Excellent article about Trump's attacks on women

By Josh Marshall:

This is the ultimate gendered election. As Frank Foer explained in March, denigrating attacks on women are the one consistent theme throughout Trump's entire public life. They're not tactical or opportunistic. They're part of his essence. What makes the general election contest more volatile and febrile is that not only is Trump basically the embodiment of 'dominance politics' and assertive violence. But Clinton, for all the toll the last two years has taken on her public popularity, is still seen as strong and a strong leader by a majority of the public. As I've written in similar contexts, when we look at the messaging of a national political campaign we should be listening to the score, not the libretto, which is, like in opera, often no more than a superficial gloss on the real story, mere wave action on the surface of a deep sea. You're missing the point in trying to make out the logic of Trump's attacks on Clinton. The attacks are the logic. He is trying to beat her by dominating her in the public sphere, brutalizing her, demonstrating that he can hurt her with impunity.

Update:  5/25 Readers respond.

The trickle down theory is actually just the rich

Pissing on the poor. But we can remember how government can and did work, how all of us were able to be in on the American dream. We can remember. And vote.

Krugman:

The leading Republican candidates for president don’t even seem to realize that there’s a problem. A few months ago Rudy Giuliani, denouncing Hillary Clinton’s economic proposals, declared that “she wants to go back to the 1990s” — as if that would be a bad thing.

In fact, memories of how much better the economy was under Bill Clinton will be a potent political advantage for the Democrats next year.

But simply putting another Clinton, or any Democrat, in the White House won’t ensure that the good times will roll again. President Clinton was a good economic manager, but much of the good news during the 1990s reflected events that won’t be repeated, including low oil prices and the great medical cost pause — the temporary leveling off of health care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. that took place in the 1990s despite his failure to pass health care reform.

And there are good reasons to think that the negative effects of globalization on the wages of some Americans are larger than they were in the ’90s. That’s a hugely contentious issue within the progressive movement, with no easy resolution. I’ll write more about it in the months ahead.

Despite these caveats, Democrats have every right to make a political issue out of the failure of the Bush economy to deliver gains to working Americans — especially because conservatives continue to insist that tax cuts for the affluent are the answer to all problems.

But Democrats shouldn’t kid themselves into believing that this will be easy. The next president won’t be able to deliver another era of good times unless he or she manages to tackle the longer-term trends that underlie today’s economic disappointment: a collapsing health care system and inexorably rising inequality.

Clinton fought two wars and won them both

Just a reminder for those loyal Bushies who are trying to blame Clinton for breaking the military.

Bush broke the military.

Bush started two wars and is losing both of them through hubris and incompetence.

Bush wants to start a war with Iran.

Bush will lose that one too.

If FEMA is going to be gutted

And have all its powers taken away, could we just hire a boyscout to give us the color coded terrorist warnings and have done with it?:

WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers and Bush administration officials are considering stripping the Federal Emergency Management Agency of its responsibility for long-term recovery efforts following a terrorist attack or natural disaster, the latest fallout from the agency's lackluster response to the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005.

Under a proposal by Senator Mary Landrieu, FEMA would still run the initial response to future catastrophes -- getting victims shelter, blankets, and food. But oversight of recovery efforts, which can go on for years, would become the responsibility of other federal agencies with expertise in specific areas: rebuilding housing, fixing roads, cleaning up hazardous spills, and supervising an area's economic revitalization.

"FEMA wasn't built to lead the recovery from a catastrophic disaster and it is a wholly inadequate tool for that kind of situation," said Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. "FEMA should stabilize the situation -- i.e., establish shelters and get people into them. But at some point, say 50 to 90 days after the disaster, [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] should take over housing. Why? Because they do housing."

Landrieu, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Disaster Recovery Subcommittee, has been conducting a series of hearings about problems in the recovery efforts from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the twin storms that devastated the Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans in 2005.

[snip]

Some allies of the Bush administration have publicly applauded the idea of handing off FEMA's long-term recovery duties to other agencies. James Carafano, a homeland security specialist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, urged Congress to extend Landrieu's proposal by removing FEMA from a disaster zone within weeks instead of months.

