Month: September 2005
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Michael Moore’s Katrina jargon
More liberal pundit jargon, this time from Michael Moore in an email to supporters about Katrina: There is much to be said and done about the manmade annihilation of New Orleans, caused NOT by a hurricane but by the very specific decisions made by the Bush administration in the past four and a half years.
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Read Tom Tomorrow
His scathing new comic about the political aftermath of Katrina is well worth sitting through a brief Salon advertisement. Brutal and hilarious. (Via Alterman.)
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Alterman’s anti-Bush jargon
One of the key tactics of political jargon* is confounding intention and (alleged) effect, as in this passage from Eric Alterman today: In the name of fighting “terrorism,” the administration has sent 40 percent of the National Guard to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away. The
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Barbara Bush: “this is working very well for them”
Yesterday, Barbara Bush proclaimed how great it is to be a Katrina refugee in Texas: What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is [the Katrina refugees] all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,
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David Brooks on the future of the GOP
The battle for the soul of the Republican Party has begun. On Thursday, I saw David Brooks give a surprisingly effective speech at the American Political Science Association meetings. Most of it was standup comedy based on his books Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive, which the audience loved. But Brooks also made a
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More WSJ sophistry on tax revenues
The Wall Street Journal editorial page has implied yet again that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue: Predictably, the Bush tax cuts are under attack for denying revenue to the government and because they don’t require “sacrifice” in wartime. But the truth is that federal revenues are rising by an estimated $262 billion–or roughly 14%–this
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Failed leadership at FEMA and the White House
This is unconscionable: [L]ocal officials, who still feel overwhelmed by the continuing tragedy, demanded accountability and as well as action. “Why did it happen? Who needs to be fired?” asked Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, south of New Orleans. Far from deferring to state or local officials, FEMA asserted its authority and made things
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The last 35 percent
Does the base realize that President Bush is in big trouble politically? According to the Washington Post, one “conservative ally of the White House” referred to conservatives as the “last 35 percent of the country that’s really on his side” — ouch: Many conservatives howled last summer at the prospect of Gonzales replacing O’Connor because
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Jack Shafer: “The Rebellion of the Talking Heads”
Via Andrew Sullivan: Slate’s Jack Shafer documents how angry journalists have stopped rolling over and started to question the official spin on Katrina: In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting from the bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New Orleans have stopped playing the role of wind-swept
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Charles Babington reads minds
Charles Babington purports to know that John Roberts’ demeanor is “deliberately bland” in a Washington Post news story yesterday: Given Roberts’s deliberately bland demeanor, some of the more entertaining or dramatic moments [in his confirmation hearings] could come from the mercurial chairman [Arlen Specter], who combines an incisive legal mind with an almost puckish pleasure