"Rahm and Obama have turned you into a guilty, weak, self hating liberal"

By GottaLaff

(via)

Yesterday Paddy and I posted a piece called "Democrats Hate Success" that stirred things up a little, both here and on Twitter.

Below are some tweets I got from a fellow Democrat. I won't mention his name because my intention isn't to call him out specifically, or to butt heads, or provoke him into yet another uninvited argument by singling him out. This is not personal.

When I received these tweets, my responses were along the lines of, "I don't engage in fights on Twitter, thanks for your input, I agree with some of your points but not your methods, you're proving my point by name-calling", etc.

We often get baiting comments here at TPC, as well as on Twitter. I have no problem with anyone expressing his/her views, and as I told this tweeter, debate is healthy, but divisiveness is more destructive than helpful.

Let me expand slightly: Insults won't change anyone's mind. Hostility and name-calling alienate. The last thing our party needs is infighting. Express your views respectfully, stand up for your beliefs, but remain civil and accept that there are two sides to every argument.

And be accurate. Making faulty assumptions about someone else's point of view only antagonizes and/or causes disengagement, which, one would think, is not the desired effect.

Here are the tweets from yesterday, with only names removed:

You realize you're attacking Democrats, right? You support the "Cadillac tax"? Did you support it when McCain proposed it?

Bullies like [tweeter] LOVE it when you attack progressives. And you're making progressive policy seem like a wild dream.

It's not really respectful disagreement. And if you talk about 'how', please talk about the procress of this #hcr bill.

I think you're not seeing how Rahm and Obama have turned you into a guilty, weak, self hating liberal.

It's not name calling - Obama and Rahm have cowed you and others into attacking progressive positions and progressives.

Well, you know I'm fan of yours and like you. Please look at how the unions actually got some results. Wasn't by being quiet.

Well, it's true. One of the worst things about what Obama has done is the rift he's opened among progressives. It sucks.

[To a third party] Saying 'attacked' by @GottaLaff was a wrong choice of words. I think she's worn down by the whole thing.

I meant 'not your style' - I meant that you're not an attack person, that's all.

Others really got into it with him, but I don't enjoy fighting, especially when it's pointless. And the author of these tweets and I are still on good terms. Again, I'm not condemning his passion, I just don't see the value or effectiveness in his modus operandi.

Those of you who are regular readers realize I'm far from being worn down. He was right about my style, though. I save my attacks for snarky political posts, not personal ones on fellow Democrats.

So by baiting and presuming, he not only showed how little he knows me (how many times have I been called out in Comments for criticizing Obama?), but also made me want to dig my heels in more, not suddenly get an epiphany: "Gee whiz! He's right! I'm convinced! What could I have been thinking? I AM a guilty, weak, self-hating liberal! I see the light!"

I understand the frustration of so many current and former Obama supproters. What I don't understand is why anyone would feel that aligning themselves with Republicans is going to work to our advantage.

BushCo divided over torture; What, on how vs. when?

By GottaLaff

The only surprise here is that these criminals aren't in prison yet:

Most news accounts of the C.I.A. program have focused on how it was approved and operated. This is the story of its unraveling, based on interviews with more than a dozen former Bush administration officials. They insisted on anonymity because they feared being enmeshed in future investigations or public controversy, but they shed new light on the battle about the C.I.A. methods that grew passionate in the second Bush term.

The consensus of top administration officials about the C.I.A. interrogation program, which they had approved without debate or dissent in 2002, began to fall apart the next year. Acutely aware that the agency would be blamed if the policies lost political support, nervous C.I.A. officials began to curb its practices much earlier than most Americans know: no one was waterboarded after March 2003, and coercive interrogation methods were shelved altogether in 2005.

Yet even as interrogation methods were scaled back, former officials now say, the battle inside the Bush administration over which ones should be permitted only grew hotter. There would be a tense phone call over the program’s future during the 2005 Christmas holidays from Steven J. Hadley, the national security advisor, to Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director; a White House showdown the next year between Ms. Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney; and Ms. Rice’s refusal in 2007 to endorse the executive order with which Mr. Bush sought to revive the C.I.A. program.

The real trouble began on May 7, 2004, the day the C.I.A. inspector general, John L. Helgerson, completed a devastating report. In thousands of pages, it challenged the legality of some interrogation methods, found that interrogators were exceeding the rules imposed by the Justice Department and questioned the effectiveness of the entire program.[...]

[T]he director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, knew that the inspector general’s report could be a noose for White House officials to hang the C.I.A. Mr. Tenet ordered a temporary halt to the harshest interrogation methods. [...]

Mr. Goss, who had succeeded Mr. Tenet at the C.I.A., wrote a memorandum to the White House saying the agency would carry out no harsh interrogations without new Justice Department approval.

The national security advisor, Mr. Hadley, was angered by the C.I.A.’s response. He called Mr. Goss at home over the Christmas holidays to complain; Mr. Goss, backed by his lawyers, would not budge. Mr. Hadley decided he could not push the C.I.A. to do what it thought might be illegal. [...]

But Bush administration officials could not agree about what to do with the agency’s prisoners. Already, disclosures of secret prisons in Eastern Europe had prompted the C.I.A. to fly many in a hurry to Afghanistan.

Vice President Cheney led those who argued that publicly acknowledging the detainees would reveal secrets and expose the program to exaggerated allegations of torture. [...]

Only by publicly admitting that the United States had held the prisoners could Mr. Bush end what critics called the “disappearing” of terrorism suspects, she told colleagues.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales proposed a middle ground: move the detainees to Guantánamo, but never acknowledge having held them in secret prisons. This proposal, lampooned by some officials as the “immaculate conception” option, was dismissed as unrealistic.[...]

