News Item: Pot Calls Kettle Uppity

Said before that BHO's politickin' daily with diplomats was making him look presidential. That's a strength.

Consider then, Dear Reader, that Walnuts' camp has brought on Rove's acolytes to steer the campaign, and since then the campaign has taken on more of a flighty, Windsurfish, Frenchy, preoccupation with drivel. The meme now, of course, is that Obama's all hat and no cattle, a political Paris Hilton, the black Britney. The accompanying media meme is that he's arrogant, presumptuous, etc.

The Rovian aspect is, of course, attacking BHO on a strength: popularity and comfortability with the idea of him being president. Turn it on its head: call him a pop-tart for drawing the crowds and uppity for thinking he's justified in drawing the crowds.

We here at the Dark Steer just find it funny because it is Walnuts who ran an ad calling himself "The American President Americans Have Been Waiting For."

Tim Kaine is not the dude, Barry...

No no no. This is a bad idea. Let's see about shutting down the Barack-Obama-Tim-Kaine rumor mill.

On the surface, Tim Kaine is a perfect match. The bumper stickers can say "O-K!" He was the first governor to come out for Obama. He ran on a platform of "smart growth" and "bipartisan solutions" -- thin gruel, but Virginia lapped it up, and it's perfectly of a piece with BHO's efforts to "overcome divisiveness." He's a Catholic, and thus opposes both abortion and capital punishment. On the stump, he's basically a non-entity, perfect for the Bucket of Warm Spit job. Anyway, so-called pragmatists will swoon over the possibility of recruiting this pro-choice Southern governor with middle-brow concerns: traffic, budgets, resources, crime.

There are numerous problems with this scenario, and they are all largely functions of the idea that a successful politics shoots for the mean of public opinion; that in order to get 50%-plus-one, you just tailor your message for the fifty-first percentile of human consciousness.

Confusion for seniors. Listen to it for a second. Johmmcain. ObamaKaine. Exit pollsters' nightmare...

Overkill. Virginia is already "in play." Kaine can't make it more "in play," and he's too much a carpetbagger and neophyte to guarantee it'll hold for Obama. And by itself, Virginia is transforming into New Jersey. Let's not gild the lily, shall we?

Obama needs a feral hound. Kaine is a namby-pamby. BHO is still being flogged for being a namby-pamby. We want two guys getting knocked for being incapable of making The Hard Decisions? Where is the Lyndon Johnson on this ticket? The John Nance Garner? The Spiro Agnew? Where is the advocate of muscular politics? Who is Obama's Cheney?

The biggie might actually be Kaine and wind. Kaine took in $135,000 from Dominion Power and is in turn backing a new coal-fired power plant for Wise County. Wise is too downtrodden a place to protest much, and coal is the last good job in Southwest Virginia. [Cf. WVTF on the Last Clinic in Galax. (mp3)] But BHO had better expect talk about The Shafting of Wise County; how, in effect, Kaine Administration policy is to redistribute income from the poor, rural Southwest and Southside to the rich, exurban North.

Kaine, to fight back, had better talk about wind...should be in this pdf somewhere..."there are environmental and community-related challenges" (p.81) to putting wind turbines in super-windy Highland County...

Will Kaine sit on wind in favor of coal gasification? Probably. Since he's found ways to strip-mine in the guise of producing "scenic vistas":

The “coal synergy” partnership will allow Alpha Natural Resources and Pioneer Coal to mine coal along the corridor and prepare a highway-worthy roadbed [...] coupling surface coal mining with building a highway.

Fuggedaboudit: BHO likes corn anyway...

Finally, that abominable State of the Union riposte. Cilizza is too kind; Tim Kaine's nervous tic does not make him look like The Rock. He looks weird; his writers suck; he's still learning the teleprompter, but that's all style. The content was the killer. Kaine lacks the Clintonian understanding that comforting the inconsolable does not jive with self-congratulation. You can't just go Katrina, Iraq, economy, then:

[...]we're moving ahead by focusing on service, competent management and results. It's all about bringing people together to find common-sense solutions to our common problems.
That's how we in Virginia earned the ranking of America's "Best Managed State."

