Prairie Weather

Lies about Bhutto's death revealed

The credibility of the U.S.-backed Pakistani government was battered again Monday when video footage appeared to contradict its version of Benazir Bhutto's death and supported assertions by her husband and others that she had been shot leaving a campaign rally.

The footage, obtained by Britain's Channel 4 News, shows what appears to be a gunman firing at Bhutto last Thursday as she waves to supporters from her armored car's sunroof in the army headquarters city of Rawalpindi. Her scarf and hair lifted up — seemingly from a bullet's impact — she drops into the vehicle and a suicide bomber detonates his explosives.

The government contends that Bhutto, 54, died Thursday when the explosion slammed her head into a part of the sunroof.  The videos added to the growing gulf between the Pakistani public and President Pervez Musharraf and to widespread suspicions of official complicity in her slaying. ...   McClatchy. 

One of the marks of the autocracy is the belief that lies won't be uncovered.  But these days the petty tyrant -- Musharraf, Bush, whoever -- has to rely on doubletalk to backstop revelations.  After all, there are cell phones, digicams, foreign reporters.  The measure of the people is the extent to which they swallow the coverup.  The Pakistani people, in this respect, seem to be a little more intelligent than, say, the American people.  Of course, the media play an important role in aiding and abetting liars.  Where is Channel 4 when we need them over here? 

Deliver us from evil. And in addition to delivering us from Bush/Cheney, wouldja get phoney "bipartisanship" off our backs?

Andrew Sullivan has links in his blog to various writings each one of which has Prairie Weather panting, almost erotically, and saying, "yes, yes! more, more!"

First there's a deft analysis of the appeal of one presidential candidate which errs only in assuming that it's the young who "get it."  Nope.  The appeal is much more general.  But aside from that, the insights are very  nice.

Then there's another deft analysis of another candidate which... Well, you already know Prairie Weather's take on her.

We usually check into Washington Note a lot but we missed a post that Sullivan adds to his links.  We agree 159% or more with Steve Clemons that bipartisanship is far less preferable at this point than dissidence. 

Boy! we wish, along with Clemons, that there were a "dissident" ticket.

What the Republican and Democratic party members need to realize is that both of their party apparatuses have been taken over by a combination of ideological and utopian zealots as well as a policy-blind secretariat that passively follows the ideologues. The pragmatists and realists in both parties -- particularly in foreign policy but also in other spheres as well -- have been in decline.

T'hell with the vapid, silly Bloomberg effort.  The undissident, old-boy-network meeting scheduled for the University of Oklahoma, in which Michael Bloomberg is due to be anointed by Chuck Hagel and Dave Boren and others, is a bunch of hooey.  Or, to quote Steve Clemons' more temperate appeal:

The sad but real truth today is that the Bush administration came in to office in 2001 under suspect circumstances but roared and behaved as if it had won an 80% mandate. The Democrats folded and gave Bush all the room to run he wanted. There is mutual responsibility and complicity in the results we have today.

I don't want more bipartisanship for its own sake. I want dissident Republicans and dissident Democrats to make this government work in the way it is supposed to work -- and to deliver on the policies that the public expects.

So a message to David Boren and Sam Nunn -- whose personal animosity towards gays and lesbians many of whom have done great service to this country is not forgotten here -- is make your meeting about an overhaul of American public policy both domestically and in the national security and foreign policy spheres.

Ridiculous! Preposterous! Unbelievable! But true!

Scott Horton notes a deliciously awful roundup of the "ten most preposterous Bushie legal arguments" of this dying year, a list put together by the tireless Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.  Example: "The NSA’s eavesdropping was limited in scope."

More:

The vice president’s office is not a part of the executive branch.

Horton comments:

Indeed, the man who shoots a lawyer in the face, and then has the lawyer formally apologize to him; the man who keeps a man-sized safe in his office; the man who has invented and used his own system of bogus national security classifications. And the man who told the U.S. that we faced thermonuclear war with Iran, evidently the same week he had read an intelligence community consensus analysis saying that Iran had discontinued its nuclear program in 2003–an analysis he fought tooth and nail to suppress. Cheney, the man who makes up his own laws as he goes along.

How about this?

The United States does not torture.

Right!

Ah, but there's more, much more. For Horton's sampling and comments, clickety-click on over to Harper's.  For Lithwick's full countdown, go to Slate.

Just one more... 

Everyone who has ever spoken to the president about anything is barred from congressional testimony by executive privilege.

