I think we all know how this is going to play out

In 2003, we saw a president who wanted to prove something to his father to resolve his childhood conflict take us into a completely unnecessary war, one which has cost us trillions in national wealth and thousands of lives.

Today we have a president so invested in proving he is no threat to the mainstream that he is going to inevitably allow the nation to succumb to a renewed recession -- or worse, simply because of his own need to belief that he can somehow transcend deep-seated differences.

Krugman, in the New York Times today:

The federal debt limit is a strange quirk of U.S. budget law: since debt is the consequence of decisions about taxing and spending, and Congress already makes those taxing and spending decisions, why require an additional vote on debt? And traditionally the debt limit has been treated as a minor detail. During the administration of former President George W. Bush — who added more than $4 trillion to the national debt — Congress, with little fanfare, voted to raise the debt ceiling no less than seven times.

So the use of the debt ceiling to extort political concessions is something new in American politics. And it seems to have come as a complete surprise to Mr. Obama.

Last December, after Mr. Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts — a move that many people, myself included, viewed as in effect a concession to Republican blackmail — Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic asked why the deal hadn’t included a rise in the debt limit, so as to forestall another hostage situation (my words, not Mr. Ambinder’s).

The president’s response seemed clueless even then. He asserted that “nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse,” and that he was sure that John Boehner, as speaker of the House, would accept his “responsibilities to govern.”

Well, we’ve seen how that worked out.

Now, Mr. Obama was right about the dangers of failing to raise the debt limit. In fact, he understated the case, by focusing only on financial confidence.

Not that the confidence issue is trivial. Failure to raise the debt limit — which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt — could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

But confidence isn’t the only thing at stake. Failure to raise the debt limit would also force the U.S. government to make drastic, immediate spending cuts, on a scale that would dwarf the austerity currently being imposed on Greece. And don’t believe the nonsense about the benefits of spending cuts that has taken over much of our public discourse: slashing spending at a time when the economy is deeply depressed would destroy hundreds of thousands and quite possibly millions of jobs.

So failure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.

Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.

So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

And the reason Republicans are doing this is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again. They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.

This fits nicely into what Bernie Sanders was saying on the Randi Rhodes Show the other day -- that the moneyed interests that have taken over our government really do not care what is left behind after their pillage, because they are already looking ahead to China and India. The notion that if the U.S. defaults on its debt, Wall Street will suffer too has been held up as a talisman against the assured destruction being held over our heads by the Republicans. Believe me, the big investors have already taken care of this in regard to their own interests...and investors who have less than billions of dollars don't even figure into this equation. Your 401(k)? Of no importance to these people whatsoever. Families being tossed into the streets? Old people dying in the gutters? Trivial. Because when people are as evil as those who currently dominate the Republican Party and their billionaire masters, it's impossible to fight them until you at least recgnize them.

In his 1983 book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, the late M. Scott Peck referred to scapegoating as the primary manifesation of evil:

A predominant characteristic, however, of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because they consider themselves beyond reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to serve their self-image of perfection.

It's easy to see why people like this take Ayn Rand as their political guru, for Randian Objectivism reinforces their sense of "specialness."

Peck goes on:

Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault.

[...]

Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat...

Look at the the Koch Republican Party's scapegoats are: Women, especially women who want reproductive autonomy. Immigrants. Liberals. Black people. George Soros. Gays. The list goes on and on. This is the Peck model made real -- evil people scapegoating others so as to pass the "hot potato" of evil onto someone else.

What Peck didn't address in his analysis was greed. The book's primary example of evil is the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre, so he thinks of evil primarily in terms of war. He presumably would make the same connection of evil with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. But the kind of evil that would deliberately destroy the economy of a once-great nation purely out of greed, because there's another emerging market just across the sea that is just waiting for exploitation is something of which even Peck never dreamed.

Nor, apparently, has Barack Obama.

Even in his speech the other day, the one that prompted the hacktacular Mark Halperin to call him a dick, Obama still remained hopeful that the Republicans would ultimately step back from the brink and compromise. When one is simply misguided, but not evil, it's impossible to fathom party leaders who would destroy an entire country at the behest of the people who finance their campaigns. But that is what Barack Obama is dealing with, and that is why if he doesn't recognize pretty damn soon that what he is dealing with is not simple political differences, but a particularly vile form of evil, then we are all completely fucked.