"There is all kind of expertise in the government on recovery issues," Carafano said. "It's redundant to have FEMA involved in it, and a distraction from their core mission."

But some skeptics doubt the proposal would make long-term disaster recovery more efficient. Drew Sachs, a crisis management and preparedness consultant who worked for FEMA from 1991 to 1999, said that such a handoff would be disruptive and confuse disaster victims, forcing them to navigate a new set of bureaucracies.

Sachs said that he agreed that specialists from other parts of the government should be more involved in disaster recovery efforts. But, he said, someone will still need to coordinate the effort -- a job FEMA already has experience doing. And regardless of who runs an emergency housing program, he warned, there will always be problems.

We've seen when FEMA was made a cabinet level position under Clinton. We've seen what FEMA could do in an emergency and how well it could be run. Bush is doing to FEMA what he has been so good at in everything else, take a functional business or system, run it into the ground and break it, then wait for somebody else to bail him out. You can just hear the guys at the Heritage Foundation salivating over privatizing disaster and emergency assistance.

Remember what Josh Marshall said way back in 2005:

Of all the sad tales of cronyism and ineptitude emerging out of the Katrina catastrophe, probably none is more telling than the history of FEMA under the oversight and management of President Bush.

So let’s review the outlines of the story, beginning with the president’s inauguration in January 2001. Like everything in the second Bush White House, the surest clue to how the administration would proceed was to find what the Clinton White House had done and then expect the opposite.

President Clinton had appointed the first FEMA director with actual emergency-management experience, James Lee Witt. And Witt had gone on to reshape the organization into what was considered a model government agency. Clinton even gave FEMA Cabinet-level status.

Bush demoted the agency’s status and put it in the hands of his chief political fixer, Joe Allbaugh, who went about dismantling much of what Witt had built. As he told Congress in May 2001: “Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management. Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.”

Uh huh. And we see what happens when you privatize disaster relief. Toxic trailers made by Bush cronies anyone?

Scooter really does know where the bodies are buried

Doesn't he? Look at this article from the past:

In 1999, Libby, a China expert, served on a special Republican-controlled House committee that laid the blame for the compromise of U.S. secrets almost exclusively on Democrats, despite evidence that the worst rupture of nuclear secrets actually occurred during the Reagan-Bush administration in the mid-1980s.

The committee’s findings served as an important backdrop for Election 2000 when George W. Bush’s backers juxtaposed images of Democrat Al Gore attending a political event at a Buddhist temple with references to the so-called “Chinagate” scandal.

The American public was led to believe that $30,000 in illegal “soft-money” donations from Chinese operatives to Democrats in 1996 were somehow linked to China’s access to U.S. nuclear secrets. Millions of Americans may have been influenced to vote against Gore and for Bush because they wanted to rid the U.S. government of people who had failed to protect national security secrets.

But the reality was that the principal exposure of U.S. nuclear secrets to China appears to have occurred when Beijing obtained U.S. blueprints for the W-88 miniaturized hydrogen bomb, a Chinese intelligence coup in the mid-1980s on the watch of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

And remember, he was the lawyer for Mark Rich, the guy Clinton pardoned:

During hearings after Rich's pardon, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who had represented Rich from 1985 until the spring of 2000, denied that Rich had violated the tax laws, but criticized him for trading with Iran at a time when that country was holding U.S. hostages. [2] In his letter to the New York Times, Bill Clinton explained why he pardoned Rich, noting that U.S. tax professors Bernard Wolfman of Harvard Law School and Martin Ginsburg of Georgetown University Law Center concluded that no crime was committed, and that the companies' tax reporting position was reasonable. [New York Times, February 18, 2001][3]. In the same letter Clinton listed Libby as one of three "distinguished Republican lawyers" who supported Rich's pardon.

Is this what makes you so special, Scooter?

Giuliani caught in lies about Clinton

Apparently he cannot get his head around the fact a popular Democratic president actually fought terrorism:

In fact, President Clinton was eager — at the recommendation of his counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke — to retaliate against al Qaeda for the U.S.S. Cole. But that attack took place in October 2000. As Clinton explained in a 2006 interview, both the CIA and FBI “refused to certify that it was Bin Laden was responsible” for the attack on the Cole until early 2001 which foreclosed on the possibility of a full response during the Clinton administration.

