Rachel Maddow gives a "If I were President" reworking of Obama's address to the nation on the BP oil spill.

The general consensus, which I suspect surprised the White House, was that the speech was underwhelming. There was plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking of what wasn't said and what opportunities were missed. Robert Reich had his own take:

Everything seemed to be in the passive tense. He had authorized deepwater drilling because he "was assured" it was safe. But who assured him? How does he feel about being so brazenly misled? He said he wanted to "understand" why that was mistaken. Understand? He's the President of the United States and it was a major decision. Isn't he determined to find out how his advisors could have been so terribly wrong?

Tomorrow he's "informing" the president of BP of BP's financial obligations. "Informing" is what you do when you phone the newspaper to tell them it wasn't delivered today. Why not "directing" or "ordering?"

The President distinguished what has happened in the Gulf of Mexico from a tornado or hurricane because they are over quickly while the leak is an ongoing crisis, lasting many weeks and perhaps months more. He likened it to an "epidemic." But the real difference has nothing to do with time. Tornadoes and hurricanes are natural disasters. Epidemics occur because germs mutate and spread. The spill occurred because of the recklessness and ruthlessness of a giant oil company in pursuit of profit.

And what has the nation learned from all this? The same lesson we've known for decades, according to the President. We must end our dependence on oil. But if we've known this for decades, why haven't we done anything about it? The President endorsed the cap-and-trade bill that emerged from the House (without calling it cap-and-trade) but didn't call for the only thing that may actually work: a tax on carbon.

I'm a fan of Barack Obama. I campaigned for him and I believe in him. I think he has a first-class temperament. I have been deeply moved and startled by his ability to speak about the nation's most intractable problems. But he failed tonight to rise to the occasion.

I think it's less an issue of temperament than it is an issue of leadership. I would love the president to speak as plainly and as directly as Rachel's re-write. There's no comfort or confidence to be derived from hearing the same words we've heard from presidents for the last forty years.

God Bless This Mess

Ezra Klein talks about a new ABC pilot that has Drudge (and the Drudgekateers) up in arms. Commander-in-Chief, starring Democrat activist Geena Davis as the President of the United States, for the fall schedule.

Jesse Taylor talks about it here: You do, however, have to love the unironic link to the Newsmax summary of the Joe Klein article in which Klein points out that it might be a bad idea for Hillary to run because publications like Newsmax will go batshit crazy.

Checks and Balances and the "F-Word"

via SeeingtheForest

Is there enough going on to make you nervous yet? The Vice President of the United States was the keynote speaker at a conference where other speakers called for "a new McCarthyism" to bring "terror" to intellectuals, saying "let's oppress them [liberals]," and "the entire Harvard faculty" are "traitors." A Congressman said, "America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," ? Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq."

Meanwhile, right-wing commentators talk about killing American journalists, their premier blogs talk about former president Carter as being on the side of the enemy and leftists have "seamlessly taken up the cause of Islamic fascism". I have provided only afew examples.

When you hear threatening talk like this,in thecompany of the country's leadership, you know that whatever comesnext isn't going to be pleasant. Things do not appear to be heading in agood direction at all. If you have been following this in the blogs, youknow that more and more people are becomming concerned that the Right'srhetoric is growing ever more violent and totalitarian. Serious peoplehave started referring tothe"f-word." (See alsohere,here,here,here and manyother places.)

Oliver Williswrites,

You cannot deal with that sort of ideology in any sort ofaccomodationist manner. Liberals need to understand this, from Democraticsenators in Washington who still ? still ? refuse to vote theirconscience out of some sense of loyalty to a long-dead notion of civilityin Washington, to progressive pundits who actually believe that theirright-wing counterparts in the nation's media are actually there for agive-and-take rather than a chance to paint everyone to the left of JoeLieberman as a terrorist sympathizer. . I have provided only a few examples.

When you hear threatening talk like this, in the company of the country's leadership, you know that whatever comes next isn't going to be pleasant. Things do not appear to be heading in a good direction at all. If you have been following this in the blogs, you know that more and more people are becomming concerned that the Right's rhetoric is growing ever more violent and totalitarian. Serious people have started referring to the "f-word." (See also here, here, here, here and many other places.) read on

Moral Hazards

via Digby (this is just some highlights. Please read the entire article)

Perhaps it would be instructive to take another little trip down memory lane. Jonah knows very well what a real story is because he was up to his ears in one of the biggest political sex scandals in history. From Michael Isifkoff's award winning MSM articles on the Lewinsky affair:

There was another guest at Jonah Goldberg's house in the Adams Morgan section of Washington that day. For some months, Newsweek's Isikoff had been in touch with Tripp – "hounding" her, Goldberg claims. Aware that Isikoff knew of rumors that Clinton was having an affair with a former White House staffer, Goldberg suggested to Tripp that she play the tapes for Isikoff. Uncomfortable with the whole taping process, Isikoff declined to listen and left Goldberg's house. In their many phone conversations that fall, Lewinsky complained to Tripp that she was being neglected by the president... By the fall of 1997, Lewinsky was complaining that Clinton's ardor for her seemed to be cooling. He wasn't calling her much, and he rarely returned her increasingly frantic calls. Lewinsky was restless and bored at the Defense Department.

