Not even Washington, Lincoln and the Constitution could save him. Tea Party candidate Rick Barber went down in flames to challenger Martha Roby 61-39%.
At what point does the media admit they're hyping beating a dead horse? The tea party's over. It's time for Republicans to admit they are the tea party and the tea party is them, and move on.
Every time I hear hype about how the Tea Party is gaining strength, I remember that it's July and last year they were amusing to pundits for a couple of months.
They're not a force in this election cycle. Just full of fight. And lies.
When the story broke two days ago, Bill O'Reilly tried to portray the Rolling Stone article as "tepid" and not worthy of all the hype it's receiving. Really? Bill knows all about military protocol so he's fibbing, trying to save McChrystal from himself. Obama HAD to fire Gen. McChrystal. I won a bet with Howie when I told him Obama would fire him quickly.
I lost a wager yesterday. Amato was certain Obama had no choice but to fire McChrystal after the now infamous Rolling Stone feature showed the Afghanistan War disaster was being run by a gaggle of arrogant, insubordinate, disloyal overgrown frat boys. Amato thought right from the start that Obama would have no choice but to fire McChrystal.
That RS article was hideous on so many levels, I won't name them all here. But the sewerage coming out of the mouths of the General and his frat boy entourage was quite shocking for a man who has built his reputation on being the ultimate soldier. We all complain about either our bosses, co-workers or friends, but we have a small circle we can trust to listen when we vent these things. McChrystal went directly to a Rolling Stone reporter and laid them all out on a Internet silver platter.
We've had many issues with Obama's handling of issues (as has been laid out on the pages of C&L), but as a political move, he did the exact right thing and when he named The Holy Petraeus to take the job. He trumped the right once again. His pick may endanger the withdrawal timetable (because he is a true believer even if he says the right things now), but the Afghan policy isn't the debate here.
The incident might be the first time since Obama took office that the right-wing noise machine could not figure out a way to pile on the President. Even when he does something they approve, they still attack him incessantly, so I found this whole situation interesting. There's one thing that they cannot argue about: the chain of command. Colonel Hunt, who works for FOX, is a blood and guts type of guy and he agreed with Obama even though Bill did his best to save the general.
Hunt: If anybody, Bill... If anybody in your chain, Bill... If anybody working for you said something close to you, that building would implode you're sitting in. If anyone in McChrystal's chain of command below him said anything even close to this, he'd be fired. You cannot do this in the chain of command. You can't do it.
BillO: I got it. Military discipline dictates, the Commander in Chief and all the generals have to have loyalty, up and down.
--
Hunt:...these kinds of comments are not done in vacuums. These kinds of officers have a great deal of experience. Tony and I have served a long time. There is never a time you could say anything like this about your military boss -- certainly not your civilian leadership with a Rolling Stone guy in the room.
BillO: But again, you're assuming that he did it, I'm not assuming that yet.
He's been apologizing all night , Bill....[Bill speaks] You can't do what he did, you can't.
Last night, Bill conceded that Rolling Stone didn't sandbag the general, but in a very "tepid" way. There may be a few stragglers, but Brit Hume's performance with Megyn Kelly summed up the right wing pretty well. Hell, he should be fired just on the basis that he gave an interview to a DFH magazine like Rolling Stone, right?
Bill O'Reilly did try to save McChrystalMeth, but crazy Colonel Hunt would have none of it, either.
Maybe David Broder should have waited until his own newspaper divulged their newest poll results before writing a slobbering column about Sarah Palin. Because wouldn't ya know, she's taken a huge dive in the polls.
I wrote a while ago that going off on her book tour would give her a nice bounce in the polls, but while the money was great, the hype would wear off long before 2012 came rolling along, and she's not going to be able to tour the country with as much positive media coverage as she did this time around.
Although Palin is a tea party favorite, her potential as a presidential hopeful takes a severe hit in the survey. Fifty-five percent of Americans have unfavorable views of her, while the percentage holding favorable views has dipped to 37, a new low in Post-ABC polling.
