crayz.org

August 20th:

John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own.

"I think — I'll have my staff get to you,"

August 21st: Obama hits McCain on the housing gaffe with an ad called "Seven"

August 24th:

Mark Halperin: My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama. […] I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.

August 17th/18th:
Stanley Kurtz writes about Ayers in National Review, and a 3rd-party swift boat group promotes the article

August 21st:

The American Issues Project today announced the debut of a new television advertising campaign examining the relationship between Sen. Barack Obama and unrepentant 1960's domestic terrorist, William Ayers...

Supported by over one hundred pages of back-up documentation and historical accounts

It might be good if Mark Halperin could explain on next Sunday's show how this group went backwards through space-time to attack Obama on Ayers days before the housing gaffe (and the National Review article makes it clear Kurtz has been spending quite some time investigating the Ayers connection), and then did a same-day turnaround from Obama's "Seven" ad to assembling a hundred-page dossier and their own ad

Sitting next to these two American guys at my hostel in London I overheard snippets of the most amazingly brain-dead conversation. They started out talking about their visit to the British Museum, and were debating whether they'd seen the Rosetta Stone or not. The entire premise behind this was baffling enough - how could you not know? But then the stupid quote parade started, with:

That couldn't be the rosetta stone, it didn't have any European writing on it

and then a minute later,

No, the magna carta was basically just a rewrite of the rosetta stone

The debate later moved on to whether people everywhere on earth eat cereal for breakfast and snack on sandwiches. All of it was a completely earnest back & forth, as I stifled laughter

Uggh, just uggh:

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq -- that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight -- has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. "The Clintons are Rich!!!!" will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

"Media critic" Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama's bowling and eating habits and how that shows he's not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama's bowling was his biggest mistake, a "real doozy."

I hadn't even heard about the Obama bowling story - guess that's what I get for giving up on the mainstream media. I clicked over to Margaret Carlson's column to get the details, and literally stopped reading mid-sentence in disgust once I realized what it was about. My prediction of a day or two of coverage for outright cannibalism is looking optimistic

So wrong on so many levels:

My friend Andrew has to book every flight using the name “Drew.” Someone who has the same name is on the terror watch list. If he books using the name Andrew, it takes him forever to get through security.

Some asshat driving his RAV4 around the curve of a narrow entranceway to a parking lot realizes that the upcoming section of the road is covered in up to THREE INCHES OF WATER so he brakes, stops and thinks for about 15 seconds, realizes his no-money down SUV lease didn't include a pair of testicles*, and then turns around and drives back out

* - Deduced but not observed

Try to make sense of this:

The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.

Some days...

Meet them here:

[Palestinian national-security adviser Muhammad] Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’”

Read the the whole thing. They tried an election and fucked it up, tried diplomacy to cancel the election and fucked that up, tried a coup and fucked that up too. End result is we've made a bunch of new enemies, given those enemies a bunch of new weapons, and just generally made everyone less safe

But remember, they hate us for our freedom

A glimpse of Bill Kristol's reckless stupidity, from 3/17/03:

Saddam will soon be gone, thanks to the courage of one man above all, George W. Bush, very much aided by the equally impressive courage of another, Tony Blair. Obviously, we are gratified that the Iraq strategy we have long advocated--and whose contours were further specified in that December 1, 1997, issue, in articles by Zalmay Khalilzad and Paul Wolfowitz, Frederick W. Kagan, and Peter Rodman--has become the policy of the U.S. government, because we believe it is the right policy for the country and the world. But we feel no joy and little satisfaction. It would have been much better if Saddam could have been removed without war, or if he had been removed at the end of the previous Gulf War. We wish a peaceful resolution were now possible. But it is not. Wishes are not facts. Saddam has proven--he had proven by December 1997--that he will not disarm peacefully. And he must be disarmed. So war will come.

We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.

This is a moment for restating the obvious: We hope and pray the war goes as well as possible, with the fewest possible American casualties, and also the fewest possible casualties to all innocent parties, very much including the Iraqi people, who have suffered so greatly. We fear, as does the Bush administration, Saddam's chemical and biological weapons, and, needless to say, hope for nothing more than the administration's success in crippling Saddam's ability to use them. We look forward to the liberation of our own country and others from the threat of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and to the liberation of the Iraqi people from a brutal and sadistic tyrant.

And indeed, the war has clarified a great many things

Hillary's office gets taken over by some loon, the freepers immediately suggest the guy is a plant in some absurd PR stunt, and then this (comment #11):

Even if it wasn’t a plant, it says a lot about her that we would even consider the possility.

A lack of self-awareness that would embarrass farm animals

Fear the Islamofascist jihadists:

I love how the Republicans are now the party of wimps. They're such huge patriots that they honestly believe America is threatened by a handful of religious fanatics who live in caves. Fuck you, cowards

Bush administration to Britain, "thanks for nothing":

The White House official added that Britain would always be "the cornerstone" of US policy towards Europe but there was "a lot of unhappiness" about how British forces had performed in Basra and an acceptance that Mr Brown would pull the remaining 4,500 troops out of Iraq next year.

"Operationally, British forces have performed poorly in Basra," said the official. "Maybe it's best that they leave. Now we will have a clear field in southern Iraq." Another White House official described Mr Brown as "challenging" and far less close to the US than Mr Blair.

Another day, another dose of abject stupidity. I have an idea, how about we leave too - then the whole country of Iraq will be a "clear field"? We're also back to being buddies with Germany and France again, after half the Republicans in the country were frothing for air strikes a few years back

In 2008 whoever gets elected is going to need to pull a "Die Hard 3", and just pretend the previous 8 years never happened

A terrific article about Blackwater and the other companies the US has outsourced military operations to:

The use of contractors in Iraq is unprecedented in both its size and scope.... In 2007, an internal Department of Defense census on the industry found almost 160,000 private contractors were employed in Iraq (roughly equal to the total U.S. troops at the time, even after the troop "surge"). Yet even this figure was a conservative estimate, since a number of the biggest companies, as well as any firms employed by the State Department or other agencies or NGOs, were not included in the census.

Halliburton's contract has garnered the firm $20.1 billion in Iraq-related revenue and helped the firm report a $2.7 billion profit last year. To put this into context, the amount paid to Halliburton-KBR is roughly three times what the U.S. government paid to fight the entire 1991 Persian Gulf War. When putting other wars into current dollar amounts, the U.S. government paid just this one firm about $7 billion more than it cost the United States to fight the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish American War combined.

This "protection first and last" mentality has led to many common operating practices that clearly enrage locals. In an effort to keep potential threats away, contractors drive convoys up the wrong side of the road, ram civilian vehicles, toss smoke bombs, and fire weaponry as warnings, all as standard practices. After a month spent embedded with Blackwater contractors in Baghdad, journalist Robert Young Pelton said, "They're famous for being very aggressive. They use their machine guns like car horns."

Here's the Aegis 'trophy video' referenced in the article, with mercs shooting up a bunch of civilian vehicles for no reason:

The entire article is full of accounts of the most mind-bogglingly self-destructive behavior. How can anyone believe we're going to win a counter-insurgency operation this way? It's as if Cheney and Rumsfeld sat down one day and came up with the best war plan that anyone had ever made, and then did exactly the fucking opposite

Cost so far:

• $500 billion
• over 10,000 wounded contractors, 36,000 wounded US military
• ~1000 contractors killed, 3800 US military killed
• 750,000 - 1.2 million Iraqi civilians killed