WHERE’S FREDO? Join the hunt for Alberto Gonzales. Anyone can play.
Condi Rice is proud —PROUD, I TELL YOU — that the US went to war in Iraq. And she’s sure that the world isn’t more dangerous as a consequence. Meanwhile, some Republicans are apparently in a state of alarm and despondency over the President’s current activities. They’re worried about the President, already sufficiently unpopular, is being shown fiddling about while the economy goes up in flames.
Democrats all over the blogosphere, including some who were quite critical of his FISA reversal, leaped to Obama’s defense when the media — incorrectly — accused him of reversing himself on his Iraq policy.
“My 16-month timeline, if you examine everything I’ve said, was always premised on making sure our troops were safe,” Obama told reporters as his campaign plane landed in North Dakota, a state no Democratic presidential candidate has carried since 1964. “And my guiding approach continues to be that we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe, and that Iraq is stable. And I’m going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold.”…
Marc Ambinder said:
It’s true that he has said what he says he said, and has said it for more than a year. But he hasn’t always said it — with “always” meaning on every occasion that he happened to mention troop withdrawals.
So there may be a change of emphasis, rather than a change of position, consonant with the facts on the ground — which is, to Obama’s credit, what he, in more reflective moments, said he would base his Iraq policy on.
And besides, The New York Times reported:
In his second news conference Thursday, Mr. Obama laid out his proposal in less-ambiguous terms.
“Let me be as clear as I can be,” he said. “I intend to end this war. My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war — responsibly, deliberately, but decisively. And I have seen no information that contradicts the notion that we can bring our troops out safely at a pace of one to two brigades a month, and again, that pace translates into having our combat troops out in 16 months’ time.”
So, as Polimom correctly stated earlier, it’s simply not correct that this represents a true flip-flop.
I mean, FISA and telecom amnesty — that is a reversal. But the hue and cry in the media over his remarks about Iraq is the result of their failure to listen to a word he was saying.
At Democrats.com, Bob Fertik finds it ‘worrisome’ that that Obama needed ‘two press conferences today to clarify his position on Iraq.’ However: though he agrees that everything Obama has said is consistent with his previous position, he makes a good point and important point about Obama’s campaign, Republican tactics, and the general laziness and irresponsibility of the media:
I hope Obama understands the powerful dynamic that’s at work: when he flip-flops on one issue [FISA], Republicans and their Corporate Media allies will try to portray every policy “clarification” as another flip-flop, so they can paint him as another John Kerry.
The Corporate Media doesn’t care that John McCain holds the Guiness World Record in flip-flops, including Bush’s tax cuts, immigration, torture, and off-shore drilling.
Meanwhile, Obama discussed his position on late-term abortions in an interview with a Christian Magazine, a position which — as Jeralyn pointed out at TalKLeft — seems unlikely to please either the pro-choice side of the argument or their opposite numbers.
In other news, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury couldn’t find much to say when queried about the economy. As Dana Milbank says, words failed him. ‘His heavy breathing, picked up by the microphone, could be heard in the back of the room,’ Dana Milbank writes. And who can blame him? There’s a history behind the saying, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who was in London yesterday, and Swagel’s other superiors in the Bush administration left him with an impossible task: appearing on camera to put a favorable and reassuring gloss on an economy that has gone to the dogs.
Yesterday’s report that 62,000 jobs were lost brought the total for the first half of the year to 438,000 jobs. Meanwhile, the Institute for Supply Management reported that its measure of the service sector had declined in June. Stock markets, flirting with a bear market, finished another losing week. Oil pushed to a record high. Inflation and foreclosures are up, consumer confidence is down, and administration forecasts for a “strong pace of growth” in the second half of 2008 are look increasingly absurd.(Milbank)
Also, though Milbank doesn’t mention it, it turns out that everyone just went out and spent their ‘stimulus package’ on porn. We are a suggestible people. They shouldn’t have called it a ‘stimulus package.’
Meanwhile, the economy remains generally unstimulated and dejected.
Here in Florida, Disney is embroiled in a fight with the NRA over Disney’s refusal to allow its employees to bring their guns onto Disney property. Recently, our Republican legislature — strongly backed by the NRA — passed a law allowing those of us with permits to keep firearms locked in our cars at work. Most employers objected:
For three years, much of the big-business community in Florida — including Disney, the Florida Chamber of Commerce and the Florida Retail Federation — had vigorously opposed legislation intended to ensure that employees could store guns in their vehicles while at work. That opposition was offset by strong support from the National Rifle Association, however, and such a bill finally was approved this spring by the state Legislature.
Now Disney thinks it has found a loophole. The NRA and Republican legislators think not. (Read more in The Orlando Sentinel; there’s lots). What can i say? My money’s on the Mouse.
North Carolina Senator and ‘conservative icon’ Jesse Helms has died. What can I say? Humanly speaking, he seemed nice enough — genial, I guess. I did not agree with his politics, but they were pretty much the same politics of all the men I knew of his age and background. It was only later that this began to seem shocking.
Here are the factors that went into making him what he was:
“I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year’s Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day,” Helms wrote in a newspaper column in 1956.(HuffPost)
That was mostly before my time, but I knew a lot of people who longed nostalgically all their lives for a return to those days, at whatever cost to others.
I remember, much later on, the following campaign:
He defeated black former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 in racially tinged campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumbling up a job application, these words underneath: “You needed that job … but they had to give it to a minority.”
“The tension that he creates, the fear he creates in people, is how he’s won campaigns,” Gantt said several years later.(HuffPost)
Here’s to a time when a man of mixed white and African-American parentage is well on the way to becoming president. Happy 4th of July!
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