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by John Cole| 2 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
John Cole started Balloon Juice early in 2002. Those who have followed along know that this has been quite the journey.
by John Cole| 2 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
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by John Cole| 22 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
The Dodd remarks have received no press other than Fox News, Roll Call, and the Washington Times, which, given the belated media response to the Lott comments, is surprising. Well, maybe it isn’t- that (D) at the end of an elected official’s name really can serve as a remarable shield.
What is surprising, however, is that I have not seen one liberal blogger comment on the affaiir, which leads me to pose this question:
If a liberal congrssman yells N—-R in the woods, would Atrios and Josh Marshall hear it?
Let’s do a quick rundown. Lott’s remarks about former Kluxer and separatist Presidential candidate Strom Thurmond:
“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
Dodd’s remarks about former Klan member and current Senator Robert Byrd:
“It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. Robert C. Byrd, in my view, would have been right at any time,” said Senator Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.
I guess someone will have to explain the nuance and show me how these remarks are appreciably different.
Oh, and not that I am counting, but Mr. Talking Points penned not one, not two, but TWENTY-FIVE (25) pieces about the Lott affair (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25). Oh, and btw, those 25 pieces were written in an eight day period. To be honest, after 16 December 2002, I quit counting Marshall’s bloviating.
Fair and balanced, indeed. For extra giggles, here is a fun quote for you to chew on:
“If a Democratic leader had made [Lott’s] statements, we would have to call for his stepping aside, without any question whatsoever.” – Senator Chris Dodd, (D-CT)
Fair and balanced.
*** Update ***
More on the issue…
by John Cole| 3 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
This is so transparent it is laughable:
A number of readers have written in to ask whether the “Joshua Marshall” who is the registered owner or registrant or whatever of ‘bushflipflops.com’ is this Josh Marshall.
Well, yes. It is.
About a month ago I registered the domain.
In large part, my immediate motivation was to make sure someone else didn’t get it who, shall we say, didn’t have a true and sincere interest in exposing the president’s long list of broken promises, changed positions, and highly disparate interpretations of the same facts.
My plan was either to set the site up myself or hand it off to some other organization or individual who was interested in setting up a site dedicated to the president’s distinguished record of flipfloppery.
I’m already so pressed for time that I’m really not going to have time to do anything with it myself. So if you’re that organization or individual, drop me a line. I’ll pass it on for the $35 registration fee or, just as likely, for nothing at all.
A novel way to get your hatchet jobs implemented while maintaining your ‘journalistic integrity,’ Josh.
by John Cole| 35 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
By now you have heard Teddy Chappaquiddick’s speech blasting President Bush, which, I must admit, was rather uneventful for me. it contained the same rhetoric the senior drunk driver from Masachussetts has employed for about the last two years, and was in my mind rather unremarkable except that it inspired the folks over at Tacitus’s site to come up with a minor quip, as they labeled the speech the Ted Offensive. If you have not seen or heard the speech, here is a bit, with the relevant part in bold:
By going to war in Iraq on false pretenses and neglecting the real war on terrorism, President Bush gave al-Qaeda two years — two whole years — to regroup and recover in the border regions of Afghanistan. As the terrorist bomings in Madrid and other reports now indicate, al-Qaeda has used that time to plant terrorist cells in countries throughout the word, and establish ties with terrorist groups in many different lands.
By going to war in Iraq, we have strained our ties with long-standing allies around the world — allies whose help we clearly and urgently need on intelligence, on law enforcement, and militarily. We have made America more hated in the world, and made the war on terrorism harder to in.
The result is a massive and very dangerous crisis in our foreign policy. We have lost the respect of other nations in the world. Where do we go to get our respect back? How do we re-establish the working relationships we need with other countries to win the war on terrorism and advance the ideals we share? How can we possibly expect President Bush to do that. He’s the problem, not the solution. Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam, and this country needs a new President.
