Sunday Discussion Group — Year-End Edition

December 25, 2005

It’s the last Sunday Discussion Group of 2005 so it seemed like a good time to look back at the year that was. I’ve compiled my list of favorite political stories of the year and invite you to weigh in with which one you like best. The standards of measurement are entirely subjective, so you can vote for the one you think was most important, or most entertaining, or most outrageous, whatever.

In no particular order:

* Pundit Payola — 2005 saw the administration hire pundits to “catapult the propaganda.” GOP lobbyists were apparently inspired by the idea, and put a few conservative writers on the payroll too.

* Harriet Miers — To this day, no one’s quite sure what Bush was thinking.

* Terri Schiavo — Congressional Republicans exploit a horrible personal tragedy and disgust the nation in the process.

* Social Security — The White House interpreted the 2004 election as a mandate for privatizing Social Security. It’s been a long time since a president was this wrong about a signature domestic policy initiative.

* Gannon/Guckert — A male prostitute pretending to be a journalist is repeatedly given a press pass and invited to ask soft-ball questions at White House press briefings. No, seriously, this really happened.

* Jack Abramoff — The most corrupt lobbyist in recent memory got caught and may take down the Republican Congress.

* Tom DeLay — After playing fast and loose with the law and congressional ethics for years, the former bug-spray salesman is under indictment, stripped of his leadership post, and fighting for his political life.

* Plame scandal — For the first time in 130 years, a high-ranking White House official is under criminal indictment and the White House remains the subject of a criminal investigation. And Patrick Fitzgerald is a star.

* Michael Brown — It’s a phrase that will live on forever, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

* Randy “Duke” Cunningham — Forget the $2.4 million in bribes; the symbol for Republican excess for this decade is the 19th-century Louis-Philippe commode.

* Dems make gains — Kaine wins in Virginia; Corzine wins in New Jersey; and Paul Hackett almost pulls off a miracle in Ohio. A sign of things to come?

* “Mean Jean” Schmidt — Not long after promising to uphold dignity and decorum in the House, Schmidt attacks Rep. Paul Murtha, a former Marine and decorated war hero, as “a coward.” And intra-party relations reach yet another low.

* Pat “Hit Man” Robertson — TV preacher causes international incident by calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Can’t you just feel the Christian love?

* Cindy Sheehan — Looking back, August would have been a lot quieter if Bush had taken five minutes to chat with this woman.

* Snoopgate — Warrants? Bush doesn’t need no stinkin’ warrants. And the “rule of law” party slips a little further into the abyss….

I’m no doubt missing a few, so feel free to vote for a political story that’s not on my list. What say you?

I’m voting for Social Security. Right after the election Bush reached for the infamous “third rail” and once he touched it nothing has gone right for him since. Democrats who were feeling in the dumps found they could successfuly fight back also, and have renewed hopes for 2006.

  • Two words: Terri Schiavo. If Dems take back Congress, the political world will look back at this as the moment Republicans jumped the shark.

  • I’d choose Cindy and Terri. Someone asked what would you put in a time capsule to describe the summer of 2005, and I said an oil can filled with blood and Cindy Sheean’s sunhat. It was the beginning of the change in public perception not just of the war but of Bush. Same thing with poor Terri. The whole ugly fiasco shone a light on the minds of the wingnuts.

    What a sad year it has been really when you look at that list. I have high hopes for the New Year and continuing to tear down the wall of the crumbling facade of the Bush adminstration.

  • Iraq deserves some more coverage here.

    I intentionally steered clear of the war for this list, in part because it’s not a purely political story. I just couldn’t justify putting Pat Robertson’s assassination comments, Gannon/Guckert, and a devastating military crisis on the same list.

  • If you’d just take your bush hating glasses off you’d see that it has been a very good year for the country.

  • If you’d just take your bush hating glasses off you’d see that it has been a very good year for the country.

