Politics
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How the World Works, Part I
Any sensible, informed person paying attention to last week’s theater regarding the Petraeus performance and Bush’s pathetic followup would not recognize the way it played to the Beltway theater critics, who just loved the show. Greenwald this morning sums up their reviews: Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray, The Washington Post (h/t Atrios): "MoveOn.org provided Republicans
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Constitutional Hardball
Digby sums up nicely what I’ve been saying about the long-term effects of the pro-authoritarian changes wrought by the Republicans. It won’t matter if the Democrats win in’08, because the underlying infrastructure has changed, and it’s unlikely that the Dems will have the political will to restore things to the status quo ante: Constitutional hardball
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Why Petraeus Has No Political Credibility
Here’s a six-minute video put together by FireDogLake and Glenn Greenwald to give readers some perspective on the Petraeus testimony if you are still in need of it. It continues to amaze me how there is no public memory–how every public event, like the Petraeus testimony, appears on the public screen as if there was
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Loss of Faith in America
It amazes me how little confidence the right wing in this country has in the strength of American values and ideals. It's probably because so many are heirs of that strain of American thinking which never understood or cared about them in the first place. This strain of right wing American always lived primarily in
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Gonzales Gone
Alberto Gonzales would be my poster boy for the special twist this administration has given to Arendt’s "banality of evil." Gonzales is the empty shell of a human being true evil requires to accomplish its purposes. He is a smiling cipher who repeatedly allowed himself to be used all the while thinking, I’m sure, he
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Progress in Iraq? (Three Updates)
It would appear that we’ll be hearing a lot more about how well things are going in Iraq, and how we have to give Petraeus more time. The latest is to give him till next spring, and then it will be to give him till the fall, and then even assuming a Democrat takes the
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A Quick Word on Rove (Updated)
Rove’s merger of politics and policy was an effort to forge a total one-party state. While he is acclaimed as a political strategist, his true innovation was in governing. He sought to subordinate the entire federal government to his goal of creating a permanent Republican majority. Every department and agency has been subject to an
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Cheney Predicts Iraq Quagmire in ’94
These guys have been caught contradicting themselves so often now, it’s facetious. Anyway, if you haven’t seen this yet, this short clip is good for a laugh. It just goes to show that that the way things were before 9/11 didn’t change just because of 9/11, no matter how badly some people wanted us to
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Reformed Libertarian Gets It
i really think every american who goes to college should spend at least one year living in another industrialized nation with universal health care. it certainly changed me; i was a libertarian before i went to australia. being there taught me that only in america does government not work (i’m talking first-world industrialized nations here).
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Getting Played (Updated)
The Democrats have proven once again that they are minor league players over their heads when it comes to playing the game in the Bigs. Like most decent Americans they are way too trusting, and at this point to trust anything that anybody in the Bush administration says is to be foolish beyond belief. Apparently