For the benefit of those who can’t access the video, when Stewart congratulated Wallace, the latter asked, “you mean that we had the highest ratings?” Wallace asked. “No,” Stewart replied. “Retaking control of the House of Representatives.”
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Meet the new members of what TPM calls “the Crazy Cqucus.”
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McConnell discusses the Republican game plan. Forget about fixing the economy. They’re going to defeat Obama with repetitive attacks on health care reform. That’s the program you voted for.
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Bush now admits that he personally gave the order to torture.
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Pelosi is thinking about leaving Congress. That opens up a slew of fresh progressive possibilities in SF!
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Nicholas Christoff of the NY Times has words for Obama.
In short, Mr. Obama hasn’t mustered an argument that resonates even among the beneficiaries of his policies.
That’s a failure of politics and salesmanship, but it’s more than that. To a disconcerting number of people I talk to, Mr. Obama comes across as remote, detached, inauthentic and arrogant. All that’s deeply unfair, I think, but it’s the stark reality.
It’s puzzling — candidate Obama could be so inspiring and eloquent, while President Obama has been flat. I wonder if he hasn’t absorbed too much of Mario Cuomo’s dictum: “We campaign in poetry, and we govern in prose.”
Please, Mr. Obama! The prose needn’t be as dry as the Harvard Law Review. And we wouldn’t mind being lifted by an occasional verse of poetry.
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Addendum: No Fox News gig for Christine O’Donnell. Probably she’s too soft-spoken.
9 comments
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November 4, 2010 at 8:09 am
Erasmus
Bush would not acknowledge that he authorized “torture” because he does not consider waterboarding — a practice that some of our own military undergo — to be an instance of it. You and I and Christopher Hitchens would disagree with his definition of torture, but the fact remains that, along the spectrum of torturous activity, waterboarding is among the most benign. The French in Algeria practiced forms of truly sadistic torture, and I am not aware of our military engaging in the routine application of such grievous harm. (Isolated instances will always occur, alas.) — How harshly should we judge Bush? As in every human activity, context is all. Bush thought (like many Americans) that another large-scale attack might be imminent. He (like hard-core environmentalists) believed that an ounce of prevention (sometimes known as the precautionary principle) was preferable to a pound of terrorism. His actions are not that far from those of a driver who — to save the lives of his children — chooses to run into a cyclist in his lane when an oncoming car threatens a lethal collision. — I do not approve of Bush’s response to 9/11. I advise others to hesitate before casting the first stone.
November 4, 2010 at 8:22 am
Eric Kirk
So he sold the American soul on fearful speculation about what might happen? And that’s coming from someone with empathy!
November 4, 2010 at 8:45 am
Anonymous
bush is a liar. he knew we were not under another imminent attack. hell man, he knew sept 11 has going to happen, and sat by and read his little book. bush should be judged extremely harshly. he has killed millions of innocent people. he lied to us, and he is still lying to himself.
November 4, 2010 at 10:51 am
ChumBolly
Yes, do not cast a stone at a lying, war-mongering torturer, that needs CONTEXT! How dare you criticize Bush, he was just saving children by ordering the kidnapping and torture … ahem … “enhanced interrogation techniques” on people we KNEW were terrorists! If we already knew they were terrorists why did we torture them? Because there was bike on the road and another car and we had to save the children!
George Bush broke our laws and the laws outlined in international treaties. He ordered the torture of our fellow human beings so that Halliburton was able to keep raking in cash from government contracts, contracts, by the way, that were deliberately kept from public scrutiny.
But, “like many Americans” whomever they may be, it’s just an unsupported assertion, Bush decided that we are America and therefore we can torture anyone we wish because … well, Murka, FUCK YEAH!
Fucking criminals.
November 4, 2010 at 10:56 am
Erasmus
How could anyone know that another attack was not imminent? In general, provocations do not happen singly, and the mindset that hatched 9/11 didn’t disappear after the attack — in fact, the success of the mission would likely have encouraged other Islamists to attempt a duplication or even a surpassing of the event. As for Bush’s reading of the kids’ book: if he were in on some kind of plot, he would have acted much more manly, he would have marched out of the classroom and strutted his stuff without any vacillating. What he demonstrated was the contrary: a clueless, uncertain man who didn’t know what to do.
November 4, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Mitch
Erasmus,
It’s not just that you, I, and others consider waterboarding torture and Bush does not.
Waterboarding is torture.
We live in an era when some people think facts, as well as opinions, are negotiable based on circumstances. It is possible that George Bush is one of those people, but that does not mean that waterboarding might not be torture, or that everyone is entitled to their opinion about whether waterboarding is torture.
Up remains up and down remains down, no matter what people say on the television.
See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html for a description of the history of waterboarding as torture.
November 5, 2010 at 7:34 am
Erasmus
No need to convince me that waterboarding is torture, but the notion that others might see the matter differently cannot be ruled out by fiat. (Do we torture our soldiers who undergo waterboarding? Does waterboarding belong in the same category as fingernail removal, cutting off of body parts, and high-voltage electric shocks?) — Anyone who wants to heap obloquy on Bush is cheerleading for the right side. His actions deserve condemnation. Obama (so far) has not linked his name with torture — only with killing, the result of the escalation of the drone-attacks in Pakistan. It’s a sad fact that those killed cannot complain of being tortured, that their cases do not make fodder for human rights groups as easily as torture-victims. I will accept the abuse hurled at Bush more easily when Obama is apportioned his share of blame also. Does anyone care how many innocent civilians have been killed by drones? I know that he inherited his wars, but does that fact absolve him of blame? How much of the anti-Bush animus is political in origin?
November 5, 2010 at 2:43 pm
ED Denson
Pelosi seems to have had a change of heart. Now she is vying for House Minority Leadership – i.e. to keep her job of being in charge of the House Democrats.
November 5, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Mitch
Erasmus,
Did you read the link I posted? I’ll quote two relevant paragraphs below. The issue of facts versus opinion is important to me, because it seems to upset some when I am inflexible about facts, I guess it’s considered ornery; maybe it’s an East Coast / West Coast thing. But facts are facts. You can’t have a country prosecute people as war criminals because they used waterboarding, which is torture, and then say that the country’s President doesn’t think it’s torture, so he just has a different opinion.
For the past decade, I’ve watched how settled science has turned into “elitist liberal opinion,” and I find it extremely disturbing.
Here are the two paragraphs from the link up-thread.
“After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: “I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure.” He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. “Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning,” he replied, “just gasping between life and death.”
“Nielsen’s experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan’s military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.”