Predictably, the Vietnam reference has created quite a stir, and when I heard the Vietnam line- it was immediately clear what Kennedy was attempting to do. Kennedy wanted to call Bush a liar, and Kennedy wanted to invoke the failure, humilation, and loss of America’s worst debacle. With a reference to Vietnam, he accomplished both.
Not so, says Mark Kleiman– he was just trying to say that Bush was deceiving the country in the manner that LBJ and others did during the Vietnam era. Now granted- Mark typed this, so I don’t know if he did so with a straight face, or maybe he just wanted another chance to join the
Vietnam wa/is a complex era, and for a Senator of Kennedy’s prominent stature (pun intended) to invoke Vietnam is to conjure up a large number of memories. Chief among them is not deceit. Chief among them is the loss of 50,000 Americans in a war that many later came to believe was wrong (as many believed it was wrong at the time, as well). If kennedy wanted to conjure up the image of deceit, betrayal, and dishonesty, there is another standard-bearer that he could have chose from the same era:
Watergate.
But he chose the words he used for a reason, and despite the best efforts of his spinmeister’s in the blogosphere, people understood what he meant. And, I might note, others overseas understood what he meant:
Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand anti-U.S. Shiite Muslim cleric, warned the United States on Wednesday that Iraq would become another Vietnam-like conflict if Washington did not transfer power to ”honest Iraqis.”
The cleric whose militia followers have battled coalition and Iraqi security forces across the country for days accused members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council of being ”collaborators” and said ”they do not represent the Iraqi people.”
”I call upon the American people to stand beside their brethren, the Iraqi people, who are suffering an injustice by your rulers and the occupying army, to help them in the transfer of power to honest Iraqis,” al-Sadr said in a statement issued by his office in the southern city of Najaf.
”Otherwise, Iraq will be another Vietnam for America and the occupiers,” the statement said.
Kennedy’s careless rhetoric is now being used as a rallying cry for a despicable Islamo-fascist who represents the opinions of an extremely small minority of the population of Iraq, and whose troops are currently engaged in hostilities with our men abroad. Of course, I fully expect that by pointing this out, I will be accused of trying to ‘stifle dissent.’
Hardly- Kennedy had his say, he said what he meant and presumably meant what he said, and now it is being used as agitprop in a battle against our men and women. No number of excuses from Kleiman and Kennedy can evade that.
*** Update ***
I just finished typing this- and then the Fox News panel has the same discussion.
by John Cole| 43 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I am about as anti-tax as is possible, but this sure does stick in my craw for some reason:
More than 60% of U.S. corporations didn’t pay any federal taxes for 1996 through 2000, years when the economy boomed and corporate profits soared, Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal reported, citing the investigative arm of Congress.
The disclosures from the General Accounting Office are certain to fuel the debate over corporate tax payments in the presidential campaign. Corporate tax receipts have shrunk markedly as a share of overall federal revenue in recent years, and were particularly depressed when the economy soured. By 2003, they had fallen to just 7.4% of overall federal receipts, the lowest rate since 1983, and the second-lowest rate since 1934, federal budget officials say.
Fix the damned tax code. Pronto. If I am way off base here- explain to me why these corporations shouldn’t have to pay SOMETHING.
by John Cole| 16 Comments
This post is in: War
Only a fool would deny the obvious- things are a bloody mess in Iraq. However, I think things are not as bad as they could be, and I never thought this would be easy, so I remain hopeful and keep praying for those men and women in harm’s way. Really- what else can I do?
by John Cole| 4 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
I hereby declare the 9/11 Commission a waste. What may have been a useful endeavor to examine intelligence shortcomings and institutional problems in the pre-9/11 era has now effectively been so lost in partisan finger-pointing (here is the latest installment)that I really couldn’t give two hoots in hell about their conclusion anymore.
I know what happened- we didn’t take terrorism seriously enough, in either administration, and we got hit hard by a group of savages. The questions that we need to ask now is are we doing enough and are we doing the right things.