmares at politically opportune times, like just before the Democratic convention in 2004. The Sears Tower scenario came right out of the playbook of his predecessor, John Ashcroft. In 2002, Mr. Ashcroft waited a full month to announce the Chicago arrest of the “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla — suddenly commandeering TV cameras in the middle of a trip to Moscow so that this tardy “news” could drown out the damning pre-9/11 revelations from the F.B.I. whistleblower Coleen Rowley. Since then, the dirty bomb in the Padilla case has evaporated much like Mr. Gonzales’s Sears Tower extravaganza.

Now that the administration is winding down and the Qaeda threat is at its scariest since 2001, one might hope that such stunts would cease. Indeed, two of the White House’s most accomplished artificial-reality Imagineers both left their jobs last month: Scott Sforza, the former ABC News producer who polished up the “Mission Accomplished” spectacle, and Peter Feaver, the academic specialist in wartime public opinion who helped conceive the 35-page National Security Council document that Mr. Bush unveiled as his Iraq “Plan for Victory” in November 2005.

Mr. Feaver’s document used the word victory six times in its table of contents alone, and was introduced by a speech at the Naval Academy in which Mr. Bush invoked “victory” 15 times while standing on a set bedecked with “Plan for Victory” signage. Alas, it turned out that victory could not be achieved merely by Orwellian incantation, so the plan was scrapped only 13 months later for the “surge.” But while Mr. Feaver and his doomed effort to substitute propaganda for action may now be gone, the White House’s public relations strategies for the war, far from waning, are again gathering steam, to America’s peril.

This came into sharp focus last weekend, when our military disclosed, very quietly and with a suspicious lack of accompanying White House fanfare, that it had killed a major terror culprit in Iraq, Haythem Sabah al-Badri. Never heard of him? Usually this administration oversells every death of a terrorist leader. It underplayed Badri’s demise for a reason. The fine print would further expose the fictional new story line that has been concocted to rebrand and resell the Iraq war as a battle against Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda — or, as Mr. Bush now puts it, “the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th.”

To understand how, revisit the president’s trial run of this new narrative, when he announced the surge in January. Mr. Bush had to explain why his previous “Plan for Victory” had gone belly up so quickly, so he came up with a new premise that absolved him of blame. In his prime-time speech, the president implied that all had been on track in Iraq after the country’s December 2005 elections until Feb. 22, 2006, when one of the holiest Shiite shrines, the gold-domed mosque in Samarra, was blown up. In this revisionist history, that single terrorist act set off the outbreak of sectarian violence in Iraq now requiring the surge.

This narrative was false. Shiite death squads had been attacking Sunnis for more than a year before the Samarra bombing. The mosque attack was not a turning point. It was merely a confirmation of the Iraqi civil war that Mr. Bush refuses to acknowledge because American voters don’t want their troops in the middle of one.

But that wasn’t the only new plot point that the president advanced in his surge speech. With no proof, Mr. Bush directly attributed the newly all-important Samarra bombing to “Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents,” cementing a rhetorical sleight of hand he had started sketching out during the midterm election season.

In fact, no one has taken credit for the mosque bombing to this day. But Iraqi government officials fingered Badri as the culprit. (Some local officials told The Washington Post after the bombing that Iraqi security forces were themselves responsible.) Since Badri is a leader of a tiny insurgent cell reportedly affiliated with what the president calls “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Bush had the last synthetic piece he needed to complete his newest work of fiction: 1) All was hunky-dory with his plan for victory until the mosque was bombed. 2) “Al Qaeda in Iraq” bombed the mosque. 3) Ipso facto, America must escalate the war to defeat “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” those “very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th.”

As a growing chorus of critics reiterates, “Al Qaeda in Iraq” is not those very same folks. It did not exist on 9/11 but was a product of the Iraq war and accounts for only a small fraction of the Sunni insurgency. It is not to be confused with the resurgent bin Laden network we’ve been warned about in the latest National Intelligence Estimate. But this factual issue hasn’t deterred Mr. Bush. He has merely stepped up his bogus conflation of the two Qaedas by emphasizing all the “foreign leaders” of “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” because that might allow him to imply they are bin Laden emissaries. In a speech in Charleston, S.C., on July 24, he listed a Syrian, an Egyptian, a Tunisian, a Saudi and a Turk.

Against the backdrop of this stepped-up propaganda blitz, Badri’s death nine days later was an inconvenient reminder of the hole in the official White House narrative. Mr. Bush couldn’t do his usual victory jig over Badri’s demise because there’s no way to pass off Badri as a link to bin Laden. He was born in Samarra and was a member of Saddam’s Special Republican Guard.

