Running for president requires great strength and stamina. The race is long and treacherous. John McCain has been forcefully pushing his argument that he is better qualified for the job than his opponent, Barack Obama. In fact, McCain contends that Obama is not qualified at all. The latest McCain ad says that Obama is "dangerously unprepared" to be president.

So what makes McCain so ready to be Commander-in-Chief?

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How Did the Dems Let Bush Commute Libby's prison sentence?  I know it is old news but that's what I would like to know.  When the leaders of this country resort to that type of lawlessness it's time to burn down the old institutions are build some new ones - literally.

Post partisan my ass! That MIGHT be a good theme as a campaign strategy. It MIGHT appeal to an electorate tired of the incompetent,  ineffectual and just plain stupid brand of government they have been getting for the last ten years....you know, since the incredibly partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton by the Republican Congress....

It might sound ... nice ...and evenhanded and reasonable and mature and responsible and all that. But it ignores the simple and undeniable fact that since the Republicans lied, cheated and smeared (including smearing their current champion when he was running against Bush) their way into having full unfettered dominance of the government.....just about everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and the country is in sad, sorry shape.

Because of the Republicans.

Everything the Republicans has touched in the last decade has turned to crap. From the micro (life saving stem cell research) to the macro (Climate Crisis) the Republicans have had full power to implement their vision, programs and policies....and have gotten it wrong every single time.

[From the Frog Pond]

You know, Lanny Davis is right.  Sen. Ted Stevens, like all individuals under federal indictment, is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.  Ted Stevens has been indicted by a grand jury for committing seven felonies.  And last Thursday, in new filings in the case, prosecutors revealed that Ted Stevens turned a $5,000 investment into a $155,000 profit through the use of an $31,000 interest-free loan that was both improper and never disclosed in his senate filings.  

Historical background on the Lie Factory:

Remember the lead up to the Iraq War?  The hype was thick and well orchestrated. Cheney's gal Friday, Judith Miller, was dishing his dirt in the New York Times from an anonymous source (Scooter Libby, pardoned by Bush), and he cited her articles as proof that his ballyhoo was substantiated by a venerable newspaper (no longer).  The New York Times stood idly by, letting Cheney play this trick on the American public, anonomously corroborating himself via their reknown reporter (infamous now). The NY Times aided and abetted Cheney's artifice, which would unleash death and destruction on thousands, while sweetening the pot of special interests at our expense, without so much as a correction.

Read the transcript of Ron Suskind's taped interview with former ranking CIA officer Rob Richer, now posted at Suskind's website: http://www.ronsuskind.com/...   It reconciles what both Suskind and Phil Giraldi have been saying about the Iraq forgery letter.  They agree on all main points.

The earlier media accounts emphasized Suskind's narrative that George Tenet handed the forgery down the CIA chain of command.

In a published comment, Phil Giraldi (former head of CIA counter-terrorism) said, no, the point of origin of the letter was Cheney's office, and the actual forgery was done by Feith's shop at the Pentagon, OSP. See, http://www.amconmag.com/...

Read the following -- the whole thing -- everyone is in agreement, the written order came "from downtown" on cream-colored White House letterhead.

Now, read this:

As the "long national nightmare" draws to a close I want to enter a preemptive protest to all future historians.  Do not lay this past eight years of the systematic destruction of American values entirely at the feet of George W. Bush.  To do so would allow the real culprits to escape with their place in this story untarnished by their crimes.

Bush is an insignificant, shallow, foolish man.  A man of no substance.  A cardboard cutout of trivial posturing, sold to an inattentive public, immersed in navel gazing.  He lacks the strength of character, intellect, or moral bearings to have committed the crimes for which his administration will be held accountable for generations.

So much has been said and written about the outing of former CIA operative Valerie Plame -- and the cast of characters that swirled around it, from Judith Miller to Karl Rove -- that today, on the fifth anniversary of how it all began, it seems proper to quote the first lines of the fateful Joseph C. Wilson IV op-ed in the July 6, 2003 edition of The New York Times:

"Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?  Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Remember its title?  "What I Didn't Find in Africa."   People in high places paid attention: As we now know, Vice President Cheney marked up a copy of the op-ed from the paper, wondering if the trip to Africa was "ordinarily" done or "did his wife send him on a junket?"  

In case there was any doubt that former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is now performing the same role for the Republican Party on the Washington Post opinion pages, today's column should put it to rest.  Labeling former comedian turned Minnesota Senate candidate Al Franken a "vulgarian," Gerson proclaimed the Democrat's satirical writing of the past the "Federalist Papers of lifestyle liberalism." As it turns out, Gerson not only has no sense of humor, he has no sense of balance: the legion of Republican vulgarians whose stench still taints Washington needless to say go unmentioned.