I think we know already how this will play out.

It's hard to believe that even as lame an incumbent as Harry Reid is losing to this crazy coldhearted bitch

There's evil, and there's crazy, and then there's Sharron Angle:

Last night, Angle sat for a grueling interview with Nevada journalist Jon Ralston, and in a key moment, she clarified her position: She said we should cut unemployment benefits to encourage those who lost their jobs to reenter the labor force at a lower level than they left it.

The key moment came after Ralston pressed Angle to clarify her earlier remarks about unemployment benefits spoiling Americans. Angle claimed she'd been misrepresented, and suggested that the problem is that unemployment benefits are so high that they discourage people from going out and finding lower lower level jobs:

What has happened is the system of entitlement has caused us to have a spoilage with our ability to go out and get a job...There are some jobs out there that are available. Because they have to enter at a lower grade and they cannot keep their unemployment, they have to make a choice now.

We're making them make a choice between unemploment benefits and going back to work and working up through the ranks of that job and actually building up a good wage again...

What we need to do is make that unemployment benefit go down, not just completely remove the safety net from them while they go out and go to work.

An incredulous Ralston asked: "If people lose their jobs through no fault of their own, as many have during this recession, Sharron Angle's solution is to cut their unemployment benefits so low so they're somehow gonna go out and find jobs that don't exist?"

Angle confirmed that this is precisely her position: "There are jobs that do exist. That's what we're saying, is that there are jobs. That those jobs are entry level jobs..."

Remember: This is a woman who's running for a job where she gets a paycheck that comes from taxpayers. Now, I don't know about in your area, but here in Bergen County, if you apply for an entry level job at the local Wendy's, and you're, say, in your fifties with over 20 years of information technology experience and a master's degree -- you are NOT going to be hired because "you'll leave as soon as you find something better" (as if there's anything better out there. I wonder what Sharron Angle would say about that?

The evil "Christian" heart of Mike Huckabee

Perhaps it's unseemly to post this during Senator Kennedy's funeral, but I think it's important to keep in mind the kind of vile, mean-spirited people that populate the Republican political establishment...and to vow to never, ever, ever let these pieces of shit ever gain power over our lives again.

Today's "honoree": Mike Huckabee:

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show, "The Huckabee Report," on Thursday that, under President Obama's health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to "go home to take pain pills and die" during his last year of life.

"[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don't have as long to live might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them," said Huckabee. "Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for."

That's the Republican meme now: Barack Obama would have killed Ted Kennedy.

There are no words for these people.

UPDATE: Let's not forget the maverickyness of John McCain, as he snubs Sen. Kennedy's widow last night:

They can change their name; they're still evil

And I shall continue to call them "Blackwater". And drunken Blackwater contractors opened fire on a civilian vehicle in Afghanistan this month:

Four U.S. contractors affiliated with the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide fired on an approaching civilian vehicle in Kabul this month, wounding at least two Afghan civilians, according to the company and the U.S. military.

The off-duty contractors were involved in a car accident around 9 p.m. on May 5 and then fired on the approaching vehicle, which they believed to be a threat, according to the U.S. military. At least some of the men, who were former military personnel, had been allegedly drinking alcohol that evening, according to a person familiar with the incident. Off-duty contractors aren't supposed to carry weapons or drink alcohol.

The incident occurred at a delicate time for the U.S., which faces rising outrage from Afghan leaders over civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes. For Xe, which is the name Blackwater chose this year to distance itself from its controversial security work in Iraq, the shooting comes as the Obama administration and Defense Secretary Robert Gates reconsider the role of military contractors, a practice that boomed during the Bush years.

The contractors were trainers hired by Paravant LLC, a subsidiary of Xe. Paravant has terminated contracts with the four men "for failure to comply with the terms of their contract," according to Xe spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell. "Contractual and or legal violations will not be tolerated," she said.

Way to win hearts and minds, fellas.

Why is this company still allowed to operate in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why is our money still going to pay this company? I realize that the Obama Administration has a lot on its plate, but this company is so unrelentingly evil there is no reason to continue using them.

These people truly are reprehensible

Don't tell ME the Republicans don't want someone to take a shot at Obama -- and his family.

From Media Matters:

First Fox Nation posts an image of a gun pointed at President Obama's head:



And now the Washinton Times joins in:


What's next, Gordon Liddy using photos of the Obamas for target practice?

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Special "Sayid on Lost can have a clear conscience after seeing what our own executive branch did" edition

Dispatches from around Blogtopia (™ Skippy):

At Bradblog, a long and thoughtful post by a man whose father was waterboarded by the Japanese during WWII: Says Ernest A. Canning: "...for the moment, if such practices are not finally brought to an end, once and for all, hopefully through accountability for those who justified them --- fixing the facts around the policy --- the President's promise that it won't happen again is little more than a vague wish."

Richard Blair warns us not to be distracted by the shiny object that is torture. The real issue is the Bush Administration's use of torture as a device to gin up a fake connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to try to justify their illegal war. This one's a must read. So is this one by Larisa Alexandrovna.

Digby gives us another reason to hate Chris Matthews.

Mark Karlin makes the case that premedited murder in the first degree would not be an outrageous charge against Bush officials.

Paul Krugman has a word for torturing people to fabricate a link between a country that did not attack us and an organization that did. (Hint: People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil">M. Scott Peck wrote about it, except that Peck believed in redemption, something that I don't think is possible for this bunch -- certainly not after watching Cheney sneer gleefully about the "good information" they got from torturing people.)

Ornery Bastard thanks Marcy Wheeler for being all over this story. (If you want one place to keep up with all this, you could do worse than bookmark Emptywheel over at FDL.

I'll have more on implications of the Bush Administration resorting to torture to gin up a case against Iraq immediately after the 9/11 attacks as soon as I have more than five minutes to do the research and put a post together. Put on your tinfoil chapeau, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

The misogyny of John McCain

Little-discussed in the foofarah over lo these past many, many days about the "Obama = Paris Hilton + Britney Spears" ad is what the slurring of these women in a campaign ad says about John McCain.

Kathy Hilton, mother of Paris, opined at HuffPo that:

It is a complete waste of the money John McCain's contributors have donated to his campaign. It is a complete waste of the country's time and attention at the very moment when millions of people are losing their homes and their jobs. And it is a completely frivolous way to choose the next President of the United States.

Hilton Mère deserves credit for speaking out, but I wish she'd shown more outrage at the subtext of this ad and what it says about a man who has daughters and essentially calls these two women "sluts" in a campaign ad. Why choose Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? Why not use Angelina Jolie or Nicole Kidman or other famous women who are tabloid fodder? Because using Hilton and Spears allows the McCain campaign to frame Barack Obama, a guy who got a scholarship to Princeton and was editor of the Harvard Law Review, as a ditzy, empty suit with no gravitas whatsoever. And toss in a little miscegenation innuendo in the bargain and you have, as I posted earlier was noted by David Gergen, one hell of a dogwhistle to the bigot constituency.

But this kind of bile directed at women is nothing new for John McCain. Let's not forget his appalling "joke" about Chelsea Clinton back in 1998, and his joke about a woman enjoying rape. Add to this how he treats his little trophy wife and his embrace of a man whose 2000 campaign slurred his own daughter, and you have truly evil, nasty piece of work -- a hollow shell with no soul left. Whatever soul he may have at one time had has been eaten away over the last eight years by his lust for the presidency, and his willingness to attack anyone who dares stand in his way. Even if they are young, sometimes troubled women who aren't even standing in his way. Because everyone is just potential collateral damage where John McCain getting the presidency is concerned.

I've been saying it for 20 years

For 20 years, I've been saying that the Bush family regards the entire country as their own private fiefdom, to plunder as they please and parcel out to their friends.

I was wrong.

They regard the entire WORLD as their own private fiefdom, to plunder as they please and parcel out to their friends.

