bustardblog

No Reporters Need Apply

The ever truthful Fred Barnes tells a very different story than does the New York Times about the interaction between Crow, David and Rove.

One thing that they do agree on is that Mr Rove was a guest of The New York Times at the correspondent's dinner.

Beyond my disgust at the Times for breaking bread with the criminal Rove, is my amazement at their article covering the incident.  Their story only reports tit for tat the differing perceptions of Rove vs Crow/David. But the even occurred at the New York Times table - wasn't there a journalist a witness to the exchange.

Not reporting, merely transcribing.

Tenet, Gonzales, Brownie, etc etc

It seems Mr Tenet is not so popular with his former employees.

CNN :

In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership."

"You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq."

Another story from CNN

In the fall of 2002, he was told specifically that there was a high level source in Saddam's government that was saying, 'We don't have WMD,' " Johnson said. "George Tenet's hands are just as bloody as everybody else in this administration in helping gin up what was an unfounded case for war."

Johnson is a registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.

Tip, Toe, Through The Tulips

Pls 2x click to enlarge.

Union Square,

Daffodils Fight

Please do double check to enlarge.
Photo from 4-22-07. Hudson River Park.
As they build the new park, they destroy previous
incarnations - these guys will not be destroyed.

Dershowitz Just Keeps on Smearing.

I keep hoping to find the reasonable right.  Could it be Captain's Quarters?  Sadly, No.   He has written posts that suggest brain wave activity, but just when you thought you might have found a well-threaded wing nut, he "writes" a post that's really just a photocopy of another's despicable smears.
Today he's posted a slimy  piece on Jimmy Carter, relying on Sir Dershowitz the Dishonest to supply him with facts.  Except Allan Dershowitz does not do facts.
The piece is entitled "Jimmy Carter, Arab Front Man", and its basic point is that the Carter Center takes money from Arabs. Thus Jimmy is anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and "that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter."  (Of course, this argument only works if you assume that neither President Bush, former or current, has neither real nor apparent integrity whatever.)
Dershowitz writes that he used to really admire Carter, and that as recently as a year ago he  did disagre with him on some issues but thought of him as one who was deeply committed to "principle and human rights. What changed his mind was the revelation that the Carter Center had accepted "Arab Oil Money." This really surprised Sir Dershowitz.

This is pure crap. Every sentient human being knows that "Arab Oil Money" permeates our political culture. The Saudis claim to have given significant money to every single modern Presidential Library. According to Robert Novak they gave up to 20 million to the Clinton Library. They gave to the Ronald Reagan Library. The closeness of the Saudi Royal family to the Bush Royal family is legendary; from their support of Neil Bush's private company, Ignite, to the million that they gave to Barbara Bush's literacy foundation, to the 80 million that they invested in The Carlisle Group. Did I mention that Prince Al Waleed gave half a million to George H.W. Bush's Boarding school to name a scholarship after him?

But somehow Carter's involvement is worse. According to Dershowitz the evil BCCI bank helped him out when his peanut farm was in trouble.  Guess what other troubled companies BCCI has bailed out: W.''s Harken Energy for one. (The bank made money on its loan to Carter, which was fully repaid. Not so with W and Harken)

Supposedly, the final straw for Dershowitz was Carter's accepting money from a source so evil that Horowitz had forced the Harvard to reject a donation to its "financially strapped Divinity School."  First, let me point out that describing the Harvard Divinity School as "financially strapped" is typical Dershowitz - and completely untrue. Depending on the source, the average endowment at private colleges in the U.S is between $90,000 and $130,000  per student in 2002.  The 2005 endowment at the Divinity School was about $1,000,000 per student.  Dershowtiz is calling an institution that is almost ten times as rich as the average, "financially strapped."  And what about  the evil donor, who is so dramatically identified as Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan? Sounds bad. Who is he?
He's the President of the United Arab Emirates. He's the guy who George W. Bush wanted to run some of our ports. When our government proclaims that "President George Bush praises UAE for progress in religious freedom" they are referring to him.

There is nothing fair, nothing honest in Dershowitz' article. I am not surprised when  places like Protein Wisdom sing its praises, or when Blue Crab Boulevard writes

"Carter has never, apparently, found a dictator he couldn't feel good about. But Dershowitz makes a very strong case that Carter is bought and paid for.

Sadly, that ever elusive, reasonable wing-nut, is not at Captains Quarters, who wrote

'There is no doubt that Carter has climbed into bed with some of the worst anti-Semites."

I'll have to keep looking.

This post was updated about two hours after initial posting. I made no significant changes; only cleaning up and fixing some links.,

First Iraq, Next Iran

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." --- H. L. Mencken

Never let it be said that Bush/Rove are not practical politicians.

Rudy the Bully.