    Wow, who knew Kevin Drum’s trolls are migratory? On Christmas morning, no less!

  • I feel like a kid in a candy store. So many choices and they all look delicious. Can I have one of each.

    I would just like to say Snoopgate may answer the question of what Bush was thinking with Miers. At the time, he knew the NYTimes had the snoopgate story in the can. He, at least in part, may have been looking to put someone on the Court that could pull his chestnuts out of the fire after the times kicked them in. Keep in mind, Alito fits the bill on this as well.

  • Under the heading “Hey, buddy can you spare me a dime”?

    To the troll known as “tbrosz”: This Christmas season, my wife is working, but I am not. We are tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and I need a decent job to pay our bills. We don’t enjoy luxuries like cable television. Me, my wife and two kids are hosting Christmas dinner for my wife’s relatives, and we are using borrowed space heaters to heat the house (I live in Pennsylvania) because my Christmas present came earlier in the week–in the form of a broken gas furnace which will take $3,000 to replace (hopefully by Friday). Merry Christmas, tbrosz.

    Bush’s trickle-down economy truly SUCKS!

  • I would have to vote for a “trend” rather than a specific incident. The trend by the courts to rule against the Bushies is becoming more apparent. We have had the Schiavo case, the intelligent design case, and now there is the 4th Circuit Court refusing to let the Bushies transfer Padilla from a military court to a criminal court.

    Op-Ed columnist Steve Chapman summarizes the Padilla case in today’s Chicago Tribune when he writes: “The court’s meaning was plain: Either you were lying to us then, or you are lying to us now.”

  • All of these are big stories, and merely illuminate the underlying mendacity and incompentence of BushCo. I have three choices, for very different reasons, with (ultimately) a devastating effect on the Rethugs:

    In terms of finally opening the eyes of Joe Six-Pack, it was clearly poor Terri Schiavo. EVERY family has or will face this excruciating end-of-life decision for their loved ones, and NO ONE wants the government to tell them what they can and cannot do.

    As for the media finally having (at least) some of the scales fall from their eyes, it was Katrina and utter devastation of New Orleans. The incompetence of BushCo and the disgraceful plight of racial/poor have-nots opened a lot more eyes of the still-decent if pre-occupied masses of mainstream Americans.

    Finally, for many in Congress — especially the sycophantic and lazy Rethugs — Snoopgate has finally awakened them to just how far they have allowed the Senate’s credibility and role as a co-equal branch of the government to wither and dangerously erode.

    Without these three events, BushCo would still be getting away with destroying our planet, our middle class, the economy, and our democracy (along with our civil liberties). NOW, we have a chance to get our progressive messages through to all of America while they are in a mood to finally listen. When one pays attention, the corruption and incompetence of all of the Rethugs — BushCo, the Congress, lobbyists, governors, and state legislators — is impossible to avoid.

    We have a chance to take back Congress in 2006 and impeach the Lying.Fucking.Bastard.-in-Chief, or at least take back the White House in 2008 and then truly “clean house” of all of the cronyism and incompetence from all of the bureaucracy. With a new year comes a new chance to finally bring some sanity to our government and, by extension, our individual lives and our relationships with the rest of the world.

  • I would just like to say Snoopgate may answer the question of what Bush was thinking with Miers. At the time, he knew the NYTimes had the snoopgate story in the can. He, at least in part, may have been looking to put someone on the Court that could pull his chestnuts out of the fire after the times kicked them in. Keep in mind, Alito fits the bill on this as well.

    Comment by Rege — 12/25/2005 @ 11:46 am

    My very thoughts on this as well. Mr. Bush knows good and well that he has been outside of the law for several years with his warrantless searches. It has been said that he has done so after receiving legal counsel. Oh….from whom? His personal lawyer. There she is!

