Reagan on Rushmore?

There's something about monumental architecture that gives authoritarians a tingly sensation all over. Thus it's no surprise that Conservatives have always harbored a desire/fantasy/delusion of putting Reagan's face up on Mount Rushmore alongside the visages of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. Today Reverend Sungh Yung Moon's Washington Times quenched its readers thirst with a fantasy proposal:



The caption to the story ran:

Artist Ted Williams has incorporated former President Ronald Reagan into an image of Mount Rushmore that was called "so realistic that it looks like Reagan is really there."

There are two things that I find rather curious about this article.

First is the caption: "it looks like Reagan is really there."

Uh... yeah. It's called Photoshop. Look, here's Ozzy on Mt. Rushmore. Looks like he's really there, too, doesn't it? Uncanny:


But the other thing I noticed about the Reagan on Mt. Rushmore picture is that it seems to involve adding rock to Mt. Rushmore. Hmmm... not really sure they thought that through very closely.

Prediction

Sort of an addendum to my previous post:

Giuliani has two cards in his deck: 911 (which he's played so many times he's worn a hole right through it) and the notable drop in crime that accompanied his tenure as Mayor of New York City. But he's weak on social issues (as far as GOP voters are concerned). Huckabee, on the other hand, is strong on social issues and potentially weak on crime, (though, this will depend greatly on how the Dumond scandal plays out). Giuliani's strength, then is Huckabee's potential weakness whereas Huckabee's strength is Giuliani's weakness.

I would fully expect the Giuliani campaign to undertake a concerted effort to undermine Huckabee's candidacy based on the "crime" issue. And I suspect that either the Giuliani campaign (or more likely a surrogate) will be the first to launch an attack in this quarter.

I'll admit it: the Huckabee candidacy worries me greatly. Depending on how the female vote lines up, he could well beat Hillary. If he's the GOP candidate I'd much rather have Obama to face him. I suspect Hillary could take any other GOP candidate, but Huckabee... I'm not so sure. Huckabee is genial, wheras Hillary has a mean streak. Obama is genial, whereas Giuliani has a mean streak. I don't think mean streak beats genial with the American electorate. Hillary could take Giuliani, and Obama could take Huckabee. But that's about all I can say with any confidence. I will say that for all the troubles the GOP field is experiencing, anyone who thinks the Democrat is just going to waltz into the Whitehouse is just naive. It's going to be a bitterly contested election.

Romney's JFK Speech

This was his conundrum, as I wrote elsewhere:

It's gonna be a tough juggling act for Romney. He's gotta convince the Christian Right that your religious beliefs shouldn't matter one single bit in our pluralistic, Democratic America, unless, of course, you're a Muslim or, Moroni forbid, ...an atheist! At the same time he's got to convince GOP voters that he's a deeply religious man who is driven by faith, because it would be unthinkable to elect anyone who wasn't (i.e. a Democrat).

And having just watched the speech, that's exactly what he tried to do. There were four main points:

1) It's unfair not to vote for Romney just because he's a Mormon...

2) ...because then we'd be like Islamists want to kill us all because we're not Islamists.

3) But obviously we need a religious man in the Whitehouse...

4) ...because otherwise we'd be like secular Europe with its empty Cathedrals.

Romney's trying to pilot his ship through a very, very narrow strait. On the one hand are the Christian fundamentalists who won't vote for him because they're a lot like the Islamists in terms of their exclusivity of belief and hegemonic evangelism. On the other hand are those on the left who are uncomfortable with the Religious Right's attempt to so closely tie religion to politics.

I for one felt very uncomfortable with Romney's insistence, at the beginning of his speech, that freedom requires religious conviction. It reminds me of the time that George Bush the elder (who introduced Romney at his speech today) questioned whether atheists should be allowed to be citizens or could possibly be patriots. Clearly Romney is trying to have it both ways. He's demanding that the Religious Right be open minded about his own beliefs while assuring them that he's just as intolerant of unbelievers as they are.

Sadly for Romney, I suspect this speech will probably be remembered as his Swan Song. The Religious Right has found its man in Mike Huckabee, and unless Romney and Giuliani make common cause and break out the Karl Rove handbook and pull out all the stops to successfully Swiftboat him based upon the emerging Wayne Dummond scandal, Huckabee's going to sail to the nomination.

