Blogito

Concerned that Republicans intend to use Mr. Rangel’s problems to cast Democrats as ethically lax — and unwilling to confront corruption in their own ranks — some Democrats are quietly edging away from him. ...

His public position has been to ask voters to withhold judgment until the investigations are complete. When pressed, Mr. Rangel, who declined a formal interview for this article, strikes a defiant if exasperated tone.

“Are you a psychiatrist?” he said the other day when asked at a public appearance if he was concerned about retaining his chairmanship.

He went on to suggest that his position on Capitol Hill remained strong, noting that both President Obama and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, congratulated him on his committee’s role in shaping the health care legislation approved by the House this month.

“President called me and said I did a great job; Pelosi called me and said I did a great job,” he said. “I’m doing a great job.”

So, of course, said another president of Brownie, who promptly thereafter bit the dust.

The first thing you need to learn about science, the WH said, was how to suppress the publication of papers which do not agree with your point of view, even if you have to change the rules of peer-review to do so.

And learning math teaches you how to substitute different sets of data into the same graph at the points one set shows your preferred conclusion while the other does not. When you find that things don’t add up, change the data until they do.

When there is no good solution to a problem, a president has three options: to avoid the problem, to pick the least bad of the available options, or to mix and match among the proposed solutions and minimize the long-term damage any decision will cause.

President Obama is soon likely to settle on something closest to the third approach regarding Afghanistan.

Well, so far he’s settled for both of the first two, at least verbally, and the question is how soon is soon for the third?

...Obama knows he has to make a decision that's sustainable over the long run, which means taking into account domestic economic and political realities.

One of these is the weariness over a truth that foreign policy analyst Andrew Bacevich put more plainly than most: "that permanent war has become the de facto policy of the United States." Americans have always been willing to battle terrorists. What they did not count on -- and were not led to expect when the Bush administration committed troops to Afghanistan and then to Iraq -- were two long, violent, indefinite occupations costing thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

E. J. is often blinded by the brilliance of his own thoughts, a trait shared with Obama, and seems, like apparently many still do, to have bought into the “war of choice:” notion on our part. This is a comforting notion because it implies that we can end the war any time we choose to do so.

But quite aside from the Blame-Bush-Game, the fact is that we did NOT start this war, and thus deciding when and where to end it is not going to be a simple matter of our choosing to do so.

Even small school children in the playground know that the bully doesn’t stop simply because the bullied want to quit fighting him, and once the bullies join up into a pack, or gang, it’s too late to fight.

One of the greatest crimes that ‘journalists’ such as E.J. have committed against the American people has been the apparently deliberate mischaracterization of President Bush’s speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. They mocked it as being his “mission accomplished” speech despite the fact that what Bush actually said was:

The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001 and still goes on. ...

Our mission continues. Al Qaida is wounded, not destroyed. The scattered cells of the terrorist network still operate in many nations and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people. The proliferation of deadly weapons remains a serious danger.

The enemies of freedom are not idle, and neither are we. Our government has taken unprecedented measures to defend the homeland and we will continue to hunt down the enemy before he can strike.

The war on terror is not over, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide.

If Dionne was an honest journalist, not just another political water-boy, he’d remember those words for his readers, since I’m reasonably certain that he must have heard them. The best thing you can call ‘reporters’ who mischaracterized Bush’s actual spoken words is either intellectually dishonest or immoral.

Was Bush overly-optimistic by saying that the war on terror would not be endless? One hopes not, but a brutally honest answer might well be that it does represent ‘analyst’ Bacevich’s permanent war, whether the United States chooses it as a policy or not. The United States did not choose 9/11, neither does it choose militant Islam, after all, yet has enjoyed the bitter fruits of both.

Dionne might well point out for his readers what stage the United States was in when the first militant Muslims murdered their very first Christians. Since it was close to a thousand years before the first colonists staggered ashore at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, et al, American foreign policy was scarcely an issue involved in their thinking.

Was Bush wrong in saying that we had seen the turning of the tide? Absolutely not, because up until the victories in Afghanistan and Baghdad, at that point, the only victories had been accomplished by the terrorists and virtually all of the deaths, by now numbered in the thousands, had been of Americans.

But Americans need to have some influential honest journalist with a podium like Dionne’s to point out that when a tide turns that marks only the BEGINNING point of the new tide.

One morning years ago, on a vacation trip to Scotland, I got up very early for some unknown reason and with nothing to do and no one to talk to I decided to walk to a nearby tidal river and see if I could tell the exact moment that the tide turned. Don’t ask me why I got that notion because I don’t know, nor do I remember why the tide tables were readily available except I suppose that fishing and boating were essential to the local economy.

Whatever the reasons, though, I knew exactly what time to expect to see something, identified right down to the minute in the tide-tables, so I walked inland a short way, well out of sight of the shore line, to the point where the down-rushing river water met the still-incoming tide, and sat down to wait and watch.

After having “seen” the tide turn several times while I was watching carefully, checking this riffle and that rock and those eddies over there, I discovered to my surprise that discerning the precise moment of a turning tide is not an easy task and I was wrong more often than I was right.

Moreover, if I had not already had the prior knowledge that the turn would be outward rather than inward there would not have been any way for me to quickly tell the difference.

Dionne reveres Obama. Maybe he’d be willing to do HIM the favor of letting him know that he might be able to decide where not to fight, or how many or how few troops to send to a spot of his choosing, but the permanence of this war is not within his power to decide as a matter of American policy.

Some of those mentioned in the emails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all. Those who have responded have insisted that the emails reveal nothing more than trivial data discrepancies and procedural debates.

As Obama’s popularity falls, expect his own partisanship to increase, and the Chicago brass knuckles to be more evident. Obama knows that he can hope and change only until he hits 35-40% approval ratings, and is rendered shouting to half-empty audience halls and a triangulating congress.

The hardball is going to get harder, first. The good news for those of us who don’t like Obama’s program is that this will turn off the independents.

See, the way things are now the far left liberals are in Obama’s camp no matter what he does. They have gone so far out on their limb that there is no way back short of seppuku. And the far right isn’t going to be convinced to support him, no matter what he does.

This means the only people presently capable of being influenced one way or the other are the independents. And most of them, according to the polls, consider themselves to be conservatives. Many, I suspect, are actually moderate Republicans who became defensive about the name, or perhaps couldn’t support the entire GOP platform as it narrowed.

Take me, for instance. I’m a Republican in the sense that I have to have a party label in order for my vote to count and I’m basically conservative. On the other hand, I have no problem with gay marriage, in fact I insist on it, and I’m generally against abortion but I don’t consider all abortions at all stages of pregnancy to be equally reprehensible.

As I like to say, we have how many different statutes which differentiate the specific charges related to the taking of another human life? Murder one, murder two, manslaughter, unlawful death...there are dozens of variations in that case and there should be similar distinctions in abortion, seems to me.

But I admire guys like Joe Lieberman and I’m really a McCain type, so as when it comes to any definition by the far right wing of the Republican party I’m not really one of their own, not someone they can rely on for a certain vote. An independent still willing to register as a Republican.

Just 38% of voters now favor the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the lowest level of support measured for the plan in nearly two dozen tracking polls conducted since June.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% now oppose the plan.

Half the survey was conducted before the Senate voted late Saturday to begin debate on its version of the legislation. Support for the plan was slightly lower in the half of the survey conducted after the Senate vote.

Obama is starting to make Bush’s poll numbers look respectable and Obama hasn’t sent any troops anywhere yet.