Here's What's Left

Douche of the day: Randy Neugebauer

Earlier this week, I saw this delightful piece in Townhall.com:

When it comes to fiscal responsibility, The Beltway Beat gives credit where it is due.

There's no finer example this week than Rep. Randy Neugebauer, who has temporarily restored faith in Congress by ending funding of federal grants to study college dorm room wall decorations and keep personal diaries.

Specifically, the Texas Republican introduced an amendment to the 2005 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill to prohibit the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from funding two grants. The amendment was approved by voice vote, and for good reason.

One study, titled "Expressions of Identity in Virtual and Physical Spaces," paid college students $100 to decorate their dorm room walls. Researchers then attempted to discern how students express themselves through the decorations.

As an added incentive, three $1,000 prizes were given away in a lottery to the students who participated in the study.

The second study, "Goals, Identity and Meaning in Life," attempted to find out "what makes a meaningful day" for today's college students. To learn this, the study asked participants to keep a diary in which they documented meaningful events (since 1995, NIMH has provided diary-keepers more than $1 million).

"The federal government has no business paying someone more than a million dollars to figure out that college can be a meaningful experience," says Neugebauer.

Three problems here: 1.) This idiotic right-wing rag misprepresents the studies in question; 2.) To put it generously, Neugebauer is woefully misguided about scientific research in general. To put it succinctly, he's a twit; and 3.) Congress has absolutely no business which research projects are valuable and which aren't. Now each of these points in a little more depth--

Colossal Failures of Judgment

John Kerry's Iraq speech today. Here are some highpoints:

The first and most fundamental mistake was the President’s failure to tell the truth to the American people.

He failed to tell the truth about the rationale for going to war. And he failed to tell the truth about the burden this war would impose on our soldiers and our citizens.

By one count, the President offered 23 different rationales for this war. If his purpose was to confuse and mislead the American people, he succeeded.

Go get 'em John. That's a good response to the Republican talking point that says that John Kerry has had 8 different positions on the war.

The President now admits to “miscalculations” in Iraq.

That is one of the greatest understatements in recent American history. His were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment – and judgment is what we look for in a president.

The most important moment of John Kerry's life

Joe Klein's column this week gets it all precisely right.

McClellan began to read from talking points. The "pessimists and naysayers" had been wrong, he said, about the Iraqi people's ability to establish a transitional government, a national council and a transitional law.[...]

My second thought was pretty wicked: Scott McClellan is beginning to sound like Baghdad Bob, the infamous spokesman for Saddam who announced hallucinatory Iraqi victories as the American troops closed in on Baghdad.

That's funny, but the stuff that the Kerry campaign needs to hear is at the end:

The Republicans, with a strong assist from Kerry, have successfully painted the Democrat as a flip-flopping incompetent when it comes to national security. It will be hard for Kerry to change that impression. In fact, he has only one chance remaining, in the presidential debates.

And that won't be easy: I've never seen George Bush lose a debate. He is a brilliant minimalist. Kerry by contrast is all oratorical flab—although he did begin to show some signs of life last week in a solid speech to the National Guard convention, in which he blasted Bush's "fantasy of spin" about Iraq. It is a powerful fantasy, though. And it is easy to predict Bush's response to any Kerry criticism about Iraq: "My opponent is too pessimistic," the President will say. "See, what he doesn't understand is that the President of the United States has to stand firm. We can't show weakness. And we won't on my watch." Unless Kerry can come off with a succinct, and lethal, response to those vaporous but compelling platitudes, he will lose this election.

If there is one paragraph in all of the writings of all the punditocracy that I would like Mary Beth Cahill and Tad Devine to read, it's that one. Surely, the most important moment of the entire election cycle will occur when Kerry is given the chance to critique the President's Iraq policy, and when he is forced to repond to a statement like "the President of the United States has to stand firm. We can't show weakness."

Unfortunately for our side and our country, the Republicans have managed to frame the words "nuance" and "complexity" in ways that denote weakness and indecision. It is essential that the Kerry campaign have a short, concise, and biting answer to the "stand firm" schtick. I don't know what it is, because all of the answers that I know take longer than 30 seconds to say. But I just hope that those people in the Kerry campaign are smarter than me, and that years of getting beaten in the communications game by Republicans will have made them mad enough to go for the jugular.

-- Michael

Shocking

I'm not sure if I have much to say about this one, other than that this is the sort of stuff that makes us lose elections. AP story:

WASHINGTON - Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November.

The literature shows a Bible with the word "BANNED" across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word "ALLOWED." The mailing tells West Virginians to "vote Republican to protect our families" and defeat the "liberal agenda."

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said Friday that he wasn't aware of the mailing, but said it could be the work of the RNC. "It wouldn't surprise me if we were mailing voters on the issue of same-sex marriage," Gillespie said.

Via Josh Marshall.

I was trying to think, if there were an equivalent on our side, what would it be? The only thing that occured to me was something like: "If George W. Bush wins, he'll bring back slavery!" But that seems to be too severe, doesn't it? Any ideas?

