After attacking DailyKos for a few extreme comments, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly defended his cherry-picked attack, saying, “I have my own website. Open forum is bull. You can regulate what’s on your website.” Today, Kos responded with a sampling of the hateful comments on O’Reilly’s website:

Posted By: Monty (2615 posts) 11 Jul 2007 - 5:27 PM PT
Reply: RE: The O’Reilly Factor (Wed 07/11) - The culture war goes to the ballpark, Should we be worried about terrorism?, Drugs, cheating and sports, more…

I have been to many ballgames and I never saw heterosexuals slobbering over each other all over the place. There might be a few who do it, but it was obvious that the homosexuals were doing what they always do when they have a stage and that is flaunt their fagginess to an “in your face extreme”.

…

Posted By: MadDog (961 posts) 21 Jul 2007 - 7:34 PM PT
Reply: RE: Future San Francisco Disasters

Get out or perish with the sodomites…

Either O’Reilly’s not regulating his website as he says or he simply doesn’t consider hoping for the destruction of an American city to be an example of hateful speech.

In a “chance meeting” on the Senate floor with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) in June 2004, Vice President Cheney told Leahy to “f*ck yourself.” According to Leahy’s spokesman, the “exchange began when Leahy crossed the aisle at the photo session and joked to Cheney about being on the Republican side.” Cheney then “‘lashed into’ Leahy for remarks he…made criticizing Iraq contracts won without competitive bidding by Halliburton.”

In the new biography of the Vice President by Stephen Hayes, Cheney claims that the reason he shouted the expletive was because Leahy had been too “close” to him:

Leahy came over and put his arm around me. And he didn’t kiss me but it was close to it. So I flashed and I told him — I dropped the F-bomb on him. … It was heartfelt.

Leahy was not “close” to kissing Cheney; all he did was try to shake his hand. One congressional source with knowledge of the event explained what happened to ThinkProgress:

There were several witnesses from both parties. Leahy walked over in a friendly way and said the Vice President should feel free to come over on the other side of the aisle too, that Democrats won’t bite, and he held out his hand. The Vice President started to stick out his hand in response and then drew it back, and that’s when he unloaded his expletive.

It’s not surprising that Cheney overreacted when Leahy tried to exchange pleasantries. According to Hayes, Cheney “won’t meet with Democrats.” At the time, Cheney said that his comment to Leahy was “long overdue.”

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Moby recently told Politico.com about how his mom once gave a baby up for adoption and he therefore has a half-brother somewhere. “I jokingly said, ‘Maybe it’s Karl Rove,’” Moby said. After the story appeared online, Moby said he received a letter from the White House:

“The envelope looked as if it was from 1952,” he said. The letter was from Rove and said, “Dear Moby (or is that Mr. Moby), It’s not me. I have no musical ability and am 19 years older (assuming you’re 37). So you can breathe easier. On the other hand, James Carville is musically inclined and bald, too. Do you like crawfish etouffee?” Moby, a liberal vegan, wrote us, “Needless to say I was a bit stunned. A letter from President Bush’s brain? The man without whom [Bush] would be doing the alligator on the floor of a Hooters in Biloxi? I was also a bit stunned because the letter was funny.”

Rick Stengel, Time’s managing editor, reportedly has Rupert Murdoch on his “shortlist” to be the magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2007.

This morning, Steve Thomma of McClatchy wrote that “When pressing a tough sale, Bush is a lousy salesman.” “He’s never really sold the country or Congress something it didn’t already want. And when he’s tried to sell something the people or the politicians didn’t want, he’s fallen flat,” wrote Thomma.

Thomma’s thesis gained a high profile supporter earlier today: Newt Gingrich. Speaking at an American Spectator breakfast, the former Speaker of the House offered some words of advice for how President Bush can gain support for the Iraq war — “Simply be quiet, say nothing:”

Newt Gingrich is offering President Bush some interesting advice about winning support for the Iraq war: The president, he says, should stop talking about it. “Simply be quiet, say nothing” is what the former Republican leader is urging. Mr. Bush instead should leave the war talk to General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who have much more credibility with both Democrats and Republicans. […]

“Petraeus and Crocker will get a better deal on Iraq than Bush, and it will be much harder for the Democrats to oppose Petraeus and Crocker,” Mr. Gingrich said.

