Recently in Radical Right Category

I agree with Digby, and thank Richard Clarke for pointing out that the trauma of September 11, 2001, is no excuse for bad decisions made by government leaders. As Clarke writes:

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.

There should be no excusing this. Nor forgiving it. And as the evidence suggests, more investigations are in order.

We must come to terms with what happened if we hope to restore our national honor.

I am sure no one was editing the text messages being shown on Fox News Channel on New Years Eve.

At the end of an excellent post on the Bush Administration's use of torture, Digby attaches an update that gets at an important part of today's politics, one that the major media is either ignoring or complicit in allowing to fester. After recalling then-Governor George W. Bush's sadistic mocking of condemned prisoner Karla Faye Tucker, Digby writes:

And I would suggest that there is ample evidence that the Republican candidates for president this time, in different ways, have all shown a similar penchant for a nasty, simple-minded meanness or outright sadism. But the press is ignoring that once again in favor of predigested GOP spin which explores in detail such character revelations as Clinton's "brittleness" and Obama's "aloofness" and Edwards' "inauthenticity." Never mind the people who say they want to start deporting massive numbers of people because they are all diseased criminals or those who want to "double Gitmo." As far as the press is concerned, their biggest problem is figuring out which ones are the most Christian.

Because Jesus would approve of torture, rendition, and holding people without charge indefinitely. Yep, that's all over the New Testament.

Frank Rich writes yet another important column today:

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.

In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.

That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.

The fact that this is true is simply pathetic.

Earlier in his article, Rich also points out that it took only 53 "aye" votes to confirm Mukasey. Yet, we are also told to give the Democrats a break because the Republicans are holding up our agenda with a series of filibusters -- requiring 60 votes to break. In fact, a favorite phrase right now is that it takes 60 votes to do any business in the Senate.

Except, apparently, when the radical right wants to make the nation's top law enforcer a man who is not sure waterboarding is torture. Then only 53 votes are apparently required.

This is yet another example of our Senate leadership failing all of us. Why do they fail to fight against the radical right's discredited and deeply unpopular agenda?

Update: I encourage you to read this Glenn Greenwald post that goes into even more detail about all of the policies that have been stopped by Republican filibuster threats while Democrats allow with a less-than-filibuster-proof vote the confirmation of an Attorney General who could not admit that obvious torture practices are illegal.

For Mitt Romney, loyalty clearly is not all that important. Whatever one might think of the situation in which Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) now finds himself, I find Romney's decision to condemn Craig and erase him from his campaign's memory truly disgusting.

Is this really how a "person of faith" is supposed to act? Whatever happened to forgiveness?

...and the myth of Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) being a moderate should be buried, perhaps in the Rev. Jerry Falwell's office.

Can someone explain to me how Bill Bennett continues to have a role in our national punditry? Especially after this statement:

But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

A radical anti-government agenda does have its consequences.

As Media Matters thankfully reveals, Pat Robertson recently called for the assassination of the democratically elected president of another country.

What a Christian idea. The radical right strikes again.

Decemberist Mark Schmitt links to an interesting Newsweek story about the latest Jack Abramoff scandal, and notes that:

Now this is beginning to seem like the uber-scandal, the thing that brings many of the grotesque threads of the last five years together. You've got Tyco International, just after the downfall of Dennis Kozlowski and when the Bermuda-based conglomerate was trying to lobby its way back into the appearance of corporate good citizenship, without going so far as to pay taxes. You've got another right-wing hack, Flanigan, who if confirmed as Deputy AG would have some oversight over the Plame investigation, and who was paid $800,000 by the Federalist Society to write a biography of Chief Justice Warren Burger that he never produced. (Leaving the millions, um, dozens of would-be readers of such a book to grasp desperately for intellectual sustenance by rereading one of the several biographies of the even duller Justice Blackmun.) You've got Abramoff, of course, and then you have a real bread-and-butter issue, one that doesn't have to do with tribes or obscure Pacific vassals: "corporate inversions," or the practice of reconstituting a corporation as a subsidiary of an offshore entity for tax purposes. These are what John Kerry called "Benedict Arnold" companies.

This is a story worth watching closely.

President George W. Bush says:

"I made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers' money to promote science which destroys life in order to save life is - I'm against that. And therefore, if the bill does that, I will veto it.''

From today's The Note from ABC News:

At 8:30 am ET, the Senate Judiciary Committee opened its hearing to examine issues relating to protecting judges at home and in the courthouse. United States District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois Joan Lefkow, accompanied by her four daughters and two staff members, will discuss the murder of her mother and husband by a plaintiff in a civil malpractice suit which she dismissed. Others testifying: Jane Roth, United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; Benigno Reyna, director of the United States Marshals Service; Kim Widup, United States Marshal for the Northern District of Illinois; and Samuel Alba, chief United States Magistrate Judge in Salt Lake City, UT.

Perhaps one suggestion for the committee to consider is a suggestion to our United States Senators and United States Representatives (and especially House Majority Leaders) to refrain from threatening judges or from explaining away such violence just because they do not like their decisions.

It seems like a good idea to me. But then, unlike some radical leaders, I believe in separation of powers and an independent judiciary.

Think Progess gives us a baker's dozen worth of lowlights from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's career.

Dear Members of the So-Called Liberal Media:

As Atrios points out, even Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has called the radical right's end-the-fillibuster strategy the nuclear option.

So, are you really now going to enable Frist and his allies in their attempt to claim that only Democrats use the term?

Kim asked me to blog about this story when I returned from hiatus. It is a story with highlighting:

Sen. Rick Santorum collected more than $100,000 from Florida donors during the first three months of 2005, when the Pennsylvania Republican maintained a high profile in the fight over Terri Schiavo.

Santorum received the bulk of the money - $84,300 - on March 31, the day the Florida woman died, according to an analysis by PoliticalMoneyLine, a campaign finance tracking group. The $84,300 was raised during campaign stops March 29 and 30 in four Florida cities, the group said.

Now, I know the Santorum campaign claims that there is no link between the Schiavo case and his fundraisers.

Right. Avoiding such a conclusion would have been simple -- cancel the fundraisers. But I am sure the Senator has his priorities.