bustardblog

An ex-Clintonite

When she ran for Senator, I sent Hillary a few bucks. A few months ago, in New York's primary, I pulled that big old lever for her, and not for Senator Obama.

This week, she chatted with Richard Mellon Scaife. She condemned the Reverend Wright and Obama's tolerance for hate speech. She, who has chosen to pray with Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, speaking with Scaife, discussed the freedom of a person to choose with whom they will talk or pray.

So tonight I'll donate a few dollars to Senator Obama's campaign.

Light Blogging.

A Hell of a week in Cancer Land. On Tuesday they inserted a Mediport, and tomorrow she gets a P.E.G.

A week of Hell is more accurate.

A Saint He Ain't

John McCain has an incredibly loose concept of morality. Today he rants about a moral imperative that we remain in Iraq:

"We have incurred a moral responsibility in Iraq. It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible and premature withdrawal."

Sorry, Mr. McCain, the character stain is in large part a stain made by your character.  We had no moral right to invade Iraq. One of the most immoral arguments used to justify our attack on Iraq has become a constant refrain of yours:

As Matt Taibi wrote in Rolling Stone:

So in his waning days he contents himself with trading in the quack syllogistic reasoning of pop conservatism. There's the always popular Because Terrorists Are Bad, We Must Fight Them in Iraq, Where They Weren't (if suicide bombers kill Iraqi kids, "what are they willing to do to our children?"). There's the still more popular When Liberals Defame Soldiers, Soldiers Die in Iraq (on MoveOn's criticism of Gen. Petraeus: "I don't think there's a place in this country for impugning the integrity and honor of those who serve"). And there's the greatest of all pro-war sophisms, the brilliant We Invaded Iraq Because Someone Kind of Like the Iraqis Attacked Us First ("The enemies we face there harbor the same depraved indifference to human life as those who killed 3,000 innocent Americans").

For five years we have occupied a country and terrorized a citizenry that never harmed us in any way. Prior to our invasion, no Iraqi had ever been a suicide bomber.  There is no moral justification for our choice of the Iraqi homeland as our battlefield.

I have no doubt about Senator McCain's personal courage, but morally, he's a coward.

(memeorandum)

Red Staters Die Faster

America on Line is pretty useless, but today it has a couple of interesting analyses of the state of our states. One compares the states in terms of the health of their citizens. Nine out of the ten "unhealthiest" states were Red states in the 2004 election.* They looked at factors like longevity, infant mortality, and obesity.

Another lists the most dangerous states - ones in which the citizenry is most likely to be a victim of violent crime. Surprise, surprise: nine out of the ten worst are Red States! !

* Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Nevada, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Alabama and Delaware.

**Nevada, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, Maryland, Alaska, Florida and Michigan

Eventual Procedures.

Sorry for the light posting.
Last week Mme Bustard had an event. So, today she had a procedure.
Cancer Talk is Fun.

(The procedure went well.)
Thank You.

Thugs on Drugs

Bruce Bartlett, "an official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush," argues in his op-ed today that as a nation, we'd be better off not sending a rebate to every taxpayer, but instead "redirect the money" to:

help the housing sector and those people who actually need assistance. The Treasury might use some of the money, for example, to enable Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored housing agencies, to buy up some of the bad mortgages, get them off bank balance sheets and help homeowners refinance them. "

So far so good. It's in the next paragraph that Bartlett's heavy drug use rears its ugly head:

My gut tells me that the vast majority of Americans would happily give up their rebate if they knew that the money would be used instead to help families in need and start the process of cleaning up the bad debts in the housing sector...This is a proposal that both Republicans and Democrats should embrace

His "gut" is not to be trusted - in fact it needs to be pumped out. Substance abuse is the only explanation for his voyage to fantasy land. The wingnuts would scream bloody murder. They despise anything that smells of helping a victim:

Michelle Malkin:

Subprime victims are the new heroes. Welcome to the politics of foreclosure.

A featured comment at ColoradoRight:

In all the articles about the "subprime mortgage meltdown", isn’t it weird how they won’t just cut the crap and put responsibility on the homeowners personally?

Instapundit:

Homeowners refinanced "only to wind up owing far more than their houses were worth and unable to make the payments. Boo hoo. Shouldn't there be a price for being an idiot? And -- despite not being on Wall Street -- a greedy idiot?"

