Brendan Calling

More of This Please

Obama bodyslams McCain and Bush.
It’s a beautiful thing to watch, whether you support Obama for President or not.
He ties the two together, than hangs an anvil on their necks, and then shoves them off the plank.

My mom, who voted for Clinton, called me up while Obama was live on TV. “OK,” she said. “I’m votiong for Obama. This speech is incredible.”

Once the primary is over, we can finally get onto attacking McSame. My mouth is watering, and I smell blood.

Weak Position

Invading Iraq was supposed to give us cheaper gas and greater energy. It was supposed to enhance our strength in the Middle East.

That must explain why, for the second time in a row, the President has gone begging to the Saudis for more oil, and for the second time in a row, has been rebuffed.

President Bush’s second stab this year at getting oil-rich Saudi Arabia to increase production and drive down the soaring gasoline prices hurting U.S. consumers appears to have again failed.

Saudi Arabian leaders made clear Friday they see no reason to increase oil production until their customers demand it, apparently rebuffing Mr. Bush, the White House said.

During Mr. Bush’s second personal appeal this year to King Abdullah, Saudi officials stuck to their position that they are already meeting demand, the president’s national security adviser told reporters.
[snip]
Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Abdullah may produce something “simply because it’s good manners,” but nothing that would have a significant effect.

“U.S. influence over OPEC and Gulf oil production is diminished,” he said. “It’s not clear what the incentive is to Saudi Arabia. We can’t deliver on (Mideast) peace. We can’t deliver on arms transfers. We can’t deliver on the Iraq that Saudi Arabia wants. We are raising problems in terms of Iran. And the reality is the market isn’t being driven by us; it’s being driven by China, by India, by rising Asian demand.”

Jon Alterman, director of the CSIS’ Middle East program, said the Saudis, with a public that doesn’t like Mr. Bush and a ruling monarchy with growing interests elsewhere, are not likely “to put themselves out to help this president.”

“The Saudis don’t have an alternative to keeping the U.S. in its corner, but their reliance on the United States, their confidence in the United States is extremely shaken,” Alterman said.

Ooops.

The Stupidest People in Philadelphia

Hamas and Obama
Tony Auth was way off the mark in suggesting that John McCain was slinging mud for noting that Barack Obama is the favored candidate of Hamas (Inquirer, May 14).

In April, Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef said: “We don’t mind - actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will [win] the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, [a] great man with great principle, and he has the vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with domination and arrogance.” Obama strategist David Axelrod called the Kennedy comparison “flattering.”

How is pointing out an accurate, direct quote slinging mud? There are clear and demonstrable differences between McCain and Obama on how to deal with difficult foreign policy issues. Shining a light on those differences is not slinging mud. It is affording the voting public an opportunity to make an informed decision.

Steven L. Friedman
Myles H. Tanenbaum

Co-chairmen
Greater Philadelphia Chapter
of the Republican Jewish Coalition
Scott M. Feigelstein

Director
Republican Jewish Coalition
of Pennsylvania and South Jersey

The letter cited above was published in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, owned by noted Republican activist Brian Tierney

It’s always sad and amusing when people who think they are very smart write stupid things. As the Washington Post reported today,

McCain, meanwhile, is guilty of hypocrisy. I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton and believe that she was right to say, about McCain’s statement on Hamas, “I don’t think that anybody should take that seriously.” Unfortunately, the Republicans know that some people will. That’s why they say such things.

But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News’s “World News Tonight” program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:

I asked: “Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?”

McCain answered: “They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.”

So I called up the Republican Jewish Coalition, and told them they might want to write another letter, explaining McCain’s quotes. The man on the other end of the phone said, “Well thank you for reading left-wing blogs,” and hung up the phone one me.

That was kind of rude, so I called back. “I don’t know why you hung up on me sir,” I began as he started trying to talk over me. “Sir– sir– SIR I AM A REPUBLICAN!” I finally bellowed. “I’m not reading “left-wing blogs”. I got this from the Washington Post and the Inquirer, hardly left-wing sources.”

“Well fine, fine,” he stammered, “but I have to go to a very important uh um meeting to get to, a very important meeting. Can you call back later?”

“Oh I’d be happy to!” I said, “only too happy to call back.”

I’ll keep y’all posted.

Prescott Bush Was a Nazi Sympathizer

UPDATED BELOW

The Worst President Ever travelled to Israel this weekend to celebrate the country’s 60th Birthday. Never one to show any class, the Asshole in Chief decided to call the Democrats a bunch of Nazi Appeasers (warning, .pdf). No, really! The CNN has the goods:

The president did not name Obama or any other Democrat, but White House aides privately acknowledged the remarks were aimed at the presidential candidate and others in his party. Former President Jimmy Carter has called for talks with Hamas.

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush said at Israel’s 60th anniversary celebration in Jerusalem.

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said in remarks to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The remarks seemed to be a not-so-subtle attempt to continue to raise doubts about Obama with Jewish Americans. Those doubts were earlier stoked by Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2008 presidential election, when he recently charged that Obama is the favored candidate of the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, which the U.S. government has listed as a terrorist group.

Tit for tat, Mr. Bush: your family’s fortune is largely due to your grandfather Prescott Bush, who bankrolled the Nazis, until his assets were seized by the US Government under the “Trading With the Enemy Act”:

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
[snip]
While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen’s US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Tantalising

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler’s efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen’s international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush’s links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen’s American assets were seized in 1942.

Read on for how Prescott Bush helped fund slave labor, crematoriums, concentration camps, and a whole bunch of machinery designed to slaughter Jews, gypsies, communists, Catholics, Slavs, Poles, homosexuals, socialists, liberals, etc etc etc.

True, Prescott Bush was not an appeaser: he was more what we call a “willing accomplice”.

UPDATE By President Bush’s definition, Arlen Specter is also guilty of appeasement: 17 trips to Syria to talk to the Assad government, noted by the US as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. And then of course, we have St. Ronald of Reagan, who traded arms to our enemies the Iranians in exchange for the return of US hostages, and then diverted the proceeds thereof to the Contras in Nicaragua.

Thank You Note

For this guy.

*&^%E#$^!!!!

I just got a call from my mechanic.
The good news is that my van passed the emissions component of its annual inspection.

The bad news is that I need a new axle, two new idler arms, one passenger side upper control arm, an alignment, a new tire, and some headlight work.

Grand total: $895.00

The van has 123,000 miles on it and a gasoline engine. My bet is that at about 180,000 the compression will start to die, and with the regular trips to get Sam, 180K is closer than it sounds. Never mind that the shitty mileage is killing me.

I think I have to start thinking about a new used car, preferably a 4-cylinder (for mileage sake) or a diesel (ditto, plus the engine will run for a million miles and can be converted to run on vegetable oil), and almost certainly a wagon (so my upright bass, which is as tall as me but doesn’t bend at the waist can fit inside).

It’d be a shame to spend my surplus stimulating the economy, so I think I’m going to sell the van for as much as I can, save up a few bucks over my next couple of paychecks, and buy an old Toyota, Honda, or Mazda.

Fuck. I really didn’t need this expense. $200.00 in repairs I could live with. Nearly $900.00? No way.

Joe Lieberman Sticks a Shiv in his Friend

Although I’m now an Obama supporter, many readers know it took me a long time to get to this point. One of my biggest arguments against Obama was that he was too quick to move to the center. After all, this is the guy who embraced Joe Liberman has his “mentor” in the Senate:

Hence Vietor’s sensitivity to the allusion in my column to Obama’s “mentor” being Senator Joe Lieberman. As a freshman senator, Vietor insisted, Obama had been assigned Lieberman as mentor. Read the Hartford Courant and you’ll find Lieberman boasting that Obama picked him.

Either way, it’s obvious that Obama could have brokered a different mentor if he’d so desired, the same way he could have declined to go and tout for Lieberman at that Democratic Party dinner in Connecticut at the end of March. But he clearly didn’t, because he wanted to send out a reassuring signal, in the same way he’s doing with his PAC, the Hopefund, which is raising money for fourteen of his senate colleagues. According to BlackCommentator, ten of them are DLC–half the DLC presence in the Senate.

Furthermore, during the 2006 election, when there was an opportunity to get rid of Holy Joe, Obama went out of his way to support his friend and mentor:

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama rallied Connecticut Democrats at their annual dinner Thursday night, throwing his support behind mentor and Senate colleague Joe Lieberman.

Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is considered a rising star in the party, was the keynote speaker at the annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey Dinner.

Lieberman, Connecticut’s junior senator, is under fire from some liberal Democrats for his support of the Iraq War. He was key in booking Obama, who routinely receives more than 200 speaking invitations each week.

Some at Thursday’s dinner said that while they were pleased with Lieberman’s success in bringing Obama to Connecticut, they still consider Lieberman uncomfortably tolerant of the Bush administration.

Obama wasted little time getting to that point, calling it the “elephant in the room” but praising Lieberman’s intellect, character and qualifications.

“The fact of the matter is, I know some in the party have differences with Joe. I’m going to go ahead and say it,” Obama told the 1,700-plus party members who gathered in a ballroom at the Connecticut Convention Center for the $175-per-head fundraiser.

“I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf,” he said.

And what has Holy Joe, friend and mentor to Obama done in return? Looks to me like he fashioned himself a shiv:

What a royal asshole Joe Lieberman is. He should have his committee assignments taken from him. Unfortunately, the Senate is run by another Royal Asshole: Hapless Harry Reid.

With friends like Joe Lieberman, who needs enemies?

Oy

Amy Argetsinger, Village idiot

According to Amy Argetsinger in the Post, “First daughter’s decision to wed privately disappoints a public fascinated by her coming of age.”

Click on the thumbnail for a better view

There are really so many kernels of undigested corn gems in this steaming turd of an article, I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know what world Ms. Argetsinger lives in, but I don’t know anyone who gives a shit about Jenna’s Bush’s nuptuals.

What, you want more? Of course you do! We’re talking about the president’s daughter here, and media organizations as varied as “Access Hollywood” and Agence France-Presse have poured into this tiny community — home to George and Laura Bush’s 1,600-acre ranch — to cover what some consider the celebrity wedding of the year.

But despite the widespread interest — and despite the blond First Twin’s increasingly public profile as a published author and do-gooder — the White House has repeatedly made clear that this is a private event.

How about the fact that the President in question is the most unpopular and despised president EVER? Or thet “First Twin’s” previously public profile as a drunk and a drug user who not only got thrown out of other countries, but didn’t have the class to leave.

Pardon me if I doubt that America’s very impressed, or really very interested in the wedding of some rich guy’s rich daughter when the rest of us are struggling to feed our families and put gas in our cars thanks to her father’s failed war and weak-dollar economy. We can’t afford bread here in the real world, why would anyone care to watch while Jenna Bush eats cake?

But that was a different era — before the growth of the wedding-industrial complex and the 24-hour news cycle. And they were different brides, well into adulthood by the time their parents entered the White House and well past 30 at the altar. In Jenna Bush, we have the first White House bride in decades whom the public truly watched grow up — and one who has trod a fascinating tightrope between private citizen and public celebrity.

That’s an interesting way of describing Ms. Bush, because from what I understand, and as google confirms, the Bush Family has ” tried to keep their daughters out of the hurly burly of the campaign and out of the public spotlight”.

[May 25, 2000] They don’t campaign. They don’t appear in political ads. They don’t pose for pictures. George W. Bush’s twin teen-age daughters so treasure their privacy that their reluctance to become public figures was at the forefront of the family deliberations over entering a presidential campaign. …
From BUSH KEEPS HIS TWINS OUT OF PUBLIC EYE - Charlotte Observer ($$)

[Dec 19, 2000] She’s been adamant about keeping the daughters out of the public eye. “Where you see the tiger in the tank will be about protecting that zone of privacy,” Dr. Whillock said. Mrs. Bush also has been overseeing the completion of the new ranch house near Crawford that will become the Bush family’s …
From Laura Bush expected to provide calming influence,… - Dallas Morning News ($$)

[Jun 8, 2000] Mrs. Bush, still described as a stabilizer to her husband, says she often keeps the TV off to avoid seeing hurtful things about her husband. The Bushes have tried to keep their daughters out of the hurly burly of the campaign and out of the public spotlight that shines on the Texas governor, …
From George W. Bush: Easy to underestimate - USA Today

Amy also seems to forget that Clintons had a daughter who grew up in the public eye too. That would be Chelsea Clinton, who people like Presidential candidate John McCain felt free to malign and make fun of, even though she was about 13 years old. You remember Chelsea: she’s the one who’s not falling down drunk all over the place, getting kicked out of Argentina, or acting like a spoiled little shit.

Which is why First Twin-watchers were stunned last year when it was announced that Jenna would not only write a young-adult book about poverty and HIV in Central America — “Ana’s Story” — but also embark on the requisite public speaking and interview circuits. Suddenly, Jenna was everywhere, displaying a natural poise and likability as she parceled out personal anecdotes (Henry’s pre-dawn proposal on Maine’s Cadillac Mountain; how her dad makes the two of them sleep in separate rooms; how she’d love to meet Chelsea Clinton) in a husky, cool-girl voice.

This is what most ordinary people recognize as “trying to rehabilitate your reputation”.

“People are fascinated by this remaking of Jenna” from party girl to serious educator/advocate type, said Jellison, who has studied American weddings and followed Jenna’s trajectory. “That may be creating more curiosity about her.”

Oh wait, I thought she was a “burrowed into a close-knit group of friends who loyally protected her privacy.” Where does this “party girl” stuff come from? Oh wait…

I guess in the long run, Ms. Argetsinger’s fawning profile is of little import, but with ordinary Americans unable to fill their gas tanks or afford to feed their families, when thousands of our kids are coming home dead from the First Family’s pointless war, when our infrastructure is falling apart, it’s hard not to point out how crass, how out-of-touch, and how truly tasteless the courtesans of the Village really are.

It must be nice to live in whatever dimension Amy Argetsinger lives in. It must be nice.

What Sadly No Said.

Sadly, NO!:

Have Obama and his supporters fucked up and been nasty and divisive and shitty at times? Yeah. So has she and so have hers. Both deserve to be raked over the coals when they sling Rovian mud at each other or blatantly and unconstructively break the 11th commandment or fling race and gender cards around or talk about obliterating Iran or invading Pakistan.

But here’s what I don’t get and maybe Lambert et. al. can help me out. On the one hand, you guys notice every wart on Obama’s face, which, again, is perfectly fine. And yet you are stunningly blind to any on Hillary’s. And really, they’re not hard to miss.

It’s like you project the entire long history of progressive discontent with centrist, party hack Democrats onto Barack Obama, again, fine, but then you turn around and somehow project Dennis Kucinich onto your own candidate. Who is Hillary Clinton. I repeat, Hillary-fucking-Clinton. Who is a real person, with a real legislative record, not some doll you can put overalls on and call Working Class Hero Hills! Now with Gas Tax Holiday Grip!

So I have to ask: why are you doing this? And really, I want to know, because it looks very much like Obama is going to be the nominee and I hope you all come home to support him. Or to turn things out and attempt to be a little more gracious, what do Obama and his supporters need to do today to get you into this car?

Well?

Good Times

Kids are funny the way they pick up their parents’ habits and catchphrases. Sam’s picked up a couple from his mom. When she’s trying to get him to focus, she says “Sam, can I talk to you for a minute?”, and he uses it all the time when he feels he’s not being paid enough attention. “Christina?” he says, gesturing withi his hand for her to come closer. “Christina, can I talk to you for a minute?” I have more than a few. “Duuude!?!” when he’s being unreasonable; “Good times” when we’re having fun, the eternal favorite “Learn how to drive!”, and of course “C’mon MAN!” when I need Sam to cooperate.

Toward the end of Sam’s January visit, we took a nice walk through Bartram’s Garden. The CSX freight tracks run through the northwest side of the park along the meadow trail, and we would stop every few minutes to watch a freight pass by.

It was a beautiful day, the height of January thaw during these last few years before the global warming catastrophe really starts to hit us. The mid-afternoon sun glanced off the Center City skyline a mile or so away on the other side of the river while a crow cawed at its neighbor. A blue and-yellow diesel hummed by, bell clanging steadily.

We watched the engine disappear around the bend and set off again along the path holding hands when Sam looked up at me and said, “Daddy?”

“Yes, Sam?”

“Good times, Daddy. Good times.”

Little guy used it right, too.