Okay, I linked to it in a previous post, but you all really have to check out The American Presidency Project. They’ve got a treasure trove of presidential documents more than 200 years old. After surfing the site for a few minutes, I’ve already found these gems :

The executive order from FDR to investigate Pearl Harbor issued a few days after the attack. (Compare this to Bush’s continuing obstruction of the 9-11 investigation)

The 1904 Republican and senate Party platforms.

Harry Truman’s announcement about the bombing of Hiroshima.

The inaugural address that William Henry Harrison gave in the freezing cold without a coat on. The address was so long, that Harrison got pneumonia and died a month later.

Lincoln’s first State of the Union address, in which he sums up the Civil War as “A disloyal portion of the American people have during the whole year been engaged in an attempt to divide and destroy the Union.”

Nixon’s one sentence resignation letter.

Okay, I know you’re probably getting tired of posts about “Dean’s breakdown”, but this article at the History News Network is particularly insightful :

Early in Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 campaign for president, his speechwriter, Raymond K. Price, was among those charged with a delicate task: Review Nixon’s disastrous “last press conference” speech of Nov. 7, 1962, and figure out how to handle it in the upcoming race.

Nixon had delivered that rambling address after losing his bid to unseat Pat Brown as governor of California. Surprising reporters by venturing down from his hotel room the morning after his defeat, Nixon sneered at “all the members of the press [who] are so delighted that I have lost” and chided them for biased coverage. He concluded, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you.”

Combined with his failed 1960 presidential bid, the 1962 loss and the emotional speech ? especially its signature phrase ? were seen as consigning the former vice president to oblivion. Five nights later, ABC aired a special titled “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” But when Price and others screened the dreaded speech years later, they found that it didn’t seem so bad.

Nixon’s remarks were indeed raw and spontaneous, especially for a man given to controlling his public image tightly. The barbs at the press displayed an unmistakable hostility.

But the candidate neither shouted nor raged. His manner was far more restrained than printed accounts ? or public memory ? suggested. He even conceded: “I’ve given as good as I’ve taken.”

In short, in its many retellings, the “last press conference,” though reflective of some real bitterness, was magnified into a debacle more damning than it had to be.

This story comes to mind after watching the Washington punditocracy indulge in a giddy round of derision at Howard Dean’s expense. The former Vermont governor and onetime front-runner for the senate presidential nomination was judged to have lost his moorings during his concession speech following his disappointing third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses Monday night.

In short, people (myself included) are as quick to predict the end of Dean’s candidacy as they were to declare the inevitability of his nomination. Since I’m not lucky enough to live in a state where my primary vote counts for much (the primary system sucks), I have no idea how “average voters” are interpreting Dean’s outburst, his appearance on Letterman, last night’s debate, etc. All I can really do is sit back and hope they don’t end up nominating a Lieberman/Sharpton ticket.

Hmmm…does this 1989 speech by former-President George H.W. Bush wound familiar? (via Altercation)

In 1961 it took a crisis — the space race — to speed things up. Today we don’t have a crisis; we have an opportunity. To seize this opportunity, I’m not proposing a 10-year plan like Apollo; I’m proposing a long-range, continuing commitment. First, for the coming decade, for the 1990’s: Space Station Freedom, our critical next step in all our space endeavors. And next, for the new century: Back to the Moon; back to the future. And this time, back to stay. And then a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet: a manned mission to Mars.

Each mission should and will lay the groundwork for the next. And the pathway to the stars begins, as it did 20 years ago, with you, the American people. And it continues just up the street there, to the United States Congress, where the future of the space station and our future as a spacefaring nation will be decided.

If Dubya seems to be taking all his cues from his dad (ie. attacking Iraq, jobless economic recovery, going to the moon), I hope his next move is to throw up on the Japanese Prime Minister or get really confused when he sees a supermarket scanner. Like I said earlier, this administration is really lacking in the comic relief department.

Okay, this is just getting crazy. The news has just reported that Captain Kangaroo (R.I.P.) has died, and this is the picture they’re including with the obituary :

Seriously media, every story this week doesn’t need to relate to Howard Dean in some way. They should have used this picture instead.


Is it just me, or does the Captain look like he’s about to pop a cap in someone’s ass?

Here’s a question for you Kucinich fans out there. What do you think about his back-room deal to get his supporters to go for John Edwards in the Iowa Caucuses? Does it somehow undermine his anti-war views that he’d work with an obviously hawkish candidate like Edwards instead of someone more dovish like Dean? Personally, I don’t think it’s a big sellout or anything, but it’s definitely an icky look behind the scenes (ie. the title of this post).

Last night I caught a part of the show “Tough Crowd” in which Colin Quinn was arguing in favor of racial profiling. His argument was roughly this : “If I see an Irish guy stumble out of a bar, should I automatically assume that he was just in there for the peanuts?” In other words, why shy away from stereotypes if they have a basis in fact? Rather than get on a rant about why stereotyping is just another example of self-fulfilling prophecies and selective observation (I’ll just say this : If the prevailing stereotype about young black men was that they were all nerdy, suddenly every black guy would start looking like Urkel), I want to clear up the misconception that the liberal objection to racial profiling is another example of political correctness run amok.

The real problem with racial profiling is that it doesn’t work. While these examples are about fighting terrorism, I think they’re probably applicable to any type of racial profiling.

