A True Blue Liberal Poll Concerning Credibility

With Bob Woodward's upcoming book, Fear: Trump in the White House, getting the current president's knickers in a twist to the point where he's attacking Woodward's credibility on Twitter, it seemed like a good time for another poll.

POLL:
Which man has established more credibility over the course of his long career, renowned #TrumpUniversity founder and prolific Twitterer @realDonaldTrump or ex-@WashingtonPost reporter and presidential biographer @realBobWoodward?
(Consider retweeting for a larger sample.)

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) September 5, 2018

This time the results should be obvious and overwhelmingly lopsided (at least until the poll is discovered by Russian bots).

Is attacking Carl Bernstein last week and Bob Woodward this week really the best strategy you have?

Attacking these serious journalists didn't work for Richard Nixon during the first #Watergate scandal; it probably won't be a successful #StupidWatergate defense strategy either,

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) September 4, 2018

A Poll About @realDonaldTrump's Tweets Without an Obvious Answer

Trump's tweets from July 1, 2016 at 10:10 AM EDT.

This morning, for the third morning in a row, the official presidential statements in tweet form from the account of @realDonaldTrump have been used to attack "Crazy Joe Scarborough" and "dumb as a rock Mika" Brzezinski; he also threw in shots at NBC, Comcast, and CNN. Over ten percent of his tweets since becoming president have been targeting journalists, aimed at the "failing New York Times" and "Amazon Washington Post" as well as CBS and ABC. They are all, in his opinion, "Fake News," and his supporters are buying it. Only Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars, and The National Enquirer escape the wrath of his little twitterfingers.


So here's the question. With more news breaking every day about the pre-election collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to affect the November results, isn't it in his interest to do everything he can to discredit the messengers who are reporting #TrumpRussia breakthroughs every day?

POLL
Are the non-stop media attacks from @realDonaldTrump the rantings of an elderly TV addict or a conscious attempt to kill the messenger?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) July 1, 2017

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Saturday Evening Update:
The Tweeter In Chief ended this day the same way he started it, while also adding the phrase "Modern Day Presidential" to the language.

Trump's Tweets from 7/1/2017 captured at 8:30PM EDT.

One Thing We Can Do Today.

I had a plan for this morning. Though I'm a digital subscriber to The New York Times, I was going to run out early and buy a print copy of today's paper with its headline about America's first woman president. I was going to put it away with these copies from 2008 for my one-year-old granddaughter.

Yes, We Did.

I have no desire to buy (or even see) a print copy of the Times this morning, but I have another plan. I want anyone who reads this to think about subscribing to the Times or the Washington Post, or your local newspaper that probably endorsed Hillary Clinton along with every major print publication in the nation.  In many ways, last night's result was a victory of the illiterate reality-television world over the world of printed words. Subscribe to the Times if only to prove the man wrong who unfailingly and gleefully refers to this essential national publication as the "failing @NYTimes" whenever he tweets about it.

The failing @nytimes reporters don't even call us anymore, they just write whatever they want to write, making up sources along the way!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 15, 2016

I don't work for the Times or the Washington Post or any other newspaper, but I consider subscribing to at least one paper as a civic duty of anyone concerned about the First Amendment. Think about it as a non-deductible charitable contribution if you need to. Think about it the same way you think about contributing to your local PBS or NPR station. We need them all all the time, but we will need them all even more over the next four years.

And have we all forgotten "John Miller" already?

This is just to refresh everyone's memory as we're less than 12 hours from the first debate.
If there were tapes from 1991 of Hillary Clinton pretending to be "Johanna Miller" in order to brag about herself to a reporter in the third person, wouldn't we still be hearing every day about how it destroys her credibility? And her sanity?

The Correction of the Day Concerns a Donald Who Was Worse Than Trump.

I just stumbled upon this correction to a July 14, 2005 Washington Post article about the use of Abu Ghraib tactics at Guanatamo before the low-level Abu Ghraib scapegoats for the widespread US torture program made the mistake of using a digital camera.

CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE

A July 14 article said that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved the use of certain interrogation tactics against a detainee who the government believed was to be the "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Rumsfeld approved the use of aggressive tactics against Mohamed Qahtani, but he did not specifically approve attaching a leash to Qahtani's chains or forcing him to wear women's underwear on his head, tactics that were authorized and used by interrogators on the prisoner in late 2002.

Rumsfeld just said "underwear"; he didn't say "women's underwear."

WOO HOO! We may have ourselves a full-fledged Clown Circus for the ages in 2016!

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin told The Washington Post in an interview Friday that she is “seriously interested” in running for the White House in 2016.

“You can absolutely say that I am seriously interested,” Palin said, when asked to clarify her thinking about a possible presidential bid.

Seriously.

Isn't Pride One of the Seven Deadly Sins?

Here's a headline in the Washington Post that hits home for someone who's been calling himself and his blog "True Blue Liberal" for the past ten years: "Proud to be an American? You’re probably not a true liberal."  
According to the Political Typology report of the Pew Research Center, only 40% of  "Solid Liberals" consider themselves "Often Proud to Be An American."

(Days like today show why we liberals often find it hard wrap ourselves in red white 'n' blue, crank up the Lee Greenwood, and exercise the cardinal sin of  pride.)

It's officially the naughties.

When I first asked the question back in July 2005 about the lack of an accepted name for this decade following on the heels of the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, I never thought that the lack of an official moniker for the naughties would still be continuing with less than a week remaining until ones replace zeroes in the third digit on our calendar headings.

