Bush in retrospect on the Cold War: "what we did in the middle east during that time was stupid"

Well, he didn't exactly say that word-for-word, but in a speech about the middle east needing to embrace democracy he might as well have:

Repudiating decades of U.S. policy, President Bush said Thursday the United States and its allies have been wrong in "excusing and accommodating" a lack of freedom in the Middle East..."Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - and in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," the president said in a groundbreaking conclusion.

Gee, hawkish conservatives who approved of all that and still defend it must be seething now...that is, if they aren't still distracted about the Reagan TV-movie.

A curious response follows:

Middle East scholars said Bush's appeal for democracy lacked any followup programs. "No new programs announced, no new money for promoting democracy - just rhetoric," said Martin Indyk, who had been assistant secretary of state for the Middle East in the Clinton administration. "The rhetoric isn't going to move the hardliners in Iran, Yasser Arafat or the governments in Saudi Arabia and Egypt who are now scared of the consequences of the kind of political liberalization that the president is preaching to them."

Isn't this the exact opposite of what many of the complaints towards the reconstruction bill were? "how come we can do all this for Iraqis but not for the American people, blah blah?"

So both sides now have remarks that contradict their original stances, and both will be ignored. Wonderful, everything's normal.

Another day, another filibuster-to-be...

The Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed one of President Bush's federal appeals court nominees today in a narrow vote that reflected the deep partisan differences over judicial confirmations. The 10-to-9 vote along party lines sent the nomination of Justice Janice Rogers Brown, an outspoken, conservative African-American who sits on the California Supreme Court, to the full Republican-led Senate for consideration next week, where Democrats are expected to attempt to block it with a filibuster.

As usual. Nope, can't have his nominees approved, that'd be giving in to "extremism". Same as the republicans did to Clinton's nominees.

Later in the article:

In her tenure on the California Supreme Court, Justice Brown has been regularly described by the California news media and by legal analysts as the most conservative justice. She has been an outspoken opponent of affirmative action programs and a strong critic of growth of government.

The "conservative"-leaning Supreme Court doesn't seem to care much about gov't expansion, and the lower federal courts have been ignoring it mostly, so why the hoopla? It seems to me that either the ones fighting this don't realize that no matter the percieved views on the bench we generally get the same vague statism anyway, or they don't care.

BTW: ever notice there's not much coverage of the background of federal court nominees unless they're polarizing picks? Personally I'd be more worried about the ones that sail through: you just KNOW something's wrong if they don't even attempt to bicker.

While we're on the lighter side of things:

Matt Drudge catches the most honest remark I've heard in years...

The top networks are suffering through a lackluster fall season partly because ``some of the programming just sucked,'' NBC's entertainment chief said on Tuesday. ``Our programming is not that good and the Nielsen sample is bad. End of story,'' said NBC's Jeff Zucker, speaking to the International Radio & Television Society Foundation.

And people wonder why I read so much...
Hmm, that'd make a good pro-literacy campaign slogan: "Read, cuz TV is ass"

Whoever controls the banner ad that appears over this page has a nice sense of humor. Everything I bash on here ends up advertized up there a few days later. First I skewer Howard Dean and end up with a link to his campaign site, then I get an ad for some christian group after slamming religion, now this convenient endorsement. LOL...

I don't mind it though. Better than paying for space.