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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Marty Carpenter
Published Letters: 41 Editor's Choice: 8
From the close to 40,000 thank you notes to Colbert over at thankyoustephencolbert.org/ one would have to acknowledge that the docile press corps caved in even more to the White House when they all decided, no doubt without having to be told by Karl Rove, upon a press corps unified talking point: he just wasn't funny. When 40,000 people found him hilarious, heroic, and truly patriotic enough to write and thank him, many more must also be feeling that way.
Thanks to you for this. I will keep my subscription to Salon. I have already quit the Post and the Times.
Mr. Shapiro. This was well done and easy to follow.
Although I think scandal will be part of this story, I doubt that it will extend to prostitution, at least where Goss is concerned. He isn't the target of a criminal investigation that I have read of, but his appointee, Dusty Foggo, is.
Two former CIA analysts/agents were guests on the Jim Lehrer News Hour (PBS) this evening, and an interesting tidbit came out: Porter Goss upset the CIA regulars by importing many staff members from his Congressional office, one of whom was a former CIA employee who had already been kicked out of the CIA for pilfering bacon from a local supermarket. I don't know whether this story is true, but if it is, it shows the lack of vetting that seems to be so rampant in D.C. these days.
I was reminded of how Rudy Guliani's sidekick, Bernard Kerik, was nominated to be the head of Homeland Security before someone actually looked at his corrupt background and prompted him to use a "Nannygate" excuse to withdraw. This did not keep the television media from continuing to invite him to appear as an expert guest on their shows following Hurricane Katrina and the failure of FEMA. What's that old saying about the pot calling the kettle black?
If Foggo winds up in prison, will we still have Porter Goss appearing as a commentator on "Hardball?" I'm not aking any bets.
For your thorough rehash of the Leopold matter. At DailyKos, it has now become a topic for some entertaining satire. I still don't understand the loyalty of some who believe this guy. I felt pretty sure I had flushed him out in one of his pseudonyms on dkos, but then I thought, why am I wasting my time on this publicity hound? If Fitz is going to indict, we will all know it when it happens. If not, well, we will just have to defeat Bush and Rove and Cheney at the voting booths in November.
And we can. Work for that, Americans.
skepticism that has been taken literally should qualify:
"Born in the U.S.A." (they didn't get it)
"If I Had a Hammer" (they never understood it to begin with)
"This Land is Your Land" (Guthrie's protest to Kate Smith and "God Bless America")
I realize some would not classify all of these as rock, but most songs I can think of are in the Country category, and the duel between "Hippie from Olema" and "Okie from Muskogee" (Merle Haggard) happened so long ago that current conservatives probably wouldn't remember it, Country or Rock.
But for literal mindedness, conservatives win it all. Skepticism, not so much.
This is truly frightening. He doesn't KNOW when he's laughing. He actually said, "I'm not laughing," when everyone in the world saw him laughing. All along, whenever I have seen that laugh, that smirk, I have taken it as a sign of his arrogance, his dismissal of his questioners. Now, I see that it is just a tic, an unconscious expression of the little boy caught killing those frogs. He doesn't know he's laughing. Someone has to tell him that he has laughed whenever the number of dead in his war has come up or any other of his multitude of sins has been mentioned to his face.
War IS unsettling. It makes people feel sour. Karl Rove said so, and now G.W. has said so, too. As if this war just happened, without any causes or anyone to blame for it. As if Iraq had attacked the USA. The way the kid in the high chair learns so early to say, "Uh-oh" and look at the ceiling after deliberately dumping his cereal on the floor. "Uh-oh!" Bad war, upsetting everybody. How could that have happened?
Oh, well, let's just do another kid thing and hope it will go away. "Where's that dune buggy? That was fun!"
Where's New Orleans? I used to LOVE getting drunk there.
Where's my aircraft carrier? I had fun playing soldier wearing a codpiece and all.
Where's my boat and my lake? I want to catch another perch or bass or whatever it was. That was fun!
More prisoners to torture? That's always fun.
Another execution? Oh, goody. Those are really fun!
Let's go sign some bills with our fingers crossed behind our back. That's fun!
Let's go cut some brush! Better yet, let's go kill some frogs. That was fun!
GOD HELP US. THIS IS OUR PRESIDENT.
was the reporter I was waiting for on this one. He usually gets it right. Whether we ever see a Rove indictment is getting blurred by whether we will ever see Cheney on the witness stand. Both would be ideal.
Jason Leopold, to be so convincing to his editors, must have been the victim of a practical joke, perhaps played by someone who doesn't like to see bloggers get scoops on the regular media. If he had simply made all this up, no one else at TO would have listened to him. So, it makes sense that, Leopold's reputation for veracity having already been in some trouble, somebody just delivered the final blow. Will Madsen be next?
And, just for perspective, why doesn't Matt Drudge take more flak when he so obviously makes stuff up out of thin air?-- (I won't give him "whole cloth").
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
