Freezing Out Faux News

For the second time in less than a month, John Edwards has taken a firm stand and said he would refuse to participate in a debate sponsored by Pravda Faux News.

The Edwards campaign said Friday that it would not attend the Sept. 23 debate sponsored by Fox News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute. Officials said Mr. Edwards would participate in a debate sponsored by the institute and CNN.

“We believe there’s just no reason for Democrats to give Fox a platform to advance the right-wing agenda while pretending they’re objective,” said Jonathan Prince, the Edwards deputy campaign manager.

Think about it - Why the hell should the Democratic candidates all get together in one place, and then hand the mendacious agenda-whores at Faux a loaded gun? If Faux was a real news network, and not the officious mouthpiece of the Republican party, it would be one thing. But they are not. They are nothing more than shills for the right-wing agenda.

Good for edwards for standing up and showing leadership on this issue.

It's downright Presidential.

Gonzalez Caught Up in the Kerik Net

It has been two years since the nomination of Bernard Kerik to be the Homeland Security Secretary in Bush's second term collapsed amid rumors of corruption and financial impropriety. Now, with indictments imminent (and the possibility that the former NYC "Top Cop" will be an inmate in the near future) that nomination - and the unusual steps that were taken in an attempt to push it through in spite of the problems that quickly came to light - are being scrutinized once more.

Within days of the nomination, the background research into Kerik was revealing a lot of damning problems that would have prompted the withdrawal of the nominee in a normal administration. But as we know, this administration and *normal* aren't even in the same time-zone.

The administration instead hunkered down and tried to salvage the nomination anyway.

Alarmed about the raft of allegations, several White House aides tried to raise red flags. But the normal investigation process was short-circuited, the sources said. Bush's top lawyer, Alberto R. Gonzales, took charge of the vetting, repeatedly grilling Kerik about the issues that had been raised. In the end, despite the concerns, the White House moved forward with his nomination -- only to have it collapse a week later.

The revelations about the Kerik vetting process is probably about the last thing the embattled Attorney General needs as he prepares to face an angry Senate Judiciary Committee on April 17th. The facts plainly show that Mr. Gonzalez, then White House Counsel (preparing to face his own confirmation process as Bush's second-term Attorney General) exhibited extremely poor judgment and a willingness to push an unsuitable appointee in spite of it all.

And sadly, it's all of a piece where this crew is concerned. Read the Washington Post piece for the entire sorry tale...

Has McCain finally severed his last tie with reality?

In the Washington Post today, Senator and Republican presidential contender John McCain takes to the Op-Ed pages and spins an alternate version of reality in an attempt to bolster support for Bush's war. It is a desperate attempt to restore his own relevance, but it is too late.

He is still insisting that the Shorja market is now a safe place!

I observed that our delegation "stopped at a local market, where we spent well over an hour, shopping and talking with the local people, getting their views and ideas about different issues of the day." Markets in Baghdad have faced devastating terrorist attacks. A car bombing at Shorja in February, for example, killed 137 people. Today the market still faces occasional sniper attacks, but it is safer than it used to be.

Unbelievable! Everyone knows by now that the marketplace had been cleared of all shoppers before the visit, only the merchants remained, and the area was sealed off. A full company of soldiers, three Blackhawks, two Apache gunships, and snipers on the rooftops made it *safe* for the congresscritters to visit the market - they still wore body armor.

The very next day, 21 of the merchants were rounded up and executed, retaliation for being seen as cooperating with the Americans. And snipers once again were back to picking off civilians.

From Think Progress:

“The crack of shots fired by unseen snipers echoed on Monday through Baghdad’s wholesale Shorja market, a day after U.S. Senator John McCain held up his visit there as one sign of improving security in Baghdad.”

and

“They were just making fun of us and paid this visit just for their own interests,” said Jaafar Moussa Thamir, a merchant in the Shorja market visited by Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) congressional delegation. “Do they think that when they come and speak few Arabic words in a very bad manner it will make us love them?”

