Tilting At Windmills

George W Bush speech writer Michael Gerson takes to the pages of the Washington Post to make his second attempt to explain to the Republican Party what they have to do to become relevant again.  He thinks the Republican party is stuck in the 1980s:

This stunning reversal of electoral fortunes has taken place for a variety of reasons: changing demographics; the end of a GOP foreign policy advantage during the Cold War; a serious gap in candidate quality; the declining relevance of economic policies that seem better suited to the 1980s; and an occasionally deserved reputation for being judgmental and censorious.

And this:

At the national level, Republicans have a winning message for a nation that no longer exists. 

In his Op Ed at Commentary he and Peter Wehner had this to say:

First, and most important, is focusing on the economic concerns of working-and middle-class Americans, many of whom now regard the Republican Party as beholden to “millionaires and billionaires” and as wholly out of touch with ordinary Americans. This is a durable impression—witness Bill Clinton’s effective deployment of it more than 20 years ago and its continued resonance during the 2012 campaign when Team Obama portrayed Mitt Romney as a plutocrat who delighted in shutting down factories and moving jobs overseas. Sure enough, in November exit polls, 81 percent of voters said that Barack Obama “cared for people like me”; a mere 18 percent said the same of Romney. They also showed that a majority of Americans (53 percent) said Governor Romney’s policies would generally favor the rich, versus only 34 percent who said he would favor the middle class.

Daniel Larison points out that Foreign Policy has also become a problem for the Republicans that is not really addressed in Gerson and Wehner's Commentary piece:

At most, Gerson and Wehner acknowledge that the GOP’s advantage on foreign policy and national security has vanished, but they still rely on the assumption that Republicans should normally have an advantage that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not bolstered. A proper reckoning of the state of the party’s reputation on these issues would admit up front that it has suffered enormous damage, and the party’s new disadvantage on these issues has existed since 2006. Republicans need to recognize that the Iraq war was a debacle, but they also need to understand why it was and then learn to avoid making similar errors in the future.
There would need to be an end to constant threat-hyping and threat inflation, which contributed greatly to the paranoia and fear that warped the debate over Iraq in 2002-03. There should also be a repudiation of preventive war. Ideally, it would be rejected because it is illegal and wrong, but it would be good enough if Republicans rejected it because it is an imprudent, reckless abuse of U.S. power. No less important, Republicans need to learn to be much warier of executive power when one of their own is in power. That is probably the hardest thing to learn, since many partisans tend to tolerate awful behavior from “their” presidents that they would otherwise condemn, but it would be essential to Republicans’ resistance to new wars in the future.

But for the foreseeable future Gerson, Wehner and Larison are simply tipping their hats at windmills. The lunatics have taken over the asylum and thanks to the conservative media machine it's not about to change.   
 

Get Off My Lawn

Former GE CEO Jack Welch has become just another angry old white man.  He doubled down on his claim that the Obama administration fixed the BLS numbers on the friendlier pages of the WSJ. Felix Solomon:

Why has Jack Welch doubled down on the false, inflammatory, and slanderous tweet that he sent out five minutes after the jobs report came out on Friday?
.......
A humble man, in such a situation, might have backtracked, realizing that he had gone way too far. But Jack Welch is not a humble man, and so instead he decided to bluster his way through. Hence the bizarre references to Soviet Russia and Communist China, and the way in which he describes his critics as “mobs of administration sympathizers”. (In fact, of course, only in highly autocratic societies could a business leader expect respectful agreement at all times, no matter how stupid his statements.) Hence the brazen — and clearly false — declaration that the reference to “these Chicago guys” in his tweet was in no way about the Obama administration or the White House. And hence his decision to depart the reality-based outlets of Fortune and Reuters, and move instead to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, where he can offer up his opinions to the right-wing echo chamber rather than to the public at large. Welch’s choiceto appear on the WSJ editorial page — underscored by a declaration that he’ll get better “traction” that way — is a demonstration that Welch is embarking on a new career as a mascot of the right, rather than trying to stretch out his fading post-retirement career as would-be management guru.