This little gem of an argument was cooked up by the White House last July when the Senate judiciary committee sought the testimony of former White House political director Sara Taylor, as well as that of former White House counsel Harriet Miers, in connection with the firing of nine U.S. attorneys for partisan ideological reasons. Taylor was subpoenaed in June and, according to her lawyers, she wanted to testify but was barred by White House counsel Fred Fielding's judgment that the president could compel her to assert executive privilege and forbid her testimony. As Bruce Fein argued in Slate, that dramatic over-reading of the privilege would both preclude congressional oversight of any sort and muzzle anyone who'd ever communicated with the president, regardless of their wish to talk.

Happy New Year!  We still have a whole year of Bush ahead of us.  In the meantime?  Well, eyes on the prize. 

New Year's Eve: chance for a fresh start.

Fresh start?  Over at Salon , Tom Tomorrow does a year-end wrap-up of 2007's absurdities.  Among them, our Hil.  Some people never learn.

Bloomers: his billions, his Bushiness, his bellicosity, and his bullshit

Bloomberg is basically just Rudy Giuliani with a billion or two dollars to spend to alter the election. When it comes to foreign policy, war-making and government power, he offers absolutely nothing that isn't found in destructive abundance among the most extremist precincts in the Republican Party, while his moderate to liberal stance on social issues would prevent him from actually winning the support of his natural GOP base.

In fact -- despite his steadfast neoconservatism -- it's hard to see how the candidacy of a divorced, unmarried, stridently pro-gun-control, pro-choice, socially liberal New York City billionaire would accomplish anything other than offering the Republicans their best hope of winning in 2008. All of this seems to be intended as punishment meted out by the Establishment to the Democrats -- using Bloomberg's billions as the weapon -- for not repudiating their loudmouth, restless liberal base strongly enough.

Right.  Glenn Greenwald's just as indignant as we are here at Prairie Weather about this ersatz "unity" candidate.  He has the goods on Bloomberg.  With damning proof.

From January 2004:  "We are going to get George W. Bush re-elected as president of the United States! We are going to carry New York City and New York State. Everybody thinks I'm crazy, but I think we can do it."

From a spring of 2004 article in the New York Times:  "Laura Bush and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stood shoulder to shoulder yesterday in an appearance that may well dispel any lingering doubt as to the mayor's feelings about the president, or of the mayor's own political identity. . . . [T]here he was yesterday, throwing in his words of support for the president's decision to invade Iraq -- promoting one of the notions that is central to the rationale for the attack, that the conflict was justified by what happened on Sept. 11.

From the Village Voice, 2005:  "Even though the City Council passed a resolution opposing the war, Bloomberg called an old friend, Paul Wolfowitz, to express his desire to host a ticker tape parade "to say thank you," apparently as unaware as the "Mission Accomplished" president that the troops would not be coming home for years. Bloomberg actually contributed $5 million to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Affairs in the late '90s, when war architect Wolfowitz was dean. . . ."

There's plenty more where that's coming from.  Do you embrace Michael Bloomberg's candidacy?  Are you so bushfuddled that you believe Bloomers is a bipartisan candidate?

Is Obama's campaign style the style of a future president?

... His references to his rivals are constant and, by and large, thinly veiled: becoming president, he says, has not been his “long-held ambition” (as has been suspected of both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards); it is not, he says, something he has craved “since kindergarten” (a reference to the Clinton campaign’s ridicule of a paper he penned, or perhaps crayoned, as a tot); the country is weary of “the same old arguments by the same old folks,” he says.

... Mr. Obama presents himself as the ultimate fresh face, untainted by the experience Mrs. Clinton trumpets as her prime asset. He appears out of nowhere, makes a big entrance on stage and tends to address his crowds as a singular civic unit (“Hello, Marshalltown”), like a real rock star would.

His events are slightly ragtag compared with his counterparts’. They draw younger people, many with Obama bumper stickers on their backs, as opposed to the smaller stickers placed neatly on the lapels of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters. Toddlers are more likely to be seen scurrying around Obama events, sometimes breaching forbidden areas, like TV camera risers.

... Mr. Obama’s “us’” and “we” reflect his unity campaign, the so-called new kind of politics. His “we” constitutes a prospective coalition of anyone bent on changing the political system — as opposed to “playing the game” within it, a tacit reference to the Clintons and their political mastery.

“Instead of sending someone to Washington to play the game, we need someone to change the game plan,” Mr. Obama said. “We are not a nation divided as our politics suggests.”

As he drills into specifics, Mr. Obama’s critique of Mrs. Clinton becomes plainer. He said deliberations on his health care legislation would not take place “in a back room,” a reference to Mrs. Clinton’s failed initiative in the 1990s, for which she was roundly slammed as being too secretive. He vows to invite C-Span to broadcast his health care deliberations, resulting in one of his most sustained and reliable applause lines.

... Excerpts from a New York Times article on the campaign styles of Clinton, Edwards, and Barack Obama