Brendan Nyhan

He can’t stand listening to a fellow senator who has to be Joe Biden:

Listening to a bloviating colleague at his first meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama slipped a three-word note to a member of his staff: “Shoot. Me. Now.”

I feel the same way.

Today’s sign of the apocalypse — someone tried to trademark “Obama bin Laden”. Luckily, they were turned down:

Government officials have rejected a Florida man’s bid to trademark the term “Obama bin Laden,” ruling that the conflation of the names of a U.S. Senator and the world’s leading terrorist was “scandalous” and wrongly suggested a connection between the politician and the mass murderer.

The Smoking Gun has posted their decision online, as well as this charming image that the applicant, Alexandre Batlle, planned to use on a shirt:

Andrew Sullivan, who warned that “[t]he decadent Left … may well mount what amounts to a fifth column” after 9/11, approvingly quotes Bruce Bawer in The Stranger calling Dinesh D’Souza’s new book treasonous:

For those who cherish freedom, 9/11 was intensely clarifying. Presumably it, and its aftermath, have been just as clarifying for D’Souza, whose book leaves no doubt whatsoever that he now unequivocally despises freedom—that open homosexuality and female “immodesty” are, in his estimation, so disgusting as to warrant throwing one’s lot in with religious totalitarians. Shortly after The Enemy at Home came out, a blogger recalled that in 2003, commenting in the National Review on the fact that “influential figures” in America’s conservative movement felt “that America has become so decadent that we are ‘slouching towards Gomorrah,’” D’Souza wrote: “If these critics are right, then America should be destroyed.” Well, D’Souza has now made it perfectly clear that he’s one of those critics; and the book he’s written is nothing less than a call for America’s destruction. He is the enemy at home. Treason is the only word for it.

By almost all accounts, D’Souza’s book is loathsome (I haven’t read it), but free speech is not treasonous.

Scooter Libby’s defense strategy is, um, unusual:

Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr. opened their case Monday with a parade of prominent Washington reporters who testified that Mr. Libby never mentioned the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative when they interviewed him during the period the officer’s identity was leaked to the news media.

One by one, the reporters from The Washington Post, The New York Times and Newsweek took the stand and recounted their conversations with Mr. Libby in the summer of 2003 about unconventional weapons and Iraq. They briskly and unhesitatingly said Mr. Libby, then the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, did not speak about the C.I.A. employee, Valerie Wilson.

But Libby isn’t accused of leaking to those reporters or lying about his conversations with them. It’s like calling all the people who weren’t killed to the stand in a murder trial.

Before it was known Vice President Cheney wouldn’t testify in the Scooter Libby trial, the New York Times made a bizarre reference to “the awesome authority of his office”:

If he testifies, Mr. Cheney will bring to the jurors the awesome authority of his office and could attest to Mr. Libby’s character as policy adviser and family man, and to his crushing workload and dedication to keeping the country safe.

Somewhere, Dan Quayle is laughing. As the Times surely knows, the vice president actually has very little constitutional power; Cheney’s “awesome authority” comes from the influence he has in the Bush administration.

Tonight PBS will be airing the first of a four-part series on the state of the news media titled “Newswar” — here’s the New York Times review:

It’s fair to say that the relationship between the press and the Bush White House has often been one of mutual suspicion and sometimes outright hostility. And the administration and its allies have at times been outspoken in their belief that the mainstream press was biased against it. But as evidenced by the “Frontline” four-part series “News War,” whose first episode appears tonight on PBS, government skepticism toward the press is just one of the trials faced by today’s news organizations. Those challenges include everything from declining audiences, to the warp speed of the 24/7 news cycle, to the Internet’s undercutting the press’s monopoly on information, to news operations beholden to conglomerates that sometimes view news as another entertainment portal.

Definitely sounds like it’s worth watching…

If you asked me what issue Americans will see in retrospect as the greatest unacknowledged barbarity of our time, I would nominate prison rape, which is not only tolerated but frequently encouraged within our prisons and is still the subject of jokes in popular culture and politics. Ezra Klein has more here,
here, and here. Warning: These posts contain graphic first-person descriptions of the attacks which go on every day within the prisons that our government controls. More than almost any other crime, prison rape is our responsibility. What will we do about it?

Eric Alterman opened his Media Matters column with this passage, which takes a cheap shot at Time magazine:

William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, has the best short explanation of where we stand in Iraq today, read it here, then just for fun, read in our Self-Parody Department: William Kristol said Barack Obama wants to appease terrorists like pro-slavery politician Stephen Douglas tried to appease slave-owners. Kristol said, “Obama’s speech is a ‘can’t we get along’ speech — sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858.” Here. Shouldn’t all of Kristol’s comments come with a warning: “Notice: This man’s predictions have helped cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people, the wasting of a trillion dollars, torture, the inspiration of who knows how many terrorists and the hatred of the United States the world over, and yet he continues to attack the intelligence, integrity and patriotism of those who were correct.”

(And shouldn’t David Duke have a column in Time as well, just to give the magazine some intellectual consistency?)

Alterman has repeatedly slammed Time for its lineup of columnists (including Kristol), which he correctly says skews conservative. But what does David Duke have to do with Time or Kristol? This certainly looks like an ugly smear. Is Alterman likening Kristol to Duke? All conservatives?

I don’t know what’s more embarrassing about this passage from Jeffrey Goldberg’s New Yorker article — the fact that Goldberg and Lieberman independently paid to see Behind Enemy Lines or the fact that Lieberman actually cheers during crappy Hollywood blockbusters:

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his first and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

PS: Goldberg shares Lieberman’s hawkish tendencies, but he does get one particularly nice shot in at the sanctimonious posturing of the “independent Democrat”:

Three days after the hearing, I went to see Lieberman in his office. He was cheerful and easygoing and more convinced than usual of the essential rightness of his vision” (my italics).

Chris Mooney and Brad DeLong report that the White House press corps is finally challenging Tony Snow aggressively on the administration’s dissembling about global warming and the revenue effects of tax cuts, respectively. It’s amazing what a 33% approval rating will do for their backbone. (Compare and contrast, for instance, to all the cases documented in All the President’s Spin.)