This isn’t the first time Gingrich has suggested that silence is the best route for conservatives to push their agenda. In May, Gingrich advised his fellow right wingers to avoid talking about Iraq, Katrina, Walter Reed, the U.S. attorneys, and Bush:

Well, President Bush is not the future. He’s not a solution…The Republicans have to say, this is not what we want to debate. It’s not in Baghdad, it’s not in Katrina, it’s not at Walter Reed, it’s not with the U.S. attorneys.

While it may be refreshing to see Bush “simply be quiet,” not talking about Iraq is hardly a solution. The U.S. needs to set a course towards a responsible redeployment out of the middle of a bloody civil war.

Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Jim Webb (D-VA), Robert Byrd (D-WV), and Evan Bayh (D-IN) today wrote a letter to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) calling for a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the status of the Bush administration’s withdrawal planning. See the full letter below: (more…)

A coalition of injured Iraq war veterans filed a class action law suit charging outgoing Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson “of breaking the law by denying them disability pay and mental health treatment.” The lawsuit asks federal court to “order the VA to make immediate improvements that would speed disability payments, ensure fairness in awards and provide more complete access to mental health care.”

Yesterday, Media Matters observed that on this week’s Meet the Press, New York Times columnist David Brooks admitted to using a made-up statistic in order to argue against withdrawal from Iraq.

Specifically, Brooks rehashed the right-wing talking point that withdrawal in Iraq would certainly lead to “genocide,” alleging that 10,000 Iraqis a month would die after redeployment. But Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward quickly forced Brooks’ to admit his statistics were baseless:

BOB WOODWARD: I mean, you cite numbers which you have pulled out of the air of 10,000 dying. I mean, that’s–that–where does that come from? […]

DAVID BROOKS: So I just picked that 10,000 out of the air.

Watch it:

As Woodward noted, what happens after the U.S. withdraws is deeply speculative. Time Magazine notes today, “just how many Iraqis would die if the U.S. withdrew is anyone’s guess” and advocates a phased withdrawal as the best option. “Some experts believe Iraqis would, after a brief explosion of violence, regain control of their country.”

In fact, numerous military and diplomatic analysts argue that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq could “prevent Iraq’s multiple sectarian conflicts from spreading beyond its borders and gives Iraq and its neighbors the right incentive to help resolve Iraq’s internal conflicts.”

Brooks has long been a ready advocate of Bush’s foreign policy failures. In January, he defended Bush’s rosy whitewashing of Iraq war history as “accurate.” Last week, he walked away from a meeting with the President entranced by Bush’s “unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea.”

While Brooks recently complained that he was “so confused” about what to do in Iraq, we can be sure that he will conjure up fallacies to defend the President.

Transcript: (more…)

In Salon yesterday, Steven Yount, president of the union representing 2,000 Dow Jones employees, argued against selling the parent company of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch:

I believe our members’ interests are best served by adherence to the principle of editorial independence within a company whose only mission is reporting the news. As journalists and union members we see no upside in reducing Dow Jones to a tiny appendage of a global conglomerate with financial, political and regulatory interests alien to what we do.

On Fox News Sunday yesterday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol attacked the upcoming YearlyKos convention and its namesake, DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, as out of the mainstream and “not respectable.”

ThinkProgress, DailyKos, and other progressive blogs responded to Kristol’s baseless charges, pointing out that what Kristol describes “as left is now center” and that the viewpoints of the progressive blogosphere reflect mainstream America.

On the Weekly Standard’s blog today, Sonny Bunch defended his boss by going on the attack, recalling a brusque comment Markos made in 2004, for which he has apologized:

The Daily Kos, Think Progress, and a host of other lefty blogs seem to be shocked that someone might question the respectability of Markos Moulitsas…Is that the kind of thing respectable people say?

