When Footwear Attacks

The Hot Rod lives vicariously ...

Quote of the Day

The New York Times Bob Herbert today:

Does anyone think it’s just a little weird to be stampeded into a $700 billion solution to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression by the very people who brought us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

I am not going to pretend like I completely understand the current financial crisis, its causes, and all of its implications. And that is why what is going on right now scares the shit out of me.

The one thing I do know: I am getting a very, very queasy feeling in my gut as the architects of the Bush's Iraq adventure, and the authors of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" put their point person, an ex-Wall Street insider, out in front of this mess:

(a) to ask for $700,000,000,000 from taxpayers ...
(b) to buy junk securities for well above market value, and also ...
(c) pay the crooks from Wall Street who got us into this clusterfuck to administer this ingenious plan.

And if that weren't enough ...
(d) to pay the ransom, -er, I mean, pass the law by Friday ...
(e) with no strings attached, and further ...
(f) to prevent regulatory oversight, and, capping it all off...
(g) giving the middle finger to the branch of the federal government set up under Article III of the US Constitution: preventing any review by the courts.

And why should we agree to this? "Trust." Just trust us.

Yeah, right. What was that cliche that Dubya Bush mangled about getting fooled once and so forth ???

Ah yes...



Trust??

One of my fave's, The Rude Pundit, draws some eerie Iraq parallels here.

The Sarah Palin Files, Pt. 12

Palin apparently views the war in Iraq (and the one in Afghanistan?) as being a war waged to acquire energy supplies.

Is this woman out of her mind? She can't really believe this, can she?

I think we'll have to try to come up with a TTT "Palin Gaffe-o-Meter."

I'll try to work on this ...

Through The Lens of History

This is very interesting, five and a half years later. This is from February 2003, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq.

The clip is probably on YouTube as an example of the abusive and slanted questioning at Fox News, which is true and all well and good. I think the underlying substance is what is really interesting. Fox is basically assuming as absolute truth the case against Iraq that the war criminals in the Bush administration was selling at the time. I found this very interesting to see which side was proven right by history. Beyond that, I'm not going to comment; the clip speaks for itself:

John McCain, Liar (the second report of the day)

On McCain's claim of "victory."

McCain Strategist: "We're Fucked."

Attribution to the title of this post, here.

These Maliki comments are going to be a gamechanger on Iraq. McSame can't paint Obama as out of touch on Iraq when the democratically elected prime minister of Iraq endorses Obama's withdrawal plan and says that John "Maybe a Hundred Years" McStay's approach is only going to cause further troubles.

Another fine analysis here (also, I like how the Bush White House released Maliki's comments to the press, when they actually meant to circulate it internally; if that isn't representative of the ineptitude of the Bush presidency, nothing is).

This Is A Fine Mess You've Gotten Yourself Into Now, John McCain...

You gotta love it: Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki says that the Iraqis want US troops out of Iraq and that Obama's 16-month time table for withdraw - the one John McStubborn and those of his ilk call "dishonorable," a "surrender," and overall un-American - sounds pretty reasonable to him and his countrymen.

I think I just heard a toilet flush somewhere in the McCain camp. Here's a good analysis of what it all means. Money quote:

On Iraq, McCain begins with a huge disadvantage: he advocated the invasion of Iraq, which most Americans feel was a mistake. (He's always urging voters to look back and consider who showed good judgment on the surge, but he doesn't want them to look too far back, lest they find themselves thinking about who showed good judgment on the invasion.) He therefore has to argue something like this: now that we're in this mess, we need someone we can trust, someone who will be able to manage this catastrophe as well as possible. McCain is solid. Obama is untested, inexperienced, risky. There was always a problem with this story: namely, it involves saying that we should trust McCain, who made the wrong call on invasion, over Obama, who got it right. But sowing doubts is pretty much all McCain has.

This got a lot harder last week, before Maliki's comments.

First the Bush administration started [] negotiating with Iran, as Obama had suggested; then McCain essentially adopted Obama's position on Afghanistan; then the Bush administration agreed to what they called a "general time horizon"for withdrawing troops. (Wait: now it's "Joint aspirational time horizons"!) McCain and Bush seemed to be adopting Obama's positions all over the place. For a risky, inexperienced novice, Obama seemed to have gotten a lot of things right. And for an experienced, serious old hand with a command of foreign policy, McCain seemed to be spending a lot of time playing catch-up. And every time Obama gets to say, in effect, 'Hi, John! What took you so long?', McCain's only winning message gets that much weaker.
(McCain was also starting to undercut his own message. Both his budget plan and his Afghanistan plan relied on troops being withdrawn from Iraq. A lot of troops. McCain was already counting on people not noticing this.)

So even before Maliki said a word, McCain was in a pretty tough position. Two weeks ago, he had some pretty sharp differences with Obama. McCain wanted to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and cast any idea of leaving as dishonorable, as a way of risking the gains of the surge in order to embrace defeat. Obama wanted to withdraw from Iraq and send more troops to Afghanistan. By two days ago, McCain was left with basically two messages: (a) timetables would be a disaster, and Obama's embrace of them just shows how naive he is; and (b) McCain got the surge right and Obama got it wrong. It's a pretty weak foundation for a candidacy.

It was against this backdrop that Maliki comes out in favor of Obama's proposal to withdraw combat troops from Iraq in 16 months (though he is careful not to endorse Obama.) McCain has to call Obama naive on Iraq. But that is a lot harder to do if Maliki agrees with Obama. It's hard to say that Maliki is insufficiently familiar with the facts on the ground. It's hard to call him naive. And whatever you think of Maliki's motives, it's also a lot more complicated to make the case that he doesn't know or care what's best for his country. In Presidential elections, uncomplicated cases are key. "Obama has only been in the Senate for three years; he doesn't have the experience to get Iraq right" is an uncomplicated case. There is no such uncomplicated explanation for Maliki's being wrong.

File Under: Actually, No, It's Not Satire

George Bush gives up golf as a way to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

No, seriously.

The Decider explains his decision:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to
acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.“I don't want some mom
whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he
said.

* * *
Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United
Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top
U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.
“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a
result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing
golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course
and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’"

Good grief.

UPDATE: Found this great pic at the Huffington Post:

UPDATE 2: Olbermann, as usual, nails it. Video and transcript here. Video embedding later.

UPDATE 3: As promised, the video: