The controversy surrounding The Road to 9/11 has been referenced to that which greeted The Reagans, which lands one to that cute and lazy “Independent” stand that we’ve landed on the partisan yin-yang. Republicans outraged, Democrats outraged — with enough room for each to claim “Hypocrite”.

If I recall right, the Drudge Report filled its page full of quotes and excerpts from The Reagans — the focal point being dialouge about Nancy Reagan consulting Astrology. I vaguely recall something about scoffawing AIDs — a case which is “Doth protesteth too much”. The Astrology stuff I will defer to the journalist who recently released a book of interviews with our recent presidents: if you look at the decisions that were attributed to Astrology, they were all pretty good decisions. Nonetheless, a depiction that was reportedly relatively positive met the rage of Reagan fans due to its failure to rise to the level of Haliography — and thus shoved off to be not seen on Showtime.

The Road to 9/11 puzzles me in a way that The Reagans can’t, even if you assume that it portrayed Ronald Reagan as the anti-Christ. It is the sheer import that ABC brought to bear on the film. It was to be broadcast sans advertisements — a sign of import I last remember tied to a broadcast of Schindler’s List. These pretenses have gradually been dropped — the study lesson that they developed for schools to use in class was abandoned, they have declared it “a drama”, its claim to be a representation of the 9/11 Report has been dropped, and ABC says they are making their last minute changes.

So The Road to 9/11 reminds me more of Stolen Honor, a broadcast of remarks from that cadre of Vietnam veterans bitter due to Kerry’s war protests, which Sinclair Broadcasting owned stations broadcast in prime-time during the 2004 campaign. The bias of Sinclar Broadcasting was shown when the executive said that its just counter-programming to the bias shown in the news proper when they reported negative developments in Iraq.

Thinking about The Road to 9/11, and looking over the constellation of these anti-Clintonites. Dick Morris now claims, belatedly, that his suggestion to Bill Clinton on becoming a “Great President” was to reform Welfare, and Defeat Terrorism (presumably as George W Bush is). Which is something that is not terribly believable, but falls into line with the mish-mashing of the claims that have spewed upward to this film about Clinton’s gross negligence of “The Gathering Threat”.

Stumbling about, I think I just found what is just about the most hilarious and hyper-ventilating editorial about Ned Lamont’s defeat of Joseph Lieberman. From the right-ward publication “Human Events” comes some fair reminiscent of Pravda. A selection of pargaraphs.

The Lamont victory over a former vice presidential candidate of the party means one thing and one thing only. The wealthy but crazed inhabitants of the left-wing fever swamps are taking over a party that has been trying to re-identify with the voters who allowed it to dominate American politics for most of the last century. The purge that began with the McGovernite seizure of the party in the early seventies has been reinvigorated.

Lamont’s victory was a triumph for the left and a defeat for the United States because it may mean that future elections will be run between candidates of a proU.S. party and nominees of an anti-U.S. party.

How can anyone argure with all of that? Probably just have to go ahead and match the shouting vitrol, I suppose.

There’s a comic strip in the Oregonian from a former (or current?) elementary school teacher from Vancouver, Washington. A while ago, the Oregonian surveyed several comic strips to decide which new strip to add to the paper and replace the Peanuts reprints. Since all the new comic strips sucked (although I was mildly partial to Lio, but it was a case of grading on a curve), the winner as the Peanuts reprint — over 50 percent of respondents voted for it. “Adams’ Apple”, the Vancouver based strip, came in second, and thus ended up replacing some forgetable comic strip that had lingered on the Comics page unnoticed for some time.

I am not one that derides the comics page of the newspaper. There are about a dozen good strips — not terribly great and not really Appointment Reading. The best of the lot seem to lose something in collected book form where a Calvin and Hobbes would gain something.

