Good Mother Bad Mother Politics

It is hard to imagine what the impeccably dressed Condoleezza Rice feels when she has to defend a President that she must now know deep down is a tremendous disappointment. She endured hours of Senate grilling including a bravura performance from Senator Barbara Boxer :
BOXER: October 19th ‘05, you came before this committee to discuss, [...]

Huffington in fine form on Woodward

The Blog | Arianna Huffington: Woodward as Journalistic Hero: the Real State of Denial | The Huffington Post:
Talk about being in a state of denial: praising Woodward for his very-late-to-the-party Iraq pile-on is like a music critic writing a rave of “Let It Be” and getting credit for discovering The Beatles. ….
Then there [...]

A China moment?

Stanley Fish says that it’s time for Bush to go to China.
I don’t mean that literally, but metaphorically. It’s time for George Bush to do what Richard Nixon did – perform an act whose effectiveness is a function of the fact that he is the last man anyone would have expected to do it. What [...]

Condi the true believer

Media Matters has a great analysis of the Katie and Condi show that aired recently on US 60 Minutes. The interview was pure Couric and pure 60 Minutes and represents what is best and worst about both those brands. Couric sits with that intense look that somehow manages to convey admiration and slight approbation at [...]

Bush’s Black and White Ball – he’s threatening to take it on home.

A lot of stuff in the press – news, analysis and opinion – about opposition to Bush’s wiretap and torture plans from leading Republicans like Colin Powell. It is interesting though that even when these pieces seek to address substantive issues they nearly always end up analysing policy as posture rather than policy as [...]

It just keeps seeping out

Yet another piece of the Bush WMD jigsaw has emerged, this time from the former head of the CIA in Europe, Tyler Drumheller. He tells 60 Minutes this week:

Drumheller, who retired last year, says the White House ignored crucial information from a high and credible source. The source was Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, with [...]

God’s wrath on Trent Lott

I was struck that in his first speech on the New Orlean’s crisis the only specific reference to damage and rebuilding by Bush was in his throw-away line about Trent Lott:

We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we’re going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we’re going to help these [...]

Bush’s photo-ops

Bush is being criticised for not acting fast enough and for a lack luster, even humorous, speech when he first addressed the plight of New Orleans. The New York Times has become increasingly strident in its editorials over the last few days:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially [...]

The Vietnamization of Bush’s Vacation – New York Times

In another installment of blistering analysis Frank Rich writes of the Vietnamization of Bush’s Vacation. It’s an astute look at Bush’s stubborn refusal to face the reality of the dismal state of the conflict in Iraq. He’s just going to stay the course with his stay the course line, it would seem. Given [...]

The Bush language program of mass distraction

NYT’s Frank Rich has another great column. This time he looks at some of the issues surrounding the Plame affair. He concludes that the real scandal is the war:

The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn’t have been a third-rate smear campaign [...]

Fascinatingly transperent

The Washington Post’s report of a Bush press conference reports the president absolutely on-message with his chorus of “we will not surrender”. It begins:

President Bush said yesterday that “cold-blooded” killers will fail in their attempt to drive the United States out of Iraq prematurely, as he defended the administration’s war strategy and its policies for [...]

Bush Season 4

A report from Reuters.com that Bush’s popularity has dropped from 51% to 42% since his election last November, has a summary of recent events that reads like the story arc from a season of West Wing:

Bush began his second term in January with an ambitious plan to overhaul the Social Security retirement program but it [...]

It’s the stupidity stupid!

The British Mirror ran with this hilarious and provocative post election headline

Now Bob Herbert at the New York Times has come up with some data to back-up the Mirror’s ballsy headline.
I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election’s outcome as values. A recent survey [...]

Evangelical culture/evangelical politics

Interesting explanation from the Washington Post that tries to unpack the poll data on increases in the evangelical turnout in 2004
Exit polls do not permit a direct comparison of how many evangelical and born-again Americans voted in 2000 and 2004 because the way pollsters identified these voters changed. Four years ago voters leaving polls were [...]

Cold War Presidential narratives

Two articles in the latest edition of Foreign Policy make essentially the same point: in spite of the rhetoric of the post-September 11 brave new world, the Bush administration is essentially driven by a cold war agenda and more importantly, cold war strategy. This is obviously a point that has been made before but it [...]