There is a growing sense that the former Alaska governor is not qualified to serve as president, with more than seven in 10 Americans now saying she is unqualified, up from 60 percent in a November survey. Even among Republicans, a majority now say Palin lacks the qualifications necessary for the White House.
Palin has lost ground among conservative Republicans, who would be crucial to her hopes if she seeks the party's presidential nomination in 2012. Forty-five percent of conservatives now consider her as qualified for the presidency, down sharply from 66 percent who said so last fall.
Among all Republicans polled, 37 percent now hold a "strongly favorable" opinion of Palin, about half the level recorded when she burst onto the national stage in 2008 as Sen. John McCain's running mate.
Among Democrats and independents, assessments of Palin also have eroded. Six percent of Democrats now consider her qualified for the presidency, a drop from 22 percent in November; the percentage of independents who think she is qualified fell to 29 percent from 37 percent.
And to all those who are enthralled with the mystical independent voters, she's dropped eight points. It's still very early, but these plummeting poll numbers shouldn't be ignored.
Since the book tour, she's become a Fox News analyst, appeared with on all the Fox shows, including with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, and was the highly paid main speaker at Tea Party National Convention. I guess it doesn't take a scandal or a major gaffe to sink this quickly after all. Or maybe Americans are getting saturated with Palin and she's losing her "populist edge."
I don't think she should be taken lightly myself, but I found these numbers quite surprising. I expected the bump she got from the book tour would last a bit longer. Joe Klein makes a good point when he says:
The speech was inspired drivel, a series of distortions and oversimplifications, totally bereft of nourishing policy proposals — the sort of thing calculated, carefully calculated, to drive lamestream media types like me frothing to their keyboards. Palin is a big fat target, eminently available for derision. But I will not deride. Because brilliance must be respected, especially when it involves marketing in an era when image almost always passes for substance. (See the top 10 unfortunate political one-liners.)
I don't agree with his use of the word "brilliance," but in the era of 24/7 cable TV, Fox News and Frank Luntz, marketing is a huge weapon. I have no doubt that she will improve as time goes by, but if America isn't buying her act at this point, I'm not sure they ever will.
Karl was positively freaking out yesterday afternoon over the prospect that some of his ex-colleagues at the White House might wind up being prosecuted -- or held responsible publicly -- for helping George W. Bush install a torture regime during his tenure, after President Obama's statement earlier in the day indicating he'd leave the decision up to the Attorney General.
Rove, appearing on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, was particularly frantic -- and when Rove gets frantic, he gets nasty:
Rove: Sure, as long as they've released the limits to which America will go to extract this information, let's share the information that was extracted, and saved America from further attacks. We know, for example -- it's already a part of the public record -- that the interrogation of these high-value targets kept them from being able to attack Los Angeles by flying airplanes into the Liberty tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles, which was one of their plans.
But look, let's step back for a minute. What the Obama administration has done in the last several days is very dangerous. What they've essentially said is, If we have policy disagreements with our predecessors, what we're going to do is we're going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run colonels in mirrored sunglasses. And what we're going to do is prosecute, systematically, the previous administration, or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration, based on policy differences.
Is that what we've come to in this country? That if we have a change in administration from one party to another, that we then use the tools of the government to go systematically after the policy disagreements that we have with the previous administration? Now that may be fine in some little Latin American country that's run by, you know, the latest junta. It may be the way that they do things in Chicago. But that's not the way we do things here in America.
Hmmmm. Last I looked, Chicago was here in America.
But more to the point: Karl's sounding like someone who's already looking over his shoulder at congressional subpoenas.
And even more to the point: Sorry, Karl, but working for the White House is not a Get Out of Jail Free card. If you broke the law -- and particularly if you and your pals are war criminals according to American law for having not merely permitted but avidly constructed a torture regime -- the appropriate justice needs meting out.
Of course, we keep hearing about how Torture Saved Us From Terrorists -- notably the overhyped
The pro-Gitmo, pro-torture camp are getting all excited about a Pentagon statement that 61 former detainees from the Guantanamo Bay facility "appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody." But that bald figure is very misleading.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said 18 former detainees are confirmed as "returning to the fight" and 43 are suspected of having done in a report issued late in December by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Morrell declined to provide details such as the identity of the former detainees, why and where they were released or what actions they have taken since leaving U.S. custody.
