disconnect

15 examples of Sean Hannity talking out of his ass, contradicted by the facts and in some cases, by himself.

My favorite:
HANNITY: "I never questioned anyone's patriotism." (9/18/03)

Apparently 27 ex-diplomats and military commanders have issued a statement saying that Bush needs to go because of the damage done to national security and foreign relations. I found this story on Google News, so I have a bunch of links to the story, all of which are different, give different quotes and have different takes on it. Some might be subscription-only, so pick and choose what you like:

Diplomats & Military Commanders for Change (this is the official site I believe, with a full list of signatories and everything)

Retired Envoys, Commanders Assail Bush Team (washingtonpost.com)
Former diplomats organise against Bush (Financial Times)
Former U.S. envoys want Bush voted out (Toronto Star)

Bush's spokesman reacts well to criticism, as always:

"It is not surprising that John Kerry has the support of a group of people who share his belief that the threat of terror is exaggerated," Bush spokesperson Steve Schmidt said. "This is a group that shares John Kerry's pre-Sept. 11 world view and supports John Kerry's failed ideas for treating terrorism as a matter mainly for law-enforcement and intelligence."

Interestingly, the statement on their website never mentions Kerry, but Schmidtty brings up his name three times in two sentences. Admittedly Kerry is the only other option, but I think since a sickly golden retriever could run the war on terror better than Bush, this is not an endorsement of Kerry specifically.

Some of the signatories: Ret. Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, commander of Middle East forces during Bush 41, Ret. Adm. William J. Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan, and Ret. Adm. Stansfield Turner, former head of the CIA. So it's not like these guys don't know what they're talking about, and it's not like they're lifelong Democratic Party shills. In fact, the statement on their website even says that many of them voted for W in 2000. They deserve to be taken seriously, which I hope people will do, and which the Bush administration clearly will not do.

[Edit: I wanted to point something out about Steve Schmidt's statement. He refers to "John Kerry's pre-Sept. 11 world view". This is something I think a lot of Republicans (or maybe other people too, I shouldn't generalize) take as a given, that the world changed completely on September 11. In reality, terrorists wanted to kill us before 9/11, and they want to kill us after 9/11. It was just that it wasn't until that day that the Bush administration was paying attention to the threat seriously. For them, a "pre-Sept. 11 world view" makes sense - it's a world in which terrorism is largely ignored. For a lot of other people, the pre-Sept. 11 world view includes terrorism as a major threat just as the post-Sept. 11 world view does.]

Sept. 11 Commission Report Says Iraq Rebuffed Al Qaeda

The September 11 commission finds that there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were linked, or that Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks.

This is such an obvious non-story that it shouldn't be front-page news, and I shouldn't even be wasting my time talking about it and telling you all the obvious, expect for the fact that the Bush administration has consistently tried to hype this up to build support for the war in Iraq, and incredibly, it's been working. So hopefully this gets splashed on as many front pages in the country as possible so people wake up to the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and nothing to do with the war on terror until Bush turned it into an Al Qaeda recruiting fest.

Also, the article contains this line:

On Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that the Iraqi dictator ``had long established ties with al-Qaida.''

To still be touting this yesterday, in the face of overwhelming evidence that this is not true, is unbelievable. This is not something that can be debated, like intelligence estimates of WMD in Iraq pre-war. I don't see how there can be any doubt left that Cheney is either a flat-out liar, or delusional enough to believe that this is the case. In either case, the man is obviously unfit to hold public office of any sort, much less be next in line to be the President if something happens to Bush.

I haven't been in much of a blog-updating mood lately... sorry to the three regular readers refreshing this page in vain. I've been in a fairly pessimistic mood about most of the stuff I would write about on here, plus some other things have been going on so I haven't really said much. Basically it's one of those writing-in-a-blog-don't-mean-diddly moods, one of which lasted the better part of three years recently.

I was going to write about Krugman's latest op-ed, but decided to limit my commentary on that, because he's said everything I would need to say about Ashcroft being a moron. I just wanted to add that I've been disturbed for a while at the lack of any kind of prosecution or capture of any terrorist cells in the U.S. since 9/11, expanding on what Krugman said about it. Unless they're keeping their captures secret for whatever reason, they've barely caught anyone, and those who they have apprehended aren't really being successfully prosecuted at all.

What I decided to break my silence about was David Brooks's op-ed. I don't like Brooks's columns very much, but I couldn't find any problems with this one. He's basically talking about a schism in the way educated voters vote in terms of knowledge workers ("teachers, lawyers, architects, academics, journalists, therapists, decorators and so on") vs. managers... you have to kind of flesh out those groups yourselves but I think he has a point. The idea is that management and business-oriented thinkers believe that leaders ought to stay out of the nitty-gritty and let their underlings work on the specifics, while they craft a broad plan themselves based on their unshakable faith of what the right thing to do is. Meanwhile academics pore over the specifics of a situation, spending lots of time becoming engrossed in the subject themselves before making a decision... Kerry reportedly spends hours polishing his speeches endlessly, and Clinton was said to stay up all hours of the night reading and watching C-SPAN. Bush, of course, reportedly goes to bed at 10 PM.

You'll have to put me in the camp that believes that it might be a good thing to have the leader of the free world pick up a newspaper himself and read it every now and then. I happen to think that being blissfully ignorant of the fine details of situations on the ground and the opinions of ordinary people is the kind of thing that leads to miscalculations about Iraqis welcoming American troops with rose petals, or delusions of being swept to a second term in office on a platform of denying gays the right to marriage. But the fact that a lot of people think differently than me is made abundantly clear when it's seen that the candidate that "talks like us" is preferred in a debate against the one whose viewpoints don't contradict themselves, much less the reality we live in.