In Ohio yesterday Rudy said, inter alia … “I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. … I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them.”
I think this is going to be a real problem for His Rudiness. And unlike many gaffes, which are just offhanded statements that tell us little about the person in question, I think this one points to an underlying contempt for the folks who ended up sacrificing their health or even their lives during the clean-up process.
Turns out fear isnât just an RNC campaign strategy. Itâs also useful, apparently, to spook up contributions.
The political parties use a variety of tactics in fundraising pitches to try and grab attention. But hereâs a letter from the RNC that seems particularly beyond the pale. It styles as a âVoter Registration Verification and Audit Formâ and warns the voter about âirregularitiesâ in his/her party affiliation.
Check it out. And thanks to TPM Reader Dennis Sidwell for sending it in after it succeeded in spooking his 83 year-old father.
I think it’s a measure of how brain dead the Republicans have become on the “war on terror” that their big puffing or policy statements on the issue now most often amount to bizarre and sometimes incomprehensible grammatical reformulations or, failing that, reorderings of sentence structure.
So for example, now you have Mitt Romney saying, “There’s not a global war on terror. There’s a global war being waged by the terrorists and if I am president, there will be a global war waged on the terrorists and we will win.”
This comes after Rudy’s insistence on rebranding the War on Terror as the “Terrorists’ War on Us.” (see the video)
Their perplexity and paralysis in the face of reality is making them look like one of those alien computers or robots at the end of one of the old Star Trek episodes where Capt. Kirk hits them with too much kick-ass logic and smoke starts to come out of their ears and then they explode.
Late Update: Alternative Headline: Emerging GOP consensus that War on Terror is being waged in the passive voice!
If you’ve been following the Scott Thomas Beauchamp Affair, I strongly recommend reading the latest update from The New Republic. The short version is that the Army’s investigation of the case appears to be confined to a) releasing no information about their investigation or details of its findings, b) leaking alleged details to the Weekly Standard, which no one will confirm on the record and c) keeping Beauchamp himself in communications lockdown where no one but family members in monitored conversations can communicate with him.
Perhaps Beauchamp made this stuff up. And that’s not a throwaway line; I freely concede it may turn out to be the case. There’s no getting around the fact that the legacy of the Glass Affair puts an extra hurdle of credibility in TNR’s way.
But the behavior of the Army Public Affairs Office suggests that what they are pushing is not an investigation that would pass any muster in the light of day but a war against a particular article and publication.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but going back over recent years — the WMD stories, al Qaeda link, the Iraq War and more — when you’ve got the goods, you take it to a real press outlet. When you’re blowing smoke, you take it to the Standard.
Fibbing goof Bill O’Reilly can’t understand why John Edwards won’t give any love to Fox News after they’ve given him such fair coverage on Fox. Take a look. It’ll start your weekend on a good note …
Also nice to see the Foxies crying a river about the hard shake they’re getting from the Democrats.
Mitt Romney is expected to win tomorrow’s Ames straw poll, but he really has to win big. That and other straw poll and political news in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, confirmed by the Senate in June to serve as the president’s war advisor (aka, the “war czar”), has kept a remarkably low profile. NSA Stephen Hadley told reporters a while back that Lute would be “up close to the president” to work “full time, 24/7” on implementing Bush’s war policy, but that apparently includes practically disappearing from public view.
In fact, Lute has not been mentioned by Bush, Cheney, or any White House spokesperson, in any context, since he was confirmed. I was beginning to think we may want to put his face on milk-cartons.
Yesterday, Lute finally emerged — and immediately sparked a controversy.
Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush’s new war adviser said Friday.
“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”
“And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another,” said Lute, who is sometimes referred to as the “Iraq war czar.” It was his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.
And with that, we may not be hearing from Lute again anytime soon.
The Philadelphia Daily News’ Stu Bykofsky, one of the city’s most widely-read columnists, caused a bit of a stir with his latest column, which posited a provocative idea: another 9/11-style attack to “help” America. As Bykofsky sees it, “we have forgotten who the enemy is,” and the murder of thousands of Americans would help us get back on track.
America’s fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater. What would sew us back together? Another 9/11 attack.
The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda. […]
Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again? If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America’s righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.
Everything about this column seems misguided — the diagnosis of what ails America, the description of the symptoms, the proposed cure. The surprising part of this, however, is that a variety of far-right media outlets seemed to embrace Bykofsky’s message. ThinkProgress noted that Drudge seemed to think highly of the piece, conservative radio host Mike Gallagher invited Bykofsky on to his show, and Fox News’ John Gibson went so far as to endorse Bykofsky’s thesis on the air: “I think it’s going to take a lot of dead people to wake America up.”
For a column that pines for mass murder, this isn’t the reaction I expected.
Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) may have inadvertently leaked classified information during a Fox News interview, disclosing an aspect of a FISA court’s decision regarding warrantless wiretapping. On Thursday, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, may have unintentionally done the same thing.
ABC News’ (and TPM alum) Justin Rood explains.
For the second time in as many weeks, a senior House Republican may have divulged classified information in the media.
In an opinion article published in the New York Post Thursday, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., reported the top-secret budget for human spying had decreased — the type of detail normally kept under wraps for national security reasons.
“The 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill cut human-intelligence programs,” Hoekstra wrote in the piece, in which he also criticized “leaks to the news media.”
Formerly the chairman of the intelligence committee, Hoekstra is now its highest ranking Republican. In its recent budget authorizations, that committee kept from public view all figures and most discussion of spending on such classified items as human spying. Hoekstra’s apparent slip was first noted on the liberal Web site, Raw Story.
“If Mr. Hoekstra wants to break ranks and disclose that information, that’s fine with me,” said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert who has long pushed to declassify overall spending on intelligence. “But it is the sort of thing he has harshly criticized in the past.”
Given Hoekstra’s hackish history, this week’s alleged disclosure is par for the course. After all, Hoekstra has had a series of recent intelligence-related embarrassments.
* In November 2006, Hoekstra pushed the administration to publish online a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The idea was to let far-right bloggers “prove” that Saddam had WMD, but Hoekstra’s plan led to the accidental release of secret nuclear research, including a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
* In October 2006, Hoestra “stripped the credentials of a Democratic committee aide he believed may have leaked a then-classified document to The New York Times. A month later, he quietly reinstated the aide’s access.”
* In July 2006, Hoekstra called a humiliating press conference to announce, “We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” — despite failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
* In June 2006, Hoekstra and Rick Santorum wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed, alleging that some officials in the intelligence community are attempting to destroy the Bush administration — and America itself.
Maybe House Republicans can find someone a little less reckless to serve as the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee?