Sacrifices

Sacrifices sometimes have to be made. I don't have a story to link to
about this, I'm just wondering if anyone else is thinking the same
thing: Will I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby be sacrificed to allow Karl
"Nosferatu" Rove to retain his place in the Bush administration?
Irving Lewis Libby Junior, 55, most often punditized as "Dick Cheney's
Dick Cheney", seems poised to take a fall to quiet the lengthy Valerie
Plame outing scandal and leave Rove unscathed. As I wrote, I don't
have a link as this is coming out of my own understanding of how these
things work in American politics. There are likely many others making
this rather obvious prognostication. The questions are, will he be
enough, and is he even willing to fall on this grenade for Big Dub's
sake?

And yes, it bothers me a great deal that the spacing has become fragged every time I have tried to post this.

Commander-in-Chief Fan Fiction

"Commander-in-Chief" is a fictional fantasy in which a Republican
President choses a politically independent female Vice Presidential
running mate who ascends to the Presidency upon his death.

Rumors were floated that "Commander-in-Chief" was meant as a form of
public brainwashing to accustom the public to the idea of a female
President, allegedly in order to quote "pave the way" unquote for a
Hillary Clinton candidacy in 2008.

Then more rumors are floated that real life Vice President "Dick"
Cheney may go Agnew side up paving the way for the current
Republican President to appoint his Secretary of State, a Republican
woman who claims she has no interest in running for the country's
highest office.

One factor that might favor her selection would be the rather
cynical 'assassination insurance' policy. The theory is, no one will
try to kill a Nixon if the alternative is an Agnew Presidency. No
one will shoot at Bush Sr. and run the risk of a President Danny
Quayle. Sane people shudder at the thought of a Cheney White House,
and frankly the 2000 election showed that almost half the voters
opposed the idea of an AlGore presidency, rendering Billy Jeff
Clinton safe from attack.
The theory would then be that America is still sexist and racist
enough that no one would harm Geo Dubya Shrub, Junior for fear of a
black, female president.

IF Condaleeza Rice were vice president that is no guarantee that she
would seek - or win - the Republican presidential candidacy in 2008.
Though if she were to prove a popular VP she might be asked to
reconsider. Vice Presidents do seem to have an edge in presidential
races. Johnson, Bush, Sr. Well, not Jerry Ford so much...

And evil as this sounds, an even more cynical variant of
the 'assassination insurance' theory is the likelihood that a first
American black female president might not survive a full term,
setting her presumably white male Vice President up to ascend to the
Oval Office.

IF the Republican Party ran VP Condaleeza Rice for President in
2008, it is possible, maybe even likely the Democrats would consider
that their best opportunity to run Mrs. Clinton.

"Commander-in-Chief" is about an independent candidate with no party
affiliations who becomes president and happens to be female.

And IF the 2008 election came down to a race between Rice and
Clinton, one of two things would occur.

Either a woman would become President of The United States.

Or, if America still hangs on to its mid-20th century patriarchal
male chauvinist sexist ideals, both candidates could be rejected and
an independent third party candidate could be elected.

EITHER WAY, with either a female President or an Independent
President, "Commander-in-Chief" would be credited with "paving the
way".

Wow. Far out.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051020/en_nm/commander_dc;_ylt=ArpnFnoPl
TJUOi8SGaYBR9kXCGYD;_ylu=X3oDMTA3YXYwNDRrBHNlYwM3NjI-

LA - American has elected a full season of "Commander-in-Chief,"
ordering nine more episodes.
"Commander" is the most-watched new series of the fall season,
averaging 16.5 million total viewers to lead its 9 p.m. Tuesday
slot. While second in the hour (behind House, MD) in the desirable 18-49
demographic, "Commander" is still up 10 percent with that group from
last year's 9-10 p.m. crapathon, "According to Jim and Rodney."
"Chief" has managed to weather a regime change behind the scenes
this month, with Steven Bochco replacing series' showrunner Rod
Lurie, who remains executive producer.

Huh. Groovy.

= Poppaspank =

Of course no one believes television really has that sort of
influence on the public. The odds are very good that the two major
American p*l*t*c*l parties will run middle aged white men for
President in 2008 and almost certain that one of them will win.
This has nothing to do with an idealistic "how it should be" and
everything to do with a cynical but realistic "how it is."
---
The optimist sees the glass as half full, the pessimist sees the
glass as half empty.

The realist carefully weighs all the factors including the
nutritional and/or hazardous qualities of the contents of the glass,
the total measurement of the fluid - assuming the contents are even
liquid, which has never been specified - and eventually concludes
that the problem is, the glass is too big.

Wil Wheaton Blasts the Governator

Here is what Wil Wheaton has to say about the Governor of my home state. Rat on, Wil. Here is his blog: http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/

yet another insult from the governator
This is crossposted to blogging.la.

In addition to countless lies, denying basic civil rights to gays and lesbians, and calling an unnecessary special election with powergrabs that masquerade as "reform," I present yet another reason Arnold Schwarzenegger makes me want to puke. Last week, while firefighters were battling the Topanga fire, the Governor flew in for a George Bush-esque photo-op, and several firemen say they were ordered to stand with him for the cameras. It's an outrageous insult to firefighters to force them to pose for a photo-op with this idiot, who is doing everything he can to silence their union with prop 75.

A few firefighters were bold enough to complain they were ordered to stand behind the governor against their will on the day of the news conference, KCAL 9’s Linda Breakstone reported. Seven more came forward Wednesday. “We did not want to do it,” Los Angeles County firefighter Greg Alldredge said. “Then it came down as an order directly from above.” Firefighters were "ordered and forced" to participate, Alldredge said. Rank-and-file firefighters were very displeased with "having to shake hands with somebody who really doesn't support us.” Schwarzenegger's press secretary says "No one from the governor's office ordered anyone to do anything.

Could it have come from his campaign office, and not his Sacramento office? I guess it could depend on what your definition of "office" is.

Updated: via comments, I see the Governor's incredibly compassionate, thoughtful, appreciative response to the firefighters' criticism:

Schwarzenegger later brushed off criticism of the stunt. He says everybody is ordered to do things at one point or another. He also pointed out that "as a matter of fact, in one of my movies, I played a firefighter."

It's almost like the word "asshole" was invented specifically for him. He played a firefighter once in a movie, and we're supposed to believe that fact is somehow relevant to anything. Well, actually, it is. It shows how arrogant, out of touch, and clueless this coddled celebrity who's playing governor actually is.

Rejected by the liberal media?

Joel H. Hinrichs III blew himself up, in an apparent terrorist attack attempt at Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, which was filled with over 80,000 people. After being turned away for refusing to have his backpack searched, Hinrichs sat on a bench outside the stadium and exploded. (I don't know if he meant to detonate or it was an accident, and I don't think the naybobs saying they are sure of either have any reason to be so sure.)  If this is news to you, or you kind of remember it sort of shooting across your attention for a moment, ask yourself why wouldn't this be considered an important story. Because he didn't get in? Well, yeah, if he had gotten inside the stadium it would be much greater news, that's for sure. But why isn't this getting the attention it should, and why aren't the frightening details surfacing in the mainstream media? Or is it that I don't pay enough attention to the MSM to know for sure that they are ignoring the story? No, everyone in the narrowcasts agree on one thing, MSM is ignoring this story.

Mark Davis for RealClearPolitics

Bombing The Smurfs

What's the deal with all the media coverage over the Unicef ad featuring an appearance of The Smurfs licensed by the Peyo estate.

People are shocked that using a childrens television icon - especially one with Gen-Y nostalgia value, will be upsetting to children and their parents.

Some thing that since some people didn't like the Smurfs and are glad to see war waged against them, it will minimize and trivialize the message.

Virtually no one seems to be addressing the actual point of the ad: to raise funds to aid in rehabilitating former child soldiers in foreign countries.

Some people gripe that ad ad showing baby Smurf crying in a bombed out village sends an anti-war message.

Pish tosh, tish, and piffle.

People, war supporters, American patriots, are not naive innocents or hypocrites. They are not self-deluded or blinded by rousing John Wayne propaganda. They're not idiots.
American war supporters know full well what a war is. Bombs do not drop from the sky and land only on unoccupied factories in Batman's abandoned warehouse district. When we wage a war on the enemies of our nation in any specific geographical region we know full well that in addition to those who have chosen to defy us, we will also make victims of innocents. Those with no political agenda, men and women, children, mothers and grandparents, the clergy or clerics or voodoo priests of whatever belief system is popular in the land we are devastating.

That is what war is. Every single person who sports a flag decal or casts a ballot in support of a war knows exactly what a war is and has absolutely no moral compunction over taking a claw hammer and smashing in the soft unformed skulls of the newborn children of our enemies like so many baby harp seals cluttering up the Canadian tundra. Hammering a child with a mallet or taking a chain saw to their limbs, and casting a vote or raising your voice in support of war: there is no moral difference, the blood on your hands is the same whether it is literal or figurative.
When a soldier pulls a trigger he accepts the moral responsibility for the demise of his or her target. When a vote is cast or a symbolic gesture is made or a verbal argument is offered in support of a war, that person accepts the responsibility and shoulders the burden of every death resulting from that war just as much as the man who declares it. That is why we do not enter into war lightly, that is why we make a war so hard to declare that only a president with the majority support of the congress and senate and, by extension, the voters, can launch us into a war.

A little cartoon about dancing blue gnomes and falling bombs and red-orange bomb-bursts and puffs of smoke and the smouldering remains of a burned out mushroom hut village don't inform us of anything we don't already know.

People who support war know about the blood and death, devastation and sweet roast pork smell of burning babies. They understand it and they accept it and they wave flags from their antennae in celebration of it and vilify pop singers who criticize it.

And they wonder why they scare me.

Some guy rips into Big Dub over Miers

   I've never heard of this guy, I don't can't keep up with every journalism major to buy a computer and start posting, although I think this guy is an actual professional, talk show host or something. Either way, this is a different take than you might hear from the GOP office holders, but this kind of rebellion by those that normally tow the party line may be the tip of the frozen elephant as this administration disintegrates over the next three years.
The following was penned today by talk-show host Michael Graham.

    Sorry, George, but you lost me at Harriet. When a reporter asked you Oct. 4 if Harriet Miers was the most qualified possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court and you answered, "Yes I I picked the best person I could find" ‹ and you did it with a straight face ‹ that was it.

I'm done. Check, please! I'm outta here.

I am no longer a George W. Bush supporter. As a conservative, I have been bitch-slapped by this man for the last time. Those suffering from "Battered Conservative's Syndrome" will no doubt make excuses and find some reason to stay with this serial abuser of our principles, but not me. I have had enough.

I've had enough of defending a "conservative" president who has spent money faster and grown government bigger than any president since LBJ. I've had enough of a "conservative" who refuses to do anything to secure our borders, and whose only plan to stop illegal immigration is to hand out temporary worker permits to create even MORE future illegals.

And George, when you look me in the eye and throw me a good old-fashioned Bill Clinton "I did not have sex with that woman" line like Harriet Miers is the most qualified person in America for the Supreme Court þ buddy, you're on your own.

It's bad enough that she's hardly conservative and has no record of achievement. Mr. President, making an affirmative-action appointment of an unqualified crony to one of the highest offices of the land is wrong, no matter what your politics. It's not just a mistake. It is shameful. You should be ashamed of yourself.

The fact that you aren't is the reason you just lost me.

