Jake Savin Posts

UndergroundClips has the video from Nightline’s rebuking of John O’Neill and the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a GOP-funded group dedicated to trashing John Kerry’s military record and personal integrity.

“This is a must see for people who had any doubts about John O’Neill and the Swift Boat Veteran’s for ‘Truth.’ On the show O’Neil comes off as a political hack and bozo. For more on John O’Neil, check out this on the Daily KOS.

“Nightline actually goes to Vietnam and the exact village where the incident occured that resulted in Kerry’s Silver Medal. The facts support Kerry. O’Neill avoids as best he can discussing the facts from Nightline’s investigation which pretty clearly put him and his group in disrepute.”

Bruce Bartlett, as quoted in the New York Times Magazine by Ron Suskind, expressed a lot of what has worried me so much about George W. Bush and the neocons:

“Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me [Bartlett] recently that ‘if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.’ The nature of that conflict [will be] a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

“‘Just in the past few months,’ Bartlett said, ‘I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.’ Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican … , went on to say: ‘This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. …'”

Fundamentalism, as I see it, is the following of a teaching — a rhetorical canon — without expression of doubt, either for fear of retribution (divine or worldly), or due to lack of exposure to other ways of thinking about the world. People who are exposed to fundamentalist “teachings” for long periods of time, are very likely to discount out-of-hand, any other belief system, point of view, or even undeniable facts which are in opposition to their beliefs.

So, here’s some food for thought: George W. Bush has probably lead a very sheltered life — one in which he has been given little exposure to ideas outside his norm, and in which he has been restricted to expressing himself within a very narrow lane of what was acceptable.

His attendance of Ivy-league universities and private schools would have only added to any already-present feeling of social isolation. Indeed his service in the National Guard may have served to isolate him further, and if common understanding is to be believed, he chose to isolate himself further still, through inattendance of his Guard duties.

Bush’s spiritual “re-birth” seems to have created a sense of resolve that he had found the path of salvation, and that his beliefs must be the Right ones. Other points of view became unworthy of Bush’s attention.

Personally, I would call this self-righteous, but it’s important to point out that Bush’s sense of self-righteousness would only have been reaffirmed by his closest advisors, for at least the last 8 years, and probably longer. In that kind of bubble, Bush couldn’t possibly understand how his decisions affect those who are outside of his small circle of support.

What was it that Paul McCartney said about the “Boy in the bubble?” Is Dubya the “baby with the baboon heart?”

Via Josh Marshall: Reed Hundt, former chair of the FCC responds to Michael Powell, the current chair, regarding the Sinclair Media Group’s shameful plans to air an hour-long anti-Kerry tirade, days before the election.

The so-called documentary, Stolen Honor, comes to us thanks to Sinclair, from the same discredited group who brought us “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” and “Unfit for Command”.

Here’s an excerpt from Reed Hundt’s letter to Josh Marshall:

“The issues are: if Sinclair shows this anti-Kerry propaganda (which can be downloaded from Internet, lest anyone question the characterization), then (1) should it also give a free hour to pro-Kerry content selected by any authentic progressive organization, and (2) will Sinclair face at least the prospect after the fact of a review of its fulfillment of its public interest duties. …

“Chairman Powell instead pretends that he has been asked to bar the showing of the propaganda — which no one has asked him to do. His remarks are so far off the point, and he is so intelligent, that one must conclude that he knows what he is doing and intends the result — tacit and plain encouragement of the use of the Sinclair airwaves to pursue a smear campaign. No broadcast group in the history of America has ever committed an hour to smearing a presidential candidate, and no FCC chairman before this one would have reacted with equanimity to this radical step down in broadcasting ethics.”

Just speculation here, and probably unrelated, but I think Karl Rove may be imploding.

Look, for example, at the way Bush has been repeating and repeating, since 1999, his mantra of tax cuts for the middle-class, when he knowingly pushed through two separate tax cuts that primarily benefit the upper class. Fact: During Bush’s term, nearly 70% of his tax cut dollars have gone to the top 20% income bracket. These numbers come from our own government — I didn’t make them up. And Bush still expects us lowly middle-classers to believe that he’s looking out for the little guy?!?

I think it can’t be Bush that’s doing all of this — sure he’s doing a lot, but as I understand it, he opposed the second tax-cut-for-the-rich, and Karl Rove talked him out of it. If this is true, either Rove is imploding or he’s already lined up Dubya’s post-Kerry Presidential successor. Any bets on who Rove is massaging from the mid-level government hack crowd to take over, once he can regroup?

For future reference, the Starve the Beast Theory.