Adams’ Apple is a strip that I suppose would garner knowing nods of recognition from teachers. The art isn’t terribly great, and the gags go no further than the cartoonists’ observations and anecdotes. So it was that it aggrivated me a few week’s ago. For a moment I had to ponder whether I had wandered a little too far into Political Correctness for my own good to decide whether this former (or current) teacher and now cartoonist of a not terribly good comic strip and a stupid gag of mild intolerance was worth a couple seconds worth anger.

I searched the web for the strip, since I would rather present it than explain it, but it appears “Adams’ Apple” isn’t on the web. Which is just as well.

So the teacher has the class rise to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. One student asks the teacher if he can be excused from the recitation of the Pledge. The teacher thinks “Oh boy. It’s one of those kids.” The next panel shows the teacher reciting a spiel about “Oh, no. We respect diversity of religion and etc.” The final panel has the kid saying “So I can go use the bathroom”, and the teacher breathing a sigh of relief.

Is the cartoonist just a little obnoxious? Goddamned those Jehovah’s Witnesses who put an unwelcome spork in our daily rituals and just mildly don’t conform. Why must we change slight things around for their benefit?

On Labor Day, President George W Bush claimed to be a “Progressive”:

And so, here on Labor Day, I say to the union members who are here, happy Labor Day, and thanks for supporting leadership that is progressive, smart, capable, and has your best interests at heart.

I’ve never been able to fully digest the meaning of the word “progressive”, but in modern American political parlance progressive really simply means “liberal” who is afraid to tag themself with that label due to years of both demonization and periods of liberal inertia. I have seen commentary bounced back and forth by blog-denziens parcing out the meaning, and coming full forth on the side of “Progressivism” before “Liberalism”, but I’ve pushed it aside and largely skipped over it and ignored it.

So, I’ve generally thought the use of the word “Progressive” managed to reinforce a bad image of Liberalism as — weak-kneed… not gumptious to the fight… spineless. And over the past few election cycles, I’ve cringed as various Centrist Democrats tapped into the word to define themselves for a difficult election cycle with their skeptical partisan crowd — Gray Davis initially tagged himself as “Progressive” when trying to feel himself for a way to win his Recall Election, and it came across like a slimy mole. The effect and botton line is the term is meaningless in the hands of political hacks.

After hearing Bush use the term, I have to reconsider the political muscle of the word. I don’t know if I’d end up changing my considerations of what the word means circa this moment in history, but it’s worth thinking about. Bush thought it was worth co-opting, and thus I pause.

Rhode Island’s Republican Senate primary race and the lines of demarcation between the incumbent Lincoln Chafee and the challenger Steven Laffey have taken a strange turn.

I turn briefly to the New Jersey Governor’s race of 2005, where the Demcrat Jon Corzine used a tagline against Republican Doug Forrester “Doug Forrester is George Bush’s Choice. Is He Yours?” That strikes me as one of the most hilarious political ads ever, because its sheer audacity: of course Doug Forrester is George Bush’s choice — he’s a Republican — How can he not be?

Steven Laffey now seems to be tapping into that very premise of connecting the candidate to the unpopular president — albeit Laffey makes various conservative (in both the good sense of the term and bad) against Bush and — by way of extension — the most liberal Republican in the Senate — Chafee. A paraphrase from the appearance on the Sunday Morning Chattering Class program “This Week with George Stephanopolis” — heard in soundbyte form — goes “I don’t think Karl Rove and the bunch know how to deal with someone as Independent as me.”

The irony is that Lincoln Chafee is the least reliable Republican for a party line vote. Laffey would be more ideologically in tune with the Republican Caucus, and therefore — drum roll please — less Independent, such as that is. Yet, Chafee has the full backing of the Republican Party Campaign Apparatus, far beyond that which the Democratic Counterpart gave Joseph Lieberman, and thus… “Lincoln Chafee is George Bush’s Choice. Is he Yours?” may as well be used for a goddamned Republican Primary.