Cheney lost the argument to Ms. Rice. Within days the C.I.A. prisoners were loaded onto a C-17 cargo plane and taken to Cuba.

Still, Mr. Cheney and top Justice Department officials fought to revive the program. Steven G. Bradbury, the head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel and author of the recently declassified 2005 memorandums authorizing harsh C.I.A interrogations, began drafting another memorandum in late 2006 to restore legal approval for harsh interrogation. Mr. Bradbury noted that Congress, despite the public controversy, had left it to the White House to set the limits. [...]

Just months after the Supreme Court had declared that the Geneva Convention applied to Al Qaeda, the new Bradbury memorandum gave its blessing to almost every technique, except waterboarding, that the C.I.A. had used since 2002.

Forced as secretary of state to defend the C.I.A. program before angry European allies, Ms. Rice and her aides argued that it had outlived its usefulness.[...]

When Mr. Bush finally reauthorized C.I.A. interrogations with an executive order in July 2007, it reflected the yearlong lobbying of Mr. Bellinger and Ms. Rice: Forced nudity was banned and guidelines for sleep deprivation were tighter.

But Mr. Cheney and his allies secured other victories. The executive order preserved the secret jails and authorized a laundry list of coercive methods. Ms. Rice, several officials say, declined to endorse the order but chose not to block it.

If you choose to look the other way, you are complicit, Ms. "Do Your Homework, We Didn't Torture Anyone". Then again, you believe that if the president okays it, it's not illegal.

Michael Steele may lose control of Republican purse strings

By GottaLaff

Using my unusually sensitive powers of perception, I'm sensing a lack of faith (there's that word again) in the RNC chair. Let us pray for him:

A battle over control of the party's purse strings has erupted at the troubled Republican National Committee, with defenders of Chairman Michael S. Steele accusing dissident RNC members of trying to "embarrass and neuter" the party's new leader.

Randy Pullen, the RNC's elected treasurer, former RNC General Counsel David Norcross and three other former top RNC officers have presented Mr. Steele with a resolution, calling for a new set of checks and balances on the chairman's power to dole out money. The powers include new controls on awarding contracts and spending money on outside legal and other services.

Mmm, I love the smell of Rushpublics eating their own in the morning.

Needless to say, it's not surprising that they are going for public flogging of Steele, who was seen as a figurehead color cover for the color-aroused, retro GOP. What's sad is that I'm sure Steele really thought he was going to break some serious new ground, and take the party in another direction -- perhaps feebly -- but even meager steps were met with the wrath of Rushbo and his party wingnuts. A Steele supporter, however, gets right to the point -- it's cutting the balls of head of the party out for all to see.

"I urge you to reject this hostile attempt to embarrass and neuter the chairman of the RNC," Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus wrote in an e-mail to the 168-member national committee.

Drowning in their own spew.

Cannibalism

By GottaLaff

Via BarbinMD at Kos, we get to witness Rushpublican infighting. How fun is that?

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) raised objections to an abbreviated alternative budget "blueprint" released today -- but were told by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) they needed to back the plan, according to several Republican sources.

... he and Cantor were reportedly told by Boehner and Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) they needed to move more quickly to counter Democrats' charge they were becoming the "Party of No," according to House GOP staffers.

“In his egocentric rush to get on camera, Mike Pence threw the rest of the Conference under the bus, specifically Paul Ryan, whose staff has been working night and day for weeks to develop a substantive budget plan," said a GOP aide heavily involved in budget strategy.

"I hope his camera time was gratifying enough to justify erasing the weeks of hard work by dozens of Republicans to put forth serious ideas," the person added.

And thank you for joining us for another edition of "Republicans Eating They're Own".

The further misadventures of IWRC*: Palin Diss-Rogued

By GottaLaff

Now even the Republicans on her own team are dissing IWRC*, the Ambitious Rogue Candidate. I posted earlier about that here, but before I knew it, out came some more juicy tidbits, and it's all over the TeeVee Machine, too:

With 10 days until Election Day, long-brewing tensions between GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin and key aides to Sen. John McCain have become so intense, they are spilling out in public, sources say. [...]

A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

"She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone," said this McCain adviser. "She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.

"Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom."

Stop the presses! She doesn't even trust... Piper? Or Willow? Or Bristol? Or Trig? Or Track? Or First Dude Guy TweedleTodd? A down-home family gal like her? That doesn't sound exactly Christian family valuey to me.

But back to crumbling Team Gramm-pa. They lamented a lot that they held her back, because she was unprepared and needed more time, see, because, see, "she was not ready and that the missteps could have been a lot worse. They insisted that she needed time to be briefed on national and international issues and on McCain's record."

If she was "not ready" for a few basic questions, then how can they possibly claim she's ready to lead the entire country?

Yet another senior McCain adviser lamented the public recriminations.

"This is what happens with a campaign that's behind; it brings out the worst in people, finger-pointing and scapegoating," this senior adviser said.

The worstest of the worst, by the worst, and for the worst. It can't get much worse than that.

"She's no longer playing for 2008; she's playing 2012," Democratic pollster Peter Hart said. "And the difficulty is, when she went on 'Saturday Night Live,' she became a reinforcement of her caricature. She never allowed herself to be vetted, and at the end of the day, voters turned against her both in terms of qualifications and personally."

If IWRC has provided us with that kind of track record already, then by 2012, we'll have volumes.

*"In What Respect, Charlie?"