Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales’s resignation for months, said this morning: “It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional, and desperately needs new leadership.”

Senator Schumer said that “Democrats will not obstruct or impede a nominee who we are confident will put the rule of law above political considerations.”

Isn't this pretty much a semaphore to the administration that they are already indeed planning on rolling over and playing dead? That's certainly how I read it.

All I can say is that I never in a million years suspected that I'd ever think so highly of John Ashcroft.

One of the things that the frustration we're feeling now obscures is just how much worse things were in 2003. Granted much of the progress that's been made since is due to the insistence of the Bush administration on engaging in behavior which makes most reasonable people cringe in disbelief but the progress is real nevertheless.

I also believe that the main point of attack should continue to be the professional media class. They are the ones who, more than any other group in this country, control the message that controls the shape of our debate. The good news is that they are responsive when caught in blatant falsehood.

Street protests will only be effective if they draw actual coverage. Otherwise, only those who attend will even know what happened.

One of the more entertain aspects of Right Wing thought is how confused they get when they encounter people who have A:developed a system of morals based on principles and B: stick to them even when it doesn't serve their own self-interest. The trolls here, of course are frequently baffled when Glenn and the other commenters actually hold Democrats responsible for doing the right thing.

In fact, at risk of overgeneralizing, I think thats what tends to separate the left from the right in the first place. The right views acting on behalf of the team first and formeost while the left tends to act on principles.

No offense, but nobody on the left cares about your sexual proclivities per se....

The impulse to uncover dirt on other people in order to bolster one's own dignity is pretty much a universal human trait. One need only watch an hour or two of daytime TV to understand that. Or count the number of hours of Celebrity Inebriation coverage on CNN. Those markets don't exist in a vacuum. People eat it up even if they're slightly uneasy about the whole process.

You have to remember that the human psyche is a cobbled together contraption made of up of parts and motives that don't always fit together snugly and that consciousness itself is almost an afterthought.

It should be unsurprising then that people are capable of holding two different contradictory views within months of each other. As long as each view was self-serving at the time it was held, there is no contradiction. The REAL trick, as Orwell notes, is to hold two contradictory viewpoints simultaneously. THAT requires practice.

But I've been through this entire thread and haven't seen anything resembling "ferocity"

But then again, I'm not a dishonest hack.

Who'd have seen that coming

Shooter's not so stupid that he doesn't realize that the whole subject isn't gayness but hypocrisy. He's fully aware of the fact that the phrase "family values" itself is just a thinly veiled code for gay-bashing. But rather than acknowlege what he knows well, he ignores it because it would interfere with his cute "gotchya" about liberals being anti-gay. Hmmmm.

Ignores facts. Team before truth. Proof positive that typical RWA's have no principles.

And for the record, when I refer to RWA's I don't mean "authoritarians"

First:

We seek an Iran whose government is accountable to its people

Boy that GW, what a kidder. A regular laff-riot! They don't even seek governments accountable to OUR people let alone to the Iranians. Governments accountable to its people are by defintion installed by the people in question. No amount of infrastructure destruction or explosions can change that basic fact. It would be heartening to think that he's paying lip-service to self-determination but we know he means no such thing.

Second: the one property of bombs that GW is counting on is their irreversible nature. Once they start falling, there's no undoing what's been done. I would therefore suspect that the whole Iranian war plan would involve massive explosive power being appied in a very short interval so that by the time Congress looked up and noticed, the deed would be done with nothing left to debate but the question of who is going to mop up.

The Madman theory was a primary characteristic of the foreign policy conducted by U.S. President Richard Nixon. His administration, the executive branch of the federal government of the United States from 1969 to 1974, attempted to make the leaders of other countries think Nixon was mad, and that his behavior was irrational and volatile. Fearing an unpredictable American response, leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations would avoid provoking the United States

Not that I find any reassurance in yet another example of GW trying to rehabilitate Nixon by reproducing all the worst aspects of his Presidencty.

Link here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory