I hate to gloat while people are being publicly embarrassed, but really, Republicans just beg for it with their hypocrisy and sleazy politicking to save themselves at any cost to actual victims, or the country.

Craig’s `wide Stance’ Enters Lexicon - New York Times
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Among the most famous excuses ever given for questionable behavior, ”I have a wide stance” must fall somewhere between the schoolchild’s favorite ”the dog ate my homework” and President Clinton’s ”I didn’t inhale.”

But Sen. Larry Craig’s contention — made just after his arrest in a restroom sex sting — has permeated the public consciousness, showing up as more than just the punch line to late-night talk show jokes.

The online Urban Dictionary defines ”wide stance” as a euphemism for a closeted homosexual. David Kurtz of the blog ”Talking Points Memo” called Craig’s wide stance claim ”The Best Legal Defense of 2007.” And Beau Jarvis, who writes about wine, travel and food on the blog ”Basic Juice,” notes that the phrase has become less than innocent and proposes ”cleansing” it by using it to describe a well-balanced wine.

h/t to Americablog.com

There’s nothing like a bad metaphor to really sow misunderstanding and mayhem. When the thing being described is as serious and complicated as the threat from stateless terrorists, the consequences of a bad metaphor have corrupted our public discourse and foreign relations, decimated our Constitution and military infrastructure, and made us all less safe from all kinds of threats, internal AND external.

“What War on Terror?” asks Larry Johnson, who has worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, thus has a rather more “serious” perspective than the pants-wetting warmongers on the teevee and tubes:

The threat of terrorism, particularly for the U.S. military, has become a raison d’etre in the same way that the Soviet Union fueled budgets and weapons systems during the cold war. But with this critical difference–the Soviets actually had a five million man Army, thousands of ships, intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear subs, and a genuine first strike capability. All of the terrorist groups in the world, even if they combined their forces, do not begin to approach the scale and scope of threats the west faced during the Cold War.

At some point we need to recover common sense in dealing with terrorism. The threat is genuine but not ubiquitous. No terrorist organization in the world has demonstrated the ability to project and conduct sustained operations outside of their geographic support base. This means that coordinated, sustained pressure to disrupt financing, training, and recruitment will pay significant dividends in reducing the scale and scope of terrorist activity.

Bottom line:

When the history of the Bush Administration’s “war” on terrorism is written, two critical shortcomings will emerge–the failure to sustain operations in Afghanistan and completely dismantle Al Qaeda and the failure to create a coordinated counter terrorism strategy that employed the vast resources of the Federal Government. The Bush Administration has talked a good game but, in terms of execution, it has fumbled the ball.

Tristero at Digby’s place looks today at “the problem of modern rhetoric” within the Right/Left political debate, prompted by the supposedly right-wing answer to MoveOn.org. MoveOn’s Eli Parisher makes the same mistake the left (including me) usually does in phrasing things to make other lefties nod their heads, and everyone else’s eyes glaze over.

The wingers’ language is simple and direct, filled with monosyllabic feelgoods, and a nasty one-word putdown. The response was hedged (”So far”), polysyllabic, included words with complex structure and meaning (”palpable,” but “palatable” is meant), and unjustifiably restrained. Certainly both Fleischer and Sembler can easily be characterized as “obnoxious,” and that’s the least of it.

When the MoveOn.org ad first appeared, I did not care for the play on General Petraus’ name — I thought it sophomoric. I completely agreed with the ad’s premise and tone, and certainly thought it fair and accurate otherwise, just quibbled with the copy choices.

But now, I think something that has caused this much ruckus, has a lot going for it. Clearly, the language got through, made a clear point and struck a nerve, unlike most our our rhetoric.

Anyway, like the Dixie Chicks, this whole episode will be viewed very differently in a year or so, if not less, as things nosedive in Iraq, Iran gets bombed and unleashes 10 times the chaos in the Middle East, the economy here crashes and 50% of the population can’t afford to buy gas. MoveOn will look like prophets, if any Republican even gives a shit about Petraus’ wittle hurt feelings at that point which they won’t one bit, because they really don’t even now.

BTW, the staged backlash to the ad is the attempted swiftboating of the netroots, and we are not going to go limp like Kerry did. Any “liberal” who isn’t supporting MoveOn 100% on this: get off the fucking bus right now.

My Dad’s a pretty mainstream, “middle of the road” Democrat, but he has upon occasion gotten passionate about politics. He still talks about the amazing Keynote Address Mario Cuomo gave at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. I just found it on a site called American Rhetoric, where great oratory is archived, in text, audio and in some cases, video. Aren’t the Internets great?

Complete index to and partial text and audio database of the 100 most significant American political speeches of the 20th century, according to 137 leading scholars of American public address, as compiled by Stephen E. Lucas (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Martin J. Medhurst (Baylor University). Find out who made the cut and experience the power of rhetorical eloquence in this provocative list of “who’s who” in American public address.

They also have great movie speeches and a collection called “Rhetoric of 9-11.”

BTW, I think Cuomo would have made a great SC justice; Dad wishes he had been president.

Daily Kos :: Galloway’s Testimony Before Senate: MUST READ!

Only Senators Coleman and Levin were in attendance for the hearing of testimony by George Galloway, MP, on what part he may have played in the Iraq oil for food debacle. But Galloway knew he had a much larger audience and he used the opportunity well.

“Senator, this is the mother of all smoke screens,” he said and, by golly, Coleman, representing the entire administration, had to sit there and listen to it. The only downside is that none of the video I saw included an angle that caught his face. He got smacked down and he bloody well knew it. Levin was an ass too, but Coleman was the top stooge.

Brilliant stuff. Don’t know whether Galloway is guilty or not of the charges, though I suspect not, but he did a great thing today. You know he hit a nerve because all the officials in DC and all the big mouths on TV were attacking his personal life, charges by an ex-wife, et. al. Again, don’t know if true, but definitely more smoke. Anything, after all, rather than talk about the $300+billion dollar elephant in our communal living room.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth.

“Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

“Have a look at the oil that you didn’t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

“Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government.”

Blunt but eloquent and intelligent language (and no notes he was reading from as far as I could tell ) — no wonder it shook up Washington so!

The AP story is dry and boring as usual, but the Guardian piece is snarky and fun, and yet also much more accurate of the dynamic that occured.

I especially like this:

The culture clash between Mr Galloway’s bruising style and the soporific gentility of senate proceedings could hardly have been more pronounced, and drew audible gasps and laughs of disbelief from the audience. “I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him,” Mr Galloway went on. “The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns.”

American reporters seemed as fascinated as the British media: at one point yesterday, before it was his turn to speak, Mr Galloway strode from the room, sending journalists of all nationalities rushing after him - only to discover that he was going to the lavatory.

By condemning him in their report without interviewing him, the senators had already given Mr Galloway the upper hand. But not everything was in his favour. For a start, only two senators were present, sabotaging Mr Galloway’s efforts to attack the whole lickspittle lot of them - and one of the two, the Democrat Carl Levin, had spent much of his opening statement attacking the hypocrisy of the US government in allegedly allowing American firms to benefit from Iraqi oil corruption.

Even so, Mr Galloway was in his element, playing the role he relishes the most: the little guy squaring up for a fight with the establishment.

For these purposes, Senator Coleman served symbolically to represent all the evil in the world - the entire Republican party, the conscience of George Bush, the US government and the British government, too: no wonder his weak smile looked so nauseous.

So out of this, watch for a slew of new words to enter the American lexicon:

• lickspittle
• schoolboy howler

and last but by no means least:

• cock-a-hoop

I think I will be using that last one to describe my feelings about George Galloway, Respect Party MP, at least as concerns his visit to the U.S. Senate today. Bravo!

Open Letter to Anyone Who Gives a Shit About Justice by Ajai Raj.

Ajai Raj — great name by the way — is the kid who had the balls (and the bad taste) to ask Ann Coulter about ass-fucking at her recent intentionally incidiary stage show at UT Austin. As Steve Guillard said in the the comments section of his blog on this event, “[...] the kids in the audience took her seriously. This guy got the point that this was a show and he upstaged her.”

And from the Burnt Orange Reports comments:

Arresting that student was wrong, period. He should have just been kicked out. Where does it end? This sets a bad precedent. What he was said was indeed immature and vulgar, but guess what, folks–he has the right to say it. Personally, I would have asked, “How do you feel about heterosexual marriages where the husband repeatedly rapes his wife, beats her and denigrates her? Is that better than two homosexuals getting married?”

Regarding the argument that there were children in the room–I’m sure that hearing hate speech from Ann Coulter will make more of an impression that “f*ck” “ass” or masturbatory gestures. They are too young to understand that–but mommy and daddy embracing “values” and speech such as killing liberals and converting Arabs to Christianity and killing their leaders is something they may vaguely understand now, and will stick with them, rather than lewd actions and speech.

and

It’s all very funny, especially since its the Ann Coulters and the Antonin Scalias of the world, as well as the Republican/Bigot Party who are truly obsessed with the behavior now so verbally and colorfully tossed back at them and who want to put people in prison for it. Maybe we should now put these true “instigators” and “outside agitators” in jail under the newly expanded and capitalized offenses of “Bad Taste,” “Disruptive” and “Lewd Conduct” and, most ominous, “Crossing the Line.

I say kick Chris Matthews out on the street and give this kid a show on cable. So he’s got a criminal record — it’s a good way to start off in the broadcasting business; just ask Chuck Colson, G. Gordon Liddy, and Oliver North.