Two notable votes where Lincoln Chafee broke with his party? He was the lone Republican Senator to vote against authorizing war against Iraq. When asked to defend his Republican credentials, he has said that he is a keeper of the “traditional” Republican values of fiscal responsibility, personal freedoms, the environment, and healthy skepticism of “foreign entanglements.” The other notable ote Chafee made against the Republican Establishment: he did not cast his ballot in 2004 for President George W Bush, instead writing in as a protest against the president George H W Bush.

Thus the Rhode Island Republican Senate Primary race double backs on itself and becomes a strange mirage of who both supports and doesn’t support at the same time the Republican Party of the moment.

To be fair to Hillary Clinton, the recent “shocking” news that she made the oh boy oh boy how so very self-serving pronouncement that she believed that “America is Ready for a female President” and a coy “stay tuned” comment (because you see, she would be the one able to control the programming of when someone will wait to be tuned in to the programming), was all the result of a question posed to her. “Do you believe America is ready for a female president?” Thus the entire spectacle is one giant Kabuki Dance amongst the chattering class and the politician as Hollywood celebrity, all just to get the headline “Clinton says America is ready for a female president”.

Nonetheless, I will go ahead and thank Hillary Clinton for giving a much needed shout out to Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius.

I saw a sticker plastered to a telephone pole, or some such object, the other day. (As I am want to do.) The message depressed me.

“I Love My Life.
I Love Myself.”
And then in a cloud — with dots coming out of it (a representation of rain):
“Fuck Bush”
And across from the rain: “raining on my parade.”

I am not a fan of George W Bush, but the reality is that he really does not affect my well being or sense of self-worth, that I need to give a daily affirmation about. Whoever stuck this sticker up is giving a politician too much power and too much credit.

The same goes for Sean Hannity, who said, “This is the moment to say that there are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of ’em is making sure Nancy Pelosi doesn’t become the speaker.”

Maybe Sean Hannity feels it is worth dying to keep Nancy Pelosi from becoming Speaker of the House. I do not believe it is a sign of “the other side” being more determined than me, but personally I do not believe it is worth dying to keep Dennis Hastert from remaining spekar of the house. Maybe it’s worth a bunch of things for a bunch of people out there — time, money, exhaustion from phone banking and canvassing, whatever the hell else people do beyond ranting — but that would seem to be the extent of “what it is worth”.

I think the poster of the Bush sticker is the person who also stuck up a piece of paper (same handwriting, I think) within the vicintity that read “Bush’s deficit will impoverish our children, but it has enriched his corporate buddies. Vote Democratic. IMPEACH!” I already noted the deficiencies of messages such as this one in the fine city of Portland. But leave that aside, and I need to note that the reasons for any “impeachment” are getting confused here. Deficit spending, as fiscally reckless as it may be, does not appear to be grounds for impeachment.

I believe this week marked, for all practical purposes, the beginning of George W Bush’s midterm election campaign. Bush launched his umpteenth “non-political” speaking tour to elucidate the public about the events in Iraq, as though he has anything worth hearing on the subject to say. The American Legion Convention looked like a good launching pad for this campaign offensive — a safe bunch of hawks in a safely Republican state of Utah (the strange blue dot of Salt Lake, and mayor Rocky Anderson, notwithstanding). Donald Rumsfeld thus spoke his effectively campaign speech, raising the specter of Neville Chamberlain. Neville Chamberlain is the last historical reference refuge of a scoundrel. Keither Olbermann thus had his At Long Last, Have You No Sense of Decency moment.

Meanwhile, the semi-offical propaganda outlet of the RNC, Fox News, furiously beat the drums of war for a military strike on Iran. As White House chief of staff Andrew Card said in 2002, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Or maybe you do, but just in the last week of August.

To get the most undiluted wad of Republican talking points, you turn to the dumbest and least independent-minded member of their cadre — Sean Hannity. Thus we get the specter of Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the tactic to bring out the beleagured base of the Republican Party — and the old saw is that midterm elections turn on whose base cares. I can’t picture anyone beyond the base who’d care about, at worst, “new boss — in some respects same as the old boss, and a check on this tired old government.” Even if the label “Limosine Liberal” fits Pelosi to a tee.

