Atrios has been doing a lot of deep thinking about Rudy Guiliani the past couple days. (Poor guy. It really is above and beyond the blogging call to duty.)
If Rudy! is elected president we can mint a special coin worth exactly $9.11.It'll double as tokens to his fundraisers, of course.
In case you've missed it, here's why.
Rarely has sarcasm had such a genuinely worthy target.
It's been 2,200 days since President George W. Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."
Later, of course, President Bush later told us that he just didn't spend too much time on Osama.
That last statement, alas, has proven all too true. In a rational world, the president long ago would have been held to account for this failure.
Because he is one of the few people in our media to have the guts to point out that the Iraq war is more important than a newspaper ad -- and even have the gall to call a radical rightwinger on her inane talking points right there on the teevee.
Here's why letting people speak is often the best course of action -- even better than radical right-wing talking points seeking to silence someone. Josh Marshall writes about Iranian President Ahmadinejad's appearance yesterday at Columbia University:
I think it's hard to come to any conclusion but that Ahmadinejad was diminished by yesterday's events, not elevated. And America seemed bigger for not having cowered before him, as so many wanted to.
It is the principles on which this nation was founded that led to the United States being respected and seen as an agent for good in this world. Open political speech is one of these bedrock principles.
Alas, it is another of our founding principles the radical right has rejected.
Thank you, Paul Krugman! I also find it strange (and stunning) that so many Democrats have bought into the idea that the 2006 election victory was close one. As Krugman writes:
For some reason a couple of people who have written to me in the last few days, on matters unrelated to this post, have mentioned in passing that the Democrats won a “narrow victory” in 2006. Apparently this is conventional wisdom, what you get from reading or watching a lot of commentary. So I thought it might be worth pointing out that it’s absolutely not true.In fact, it’s quite strange how the magnitude of the Democratic victory has been downplayed. After the 1994 election, the cover of Time showed a charging elephant, and the headline read “GOP stampede.” Indeed, the GOP had won an impressive victory: in House races, Republicans had a 7 percentage point lead in the two-party vote.
In 2006, Time’s cover was much more subdued; two overlapping circles, and the headline “The center is the new place to be.” You might assume that this was because the Democrats barely eked out a victory. In fact, Democrats had an 8.5 percentage point lead, substantially bigger than the GOP win in 1994. Also, the new Democratic majority in the House isn’t just larger than any the Republicans achieved over their 12-year reign; it’s much more solidly progressive than their pre-1994 majority.
It’s just one election, and may not represent a trend (although I think it does.) But the 2006 election was, in fact, a progressive landslide.
On May 1, 2003, President Bush stood below a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared, "In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."
Thus began our occupation of Iraq. A period of time longer than the United States' involvement in World War II has since past, and President Bush still has to make "surprise" visits to Iraq.
Yet in some (neoconservative) quarters, President Bush's visit today will appear triumphant. Instead, it should focus our attention on the how the Bush Administration's war policies have failed.
After all, the security situation remains so bad that the Commander-in-Chief has to drop in unannounced more than four years after our troops won the Battle of Iraq. How is this success?
Way to go Dallas Stars (a sentence I never thought I would type). The Stars have a great marketing campaign that takes a shot at the NBA and its referee scandal. Here's the story via Tarik El-Bashir's Capitals Insider blog:
The Dallas Stars may have already taken themselves out of the running for the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy -- the NHL's award for "sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct."As part of the team's "come into the cold" ad campaign to sell seats for 2007-08, the Stars took a shot at the NBA's referee scandal on a billboard near the American Airlines Arena, the building the Stars share with the Dallas Mavericks.
The message? "The only thing our refs shave is the ice."
But Mavericks owner Mark Cuban didn't seem to mind, according to the Dallas Morning News.
"I think it's hysterical," Cuban told the newspaper. "Good for them. It's a fun ad."
Rudy Guiliani campaign advisor Tony Carbonetti issued this odd (or self-serving?) response to concerns raised by victims' families and emergency responders about Guiliani's plans to participate in upcoming ceremonies marking the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks:
"If you know Rudy Giuliani, he'd be down there paying his respects whether he was invited or not," Carbonetti said in a statement. "To say he's politicizing it -- he never would do anything like that."
Oh, Giuliani would never politicize the September 11 attacks? Just what campaign is Carbonetti senior advising? This is all Giuliani has -- the self-proclaimed "hero" of September 11, the only man who knows how to attack the terrorists.
This seems as good a time as any to encourage people to read Wayne Barrett's important Village Voice article, "Rudy Giuliani's Five Big Lies About 9/11", an expose that debunks the claims Guiliani makes on the campaign trail while politicizing September 11.
This really is despicable: military censors block out ThinkProgress.org, but keep National Review and Fox News in the clear.
Also troubling: someone in the Green Zone is distributing negatively biased biographies of Democratic Members of Congress visiting the area.
The people behind these actions should be identified and fired. Immediately.
It's been 2,175 days since President George W. Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."
Later, of course, President Bush later told us that he just didn't spend too much time on Osama.
That last statement, alas, has proven all too true. In a rational world, the president long ago would have been held to account for this failure.