Further, while Giuliani asserted that “America needs leadership to remain on the offense,” on national security issues, his “12 Commitments” to America doesn’t contain a single reference to the war in Iraq. Giuliani defended the omission, claiming “the fluid situation there makes it hard to speak in specifics about the war.”

“Iraq may get better; Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq; we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people.”

Guiliani’s comments demonstrate exactly how far out of touch with the American people he truly is. As a spokesman for American Against Escalation in Iraq said, “The notion that the war in Iraq does not need to be addressed by presidential candidates because it is ‘in the hands of other people’ is simply preposterous.”

Giuliani clearly needs to be on tv more. Give the man as much air time as he wants....

What a difference a president makes

Depending on which one we're talking about.

Clinton in 2005 in Italy for Pope John Paul's funeral. He takes a moment to interact with people and is swamped by cheering crowds:

Former Pres Bill Clinton, in Rome for funeral of Pope John Paul II, takes midday stroll, greeting shoppers, tourists eating at outdoor cafes and Italian business people; gets warm reception.

Yet when Bush's face shows up on the tv screen showing the world leaders at Pope John Paul's funeral:

when George W. Bush's face appeared on the big monitor that showed part of the funeral the crowd erupted in loud boos.

So when Bush visits the pope after the G8 summit:

ROME (Reuters) - President George W. Bush will skip a visit to a central Rome neighborhood for security reasons, a move that highlighted fears of possibly violent demonstrations against his visit to the city on Saturday.

The Sant'Egidio Roman Catholic community, which has been nominated several times for the Nobel peace prize, said on Friday they were told by U.S. officials that Bush would not visit their headquarters in the Trastevere neighborhood.

Trastevere is one of Rome's oldest quarters, made up of narrow, cobbled alleys difficult for a motorcade to negotiate.

The meeting will take place at the U.S. embassy instead.

The embassy advised U.S. citizens to avoid the anti-Bush protests. "To avoid becoming targets of opportunity, Americans should avoid the demonstrations, bearing in mind that violence may erupt," it said on its Web site.

A big anti-Bush march is planned to wind through the city for several miles between two large squares. Police said they feared the demonstrations may turn violent.

Many supporters of Prime Minister Romano Prodi's centre-left government, which includes communists, oppose the war in Iraq and some of his coalition parliamentarians may join the rallies.

The centre-right opposition led by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has criticized Prodi's leftist allies for preparing what they say is a lukewarm welcome for Bush at best.

Posters reading "No Bush, No War," have been plastered in many parts of the city and rainbow-colored peace flags were hung in Trastevere and other neighborhoods.

A president who rules by fear reacts to the world in fear. No wonder people hate him.

But it pays one of Bush's cronies a load of money

So everything is fine. (my bold):

In the Clinton administration, Philip E. Coyle was in charge of weapons testing and evaluation. SPIEGEL spoke with the 72-year-old about Bush's planned missile defense system, why Russia feels threatened and how shooting down missiles is like playing golf.

...SPIEGEL: During Bill Clinton's presidency you were responsible for evaluating the technical feasibility of the project. Why did the President decide against it?

Coyle: He decided not to deploy the system because it could not do what it promised. One of President Clinton's criteria was to be able to shoot down an accidental launch of a nuclear missile from Russia or China rather than immediately starting World War III. In those days, we were not so worried about Iran and North Korea. The Bush Administration has not really set any criteria as to what the missile defense system actually has to be capable of doing.

SPIEGEL: But why does the US spend so much money for a system which, as you say, does not work?

Coyle: That is a good question. If you add it all up, the administration since 2002 has spent over $10 billion annually. The Pentagon has never before tried to build such a difficult system -- it is much more complex than any ship or aircraft. I support the research, but I am against deploying defense systems that do not work under realistic operational conditions.

SPIEGEL: Russia is sharply critical of the missile defense plans and feels threatened. Justifiably?

Coyle: If Russia were installing missile defense systems in Canada or Cuba, we would react pretty much the same way. We are surrounding them and getting closer to their territorial boundaries.

