Monday, Sep 19, 2005 3:03 PM UTC
Appearing in New York, Sheehan says it's time for Clinton to admit that Iraq is a "lie" -- or else.
By T.g.
The president’s dismal poll numbers may have Democrats feeling a little better about their electoral prospects in 2008, but news out of New York last night underscores a fact that a lot of Democrats in Washington would like to forget: Iraq is a galvanizing issue for a lot of Americans, but it’s not without its complications for the opposition party.
When Cindy Sheehan spoke in Brooklyn last night, she had George W. Bush’s Iraq policies centered in her sights. But along the way, Sheehan took note of the fact that Sen. Hillary Clinton voted to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq and — like most Senate Democrats — hasn’t called on him to bring the troops home yet. “She knows that the war is a lie but she is waiting for the right time to say it,” Sheehan said of Clinton. As the New York Times reports it, the crowd cheered as Sheehan said: “You say it, or you are losing your job.”
There’s more than a little hyperbole there: Whatever she says about Iraq, Hillary Clinton isn’t at much risk of her losing her job in the U.S. Senate. But Sheehan’s comments foreshadow problems Clinton — and a lot of other Democrats — may face in contending for the Democratic presidential nomination for 2008. While nearly 60 percent of the public disapproves of the way Bush is handling the war and thinks some or all of the U.S. troops should come home now, few Democrats in Washington have pushed hard for a specific timetable for a withdrawal. Clinton isn’t among them; to the contrary, she has said that more troops may be needed before the U.S. is done in Iraq.
That may or may not be the right answer, but it’s not one that’s going to satisfy Sheehan or millions of other Americans who think that 1,900 dead Americans is already too high a price to pay for a war that shouldn’t have been fought in the first place.
Monday, Sep 19, 2005 2:05 PM UTC
After making nice in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, the former president has a few words of advice for his successor.
By T.g.
In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bill Clinton made nice with George W. Bush. Those days seem to be over. Appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, Clinton had a few words to say about the policies of his successor, and they weren’t the kind designed to get him invited for another boat ride with the president’s father.
Some highlights:
On rolling back some of Bush’s tax cuts to pay for Katrina: “I think it’s very important that Americans understand, you know, tax cuts are always popular, but about half of these tax cuts since 2001 have gone to people in my income group, the top 1 percent. I’ve gotten four tax cuts. They’re responsible for this big structural deficit, and they’re not going away, the deficits aren’t. Now, what Americans need to understand is that that means every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina and our tax cuts. We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else.”
On the Republicans’ responsibility for problems involving poverty and race: “If you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up, and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that’s a consequence of the action made. That’s what they did in the ’80s; that’s what they’ve done in this decade. In the middle, we had a different policy. We concentrated tax cuts on lower-income working people and benefits to low-income people that helped them move from welfare to work, and we moved 100 times as many people out of poverty. We know what works, and we had a program that was drastically reducing poverty, and they got rid of it. And they don’t believe in it.”
On whether the United States has a strategy for winning in Iraq: “Well, if we do, it’s not working right now, at least … A lot of good Americans have given their lives; thousands of others have been horribly wounded. So I have been in a position where I wanted the strategy to work. Whether it will or not, I don’t know. But the only thing I would sacrifice it to is if I thought we were going to lose in Afghanistan. We cannot lose in Afghanistan. We cannot let the Taliban come back. We cannot let [Hamid] Karzai fail. We cannot relax our efforts to try to keep undermining al-Qaida, because that’s still by far a bigger threat to our security.”
Monday, Sep 19, 2005 1:30 PM UTC
The Pentagon doesn't do body counts -- or does it?
By T.g.
From Fox News Sunday, Nov. 2, 2003: Asked why Americans aren’t seeing reports on the numbers of Iraqi fighters killed, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says: “Well, we don’t do body counts on other people.”
From the Huffington Post, Sept. 17, 2005: At an off-the-record gathering in Aspen over the weekend, Karl Rove said that the Bush administration hasn’t done a good enough job of explaining its success in Iraq.
