The Postman
Dwight Meredith writes in:
I saw your post on the Big Meanies. Now you have to admit that it would be unpatriotic and just wrong during a time of war to refer to the President and his party as “spineless” or as a “shitstain,” or as the “Coward-in- Chief” or as the “Waffling Asskisser-in-Chief.” Real Americans who love their country do not criticize the President at a time of war, right?
See also: Spoons, Sullivan, Levy, Drezner and, most importantly, the Manchester Union Leader.
Yes. Those Democrats are way out of line.
I just happened to see Bob Novak make his patented wail about the terrible "Bush Bashing" on Capitol Gang. (He says it at least once a week in response to virtually any criticism of Junior.) He was very unhappy when Mark Shields reminded him of the Marquess of Queensbury rules under which the Republicans operated during the Clinton years.
He disingenuously replied, in typical weaselly GOP fashion, that he was talking about presidential debates and that Bob Dole had criticized Steve Forbes. Then he stuck out his lower lip and pouted for the rest of the show.
(On the Estrada abomination, when it was pointed out for the 6,456th time that the Republicans also blocked Clinton's judges, Kate O'Beirne made the usual tiresome argument that the big difference is that they'd never used the filibuster. As usual, it's the breaking of arbitrary dealines and bureaucratic procedures that really makes the difference to Republicans. Principles, apparently, are for losers.)
I also received a very interesting e-mail from a reader responding to my post of the other day about Paul Wolfowitz's shameless patriotic pandering. She says:
Wolfowitz gets all weepy in the WSJ about Christy Ferer going to Iraq to thank the troops for fighting terrorrism. Left out of Wolfie's article and your comments was the fact that Ferer's late husband, Neil Levin, was a Pataki patronage appointee as insurance, then bank superintendent before getting the plum and quite-high-paid job as head of the Port Authority. He died in the World Trade Center attack.
Wolfowitz used one Republican-connected WTC widow to add cheap emotion to his atrocious op-ed, but most of the rest of the WTC survivors are a lot less thankful for what the Bushies have done to them, their families and their country. And, naturally, you don't see them getting a government-subsidized, spin-producing trip to Iraq. Hopefully, we will see them embarrassing the Bushies and their New York bootlickers like Pataki at next year's convention.
I have felt for a long time that the most potent political force in America right now are the families of 9/11. It's a lot to ask, considering what they went through, but I hope they realize that they have in their hands the ability to change the course of American history.
Nobody can touch them, not even Karl Rove or Tom DeLay.