If you can tell me another way to interpret this I’d like to hear it. I’m not going to offer any kind of neat intro, just read Bush’s words for yourself.

“However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses,” Bush told a raucous crowd of about 5,000 GOP partisans packed in an arena at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, one of his stops Monday. “That’s what’s at stake in this election. The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq.”

Times like these I’d pay every dollar I have (which isn’t a lot, granted), to be allowed to walk up to Bush and spit in his face. Uniter not a divider my ass. Cheney, of course, also makes sure to chime in with his two cents.

“It’s my belief that they’re very sensitive of the fact that we’ve got an election scheduled,” he said. Cheney said the insurgents believe “they can break the will of the American people,” and “that’s what they’re trying to do.”

Strong words from a man whose thumb is firmly on the pulse of the Iraqi nation. After all, he was right on the button with what they thought of our invasion. Now let’s play a game of “why Bush sucks as both a speaker and a leader”:

In the interview with Hannity on the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes,” Bush said he believes the United States will one day be hit by another terrorist attack. Asked whether the country would be attacked again, Bush said, “I think so, and we’ve got to do everything we can to stop them.”

The implied message here is that we’re going to try to stop them, but we’re gonna get attacked. A smart man would say “no we won’t get attacked again, because we’re going to be able to stop them.” Even in his tough talk, Bush sounds wimpy. Minor quibble there, just something I noticed.

I had a lot more to write, but I’m so furious that these men, at this stage in the game, are still accusing the Democrats of being on the same side as terrorists, that I’d end up writing far more colorful language than I mean to.

I’ll just finish with this: the reason I hope Bush isn’t going senile is that I want him to be perfectly coherent and alert when he sees that history calls him the worst president of all time. And I want him to live another 40 years knowing that, and go to sleep every night thinking about what a disgrace he was.

I often think that the real rift between the left and the right is that the right is all pie-in-the-sky ideological efforts that have nothing to do with reality and more to do with the way they wish the world works, while the left has a grip on the way things are and is trying to steer them towards a better tomorrow.

Case in point, we now are being confronted with “abstinence-only” propaganda being pushed towards everyone under 30.

But Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

Government data released last month show that 998,262 births in 2004 were to unmarried women 19-29, the ages with the most births to unmarried women.

“The message is ‘It’s better to wait until you’re married to bear or father children,’ ” Horn said. “The only 100% effective way of getting there is abstinence.”

See, this is where we find the head in the clouds mindset. He’s absolutely right, abstinence is the only 100% effective way of avoiding unwanted pregnancies, STDs, and embarrassing MySpace pictures. Problem: people will never abstain from sex before marriage on any kind of a wide scale. Not gonna happen. Never has, never will.

I think the analogies to gun control are pretty evident. Everyone claims they’re just for the protection of life and the family, but the fact is people get ‘em because they’re fun. The only way to avoid crime and accidental gun deaths is for guns to be totally banned for anyone not explicitly trained in their use. But they don’t want to do that, because guns are an American right and teaching responsibility with guns is better than trying to ban them.

Somehow, this logic has not made the hop over to people’s rights to have sex.

There are two distinct classes of hack journalists out there, those who lie to shield themselves and those who lie to push an agenda. Bill O’Reilly seems to lie not because he wants to convince people of a conservative viewpoint, but because he has his opinion (which happens to be on the right most often) and refuses to concede that he may be wrong ever ever evereverever.

Then we have Sean Hannity. Here’s a guy who, no matter what, will find a way to either blame Democrats or credit Republicans. Take this as a case in point. When the Foley scandal came out, Hannity joined in blaming the media for having a liberal bias, saying that they waited to report it so it would sabotage the election. If a scandal impuning a democrat comes out now? Well that’s the liberal media avoiding the story.

HANNITY: The only thing I would argue — and, for me, Karen, this is a bigger media issue, because you know what? They did hit Senator Allen hard on the “macaca” comment. They did go back 30 years in his past. They talked about everything that he has ever done. And what I think here is, why didn’t they go back in this particular case, Karen, until 11 days out? Why didn’t the media do their job? Is there a media bias?

Okay, try and wrap your head around that. Foley was the democrats timing the release to impact the election. This is the democrats avoiding the story while they pound on Allen. Good ol’ Hannity. No matter what, it’s a liberal bias.

Oh, and as for that scandal they’re sitting on? It’s a hyped up controversy of Jim Webb’s book, which Hannity/Drudge/etc claim has pedophilia in it. Only, it doesn’t. It’s just an accurate depiction of a rather odd cultural practice. D’oh.

Oo boy. Bush has spent quite some time reminding us that he listens to his generals (as this video will attest), specifically General George Casey. So it must be disheartening to find out that 100,000 or so more Iraqi troops are needed.

CBS News has learned exclusively that Gen. George Casey, the U.S. Commander in Iraq, is expected to recommend the size of Iraqi security forces be increased by up to 100,000. This comes just as the U.S. military is about to reach its long-stated goal of training and equipping 325,000 Iraqis to take over the fighting from American troops.

Officials say the explosion of sectarian violence, which Gen. Casey calls a fundamental change in the nature of the threat, now makes that number look inadequate. On top of that is the fact that any given day, one quarter of the Iraqi Army is on leave.

They aren’t stepping up, and we sure as hell aren’t stepping down. Often times it seems like the only ones stepping up are the insurgents and those participating in the “no it’s not really a civil war”. Let’s hope this accomplishes something.
UPDATE: Ascap in the comments helpfully pointed out my absolutely awful misreading of the article first time around. Clearly states Iraqi forces, I wrote this as though it said US forces. I’m man enough to admit I was wrong, and it is encouraging when people correct me rather than letting errors just sit on the page for all to see.

I caught this one on MSNBC and just HAD to say something about it. Showing an impressive ability to invent explanations to avoid the obvious, we have a few guys pointing at the reason the exit polls favored democrats while the elections themselves had republicans winning: bias in the polls themselves. The source article:

Interviewers can inject bias in the results. The late Warren Mitofsky, who conducted the 2004 NEP exit poll, went back and found that the greatest difference between actual results in exit poll precincts and the reports phoned in to NEP came where the interviewers were female graduate students — and almost all the discrepancies favored the Democrats.

The brilliant analysis:

Seems to me that Republican women and conservative men might tell young women they voted liberal when they didn’t for admittedly different reasons. Some small fraction of, say, married women might not want to seem “un-progressive” with young clipboard-carrying women who effuse progressiveness (we can debate another time whether young liberal female grad students have “tells” about their ideology even when not wearing their “keep your rosaries off my ovaries” buttons). Meanwhile, some men might be inclined to tell young attractive ladies what they want to hear. Not me, of course. But I hear rumors that this sort of thing happens.

I’d like to point out that, as far as I am aware, I never put anything on here like that bolded statement. I don’t put up something that is a “rumor” or unsubstantiated without letting you know that this is MY opinion and something I think might be possible. I’d never claim that something I “heard about somewhere from some guy” may be reality.

Now then, notice that the explanation here is that people are lying to the exit poll takers, the women, because they either want to appear progressive or they want to appease the women (presumably by appearing progressive). I’m seeing at least two massive flaws in the reasoning here.

For one, it assumes that the people being asked are all assuming that the women are liberals and that the people are trying to appeal to them as such. Naturally he doesn’t want to have the debate, which is a “tell” that he can’t defend it if one arose.

Another is that it means that voting republican is a source of shame for these people, while voting democrat is something that sounds attractive. So we’re to believe that voting republican is the kind of thing you do in secret but don’t admit publicly? Actually, wait. That’s not much of a flaw, I have to admit that makes sense. I’d be embarrassed, too.

A third (since that last one didn’t count) is that we aren’t given location information. Where are these women conducting the polls and where are the men doing it? If a man switches shifts with a woman during the day, does the vote count suddenly go red?

A fourth (let’s keep going, shall we?), is that it’s entirely neglecting who’s getting asked. While I find this all a completely stupid premise to begin with, if we’re going to start attacking polling as having a liberal bias we might as well consider that these women are asking people who look like they voted democrat. Maybe they tend to go after people in their own demographic which, likely, would be more left-leaning people.

And a problem not with the argument, but with the issue entirely, is that exit polls don’t mean jack. They’re an indication for how the voting probably went, but they aren’t the be all and end all. What bothers me is that the voting machine errors all seem to favor the republicans. Odd that the NRO and others don’t care much about that.

Folks, I’m getting worried. There’s a progression going on in the United States, and the direction it’s heading is, to put it mildly, less than encouraging. You can read down below on the most recent developments, but for a moment let’s mentally make a checklist for what’s happened lately.

We have a president who wants to spy on American citizens. We have a president who has signed a bill that lets him use the military inside the United States. We have a president who has signed a bill that lets him interpret the Geneva conventions however he wants, and detain whoever he wants without giving them the benefit of habeas corpus.

Slipping under my radar, we even had a company hired to build a nice big ol’ prison at an undisclosed location.

That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney’s Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.

KBR, it seems, has been hired under the guise of making “temporary detention facilities” and this isn’t exactly news.

I want to highlight those three points again. I want everyone to think about them deeply.

1. U.S. citizens can be spied upon
2. The military can be used to detain Americans
3. Anyone held as an “unlawful combatant” has no ability to argue his innocence
4. Secret prisons are being built

Now, let’s put all of these situations into a single storyline. Let’s say, hypothetically, that Bush spies on some particularly vocal and influential anti-war activists. He sends the military after them and they’re detained without charge. They can’t get a court date or fight their arrest because they were labeled “unlawful enemy combatants.” They’re held indefinitely at a prison at an undisclosed location.

Impossible? I doubt it.

Things are ramping up, that’s the only way to put it. But for what? It’s like Bush is throwing the gauntlet down and declaring an all-out assault on everyone who wants to speak out against him. Bush is gradually fulfilling that whole Emperor Palpatine storyline that everyone pounced on in 2002’s Attack of the Clones.

One problem: Bush is gone in 2009. Or is he? Well, consider both Bush’s words and his actions so far. He has little regard for the law of the land, or any land for that matter. And he constantly tries to say that the Iraq War is like WWII.

Is it conceivable that Bush could declare a state of emergency that requires that he be allowed to run for a third time? I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility. Bush may be a little out of his gourd, but he’s not so far gone that he’d go and actually declare martial law and himself emperor of the ol’ USA.

Rather, we could look forward to sideways authoritarianism. Consider that the biggest reason the right is running from Bush now has nothing to do with his policies, but rather the public. As the guy’s on his way out and he’s less than popular, the republicans want nothing to do with him. He’s on the ballot again, you can bet they’d suddenly find themselves in his pocket once again.

Then we’d have another “fair” election to look forward to, devoid of any cheating thanks to those pesky Venezuelans.

I’m not calling this a certainty, or even that it’s very likely, but it certainly seems like Bush is doing all he can to keep himself in power or at least expand the power he has.

Now there’s a problem with that, as well. Not so much with Bush’s power-grabbing, but the public support thereof. The greatest logical fallacy in both the wiretapping debate and the MCA is the fact that there’s no guarantee against abuse. The president can order wiretaps with no warrant, and these people can be imprisoned without defense.

In fact, the only safeguard against abuse seems to be the man’s word, and the right is more than happy to trust Bush with just that. So either they’re actually counting on his ability to keep in office forever, or they’re incredibly short-sighted.

To use an analogy an astute friend of mine came up with, imagine you have a job you like with a boss who you REALLY like. A big project is coming up, so you sign a contract saying he can monitor your internet usage to make sure you’re not slacking, and he can call you at any hour of the day and force you to work overtime without overtime pay. You know he won’t abuse the power, so you gladly sign it over.

Only the contract doesn’t say your boss’s name, it just says “the boss”. And the guy you really like is leaving in a few months. That’s where we are now.

The neocons in America have to ask themselves one question: if Hillary Clinton wins in 2008, or John Kerry had won in 2004, would you support these same laws?

I have a feeling that answer is obvious. So what are we expecting? What is this all leading to? Frankly folks, I’m a little worried. I think we’re just seeing the beginning of what’s going to be a very ugly last two  and a half years of Bush’s presidency.

Sometimes a story really hurts my head. We’ve had stories piling up about the dangers of electronic voting. A few of the companies have been shown to have political ties, the machines can be hacked in 30 seconds using a screwdriver and a USB key, the voter irregularities were mindblowing. Finally, the United States is investigating one company. Is it because of political ties? Security issues?

No, it’s because they might have a connection to Venezuela.

The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.

Ah yes, ol’ Hugo Chavez and the George “Diablo” Bush thing. It doesn’t matter if the republicans are rigging the elections, the machines can be hacked, and if elections have already shown some more than puzzling irregularities. No, we’re going to go after a company who might be connected to Chavez, because obviously he wants to hurt America.

And, as is the way of things these days, it only counts as hurting America if it’s something that would help the democrats. But then…

Government officials familiar with the Smartmatic inquiry said they doubted that even if the Chávez government was some kind of secret partner in the company, it would try to influence elections in the United States. But some of them speculated that the purchase of Sequoia could help Smartmatic sell its products in Latin America and other developing countries, where safeguards against fraud are weaker.

Anyone here watch Drawn Together? Moments like these make me think of that oft-used gag variant: HEY! Nobody rigs my election but ME!

I could have told you this one. In a recent Gallup poll, only 28% of Americans are “very confident” that the votes will be counted accurately. For your consideration:

The overall number expressing a high degree of confidence, in the poll taken Oct. 20-22, is 28%, with 4 in 10 Republicans very confident versus only 17% of Democrats. Republicans also express more faith in electronic ballots than Democrats.

The confidence level is about the same as in 2004, Gallup reports. Voters have more confidence in their local polling places than the national picture.

Here are my problems. The fact that 28% of voters being confident that they’ll be counted accurately is considered “high” shows that we’re in a sorry friggin’ state. For a democracy to run, you need the people to know that their votes count. For just over a quarter of them to think this way shows why we have one of the poorest voter turnout rates around.

Now the real problem I see is the last bit. See, the poll showed 28% of people think votes, as a total, will be counted accurately. But more people think their PERSONAL votes will be than those elsewhere. This is the American “it can’t happen to ME” mindset. It’s the same you’ll see in Congress’s approval ratings. People like their own, but think the rest of ‘em are bad.

And this is why we get so little done by way of corruption investigations. No one is willing to accept that the problem may be in their own back yard. Other Congressmen? Corrupt and inept. Other elections? Rigged. Other countries? Fixed elections and cruel leaders. But people think that they’re insulated from it.

Less than encouraging words from the man the United States helped to put in charge of Iraq.

Privately, however, Maliki criticized what he called the patronizing U.S. tone toward the Iraqi government and warned U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to respect Iraq’s sovereignty, two of the prime minister’s advisors said.

“I’m a friend to the United States, but not America’s man in Iraq,” Maliki told Khalilzad, according to Hassan Senaid, one of the prime minister’s closest advisors.

…

“[U.S. Ambassador Zalmay] Khalilzad’s demand for a timetable was clear interference with the sovereignty of the Iraqi government,” said Nada Sudani, a member of parliament from Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party. “Maliki rejects any exterior body giving a timeline for the performance of the Iraqi government.”

Uh-oh. The big brouhaha lately has been that Bush wants to set “benchmarks” for the Iraqis to meet. Now it seems the man that is repeatedly praised by the Bush Clan isn’t a big fan of them.

See, this is what we’re going to find out (as thought it weren’t painfully apparent now): Iraq doesn’t want to be Israel. They don’t want to be our little representation of Democracy in the Arab world. The purpose of liberation isn’t to transfer control from Dictator A to Foreign Country B.

From their perspective it’s not much better if the US or Saddam is in charge, because in both cases the population isn’t in control of their own fate. I’m not equating the two in terms of brutality, but rather that no one wants their country run by someone they can’t vote out.

Barack Obama has caused a heck of a firestorm in the world-o politics. With his actual straight talking (as opposed to the Straight Talk Express which seems to take frequent stops at polling stations) and energy, he seems a perfect Democratic candidate for 2008. In fact, Slate.com has explained why he’s turned politics upside-down.

At a magazine conference this week in Phoenix, I watched David Remnick of The New Yorker interview Obama on a stage. Obama declined to deeply regret
his much-publicized youthful indiscretions with drugs. He suggested that believing in angels is a sign of irrationality. And he acknowledged that his wife doesn’t like his choice of careers. He disarms challenges with grace, humor, and unexpected candor.

So true. In fact, anyone’s who’s heard Obama speak in the past has to admit he’s one of the most powerful voices the party has today. Now and again it almost seems like he’s interviewed just to bask in his aura, he’s a larger-than-life member of the Democratic party that is nigh-impossible to attack without looking ridiculous. Despite his single term in the Senate, he’s becoming a favorite for the 2008 presidential run.

But still, I can’t help but see this as a rebound relationship of sorts. The last two Dem candidates, Gore and Kerry, were characterized by their lack of a personality. The jokes of the robot Gore and the Frankenstein Kerry started even before the presidential race got started. Obama, with his “personality,” is such a departure from the other two after damn humiliating defeats (George W Bush? Really now.) that people are latching onto him simply for that.

Well, not ONLY for that. He’s a political jackpot from the PR standpoint, I just wonder about his policy capabilities. I know that doesn’t matter to the right, but it matters to me. Of course, through a good running mate in there and know that he’d piece together a good cabinet and that’s a null point anyway.

I just worry that the flurry of attention Obama’s getting is more on personality and appeal than policy.