If Badri was responsible for the mosque bombing that has caused all our woes in Iraq and forced us to stay there, then the president’s story line falls apart. Far from having any connection to bin Laden’s Qaeda, the Samarra bombing was instead another manifestation of the Iraqi civil war that Mr. Bush denies. No wonder the same White House “fact sheet” that left out Mr. Gonzales’s foiled Sears Tower plot and, for that matter, Jose Padilla, also omitted Badri’s name from its list of captured and killed “Senior Al Qaeda Leaders.” Surely it was a coincidence that this latest statement of official Bush administration amnesia was released on Aug. 6, the sixth anniversary of the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

And so the president, firm in his resolve against “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” heads toward another August break in Crawford while Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan remains determined to strike in America. No one can doubt Mr. Bush’s triumph in the P.R. war: There are more American troops than ever mired in Iraq, sent there by a fresh round of White House fictions. And the real war? The enemy that did attack us six years ago, sad to say, is likely to persist in its nasty habit of operating in the reality-based world that our president disdains.

War Czar Lute: Involuntary Draft a Possibility

For those of you keeping score at home, statements like this out of the Bush administration provide the surest signal yet that the US will be out of Iraq pretty soon. Vietnam and its draft literally ripped apart American society, with scores of the military aged 'haves', like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, etc. using their family influence and money to escape enlistment under the involuntary draft, while those men without connections served, and often returned home either injured or in a body bag. Fast forward 40 years, and the American public clearly has little if no appetite whatsoever for the draft. Bush not only asked for 0 war time sacrifice initially from the American people before launching these wars, he was the first president in history to actually give a tax cut--mainly to the extremely wealthy, before going to war. The very fact that the American military is stretched to it's near breaking point, that there is no solution at all in sight to the quagmire that is Iraq, and that now the involuntary draft is being introduced into the discussion to replenish the military's numbers is extraordinary. Extraordinarily bad if you're a Republican elected official.

Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.

The New York Times with a piece on the father/son relationship between the two Georges.

Gore Doesn't Rule Out a Return to Politics

James Carville says that running like President is like having sex: no one can do it just one time. Here Al Gore hints yet again that he is not through with politics.

Cheney War Clouds Gathering Over Iran

Only Dick Cheney and perhaps the feeble, impressionable little mind of George W. Bush could think that launching another war this time with Iran would be in the best interests of the United States. But as this article suggests, this almost unfathomable scenario could very well be unfolding before our very eyes.

Obama Spars with Other Candidates in Democratic Debate

"I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me."--Barack Obama in Chicago Democratic debate last night

Story Here

Bloomberg Continues to Make Important Political Friends

As this story reports, Bloomberg is very seriously considering a third party run in 2008, busy scouting for independent leaning big name former elected officials to serve as his potential VP choice. Sam Nunn is a very highly regarded--especially on military matters, former Democratic senator from Georgia.

Rudy MikeRomney? Huckabee Scores in Iowa Debate

For the past six months or so the mainstream media have been pounding to us the notion of the Republican race for the presidency coming down to "Rudy McRomney", meaning the prize will eventually go to one of the three 'top tier' candidates of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.

Although that's changed a bit with the emergence of non-candidate extraordinaire Fred Thompson, after Iowa's debate on Sunday another candidate appears poised to replace the floundering John McCain, and that's former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who had yet another very strong debate performance as this The Politico article reports.

Huckabee was a successful governor from a southern state (Arkansas) who has rock solid conservative credentials: normally a winning combination for presidential candidates. He has struggled to gain any attention or publicity from a national media that has been thus far transfixed on Giuliani, Romney, McCain (mostly because of his campaign's spectacular implosion), and Hollywood Fred Thompson.

However as we learned with Howard Dean last time around, it will be the people--the voters who will ultimately decide who wins in Iowa and the rest of the country, not the media as much as Hillary, Rudy, and Barack would like it to be otherwise. That bodes well for a candidate like Mike Huckabee, a person who is eminently qualified and is just starting to get noticed. So has "Rudy McRomney" now become "Rudy MikeRomney"? Let's let the people decide.

FRANK RICH: Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death

The New York Times, August 5, 2007

GERALD FORD spoke the truth when he called Watergate “our long national nightmare,” but even a nightmare can have its interludes of rib-splitting farce.