It's tantamount to saying "I manage results for your pain."

In sum, Kaine represents the Built for Solutions, politics-of-no-politics that Mike Bloomberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Warner and Webb have been pimping for the bulk of this decade. It is the first baby step into the abyss of single-party government. No one can disagree with solving problems! The public, satisfied, retreats from political life. The political class proceeds to identify problems, develop and implement solutions...

The process is only halted when we remember that the cult of "competencies and skillsets" hides a little Auschwitz; that every solution is always already a Final Solution...
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Flash!!

WASHINGTON -- Jack Bauer, the fictional television character, in an appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, defended the necessity of torture to success in the war on terror groups, even as the Bush administration moved to pardon him and quash his testimony.

Bauer was disarmingly candid with the committee. When the Chair, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), opened the proceedings by lambasting Bauer's contempt for the rule of law, Bauer responded, "All that is true, Congressman. I violated the DTA, the MCA, the Torture statutes, the Convention Against Torture, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and the Mann Act [...]

"In a single 24-hour period, I killed seven men, one woman, and a dog; kidnapped 5 other people; shaved, electrocuted, interrogated and released 12 other people. During this period I revealed an attempt to stage a military coup in Hawaii; I assassinated the Vice President; I saved the President and the Speaker of the House; I hijacked a Capitol tour bus, and found the remains of the bomb that brought down Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane."

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) quickly countered, "You are clearly a man who believes himself to be above the laws that govern human relationships." Bauer's reply: "That's not all, sir. I am also beyond the laws that govern physics." To a stunned audience, Bauer simply opined, "I can bend time with my mind."

The administration had initially sought to restrict the scope of Bauer's testimony, then denied access to him as a matter of executive privilege, until Waxman and committee Democrats were compelled to subpoena him. Yesterday, the administration moved to distance itself from Bauer. "This is a Tom-and-Jerry hearing. Jack Bauer was a low-level freelance operator requesting limited access to enhanced techniques, who's now selling his story to FOX for millions of dollars."

Shortly after the hearing, Bauer was indicted at the International Criminal Tribunal for Broadcast Programming after judges at the Hague viewed the 5-disc first season of 24. "No international body claiming to govern the world's fantasies would dare stand idly by while men such as Herr Bauer wreck havoc on our institutions," said a three-member panel of justices.

A full presidential pardon is expected to be issued later today. Such a measure would prove conclusively that Jack Bauer exists, though it would obscure just what exactly his role was in crafting administration interrogation policy.

The question of Bauer's culpability in defining, enacting and -- as his critics point out -- hyperextending that policy, from Guantanamo to Bagram, may be moot. Yesterday evening, Bauer was sprayed with the nerve agent, sarin, and was abducted by rogue elements of the Chinese military. His precise whereabouts are unknown.

Welcome to the Fudge Haus...

Once more blurring the line between the campaign as high-meta Kaufmannesque "comedy" and, as Bumiller sees it, the campaign as paean to ineptitude, John McCain was in Columbus, Ohio's German Village yesterday at a place known as Schmidt's Restaurant und Sausage Haus. OMFG. I can't stop peeing my pants.

BHO was in another place, doing something else. Whatever it was, it was not funny.

Walnuts even gave a press conference in front of a sign that apparently said "Fudge Haus." I couldn't read it from the AP video, because of the tacky gold paint and faux-Gothic lettering.

While there, he was able to sample the "Bahama Mama sausage and jumbo cream puffs." Perhaps at the same time.

While Barry unfurled a cosmic vision of brothers and sisters breaking boundaries, John ate a quarter-pound stick of swirly marshmallow fudge, saying, "Here, in my mouth, ebony and ivory live in perfect harmony," and "People, listen. Fudge knows no boundaries."

In reality, McCain was there to woo German-Americans, a key demographic unfortunately alienated by the 1930s crackdown on German-lanugage schools, the elimination of German community groups and sympathizers like the Silver Shirts, the mocking of German cuisine, and the firebombing of Dresden.

