I swear to you there was no coordination between the previous two posts or their titles…
April Fools
A day late, but I do have two April Fools for you- John McCain and Michael Ware.
First, McCain, who continues to make a total ass out of himself by stating Baghdad is the perfect place to go for a walk, and then stages a photo-op to prove it.
Except, of course, he fails to mention the flak jacket, the helicopters, and the troop escort that got him through that walk a few miles from the green zone unmolested. Personally, I will be doing my strolling stateside. This is akin to sleeping overnight on the White House lawn and claiming that “DC is so safe you can sleep in the open and no one will mess with you!”
Second, CNN Reporter Michael Ware, who, while right to call McCain on his bullshit, has now helped to make the story about him. Red State and others are in full on outrage mode. C’mon, Michael. Be smarter.
*** Update ***
Looks like the Ware incident is completely manufactured and I am the fool. Again.
By now, you would think I would know that the more updates a Red State post has the more full of shit it is.
April Fools
Last Monday when John McCain declared, “There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today,” anyone could see what would come next. Reporters and soldiers in Iraq called McCain’s statement “way off base” or just laughed at him. Some asked which neighborhood exactly McCain had in mind.
Already stung by the news that he would have switched parties in 2001 if not for Jim Jeffords, John McCain’s place as the goat of the ’08 pres race seemed guaranteed (where’s Joe Biden?). Any serious candidate for president would have no choice but to either eat his words or step up.
A group of Republican politicians from the United States has used a shopping trip in Baghdad to argue that security is improving in the Iraqi capital.
White House hopeful John McCain and fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham have been gushing about their hour spent shopping at a Baghdad market.
Take that, Michael Ware! Or maybe not. NBC Nightly News reports that McCain, wearing body armor, made his shopping trip escorted by 100 soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships. Thirty minutes after McCain’s press conference in the Green zone insurgents peppered the site with a half dozen mortars.
Kevin Drum muses:
Seriously, just how stupid does McCain think we are? Doesn’t he realize that this kind of thing just draws attention to exactly how dangerous Baghdad still is? He’s accomplished the exact opposite of what he set out to do.
Methinks Kevin has forgotten H.L. Mencken’s quip about poverty, intelligence and the American people. News junkies like us will see through McCain’s antics, sure. But unless Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall plan on voting in the Republican primary, John McCain doesn’t really care what they think. Does anybody think that FOX News and Rush Limbaugh will choose to NBC’s report when they talk about McCain’s trip? Seriously? Significant numbers of the FOX/Limbaugh/Hannity demographic still think that Saddam played a role in 9/11, that Saddam had a nuclear program.
McCain’s trip was an April Fool’s joke, sure. I have a hard time seeing that as a bad thing when he’s catering to a base of April fools.
Convert Porn
Since conversion porn is pretty much our bread and butter here at Balloon Juice, it seems mandatory to point out that Bush uber supporter Matthew Dowd just had his official come to Jesus moment. Dowd’s complaints run the usual gamut of mismanaged war, hanging on to Rumsfeld after abu Ghraib and other screwups that would offend any red-blooded conservative. The strange part is that Dowd is not a red-blooded conservative but an ostensible Democrat, making his priorities seem somewhat skewed. Backing one of the most ideologically lockstep and nakedly partisan administrations in history barely registered as an issue:
He said that during his work on the 2006 re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, which had a bipartisan appeal, he began to rethink his approach to elections.
“I think we should design campaigns that appeal not to 51 percent of the people,” he said, “but bring the country together as a whole.”
For an administration that governs for and only for its voting “base” that essentially means that for six years Dowd had no problem with the idea of governing for 51% of the people. The other 49% includes Dowd. It would be hard to find a better definition of quisling.
Finally, food for cynics:
In the last several years, as he has gradually broken his ties with the Bush camp, one of Mr. Dowd’s premature twin daughters died, he was divorced, and he watched his oldest son prepare for deployment to Iraq as an Army intelligence specialist fluent in Arabic. Mr. Dowd said he had become so disillusioned with the war that he had considered joining street demonstrations against it, but that his continued personal affection for the president had kept him from joining protests whose anti-Bush fervor is so central.
