The Candor is Enough to Knock You On Your Ass

Adam Boulton of SkyNews sat down with the President. Do not have liquids in your mouth when you read this.

BOULTON: I mean, has it been good for your marriage -- eight years in the White House?

MRS BUSH: It's been fine for our marriage.

THE PRESIDENT: Never been better.

MRS BUSH: We have a very good marriage. We both have a lot of strength. And believe me, these were years when you really needed to be really strong.

BOULTON: Yes, Cherie Blair called it the "goldfish bowl."

THE PRESIDENT: Let me say this to you about all this popularity stuff. First of all, popularity is fleeting. And I want it to be said about George W. Bush that when he finished his presidency, he looked in the mirror at a man who did not compromise his core principals for the sake of politics, or the Gallup poll, or the latest, you know, whatever. And you can't lead in this world if you're chasing something as temporary as a popularity poll.

BOULTON: I mean, you've talked a lot about freedom. I've heard you talk about freedom -- I think every time I've seen you.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

BOULTON: And yet there are those who would say, look, let's take Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and rendition and all those things, and to them that is the, you know, the complete opposite of freedom.

THE PRESIDENT: Of course if you want to slander America, you can look at it one way. But you go down -- what you need to do -- I think I suggested you do this at a press conference -- if you go down to Guantanamo and take a look at how these prisoners are treated -- and they're working it through our court systems. We are a land of law.
BOULTON: But the Supreme Court have just said that -- you know, ruled against what you've been doing down there.

THE PRESIDENT: But the district court didn't. And the appellate court didn't.

BOULTON: The Supreme Court is supreme, isn't it?

THE PRESIDENT: It is, and I accept their verdict. I don't agree with their verdict. And it's not what I was doing down there. This was a law passed by our United States Congress that I worked with the Congress to get passed and sign into law.

BOULTON: But it looked like an attempt to bypass the Constitution, to a certain extent.

THE PRESIDENT: This was a law passed, Adam. We passed a law. Bypassing the Constitution means that we did something outside the bounds of the Constitution. We went to the Congress and got a piece of legislation passed.

BOULTON: Which is now being struck down, I think.

THE PRESIDENT: It is, and I accept what the Supreme Court did, and I necessarily don't have to agree with it.

My only point to you is, is that yes, I mean, we certainly wish Abu Ghraib hadn't happened, but that should not reflect America. This was the actions of some soldiers. That doesn't show the heart and soul of America. What shows the heart and soul of America is the sacrifice of our troops willing to defend our country and liberate 50 million people, or the generosity of America when it comes to providing money for HIV/AIDS in Africa, or the fact that America feeds more of the hungry in the world than any other country. That's the true America.

Noted without comment...

Impeach Scalia, Now

For fear-mongering, I would submit to you that the time has come to impeach Justice Antonin Scalia:

In the wake of today's 5-4 decision to grant Habeas Corpus rights to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, this is what Think Progress found:

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, however, is outraged. In his dissenting opinion, he devoted an entire section to “a description of the disastrous consequences of what the Court has done today,” a procedure “contrary to my usual practice,” he admitted. Scalia adopted extreme rhetoric about the impacts of the decision, calling it a “self-invited…incursion into military affairs” that would “almost certainly” kill Americans. Some lowlights:

– “America is at war with radical Islamists. … Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

– “The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

– “Today the Court warps our Constitution.”

– “The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.”

The time has come to impeach Justice Scalia. Fear mongering is inexcuseable.

Even though he wasn't removed from the court, a Justice can be tried for his conduct. Samuel Chase is the only Supreme Court Justice to be impeached:

[Justice Samuel] Chase was served with six articles of impeachment by the House of Representatives in late 1804, one of which involved Chase's handling of the trial of John Fries. Two more focused on his conduct in the political libel trial of John Thompson Callender. Four articles focused on procedural errors made during Chase's adjudication of various matters, and an eighth was directed to his “intemperate and inflammatory … peculiarly indecent and unbecoming … highly unwarrantable … highly indecent” remarks while "charging" or authorizing a Baltimore grand jury. The Democratic-Republican-controlled United States Senate began the impeachment trial of Chase in early 1805, with Vice President Aaron Burr presiding.

Fear mongering is just another way of terrorizing the American people: It is as thought the "war on terror" needs surety bonds just to insure any sort of a victory!

Zbigniew Brzezinski:

To justify the "war on terror," the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan.

The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own -- and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself.