    The very person who conspired (my term) with Mr Bush is the very person he wanted on the Supreme Court – where this in all likelihood can end up. (But don’t you know she is a “good person?. She goes to church.) What a red herring those code words were supposed to provide! We are all distracted to the religious ferver of it. While all along, he needed someone on that court who will act as a ringer. He still does. …and Alito is already on record as being quite lenient toward the concept.

  • 1.) Bush gripped and planted a ‘KISS’ on the forehead of former Democratic Presidential Candidate and Senator Joseph Lieberman.
    2.) The Commander in Chief’s military record is highly questionable.
    3.) In the first 2004 Presidential debate, Bush referred to UBL and Al Quadea as “folks” after Kerry reminded him that they were our attackers and not Saddam. But referred to Saddam as a ‘madman’ everytime he opened his mouth prior to the “preemptive” war against Iraq.
    4.) Bush withdrawing– from the public he vowed to protect and make safer without “Saddam in power”–deeper in to a small circle(bubble if you will) where reality cannot penetrate and the people cannot ‘reach” him.
    5.) We should pray that the Iraq people forgives US All.

  • Hurricane Katrina rips the mask off the Croney-in-Chief, and reveals the malefactor behind the lies.

  • I’m paraphrasing this, from a Paul Krugman column prior to the 2004 election “The Republicans can’t afford to lose because then everyone would find out what they have been up to”.

    I think that Analytical Liberal nails the events that have awakened the American public. From conversations that I have had with people, Barbara Bush’s comments about the Katrina refugees in the Houston Astrodome were the straw that broke the camel’s back. If there is one character trait that the majority of Americans can’t stomach, it’s arrogance, and good old Bab’s showed her true colors well. Is it just me or have they been keeping Barbara out of public view since that time?

    For myself, I think that the Jack Abramoff scandal has the larger implication. It symbolizes the type of thinking, disregard for the law, that Republicans seem to have in general. And, of course, I wouldn’t mind seeing his bosom buddy Grover Norquist take a fall.

    I couldn’t decide if tbrosz was a troll, or being sarcastic, but either way my list doesn’t have Bush in it. Not that I don’t think he deserves it. Bush rode in on a carpet of scandal that was laid before he set foot in the White House. There’s no way that he could have perpetrated all of these crimes against the American public, without all of those willing accomplices such as Delay and Cunningham.

  • This is NOT the most important or best story of the year, but it deserves a mention to show how ludicrous the national discourse has become: Intelligent Design — how the media worked the story into a “he said”/”she said” story between evolutionists and ID’ists; how Bush, Santorum and McCain embraced ID, and how a judge last week shot down the Dover PA creationists, saying that the very idea of bringing the issue to court was “inane” to begin with.

  • “Bush’s thinking on Miers? They like me! They’ll love her!!”

    I’d say rather:

    I don’t give a hoot whether they like me. I’m president and I’m drawing on my political capital.

  • You couldn’t make this list up! Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
    After much thought, I’m voting for Harriet Miers. It so captured Bubble Boy’s alternate view of reality. He just doesn’t get it.
    Unfortunately, we do get it. Day after day after f**king day.
    I can’t wait to see next year’s list.
    Happy new year!

  • By far the biggest is snoopgate, because this is a direct attempt at a coup d’etat on the Constitution and the basic principles on which the republic is founded. This is the most profound constitutional crisis since Watergate, and is interestingly enough the product of the “dead enders” of Watergate, from which it comes pretty directly.

    If this is allowed to stand, all the other controversies on the list will be meaningless.

  • Going by most important, I’d have to say the Plame scandal. Snoopgate, it’s too soon to tell, but it could become just as important.