Solomon concludes with this:

And so, with one unretracted tweet, Welch has effectively rendered himself irrelevant in the so-called thought-leadership world he has dominated for so long. It’s fine to have unusual or minority opinions. What’s not fine is to base those opinions on nothing but ideology, and admit of nothing which could make you change your mind. At that point, you’re not a thinker any more; you’re a theologian. Welch has clearly decided that he would much rather be a pastor, preaching to a like-minded flock of WSJ op-ed page dogmatists, than a participant in substantive debate. The sad thing is that he received much more attention for his outbreak of crazy than he received in response to any of his less-bonkers pronouncements. Which is probably only going to encourage him, going forwards. (Bold Mine)

After a successful career Jack Welch has just become another crazy old right wing ideologue 

Does Admiral Fallon have to go?

Now we all know that George W. Bush wants to do whatever his bat shit crazy Vice President, Dick Cheney, wants to do and we all know that Dick Cheney and the rest of the lunatics want to attack Iran. According to Thomas P.M. Barnett there is someone standing in their way, the head of U. S. Central Command, Admiral William "Fox" Fallon.
The Man Between War and Peace

So while Admiral Fallon's boss, President George W. Bush, regularly trash-talks his way to World War III and his administration casually casts Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as this century's Hitler (a crown it has awarded once before, to deadly effect), it's left to Fallon--and apparently Fallon alone--to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: "This constant drumbeat of conflict . . . is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."

What America needs, Fallon says, is a "combination of strength and willingness to engage."

Those are fighting words to your average neocon--not to mention your average supporter of Israel, a good many of whom in Washington seem never to have served a minute in uniform. But utter those words for print and you can easily find yourself defending your indifference to "nuclear holocaust."

How does Fallon get away with so brazenly challenging his commander in chief?

The answer is that he might not get away with it for much longer. President Bush is not accustomed to a subordinate who speaks his mind as freely as Fallon does, and the president may have had enough.

Yes, the last thing on earth the Bush/Cheney cabal, the neocons and the AIPAC crowd wants is a sane man in their asylum.

Go read the entire article and Tom Ricks' half hearted rebuttal.

Bat Shit Crazy

The other day I suggested that John McCain was trying to convince the criminally insane at CPAC that he is just as crazy as they are. Well via Think Progress we see that now he is trying to convince everyone else he is simply bat shit crazy.

Speaking to reporters in Richmond, VA last night, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) attacked “anyone” who points out that he is “fine” with keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 or more years. “Anyone who worries about how long we’re in Iraq does not understand the military and does not understand war,” said McCain.

He then added that it is “really almost insulting to one’s intelligence” to question “how long we’re in Iraq” because he believes the current “strategy” is “succeeding.”

By dismissing as naïve those concerned with how long the U.S. military is mired in Iraq, McCain is claiming that top officials in the Pentagon don’t understand “the military” or “war” as well as he does. In a recent GOP presidential debate, McCain argued, “I’m the expert” on Iraq.

Top military brass, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey, have worried in the past year that “a protracted deployment of U.S. troops”in Iraq would not be a wise move for the military:

[....]

By McCain’s logic, both the Army Chief of Staff and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff don’t “understand the military” as well as he does.

With two thirds of the country thinking we should get out of Iraq sooner rather than later McCain should be so easy to beat in November. A seventy two year old mad man who sings "bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran." Does this sound like a winner?





Is this really the person anybody wants as the next President?

Update
Matt Yglesias has some good observations:

McCain even goes so far as to directly compare his vision of Iraq to the current situation in Kuwait, where in exchange for basing rights and oil we help prop up an unaccountable and corrupt dictatorship. Fear that this is what we're aiming for in Iraq is precisely why many Iraqis are fighting so hard against our troops, and our habit of acting this way in other Gulf states is a major driving force of anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world. The Bush administration has at least had the good sense to pursue this agenda quietly and in secret, but hot-head McCain can't keep his mouth shut to avoid gaffes and can't stop digging now that he realizes he's in a hole.

McCain's own rhetoric could result in an increase in violence and further submarine his own chances.

What really scares me

Below Chuck takes exception to the adolescent bravado of George W. Bush's "kicking ass" statement as well he should. But that was not all of the dismal and embarrassing Bush performance at APEC. Barbara O'Brien gives us a summary and a video clip and directs us to this article in the Economic Times of India.
Bush botched yet again

SYDNEY: Even for someone as gaffe-prone as US President George W Bush, he was in rare form on Friday, confusing Apec with Opec and transforming Australian troops into Austrians. President Bush’s tongue started slipping almost as soon as he started talking at a business forum on the eve of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Sydney.
“Mr Prime Minister, thank you for your introduction,” he told Prime Minister John Howard. “Thank you for being such a fine host for the Opec summit .”

As the audience of several hundred people erupted in laughter , Mr Bush corrected himself and joked, “He invited me to the Opec summit next year.”Australia has never been a member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Later in his speech, Mr Bush recounted how Mr Howard had gone to visit “Austrian troops” last year in Iraq. There are, in fact, no Austrian troops there. But Australia has about 1,500 military personnel in and around the country.

Upon finishing his speech, the US president took the wrong way off-stage and, looking perplexed, had to be re-directed by Mr Howard to a centre-stage exit. But not before a veteran White House correspondent seized the opportunity to ask Mr Bush whether there had been any new message in his speech. Apparently misunderstanding the question, he bristled and asked, “Haven’t you been listening to my past speeches?” before turning away.

So Dubya has never been the sharpest knife in the kitchen but this example of back to back idiocy is a new record even for him. So is he about crack up. Rosa Brooks writes in the LA Times that he is a lonely man now that Karl, Gonzo and Rummy are gone. Barbara says:

Let’s face it; Bush doesn’t do the diplomacy thing well. Or the President thing. Or even the human being thing.

And he’s never been the sharpest tack in the box, but a few more performances like this might indicate some kind of psychological breakdown. The sheer weight of the bullshit Bush must carry around in his head would crush anybody.

A moron as president is scary enough but one that is over the edge bat shit crazy?

Just Amazing

Your Imperial Delusional President
This from Think Progress
Bush ‘Still Believed Saddam Possessed WMD’ In April 2006

In Oct. 2004, President Bush finally admitted that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction: “Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there.”

Yet according to former White House chief of staff Andy Card, this statement was just rhetoric. In his new book on Bush, Robert Draper writes that the President continued to privately insist through April 2006 that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction:

Bush, for his part, was not disposed to second-guessing. Througout 2006, he read historical texts relating to Lincoln, Churchill, and Truman — three wartime leaders, the latter two of whom left office to something less than public acclaim. History would acquit him, too. Bush was confident of that, and of something else as well. Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs. [p. 388]

We have been amazed that the Bush cultists could still hold the belief that Saddam had WMD. But how can we blame them when the Bull Goose Loony himself still believes it. Bush is unfit for office because he is clinically insane.

Failed Surge/State

I touched on this early this morning but Tim F. at Balloon Juice did a much better/snarkier job in Maybe He’ll Take Credit For The Soccer Win.

As described by its own architects, the Kagan “surge” was meant to provide a window of security so that the Iraqi factions can work out their differences. I guess in Kaganland a few months of light chatting is all it takes to smooth out the factional divide that is tearing Iraq apart, but then people like me aren’t in charge of American policy. Kagan is, so let’s at least look at Iraq on Kagan’s terms.

In the last few days the Iraqi parliament has taken a monthlong recess without accomplishing anything. The steady drumbeat of violence and death goes on unabated. The main Sunni bloc has walked out of Maliki’s government. Reconstruction of the country has largely failed, leaving average Iraqis dramatically worse off than before we invaded.

Go read the entire thing. Fortunately John Cole infrequently reads his own blog and also posted on the subject in Paging Ken Pollack, also worth a read as he takes on O'Hanlon and Pollack of the Lieberman school of totally bat shit crazy neocons.