How twisted do you have to be to send 160,000 American kids to die or be wounded and scarred for life....for THIS:

United States policy is to warn companies that they incur risks in signing contracts until Iraq passes an oil law and to strengthen Iraq’s central government. The Kurdistan deal, by ceding responsibility for writing contracts directly to a regional government, infuriated Iraqi officials. But State Department officials did nothing to discourage the deal and in some cases appeared to welcome it, the documents show.

The company, Hunt Oil of Dallas, signed the deal with Kurdistan’s semiautonomous government last September. Its chief executive, Ray L. Hunt, a close political ally of President Bush, briefed an advisory board to Mr. Bush on his contacts with Kurdish officials before the deal was signed.

In an e-mail message released by the Congressional committee, a State Department official in Washington, briefed by a colleague about the impending deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government, wrote: “Many thanks for the heads up; getting an American company to sign a deal with the K.R.G. will make big news back here. Please keep us posted.”

There are no words to describe how evil these people are.

The tipping point of evil, part II

On May 30 I posed the question: "What will it take to arouse the ire of the American people so that they demand that Nancy Pelosi put impeachment back on the table?"

Every day, as the Bush Administration racks up more crimes against the Constitution of the United States and declares itself subject to no existing law anywhere on the face of the earth, I find myself wondering: Is there a tipping point of evil beyond which a president and his administration can find themselves completely unaccountable? Is there a point where the crimes become so heinous that the will is just not there to remove the perpetrators from office because to do so would mean to acknowledge that there are times when our system just plain doesn't work?

The laws upon which this country was founded presupposed at least a modicum of good will on the part of those who would lead it. Checks and balances were built in to prevent any one individual or any one branch of government from gaining too much power. These were designed to protect us from the kinds of despotic individuals that would set themselves up as kings or dictators.

The words "no one could have anticipated..." have become hallmarks of the Bush Administration, but in the case of the way this bunch has circumvented every attempt by the Founding Fathers to make our system immune from people like them, it's clear that the men who rebelled against a king and created a new government, like the humanists they read, believed in the inherent good will of those that would seek to lead this nation. They never banked on bandits taking over and deciding that the laws codified in the Constitution didn't apply to them.

And so we find ourselves now with an administration and a party that puts its own gain and its own power not just ahead of the good of the nation, but supplanting the good of the nation, so that this country is now nothing but a fiefdom for the corporatocracy, to be plundered by those who seek ever more power and ever more money -- even if it means taking the entire country down.

And yet, Americans are still more interested in who the next Top Chef will be, or how Paris Hilton is doing in jail, or whether Angelina is pregnant again than they are in the world in which their kids will live.

Sometimes I wonder why people with children don't seem more engaged in the process, and why they don't seem to care about the crimes that their government is committing against them and their children. Is it really just about being too busy holding two jobs and taking the kids to soccer practice or is it something more? Is it a willful ignorance because to acknowledge what's happening is to be obligated to do something about it? Isn't part of being a parent and protecting your children protecting their future from those who would destroy it in the name of self-enrichment and the amassing of power?

In other words, do George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales, and especially Dick Cheney, recognize that there is a kind of criminal tipping point beyond which Americans are unable to believing their government capable? And is that why as the exact nature of this bunch becomes ever more apparent, ever more brazen, and ever more appalling, the sound you hear is only that of crickets chirping?

Last week the Vice President of the United States blatantly declared himself to be not subject to any applicable law, making the indefensible statement that "vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch."

When you think that the last president was impeached for what was said to be lying about sex under oath in a civil case (even though "sex" in the case was defined to be "sexual intercourse, so technically it wasn't a lie), it makes it even more appalling that in a country that fancies itself to be all about law and order, an administration that declares itself to be not subject to any laws gets a free pass.

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman goes through the motions of hearings, while the party he represents has shown itself to be lacking the courage to protect this nation from the criminals now sitting in the executive branch and their lackeys in the Senate and House. Instead, they, just like the president and his war in Iraq, choose to run out the clock rather than honor the many hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have died over the last 231 years defending this country by providing the oversight and accountability for which they were elected.

The tipping point of evil

A concerted Administration effort to blow the cover of a covert CIA agent involved in counterproliferation wasn't enough. Lying us into war wasn't enough. Turning the Justice Department into an arm of the Republican party to disenfranchise Democrats wasn't enough.

