Author: Chris

Update [2008-9-7 22:37:22 by BooMan]: [Originally posted Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 12:35:49 AM EST. Seemed appropriate to remind everyone]

I’m only doing this because BooMan looked me straight in the eye a few hours ago and told me he wanted me to. Dumb ass or fool? You decide.

For the sake of Democracy and accountability and all that is good in the world, I try to stay away from the baby animal pictures, but I’m just too weak. Quite clearly, I’m just too weak. Anyway, I knew all about the cuteness of baby pandas and kittens, but holy shit, have a look at these moose!

This does bring up an important point, however. Whenever a conversation about moose occurs, it’s absolutely imperative that somebody say “moose are no joke” before the conversation is done. The life you save just might be your own.

When they were much younger, my niece and nephew referred to my brother, Bruce, as Moose. They would say “Mooooooooooose” and then laugh and laugh hysterically, until they were finally reminded by a sober minded village elder that moose are no joke. As smart children, they understood this immediately and would spend the next several hours in quiet, somber reflection. May your village elders be so wise and the children of your siblings so docile.

Cross Posted from Suburban Guerrilla, where I seem to occur from time to time despite my clear lack of suburban credentials. This is an open thread. Feel free to stop thinking about Bob Casey.

I’ve been involved with my wife since I was 17 years old. I’m 32 now. We’ve been exclusive for 15 years. She is the most remarkable person I’ve ever met in my life and she is my closest friend.

I think “All I Want Is You” is an awesome love song. I wish I could have written it for Sheila. Especially tonight. She and I are in a lot of pain tonight. It’s a long story that I’m not going to be telling you.

Sheila and I danced to “Nancy With the Laughing Face” performed by John Coltrane at our wedding. It was the only Coltrane tune we could find that we could actually dance to. If you know me, you know how important John Coltrane is to me. If you know Sheila, you know how important my love of John Coltrane is to her. It was a lot of fun.

But, whatever. Use this as an open thread to talk about love songs. If you can find your love song on You Tube, post it. If you can’t, tell us a story. It doesn’t have to make sense. Love is always a bit funny.

Since BooMan asked, I suppose I should provide something in the way of an answer. If you’ve ever heard Barack Obama’s standard stump speech, you’ve heard him say something about ending the mindset that took us to war. One could be forgiven if today’s statement from Obama on the Fisa bill made one question whether or not he really knows what that mindset looks like.

I know what that mindset looks like. It looks like this

The negotiations underscored the political calculation made by many Democrats who were fearful that Republicans would cast them as soft on terrorism during an election year.

Fascinating. What is the thinking here? That if we break down and give them everything they want, this one last time, that they will finally be satisfied? Strength through capitulation? That worked out so well in 2002.

Back to BooMan’s question. He’s right, I’m not in the mood for pandas. I think a better meditation on the slack jawed horror that so many of us are feeling tonight might come from the words of Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Behave like Republicans. Vote to legitimize tyranny and lawlessness. Capitulate to every demand, no matter how unreasonable, and they will not be satisfied. They will never be satisfied. Not until the whole atmosphere is disinfected from the taint of liberty, justice and equality. Dipshits.

Well, that was fun. Back to my multi year hiatus.

Natasha:

…follow closely here, upholding the Constitution is a partisan left position in American politics now. Utterly disregarding it is the partisan right position. Deciding that utter disregard for it needs to be smoothed over by special legal dispensation, so we don’t have to settle the question distastefully in court, is centrist.

This is way better than playoff baseball, or regular season football, if you’re from Philadelphia or Chicago.

Via Susie

I was chatting with Booman just a little while ago and he mentioned that he felt the Booman Tribune was suffering something of a panda deficit. I think I can fix that.

Let the healing begin

Um, yeah, about that Booman’s sick and in the hospital business. Booman is not actually in the hospital so much as he’s at the hospital with somebody else who’s in the hospital. You can take back all the nice stuff you said about him now.

Update [2007-6-1 7:53:23 by Chris]: Well shit, now Steven has gone and updated his post and this post is just sitting here like an ugly duckling. No reason in the world it should stay here, but just to show you how much spite I have in my heart, I’m going to leave it here – ugly, naked, bitter and alone. You can say rude things about it if you like.

Update [2007-6-1 8:10:79 by Chris]: Well shit, now this ugly ducking of a post is getting pushed down the page without any thought for its feelings, or its hopes, or its dreams and I’m starting to feel bad for it. Poor ugly little turd of a post. That’s it, I’m posting my SpiderBooMan pic again.

Something you may be interested in watching –

NEW YORK (Commentary) The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called “Buying the War,” which marks the return of “Bill Moyers Journal.” E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media’s role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again — yet Moyers points out, “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses.”

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, “The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should’ve all been doing that.”

At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, “I don’t think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war…We didn’t dig enough. And we shouldn’t have been fooled in this way.” Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to “dig deeper,” and he replies, “No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas….nope, I don’t think we followed up on this.”

Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a “softer” way, explaining to Moyers: “I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light – if that doesn’t seem ridiculous.”

It does.

(Via The effervescent, minty fresh and ruthlessly moderate Editors.)

Just in case you were wondering what’s happening over at Renew America –

Satan, Islamic terrorists, and the Democrats are out and about like roaring lions, ready to devour any one they can.

Oh, and…

Using the word of God as a kind of metaphor, just as God sent our Lord and Savior “to set the captives free,” so did President G. W. Bush impacted Iraq with the opportunity to grasp the gift of freedom.

It is sadly amazing just how wrongly the far Left Democrats perceive their works while serving their country in the legislative halls. They are out-and-out obstructionist and traitors to America[…]

Again using the comparative metaphor, just as Christ came to save a people with His own strategy, President Bush was in a position to do the same for the people of America and Iraq.

The Fuck? Wha..? Could somebody pass the rubber cement, I think my buzz is wearing off. The Hon. Dr. St. Rev. Bradley S. Rocket, Esq, PhD, MD has much more on Jesus W. Bush and his many addled adherents, though likely no rubber cement. Anyway, be open or be a thread. Next up, we’ll explore whether or not BooMan is the worst panda blogger ever?

Earlier today on Countdown, Russ Feingold explained one of the various reasons the Iraq Study Group is such a very stupid joke (see the video at C&R):

The fact is this commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism. So that’s who is doing this report. Then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There is virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place. Virtually no one who has been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism. So this is really a Washington inside job and it shows not in the description of what’s happened – that’s fairly accurate – but it shows in the recommendations. It’s been called a classic Washington compromise that does not do the job of extricating us from Iraq in a way that we can deal with the issues in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, and in Somalia which are every bit as important as what is happening in Iraq. This report does not do the job and it’s because it was not composed of a real representative group of Americans who believe what the American people showed in the election, which is that it’s time for us to have a timetable to bring the troops out of Iraq.

In weak moments, one does begin to wonder exactly how horribly fucking wrong a person has to have been about the most grievous foreign policy failure in modern history in order not to be taken seriously about that very same failure. Why aren’t they just laughed right off the stage? Not that it matters, of course. So long as Bush is our president, nothing but the magnitude of the chaos and the number of dead is going to change.