Columbus resident Otto Schneemann reflected on this: "Above all, the will of the people, including our demand for living-space (lebensraum), must be met and adhered to!"

Ohh, I can only laugh but so much. The midwest is a crazy Teutonic place, full of hunting lodges, deer heads, red leather. Among the populace, a grim hunger for the apocalypse. Faced with this lala-land, McCain could either walk Lindsey Graham around on a leash with a knife in his own teeth, or suck it up and face the wurst. The awful wurst...
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Who put that deranged beast Peter Hoekstra on metaphor control?

K: Wars end when they are satisfactorily framed. Physical and monetary costs aside. When the damage to ideas can be repaired, the populace is ready for another war; this is the only sign of war's end. Conflict needs brackets.

Build the brackets by policing the jargon of teleology; this weekend's laughable coinage of the "Time Horizon," par exemple. I'm not sure the beast actually works, a little sci-fi, but selah. The vision of soldiers reaching a limit in space-time only to be sucked into some hyperspace vortex cannot be what the president intended. But nevermind: "benchmarks" defeated "fixed deadlines"; "horizon" beats "artificial timetable."

Thus, Peter Hoekstra howling like a wounded beaver in the Post. "Ten weeks" with "virtually no sectarian killings," sounds like a pretty squishy standard for peace, as does the handover of most of the provinces, the hope for provincial elections, the return of a Sunni bloc to the Cabinet, etc. So congratulations, Rep. Hoekstra. Iraq is no longer a failed petrostate : it is a crankily operable client regime of the U.S., still occupied by American soldiers.

Really, I hate to rain on folks' parade, but this isn't the first, nor will it be the last time Pete conjures some fantasy land for political points. What's interesting now is that he's conjuring a fantasy land of peace and buttercups.

The Hoekstra modus operandi is to invent a fictional world that is more vicious and Hobbesian than we believe. In an op-ed last summer calling for the revision of FISA, he argued that "lightning-fast" communication would lead to attacks on the homeland. Now, it's dumb to mimic Verizon talking points when lobbying for amnesty for such phone companies as violated Constitutional protections against unlawful search...but he got what he wanted. Mind you, nothing happened in the six-month period between the lapse of the PAA and the passage of the Surveillance Once, Surveillance Now, Surveillance Fo'evuh Act. Metaphor control works: the speed of the Interweb becomes the bolt of Jove, wielded by irritated Pakistanis...

This is the same man who two years ago crassly exaggerated the threat of the trans-Atlantic bombers in the NYPost, and who thus is directly accountable for my not being able to bring 8 ounces of Boursin from DiBruno's to my parents for Christmas last year. (Philly International's response: "Yuhs can eider eat it 'ere, or what." I want my cheese back, BTW.) Pete asked us to "imagine the horror." Trouble with that is, people did. Turns out it's laughably hard to do the chemistry on a plane:

Don't forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked "perishable foods"), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You're going to need them.

But again, the Die Hard: With a Vengeance script scared the pants off everyone, and confiscated my cheese.

Pete's finest hour, however, was his Wall Street Journal opinion piece of June 26, 2006. The one that wrote for the right-wing the shibboleth about "500 canisters of sarin" found in Iraq -- another metaphorical success where literal failure reigns. Hoekstra gets unhinged, all but alleging a grand conspiracy by SIGIR, the IAEA, David Kay, Charles Duelfer, the Pentagon...He lapses into Rumsfeldian philosophy:

Indeed, we do not even know what is known or unknown.

A deranged tour de force. Easily mocked by the NYTimes.

Ahh, the first casualty of war is language...My only question is how long will it take for Hoekstra to run out the string?
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[His] art of war is unknown...

"Horizon" don't beat "timeline". I mean, "Surge" beat "escalation," sure, but with a bigger stage, BHO's gonna call it tomayto-tomahto in that commonsensical way and that'll catch on. Horizon-potayto, timeline-potahto, he's been saying we should call the whole thing off the whole time.

Thing is, the semantics don't matter much, because we're seeing a repeat of what happened versus Hillary. Back in the debates, there was a stone-cold killer moment wherein one BHO, in the parlance of our times, "owned" one Hillary Clinton. An addendum, one supposes, is necessary for Ye Olde Dark Steer Theorem #4432: You underestimate Barry Hussein at your peril.

Walnuts, et al. got what they wanted: they'd raised the rhetoric to the point where BHO had to go to Iraq and make a big deal about it. Unfortunately for them, he used the opportunity to turn the trip into a global jetsetting romp wherein he... well... looks... presidential. Littman, over at HuffPo, gets it perfectly:

All John McCain has done, with his childish taunting of Obama, is create a situation where Obama has now gone overseas; been seen with General Petraeus smiling, looking Presidential; been photographed with world leaders who seem excited by the prospect of an Obama Presidency, and shown, by images, that he fits in just fine on the world stage; and, of course, Obama has taken all the media attention with him when McCain is desperate for media coverage.

If McCain's team wants any chance of winning, they've got to stop underestimating this man. He and his team are excellent at goading opponents into hubristically overplaying their hands--see frontheavy spending from Clinton camp and redfaced Bill Clinton. The dominant media narrative is that McCain's the one heavy on foreign policy cred. Well we've got a week plus of footage of BHO politickin' daily with diplomats and not just looking like he belongs, but exceeding expectations as he goes. Meanwhile, Walnuts looks the fool mixing up brown people geographies, all the while trying to figure out how he's going to address the issue that's going to dominate the political discourse this fall: the shit sandwich that is the Bush economy.

And, on that note, a question: The quieter Iraq gets, the more people focus on their pocketbooks; so is the prevailing wisdom that "progress" in the war is good news for Republicans...wrong?

We got it sewn, The Firm art of war is unknown
Lower your tone, face it, homicide cases get blown
Aristocrats, politickin daily with diplomats
See me I'm an official mack, Lex Coupe triple black
-AZ, "Affirmative Action"

Potatohead AG Mukasey takes on the Supremes...

Seriously Mike, I thought you were listening when the Supremes hit you with Boumediene. Habeas, bitch! It's up there in the executive summary:

Because the [Detainee Treatment Act's] procedures for reviewing detainees' status are not an adequate and effective substitute for the habeas writ, [the Military Commissions Act] operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ.

The permission the D.C. Circuit Court gave you to operate has been reversed and remanded. These guys are going into the federal system, or they're getting shipped back to Yemen, one.

This is what I thought anyway, until the Hamdan trial finally opened, "ending" the story of his probably illegitimate detention, fruitless interrogation and needless maltreatment. I thought we were done here.

So did Mukasey. Why shut the Commissions down for a 5-4 vote? As every Bushite has said since Boumediene, "it was a very divided decision." I mean, yes, it was divided once, into the Yea and the Nay, as all decisions are, and you lost. The A's lost the other day in New York on a walk-off hit-by-pitch, 4-3; do I now get to claim victory, saying, "it was a narrow outcome, very divided, went 12 innings." Do I get to mark that 4-3 embarrassment in the Wins column?

Foolish pride...I had ignored the pattern of judgement and judicial leg-cutting that continues to operate. The court revealed that detainees in Cuba had habeas in Rasul v. Bush. The administration had Congress then clumsily strip detainees of habeas in the Detainee Treatment Act (2005). The Supremes nullified that part of DTA; Congress wrote it back in in the MCA (2006). Now, having been smacked down, Mukasey will ignore Boumediene and have Congress try something new.

Just as the DTA and MCA were ostensibly about preventing torture and guaranteeing access to lawyers, the new shit will have some ostensibly noble goal. I don't think Mukasey's vision of "reaffirmation" applies. Some quasi-pagan public cleansing ritual, elevating Bush era crimes to the level of national religion? Not sure you want that exactly, Mike.

I am suggesting that it would do all of us good to have that principle reaffirmed [...] not that the principle itself is in doubt.

...but that the People are of dubious fiber, Chairman?

Well, since I'm already convinced that this is Guantanamo's endgame, that you're just running out the clock to avoid giving an inch of legal ground, and that you look and act like a stunned cave-toad, shocked to find a world of light and air every time you pop out of your little hole...I say bring it on...
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