None were zanier than the antics of Baruch Korff, a small-town New England rabbi who became a full-time Richard Nixon sycophant as the walls closed in. Korff was ubiquitous in the press and on television, where he would lambaste Democrats and the media “lynch mob” for vilifying “the greatest president of the century.” Despite Nixon’s reflexive anti-Semitism, he returned the favor by granting the rabbi audiences and an interview that allowed the embattled president to soliloquize about how his own faith and serenity reinforced his conviction “deep inside” that everything he did was right.

Clearly we’ve reached our own Korffian moment in our latest long national nightmare. The Nixon interviewed by the rabbi sounded uncannily like the resolute leader chronicled by the conservative columnists and talk-show jocks President Bush has lately welcomed into his bunker. For his part, William Kristol even published a Korffian manifesto, “Why Bush Will Be a Winner,” in The Washington Post. It reassured us that the Bush presidency would “probably be a successful one” and that “we now seem to be on course to a successful outcome” in Iraq. A Bush flack let it be known that the president liked this piece so much that he recommended it to his White House staff.

Are you laughing yet? Maybe not. No one died in Watergate. This time around, the White House lying and cover-ups have been not just in the service of political thuggery but to gin up a gratuitous war without end.

There is another significant difference as well. Washington never drank the Nixon Kool-Aid. It kept a skeptical bipartisan eye on Tricky Dick throughout his political career, long before the Watergate complex had even been built. The charmed Mr. Bush, by contrast, got a free pass; both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and both liberals and conservatives in the news media were credulous enablers of the Iraq fiasco. Now a reckoning awaits, and the denouement is getting ugly.

The ranks of unreconstructed Iraq hawks are thinner than they used to be. Some politicians in both parties (John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Gordon Smith) and truculent pundits (Peter Beinart, Andrew Sullivan) who cheered on the war recanted (sooner in some cases than others), learned from their errors and moved on. One particularly eloquent mea culpa can be found in today’s New York Times Magazine, where the former war supporter Michael Ignatieff acknowledges that those who “truly showed good judgment on Iraq” might have had no more information than those who got it wrong, but did not make the mistake of confusing “wishes for reality.”

But those who remain dug in are having none of that. Some of them are busily lashing out Korff-style. Some are melting down. Some are rewriting history. Most seem more interested in saving their own reputations than the American troops they ritualistically invoke to bludgeon the wars’ critics and to parade their own self-congratulatory patriotism.

It was a rewriting of history that made the blogosphere (and others) go berserk last week over an Op-Ed article in The Times, “A War We Just Might Win,” by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. The two Brookings Institution scholars, after a government-guided tour, pointed selectively to successes on the ground in Iraq in arguing that the surge should be continued “at least into 2008.”

The hole in their argument was gaping. As Adm. Michael Mullen, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said honorably and bluntly in his Congressional confirmation hearings, “No amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference” in Iraq if there’s no functioning Iraqi government. Opting for wishes over reality, Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack buried their pro forma acknowledgment of that huge hurdle near the end of their piece.

But even more galling was the authors’ effort to elevate their credibility by describing themselves as “analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” That’s disingenuous. For all their late-in-the-game criticisms of the administration’s incompetence, Mr. Pollack proselytized vociferously for the war before it started, including in an appearance with Oprah, and both men have helped prolong the quagmire with mistakenly optimistic sightings of progress since the days of “Mission Accomplished.”

You can find a compendium of their past wisdom in Glenn Greenwald’s Salon column. That think-tank pundits with this track record would try to pass themselves off as harsh war critics in 2007 shows how desperate they are to preserve their status as Beltway “experts” now that the political winds have shifted. Such blatant careerism would be less offensive if they didn’t do so on the backs of the additional American troops they ask to be sacrificed to the doomed mission of providing security for an Iraqi government that is both on vacation and on the verge of collapse.

At least the more rabid and Korff-like of the war’s last defenders have the intellectual honesty not to deny what they’ve been saying all along. But their invective has gone over the top, with even mild recent critics of the war like John Warner and Richard Lugar being branded defeatist “pre- 9/11 Republicans” by Mr. Kristol.

It’s also the tic of Mr. Kristol’s magazine, The Weekly Standard (and its Murdoch sibling The New York Post), to claim that the war’s critics hate the troops. When The New Republic ran a less-than-jingoistic essay by a pseudonymous American soldier in Iraq, The Weekly Standard even accused it of fabrication — only to have its bluff called when the author’s identity was revealed and his controversial anecdotes were verified by other sources.

