Today’s bombshell is the Rolling Stone article about Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In case you’re unable to have the web fed to you intravenously throughout the day, as I do — General McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, and his aides badmouthed the Obama Administration. In print.

I’ve been trying to understand precisely what’s wrong with General McChrystal, and my impression is that he’s an asshole. This could be wrong, of course, since I never met him. Alex Pareene provides a more nuanced overview. A consensus is forming that the General feared the President wanted to end the Afghanistan campaign, and McChrystal seems to have thought the interview would stir public opinion against Obama and toward continued military operations in Afghanistan. That was a really stupid thing to think, but there it is.

As Pareene says, “the story presents a counterinsurgency expert general who got literally everything he wanted from an initially (and understandably) reluctant White House, and who is still childishly peeved that anyone in the civilian leadership ever had doubts to begin with.” See also Marc Ambinder.

The military’s subordination to civilian authority is a time-honored principle in the U.S. going back to the beginning. Generals who forget that principle tend not to be remembered well. George McClellan and Douglas MacArthur come to mind, suggesting that we need a rule about not promoting anyone with a “Mc” name above the rank of colonel. And McChrystal needs to be relieved of command asap.

Oil still spreading in Gulf of Mexico, wingnuts still crazy. Today’s headlines —

In crazy wingnut news, we’ve learned that Rep. Michele Bachmann is so crazy she makes Bill O’Reilly seem sensible.

By now you may have heard the rumor that Rahm Emanuel will be leaving the White House. I say “rumor” because the story seems to have been fabricated entirely out of speculation, but “Rahm Emanuel expected to quit White House” is an easier headline to write than “Anonymous Source Who May Not Know Diddly From Squat Expects Rahm Emanuel to Quit White House.”

Not that anyone I know would mind if Rahm Emanuel did quit the White House, but apparently, there’s no “there” to this story. The columnist for The Telegraph just pulled it out of his butt. That hasn’t stopped anyone on the Right Blogosphere from seizing this story as evidence that the Obama White House is on its last legs.

Regarding the Gulf — everybody screwed up. This was in the New York Times —

An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.

It also shows that the Obama administration failed to grapple with either the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations even as it made plans this spring to expand offshore oil exploration.

Finally, today Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explains how economic growth (or not growth) happens.

I understand the White House is working overtime to hang Rep. Joe Barton’s apology to BP around the necks of the entire Republican Party. I hope this is noticed by independent voters, because of course it won’t make a dent in the opinions of wingnuts.

Barton’s “shakedown” and “slush fund” lines are, in fact, popular in the wingnut echo chamber. Via Digby, we find the increasingly irrational Rush Limbaugh saying —

Now, here are my questions. You know, it’s funny, was just last week congressional Democrats said they wanted BP to set aside $20 billion. Where did this figure come from? And will the same people be administering this as who administered TARP money? Look, the government is in charge of this. I want to know who’s gonna get it. Who’s gonna get this money? Union activists? ACORN people? Who’s going to get this money? Let’s keep a sharp eye on who Feinberg gives this money to because I’m telling you this is just another bailout fund called something else and we’ll see who gets it. If Obama’s past is prologue — and it is — then this is going to be used as a little miniature slush fund and that’s why he’s bragging about it being third party, independent, so forth and so on.

Of course, an escrow account is not a “slush fund,” but you know that, so let’s go on … In wingnutland, see, the money set aside to play for the economic damages done to small business and honest, hard-working wage earners along the Gulf Coast is a “bailout.”

And somehow, ACORN is going to get its hands on the money, even though ACORN had dismantled itself and is no longer operational. I have no doubt that the name George Soros will get hauled into the Right’s hallucinations about the escrow account eventually. ACORN, George Soros, union activists (i.e., “thugs”) — all bogymen.

The basic irrationality that is wingnuttia is exposed pretty well in this Associated Press article, which I think is meant to be a fluff piece extolling the virtues of conservative citizen activists. But if you actually read it, you see that the wingnuts seem not to be living in the same time-space continuum as the rest of us. Even when they get something right, they get it wrong. Here, for example, we see an exchange that includes Hildy Angius, head of an organization called Colorado River Republican Women —

One of the golfers, between sips of a stiff drink, asks about the country he loves: “Why are we in such dire straits?”

“Years of neglect,” says Angius.

“Democrats!” another golfer exclaims.

See, in their world, Republicans did not control Congress for most of the past two decades, and the George W. Bush administration didn’t count as “not-Democrat” because Bush was not a conservative. And why not?

For her, it comes down to the competing and vastly divergent ideologies of the left vs. the right, and a feeling that American conservatives have been marginalized for years – throughout even the presidency of George W. Bush.

Bush, she says, “spent like a drunken sailor. He reached across the aisle. We weren’t happy with the taxes. We weren’t happy with his policy on illegal immigration. So, by the time he left, he was not very popular among conservatives. Because he was not conservative.”

We weren’t happy with the taxes — what taxes is she talking about? Does she think Bush raised taxes? And when did Dubya ever reach across the aisle? And the idea that the Right has been “marginalized” these past few years, when in fact until very recently the Right pretty much controlled the whole show in Washington, and still does control a whole lot state governments, tells me that Angius and her ilk are not responding rationally to current events. Instead, they’re responding to dog whistles.

I’ll get back to blogging in a day or two, I promise. Meanwhile — how about that Rep. Joe Barton, R-TX? Barton, who takes a whole lot of money from the Petroleum Industry, got his “shakedown” line from a GOP press release, btw.

Meanwhile, Tony Hayward went to Congress and did an Alberto Gonzales imitation. Didn’t go over well, though.

Comment away.

Update: Underwhelmed. I was expecting more.