One thing I can guarantee: the GOP nomination is about to get nasty. Hillary and Obama are going to look like bestest pals based on what's about to unfold in their opponents' race.

The enemy is us...

Remember when the Likudnik right pilloried Jimmy Carter as an anti-Semite for suggesting that maybe the State of Israel would be better off in the long-term if it ended its occupation of the West Bank and allowed the Palestinians to live their lives like human beings? Well, looks like they've found another vile anti-Semite hiding in our midst... Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, disciple of Carter (and Hitler, obviously)!

(found through Andrew Sullivan)

The President's lies and misrepresentations

The President responds to the latest NIE report, in which 16 separate intelligence agencies concluded that Iran halted work on acquiring nuclear weapons in 2003.

"I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program," Bush said. "The reason why it's a warning signal is they could restart it."

So if it stops raining, put your baseball bat and glove back down, kids. Doesn't mean you can go out an play. It's just a warning that it might start raining again soon. The President has a knack for absurdly inappropriate interpretations of inconvenient facts and data. Remember when he insisted that military operations in Iraq were obviously succeeding because U.S. casualties were rising? Remember what Bush said back when inspection teams concluded that Iraq possessed no Weapons of Mass Destructions, either chemical, nuclear or biological?

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.

It was a similar attempt by the President to look the world straight in the face and tell us all that the moon was made of cheese. Of course, intelligence agencies had concluded no such thing, and were instead inclined to believe that that the mobile laboratories to which Bush was referring were not chemical weapons labs, but rather mobile facilities for the production of hydrogen gas (probably used to fill balloons which were used as targets in anti-aircraft gun training exercises.) So he was lying then too, just as he's lying today.

Reports are now surfacing that the Bush administration kept this NIE assessment under wraps for over a year, even as the President ceaselessly belched apocalyptic rhetoric about the threat of Iran's Nuclear program.

But at least he wasn't lying about sex, right?

Ooopsie!

Look what country we don't have an excuse to bomb any more.

Rewriting History

The liberal blogosphere is positively livid these days by the following exchange that Karl Rove had with Charlie Rose a few days ago on Rose's TV show:




Rove's suggestion that the Congress' vote to authorize (pdf) the president "use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary" to counter the perceived threat of Saddam Hussein's Iraq somehow "pushed things along" faster than the administration would have liked is simply ludicrous on the face of it. And he has rightly taken much heat for this claim.

Today Rove had to answer for that claim most explicitly on Fox News of all places, a video of which encounter can be found on the Huffington Post. It's great fun, though rather peculiar watching Rove attempt to rebut a counter claim by Ari Fleischer by insisting that Rove was an administration insider whereas Fleischer, presumably was not. Talk about rewriting history. A nice bonus is watching Fox host Chris Wallace trying desperately to change the topic (well aware, it seems, of how ridiculous Rove was sounding).

What to me is interesting in all this is the way Rove is trying to spin his statements. He's placing most of his emphasis on the claim that Congress (which, on the Senate side was nominally Democratic) hurried through an Iraq resolution before the Bush Administration was ready for it, while expending very little effort justifying the more subtle claim that the authorization in question somehow forced the Administration's hand (probably because it's a pretty ludicrous claim).

Now, in all honestly, I am inclined to believe that some members of the administration (though I doubt all) did, in fact, want for the vote to occur after the elections. But the notion that they wanted this to be the case to avoid a "politicized" vote is simply ludicrous, coming from an administration that has sought to squeeze every possible ounce of political advantage from the events of September 11, 2001. As I've written already below, it is very likely there were some in the political wing (and I suspect Rove was among them) who wanted to head into the 2002 elections without such a vote so that they could run a campaign based on the theme that only Republicans were prepared to do what was necessary to defend the country from the menace represented by Saddam Hussein. Having the war authorization vote take place before the elections would neutralize that message to a certain extent, since the president could no longer hit the campaign trail asking voters to elect Republicans so that his hands might no longer be tied and he be allowed to do what was necessary to secure the nation. In fact, even after the vote took place, that message was still central and critical to be GOP's campaign strategy. One need only witness what the GOP did to GA, senator Max Cleland to see how this played out in the field.

So my message to rove, is this: cute, nice try, but too clever by half.