-- Michael

GOP: the party of diversity

Everyone remember that talking point from the convention? "Our party is so diverse that we're putting all kinds of different opinions on stage!" Well, maybe they're right, maybe they are the party of a wide range of perceptions of reality. Let's look at the situation in Iraq, for example, and see what Republicans are saying about it:

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE): "The worst thing we can do is hold ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we're winning. Right now we're not winning, things are getting worse. Measure that by any measurement you want -- more casualties, more deaths, oil pipeline sabotage -- you pick the measurement standard and it's worse than where it was six months ago or 12 months ago." (09/16/04)

President George W. Bush: "This country is headed toward democracy. There's a strong prime minister in place. They have a national council. And national elections are scheduled for January. It wasn't all that long ago that Saddam Hussein was in power with his torture chambers and mass graves. And today, this country is headed towards elections. Freedom is on the march." (09/16/04)

Sen Richard Lugar (R-IN): "[This is] exasperating for anybody look[ing] at this from any vantage point." (09/16/04)

President George W. Bush: “We’re making progress there. I’m impressed -- I’m impressed by Prime Minister Allawi. He’s a strong guy who believes that democracy is the future of Iraq, and he’s got hard work to do. It wasn’t all that long ago that people were brutalized by Saddam Hussein. But we’re making progress.” (09/09/04)

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): "[I]t is going to be a tough sled. And we need to be more direct and more honest about how difficult it will be." (09/16/04)

President George W. Bush: “We talked about Iraq, the way forward in Iraq, the way to help the Iraqis get to elections. We’re making progress on the ground.” (08/23/04)

-- Michael

The way in which Republican ideology is fundamentally self-contradictory

In the last week or so, we've heard a lot from the usual suspects about how bad CBS is, how much of an agenda Dan Rather has, and (all together now!) how liberal the media is. Let's take a representative quote, this one from Carl Limbacher, of Newsmax, on Joe Scarborough's show:

Now we learn that, at least in Rather's case, there seems to be a very pronounced agenda that goes so far even to tolerate perhaps forged documents getting on to the nation's airwaves in a way that severely misleads the potential voters in this year's election.

And if you're a person with a brain, you probably thought, "why is it that Dan Rather's agenda is being questioned, but the right-wing nutjobs, who are always making stuff up, don't get the same kind of scrutiny?" Then you go to Media Matters, and find that Sean Hannity said this, of the CBS producer who produced the segment with the apparently forged memos:

HANNITY: [T]his woman who also produced -- was the producer who obtained the Abu Ghraib photos. ... [T]he same person that had the Abu Ghraib pictures -- the Abu Ghraib photos is apparently the same one that got these documents. ... Now here's the question. Where did she get all this stuff from? So that could mean that Abu Ghraib -- where did that come from? Was that a DNC plot too? I mean, there's a lot of questions here.

Memo"gate"

Seriously, "memogate" is what what Fox News was calling it. Fair and Balanced my ass.

Anyway, I think this chapter is pretty much closed for the election cycle, at least I hope it is, because I think most people think that the documents are either forgeries, or are most likely forgeries. Certainly, no one on the Democratic side is claiming that they mean anything anymore, and I certainly won't.

What amazes me about this issue, and what makes me suspicious about the whole thing, really, is just how bad it's been for the Democrats. I don't want to accuse Karl Rove of forging them or anything, because obviously there's no evidence of that, but I think the situation couldn't have worked out better for him, really.

Kitty Kelley and the so-called liberal media

Before the stuff about the charges in Kitty Kelley's book get too out of hand, I'd like to take this opportunity to add yet another piece of evidence to the already substantial pile that suggests that the media isn't actually liberal at all. Let's take a little gander through this so-called liberal media, and how they're covering Ms. Kelley's book, shall we?

The NYTimes is the bastion of the liberal media. Surely, one would expect them to have a review of the book that was favorable to Ms. Kelley, since her attack on the Bush family would be so damning were it substantial. Funny then, some editor must not have been paying attention:

Kitty Kelley's catty new book about the Bush family is a perfect artifact of our current political culture in which unsubstantiated attacks on Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record and old questions about President Bush's National Guard service get more attention than present-day issues like the Iraq war, the economy, intelligence reform or the assault weapons ban.

It is also a perfect artifact of a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet; more and more biographies of artists and public figures dwell, speculatively, on familial dysfunction and disorder; and buzz - be it based on verified facts or sheer rumor-mongering - is regarded as a be-all and end-all.

Health stories for (and by) idiots

Seems a little boo-boo was made by the FDA--apparently antidepressants can cause young people to become "acutely suicidal," as you can read here. That's bad enough, but the real fuck-up by the FDA was that they apparently suppressed information about clinical trials that showed evidence for increased risk of suicide in children and adolescents on antidepressants. Fabulous.

Today an FDA committee voted to put giant warning labels on drug information sheets, but 7 months ago:

The agency held a similar hearing in February in which top agency officials treated with skepticism findings from numerous clinical trials that the drugs may lead some patients to become acutely suicidal.

Weeks after the hearing, leaked documents showed that a top safety reviewer at the agency, Dr. Andrew Mosholder, had concluded that the drugs did cause some patients to become suicidal and that the drugs' risks outweighed their benefits in children and teenagers. Top officials were forced to admit that Dr. Mosholder's testimony at the February meeting was canceled because of his views.

Senate and House committees initiated investigations. More leaks ensued. Agency officials insisted that they simply needed time to undertake a more thorough review of the studies. That review was completed last month with conclusions nearly identical to Dr. Mosholder's original analysis.

Oopsy!

Some people never learn

Atrios points me to Nicholas Kristof, who, writing about the Bush Texas Air National Guard scandal, has the best articulation of the following idea I've heard yet:

Does any of this matter? What troubles me is less Mr. Bush's advantage three decades ago and more his denial today. Mr. Bush's own route to avoid the draft underscores the disparities in America, yet his policies seem based on a kind of social Darwinism in which the successful make their own opportunities. His tax cuts and entire outlook seem rooted in ideas not of noblesse oblige, but of noblesse entitlement.

It sure is easy to cut taxes for the rich when you've never been poor.

-- Michael