The latest issue of Weekly Standars is already out of date. The magazine had an editorial on the bump Bush was receiving due to the foiling of the British Liquid Terror Plot. The bump never materialized, but we all try to will such things into existence.

Something pops out to me from this transcript of Brian Williams’s interview with George W Bush

WILLIAMS: Is there a palpable tension when you get together with the former president, who happens to be your father? A lot of the guys who worked for him are not happy with the direction of things.

BUSH: Sometimes, yeah, of course we do. But it’s a really interesting question, it’s kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant. My dad means the world to me, as a loving dad. He gave me the greatest gift a father can give a child, which is unconditional love. And yeah, we go out and can float around there trying to catch some fish, and chat and talk, but he understands what it means to be president. He understands that often times I have information that he doesn’t have. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”

Rewind. Why in the world would George W Bush say:

But it’s a really interesting question, it’s kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant.

Who said anything about any “conspiracy theory”? Bush is being asked about his relationship with his father, who although hasn’t said anything or made any public nudges in any direction, some of his aides have over the past few years publicly opposed some of Bush’s foreign policies. Nothing untorrid about that, and nothing “conspiratorial” about it.

But to mention it, out of the blue, is to suggest that he has it on his mind, and it is to suggest that, yes my dear, there is something X-Filey, aluminum or tin-foil hat going on. Otherwise, why would he mention a goddamned “conspiracy theory”, and have it on his mind as though it something he wants to dismiss and is hyper-aware of?

I may as well plunge on with the next curious moments of this interview.

WILLIAMS: We always talk about what you’re reading. As you know, there was a report that you just read the works of a French philosopher. (Bush laughs)

WILLIAMS: This is a change…

The back story of Camus’s The Stranger is that Laura recommended he read it? Can you get away with that as an answer on a school book report?

I hate these presidential reading lists. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a president who reads the required reports concerning his job, and has for his Summer reading list — say, the latest Dean Koontz novel. Yes, I would hope he (or she) would be pretty well read throughout his life, but let the “heavy history of world literature” (or in Camus’s case, sort of middling — “a quick read” I hear) reading slide during his presidency.

If we pretend that Bush read The Stranger, we then have to wonder exactly what he got out of it. More importantly, we have to wonder what the Bush Administration was trying to signal by having him read it (or having him say he read it.) The premise:

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he’s imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial’s proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities–that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother’s death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts–so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

Does that describe his administration somehow?

I find it difficult to believe that her Democratic opponent, Bill Nelson — who is probably one of the three or so most conservative Democrats in the Senate, is not publically Christian. A quick google search of “Bill Nelson” AND “Christian” shows up with the startling admission that… gasp… he votes a meager 16% with the Christian Coalition! For whatever that is worth. I wonder if the Christian Coalition charts votes over, say, the Estate Tax.

When candidates such as Katherine Harris attach themselves to the godly cause I am never entirely sure, nor do I ever really understand how these things transmit themselves to the True Believer.

OR:

You are giving her the benefit of the doubt regarding what she meant. Don’t. Odds are she believes just exactly what she said. It is a Fundie mind set that anything contrary to what they advocate HAS TO BE SINFUL.

May. Be.

As it were, Katherine Harris’s campaign has been one giant train-wreck and a joke. She is 30 points behind in the polls and keeps firing her staff. Should she be nominated, which is no longer a certainty, the Florida Republican Party will likely leave her name out of their campaign literature. God, as well as Jeb Bush for that matter, is telling her to go away, but she does not seem to have ears to hear.

The Tampa Tribune endorsed one of her obscure competitors for the Republican nomination. Actually they endorsed the least obscure competitor, whose relative name is owed to the fact that he is the son of a famous Florida Senator and Governor from the 1930s to 1950s. QUICK: Name me the most prominent politicians from your state in those decades.