In his column today in the Washington Post, former Bush chief speechwriter Michael Gerson rips Al Franken for his 2000 piece in Playboy magazine, a satirical piece in praise of pornography (and no, I'm not linking the column because the more hits it gets, the more WarPo will pay him).
Yes, it's old news that Gerson is the word wizard who came up  with the "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" metaphor and other phrases of mass deception in 2002 for the murderous White House Iraq Group to sell its war for oil to a gullible public and press.
Yes, we here know Gerson as the rankest kind of hypocrite and aren't surprised he'd attack Franken and praise incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

When I think of the life of Tim Russert I will think of a man who could have done so much good with the power that was given to him and instead used it to help those who had some of the worst motives and intentions on the American political scene.

Having listened to several recent interviews with McClellan, I’ve heard him consistently selling two notions in every one of those interviews that have received scant attention.  First, GWB is a good guy with good intentions.  Second, Scotty is a truth teller and not a liar.

How could anyone that is capable of detailing numerous instances of GWB not acting like a good guy with good intentions continue to hold onto that opinion of GWB?  GWB lied and people died.  Lots of people died.  

With the Democratic nomination contest finally over, Democrats now have the opportunity to put the rancor of last many months behind them and unite to defeat the Republicans in November by taking the White House and adding to our leads in the House and Senate.

Among the most important issues that will arise for the next administration is the question of accountability for the villains that preceded it in the Executive Branch.  Yesterday on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Richard Clarke suggested a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission".  Some would go farther, others less far.

But few in American politics today have as much personal knowledge and experience with the Bush Administration's lies and its mafia-style intimidation as Ambassador Joe Wilson, whom clammyc and I will be interviewing today at 2pmPST/5pmEST.  And the topic we'll be covering?  Accountability for Bush and his cronies after that glorious day on which they leave office.

Because it pays to know what the other side is thinking, one of my alter egos regularly drops Dick Morris' e-mail blasts in my Inbox. It's not nearly as bad as you would imagine. He is, after all, a pollster who on occasion offers some well-founded insight.

It's been entertaining, too, because his unbridled, visceral hatred of all things Clinton drives Dick seriously and embarrassingly off the reservation when the subject is Hillary Clinton. I mean the kind of stuff that would make even Karl Rove go "eeeeiiuw."

So with that frame of reference, Dick's column in today's New York Post was par for the course (I'd provide a link, but I don't want to give Rupert the hits). Having danced on Hillary's grave at some other time and place, he has tuned his attention now to Barack Obama.

And what was his casus belli?

Henry Waxman noted the same thing that I did about Scottie McClellan's book. He noticed that Scottie McC's book sure came close to saying Dick Cheney and George Bush were personally involved in the outing of Valerie Wilson.

New revelations by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan raise additional questions about the actions of the President and the Vice President.  Mr. McClellan has stated that "[t]he President and Vice President directed me to go out there and exonerate Scooter Libby."  He has also asserted that "the top White House officials who knew the truth - including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney - allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie."  It would be a major breach of trust if the Vice President personally directed Mr. McClellan to mislead the public.

Alas, irony.  White House Press Secretary Dana Perino calling former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan "sad" is like McClellan calling Perino a "Bush administration whore."  They’re both right, but look who’s talking.  

No, Scott didn’t really call Dana a Bush administration whore—not in public, anyway.  Dana really did call Scott sad though, and she really is a Bush administration whore.  

Dana should have taken it easy on Scott.  He’s just the latest in a long line of former Bush liegemen who wrote books so they can make enough money to buy their way out of hell.  Dana’s time will come.  After her press secretary gig is over and people start calling her out for fibbing about the surge, she’ll get to dwelling on the fate of her immortal soul and boy, will her tune ever change.  

In today's NYT, Frank Rich engages a topic that has been on my mind a lot recently: why the tiny, seemingly inconsequential pebble of Scott McClellan's new book should be creating such a huge ripple effect.  After all, there is nothing new in this book, and it in fact is a far kinder rendering of Bush and especially McClellan than seems truthful or warranted.

What is the cause of the uproar that has kept McClellan in the news?  Rich concludes, basically, that it's the war, stupid--that Americans are unhappily fixated on not only the failure of the Iraq War, but particularly on its duplicitous beginnings, and therefore any new telling of that story captures our attention.  

To my thinking, Rich's analysis is incomplete.