Commence, cont...

Seems to me the first tactic of the Right will be to smear O'Connor, a moderate Conservative, certainly a Conservative, as a Liberal. Sandra Day O'Connor, too liberal for America, that'll be the meme.

Which begs the question, which is worse: that the Right KNOWS they're lying and lie anyway or that the Right actually BELIEVES that O'Connor is a Liberal?

In any case, let's hope our side is prepared with facts - not that that's mattered much lately - so that when dWarf nominates an FU appointee that person's rightwiggery can't be passed off as centrist by comparison to a real Conservative now maligned as a Liberal.

MORE: I was going to make this point, but Yglesias over on Tapped beat me to it: think economics and worker rights:

There's more at stake here than your "hot-button" topics of abortion and gay rights, and more in play than the possibility that the Court will underenforce Americans' basic rights and liberties. The Republican Party has done an excellent job of obscuring this fact, but a huge element of the conservative judicial agenda concerns economics.

Josh Marshall over at TPM concurs:

But don't forget the effect in the workplace and the economy at large. The decision on who to appoint is in the hands of those who would turn the US economy back to what it was in the latter part of the 19th century, a world in which state and federal legislative action to insure the common good was hamstrung by court decisions that left everything in the hands of the marketplace.

Neat trap they've constructed: the more the Left focuses on Roe and gay rights and civil liberties the more the Right is energized, and the more the Right is energized the less attention is paid to the Poobahs true intentions. Didn't they just win an election running this scam?

I by no means say that Roe and gay rights and civil liberties are secondary concerns, but they should not be the primary concerns alone. The Left has played this game and been played for rubes before. When the Rove Administration names a neo-Nazi for the court, as much attention needs to be paid to that person's positions on business economics and workers' rights and environmental protection as that person's positions on issues in the culture war.

Commence Armageddon

O'Connor (O'Connor?) announces retirement.

This is bigger than a Rehnquist retirement. O'Connor was the sensible middle, the crucial swing. Replacing Rehnquist with another Rehnquist would be a wash. Bushco will not chose another moderate. Everything's changed. Anyone who doesn't believe that dWarf will choose an FU appointee has learned nothing over the past four and a half years.

This is the nomination that all sides have been girding for. Shitstorms are on the horizon. We only think we've seen ugly.

Al-Quagmire, cont.

From yesterday's Altercation, an Iraq is like Vietnam list:

VIETNAM 2 PREFLIGHT CHECK

1. Cabal of oldsters who won’t listen to outside advice? Check.
2. No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check.
3. Imposing country boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.
4. Unshakeable faith in our superior technology? Check.
5. France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
6. Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
7. China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
8. SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.
9. Fear we’ll look bad if we back down now? Check.
10. Corrupt Texan in the WH? Check.
11. Land war in Asia? Check.
12. Right unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.
13. Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.
14. Soldiers about to be dosed with *our own* chemicals? Check.
15. Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.
16. Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.
17. B-52 bombers? Check.
18. Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.
19. In-fighting among the branches of the military? Check.
20. Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.
21. Local experts ignored? Check.
22. Local politicians ignored? Check.
23. Locals used to conflicts lasting longer than the USA has been a country? Check.
24. Against advice, Prez won’t raise taxes to pay for war? Check.
25. Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.
26. Use of nukes hinted at if things don’t go our way? Check.
27. Unpopular war? Check.

Al-Quagmire

Herbert gets at part of it here.

What has this man and his handlers done
that gives any conscious person any hope
that the Iraqibog will stabilize much less
get better? The ultimate message of his
pathetic recitation of talking points last
Tuesday: you trusted me to screw this up,
trust me to screw it up more, and if you
don't trust me to screw it up more you hate
America.

