Our Rightist Leaders Leading; The Master Race in Action!

State Sen. Scott Brown, R-Wrentham, came under fire yesterday following a presentation to a group of King Philip High School students in which he directly quoted Internet postings about him containing foul language, and identified some of the students who authored them.

Brown on Thursday spoke to students in some of teacher Joseph Ferreira's history classes on the legislative process, and while talking about the divisiveness of some issues, discussed postings some students had put up about him and his family on facebook.com, a Web site popular with students.

[More.]

And here's a rightist blogger of great intellect and principal:

Pardon My French

But I can't resist - it seems the Dixie Clits were the focus of that music industry masturbatory fantasy they call the Grammy Awards. I would have watched, but my toenails were having a growth spurt and it was simply that much more fascinating to watch. That the Police were probably the best thing going tells you something about the state of the music industry today. Not that the Police weren't great in their day - and they're still excellent musicians - but why go on tour when you need another roadie just to carry the hair pieces and rejuvenation cream?

(Emphasis in witty original.)

Link.

Read and weep: The modern Big Media water carriers compared to real journalists. (Short answer: it's not favorable.)

An old-time enabler of the leadership that's brought us our debased world apologizes:

Mea culpa to Bush on Presidents Day
Plain Talk by Al Neuharth, USA TODAY founder

Our great country has had 43 presidents. Many very good. A few pretty bad. On Presidents Day next Monday, it's appropriate to commemorate them all.

I remember every president since Herbert Hoover, when I was a grade school kid. He was one of the worst. I've personally met every president since Dwight Eisenhower. He was one of the best.

A year ago I criticized Hillary Clinton for saying "this (Bush) administration will go down in history as one of the worst."

"She's wrong," I wrote. Then I rated these five presidents, in this order, as the worst: Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, Hoover and Richard Nixon. "It's very unlikely Bush can crack that list," I added.

I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly at the top.

The Iraq war, of course, has become Bush's albatross. He and his buddies are great at coining words or slogans. "Bushisms" that will haunt him historically:

"Shock and Awe," early 2003.

"Mission Accomplished," May 1, 2003.

"Stay the Course," June 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006.

"New Strategy," 2007.
Another term historians may weigh critically is "Decider."

Is he just a self-touted decider doing what he thinks right? Or is he an arrogant ruler who doesn't care or consider what the public or Congress believes best for the country?

Despite his play on words and slogans, Bush didn't learn the value or meaning of mea culpa (acknowledgement of an error) during his years at Yale.

Bush admitting his many mistakes on Iraq and ending that fiasco might make many of us forgive, even though we can never forget the terrible toll in lives and dollars.

Feedback: Other views on Bush presidency

"Just as we don't stop football games after three quarters, we shouldn't judge the historical place of presidents when they've still got nearly two years in office."

— John J. Miller, political reporter, National Review

"Unless there is some great reversal, Bush will be seen as one of the country's poorest presidents. Iraq will stand at the top of the list, but the administration's failed responses to Katrina and global warming will stand with its abuse of civil liberties to mark Bush out as a man with poor judgment and a failed leader."

— Robert Dallek, historian; his new book, Nixon and Kissinger: Powers in Power, will be published in April.

(And yes, this is too little, too late.)

And here's Our Leaders being caught in their own lies and Big Media water carriers letting them get away with it:

It seems almost inconceivable: The White House actually invites the press corps to hold it accountable -- but when the time comes, and a key benchmark is missed, the press is silent.

And yet that's exactly what has happened.

Back in January, when President Bush announced that in spite of the public opinion against the war in Iraq he was going to send in more troops, he repeatedly insisted that what was different this time was that the Iraqis were finally serious about stepping up.

Responding to reporters who were skeptical -- after all, they'd heard this many times before -- White House officials urged them to judge for themselves whether that would happen

"You're going to have to -- you're going to have some opportunities to judge very quickly," one senior administration official said at an official background briefing on January 10, a few hours before Bush's prime-time announcement.

"The Iraqis are going to have three brigades within Baghdad within a little more than a month. They have committed to trying to get one brigade in, I think, by the first of February, and two more by the 15th," the official said.

"So people are going to be able to see pretty quickly that the Iraqis are or are not stepping up. And that provides the ability to judge."

I'm no military expert, and as I indicated on the Nieman Watchdog Blog on Wednesday and in yesterday's column, it isn't entirely clear to me whether the Iraqis are living up to their word.

And President Bush yesterday insisted that everything's going according to plan: "Our new commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is now on the ground in Baghdad," Bush told the American Enterprise Institute. "He says the Iraqi government is following through on its commitment to deploy three additional army brigades in the capital."

But at a Pentagon press conference yesterday, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Peter Pace acknowledged that only two of those three Iraqi brigades are there: "You've got two of the Iraqi brigades in -- that were going to plussed up in Baghdad in Baghdad now. The third one is moving this month," Pace said.

Other press reports suggest that even those two brigades are not anywhere near full strength.

And action in Baghdad seems thus far to be almost entirely led by Americans, in stark contrast to what was promised.

David Lerman writes for the Hampton Roads (Va.) Daily Press: "The Democratic chairman and former Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the credibility of President Bush's new security plan for Baghdad Thursday, citing news reports of an overwhelmingly American-led operation despite administration promises to let Iraqi forces take the lead.

"Virginia Sen. John Warner, a senior Republican, used a committee hearing to call attention to a New York Times report that the first major sweep of the Iraqi capital under the new security plan used only 200 Iraqi police and soldiers, but 2,500 Americans.

"Warner, who has warned against sending more Americans to combat a low-grade civil war, expressed surprise that the first major security sweep of Baghdad under the new plan would be conducted by so few Iraqi forces. Defense officials had stressed in recent weeks that U.S. troops would be deployed in phases over coming months - with time allowed to measure the commitment of the Iraqi government to beef up its own security.

"Gen. Peter Schoomaker, chief of staff of the Army, and Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, told Warner Thursday they were not familiar with the details of the described security sweep. But Conway added, 'It is counter to what I understand to be the plan as well.'"

As Lerman explains: Pace "described the new security plan as an Iraqi-led operation during an appearance before Levin's committee earlier this month.

"'We will not be out front by plan,' Pace said of U.S. forces. 'The Iraqis would be the ones going door-to-door, knocking on doors, doing the census work, doing the kinds of work that would put them out in front for the first part of the - if it develops - firefight. Our troops would be available to backstop them and to bring in the kind of fire support we bring in."

That was the plan.

Where's the accountability?

A Rogue Briefer? Hardly
The official Bush administration position on its earlier, unsubstantiated charges of direct Iranian government involvement in the shipping of explosive devices to Iraqi militants is that the anonymous military briefers in Baghdad on Sunday went too far.

But that's baloney.

Consider a few facts:

1) The briefing was being carefully monitored by the White House -- which had postponed it twice previously. National security adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters on February 2: "The truth is, quite frankly, we thought the briefing overstated. And we sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts."

After that, it's quite obvious that neither the briefing -- nor its suspiciously secretive, entirely anonymous format -- would have gone forward without explicit White House approval.

2) And far from being a creature of this briefing, the allegation that Tehran is supplying the explosives was actually first made days earlier, by a slew of administration officials who spoke in what had all the appearances of a coordinated leak to New York Times reporter Michael R. Gordon.

Gordon's story, which came out the day before the briefing, credulously quoted "civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided specific details. . . .

"An American intelligence assessment described to The New York Times said that 'as part of its strategy in Iraq, Iran is implementing a deliberate, calibrated policy -- approved by Supreme Leader Khamenei and carried out by the Quds Force -- to provide explosives support and training to select Iraqi Shia militant groups to conduct attacks against coalition targets.'"

That assessment doesn't sound like the work of one rogue briefer, does it?

3) Until Bush officially backed off the specific charge of involvement by Tehran, what the briefer said was being espoused as the White House position by press secretary Tony Snow.

"Let me put it this way," Snow said on Monday. "There's not a whole lot of freelancing in the Iranian government, especially when it comes to something like that. So what you would have to do, if you're trying to do the -- to counter that position, you would have to assume that people were able of putting together sophisticated weaponry, moving it across a border into a theater of war and doing so unbeknownst and unbidden."

4) Furthermore, CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr was apparently being told by her sources as recently as Wednesday that the briefer actually understated things.

"[T]he US certainly does have intelligence tying these Iranian weapons shipments to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah ali Khamenei," Starr said. "It's not something that the Bush White House wants to talk about in public too much because they really do not want to ratchet up tensions with Iran, the facts aside."

5) Bush's big backtrack, of course, wasn't really a backtrack. His basic argument: What's the difference? (See yesterday's column.)

So at a point where the Bush administration needs to be taking extraordinary steps to reestablish its credibility when citing intelligence against a potential enemy, the rollout of this specious claim simply adds to the belief that they can't be trusted.

What Can You Believe?
Can any part of what the administration says about Iran's involvement in Iraq be taken at face value? Given recent history, certainly not without independent verification.

Michael Hirsh, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek weigh in with the first of what I hope will be many substantial examinations of the charges. They find lots and lots of holes.

"President Bush officially anointed a new enemy of the United States on Wednesday: the 'Quds Force.' After a week in which his administration contradicted itself repeatedly over the threat from Iran, Bush settled on what he said were the known facts. The sophisticated weapons being used against U.S. troops in Iraq 'were provided by the Quds Force,' a paramilitary arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the president said at a news conference in the East Room. 'We know that. And we also know that the Quds Force is a part of the Iranian government. That's a known. What we don't know is whether or not head leaders of Iran ordered the Quds Force to do what they did.'

"Just who are the Quds Force? And how good is the intelligence on them, really? A Newsweek investigation shows that the evidence against the Quds Force is still questionable, and that some of the key Iraqi politicians Washington is relying on most, such as Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, have had close relations with the Iranian group. . . .

"The upshot is that while the American military is blaming the Quds Force and [the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] for all sorts of misdeeds, the highest officials in the U.S.-backed Iraqi government appear to be buying weapons from them and asking for their help on security issues.

"Yet even if elements of the Quds Force are involved in weapons trafficking, it is unclear if they are being directed by Tehran or if they are freelancing. After the war in Bosnia in the '90s, some former Quds Force members were known to engage in smuggling, apparently without the knowledge of their central command. . . .

"[C]onsiderable doubts continue to surface about the intelligence presented at the Baghdad slide show, including the fact that the writing on the conventional weapons displayed was in English, not Farsi. U.N. Ambassador Zarif also says that the date markings are American-style--that is, the month comes first. 'There is every reason to believe that this evidence is fabricated,' he said. U.S. officials say the weapons were apparently built for the international market. Asked why the writing on the weapons allegedly made in Iran was in English, one U.S. intelligence official responded: 'That's a very good question.' It is one of many questions about the Quds Force that has yet to be answered."

(Note that the WaPo only has enough balls to publish him on the website, not in the paper itself.)

And looky: You can be religious and hate the war and disagree with Our Leaders! And believers can also support Dems! Will Miracles never cease??

And another great leader:

Here's GOP Rep. Don Young of Alaska on the House floor today, coming out against the anti-escalation resolution. To make his case, Young very portentously attributed the following quote to Abraham Lincoln: "Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged."

Of course, as many of you know already, Lincoln never said those words. The quote, which has been recycled endlessly by war supporters, has been thoroughly discredited. Given that the discrediting of this quote has been all over the internet for over six months, we have to ask: Did Rep. Young know that the quote was bogus, but recycle it anyway? We'll never know. He certainly seemed to think what he was saying was very profound.

Meanwhile, Faux News Channel starts a rightist rip-off of The Daily Show -- humor free! Of course, idiots are entitled to their crap to wallow in -- TV was built on such high-quality programming. And here's a quick example of FNC's mendacity. (See, FNC isn't actually a news channel so a humor show is in fact appropriate.)

And Atrios claims:

Schaller argues that Bush has pretty much destroyed everything the Republicans have spent the last few decades building. I think it might take a little bit longer for the damage to be lasting, but it looks like that little bit longer will continue to happen. None of the Republican presidential candidates are really breaking from Bush. The Republicans in Congress aren't either. It's actually weird. There's this sense that at any moment the damn will burst and they'll all be fighting over who hates Bush the most, but it hasn't happened yet.

I don't quite agree. The goose-steppers still aren't yet at a point when they can run against Our Leaders. It's not yet the time.

And worse, there's going to be a lot of screwed up policies left around that will need -- but probably won't get -- fixing. (See next post for one heart breaker that pretty will get fixed -- and probably sooner rather than later or never.)


Finally, the rightists know so much about how things should be done because they're so good at what they do. Here's the daughter of one rightist exemplar -- well, the man who made Our Leader Our Leader (instead of the guy who was elected).