Sounds like the Iraqi’s saw if differently than the potentates, doesn’t it?

Extremist Shiite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr is in hiding, his followers are not contesting American forces, sectarian violence has dropped in Baghdad and we are working with the Shiite mayor of Sadr City.

Really Senator? Then what was this all about?

Iraqi army and police forces are increasingly fighting on their own and with American forces, and their size and capability are growing. Iraqi army and police casualties have increased because they are fighting more.

Again, really Senator? Then why all the need to call in airstrikes in recent weeks as those insurgents adapt tactics and learn to fight more effectively?

And true to conservative form – there was a blame-the-media backbeat to the tune he was singing:

I am not saying that bad news should not be reported or that horrific terrorist attacks are not newsworthy. But news coverage should also include evidence of progress.

Ah hell – now I’m all pissed off and I need a drink and it isn’t even 3:00 p.m.…So I’ll let Larry Johnson have the last word.

So, the media is losing us the war in Iraq because they refuse to tell the good news? That boys and girls is known in polite company as merde of Moo Cow. This disgusting and disgraceful lie has been repeated ad nauseum by the Bush Administration and its Republican hacks--John McCain to name one. There are, unfortunately, some in the media as well who insist that the media is just not telling us the good news. A friend of mine, Joel Mowbray, takes a whack at this topic in today's Washington Times (and please, no hateful comments for Joel, he is still willing to give the Bushies the benefit of the doubt and is not an evil soul) by arguing that Iraqis by and large say they are better off today than under Saddam Hussein.

I would argue that objective facts point to a society that is drastically and dramatically worse off:

· Iraqi doctors and dentists have fled the country in droves

· Iraqi society has become more segregated

· Electricity production lags far behind the norm achieved under Saddam

· Public safety is a joke

· Religious extremism is more widespread and women in several areas of the country are subjected to Sharia law in a way never experienced under Saddam

The Senator seems to have slipped the last of his moorings to reality. Speaking as someone who never supported him but who used to respect him, I find this very sad indeed.

A once noble man, reduced to a laughing stock. And still a prisoner of war if you really get right down to it.

Let’s Crucify a Lie and Resurrect the Truth

The truth has taken a beating lately. It’s cowering in the corner, bleeding and in need of intensive intervention. Fortunately, the McClatchy Washington Bureau is there.

The Pinnochio President has become increasingly shrill in recent weeks, as he crisscrosses the country, desperately flogging fear in an attempt to get us recalcitrant children back in line and supporting his grand adventure in Mesopotamia.

His favorite meme is still the absurd insistence that if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will just follow us here. He is still insisting that we gotta fight ‘em there so we don’t have to fight ‘em here, despite all evidence that he is 180º off. – in other words he is the exact opposite of correct – or to put it bluntly – flat fucking wrong.

Anyone with more than three firing neurons working in concert knows that he is full of shit.

Military and diplomatic analysts say the president is lying when he makes that absurd insistence. They accuse Bush of grossly exaggerating a non-existent threat when he insists that enemy forces in Iraq pose a danger to the U.S. mainland.

“The president is using a primitive, inarticulate argument that leaves him open to criticism and caricature,” said James Jay Carafano, a homeland security and counterterrorism expert for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy organization. “It’s a poor choice of words that doesn’t convey the essence of the problem - that walking away from a problem doesn’t solve anything.”

U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic experts in Bush's own government say the violence in Iraq is primarily a struggle for power between Shiite and Sunni Muslim Iraqis seeking to dominate their society, not a crusade by radical Sunni jihadists bent on carrying the battle to the United States.

Foreign-born jihadists are present in Iraq, but they're believed to number only between 4 percent and 10 percent of the estimated 30,000 insurgent fighters - 1,200 to 3,000 terrorists - according to the Defense Intelligence Agency and a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center-right research center.

Daniel Benjamin, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank, agreed.

