Truthiness report: Right-wing blogs have more fun posting questionable e-mails from the Iraq war.
Ahhh, a walk down memory lane. Back in April, Paul Kiel broke the story of Rep. Jim Ryun’s (R-KS) really killer house deal on a home that just happened to be owned by an Abramoff-DeLay front. Here’s some fun follow up.
Matt Yglesias has a good post here about what’s really behind the ‘surge’. This is also a good example of how paradoxical or even bizarre ‘answers’ often emerge from political problems. No actual policy or strategic imperative is driving the move to escalate the conflict in Iraq. The real causes are political and psychological.
To put it simply, the presidential is neither psychologically nor politically capable of leaving Iraq. The 2006 election made it clear the current course can’t be sustained politically. Even his own party won’t back it. That leaves escalation as the only alternative. All that’s left is a rationale for doing so. And that’s what the president is now working on.
That doesn’t mean that in theory there couldn’t be a good argument for escalation, only that whatever it is, it has nothing to do with why the president is in favor of escalation. Because if it did he would have called for it at some point over the last three years. And he didn’t. All that’s changed is that option two of three — stasis — was removed from the list of options. End of story.
Joker Gov. Mitt Romney’s long twilight struggle against gay marriage.
End of year TPM game. Which is most likely to cause the inevitable collapse of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign?
1. History of ridiculous flip-flops on gay rights.
2. Fact that all he’s ever done in politics is win one gubernatorial election in Massachusetts.
3. Fact that his real first name is Willard.
4. Not a genuine conservative nutjob.
Choose one of these or come up with one of your own.
In unexpected dig againt Jeff Greenfield, entire Bush war cabinet adopts Ahmadinejad look.
Cold. Very cold.
My, I think Woodward’s got some real news here. As a country, for three decades, we’ve been trying to sort out Gerald Ford’s motivations for pardoning Richard Nixon. And in that posthumously published interview of Ford, which Woodward has been excerpting, I think the late president goes pretty far toward answering the question. Said Ford: “I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn’t want to see my real friend have the stigma.”
Woodward follows by noting that “that acknowledgment represents a significant shift from Ford’s previous portrayals of the pardon that absolved Nixon of any Watergate-related crimes.”
I would say that’s something of an understatement.
I’ve always thought the notion of some knowing bargain between the two men — the presidency for the pardon — was a bit too Hollywood.
With people who know each other well enough stuff like this never has to be said. Perhaps it needn’t even be thought. We’d like to think at least that we know who’ll really have our back at the critical moment and who won’t. And perhaps Nixon’s well-known paranoia helped him refine that skill to a tee. As Ford told Woodward last year: “I think that Nixon felt I was about the only person he could really trust on the Hill.”
The Federal Election Commission handed out a record multi-million-dollar fine — to an unusual culprit. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
The White House doesn’t know failure in its War on Terror. Only “success that hasn’t occurred yet.”