ThinkProgress has created a compilation of the highly-esteemed rhetoric of Bill Kristol, presumably the type of language Bunch considers emulatable:

- “It is insane for this country to be obsessing … about a small prisoner abuse scandal,” referring to Abu Ghraib. [5/16/2004]

- “Cheney’s statement” that Ned Lamont’s primary victory helps al Qaeda “is indisputably correct.” [6/13/2006]

- “The voters in Florida, I guess, who elected him” are responsible for former Rep. Mark Foley’s illicit sexual behavior. “Maybe they should have known better.” [10/3/06]

- Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is “sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858″ in appeasing slave owners. [2/10/07]

- Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) saying the war is lost “is much more disgraceful than anything Trent Lott said” about the country being better off if it had maintained racist segregation policies. [4/22/07]

Bunch seems to consider such commentary to be “the kind of thing respectable people say.”

UPDATE: Atrios notes:

Over the next couple of weeks there will be a grand effort by the wingosphere/conservative pundits/Falafel boy/their mainstream media enablers/etc… to try to undermine Yearly Kos and to marginalize anyone who attends.

UPDATE II: In the Washington Post last week, David Corn laid out Kristol’s less-than -”respectable” record as a shill for the Iraq war.

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This weekend on the Tim Russert Show, conservative pundit Robert Novak said Scooter Libby simply got “mixed up” when he told false stories about how he learned of Plame’s identity. He said of Libby: “He’s not dumb, he’s a lawyer, very smart fellow,” but then added, “I hardly know him myself.” Watch it:

In the interview, Novak said Bush should have pardoned Libby, “but right now it is very difficult, I believe, for him to pardon him…since he has said that he—commended the jury, commended the prosecutor, and indicated that the trial–that the verdict was correct.”

Greg White is currently serving as the U.S. attorney in Cleveland. New documents reveal that in 2002, White campaigned heavily for the position, touting his loyalty to the Bush campaign in 2000. From an 8/21/02 e-mail White wrote to Brian K. Hicks, chief of staff to then-Gov. Bob Taft (R-OH):

Brian, I talked to the governor at the Lorain County Fair today. I am concerned that we have not heard anything regarding the U.S. attorney position. … This is very frustrating for me. I believe that my record speaks for itself and I doubt there too many county chairs for the Bush campaign that worked harder. Do you think that the governor would be willing to call the president on this issue? I doubt that anyone has the broad-based support that I do.

White acknowledged that the U.S. attorney selection process is “a little like making sausage” — you don’t want to see the dirty work get done. Joseph DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington, DC, said that the White-Hicks e-mails “are relatively mild compared to conversations I have been privy to.”

White is not the only U.S. attorney who touted his right-wing credentials to become a U.S. attorney. Tim Griffin, the former U.S. attorney in Arkansas who recently resigned, was a former protege of Karl Rove and research director at the Republican National Committee. Not surprisingly, his appointment was “important to Harriet [Miers], Karl [Rove], etc.”

Additionally, Rachel Paulose, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, was handpicked by the Justice Department because of her personal connections, rather than her professional qualifications. She “was a special assistant to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, worked as a senior counsel for deputy attorney general Paul McNulty and is best buds with Monica Goodling.”

“Halliburton Co., the world’s second-largest oil services company, said on Monday that second-quarter profit from continuing operations rose 19 percent, topping Wall Street views, helped by new international contracts.”

According to a new biography by Stephen Hayes, in 1996, Cheney “called the vice presidency a ‘cruddy job,’ which his political mentor, President Gerald Ford, had hated. But by 2000 Cheney was persuaded to accept when George W. Bush offered the position.”

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The Washington Post writes, “Bill Kristol’s the-war-is-being-won piece in The Washington Post brought him plenty of ridicule, but at least one person liked it. President Bush read the July 15 Outlook article that morning and recommended it to his staff.” The title of Kristol’s piece was: “Why Bush Will Be A Winner.”

As the “White House struggles to show progress in the 52-month-old war, other important global issues increasingly are getting pushed to the side.” McClatchy reports:

Two months ago, President Bush enthusiastically accepted an invitation to visit Singapore in September. But he abruptly changed plans, and his summit with Southeast Asian leaders is off. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is skipping an Asian meeting, too, and tossed out plans to visit Africa this week. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ mission to Latin America? Postponed.