Yesterday's post regarding McCain's digs at Giuliani  elicited some great comments.  For example, from Farmer Mark:

Nice as it is to see Rudy criticized from the right, or wherever McCain may be, it's not so nice to see the other part of 9/11 politicization going on: Rudy trying to mount it and ride it to the White House. What's so interesting about his attack on the Dems is that his support for Bush's war is probably not a mere campaign ploy. He really believes that tough guy tactics are the right way to deal with hostile cultures different from his own, as he demonstrated so vividly in his myopic time as Mayor.

It's worth checking out the rest of the comments. While being self-referential, I might as well mention a post of mine about Cho Seung-Hui that was also about bullies and tough guys. The macho, shoot-em-in-the-face ethos of Republicans leads us from one tragedy to another. 

In McCain's Speech...

Thanks to Atrios, who noticed a great attack on Rudy in McCain's 48th speech announcing his intention to run for the presidency:

When Americans confront a catastrophe, natural or man-made, they have a right to expect basic competence from their government. They won't accept that firemen and policemen are unable to communicate with each other in an emergency because they don't have the same radio frequency.

He is referring to the many, many unnecessary deaths caused by the inability of the firemen in the World Trade Center to hear instructions to get out of the building before it collapsed. Rudy lied in his testimony to the 9/11 commission, and said that the technology simply did not exist that would allow the two departments to communicate. In fact, as Salon noted:

The U.S. conference of mayors found before Gillian's testimony to the commission that of 192 cities it evaluated, three-quarters had radios interoperable across police and fire departments.

Poor Laura

The saddest aspect of Laura Bush's claiming that Iraq has caused no one to suffer as much as the President and herself is that she believes it.  That is her reality, much as Cho Seung-Hui's reality was his as well..
(h/t Atrios)

It's OK to Blame the GOP, They're Responsible

I go to memeorandum a few times a day - both to get news and to see what people are talking about. When I went some minutes ago, I was saddened to see another Republican victory in the battle to control the topics of our national discourse. There was not a single link nor any reference to the tragedy at Virginia Tech. It's not in the technorati top ten either.

President Bush flies to the memorial service, and flags are at half-mast, but since the first reports out of Blacksburg, the goal of the GOP has been to stifle inquiry and silence discussion.  Endless talk of healing and closure are easy and cheap - actually allowing the press to stay on campus to do their job could be really damaging.

Bush:

I think it's very important for us not to comment until it's all said and done."

As Adam Gopnik noted in The New Yorker the best time to discuss issues of gun control is after an incident like this, yet we were told that we had to concentrate on healing. Wing-Nuts were furious at those who tried to "politicize" the tragedy, and in their outrage argued that more guns are needed on campus, not less, and that the dead men's masculinity was to be doubted. The issue for Derbyshire was the cowardice of the victims. The simple fact that a  really crazy young man had had no problem buying two semi-automatic handguns, guns whose only purpose is to kill people, is OK with them.

The right cheered when V-Tech kicked the media off campus, and condemned the media for showing the Cho video.  The media often does do an awful job in this country, but I agree with Atrios that it is hugely hypocritical for the right to want them to exercise even more control over what information we get to see. But they did not want us to see the video, not as Noonan says because "such pictures are inspiring to the unstable."  No, we cannot see the video because that might humanize the demon.

The right's delight when reporters were asked to leave campus is understandable. Like  Peggy Noonan, they want to see Cho as "a walking infestation of evil." and mourn that it is "Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved."  An "infestation of evil" is not the son of your neighbor, not a person  - it's  only a thing, a thing that must be stopped. (Preferably by the pull of a trigger.)  It's not like a person who could be helped. 

There is no need for a reporter to ask what happened after Cho's English teacher asked the administration to make sure that he got help?  Did his roommates ever try to get him to get help? When a classmate mockingly offered to pay him ten bucks if he'd speak, how did the others gathered round react?  This was a sick guy who clearly needed help.  He wanted to be heard.  People don't take play-writing seminars because they don't want to be heard. In all its convocations, did the University spend any time exploring their own culpability?

Noonan's piece was especially hateful, as she revered the Reagan who cynically pulled a bait and switch making help less available to the next Cho, and then writes about our "therapized nation." The college years are ones in which serious mental illness often first manifest themselves. Yet the Times reports today, there is "one full-time clinical staff member per 1,697 students." This, while there is 1.3 suicide attempts per hundred students, hardly defines a therapized nation. The AMA reports "that the supply of U.S. psychiatrists shrank 27 percent between 1990 and 2002. Meanwhile, physician staffing industry data indicate that demand increased by 16 percent in a shorter time frame (1997-2001)."

If we needed it, the Gonzales testimony gave us a reminder last week that the Republicans do not believe in responsibility. They are not responsible for the effects of their actions, nor are they responsible for helping their neighbor. The God that guys like Riehl want back in the classroom has nothing to do with the One insisting that you are your brother's keeper. There is no compassion in today's Conservatives.

So the liberals have lost another round.  The case of V-Tech is closed. No lessons are to be learned and no questions asked. Cho is evil. We should all carry semi's to shoot evil. It's much better to focus on Tom DeLay calling Sen. Reid of being a traitor.