Needlenose

Apparently to make up for his unusual absence from this weekend’s Sunday talkfests, John McCain is profiled today by Politico, which muses about his reinvention as a knee-jerk Republican partisan:

For years, McCain relished being an outsider and a maverick, a style that often led to battles with his own party’s leadership. Today, for reasons that friends and McCain observers say could range from unresolved anger to concern for his right flank as he seeks re-election to genuine dismay about Obama’s agenda, he is helping lead a fiery crusade of GOP loyalists against Democratic priorities…

Democrats argue that McCain has marched to the right, pointing to his opposition to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court after years of trying to avoid battles on judicial nominations; his damaging criticism of the Democrats’ climate change plans when he was an early supporter of cap-and-trade legislation; his attacks on AARP when he actively sought the powerful lobby’s support in the 2008 campaign.

… there was speculation that the post-presidential McCain would return to the Senate and emerge as an Obama ally, the latest turn in his “Country First” narrative going something like this: White House dreams dashed, the grizzled old politician yet again puts service over self, patriotism over party and joins with the new young president to guide America through a crisis.

It seems clear, though, that winning another Profile in Courage Award and the approval of elites by following such a course is not what McCain has in mind.

Of course, McCain is hardly losing “the approval of elites,” nor does he have any reason to fear that happening, if his near-omnipresence on TV’s political gabfests is any indication.   Instead, he’s seeking what he’s consistently sought over the past couple of decades — attention.

And Christina Bellantoni at TPM has a story this morning explaining why the GOP has adopted a conscious strategy of encouraging him, making him “the front man” in opposing Democratic healthcare reform efforts:

A Republican staffer who worked for McCain in 2008 said the party spent “millions of dollars bolstering his national image,” so it makes sense for him to be the go-to guy.

“Does anyone know who Mitch McConnell is?” the staffer asked.

This, by the way, would be the same conscious strategy that Politico is doing its small part to boost by treating McCain’s “emergence” as an Obama critic as an objective news story.  But I suppose that’s no surprise, either.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

After years of shameless banner-carrying for the war on Islam and associated Shrubya apologia, the dumbass blogger of  Little Green Footballs says that now the American right wing is too extreme even for him!  The punchline is at the bottom of the article:

“[Charles] Johnson told me that he’d never considered himself a ‘conservative.’”

Yeah, I’ve never considered him a conservative either – the word that springs to my mind is ‘reactionary,’ or ‘war-monger.’

Trial by Monster Truck

I can’t determine which is crazier – the claim that Obama shouldn’t be President because he wasn’t born here, or the belief by a large majority of Repugs that he didn’t wind because little old ACORN managed to steal 9.5 million votes.

Are they stupid, crazy or does this just demonstrate the success of the big lie technique as applied by Faux News and the Wrong-Wing Media Echo Chamber?  Or all three?

Combine this with the obvious popularity of Caribou Barbie among the wingnut set, and you come to realize that Idiocracy is closer at hand than 500 years in the future.

Maybe we could make the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial more popular with the Palin crowd by including monster trucks, flamethrowers and chainsaws.

*Update 11/24/09* case in point:

…if Rupert Murdoch cuts off their links to WSJ and their other sources of content?   I guess they’ll be limited to Glenn Beck YouTube clips and Drudge dreck.  Cut ‘em off Dark Lord!

Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post attended the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh yesterday, and wrote this about President Obama’s speech there:

In a fiery speech to the nation’s largest labor federation, Obama urged members to get behind his proposal to overhaul the health-care system, which he vowed would pass in the next few months. To his audience’s satisfaction, he reiterated his support for including a government-run insurance plan, or public option, among the choices for consumers — a top priority for AFL-CIO leaders. And he dropped some of the language he used in last week’s health-care address to Congress in which he seemed to play down the importance of the public option.

But Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times was also there, apparently in the same convention hall but a different world:

A week after he asked Democrats in Congress to support the outlines of his health care plan, Mr. Obama made a similar but broader case to union audiences here and earlier Tuesday in Ohio. . . .

Yet despite the thunderous applause he received, his mentioning the term “public option” only once during a 35-minute speech at the convention did not go unnoticed. Many delegates carried signs and wore T-shirts declaring that a government-run insurance program was a nonnegotiable piece of health care legislation.

I suppose this is better than MacGillis and Zeleny getting together and deciding among themselves what the approved spin should be.  But still…

Stuart Taylor, Jr., stalwart defender of oppressed white males

Via Atrios and Adam Serwer at the American Prospect, Stuart Taylor, Jr., of the oh-so-overpriced-respected National Journal has decided to delve into Sonia Sotomayor’s undergraduate student days in hopes of derailing her Supreme Court nomination:

Princeton University was guilty of “an institutional pattern of discrimination” against Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, then-sophomore Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a letter published in the May 10, 1974 edition of the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. [. . .]

. . . Sotomayor’s parents had moved from Puerto Rico to New York in search of better opportunities. Those opportunities ultimately came to include her admission to the university that she so sharply attacked. [. . .]

. . . Some may see the fact that Princeton awarded Sotomayor a summa cum laude degree and the prestigious Pyne Prize when she graduated in 1976 as evidence of her unparalleled brilliance in overcoming a “total absence of regard, concern, and respect” for people such as her.