The reason is Iraq. […]

Few doubt Iraq’s centrality in U.S. foreign policy. Failure there could damage America’s prestige for years, if not decades, and suck Iraq’s neighbors into the vortex of violence.

But the high-level U.S. attention and energy drawn away from all but a handful of other world problems is yet another cost of the Iraq war.

Steve Thomma of McClatchy writes, “When pressing a tough sale, Bush is a lousy salesman.” “He’s never really sold the country or Congress something it didn’t already want. And when he’s tried to sell something the people or the politicians didn’t want, he’s fallen flat.” Thomma cites Bush’s sales pitches on reforming immigration, privatizing Social Security, and staying in Iraq.

The Washington Post reports on an executive order issued by President Bush last week entitled, “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.” In the extreme, it could be interpreted as targeting the financial assets of any American who undermines the administration’s Iraq policy.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, was denied access to the White House plan for operating the government after a terrorist attack. “I just can’t believe they’re going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they plan to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack,” he said.

A few months ago, Condoleezza Rice decided to write an opinion piece about Lebanon, but no one would publish it. Price Floyd, the State Department’s director of media affairs, said, “I kept hearing the same thing: ‘There’s no news in this.’” The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush’s wise leadership. “It read like a campaign document.”

“After a rare bipartisan agreement in the Senate to expand insurance coverage for low-income children, House Democrats have drafted an even broader plan that also calls for major changes in Medicare and promises to intensify the battle with the White House over health care.” (more…)

Number of Iranians the United States has accepted into the country in the past nine months. In contrast, the United States has admitted just 825 Iraqi refugees since 2003, “many of them backlogged applicants from the time Saddam Hussein was in power.”

In Stephen Hayes’s upcoming biography on Dick Cheney, he writes that the current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell appears to side with “those who believe that the administration manipulated intelligence on Iraq for political purposes before the 2003 invasion.”

McConnell reportedly said he had “serious reservations” when asked by President Bush to become the DNI because of the Pentagon’s manipulation of intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war. Today, Meet the Press host Tim Russert previewed the relevant portion of the book:

McConnell was honored to be asked [to be DNI], but he had serious reservations. He had been unimpressed with many aspects of the Bush administration and its conduct of the war on terror, particularly what he felt was a politicized use of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war. […]

“My sense of it is their political faith and convictions influenced how they took information and interpreted [it], how they picked up and interpreted outside events. … I’ve read much more about the current set of players and they did set up a whole new interpretation because they didn’t like the answers. They’ve gotten results that in my view now have been disastrous,” [McConnell said].

Watch it:

McConnell decried the “secondary unit” established within the Pentagon to “reinterpret information” prior to the war. An internal Pentagon investigation released in February revealed that former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith utilized the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group within the Pentagon to create and promote false links between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Specifically, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz “asked Feith’s analysts to ignore the intelligence community’s belief that the militant Islamist al-Qaida and Saddam’s secular dictatorship were unlikely allies.” Subsequently, Feith “disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaida relationship…to senior decision-makers.”

McConnell stated, “The way you do intelligence is all sources considered. You have to factor one issue against the other and balance it.” Four years later, this administration is still reinterpreting intelligence.

On the Chris Matthews Show this morning, NBC White House correspondent David Gregory said that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) will need to have “her ‘Sister Souljah’ moment” and distance herself from the “hatred over Iraq” on “the left.”

“The left” needs to “think about how they’re going to engage the war on terror in a very serious and tough way,” said Gregory. Watch it:

Gregory is echoing the conventional, but deeply flawed, thinking that it is only the “angry left” who want to change course and redeploy from Iraq. In fact, 68 percent of Americans support withdrawal from Iraq within a year.

Gregory suggests that progressives have not been thinking seriously about how to transition responsibly out of Iraq. In fact, the Center for American Progress introduced such a plan in 2005, and has recently adapted the plan to respond to the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Once again, Gregory is demonstrating his fundamental misunderstanding of the current political dynamics in America by describing left-leaning positions as out of touch when they are actually held by the majority of mainstream Americans.

Transcript: (more…)