We're accused by some of "hating the troops"
and "giving comfort to the enemy" and
"loving the terrorists more than our country."
Speaking only for myself, if not wanting to
see American soldiers blown up for the sake
of dWarf's legacy is hating our troops, I
suspect many troops would rather have my
hate than Repignican commenters' love. If not
wanting a generation of American soldiers to
be relentlessly groundbeefed in a war conceived
by false prophets of American glory is giving
comfort to the enemy, I suspect many troops would
rather have my comfort for the enemy than our
Repignican commenters' comfort for our troops.
If hating a president who has undermined America's
credibility in the world, undermined the strength
and morale of our military by engaging it in
a fool's quagmire, and who professes love for
our soldiers while ordering them to die for his
mistake, is loving the terrorists more than my
country, I disrespectfully urge our trolls to
go fvck themselves in front of the carnival
mirror through which they view the world.

Circular Justification



dWarf said: Here are the words of Osama bin Laden:
This third world war is raging in Iraq. The whole
world is watching this war. He says it will end in
victory and glory or misery and humiliation.

Think about this: if the dope hadn't diverted
resources away from trying to defeat Al-Q to sate his
warlust on Saddam then maybe he wouldn't have been
able to use Osama as his prime endorser for his war
on Saddam. dWarf is actually using his signature
failure as president as rationale for his runner-up
failure.

Our president (and Osama) has the circular logic,
the yen for the self-fulfilling prophecy, of a zealot
willing to martyr YOU for his beliefs.

CONTEST!

We don't have Best of the Blog t-shirts yet, so I don't know what we could offer other than congratulations, but here's a five-pronged contest:

How many times in his commercial tonight will he say:

*Freedom (my guess = 27)
*Liberty (15)
*Terrorists (30)
*911 (4,789)
*Grand total of the four (4,861)

I will download the, well, I suppose you could call it a speech, tomorrow and run a word search. Lord knows I won't want to read it.

Republic of Baseball

Today's blogfury is over the Republican outrage that George Soros might actually bid and win the ownership of the Washington Nationals (the ex-Montreal Expos, currently owned by Major League Baseball and up for bid for new ownership).

It'd be funny as parody, but it's not. See, nothing is more American than baseball, and if you let a Liberal own a team, next thing you know Liberals are going to start thinking they're Americans.

Coming Soon: Night of Long Knives

Last week I posted about Rove's attack on Liberals. My thesis was that one of the major goals of the attack was to warn those Conservatives that may be awakening to their stoogeness and starting to voice opinions that hadn't been cleared by Bushco censors.

Dick Cheney attacks vaunted Liberal Chuck Hagel (from the Blue State of Nebraska).

Hagel's considering a bid for 2008 Republican president nomination. Think there's at least two messages he's supposed to take from Cheney's slanderous attack?

If you think Bushco attacks against Liberals are beyond the pale, imagine what neo-con reaction will be to Conservatives who don't parrot the party line. Bushco will eat its own.

MORE: Consider this: the attacks against their own, to keep them in line, to warn them of consequences, is not primarily because of what they have already said but because of what they may say in the future as more and more of the depth of Bushco's imcompetence and depraved motives and pathological hunger for power is revealed. Bushco knows what Bushco's done, doing, trying to do. We haven't seen anything yet as far as disclosures and revelations go. Discoveries will be made that will challenge the morals of even the most devout Bush supporter.

Empire or Republic?

Please read this article in current NYRB by Tony Judt. Here's a taste:

Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially—brutally, contemptuously, illegally—abroad while preserving republican values at home. For it is a mistake to suppose that institutions alone will save a republic from the abuses of power to which empire inevitably leads. It is not institutions that make or break republics, it is men. And in the United States today, the men (and women) of the country's political class have failed. Congress appears helpless to impede the concentration of power in the executive branch; indeed, with few exceptions it has contributed actively and even enthusiastically to the process.

and

For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national "values"; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not "democracy."

The cost of empire: it requires its citizens to adopt humanity's worse instincts at the expense of its best. Which is precisely the political methodology of Bushco.