Putin is pissed off at the missile defense system, Merkel tells Bush to talk to allies. And to illustrate where the mindset of the Bush administration is, Condi Rice refers to the Russians as the Soviets while trying to reassure Putin of our intentions. Good job, Condi!!

When neocons end up using 'Well, Clinton did it' as an excuse

You know it's getting a bit desperate.

Josh Marshall:

First, we now know — or at least the White House is trying to tell us — that they considered firing all the US Attorneys at the beginning of Bush’s second term. That would have been unprecedented but not an abuse of power in itself. The issue here is why these US Attorneys were fired and the fact that the White House intended to replace them with US Attorneys not confirmed by the senate. We now have abundant evidence that they were fired for not sufficiently politicizing their offices, for not indicting enough Democrats on bogus charges or for too aggressively going after Republicans. (Remember, Carol Lam is still the big story here.) We also now know that the top leadership of the Justice Department lied both to the public and to Congress about why the firing took place. As an added bonus we know the whole plan was hatched at the White House with the direct involvement of the president.

And Clinton? Every new president appoints new US Attorneys. That always happens. Always…. The whole thing is silly. But a lot of reporters on the news are already falling for it. The issue here is why these US Attorneys were fired — a) because they weren’t pursuing a GOP agenda of indicting Democrats, that’s a miscarriage of justice, and b) because they lied to Congress about why it happened.

And there's an email:

...to Harriet Miers on Jan. 9, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff Kyle Sampson (who resigned yesterday) admitted that the Clinton administration never purged its U.S. attorneys in the middle of their terms, explicitly stating, “In recent memory, during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, Presidents Reagan and Clinton did not seek to remove and replace U.S. Attorneys to serve indefinitely under the holdover provision”

We were told about Walter Reed two years ago

But then, no one was listening. Now with a Democratic Congress and Bush death-spiraling in the polls, we suddenly have a media who will print the story.

Paul Krugman: (my bold)

When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems. And they initially tried to brush off last month’s exposé in The Washington Post.

But this time, with President Bush’s approval at 29 percent, Democrats in control of Congress, and Donald Rumsfeld no longer defense secretary — Robert Gates, his successor, appears genuinely distressed at the situation — the whitewash didn’t stick.

Yet even now it’s not clear whether the public will be told the full story, which is that the horrors of Walter Reed’s outpatient unit are no aberration. For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

What makes this a particular shame is that in the Clinton years, veterans’ health care — like the Federal Emergency Management Agency — became a shining example of how good leadership can revitalize a troubled government program. By the early years of this decade the Veterans Health Administration was, by many measures, providing the highest-quality health care in America. (It probably still is: Walter Reed is a military facility, not run by the V.H.A.)

But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.

Update: Crooks and Liars has the video of Waxman and Shays listening to Staff Sgt. John Shannon tell it like it is.

That dog!

Karl Weber blogs at World Wide Webers and takes offense at Dinesh D'Souza. His post title: The Muslim Street Is Not Ready To Follow Jerry Falwell.

...I am currently in Bangladesh, a Muslim country where conservative social mores are very much in force--alcohol is almost entirely unavailable, women dress extremely modestly (even on the beach), men dominate the business world, public displays of affection are unheard-of, etc. But every single Bangladeshi I have encountered expresses strong dislike for President Bush--and, without prompting, many mention their respect for President Clinton and their hope that Hillary Clinton will be president some day.

This is partly because Hillary Clinton actually visited Bangladesh while first lady, impressing local people with her interest and openness. But it is mainly because they feel that both Clintons respect Muslim people and culture, while Bush, by contrast, is viewed as an arrogant bully.

As for Clinton's personal morality, which social conservatives in the US find so distressing--and which you might assume would horrify the strait-laced Muslims: When Bill is mentioned in conversation, I often recount my favorite anecdote about him, which is about the time Mary-Jo and I were having dinner in a French bistro in Chappaqua and Bill came in to have dinner with not one but two beautiful young women. (True story.)

When I told this tale to a group of six or seven Bangladeshi men the other night, they all reacted exactly the way Americans usually react--with a big, appreciative laugh, as if to say, "That dog!" There was certainly no suggestion that Clinton lost any stature in their eyes as a result.

