It is in response to this news story.
Yeah, great idea, goofball – give Bill Orally, Sean Inanity and Flush Limbore, along with all of the life forms at Fix Noise, another reason to yell that Daily Kos is a “hate site.”
I know Markos Moulitsas and company don’t need advice from me when it comes to managing this sort of thing, but there’s a time and a place to address our grievances with Deadeye Dick, which are legion. However, a moment when he’s getting a heart pump inserted into his body, a procedure entailing grave medical risk especially for a person with his age and history, is not one of those times.
Top Democrats led their party in making the "Bush lied, people died" charge because they wanted to defeat him in 2004. That didn't happen. Several bipartisan commissions would later catalogue the serious errors in the intelligence on which Mr. Bush and Democrats relied. But these commissions, particularly the Silberman-Robb report of March 31, 2005, found that the "Bush lied" charge was false. Still, the attacks hurt: When they began, less than a third of Americans believed the charge. Two years later, polls showed that just over half did.Through one of the easiest Google searches in my life, I came across this item from Media Matters, which tells us the following…
During a discussion about a November 20 Washington Post op-ed by former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) detailing conflicting intelligence in the lead-up to war, (Charles) Krauthammer responded to National Public Radio legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg's assertion that information had been withheld from Congress by claiming that the Robb-Silberman report "concluded precisely the opposite -- that there was not a scintilla of evidence of that."And Rove actually sounds in the Murdoch Street Journal Op-Ed as if he thinks he took it easy on John Kerry when Kerry said that, “It is time for a president who will face the truth and tell the truth,” when in reality, he accused Kerry and the late John Murtha, decorated veterans both, of “cutting and running” in Iraq, an act of callow brazenness that few people other than Rove could pull off (here).
In fact, the Robb-Silberman report never examined the administration's use or provision of intelligence, so there was no "opposite" conclusion for it to reach. As The Washington Post noted in a November 12 article, upon releasing the report in March, Silberman said: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."
In challenging Totenberg's assertion, Krauthammer also claimed that the Robb-Silberman report concluded that "the information that the president received was far more indicting of Saddam and of the existence of weapons of mass destruction than the information that the Congress received, and Congress came to precisely the same conclusion."
The only section of the report that indicated any difference between intelligence received by the Bush administration and by Congress, however, was an indication that the PDBs and Senior Executive Intelligence Briefs (SEIBs) contained information not "markedly different" from that contained in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) presented to Congress. The report described the PDBs and SEIBs as "more alarmist and less nuanced than the NIE," creating "an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few sources."
Besides, I don’t hear Rove offering a single word in response to the Downing Street Memo, in which British Foreign Minister Jack Straw said that that it was clear that Bush had "made up his mind" to take military action (in Iraq) but that "the case was thin."
No, Karl, it doesn’t matter what you could have said in response to the plainly obvious fact that the Iraq war was ginned up to remove Saddam Hussein for personal reasons on the part of Commander Codpiece, to get our hands on Hussein’s oil, or to perpetuate some sort of “pax Americana” in the Middle East in accordance with PNAC’s wet dreams, teasing the “fundies” with an image of some sort of holy path from Jerusalem to Baghdad (or all of the above).
You broke it. You own it. And because of that, we all own it too. And it’s your fault and that of your regime, first and foremost.
It remains far from certain, however, that Mr. Obama and Mr. Reid can win passage even for the limited legislation. Most Republicans remain firm in their opposition to any cap on emissions, and six Democrats recently joined an effort by Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, to pass a resolution criticizing new Environmental Protection Agency rules relating to greenhouse gases.And how much, exactly, would this “light switch” tax cost? Paul Krugman gave us some idea last September (here)…
“Senator Murkowski won’t support a utility cap-and-trade bill because it raises energy prices on Americans at a time when they are already struggling financially,” said Robert Dillon, a spokesman for the senator. “It’s a light-switch tax.”
…the best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the effects of Waxman-Markey, concluding that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family only $160 a year, or 0.2 percent of income. That’s roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day.Kind of a shame that Times writers Peter Baker and David M. Herszenhorn apparently don’t even read the rest of their own paper.
By 2050, when the emissions limit would be much tighter, the burden would rise to 1.2 percent of income. But the budget office also predicts that real G.D.P. will be about two-and-a-half times larger in 2050 than it is today, so that G.D.P. per person will rise by about 80 percent. The cost of climate protection would barely make a dent in that growth. And all of this, of course, ignores the benefits of limiting global warming.
Of course, being a product of the Beltway media culture, they are also capable of bloody great wankery, and I’m afraid this falls under the latter category (dealing with why, even when he succeeds, Obama is supposedly a failure – these are the enumerated “reasons” from Jim VandeHei and John Harris)…
1) The flight of independentsYes, I realize basically that independent voters decide our elections any more due to that oh-so-unpleasant partisanship that David Broder and Steve and Cokie Roberts tut-tut about during their dinner parties, but that doesn’t mean that these people are better informed than anyone else. At this moment, though, no one should govern as if they’re preoccupied with whether or not “independents” approve of them. Their support is always a lagging indicator, if you will, probably up to the moment when those voters step into the voting booth.
2) The “Ideology conundrum”Obama does not try to mobilize Democrats by “Bush hatred.” He does so in part by plainly pointing out the messes left to him by his predecessor (reflected in this, by the way).
Even as Obama pays the price for liberal positions, he doesn't manage to reap what should be the rewards. That's because he has never adequately reckoned with the divisions in his own party and taken a clear stand of his own. During the campaign, he avoided the whole question of whether he is centrist “new Democrat” or a “traditional liberal” by insisting the debate was irrelevant, and uniting the party around Bush hatred and the power of his own biography.
