“…a devil, a donkey and a drunkard.” -Hugo Chavez, referring to president Bush

Of course Hugo didn’t really mean this. He was going for “Satan, an ass and a boozehound.”

WashingtonPost.com:

Chavez Says Attacks on Bush Not Personal

CARACAS, Venezuela – Hugo Chavez has called President Bush a devil, a donkey and a drunkard. But on Wednesday the Venezuelan leader said his comments were “nothing personal.”

Chavez, who had stepped up his verbal assault during Bush’s Latin American tour this week, suggested that the two adversaries might eventually overcome their differences and even play a game of dominos or baseball together.

“One day, if maybe George Bush and I survive all of this, we will reach old age, and it would be good to play a game of dominos, street baseball,” Chavez said on his weekday radio program.

But he said his comments about the American leader were “nothing personal” and that his opposition to Bush was due to “deep ethical, political, historic and geopolitical” reasons.

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Caesar: Antonius!
Antony: Caesar.
Caesar: Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Antony: Fear him not, Caesar, he’s not dangerous;
He is a noble Roman, and well given.
Caesar: Would he were fatter!
- Julius Caesar, 1.2, 190-198, William Shakespeare

Bush’s men are both fat and still hungry. As corrupt as these men and women get, they are never satiated. But they-ve been choking these past few weeks. Our boy-emperor need not fear plots with daggers - but subpoenas are another matter.

Libby has been found guilty. The FBI’s abuse of the Patriot Act and their lies about their activities have been revealed. Alberto Gonzales has been laid bare as the fraud and liar he is. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are testing the limits of how low an approval rating can go. And Karl Rove, who is still accusing the Democrats of playing dirty politics, is watching more and more of his dirty tricks being exposed.

The more we learn about the Bush administration, the worse they look. And hallelujah, Congress is scrutinizing them, and the general public is seeing more of the truth.

A year ago, this U.S. attorney scandal, a mere fraction of the wrongdoing perpetrated by this administration, would have been furious fodder for liberal blogs, but little probably would have been done. This time, the liberal blogs were right as usual - and the mainstream media actually listened. Is this a dream? Not that all the coverage is fantastic, but isn-t this widespread furor over obvious misdeeds, incompetence and villainy exactly what’s supposed to happen? Not that everything is going well, but isn-t this cause for hope?

Did the divine inspiration and brilliant instincts of George W. Bush warn him of this? Has Dick Cheney’s unerring judgment fled to an undisclosed location? Did Karl Rove see this in the entrails of a crony, or have his powers of prognostication left him?

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Antony says:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

The truth always comes out eventually. But there’s now real hope that some of the evil can be dug out while the culprits are still alive, or even while they-re still in office. Every lie exposed and misdeed challenged is a small victory. And the permanent discrediting of these knaves and scoundrels is a matter of national security. There is providence in the fall of an attorney general. (Or something like that.)

Happy Ides of March!

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

To continue The Chart Project, despite all those rightwing charges about a “liberal media,” it seems fairly rare to see true “liberals” on mainstream television. It’s pretty common to see a strident, hardcore rightwinger paired with a moderate and relatively civil, measured Democrat. This may be partially due to most news outlets- corporate ownership, which tends by its nature to be establishment or bourgeois (to resurrect a seldom-used term in the States). This also may be because the United States has grown more conservative in bent in the last fifty years or so, at least in self-perception and by self-identification (although on actual policy issues, Americans tend to lean liberal). There’s also no major socialist party in the United States, unlike many other industrialized nations, but more to the point, America lacks programs such as universal health care that are common in many foreign major players on the world stage.

Of course labels such as “liberal” and “progressive” are contentious, and can mean different things to different people, even in a single country. Plus the “hawk” versus “dove” divide, as contentious as those terms are as well, is probably a more important dichotomy than any other currently in American politics, even though it’s often ignored, obscured, or just poorly covered by most of the mainstream media, who think almost exclusively in Democrat-Republican terms (as covered in “The Chart That Explains It All!” ).

There’s also an inherent flaw with a spectrum like this, even though it gives more nuance to the normal binary oppositions of Democrat-Republican and liberal- conservative. For example, a one-dimensional scale like this doesn-t allow the flexibility of a two-dimensional grid that considers both social and economic liberalism/conservatism:
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