"This is acts of terrorism. It could be Iraq, Afghanistan, it could be acts of terrorism around the world," he told reporters.
Morrell said the latest figures, current through December 24, showed an 11 percent recidivism rate, up from 7 percent in a March 2008 report that counted 37 former detainees as suspected or confirmed active militants.
Just as the Government's claims that the Guantanamo detainees "were picked up on the battlefield, fighting American forces, trying to kill American forces," do not comport with the Department of Defense's own data, neither do its claims that former detainees have "returned to the fight." The Department of Defense has publicly insisted that at least thirty (30) former Guantanamo detainees have "returned" to the battlefield, where they have been re-captured or killed. To date, however, the Department has described at most fifteen (15) possible recidivists, and has identified only seven (7) of these individuals by name. More strikingly, data provided by the Department of Defense reveals that:
- at least eight (8) of the fifteen (15) individuals identified alleged by the Government to have "returned to the fight" are accused of nothing more than speaking critically of the Government's detention policies;
- ten (10) of the individuals have neither been re-captured nor killed by anyone;
- and of the five (5) individuals who are alleged to have been re-captured or killed, two (2) of the individuals' names do not appear on the list of individuals who have at any time been detained at Guantanamo, and the remaining three (3) include one (1) individual who was killed in an apartment complex in Russia by local authorities and one (1) who is not listed among former Guantanamo detainees but who, after his death, has been alleged to have been detained under a different name.
It seems clear the people being referred to in this new statement aren't a different set of Gitmo detainess and include that spurious 30 and doubtless a bunch more too.
Moreover, not one of those named in that earlier claim had attacked Americans after his release from Gitmo and all had been released "by political appointees of the Department of Defense, sometimes over the objection of the military" rather than through the tribunals process. Seton Hall's studies also found that a bare 55% of Gitmo detainess had ever taken up arms against the US and only 8% were suspected of being members of Al Qaida. The vast bulk of Gitmo detainees had been turned in by local warlords for bounty payments with no US witnesses to their alleged involvement in terrorism at all. No wonder their recidivist rate is so low, at a Pentagon figure of 11%. That compares with "an estimated 67.5%" in the general prison population.
With Obama seemingly set on closing Gitmo down, and Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions, coming forward to say that some cases cannot be prosecuted because the evidence is indelibly stained by torture, the timing of this Pentagon "just believe us" statement is a little too pat. It is undoubtably true that some dangerous people will likely be freed because of the Bush administration's arrogant belief in its own ability to re-write law to suit itself, although the number is far lower than the Pentagon is trying to suggest. Even so, any failure to keep the public safe should be blamed on Bush and his coterie.
Accusations of voter fraud by the pro-Obama progressive group ACORN. It's the subject all the rightwing bloggers are going nuts over and now they've been joined in their prosecutory zeal by the Wall Street Journal. But looking closely at the outrage, it becomes obvious very quickly that if there is a problem at all then, "the more accurate accusation may be voter-registration fraud -- for which there appears to be plenty of checks in place to guarantee it doesn't turn into some actual voter fraud."
The McCain-Palin campaign is being careful in its wording, limiting its direct accusations while hinting at far more. A current fundraising email under Sarah Palin's signature says:
The left-wing activist group, ACORN, is now under investigation for voter registration fraud in a number of battleground states. ACORN's political action committee has endorsed Barack Obama and Senator Obama himself has said, "I have been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career." The Obama Campaign even paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN affiliate for "get out the vote activity." And now we find out that ACORN is suspected of voter registration fraud.
... We've always known the Obama-Biden Democrats will do anything to win this November, but we didn't know how far their allies would go. The Obama-supported, far-left group, ACORN, has been accused of voter registration fraud in a number of battleground states.
The media, in the main, are only too happy to pile on - as this compilation of reports by a rightwing YouTuber illustrates:
