Category Archives: Politics: US

So Al Gore gave a great speech. It’s worth reading.

I sure would like to know why he didn’t do stuff like this when he was running for President.

UPDATE: The Washington Post covered the speech, which is more than most TV networks apparently did.

Daily Kos contributor “Hunter” thinks he’s spotted a sea change in inside-the-beltway political discourse, one likely to have national impacts if it really exists.

[Newsweek’s Howard] Fineman was remarkably blunt in his assertions that the “ethics” and other attacks on Murtha are being orchestrated by Karl Rove — by name — and the White House, which intends to hit Murtha with everything “necessary”. He stated directly that the White House sees everything as a political operation. He was blunt in Murtha’s record and leadership position in the war, and in attributing to Murtha the behind-the-scenes voices of many top Pentagon voices who are unhappy with both the state of the war effort and with Rumsfeld’s planning in the specific.

In short, he made it perfectly, bitterly clear that the White House itself sees Murtha as a tremendous threat, considers itself at war with Murtha, and that Rove — again, by name — intends to hit him with everything at the administration’s disposal.

And without betraying any secrets of the Washington press corps, I’d have to say that Fineman, for one, met the airways today genuinely either angry or disgusted with the effort.

… There is something different in the air, the past few weeks. Murtha has managed to tap a tuning fork that the whole war sounds off of — one I’m not sure he ever intended to find.

…

Whether or not Karl Rove survives the excesses of being Karl Rove, I have to wonder if the same crass, one-note song will play, or if the audience has changed. When the only weapon the White House is capable of using is to impugn the very patriotism and Americanness of their opponents, what happens if the reactions to that attack change?

What happens if the press decides that dissent is, after all, patriotic?

Now wouldn’t that be something.

Obligatory Bob Dylan reference.

Nice sticker. But is it true?

Nominations for Presidents even worse than GWB — if any — are now open.

I have come around to the view that GWB is substantially worse than Nixon. And also Jefferson. But is he worse than Andrew Johnson? Than US Grant? Andrew Johnson had some principles, but they were pretty bad ones on the whole. Grant was a great general but an unabashedly awful President. And there are surely some obscurely bad Presidents that I’ve neglected?

Or, I suppose, this could perhaps be no more than another example of the middle-aged propensity for the jeremiad…

Today the GOP coalition cracks up on domestic policy.

The shape of tomorrow’s (ok, maybe January’s) foreign policy crackup can be glimpsed in this piece of apostasy from a conservative military-loving Democratic Congressman, Congressman John Murtha’s turnabout on Iraq. Not only does it serve as prologue for the next act, but it increases the pressure…

As everyone who pays attention to politics knows, the outcome of Sen. Harry Reid‘s brilliant stunt the other day was a promise that a bipartisan six-Senator committee would report back by Nov. 14 — a week from today — as to the fate of the long-delayed Phase II of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the creation and use of the intelligence data that the administration cited as its casus belli, or perhaps causus belli, for the invasion of Iraq.

But here’s what I can’t find out: who are the six Senators in this group?

How Bush Visit Became the Siege Of Howard U.