The Post-50 Monday Grab Bag
by Steve
After a weekend where I survived turning the big Five-Oh, let’s jump back into the fray with several stories this morning for you to comment on.
Mary mentioned it over the weekend, but the real agenda behind the firing of the federal attorneys was to install partisan hacks in key 2008 battleground states who could suppress Democratic voter turnout and fire up phony investigations against Democratic candidates. As we suggested weeks ago, if Bush wants to make voting fraud an issue, Democrats should oblige by investigating what the GOP did in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, while digging into the various e-voting and voter ID scams perpetrated by GOP officials since 2002, and use 2007 to pass a new Voting Rights Act of 2008.
And it doesn’t stop there. The next scandal for the administration is Karl Rove’s attempt to politicize the General Services Administration by using taxpayer monies to be an arm of the RNC in aiding GOP candidates.
Only Orrin Hatch would say that Alberto Gonzales is an honest man.
On another item Bush ignores, five more US soldiers died in Iraq yesterday.
Are the Iranians stupid enough to turn the seizure of 15 British military personnel conducting lawful UN-sanctioned activities into the Gulf of Tonkin Bush and Blair are looking for?
Bob Novak says that Bush is the most isolated president he has seen in decades. But what pisses Novak off is that Bush hasn't pardoned Scooter yet.
Only the tunnel-visioned right wing hacks at the Tribune Corporation would think of taking a major paper like the Los Angeles Times in a Democratic city and turning it into a neocon cesspool by adding Donald Rumsfeld as a guest opinion editor.
Everyday Afghans have turned against the coalition forces as well.
David Broder catches up to the Pew poll we wrote about last week, and notes that public opinion has swung in favor of Democratic politics and against the GOP. His recipe: Democrats should legislate more and investigate less. Along these lines, we are also told that a recent Gallup poll reveals that for the first time since 1993, a plurality of Americans feel that we spend too much on the military, something we also wrote about months ago.
Don’t look now, but it’s possible that John McCain is having problems raising money.
The New York Times notes today that GOP senators up for reelection next year will be saddled by the war. Yeah, so what? As I have said several times now, Harry Reid should try one more time to get a resolution passed this week with a timeline attached to it, and when these GOP senators vote against it, then Reid should hang that vote around their necks and not give them another chance at redemption until the 2008 defense appropriation vote this fall.