The President is supposed to take charge of the oil spill in a major speech tonight, but until then let’s just gossip about Rand Paul.

First off, I hope you didn’t miss the juicy bit about Rand not being a board-certified ophthalmologist, as he had claimed. He’s certified by a board, the National Board of Ophthalmology. But the National Board of Ophthalmology is a board Rand set up himself about ten years ago and runs out of a post office box in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He is not certified by the American Board of Ophthalmology, which is the official board that certifies ophthalmologists.

Apparently he had claimed to have been certified by both boards, but fibbed. When asked about this, the best excuse he could come up with was “what does that have to do with the election?”

The other juicy bit was brought up by Dave Neiwert over the weekend. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to Kentucky, but I’ve always found it beautiful in its way. But what is making it not so beautiful is mountaintop coal mining, the kind of mining that takes off the tops of mountains and doesn’t put them back.

So here’s our boy Rand on mountaintop removal:

PAUL: I think whoever owns the property can do with the property as they wish, and if the coal company buys it from a private property owner and they want to do it, fine. The other thing I think is that I think coal gets a bad name, because I think a lot of the land apparently is quite desirable once it’s been flattened out. As I came over here from Harlan, you’ve got quite a few hills. I don’t think anybody’s going to be missing a hill or two here and there.

And some people like having the flat land. Some of it apparently has become quite valuable when it’s become flattened. And I think they do a good job at reclaiming the land, and you know, adding back in topsoil, bringing in help. So the bottom line is, it’s not just me pandering to coal. It’s me believing in private property.

Now, the part about “some people” liking the flat land and claiming it becomes “quite valuable” when it is flattened is hallucinatory. Yes, the excuse the coal companies trot out for leaving the former mountain tops barren is that the flattened land is ready to be “developed.” Developed by whom, pray tell, and for what? Many of these mining areas are too sparsely populated, and too far off the beaten path, to support a bunch of shopping malls or housing developments. And the land doesn’t offer much else in the way of resources, except that it used to be pretty. Dave has some graphics showing how much of the land has not been “reclaimed,” and data that says only 4 percent of “flattened” land in Appalachia has been “developed” in any way.

The thing is, how can you live in Kentucky and not know this? Put another way, how far up his ass has Rand shoved his head?

The other major factor of mountain removal is that the mining operations pollute water for miles around. Rand is in denial about this, saying that if it were true, “local judges” would stop it. But the fact is that “local judges” have no authority to do anything about it, and many hundreds of miles of mountain creeks and streams have been polluted.

Are you hearing this, Kentucky?

I’m not feeling up to writing much, but I want to note this news article in the New York Times —

President Obama for the first time will address the nation about the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday night and outline his plans to legally force BP executives to create an escrow account reserving billions of dollars to compensate businesses and individuals if the company does not do so on its own, a senior administration official said on Sunday.

This is good, because claims against BP are going to be tied up in court for years and years, and the people whose livelihoods are being ruined don’t have years and years to wait for compensation.

I understand that Republicans are still pushing for continued drilling and are trying to make the lost jobs of the rig workers an issue. But what about the lost jobs of shrimp boat workers, hotel cooks, and most of the state of Florida?

I don’t think “drill, baby, drill” is workin’ for folks around here, but what’s it like where you live?

Now they’re complaining that President Obama hasn’t picked up the phone, or the blackberry as it were, and called BP CEO Tony Hayward.

Call me crazy, but I think a POTUS outranks a CEO, and as the person responsible for fowling fouling up U.S. waters and beaches I think protocol calls for Tony Hayward to phone President Obama, or whoever in the White House will take the call, not the other way around. And apologizing. Profusely. A little abject groveling wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Agence France Presse reports that BP’s chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, has been summoned to the White House to discuss the spill. Rightie Don Suber complains, “instead of talking to the man in charge, he will be talking to the chairman of the board that oversees the man in charge.”

Um, yes.

Suber, by the way, thinks President Sarah Palin would have done a better job dealing with the oil spill. So much for Suber.

Not that President Obama is blameless in this mess. He’s been caught flatfooted by the whole thing, obviously. I have been reading the Rolling Stone article by Tim Dickinson, “The Spill, the Scandal and the President,” and think on the whole it’s a fair assessment, although I haven’t made it all the way through the thing yet.

A couple of days ago some rightie bloggers were high-fiving each other over the Dickenson piece. They especially liked the word “scandal” in the headline. But what has struck me is that Obama has reacted too much as a conservative would have reacted.

First, the White House seems to have assumed BP knew what it was doing and could stop the leak.

Second, the Obama Administration had not cleaned house at the US Minerals Management Service (MMS), but had left in place way too many Bush appointees, people who are too cozy with the oil business to supervise them.

The White House is allowing BP to continue drilling at another deepwater site off the coast of Louisiana, and there is reason to believe that rig is just as likely to have a meltdown as Deepwater Horizon was.

For once, the people who say Obama is “no better than Bush” aren’t too far off the mark, as far as Deepwater Horizon is concerned. The only difference is that Obama has publicly taken responsibility for government’s response to the disaster, and there is no Karl Rove-type operative in the White House trying to use the mess for political advantage. Oh, and so far, President Obama hasn’t posed for a camera wearing a tool belt.

Update: Unrelated to the oil spill — William Kristol has learned that the Obama Administration will support an anti-Israel statement at the UN next week. Alas, if Kristol says this, just the opposite will happen.

I’m short of blogging time this week, but there are some short bits. First, I like this ad —

More stuff to read — “The Case for Calling Them Nitwits“; billionaire criminals as the new political outsiders; the anti-tax Right wants taxpayers to pay for the oil spill.