Rush is classy

Media Matters for America will document and correct conservative misinformation in each news cycle. Some nice ones in here: Rush Limbaugh’s comments on the March for Women’s Lives: “Some of these babes, I’m telling you, like the sexual harassment crowd. They’re out there protesting what they actually wish would happen to them sometimes.” [4/26/04].

‘There seems to be almost an absence of any analytical or deliberative process for mapping the problem or exploring alternatives or estimating consequences,’ said Graham Allison, a professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. And Bush appears to give greater weight to his own instincts than to experts or other sources of advice and information. The president has a ‘bias for action,’ said Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. ‘I’ve been struck by [how] Bush’s sense of personal identity as a leader shapes his decisions,’

The Ney Yorker looks at Abu Ghraib prison abuse in Iraq. It seems to show that the abuse of prisoners was not isolated. It was systematic and encouraged by the intelligence community.

President Bush took a huge diplomatic gamble two weeks ago when he forcefully embraced Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza and handed Israel key concessions on a final peace deal. The backlash in Arab and European countries was especially intense, but administration officials argued Sharon’s plan carried the seeds of a breakthrough in the stalled peace process. Now, the Likud Party’s overwhelming rejection of that plan has left the administration’s credibility in the Middle East in tatters.