That is the result of five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror, quite unlike the more muted reactions of several other nations (Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, to mention just a few) that also have suffered painful terrorist acts. In his latest justification for his war in Iraq, President Bush even claims absurdly that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States.

Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation.

That America has become insecure and more paranoid is hardly debatable. A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.

Just last week, here in Washington, on my way to visit a journalistic office, I had to pass through one of the absurd "security checks" that have proliferated in almost all the privately owned office buildings in this capital -- and in New York City. A uniformed guard required me to fill out a form, show an I.D. and in this case explain in writing the purpose of my visit. Would a visiting terrorist indicate in writing that the purpose is "to blow up the building"? Would the guard be able to arrest such a self-confessing, would-be suicide bomber? To make matters more absurd, large department stores, with their crowds of shoppers, do not have any comparable procedures. Nor do concert halls or movie theaters. Yet such "security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality.

Government at every level has stimulated the paranoia. Consider, for example, the electronic billboards over interstate highways urging motorists to "Report Suspicious Activity" (drivers in turbans?). Some mass media have made their own contribution. The cable channels and some print media have found that horror scenarios attract audiences, while terror "experts" as "consultants" provide authenticity for the apocalyptic visions fed to the American public. Hence the proliferation of programs with bearded "terrorists" as the central villains. Their general effect is to reinforce the sense of the unknown but lurking danger that is said to increasingly threaten the lives of all Americans.

Justice Scalia crossed a line with his dissent, and to say of the decision of the court in dissent that "It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed" is to betray his true allegiance, and that is, not to this country, not to the laws which govern us, not to the freedom we cherish or to the rule of law but to George Bush.

It's Called Disenfranchisement

This is an expansion of the last item from last night's newswrap--and it deserves a post. EVERYWHERE. Treating some nuns like convicted felons--that's no way to show the world what democracy is supposed to look like:

About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn't have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary's Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.

The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn't get one but came to the precinct anyway.

“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, 'I don't want to go do that,”' Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

Yes, they're getting away with it. Yes, it's what they have been planning since the first day Bradley Schlozman showed his putrid mug to the public after law school. All courtesy of your Bush Appointed Supreme Court.

Explain to me again how a country that turns away old women who want to vote can lecture the world on anything anymore? Do you remember those pictures of old women in Iraq, holding up their purple fingers?



We are a nation that sends an army halfway around the world to fight an endless war on behalf of those old women in Iraq--just so they can vote and not complain while we line up the means to take their oil. We are a nation that empties the National Guard units in Indiana to do all of this--just so those nuns can be turned away without voting. All of this is the conservative wet dream, writ large, and it is destroying our country.

Did you know both Obama and Clinton voted AGAINST John Roberts being confirmed as Chief Justice? And that they both voted AGAINST the confirmation of Justice Alito? Those are some votes to be proud of. And for an excellent, older article on the mental depradations of a certain Justice Scalia, here's a little light reading for you...

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

As always, you gotta go to the Brad Blog for the real story--the new law in Indiana might have disenfranchised 43,000 people...

And don't forget skippy, too...

It's about the Judiciary, Stupid!

Tomorrow, we go to the polls to select the candidate that will be our standard bearer in the general election in November.

The Republican nomination, based as it is on their oh-so-Republican "winner take all" delegate allocations might be sewn up tomorrow. But the Democrats, being, well, Democratic and awarding delegates proportionally, will probably have to battle on for another month or so.

For me, this election distills to one solitary issue...judicial appointments.

Appointments to the Federal bench are for a lifetime. And those lifetime-tenured appointments are the real source of power over the lives of ordinary Americans. They can make decisions that affect your ability to seek recompense in the face of negligence. They can interpret laws in such a manner that your fundamental rights and the relationship between citizens and their government are fundamentally altered.

Who sits on the Federal bench is the ongoing legacy of every president, Democrat or Republican.
With Judicial appointments in the forefront, the Alliance for Justice Action Campaign has assembled a voter handbook, and spells out five questions informed voters should not merely ask, but demand cogent answers to.

1. What criteria would you use to select a Supreme Court Justice?
2. What is the best Supreme Court decision in recent history? The worst?
3. Who do you have in mind as a potential Supreme Court nominee?
4. Which Supreme Court Justice would be your role model when you are appointing a nominee? Why?
5. How can Americans make their voices heard in the White House and in the Senate to influence the judicial nomination process.
   

Keep that in mind when you go to the polls tomorrow, and in November.