Happy Hour Open Thread
* It’s not easy to say that your superior screwed up, but Robert Gibbs did his best to explain today what Veep Joe Biden “meant to say” with his swine flu/public transportation gaffe. Video here.
* GOP Rep Eric Cantor offers an in-depth explanation of the National Council for a New America, the new initiative the GOP rolled out today.
* Andrew Sullivan wants to know why a student asked Condoleezza Rice better questions about torture than any professional journalist has.
* For the first time in a Washington Post/ABC News poll, supporters of gay marriage outnumber its opponents.
* John Aravosis points out that it’s not easy for RNC chair Michael Steele to carry out his mission of expanding the GOP while simultaneously claiming that it’s good that a moderate like Specter left it.
* Don’t miss our big new profile of Richard Lugar. It’s the 500th profile we’ve posted at WhoRunsGov, so check out the site for many more like it.
* For instance, we’ve got a good profile of Pat Toomey, the conservative Club for Growth chief who is likely to be the Republican general election candidate in the Pennsylvania Senate race against Democrat Arlen Specter.
* Senator Robert Byrd says we have an obligation to investigate the Bush torture program.
* MoveOn launches a new ad calling for torture memo author and Judge Jay Bybee’s impeachment.
* And this is just bleedin’ awful.
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Two guys in our party always make me nervous: Joe Biden and Byrd. I saw him on NBC this am. He simply has no idea what he is confronting. Seems the WH Firefighters are on standby to put out his brushfires. Sen Byrd: when are going to retire? Stevens is gone.
Sometimes I wonder if Biden has WH orders to go out and gaffe on purpose. “I’ll talk the fall.” The official position is, stay home if you’re germy. The subliminal position is, geez, there’s a lotta germy people out there. If you can walk instead of taking the subway, do it.
Kyra is a swooner. She went gaga over Petraeus too.
Rice should be jailed, or shunned, or … something. I’m trying to digest this:
Questioner: Even in World War II, as we faced Nazi Germany — probably the greatest threat that America has ever faced — even then…
Rice: With all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States.
Q: No, but they bombed our allies…
R: No. Just a second. Three thousand Americans died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
Q: 500,000 died in World War II, and yet we did not torture the prisoners of war.
R: And we didn’t torture anybody here either. Alright?
This woman actually said, “Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States”? Are these people out of their minds? The fact that the Bushites had control of this nation for eight long years sickens me and always will. My God.
” And this is just bleedin’ awful.”
I have steadfastly refused to watch that video anywhere and I’m not going to start now. I don’t want to know anything about it.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? (h/t John Belushi)
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I wonder if it makes any difference to her that we didn’t torture Japanese, either.
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jzap
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Probably not because we DID lock through Japanese into camps
am I missing something, or is Rice saying that terrorists are a greater threat than Nazi Germany was?
“am I missing something, or is Rice saying that terrorists are a greater threat than Nazi Germany was?”
Kinda. I remember when the war had just started and the Right was comparing everything to WWII. Sy Hersh in the New Yorker pointed out that the difference couldn’t be greater inasmuch as if the Nazis and the Axis had won that war, the entire world would have been affected.
That’s hardly the case with the Wahabists who attacked us on 9-11. But they just won’t stop saying it. Yet no one sees it that way because it never was.
Greg – my take is that she’s filibustering him, a la Rumsfeld or Cheney in these sorts of situations where any significant error will simply not ever be acknowledged. She’s not making a rational, careful argument, merely throwing up flak defensively. The magnanimous reading of what she is suggesting re comparison with WW2 is might be the difference in how we felt when Germany’s neighbors began to be annexed contrasted with how we felt when Pearl Harbor was bombed. But his question was directed to torture and she moved (rhetorically) to cut off that thrust.
She makes one point which is surely valid – anyone not part of the decision-making process at that time won’t have as clear a set of notions about the dilemmas faced. On the other hand, with accounts from Clarke, Powell, O’Neill, and others we can get close.
What a horrible crowd of people these folks were.
But I popped in this morning to link an essay from the NYRB that arrived in my mailbox late yesterday. It’s by Arlen Specter. My first thought…”sheesh, this might be embarrassing!” but in fact it’s not bad at all. He’s writing on the dangers of expanded presidential powers under Bush and how they have to be turned back.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22656
Charges are being dropped in the AIPAC-related spy case. Try to imagine how much push there was for exactly this to happen.
It didn’t take long, but we knew it wouldn’t. From NRO this morning…
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“As expected, Justice Souter is retiring, giving President Obama his first Supreme Court nomination just 3 months into his presidency.
Keep in mind:
1. The current Supreme Court is a liberal, judicial activist court. Obama could make it even more of a far-left judicial activist court, for a long time to come, if he appoints radicals like Diane Wood, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. A new Justice in this mold would just entrench a bad majority for a long time.”
http://bench.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTljN2ZkNmUyODUwNTBlYTkxMTljZmI2NmY3YzIwMzM=
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There’ll be a lot more of this: ‘the court is a bastion of liberals’ and ‘that potential nominee is a radical leftist’. That’s the playbook.
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