Alienating the people whose help we need - One of the biggest keys in fighting terrorism is convincing people “on the inside” to become informants. In order to do this, we not only need to send the message that the terrorists are wrong, but also that we can be trusted. If we treat everyone with brown skin like a terrorist, gaining that trust becomes impossible.

Too much information - The intelligence failures that preceded 9-11 were failures with interpreting intelligence, not collecting it. As many experts have noted, the dots were all there, nobody was able to draw the lines to connect them. Racial profiling creates more suspects (dots), when the real problem is that we don’t have enough people “drawing lines”.

They’re not all Arabs - If we relied on racial profiling, we never would have caught Richard Reid, Jose Padilla, John Walker Lindh, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph…..

Okay, the mental list I had last night when I was screaming at the TV is escaping me. There’s a couple more reasons I originally had in mind that I can’t remember. If you can think of any other, post em’ in comments.

The real reason we should elect Howard Dean is because it might make Saturday Night Live funny again. This whole “having a retarded frat-boy for a president” thing hasn’t worked out (comically or otherwise), especially after the twin tragedies of 9-11 and Will Ferrell’s leaving the show. With a Howard Dean presidency, SNL can count on four years of comedy gold!

I wonder if I’m the only one who wanted to watch this debate, just to see what the hell Howard Dean would say in response to the last few days of media criticism. For those who missed it, here’s his response :

DEAN: You know, I’m not a perfect person. I think a lot of people have had a lot of fun at my expense over the Iowa hooting and hollering, and that’s justified. But one thing I can tell you is that I’m not kidding about what I say.

The things that I do are things I believe in. I think it’s important that the president of the United States be willing to stand up for what’s right and not stand up for what’s popular.

I did it with No Child Left Behind. That was a mistake a year ago, not just now that everybody’s suffering with it. I did it in Iraq. And I did it when I stood up for civil unions for gay and lesbian people my home state when it wasn’t popular. And I’m willing to do it again as president.

Pretty good response, but not the joke I was hoping for. Of course, the class clown of this race had a good one liner for us :

SHARPTON: Well, first of all, let me say this. I wanted to say to Governor Dean, don’t be hard on yourself about hooting and hollering. If I had spent the money you did and got 18 percent, I’d still be in Iowa hooting and hollering.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

SHARPTON: So, don’t worry about it, Howard.

(LAUGHTER)

DEAN: Thanks, Reverend.

Hopefully, this will stop the near-endless loop of Dean screaming state names on the news.

Ever since I first saw Roger & Me ten years ago, I’ve been a huge fan of Michael Moore. When I was in college, I remember sitting in my dorm room watching TV Nation with my stepbrother, awestruck that something this radical would ever be shown on TV. In the years since, I’ve been the first in line for any of his movies, books, and television programs (not that you actually wait in line to watch TV, but you know what I mean).

In the wake of the success of Stupid White Men and Bowling for Columbine, there has been a flurry of criticism of Moore and his methods. Whether fueled by ideological differences or personal grudges, his work has been picked apart so much that it’s hard to have a conversation about him without using the words “Yeah, but…” Because of this, even his staunchest defenders have been forced to concede that he’s an amusing blowhard who’s sloppy with the facts. In short, he’s our Rush Limbaugh.

This is what I had in mind as I ate dinner with him following the “Bush in 30 Seconds” awards ceremony. When Dan told me that he was going to introduce us to Michael, I expected a Franken-esque brushoff. Within minutes of meeting however, we were already discussing the reasons for his pending endorsement of Wesley Clark. He was not only incredibly down-to-earth, but he was a lot more pragmatic than the raving left-wing nut who the media loves to hate.

A while later, however, he said something that I was convinced was another one of those lies that conservatives love to pin on him (I’m paraphrasing here) :

“Right after I gave the award to the guy who won the contest [Charlie Fisher who created Child’s Pay], he pulled me aside and said ‘When I read the letter from the soldier that you posted on your website, I cried for fifteen minutes.’”

“Bullshit”, I thought. “There’s no way somebody was crying for fifteen minutes over some letter”. (You can read the letters here.)

A while later, when we were at the after-party, Tom and I ended up hanging out with Charlie. When I mentioned that we had met Michael Moore, he gushed about how much he loves Michael Moore’s work and said “Have you read the letter on his homepage? After I read it, I cried for twenty minutes.” Wow. It turns out, Michael wasn’t lying after all.

Now if this had happened to one of Michael Moore’s frequent detractors, I’m sure they would have spun it to make him look bad. They’d probably write an article called “Stupid White Man” and make the argument that Moore can’t stop lying (Something like : “Moore said fifteen minutes when Fisher cried for twenty. Can he get anything right?”) For me, however, I feel like I’ve seen first-hand what happens when you give media spin too much credibility (conciously or subconciously).

[And speaking of Michael Moore being unfairly trashed, here’s a prime example of what I’m talking about. This Salon interview is one of the most dishonest pieces of journalism I’ve ever read. After you’ve read that, check out my letter to the editor that they printed a couple weeks later.]

Just in case you missed this article from every other blog (or Andrew’s comment), check this out :

Republican staff members of the US senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted senate communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight — and with what tactics.

The office of senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 senate memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.

With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers — including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.

Republican staffers illegally breaking into senate property in order to steal files….hhmmmmm…how is this any different than Watergate??