3) LikeabilityGosh, a president who imagines that he’s the center of his own universe. I’ll bet we’ve never had that before! Besides, based on this, it sounds like everyone is playing nice, at least for now (I'll admit, though, that that "mixed message" from Gibbs had questionable worth, trying to be "bipartisan" yet again while motivating the Dem base at the same time, or trying to).
Many Democrats on the Hill don’t much like Obama, or at least his circle of advisers. They think the White House makes them take tough votes, but doesn’t care that much about the problems those votes leave politicians facing in tough races in 2010. Numerous Democrats have complained privately that Obama only cares about Obama — a view reinforced by Gibbs’s public admission that Democrats could lose the House.
4) West Wing is unsteadySee above (though the point about the energy speech is well-taken, unfortunately…parts were great, but parts also went thud.)
But Democrats privately complain that the real power center — the West Wing staff — isn’t nearly as impressive. A common gripe on the Hill and on the lobbying corridor is that the communications team isn’t great at communicating, the speech-writing team isn’t great at speech writing (exemplified by Obama’s flaccid Oval Office speech last month on the BP spill and energy policy) and the political team often botches the politics.
5) Numbers matterIndeed they do (and here are some for consideration).
6) Liberal echo chamberAw, c’mon! You just knew that Harris and VandeHei were going to find some way to blame the DFHs, didn’t you?
The liberal blogosphere grew in response to Bush. But it is still a movement marked by immaturity and impetuousness — unaccustomed to its own side holding power and the responsibilities and choices that come with that.
So many liberals seem shocked and dismayed that Obama is governing as a self-protective politician first and a liberal second, even though that is also how he campaigned. The liberal blogs cheer the fact that Stan McChrystal’s scalp has been replaced with David Petraeus’s, even though both men are equally hawkish on Afghanistan, but barely clapped for the passage of health care. They treat the firing of a blogger from the Washington Post as an event of historic significance, while largely averting their gaze from the fact that major losses for Democrats in the fall elections would virtually kill hopes for progressive legislation over the next couple years.
And by the way, Dave Weigel was basically fired from the WaPo because he communicated in unflattering terms about conservatives through a listserv that he thought was private. That had no impact at all on his actual reporting, which was top-notch.
7) BP camDon’t you just love the way they so con-vee-niently conflate the two like that?
Obama is not responsible for the leak, and realistically there was little he could do to expedite the repair. But for an irritable public the Gulf coast debacle was a reminder — horribly timed from Obama’s perspective — that big business and big government are often a problem, not a solution.
Yes, Team Obama needs to tighten up their message discipline a bit, especially as we proceed further into the electoral season. They need to be as forceful about telling everyone what they’ve done right as Bushco was about telling everyone what they’d done (as it turned out) wrong (and we in the field have to do all we can to support them, even if we get highly POed at them from time to time).
Unfortunately, Politico will be one of the outlets they’ll need to get the Obama story told (and told straight, as it were).
More’s the pity.
(Yes, it's true that I oppose the Arizona law, for purposes of disclosure. My point is to publicize Mikey's record here.)AMNESIA WATCH:
Is Congressman Fitzpatrick Confused About His Own Immigration Record?
Bucks County voters demand answers on why Congressman Fitzpatrick supported amnesty and voted against (an) Arizona-Like measure.
(Bristol, PA) – In recent days, former Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick has again assumed that voters in the 8th district have amnesia – this time on immigration.
Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick now claims to support the new Arizona law, but he voted against nearly identical legislation while he was in Washington. The legislation he voted against would have given state and local authorities the ability to detain illegal immigrants in the course of the officers’ regular duties.1 Further, Congressman Fitzpatrick voted to allow “sanctuary cities” to continue their practice of ignoring federal anti-immigration laws.2
Patrick Murphy doesn’t just talk tough on illegal immigration. He actually does something about it. Patrick broke with his party to support the Arizona law, which requires police to check the immigration status of individuals stopped for other crimes. He was the lone Democrat to vote in support of an amendment to prevent the Obama administration from using federal funds to sue Arizona over the law.
Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick also voted against providing $20 million for construction of a fence to protect our borders from the flow of illegal immigrations.3
Patrick Murphy, on the other hand, has constantly fought to beef up security along our borders and introduced legislation to increase penalties for border agents who help smuggle people into the country, a serious breach of national security.4
While he claims to be tough on illegal immigration, Mike’s voting history from his time in Washington falls far short of his newfound rhetoric. He also fails to match up to Patrick Murphy’s record of being tough on illegal immigrants as well as the employers who hire them.
Talk is cheap. Mike might hope people in Bucks County have amnesia, but it's impossible to forget a voting record this appalling.
1Roll Call Vote #659, 109th Congress, 1st Session
2 Roll Call Vote #177, 109th Congress, 1st Session
3 Roll Call Vote #669, 109th Congress, 1st Session
4 Secure Borders Act (H.R. 4622)
And here is a letter from today’s Courier Times…
I can't believe Republican congressional candidate Mike Fitzpatrick has the nerve to make statements about Congressman Patrick Murphy.(Hey, a little unbridled enthusiasm from time to time doesn’t hurt, people.)
Fitzpatrick sold his country out on CAFTA when he served in Congress, while sending our jobs overseas. He said Murphy isn't doing enough about immigration. It just shows how much he doesn't know.
Murphy opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants and supports the E-verify law. He is in support of the Arizona law. Who is Mike Fitzpatrick trying to kid?
State Rep. John Galloway probably spent years trying to get the E-verify bill passed in the state House.
Patrick Murphy is overqualified for his position; he could be the next John Kennedy. God knows we need it. I wish there were a hundred more like Murphy.
Chuck Clayton
Levittown, PA
And as always, to reward good behavior (you know the rest)…
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