A similar over-the-top tirade erupted on “Meet the Press” last month, when another war defender in meltdown, Senator Lindsey Graham, repeatedly cut off his fellow guest by saying that soldiers he met on official Congressional visits to Iraq endorsed his own enthusiasm for the surge. Unfortunately for Mr. Graham, his sparring partner was Jim Webb, the take-no-prisoners Virginia Democrat who is a Vietnam veteran and the father of a soldier serving in the war. Senator Webb reduced Mr. Graham to a stammering heap of Jell-O when he chastised him for trying to put his political views “into the mouths of soldiers.” As Mr. Webb noted, the last New York Times-CBS News poll on the subject found that most members of the military and their immediate families have turned against the war, like other Americans.

As is becoming clearer than ever in this Korffian endgame, hiding behind the troops is the last refuge of this war’s sponsors. This too is a rewrite of history. It has been the war’s champions who have more often dishonored the troops than the war’s opponents.

Mr. Bush created the template by doing everything possible to keep the sacrifice of American armed forces in Iraq off-camera, forbidding photos of coffins and skipping military funerals. That set the stage for the ensuing demonization of Ted Koppel, whose decision to salute the fallen by reading a list of their names in the spotlight of “Nightline” was branded unpatriotic by the right’s vigilantes.

The same playbook was followed by the war’s champions when a soldier confronted Donald Rumsfeld about the woeful shortage of armor during a town-hall meeting in Kuwait in December 2004. Rather than campaign for the armor the troops so desperately needed, the right attacked the questioner for what Rush Limbaugh called his “near insubordination.” When The Washington Post some two years later exposed the indignities visited upon the grievously injured troops at Walter Reed Medical Center, The Weekly Standard and the equally hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial page took three weeks to notice, with The Standard giving the story all of two sentences. Protecting the White House from scandal, not the troops from squalor, was the higher priority.

One person who has had enough of this hypocrisy is the war critic Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations who is also a Vietnam veteran, a product of the United States Military Academy and a former teacher at West Point. After his 27-year-old son was killed in May while serving in Iraq, he said that Americans should not believe Memorial Day orators who talk about how priceless the troops’ lives are.

“I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life,” Professor Bacevich wrote in The Washington Post. “I’ve been handed the check.” The amount, he said, was “roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning.”

Anyone who questions this bleak perspective need only have watched last week’s sad and ultimately pointless Congressional hearings into the 2004 friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman. Seven investigations later, we still don’t know who rewrote the witness statements of Tillman’s cohort so that Pentagon propagandists could trumpet a fictionalized battle death to the public and his family.

But it was nonetheless illuminating to watch Mr. Rumsfeld and his top brass sit there under oath and repeatedly go mentally AWOL about crucial events in the case. Their convenient mass amnesia about their army’s most famous and lied-about casualty is as good a definition as any of just what “supporting the troops” means to those who even now beat the drums for this war.

Republican Candidates Shifting Towards "Cutting and Running" in Iraq

First and foremost, Giuliani, Romney and Thompson are politicians who want to be elected president. Therefore as this Bloomberg article points out, they are having to walk an increasingly fine line between satisfying the fringe right, pro-war Republican base voters who are obviously of critical importance to their winning the party's nomination, and the overall American population in general, who opinion polls show are overwhelmingly against Bush's Iraq policy. Indeed what we are witnessing is subtle flip-flopping in real time, the parsing of language and words so delicately that it would make Bill Clinton--he of the famous, "It depends on what your definition of the word is is." line, blush. Bush has not only led the military over a cliff with his reckless Iraq policy, evidence is increasingly showing he's leading his party's electoral chances over that same cliff as well

First Armed Robots Being Used in Iraq

Word has it that one of these machines actually defeated President Bush in a game of checkers without human assistance. Just kidding.

Security Camera Footage of Bridge Collapse

video...

Edwards: Giuliani is "Bush on Steroids"

article here

Bush Insults Respected BBC Reporter at Press Conference

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad...George W. Bush, a man 62 million Americans voted for in 2004, teasing another man about being bald.

O.J. Simpson Answers Questions on Call In Show

Novak Likes Ron Paul for President

As reported here: Novak, as the dean of Washington's conservative journalists, seems to bemoan the Republicans' sad state of affairs heading into the 2008 presidential election. Their lineup is truly pathetic. Paul is a libertarian who favors isolationism; he has also indicated that the United States deserved what happened on 9/11 because of the theory of 'blowback'--our interfering in the Middle East provoked confrontation. He had a notable confrontation with Rudy Giuliani earlier this year during a Republican debate over the subject (see video here). He has 0 chance of being elected president, and his current and indeed growing popularity among influential Republicans like Novak, let alone Republican primary voters, speaks volumes about the current state of the Republican party.