Isikoff listened later, needless to say. So did the entire country. That little meeting at Jonah's house led to the impeachment of the President of the United States. They came this close to forcing him from office. Goldberg and the entire GOP establishment knew without doubt that they had a story and they were not afraid to lead the media to it by the nose. And just look at what an oozing chunk of soap opera tabloid offal it was.

The Daily Show on Robert Novak

Jon Stewart:"Robert Novak, Douchbag of Liberty award"

Video

Stewart goes to "Crossfire" and exposes him as a hypocrite.

From Americablog

Of all people to be talking about leaks at the CIA, ROBERT NOVAK? The man who leaked Valerie Plume's name? From Creators Syndicate:

Moreover, McCain told me this week, "with CIA leaks intended to harm the re-election campaign of the president of the United States, it is not only dysfunctional but a rogue organization." (Rob's Note: As opposed to leaking the name of the wife of one of YOUR political opponents.)

Red State Values Mark A. R. Kleiman

Note that it's considered perfectly acceptable for the President of the United States to pronounce "Massachusetts" as if it were the name of something slimy he'd just turned up under a rock, but it would be considered rude to suggest that the white population of Alabama is numerically dominated by the ignorant and bigoted.

Update: A reader points out that the Alabama Christian Coalition led the charge against the amendment. When, exactly, did "Christian" become a synonmym for "bigoted"? Or, as it is written in the Gospel According to St. John, 11th chapter, 35th verse:

Jesus wept.

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Has anyone else noticed that a lot of WorldNetDaily nutcases are showing up on Sean Hannity's show these days? First it was Jesse Lee Peterson, spouting crazy talk about Obama destroying America. And then, last night, it was WND's managing editor, David Kupelian, hawking his new book, How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America.

And just who and what is evil? Why, President Obama and the Democrats, of course:

Kupelian: I think we have a terrible problem right now, Sean. Basically, what we're looking at is -- let's say it. Can we say it on national TV? -- We're looking at an attempted socialist coup d'etat in Washington, D.C. And people are really, freely unhappy about it.

And you know, the thing about Barack Obama -- you know, 53 percent of us voted for him. Sixty-nine million Americans. But this is a guy -- I know it sounds crazy, but here's a guy who has been steeped in Marxist ideology for the past thirty years.

Things proceed as they usually do on Hannity's show with these "All American Panel" -- with Bob Beckel trying to bring some touch of sanity to the conversation, while Hannity readily agrees to the nutty stuff coming from his far-right guests. (They all agree at the end that Obama is "the most radical" president in American history.)

Finally, Beckel -- who gets used mostly as a football on these shows, much as Alan Colmes once was -- reaches his limit:

Beckel: Let me jsut say this. I've tried to be a nice guy tonight and be all the rest of that -- let me tell you something. The idea that the President -- you call the President of the United States a Marxist -- is, as far as I'm concerned, it's worse than Joe McCarthy calling people in the State Department a Communist. And you ought to apologize for it.

Of course, because it's Fox, no apology is either forthcoming or even considered necessary.

Obviously, Hannity is doing his best to keep up with the competition from Glenn Beck. So it looks like he's meeting his wingnuttery quota by calling on his new friends at WND, and its resident nuts are going to become regular fixtures. How lovely.

If you haven't noticed lately, the Washington Post has become the NRO for the most awesome Rahm Emanuel. Dana Milbank penned a column that could have been dictated to him by Rahm and then came another one basically saying all the same things. Rahm is teh Awesome and Obama is not.

We've had big problems with Broder, but even these weird displays of over the top Rahm leaking riled up the King of the Village:

In the space of 10 days, thanks in no small part to my own newspaper, the president of the United States has been portrayed as a weakling and a chronic screw-up who is wrecking his administration despite everything that his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, can do to make things right.

This remarkable fiction began unfolding on Feb. 21 in the Sunday column of my friend Dana Milbank, who wrote that "Obama's first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter," i.e., a one-term failure.

A week later, presumably the same anonymous sources convinced Milbank to pronounce that Obama "too often plays the 98-pound weakling; he gets sand kicked in his face and responds with moot-court zingers."

And on Tuesday, The Post led the paper with a purported news story by Jason Horowitz saying that a president with Obama's "detached, professorial manner" needed "a political enforcer" like Emanuel to have a chance of succeeding, "because he [Emanuel] possessed a unique understanding of the legislative mind." Unfortunately, the story said, "influential Democrats are -- in unusually frank terms -- blaming Obama and his closest campaign aides for not listening to Emanuel."

Rahm was instrumental in recruiting many new Blue Dogs in 2006 and 2008. If he was so great, then why didn't he get the ConservaDems and Lieberman on board with health care?

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Marc Thiessen was out flogging his most recent bit of ugly fearmongering -- his book that claims that the Obama administration doesn't want to capture terrorists -- on Morning Joe today, and ran smack into Lawrence O'Donnell, who gave him an earful:

Thiessen: You know, we've got to think back to the period after 9/11. We didn't even know who hit us. We didn't know that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was the mastermind of 9/11, or the operational commander of Al Qaeda. And then we started rounding up these terrorists. We caught Abu Zubaydah, we caught Ramzi Binalshibh, and KSM. And these guys provided us information under questioning by the CIA that stopped a number of terrorist attacks. They would have been planning to blow up the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, they were planning to blow up our Marine camp in Djibouti, they were well on their way to recruiting a cell of terrorists who would fly an airplane into Heathrow Airport and buildings in downtown London. And KSM had recruited a cell of Southeast Asian terrorists called the Garaba Cell, because he knew we'd be on the lookout for Arab men, to fly an airplane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, the tallest building on the West Coast. This program is why we did not have another 9/11 after the attack.

Scarborough: Lawrence O'Donnell:

O'Donnell: Well, you're lying about the West Coast thing, that's been covered very clearly --

Thiessen: Oh that's not true!

O'Donnell: -- But you as a former speechwriter for the White House, you took an oath of office when you took that job, that you might or might not remember. You actually published a book that says that the president of the United States, on its title, the president is inviting the next attack. Isn't it true that the president you work for invited the first attack?

Scarborough: All right.

Thiessen: Oh Lawrence, that's ridiculous.

O'Donnell: By having no idea what was going on with Al Qaeda. You just admitted that when you were hit on 9/11, you just said, 'We didn't know who hit us.' You said we didn't know who hit us. You were told who was going to hit us before we were hit on 9/11, and your administration invited the first attack, you should live in shame.

All this terribly upset everyone on the set, who began saying, "Lawrence, Lawrence!" Thiessen began responding by reverting to discussing Democrats' terrorism policies, and O'Donnell demanded he talk about the Bush administration's record. It was too much for Scarborough, who broke in:

We're going to break right now. We're going to break right now, and I'm going to be interviewing Marc myself.

When they returned, it was all civilized.

Have you ever noticed that anyone who wants to talk about the Bush administration's culpability for being asleep at the wheel on terrorism when the 9/11 attacks hit -- even though the record on this matter is quite clear -- gets quickly shut down?

In fact, even bringing it up gets you described as a "conspiracy theorist." For instance, the fact that 35% of Democrats believe Bush was warned in advance about the 9/11 attacks is frequently touted by people like Scarborough as some kind of evidence that the party is full of "9/11 conspiracy theorists."

Believing Bush was warned in advance about impending attacks from Al Qaeda is not a conspiracy theory: It's a fact. Or have none of these people ever heard of Bush's August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing -- the one titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US"?

You know, the briefing that specifically warned:

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Excuse me?

You know I was trying to think about who he was tonight and it's interesting... he is post-racial by all appearances. You know I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know he's gone a long way to become a leader in this country and passed so much history in just a year or two. I mean it's something we don't even think about. But I was watching him and said "Wait a minute, he's an African American guy in front of a bunch of white people and there he is President of the United States and we've completely forgotten that tonight". Completely forgotten it.

I think it was in the scope of his discussion; it was so broad ranging, so in tune with so many problems and aspects, and aspects of American life that you don't think in terms of the old tribalism, the old ethnicity. It was astounding in that regard and very subtle fact -- it's so hard to even talk about it -- maybe I shouldn't talk about it, but I am. I thought it was profound in that way and I think in terms of the seduction tonight -- I don't think he did anything tonight out of love for Republicans or deep understanding of people who disagree with him. He's probably incredibly frustrated by the failure of a single Republican Senator to step up and say "We've got to do something about health care. I'm challenging my caucus on this one. I'm with you buddy. I'm a profile in courage." Not a single Republican. That has got to frustrate a guy who has tried to reach out.

If only Tweety's brain was post-racial. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that MSNBC is going to do some apologizing tomorrow.