Again and again, watching you throw tax dollars around like a drunken teenager at a New Orleans strip joint, I've told myself, "Stick with George, because he gets the big ones right." And the biggest of the "big ones" has always been rescuing America from an out-of-control, activist Supreme Court. You promised me a Scalia. Instead, you're sticking me with a "sistah," a woman whose qualifications for the Supreme Court begin and end in her brassiere.

She's no Scalia. She's no Thomas. She's not even a Ginsburg or a Souter. She's a joke ‹ FEMA's Michael Brown in a skirt. In fact, that's an insult to Brown, who had at least some experience as a judge, if only at horse shows.

Your nomination of Harriet Miers is an insult to the court, to conservatives and to any American who cares about competence. She's an utterly unqualified crony who has never sat on the bench, never written on constitutional issues, never been involved in a single significant issue or overseen an important case. According to you, Mr. President, she's been your attorney off and on for 10 years, and you've never once discussed the issue of abortion and the Constitution!

Good grief, my mailman and I have had that conversation.

George, you have done more than merely betray your conservative supporters. You have embarrassed us. You have made incompetence and cronyism part of the conservative character. You kept CIA director George Tenet after the worst terrorist attack in American history occurred on his watch. You kept Michael "Best In Show" Brown in a job at FEMA he was never qualified to do. And now you're giving the Dallas Library Lady a seat on the highest court in the land and telling us, "Trust me, I know she's good"?

Sorry, no dice.

Trust you? You just went on TV and told me that Harriet Miers is the most qualified person in America to sit on the Supreme Court! C'mon George, even Harriet's MOM doesn't believe that.

And now we find out that, in addition to giving campaign checks to Al Gore, Miers chaired an American Bar Association panel that recommended legalization of gay adoption and American participation in the International Criminal Court ‹ both liberal positions that you oppose. So mediocre is the Miers pick that your supporters have already fallen back to the "Don't worry, we'll probably get another pick before Bush is gone" defense.

Mr. President, if you honestly believe that Harriet Miers is the most qualified candidate, then you wouldn't be qualified to be president.

But you don't believe it, and you know it. The question is "why?" You've got 55 Republicans in the Senate, you had a dozen well-qualified conservative candidates you could have chosen from, several of them women. Why pick an incompetent crony when you held all the cards?

I fear that, when all the layers are pulled away, we will find that your answer will be "because I wanted to." You knew it would leave conservatives disappointed and despondent; you know she's a second-rate nominee at best; but in your heart you are what I've always feared you were: a Bushie, a spoiled, rich-kid president's son who has spent your life doing what you wanted whenever you wanted and making sure everyone else knows it. The more people complained about cronyism, the more determined you were to shove one down our throats.

Well, Mr. President, you've certainly made that perfectly clear. You've told my fellow conservatives and me that you don't need us. That's fine, George, because we don't need you.

I'm done. I'm off the team. I have gone from a George Bush believer who reluctantly criticized you when necessary to an avowed critic who will support your positions when I can, but not your presidency.

Harriet Miers, "The best possible nominee?" That's like saying "George W. Bush, the best possible Republican president."

What a joke.

Thud thud thud

It seems Big Dub is in a bit of a quandry over his nomination of close friend, never-been-a-judge-but-I-know-her-character-and-we-all-know-how- good-my-judgement-is Harriet Miers. If you get where you are propped up by your more 'thought intensive' pals, shouldn't you give a wee bit of thought to what they might want you to do? I don't know what I expected, but this isn't what they expected either. Sheesh, he's even being berated by bony neo-con hag Coulter, whom at least has a mind of her own, which I almost respect, if it weren't so twisted. No, I actually do respect the Coulter that wrote that last piece, just not the one she will inevitably contort back into when the whim or the wind of controversy strikes her. The fact that this decision is being denounced by both sides only adds credence to the theory that Big Dub operates purely on a gut level. You're a pal o' mine and I got a job opening, here ya go. To quote Yakov Smirnov, "What a country! In Soviet Union, village idiot has no power!" Of course, there is the theory that Miers nomination is a MacGuffin, to tire out anyone ready for a fight, while Big Dub's overseers prepare their actual nominee.