Dinesh D'Souza may wish that the typical Muslim hated the cultural decadence of the American left and admired the rigid moralism of American conservatives. He may even believe that to be the case. The only problem is that there is no evidence to suggest he is right.

Update 2/24 from Vanity Press taking on Beck and D'Souza:

There's a lot more to the question of morality than sexual behavior, of course, but sexual behavior is one of the things Beck is thinking about when he makes his claims about moral collapse. And he's simply full of it. The facts (those, yes) just don't bear these claims out.

And that's the real problem with culture-war critiques like D'Souza's, Beck's, and, yes, Helmy's: they have nothing to do with what's happening in the real world. If you want to look at real immorality, then you might want to consider things like torture, corruption, crooked elections, and misleading countries into war. But people like D'Souza and Beck don't want you to think about that. D'Souza, Beck, and an army of others have made up a fake version of Western society, and promoted it so hard and so effectively that it's become more real to them, and apparently to some others, than the actual society in which they live.

If that imaginary society really is hated worldwide, and is mistaken for the real one, well, then whose fault is that?

Somebody's gone to the library

And actually read the Constitution:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate Republican on Tuesday directly challenged President Bush's declaration that "I am the decision-maker" on issues of war.

"I would suggest respectfully to the president that he is not the sole decider," Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said during a hearing on Congress' war powers amid an increasingly harsh debate over Iraq war policy. "The decider is a shared and joint responsibility," Specter said.

The question of whether to use its power over the government's purse strings to force an end to the war in Iraq, and under what conditions, is among the issues faced by the newly empowered Democratic majority in Congress, and even some of the president's political allies as well.

[snip]

"The Constitution makes Congress a coequal branch of government. It's time we start acting like it," said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., who is chairing a hearing Tuesday on Congress' war powers and forwarding legislation to eventually prohibit funding for the deployment of troops to Iraq.

His proposal, like many others designed to force an end to U.S. involvement in the bloody conflict, is far from having enough support even to come up for a vote on the Senate floor.

Closer to that threshold is a nonbinding resolution declaring that Bush's proposal to send 21,500 more troops to Baghdad and Anbar province is "not in the national interest." The Senate could take up that measure early next month.

But some senators, complaining that the resolution is symbolic, are forwarding tougher bills.

Update: Glenn Greenwald lists a few quotes from Republicans when they were protesting Clinton maintaining troops into Somalia, and declaring that Congress had such the right to remove them.

When Bill Clinton was President, most of the country's leading Republicans did not seem to have any problem at all with Congressional "interference" in the President's decisions to deploy troops (really to maintain troop deployments, since President Bush 41 first deployed in Somalia). There wasn't any talk back then (at least from them) about the burden of "535 Commanders-in-Chief" or "Congressional incursions" into the President's constitutional warmaking authority. They debated restrictions that ought to be legislatively imposed on President Clinton's military deployments and then imposed them.

And Sen. McCain in particular made arguments in favor of Congressionally-mandated withdraw that are patently applicable to Iraq today. And he specifically argued with regard to forcible troop withdrawal that "responsibilities for that lie with the Congress of the United States." The Constitution hasn't changed since 1993, so I wonder what has prompted such a fundamental shift in Republican views on the proper role of Congressional war powers.

Bush demanded an exit strategery

from Clinton's involvement with Monic... Kosovo, sorry. Strange how the pretzel attack erased his memory on such things....

It's not the lies

It's who is doing the lying. Digby:
"... all these bluenosed hypocrites who excoriated Clinton for his lie ("I will not be lied to!") about a personal matter and complain that the office lost its moral authority, seem not to be personally exercized about the repeated, endless lies of the Bush administration that landed us in the most unnecessary, intractable foreign policy crisis in the nation's history. Broder and his snuff-snorting fellow courtiers aren't nattering on about how Junior "trashed the place." But then the only place he's trashed is the United States of America, where the silly peasants live --- and Iraq which is filled with a bunch of dirty foreigners. In the nation's capital everyone is perfectly happy because as far as they are concerned, the "right" people are in charge. And that's all that matters."