What will it take to arouse the ire of the American people so that they demand that Nancy Pelosi put impeachment back on the table? How high do the crimes have to get?

How about sending amputees back into combat:

In the blur of smoke and blood after a bomb blew up under his Humvee in Iraq, Sgt. Tawan Williamson looked down at his shredded leg and knew it couldn't be saved. His military career, though, pulled through.

Less than a year after the attack, Williams is running again with a high-tech prosthetic leg and plans to take up a new assignment, probably by the fall, as an Army job counselor and affirmative action officer in Okinawa, Japan.

In an about-face by the Pentagon, the military is putting many more amputees back on active duty — even back into combat, in some cases.

Williamson, a 30-year-old Chicago native who is missing his left leg below the knee and three toes on the other foot, acknowledged that some will be skeptical of a maimed soldier back in uniform.

"But I let my job show for itself," he said. "At this point, I'm done proving. I just get out there and do it."

Previously, a soldier who lost a limb almost automatically received a quick discharge, a disability check and an appointment with the Veterans Administration.

But since the start of the Iraq war, the military has begun holding on to amputees, treating them in rehab programs like the one here at Fort Sam Houston and promising to help them return to active duty if that is what they want.

Well, why not? If you're recruiting criminals and the mentally ill, why not hold onto amputees? After all, it's one less limb they have to get shot off.

Or perhaps spending $592 million dollars to build a palatial embassy in Baghdad, one that will cost over a billion dollars a year to run, as you plan to turn Iraq into the new South Korea?

Or maybe it'll be when they do Norman Podhoretz' bidding and bomb Iran to smithereens?

Or when people start dying of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease because the Administration helped out their rancher friends and vowed to fight all attempts to test all beef cattle?

Or when a child is killed with a gun because the Republicans passed an amendment to an appropirations bill 4 years ago that restricts the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from sharing crime gun tracing data with law enforcement officials and the public.

What's it going to take?

All roads lead to Rove

Surprise, surprise: Karl Rove DID pass on complaints from Republicans to the Justice Department about U.S. attorneys who refused to do the party's bidding:

The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints about federal prosecutors as House investigators declared their intention to question him about any role he may have played in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Iglesias says he lost his job as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico after rebuffing Republican pressure to speed his investigation of Democratic officials in the state.

Rove said he did not suggest that any of the U.S. attorneys be forced to resign, Perino said.

The new details about Rove's involvement in the firings emerged as the top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee declared their interest in talking to him. The committee is trying to determine whether the firings were part of an effort to exert political influence over federal prosecutions.

Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., confirmed their plans after McClatchy Newspapers reported that New Mexico's Republican Party chairman, Allen Weh, had complained to Rove and one of Rove's deputies about Iglesias. Iglesias was fired Dec. 7.

"Mr. Conyers and Ms. Sanchez intend to talk with Karl Rove about any role he may have had in the firing of the U.S. attorneys," said Sanchez spokesman James Dau.

As soon as Karl Rove denies involvement in something, you know he was involved.

It occurs to me that what we've seen in this Administration is that there is a "tipping point of evil" -- a point beyond which the citizenry becomes so paralyzed from trying to wrap its mind around the horrors being committed by its own government that consequences become impossible.

When you look at the collections of violation of the law, human rights violations, embezzlement, theft, and other atrocities committed by the Bush Administration, that there is as little outcry as there is seems mind-boggling. But it's clear, looking back at the carrying on over Bill Clinton lying under oath about a sexual liaison that should never have been investigated in the first place, contrasted to the Bush Administration's lies to get us into war, flagrant discarding of the U.S. Constitution, war profiteering, tossing of habeas corpus, tossing of the Geneva Conventions, illegal spying on Americans for no reason, and now politicizing the Justice Department, that the message has now been sent to all future presidents: If you're going to do bad things, don't screw around. You can get away with anything, as long as your wrongdoings come fast and furious, and don't let up for a minute. Because once you reach that tipping point, you can do whatever you want and the need Americans have to believe that the men who lead the United States by definition could not possibly be as evil as it appears.