My ungenerous side wonders about the coincidence between Mr. Dowd watching his son ship to Iraq and his flagrant flip-flop from the Bush position to John Kerry’s. How far do you have to go into the suburbs of the Bush circle before you find people with a real stake in the Iraq war? I’m sure that commenters will name a few, but I doubt that the list will run very long.
No doubt it’s just a coincidence.
***Update***
Ready for another hit? Bush family friend and staunch Republican Vic Gold discusses his new book:
“For all the Rove-built facade of his being a ‘strong’ chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times,” Gold writes. “Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots.”
We both know that you’re going to read the whole thing.
***Update 2***
Steve Benen on Vic Gold:
First, it’ll be interesting to see how Bush’s followers manage to smear a long-time GOP insider.
Ha ha. You must be new here.
Open Thread
Because I am too lazy to even pen a prank post.
Chocolate Balls
Billy Donohue and his merry gang of holy thugs are in full-on outrage mode again:
A planned Holy Week exhibition of a nude, anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ was canceled Friday after Cardinal Edward Egan and other outraged Roman Catholics complained.
The “My Sweet Lord” display was shut down by the hotel that houses the Lab Gallery in midtown Manhattan. Roger Smith Hotel President James Knowles cited the public outcry for his decision.
Matt Semler, the gallery’s creative director, resigned in protest.
The six-foot sculpture by artist Cosimo Cavallaro was the victim of “a strong-arming from people who haven’t seen the show, seen what we’re doing,” Semler said.
But word of the confectionary Christ infuriated Catholics, including Egan, who described it as “a sickening display.”
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, fumed, “It’s an all-out war on Christianity. They wouldn’t show a depiction of Martin Luther King Jr. with genitals exposed on Martin Luther King Day, and they wouldn’t show Muhammad depicted this way during Ramadan. It’s always Christians, and the timing is deliberate.”
Good thing the artist doesn’t blog for Edwards- the Donohue might have turned purple and died on the spot.
At any rate, I guess we can safely conclude that what drives Jesus nuts really nuts is Jesus’s nuts.
*** update ***
9 Months for Hicks
The details of the plea deal are out:
Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty at the Guant‡namo Bay Navy Base yesterday to supporting terrorism in exchange for a nine-month prison sentence under a plea deal that forbids him from claiming he was abused in U.S. custody.
In return, Hicks, 31, will be allowed to leave Guana‡namo within 60 days to serve out the sentence in his native Australia. He will be free by New Year’s Eve.
“They told us this was one of the world’s worst terrorists, and he got the sentence of a drunken driver,” said Ben Wizner, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Bush administration originally had sought life in prison for Hicks. But the presiding officer, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, disclosed that a Pentagon official had cut the deal.
Under the deal, Hicks agreed not to talk to reporters for a year, to forever waive any profit from telling his story, to renounce any claims of mistreatment or unlawful detention and to submit voluntarily to U.S. interrogation and testify at future U.S. trials or international tribunals.
And there you have it. One of the worst of the worst, as we are told, and even after abusing him and trying him in a kangaroo court of their own construction, the best our fearless leaders can get is 9 months. I sure feel safer now that this terrifying menace is off the streets. Maybe they should charge him with jaywalking to up the sentence?
That is how weak their case was, that is how weak this whole system is. The only security that this whole Hicks deal provides is security for the Government- Hicks can’t officially allege he was abused or talk to the press.
Pathetic.
*** Update ***
When did we become such a damned joke? You know who else is going to be forcing people to sign paperwork stating they were not abused?
Iran.
Seriously- we were told this guy and the others down there are the worst of the worst- real terrorist masterminds and vicious, murderous thugs, and that is why we couldn’t try them using ordinary means, etc. And the sentence they give this terrible menace is the legal equivalent of a wedgie.