Has Anybody Seen This Gal?

Well I was hoping someone else watched this - after all, with "House, MD" on hiatus, what else is there? - but I kinda liked "Commander-In-Chief".
Liked it? Heck, I may have to start setting the VCR when "House" returns for one of those watch one/tape one showdowns.
I only caught a few minutes of the series debut, but I was glued to the set for the following episode.

Now I've never watched "West Wing" or "24" or "Prison Break" so I don't know how this stacks up against those other Presidential shows. And it's been a long time since I watched "Mr. President" (early Fox sit-com) or that show where Delta Burke was the first lady.

So without any precedents to provide easy comparisons, I have to judge "Commander-In-Chief" on its own merits.

I found it to be of exceptional quality. If it hadn't been a TV Series, I think it was riviting enough that it would have made an excellent film. Especially with a cast including Geena Davis, Donald Sutherland, Mary Page Keller (as the out-bound former first lady), Nastasha Henstridge, Peter Coyote and a few others whose faces I recognized but couldn't connect with names. But as good a film as there was to be made here, I expect they have too much area to cover with this premise than a single film or even a TV mini-series could cover. (Though it might have made an interesting HBO or Showtime series.)

It would be disingenious to ignore the novelty of the series core premise: Geena Davis becomes the first female US President.

Of course it's the shows _other_ high concept that really skews it into the realm of fantasy: Her character is a political independent stunt-appointed as a vice presidential candidate to balance a Republican ticket. When her President dies, she steps into the job. With the knowledge that a third party candidate has no chance of re-election, she is totally free to spend two years in the Oval Office with only one priority; do what's best for the nation. (One wonders how they plan to deal with that limitation just in case the series runs more than two or three years.)
One of her first major acts is to appoint a vice-president. Although in office on a Republican ticket, she choses a Democrat and war hero for her second in command, based on what she describes as the "going with the best man for the job plan".

Actually, if a comparison need be made, the political outsider serving her ideals and striving to do what's best without political considerations of obligations might remind one of the Robert Redford classic "The Candidate". (Or maybe "Dave".)

The creators of this series have stated that they are all huge fans of "West Wing" and intend to try very hard not to clone that series. One of their first choices is to place more emphasis on the domestic side of her life, as a wife and mother of three.
One wonders how the feminists attracted to a series about a first woman president will react to her being President first but "Mom" a very close second. Move aside Lynette Scavo, if there's ever been a story about a 'working mother' "trying to have it all", this is it.
Emphasizing the family component is not unique among televison shows. I've noticed, reading the comments on "Medium" at the Jump The Shark web site, that a lot of people seem to hate her husband and their constant irritable squabbling. They clearly don't get that the domestic component of her life is an essential component of the shows formula and without it she'd just be a generic super-hero sans tights, or a cop show with a supernatural gimmick.
I enjoyed the 'lost diary' subplot: it was a clever way of quickly introducing the kids and their interrelationships, and clearly showed the stress placed on the 'first family". If you ever kept a diary, imagine the humiliation of trying to reconstruct, from memory, its contents so the US Secret Service can determine if it contains any information that might prove damaging to your mother - and then discovering the absent volume was in your little sister's possession the whole time. (That's cute and horrifying at the same time.)

One thought among many tugged at my mind. Will a show about an idealistic president who wants to do what's good be seen as criticism of the current real life US President and his fluctuating approval rating? Actually, my conclusion was no.
President Mackenzie Allen has her fiercely dedicated loyal supporters and her vicious detractors and conniving and outspoken political foes. There are those who question her qualifications and subject her to brutal and often ungrounded criticisms. Through it all she does what she believes to be right, allowing her morality to serve as her compass.
Whether there's a political metaphor to be seen there or not may depend on how you feel about the Oval Office's current occupant.

I'd still like to know what anyone else thought about this show, especially any fans of that show it will inevitably be compared to...

= Napoleon =