It was at Bush's insistence that the current plan included sending rebates to the rich as well as the poor, even though all evidence argues that money sent to the wealthy does nothing to stimulate the economy.

Sadly, Bartlett's Republican Party is merely a hallucination   

(memeorandum)

Greenwald's Right

I've not hesitated to criticize Glenn Greenwald when I disagree with him. Today I do not.  His take on wingnuts and race is a must read.

Fact Finding by John McCain

C.N.S. reports that the prolonged Democratic primary fight is helping John McCain. I'm not so sure.

Many Democrats believe it's helpful to have the focus on our prospective candidates, leaving  McCain to linger on the back pages. I'd rather have coverage of McCain on Page One, if the coverage were not so soft.  His "fact-finding" visits to Jordan and to Israel prompted some statements that would be worth examining, but the press cannot stop malingering when it comes to St John.

Wolf Blitzer led the way with exaggerating how quickly McCain corrected himself after saying that Iran was training members of Al Qaeda.  He did correct himself, after prompting from his assistant, Sen. Joe Lieberman, (I-Il). It's a gaffe he repeated more than once.

His correction:

"I’m sorry," Mr. McCain said, "the Iranians are training extremists, not Al Qaeda."

But like the President he admires so greatly did with Iraq and Al Qaeda, McCain wants to muddy the waters on Iran and Al Qaeda. While he was apologizing, his staff was saying that he had said nothing wrong and that A.Q. and Iran "collaborate."  Straight talk - from both sides of his mouth.

Also disturbing was his mistakenly calling Purim the equivalent of Halloween for Jewish kids. I accept the explanation of his aide, Sen. Lieberman, that he  had been the cause of the confusion. But why? Why does McCain, on a fact finding trip, need to be told a fairy tale? I'd kind of like the next President to actually be interested in the culture of countries  he visits.

His lack of intellectual curiosity, and his comfort with deceptive descriptions of our foes and allies is a little too similar to Mr. Bush for me.

(memeorandum)

Geraldine Looks in the Mirror: Not Pretty

Geraldine Ferraro is reported to be resentful of the comparison between herself and the Reverend Wright.  Her reaction exemplifies the racism outlined by Senator Obama in his speech. Ms Ferraro uses projection to defend against her own failures, which vividly contrast with Sen Obama's successes.

A comparison between Ferraro's resume and Obama's is instructive - especially since she stated that his current status is largely due to his race.  Using her logic,  in fact it would be far more accurate to argue that her fame is due to  gender, than his is to race. Ferraro's claim to fame was her selection by Walter Mondale to be the first woman to run for Vice President in one of the major parties. Both she and Obama are lawyers - her degree was from Fordham, while he was the editor of the Law Review at Harvard. And there are more differences.

She never ran in, let alone won, a single primary. She twice ran for the U.S. Senate, but both times failed to even get her party's nomination. She did serve for 6 years as a U.S. Representative, even though she had never been either a Senator or Congressperson at the State level. (The U.S. House ethics committee did find against her for misuse of campaign funds.) She never showed a capacity for leadership, nor was she ever an inspiration to anyone. While Obama has been campaigning against the party's centrist leadership, Ferraro was their annointed candidate.

Even Ferraro's legacy as the "First Woman Nominated for V.P." is tarnished. While she and her husband skirted the law, she often responded with the "poor little wife, unable to understand her husband's machinations" defense. (Unlike her mentor, Lady Geraldine never tries to wash her hands of the money. She hoards the blood. No suicide for her.)  As Wayne Barrett wrote in the Village Voice, while she was campaigning for the U.S. Senate:

The woman who would be senator has made a career out of hostile denials about the escapades she joins in with her husband. They got her in trouble with the House Ethics Committee and the Federal Elections Commission in the mid '80s. Her only response to the mob charges in 1992 was that they were anti-Italian. Her know-nothing defense forced the Times's Maureen Dowd to conclude, "She does not seem to feel that as a former prosecutor, a public official and a savvy woman who was listed as an officer in her husband's real estate company, she should have made it her business to know more about 'John's business.'"

Everywhere you look, and every time you look, there is another Ferraro scandal, as inevitable, it seems, as her teeth-clenched determination to run again for the public mantle she surrendered in 1984. It is an arrogance of entitlement born in a grand moment the women of America will never forget.

 

(memeorandum)

Wasted Day

Mme Bustard remains in the hospital, essentially because of hospital incompetence.