From the Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2005: “Using enemy body counts as a benchmark, the U.S. military claimed gains against Abu Musab Zarqawi’s foreign-led fighters last week even as they mounted their deadliest attacks on Iraq’s capital.”
Friday, Sep 16, 2005 7:30 PM UTC
First it put Michael Brown in charge of FEMA. Now a veterinary expert will lead the FDA's Office of Women's Health.
By T.g.
We’re not saying there’s a connection here, but we’re not saying there isn’t, either.
Remember how George W. Bush selected as his FEMA director a man whose last job involved judging horse shows for the International Arabian Horse Association? Well, the president’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner has appointed an acting director for the Office of Women’s Health, and he’s a man — a man! — who has spent much of his career working in the field of veterinary medicine.
The FDA had an opening to fill in the Office of Women’s Health because its last director, Susan Wood, quit in protest over the agency’s dithering and delays on the morning-after pill. Wood’s acting replacement is Norris Alderson. Alderson has a bachelor’s degree in animal husbandry from the University of Tennessee and graduate degrees from the University of Kentucky. He has worked at the FDA for more than 30 years, more than 20 of which he spent in the agency’s Bureau of Veterinary Medicine.
Karen Pearl, the interim president of Planned Parenthood, said that Alderson’s appointment “speaks volumes about the priority the Bush administration places on women’s health and safety.”
It does, all right, and not just in the language that Doctor Doolittle understands.
Update: Shortly after we posted this item, which was based on a press release from Planned Parenthood, a reader alerted us to a press release that was posted today on the FDA’s Web site. In that release, the FDA said that Theresa A. Toigo has been appointed as the acting director of the Office of Women’s Health. The FDA press release also says, rather cryptically, “This is a revision of this statement posted earlier on September 16.” That earlier statement is no longer available on the FDA’s site, but, as another reader pointed out, a cached version is still available through Google. Under the heading, “Dr. Norris Alderson — Acting Director of FDA’s Office of Women’s Health,” Alderson’s bio says, “The majority of his FDA career has been in the Center for Veterinary Medicine, holding a number of management positions, culminating in the position of Director, Office of Research.” Did the FDA scramble to change acting directors once it realized that Alderson’s appointment might invite unhappy comparisons to Michael Brown’s tenure at FEMA? Inquiring minds want to know, and are still waiting for calls back to find out.
Friday, Sep 16, 2005 7:19 PM UTC
Three years is a very long time.
By T.g.
George W. Bush, talking today about the work he can still accomplish with Russian President Vladimir Putin: “We do have three more years, which I’ve found out is a long period of time.”
Friday, Sep 16, 2005 5:43 PM UTC
The president says he'll take responsibility for the government's failings in Katrina, but he blames all the consequences on a higher power.
By T.g.
George. W. Bush has said that he’ll “take responsibility” for whatever the federal government might have done wrong in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but he made it pretty clear today that he isn’t taking responsibility for the harm that resulted.
That part, it seems, is all God’s fault.
In a speech this morning at the National Cathedral in Washington, Bush said nothing about the government’s role in contributing to the suffering in New Orleans. Instead, he described the hurricane and the suffering in its wake as mystifying acts of a God whose “purposes are sometimes impossible to know here on Earth.”
“On this Day of Prayer and Remembrance, our nation remains in the shadow of a storm that departed two weeks ago,” Bush said. “We’re humbled by the vast and indifferent might of nature, and feel small beside its power.”
But what’s on Americans’ minds isn’t so much the humbling power of the storm as the bumbling response to it. Yes, many lost their lives in the “fury of the storm,” as Bush said today. But as the president and his people keep insisting, New Orleans “dodged a bullet” from Katrina itself. It’s what came next that caused the greater disaster: the breach of man-made levees that everyone knew weren’t up to the task and the slow response of a government that should have been.
Bush said that Americans will look “through prayer for ways to understand the arbitrary harm left by this storm.” It looks like they’ll have no other choice: With Republicans having killed a plan for an independent Katrina commission, there’s little hope that we’ll ever understand how the government’s failings led to the additional, not-so-arbitrary harm.
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