And some may see Sotomayor’s letter as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities.

Wow. Personally, I look forward to Mr. Taylor extending his investigation of Ms. Sotomayor’s past into her junior high school years. Really, why stop at a letter she wrote when she was 19? Surely she did something earlier in her teens that would disqualify her even more!

Also, although my windbag-to-English translation book isn’t handy at the moment, I wonder what “she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities” really means to Taylor — perhaps something like, “We let you in — shut up and be grateful”?

Apparently, uppity women and minorities make Mr. Taylor uncomfortable by not knowing their place.

(P.S. In a comment on Taylor’s article, Michael Bérubé notes that current Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito was a “former member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, the group that was formed as a reaction against the admission of women and minorities in the first place.” No doubt the kind of guy Taylor feels is more respectful of the great institution he attended.)

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Via Raw Story, another media figure has had to learn the hard way that water torture — excuse me, waterboarding — really is torture, after all:

Chicago radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided he’d get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn’t torture. It didn’t turn out that way. “Mancow,” in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul.

… “It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow told listeners. [...]

… “If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it,” he said.

Mancow joins Christopher Hitchens and at least two other journalists in learning what Steve Benen points out should be obvious to anyone (“If this wasn’t torture, we wouldn’t have done it. The whole point is to do something so horrific that the detainee would feel compelled to give up information.”).  But even if this is the least efficient way in the world to teach people morals, maybe in these times we have to settle for what we can get.

Matt Yglesias nominates Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard to be next in line for personal education, but I think most of the rest of us would agree the most worthy “volunteer” is Sean Hannity of Faux News.

However, I’ll hasten to add that I understand those who argue that these grotesque experiments should stop. First of all, waterboarding is wrong.  It’s torture, and that’s nothing to joke about.  Even worse, the more people think of it as something that’s “cool” to try, the greater the odds that some teenager somewhere will do it carelessly and die.

Even so, there’s a point to calling the bluff of the posturing phonies who advocate torture publicly.  As anyone familiar with framing understands, the purpose of their argument is to shore up the right-wing pose of being morally self-assured tough guys who are willing to do what it takes to defend America.

The truth, which isn’t brought up nearly often enough in the cable back-and-forth, is exactly the opposite:  At a time when America was tested, these cowards folded, throwing in the hand on the precise values they should have been protecting.

So I’m not above rude tactics in pointing out their weakness, their irresponsibility, and their hypocrisy.   If Sean Hannity and others won’t back up their talk about waterboarding, I’m fine with humiliating them using the same derisive language they’ve been aiming at the left for years.

They’re cowards, and moral failures.  And they need to be told that to their faces.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Matt Yglesias caught this bit of double-talk about the Rod Blagojevich indictments coming from the Washington Post’s Shailagh Murray in an online chat yesterday:

There isn’t a reasonable person around who thinks this scandal will taint Obama in any meaningful way, but at the very least, it reminds people of the political world from whence he came. This story could be a useful preamble to something bigger down the road.

Seeing Murray’s eagerness to tolerate phony claims of corruption in the hopes they will prove “useful” in reporting on a hoped-for presidential scandal later, I immediately flashed back to her comments in the summer of 2007, reacting to the actual corruption of a President commuting the sentence of a criminal in his own administration:

Yaawwn. That’s my view of the Libby flap. What on earth did people expect Bush to do?

Apparently her enthusiasm for White House scandal depends greatly on which party is occupying the White House.

Via Think Progress, Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio.com reports on a conversation with perversely influential moron Bill Kristol (whose career arc has taken him from being the “brains behind Dan Quayle” to the impressive dual misadventure of helping bring America both the Iraq war and Sarah Palin):

I asked Kristol about the rumors that he might be leaving the New York Times op-ed page after his contract expires next month. Did he expect to have it renewed?

“I don’t think I’ve had that conversation yet,” he told me.

You don’t think you’ve “had that conversation yet”?  You’d think a lifelong neoconservative would be a more convincing liar.  Bercovici continues:

Okay — but would he like to have it renewed? “I’m ambivalent. It’s been fun. It’s a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on. But I haven’t really focused on it.”

Yep, he’s toast.  Assuming this firing non-renewal comes to pass, though, it would constitute an event so unlikely many observers considered it physically impossible — a conservative actually being held responsible for failure.

From Howard Kurtz’s Monday column for the Washington Post:

Fox News is expected to announce today the hiring of a new contributor, a veteran national security correspondent who has shared a Pulitzer Prize.

Her name is Judith Miller, and she is nothing if not controversial. Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after testifying in the trial of former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby that he had leaked her information about a CIA operative. Miller’s conduct in the case, which led to her serving 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify, drew rebukes from the Times executive editor and some of her colleagues.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor’s note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had “become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.”

Miller will be an on-air analyst and will write for Fox’s Web site. “She has a very impressive résumé,” says Senior Vice President John Moody. “We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped. It’s certainly something she’s going to be associated with for all time, and there’s not much anyone can do about that, but we want to make use of the tremendous expertise she brings on a lot of other issues. . . . She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for.”

Given her background in ideologically motivated snipe hunts, Miller seems like a perfect fit to join Fox News’ round-the-clock coverage of ACORN’s alleged vote-fraud activities.