THE PLANK JUNE 12, 2007
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The most salient thing about the Al Gonzales "no confidence" measure--which, as Eve has already noted, went down to defeat last night in the Senate when its supporters couldn't get the 60 votes needed to achieve cloture--was its utter meaninglessness.
Meaningless not just because President Bush had already said that a "no confidence" measure wasn't "going to determine . . . who serves in my government," but meaningless in that the measure's supporters and opponents now act as if what happened last night didn't really happen.
Chuck Schumer argues that just because the Democrats mustered only 53 votes for cloture doesn't mean they failed:
"When a majority of the Senate votes no confidence in a cabinet officer, it says a lot," Mr. Schumer said at a news conference after the vote.
Meanwhile, John Sununu argues that just because the majority of Republicans refused to support the "no confidence" measure doesn't mean they actually have confidence in Gonzales:
"A lot of senators felt strongly that this was a meaningless resolution and that this was political theater," said Senator John Sununu, a New Hampshire Republican. "At the same time they've been fairly disappointed in the leadership of the Justice Department."
It's almost enough to make you want to quote "Yeets."
--Jason Zengerle
15 comments
voted against the no confidence resolution doesn't mean the AG enjoys their confidence. For six years the GOP Congress watched as this President appointed hack after hack and they did nothing but swing their rubber stamp. Now - the AG lies to them in their own hearings and they shrug it off! I don't think the vote was meaningless - it shows how craven and useless the GOP legislators really are. Neil
- purcellneil
June 12, 2007 at 1:03pm
ha. A frisson of snobbisme-- like it.
- teplukhin2you
June 12, 2007 at 1:25pm
don't we want democrats to both legislate and win political victories? if this will help down the line in a few senate races then i say go for it - just don't totall pass up on that whole governing thing. of course i recently got a bmw so i see the world through rose colored glasses.
- bstahlbe
June 12, 2007 at 1:28pm
What's with the new moniker?
- drdannyu
June 12, 2007 at 1:39pm
Have a new credit card, can't use old moniker to re-subscribe. CanWest just left $10 on the table.
- teplukhin2you
June 12, 2007 at 2:59pm
Maybe I should let me old subscription lapse, so I can get rid of this ridiculous hold-over from residency.
- drdannyu
June 12, 2007 at 3:17pm
- teplukhin2you
June 12, 2007 at 3:56pm
..is that the current American constitutional system itself is all a nonfunctioning "big nothing", thanks to the Founders' idiotic failure to foresee the rise of political parties at all. It shouldn't be too long now -- in the Age of Megaterrorism and the resultant emergency security orders by the President -- before what's left of the American democratic system collapses completely in its current form (probably to be replaced by something Napoleonic).
- moomaw1
June 12, 2007 at 7:42pm
So it looks like Ed Gillespie is going to work at the White House. Yeah, I know: big whoop. I'm only mentioning it because I wanted an excuse to refer back to something I heard Don King say during those strange days in the 2004 presidential campaign when he was the Bush campaign's liaison to black America. Speaking of the uber-lobbyist and Republican apparatchick, King declared:
It's a wonder he's not going to work for John Edwards. P.S. It is worth noting that joining the lame duck Bush administration actually represents a step up for Gillespie--who was last seen hackishly (and unsuccessfully) spinning for George Allen's disastrous Senate campaign. --Jason Zengerle- jzengerle
June 13, 2007 at 1:00pm
Don King as [muh ha ha] a "liason to [hee hee] black America?" [hoo hoo] HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Ah hell. Maybe he can cash in by becoming the next Attorney General.
- cleavet
June 13, 2007 at 9:49pm
The American Prospect has an article today complaining, in part, about TNR:
There's a little backstory here. About a year ago, TNR published an editorial urging the Bush administration to "move ruthlessly" to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. This was, admittedly, a little vague, and a post on Tapped, the American Prospect's blog, wondered if TNR was fomenting war. Then a subsequent TNR editorial urged "the West" to "get ruthlessly serious about Iran," and noted "No, bombing is not the only instrument of policy we have." I hoped this would clear things up. But then Tapped wondered if our editorial meant "That bombing would be insufficiently ruthless and we should mount a full-scale invasion?" Uh, no. I figured any lingering confusion would have been cleared up a couple months ago, when TNR published a special issue on Iran, with four articles on the topic. The most hawkish of them urged: None of the others came close to calling for war. Indeed, the policy synthesis that emerged from all four articles recommended strong multilateral diplomacy, economic pressure and allowing Iranian moderates space to push for reform. Maybe TAP dislikes this diagnosis and prescription. But if they're accusing us of having "relatively little in the way of actual diagnosis or prescription" -- well, the word "relatively" is doing a lot of work. Relative to what? If we were publishing more stories about Iran, I suspect they'd be back to accusing us of secretly fomenting war. --Jonathan Chait- abelenky
June 14, 2007 at 1:51pm
Somehow I respond to the feud about TNR "fomenting war with Iran" and end up on a thread about Don King. Ah well The reason that TNR gets accused of this kind of thing is that all of the reasonable stuff that gets published gets undercut by whatever Mr. P. is saying.
- miceelf
June 14, 2007 at 1:58pm
I see you! You're hiding on the Prospect/Iran thread! You thought you could post on something else and it would go who knows where and I would never find you! But here I am! Come back here, silly! Daddy's gonna tickle you! Tickle, tickle, tickle!
- williamyard
June 14, 2007 at 2:19pm
The Politico story I slammed yesterday--about Harry Reid criticizing Generals Pace and Petraeus in a conference call with liberal bloggers--turns out to be accurate, at least as it relates to Pace. Blogger Bob Geiger, who was on the call, has confirmed that Reid described Pace as "incompetent." The outstanding question, as far as I can tell, is what, if anything, Reid said about Petraeus during the call. The initial story asserted that the majority leader made "similar disparaging remarks" about Petraeus but gave no further sense of what those comments might have been. As I noted in my earlier post, this always seemed to me the most implausible (and inflammatory) element of the story. A followup blog post by the reporter of the initial piece, John Bresnahan, repeats the claim that Reid made "disparaging remarks" about Petraeus (though they're no longer described as "similar" to the Pace charge) but again offers no further detail. Bresnahan does note a criticism of Petraeus that Reid made publicly yesterday, specifically that Petraeus is not being "very candid" about the situation on the ground in Iraq. Reid also reiterated, however, that he holds Petraeus in "high regard." So, yes, Reid did describe Pace as "incompetent." But there's still no real evidence that he called Petraeus anything remotely similar to "incompetent," which was the clear impression given by the article. (As a general rule, it seems to me rather unprofessional to cite "disparaging remarks" if one doesn't know, or is unable to say, what those remarks were.) I'll gladly update if I hear more. --Christopher Orr
- abelenky
June 15, 2007 at 9:56am
While Mr Chait is correct on the facts and reasoning, he ignores the fact that our words are always colored by our character. TNR was a whore for Bush's Iraq war, and will wear the implications of that for years to come. If TAP and others shiver at TNR's breathless use of "ruthlessly", they are not alone. Let's face it, TNR lost a lot of prestige and credibility by attaching itself to the Bush-Cheney-Wolfowitz war machine. Yellow journalism has its consequences. Neil
- purcellneil
June 16, 2007 at 10:32am