“There are very few foreign fighters who are going to be leaving the area because they don’t have the skills or languages that would give them access to the United States,” said Benjamin, who served as the National Security Council’s director for transnational threats from 1998 to 1999. “I’m not saying events in Iraq aren’t going to embolden jihadists. But I think the president’s formulations call for a leap of faith.”

"The war in Iraq isn't preventing terrorist attacks on America," said one U.S. intelligence official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he's contradicting the president and other top officials. "If anything, that - along with the way we've been treating terrorist suspects - may be inspiring more Muslims to think of us as the enemy."

There is no guarantee that America will not be attacked again. There will never be any guarantee that America will not be attacked again. It is imperative that we get our heads around that, and stop setting our hair alight every time we see a brown person. (Hint: If you are getting on a plane, the "threat" isn't the bearded man in traditional dress who faces Mecca and prays before boarding. It is the clean-shaven guy in the leather jacket trying his damnedest to pass himself off as a Greek.)

The danger isn’t in waves of terrorists landing on American shores if we pull out of Iraq. While it is true that violence will most likely relocate, it will do so regionally. Some will go home, some will go to Afghanistan, and others will relocate to Europe, where there are established communities of Muslims to blend into. The United States is a distant fourth

[An aside: We have really screwed our European allies here. They already had problems in this regard, and now they are much worse; and heading south towards all-hell-breaking-loose on an express train, and the United States paid for the ticket.]

America will have fallout to deal with, but it will be economic and social. “The danger is not that they’ll follow us home,” Carafano said. “The problems will come to our doorstep, not the terrorists.”

Sunday Morning Spiritual: Easter Edition

Happy Springtime, everyone.

And hey - if there is a God out there - I have a couple of candidates for that Resurrection thing...

Still a Bug Hunt

After two days of heavy fighting in Diwaniya, American airpower was called in to quell the violence.

Members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (they are no longer abstaining from engaging Americans) have relocated to Diwaniya in recent weeks as the American troop presence has increased in Baghdad - because, well hey, the Americans can't be everywhere, now, can they?

The fighting started on Friday after American and Iraqi forces sealed off neighborhoods and started house-to-house searches, looking for members of the Mahdi Army. When such an operation results in two days of heavy fighting, it is quite obvious that all did not go swimmingly.

Iraqi police confirmed that seven rebel fighters were killed, fifteen more were wounded and dozens were arrested. No American casualties were reported.

I am disturbed by this stand-their-ground posture that Iraqi forces have been taking. A posture that seems to hold until airpower is called in, by the way.

I look at this through a different lens than most everyone else.

I see reason for caution. I see a resistance that is adapting and getting stronger.

I see the potential for a very, very bad day as American forces leave the hardened bases and spread out into the neighborhoods.

Thats not defeatism talking, that's realism talking. George aWol Bush is unwilling to deal with reality - and here is the real bitch of the whole deal - He isn't the one who has to deal with the reality of Iraq.

That unpleasant task is left to the 18-year-old rolling through Ramadi looking for IED's in a Hummer that may or may not have adequate armor. Oh, and the parents who bury him when Bush's grand scheme literally blows up in his face, of course.

Remember the Taliban?

Turns out rumors of their demise were greatly exaggerated. Five years after they were ousted from power, they continue to fight on and wreck bloody havoc.

Seven were killed by Taliban fighters Saturday as they engaged in a mine-clearing operation in western Farah Province in Afghanistan. The ambush killed three members of the mine-clearing team, three guards, and an Afghan woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Five were wounded.

The dead were employees of Ronco Consulting Corporation, a demining company based in the United States. The attack was the latest in a wave of violent attacks that have been attributed to Taliban fighters.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan on Saturday, U.S. warplanes strafed Taliban positions, killing several rebles and destroying a weapons cache in a cave.

So folks, here is the talking point…The next time you hear the noise machine bemoaning the Democrats as “defeatocrats” intent on losing in Iraq – remind them that we were not the ones who surrendered to the terrorists in Afghanistan to go running off to fight a vanity war in Iraq that has cost billions of dollars, thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s.