  • The federal judge in Florida who refused to intervene in the Schiavo case should qualify for a profile of courage. Recall, Congress had just voted to grant the authority to intervene in the case and the President had flown back to DC specifically to sign that legislation. The whole country expected the federal district court to at least grant an evidentiary hearing and stay the removal of the feeding tube. Instead, the judge fairly appraised the Florida proceedings and found no basis to use the extraordinary authority Congress had granted him. The hysterical reaction that followed by the Republican leadership in Congress woke many Americans to the mean natured authoritarian instincts of the religious right wing of the Republican Party. Had that judge simply gone with the flow and held the hearing it would have been yet another victory for the theocrats who seem so perilously close to all the levers of power in what at times appears to be our too fragile democracy.

    Richard Arvedon

  • I’d have to say the biggest story is that
    Bush survived all the scandals, and that
    his ratings are on the way up at year
    end, as he pushes toward 50%.

    I ‘ve read more obituaries of the Bush
    presidency in the last four months than
    I can possibly remember, and the guy
    is still standing, ratings moving up. Truly
    the indestructible man.

    I remember the great 1953 adaptation of
    H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds,” where they
    dropped the atom bomb on the advancing Martians,
    figuring that would finally do them in. When the
    dust cleared, the Martians continued their
    relentless attack, untouched and unfazed by the fury of
    the nuclear assault.

    Sorry guys, but he survived the worst.
    The story for 2006 – He’s baaaaaaaack,
    and nobody can stop him.

  • Not listed but worth mentioning is the ongoing scepticism and debate about our uncoordinated and very difficult to trust voting systems.

    The Abrahmoff deal bleeds in so many directions. It has huge unrealized potential.

    But the NSA spying saga has all the hallmarks of the Imperial Hubris that has been the foundation for so much of the concocted chaos that defines the Shrub years. They were corrupt when they came in but extreme power has exposed their desire for nothing less than complete control of this country. And as Mr. Cleaver notes, the connections to Watergate are like some dormant zombie hearing friendly voices after 40 years and sitting up in it’s shallow grave ready to begin it’s plodding journey once again. It’s an ugly but important reminder of how vulnerable our democracy is.

  • Mr Integrity, Colin Powell, speaks up like a man again, “I see absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions,” he said.

    What a phoney.

  • >Sorry guys, but he survived the worst.
    >The story for 2006 – He’s baaaaaaaack,
    >and nobody can stop him.

    Comment by hark

    Yeah it’s scary. But the mid term elections are coming up.

    Impeachment in 2007!

  • Poor Frist didn’t even make the list. Though his troubles are mere parking tickets compared with Abramoff, DeLay or Cunningham, it’s still significant that the Senate Majority leader’s stock sales are the subject of 2 separate investigations. If not for being overshadowed by the far more outlandish corruptions of Abramoff, DeLay and Cunningham, this would be a pretty big deal.

    Add in guys like Ney, and it becomes difficult to believe there is such a thing as an honest republican. I think I’ll vote for ‘Culture of Corruption’.

  • It is truly amazing how the GOP/Bush flitted from one disaster to another, in an almost comical fashion. The headline story on the news seemed to be, just as one bad story was dying down, another awful occurrence for them would pop out of nowhere. It started with Social Security, and the frightening lack of support for that idea lasted a couple of months, just enough time for the Terri Schiavo mess, which led into Cindy Sheehan, even more of a mess in Iraq, the revelations about the lies that led us into war, including the Downing Street memos. And then as everything was just dying down a bit, Katrina happened, and the callous, unfocused, lame-ass response to that from Bushie and Brownie. Oh, and then Harriet Miers happened. Through all this you’ve got DeLay and the others all getting indicted, the stifling of the Patriot Act, and just as Bush goes back on the offensive with his “Iraq is great” barnstorming tour, we have the spying thing.

    And these aren’t minor incidents, either. Sure, the media likes to hype and jump on a trend, but spying against your citizens, the ham-fisted Schiavo thing, which represented the worst of government intrusion into people’s lives, the lack of response to Katrina, and the awful Social Security proposal (or lack of, really), weren’t exactly events that could be ignored.

    What a terrible year. The fact that his ratings are even above 30% shows how little some people care for this country.

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