In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
A bunch of quick links:
An accuracy check on last Wednesday night's debate: Attacks misleading and out of context
George says things are doing well, and that he's done a good job. Damn those facts getting in the way. Trade Deficit Soars, Jobless Claims Up
The DNC has too great videos up. Exaggeration and the really excellent and funny Not Funny (finally that damn chuckle used to hit Bush)
Voting in Florida is so screwed... the electoral vote of Florida depends on whether it is humid or not. E-Voting Machine Crash Deepens Concerns (actually if you read the article they ran the server in an unconditioned room that reached 90 degrees which again proves that having people who have no idea about computers relying on computers to guid our democracy.)
Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?UCH is the power of movies that the first image "Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the President's Men." But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.I'm of course of the opinion that Ashcroft is just trying to intimidate Judith Miller so she won't reveal to many of her sources that fed her all the bogus articles she wrote about Iraq being a threat and who in the Bush administration told her that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent.
It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.
The RNC is really terrified of free speech: RNC threatens Rock the Vote over MILITARY DRAFTThis is outrageous, but also quite indicative of scared the Bushies really are. They're threatening Rock the Vote for doing an ad campaign around the issue of the draft! Why? Because the RNC claims - GET THIS - that President Bush has said there will be no draft, so clearly it should be illegal for any organization to even publicly discuss whether there will be!Follow up: Rock the Vote tells RNC to go Cheney themselvesDear Chairman Gillespie,
The letter I received from you yesterday was quite a surprise. It struck us as just the sort of “malicious political deception” that is likely to increase voter cynicism and decrease the youth vote. In fact, it is a textbook case of attempted censorship, very much in line with those that triggered our organization’s founding some fifteen years ago.
I am stunned that you would say that the issue of the military draft as an “urban myth” that has been “thoroughly debunked by no less than the President of the United States.”
I have some news for you. Just because President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary Rumsfeld, and for that matter Senator Kerry, say that there is not going to be a draft does not make it so. Just because Congress holds a transparently phony vote against the draft does not mean there isn’t going to be one. Anyone who thinks that the youth of America are going to take a politician’s word on this topic is living on another planet.
By your logic, there should be no debate about anything that you disagree with. There’s a place for that kind of sentiment (and your threats), but its not here in our country.
- rob 8:56 AM - [PermaLink] -
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