From a letter in the Daily News today, on the historians who voted George W. Bush the worst president in history: “Sounds to me like a bunch of secular progressive elitists trying to defame a good, decent, honest, God-fearing man … President Bush has brought a sense of morality and godliness back to the White House.”

And when was that, I wonder? When he signed off on his cabinet sanctioning and authorizing torture of American prisoners? When he kept telling America he was trying to avoid war, even though he’d already decided on regime change? When he kept telling America that we had to invade because Saddam had thrown out the UN weapons inspectors—even though this wasn’t true?

And by what logic is the son of a former president, Yale graduate, millionaire not an elitist himself?

Then the writer goes on to assert that Bush and McCain “will go down in history as the men who brought democracy, peace and stability to an otherwise Islamo-fascist, theocratic area of the world that was hellbent on killing anyone and everyone who didn’t cater to their deranged extremist beliefs.”

Ah, no. Until we invaded, Iraq was a largely secular nation. We brought the theocratic whackjobs to Iraq, which is why “democracy, peace and stability” are nowhere to be found in the Iraq Bush made.

Then there are the usual right-wing rants about how the enemy are fascists (they’re evil, but not fascist); everyone criticizing the war is doing so for a political agenda (in contrast to war supporters who presumably are noble souls totally removed from base politics) and it’s only because traitorous anti-war activists stabbed the troops in the back that we aren’t proclaiming victory now.

Reading letters like this are kind of unsettling. I believe in reason and negotiation to settle differences; it’s the only way to work things in a democracy where every point of view is entitled to be heard (even if we only hear it long enough to mock it). How do you reason with people who impose their own fantasy world over reality and refuse to admit error?

The writer says “This is what I firmly believe and you can’t change that.” And that’s the problem, we probably can’t.

In his 2002 speech supporting the Iraq resolution, he quotes Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker: “But Saddam Hussein is a figure of singular repugnance, and singular danger. To review: there is no dictator in power anywhere in the world who has, so far in his career, invaded two neighboring countries; fired ballistic missiles at the civilians of two other neighboring countries; tried to have assassinated an ex-president of the United States; harbored al Qaeda fugitives…; attacked civilians with chemical weapons; attacked the soldiers of an enemy with chemical weapons; conducted biological weapons experiments on human subjects; committed genocide; and… [weaponized] aflotoxin, a tool of mass murder and nothing else. I do not know how any thinking person could believe that Saddam Hussein is a run-of-the-mill dictator. No one else comes close… to matching his extraordinary and variegated record of malevolence.”

Strangely enough, McCain forgot to point out that many of those actions, including Saddam’s attack on Iran and his bombing their soldiers with chemical weapons, were sanctioned by the Reagan administration. At the time, our government’s only concern about Saddam’s use of poison gas on the Iranian forces was that it might make it hard for us to criticize other governments for doing it.

And when Congress tried to slap a penalty on Saddam for gassing the Kurds, the White House (Bush I, this time), blocked it.

So if Saddam is such an unparalleled monster of depravity, what did that make his trusted allies, Bush and Reagan?

Columnist Ron Hart: “Hillary is trying to win this election as only a Clinton knows how: by targeting a group of simple-minded poor whites and scaring the bejeezus out of them that her black male rival intends to take away their gun.”

Who knew Hart could be so funny? “As only a Clinton knows how”—given how often Republicans have played the Scary Black Male Card (both in this election—as I’ve blogged about previously—and others) and made guns an issue, that’s positively hysterical.

You may know that the Supreme Court recently ruled that a Goodyear employee, Lily Ledbetter, couldn’t sue her employer for paying her less than men doing the same work, because she didn’t find out until after 20 years with the company (apparently Goodyear, like a lot of corporations, doesn’t encourage people to discuss salaries). The court’s ruling was that based on current law, she had six months after the disparate pay started to file a suit, regardless of when she learned about it.

Congress is now looking at a bill to change the law. Sen. McCain, who skipped a vote on it, said that of course he supports equal pay but “this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.”

Some support. Apparently someone such as Ledbetter suing because she’s been discriminated against is worse than the actual discrimination in McCain’s view. How does he think these cases should be handled then? Have Ledbetter stare at her boss with sad puppydog eyes?

If McCain is the kind of elitist who thinks it should be legal to discriminate based on gender, fine, but spare me the crap about how he really, really supports equal rights.

Lisa Schiffren on the National Review Web site, regarding a photo of Julie Nixon Eisenhower contributing to the Obama campaign: “given the linked picture, perhaps the fact that she looks like a carbon copy of her mother — a bit mad, but with a little more iron about the jaw — suggests that she is not her father’s daughter after all. The picture is more shocking than the deed.”

Is Schiffren suggesting that Eisenhower doesn’t follow her father’s politics? If that’s all it is, what does her mother’s picture have to do with it (because politics, astonishingly, isn’t something that’s passed down genetically with the bone structure).

Is she implying that Eisenhower is literally not Nixon’s daughter? In which case does she think Pat Nixon cheated on Dick or simply cloned herself?

And what’s so shocking about supporting Obama over McCain?

I see that in yesterday’s Daily News, someone thought he had a conclusive argument in favor of the right to keep guns in our cars on other people’s property: Even if they ban guns, people can still bring in baseball bats and knives!

This is an old, silly argument by the NRA and similar gun-worshippers: If government takes away the guns, people will just find other weapons.

Quite possibly true. But there’s a reason we hear about the Virginia Tech shooting or the Columbine shooting and not the Virginia Tech knifing or the Colubmine clubbing—the chance someone with a blade or a blunt instrument could go on that kind of killing spree without a gun and not get brought down is well, nil.

If knives and clubs were as effective as these gun-nuts seem to think, then all we’d have to do is walk around carrying a baseball bat and we’d be able to defend ourselves from crazies like the Virginia Tech guy. But the pro-gun forces all insist that without guns we’d be helpless—doesn’t it occur to them that cuts both ways?

How much does John McCain pay for his haircuts?
What is his bowling score?

Since the national press keeps insisting these are relevant to how we pick our presidents, why aren’t they giving us full disclosure? What does the senator have to hide?

Warhawk and Middle East expert Kenneth Pollack on McCain’s frequent references to the insurgents in Iraq as “al-Qaida”: “A perfectly reasonable catchall phrase” because campaigning “does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing.”

And it’s not like calling the insurgents “al-Qaida” or saying that Iran is financing “al-Qaida” is going to confuse anyone, is it? It’s not like the question of whether Iran and the masterminds of 9/11 are working together (they’re not, actually—their branches of Islam consider each other heretical) is important? It’s not as if calling the insurgents “al-Qaida” would excuse our staying in Iraq instead of pulling out and going after the real al-Qaida on the Pakistani border, is it?

No, I can’t imagine why the American public would want long-winded explanations of the difference.

From hilzoy on the Obsidian Wings blog: “One of the great dangers of the Bush administration is that it will permanently alter our sense of what is possible or acceptable. You can see an analog of this when people say things like: Bush won’t be able to do X, or: he will have to do Y, where these statements do not refer to physical necessity or impossibility. (E.g., if memory serves, when the surge began, some Republicans said: if it doesn’t work, Bush will have to withdraw.) The sense in which people who say such things think that Bush “has to” or “can’t” do something or other is just that there are certain things we do not believe that any President would do, and others we think he must do. There are lines we assume he would never cross.

But this administration does not recognize the existence of any such lines. They do not “have to” withdraw just because none of their plans have worked, the army is breaking, and the war has next to no popular support. They would “have to” withdraw only if someone put a gun to their collective heads and forced them to. They do not “have to” obey the law or the Constitution: they will only if they are literally compelled to. Likewise, they do not “have to” respect even the most basic principles of decency and humanity, even when obligated to do so by US law and treaties we have signed, which are, according to the Constitution, the law of the land. Neither moral suasion nor legal obligation seem to matter to them. The only sense in which they “have to” do anything is the sense involving physical necessity.
….

The Bush administration threatens us with the catastrophe of losing our sense that there are things the government cannot do every time they do one of those things. I never, ever want to go along with their redefinition of what is possible, which is why I refuse to stop being outraged.”

NYT columnist Dowd on Obama: “Obama did not grow up in cosseted circumstances …But his exclusive Hawaiian prep school and years in the Ivy League made him a charter member of the elite, along with the academic experts he loves to have in the room.”

Down on herself: “I grew up in a house with a gun, a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling. (My bowling trophy was one of my most cherished possessions.)”

Apparently we’re supposed to conclude that while Obama has become an elitist, writing a column for more than a decade for one of the country’s top papers (and the salary that comes with that) doesn’t qualify Dowd as part of the elite. Uh-huh.

This may seem a trivial point to blog about, but this theme crops up in the press quite a bit: Politicians (usually Democrats) are rich elitists who are out of touch with the common man, while journalists, no matter how highly paid, have their finger on the pulse of Joe Average.

John Kerry, for instance, was mocked as an elitist by one journalist for ordering green tea in a restaurant in the Midwest (apparently the writer considered it an obscure drink unheard of by anyone who isn’t very, very, very rich). John Edwards, as we know, has a really, really, really big house (so does McCain, but he invites lots of journalists over, so apparently that’s different) and pays for expensive haircuts.

On the other hand, we have cable pundit Chris Matthews, who owns a $4.4 million home on Nantucket and recently told an interviewer that “I don’t think people look at me as the establishment, do you? Am I part of the winner’s circle in American life? I don’t think so.”

Ann Coulter, who grew up in the suburb where the median income is over $200,000 (IIRC) has proclaimed her spiritual home is in Queens and Kansas City. None of her actual homes are in either place.

And then there’s Dowd, who seems to feel that wealth and success can’t possibly have affected her like they have that snotty Obama.

(While it’s aside from my main point, Dowd’s column is also pretty feeble: She points out that Obama’s mother was an anthropologist to justify that Obama “appears to be observing the odd habits of locals” in rural areas, though she doesn’t offer much in the way of examples).

(Edited from initial post slightly).