Category: Politics

Kudos to Atrios (most days, my favorite blog) for pointing me to this Krugman Quote of the Day on jobs:

In April, the economy added 288,000 jobs. If you do the math, you discover that President Bush needs about four years of job growth at last month’s rate to reach what his own economists consider full employment.

The bottom line, then, is that Mr. Bush’s supporters have no right to complain about the public’s failure to appreciate his economic leadership. Three years of lousy performance, followed by two months of good but not great job growth, is not a record to be proud of.

POTUS gives his latest speech in about 2 hours. I’ll be out to dinner with some family members & will thankfully miss it. Given what’s been proposed to the UN today, it’s pretty easy to guess what will be in the speech tonight anyway.

Instead, here’s a nice article by Carl Bernstein about why Bush must go, and why the GOP need to get off their collective butts and do the kicking. Not that they’re likely to do so.

Daily Kos catches the Bush team in another lie – this time, about why Bush did a face plant while out on a bicycle ride.

In short, when asked why Bush fell, White House spin control droid Trent Duffy said: “It’s been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose.”

There hasn’t been significant rain in Crawford TX in 10 days.

It’s so stupid and trivial, that on the one hand, you might think, ‘Who cares?’. On the other hand, why would you lie about something so trivial, and so easy to catch as a lie, unless you have no respect whatsoever for the truth?

I know there’s a war on and that there’s a lot more to get upset about in this country than why our presidnet fell off his bicycle. But this is symptomatic of the crisis our country is in. If you can’t trust the White House Press Office to tell the truth about something so trivial as this, how can you trust them about anything they say?

Thought I was done with blogging for this day but found one last headline that makes me feel sick: Son mistreated to make father talk.

The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.

And what would have happened to the son if the father had not broken down? We’re supposed to be better than this.

Greetings from New York City. It’s warm and muggy.

Quote of the day, from Senator Joseph Biden by way of the Guardian:

“With at least 82% of the Iraqis saying they oppose American and allied forces, how long do you think it will be before the Iraqi government asks our departure?”

Ouch.

To be honest, I couldn’t finish reading Seymour Hersh’s expose in the New Yorker. It’s way too depressing.

One thing that does bother me a little is that in the tradition of Watergate, few sources cited in the article are identified by name. Not surprising, given the subject matter, but it does make me a bit uneasy. I’m going to give Hersh and the New Yorker the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that if they’re going to publish accusations like this, then their sources are multiple and significant.

The DOD, of course, put out a standard denial (thanks to Talking Points for the link). It’s interesting, though, that although the spokesperson claims that the article is ‘filled with error’ she only cites one relatively minor point as an obvious error. One would think that if Hersh had truly made some ‘dramatically false assertions’ she’d have more specific corrections to make than just that one.

I’m not completely naive. I know that gathering intelligence is a hard business. But I think there are some lines a civilized nation should not cross unless under the most extreme of emergencies – and as far as I can tell, Abu Ghriab was not one of them. It wasn’t even close.