The Washington Post confirms the continuing uncertainty about the name in an article today by Michael S. Rosenwald today titled "21st century's first decade is slipping away without leaving its name":

"Dictionary editors, linguists and even radio DJs say we have entered a semantic black hole in which the English language failed to produce a term for the outgoing decade in the same way it has failed to find a catchy moniker for your former in-laws. (Out-laws never stuck.) The language is stumped. The Zeroes? The Ohs? The Oh-Ohs? Help!"

So, since the mainstream media cannot decide on the name that we should be using, I'm officially making "the naughties" the name for the waning decade in the True Blue Liberal dot Org stylesheet. It's not up to "the English language...to produce a term for the outgoing decade." It's up to us, the speakers and writers of our language.

Now, what's the name for the next decade? Should we start calling it "the teens" before 2013?

Joe Biden for Vice President (Part Three)

See E.J. Dionne Jr.'s column in the Washington Post today, "A List Biden Belongs On".

Evading national security, says Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), would be a disastrous mistake. "The only way we lose this election is not to engage this issue head-on," Biden said during an interview in his Capitol office the day after Obama clinched the nomination. Democrats, Biden said, should be "proactive" and not "play defense on foreign affairs" because "the case against McCain and Bush on national security is so overwhelming. . . . It should be an essential part of the case for the Democratic nominee."

I visited with Biden because he should be at the top of any list of vice presidential picks for Obama. Why Biden? In part because of where he took our discussion: Few Democrats know more about foreign policy, and few would so relish the fight against McCain on international affairs. Few are better placed to argue that withdrawal from Iraq will strengthen rather than weaken the United States.

The worst thing in a running mate is the fear of muddying his or her image in political combat. Biden would be a happy warrior.

Read the rest here.

A New "WHIG of the Week", Scott McClellan

This is crossposted from WHIGgate Update at whiggate.org.

OK. I know that WHIGgate.org has been very inactive lately, but the fact is that it started with high hopes (and what turned out, of course, to have been false hopes) that the American people and their representatives in Congress and the "independent" flag-waving American mass media would come to their senses and hold the war criminals of the Bush Administration responsible for waging a war of aggression on manufactured evidence. The White House Iraq Group seemed like the perfect frame in which to tell the story of those lies, and the way they were sold to us.

Despite the fact that we seem to be OK with being lied to, I couldn't help posting this new entry for nobody to read when I ran across the following question and answer in the transcript of a Washington Post Book World online discussion from May 30:

Rhode Island: Hi. I hope this question doesn't sound confrontational. My understanding is that you didn't become press secretary until a year or so after the Iraq war began. Can you tell us about what your role was before that? Were you privy to high-level discussions in the lead-up to the war? Thanks.
Scott McClellan: I became press secretary on July 15, 2003, a few months after the initial invasion. Prior to that, I served as the principal deputy press secretary. I was not involved in the policy-making on Iraq or in developing the overall marketing strategy for selling the war to the public. I did fill in for my predecessor at times, and even participated in some White House Iraq Group, or WHIG meetings. WHIG was set up as the marketing arm for selling the war to the public.

I'm not sure that I've seen the White House Iraq Group referred to by name and by its WHIG designation so clearly by a White House official who took part in their meetings. I find it very impressive that the author of What Happened was not responding to a specific question about the Group or its role; Scott McClellan brought the names up unprompted, and followed up with the perfect one-sentence definition: "WHIG was set up as the marketing arm for selling the war to the public."

When America's Paper of Record, The New York Times, still has not mentioned the "White House Iraq Group" in its news pages [only in Frank Rich's columns], then it's not surprising that even some of us who track down these scattered references begin to doubt the group's existence and/or importance. Scott's nonchalant confirmation of its name and its role is striking (but not as striking as the continuing silence from the "liberal" Times). WHIGgate Update will come roaring back with another post if the Times ever writes about the Group in its news pages [click here to see if they do], but don't hold your breath. We don't expect to see anything until we're well into the Obama administration and they can treat this Bush-regime story in quaint historical context, not as a crime that demands immediate prosecution.

This is crossposted from WHIGgate Update at whiggate.org.

. . . an alternate path toward the extinction of suvs? casting them as anti-american?

So now, according to today's Washington Post article, "An Unlikely Meeting Of the Minds ", it's patriotism that's going to give us fuel-efficient vehicles. Even diminutive right-wing nutjob Gary Bauer has signed on to this new effort! While yesterday I wrote that only ridicule could kill the SUV (rhymes with glove), today it seems like this coalition of strange bedfellows may be pointing to another form of death for those dinosaurs:

"While skeptical about links between autos and global warming, the conservatives have concluded that cutting gasoline consumption is a matter of national security [. . . ]Last week a survey sponsored by the nonpartisan Civil Society Institute in Boston found that two-thirds of Americans feel it is "patriotic" to buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle."

And of course the only way to sell anything in today's U. S. of A. is to wrap it in a flag.

True Blue Liberal

An Army of None

or,

What if They Gave a War and Nobody Came?

More excellent news on the recruiting front from Today's Washington Post : " Army Still Behind in Recruiting". No problem. As my sign said in New York on February 15, 2003, "Draft the Bush Twins!"

And here's a relevant quote I ran across in my handwritten journal (from pre-blog days), copied from the new English translation of Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust. This is Charlus talking to Marcel about the Great War raging on their doorsteps (p. 105 of the Penguin UK paperback):

<<. . . the truth is that every morning war is declared anew. Thus those who wish to continue it are as guilty as those who started it, perhaps more so, for the latter may not perhaps have foreseen the full horror of it.>>

Imagine, an Army of None,
True Blue Liberal