The newest member of "Dictators for Democracy"

Glenn Greenwald has a good post today on the difference between what BushCo claims to be doing and what they're actually doing regarding their so-called "pro-democracy" foreign policy. Apparently Muammar Qaddafi is George's new buddy and we all know what a ally of democracy he is, right?

Last week, the Bush administration normalized diplomatic relations with Libya -- and is soon to remove them from the list of terrorist countries for the first time since 1979 -- despite the fact that Libya's internal repression is among the worst in the world and it is about as far away from democratizing as a country can be. All of those pro-Libya actions are direct and glaring contradictions of our supposed foreign policy principle of only supporting countries which provide democracy and freedom to their citizens (although, purely coincidentally, Libya has developed superb relations with international oil companies).

In virtually every Middle Eastern country, we seem to be acting as contrary to our ostensible ideals as possible -- including our increased support for Gen. Musharraf in Pakistan despite his increasing stranglehold on that country's democratic processes, our strengthening alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and our contempt for those governments which are democratically elected but not to our liking, including Hamas, Hugo Chavez, and even the government of Iran.

It's as though we think that Muslims -- whose improved view of the U.S. is allegedly the objective of all of our foreign policy actions, including our occupation of Iraq -- won't notice the ever-widening gap between our pro-democracy rhetoric and our actions. Of course they notice. And now, even the administration's most vigorous neoconservative boosters are admitting, and complaining, that the administration seems to have given up on these pro-democracy goals, if they ever really had them in the first place:

But as the US struggles to assert itself on the international stage, the president‚’s most radical supporters now dismiss this as mere rhetoric, and traditional conservatives are questioning the wisdom of a democratisation strategy that has brought unpleasant consequences in the Middle East. . . .

“Bush killed his own doctrine,‚” they said, describing the final blow as the resumption of diplomatic relations with Libya. This betrayal of Libyan democracy activists, they said, came after the US watched Egypt abrogate elections, ignored the collapse of the “Cedar Revolution‚” in Lebanon, abandoned imprisoned Chinese dissidents and started considering a peace treaty with Stalinist North Korea.

More than anything our foreign policy is just a horrendous, jumbled, incoherent mess -- actions in search of some post hoc, unifying rationale. We embrace the worst tyrants in China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt; act with hostility to numerous democratically elected governments that we dislike; and then preach to the world that all of our actions, including our militarily aggressive ones, are geared toward the goal of spreading democracy and freedom around the world.

There are good, convincing, legitimate reasons why we should maintain alliances with undemocratic countries which nonetheless promote U.S. interests (including, for instance, a country's cooperation in tracking Al Qaeda activities, as Libya's intelligence service provides). Virtually every country makes its foreign policy decisions based on that self-interested calculus. But we are a country which has now loudly proclaimed that everything we do -- including invading sovereign countries -- is justified by our need to bring democracy to the world. Once a country makes that the proclaimed centerpiece of foreign policy, acting in direct contradiction to it achieves nothing other than the destruction of national credibility and the failure of every claimed foreign policy objective.

There is no "War on Terror" - 3

Jane Hamsher wades in on There is No War on Terror too:

Ever since Pach launched his broadside against the War on Terror and the cover it has provided for a whole host of executive sins, the comments section on that post has looked like Chickamauga: The Morning After.

Wingnuttia came unglued. The challenge it presented went to the absolute core of how they define themselves. Of course they needed the help of a straw man to wage their battle; skipping several logical steps they surged to the conclusion that Pach (and by extension the left) denies the existence of a terrorist threat in order to prop themselves up as the true, steely-eyed defenders of the realm. But Pach said no such thing; as a matter of fact, some of us were supporting RAWA and banging the gong about the dangers of the Taliban in 1998. Funny I don’t remember seeing any of the Red State White Boys at those meetings. The only thing 9/11 changed was that some people finally caught up with the feminists.

It isn’t that terrorism doesn’t exist, but there is a big problem with the bill of goods that has been sold to the American people in the name of some vaguely defined aineffectualual construct by George Bush and the incompetent kleptocrats who serve him. Perpetual fear, racial hatred, unlimited executive authority, surrender of civil rights, the blank check written to war profiteers, and the label of traitor slapped on anyone who challenges any of it — it’s all part and parcel of the political edifice that the right erects around their proxy battle with "terror" (few of the participants actually being willing to go fight the good fight themselves).

Over at Kung Fu Monkey, John Rogers gives a colorful but I think apt description of where we've arrived as the result of an environment where no questioning of our political leaders is allowed:

The problem is, these yahoos have managed an ugly trick. They have turned criticism of the policies of Bastards in Suits into criticism of The People in Uniform Getting Shot At. This, of course, is completely wrong, as one can easily tell the difference between the Bastards in Suits and The People in Uniform Getting Shot At. One group is in Suits, and Not Getting Shot At, while another is in Uniform, and Getting Shot At. Please, try to grasp this. Not the same.

There is a flip side. Some people confuse supporting the Bastards in Suits for supporting The People in Uniform Getting Shot At. This is, again, ridiculous. If the history of modern warfare has taught us anything, it’s that the Bastards in Suits spend an awful lot of time working the kinks out of plans involving The People in Uniform dying unpleasantly. They often screw that up. When they do screw up, it is incumbent upon Bastards in Suits to suffer criticism and fix the situation, as by comparison The People in Uniform are suffering shattered skulls, missing limbs and death. Which is, on my scale, exponentially more traumatic than criticism.

Some people even seem confused on how we are criticizing the Bastards in Suits. The Bastards have a job to do. They are not doing it. Period. Tommy Franks recently trotted out the classic bit of misdirection, attacking critics of Donald Rumsfeld.

"I don'’t care about your politics. I don't. Don Rumsfeld is an American patriot."

Yes, well, that's lovely. But we'’re not criticizing his patriotism. We're criticizing his job performance. One of the great mysteries of the last six years was how and when the Bush Administration turned public policy into Special Olympics. "Oh, I know Donny knocked over all the hurdles, but HE LOVES THE RACE, so you SHUT YOUR FILTHY, CYNICAL MOUTH." Jesus H. Christ.

Yes they will scream, yes they will yell, and it will be a straw man bonanza, you can count on it. But it'’s time the extreme wingnutty hijacking of this dialog ends, and it'’s not going to end until someone is brave enough to introduce the notion that this whole phantasmagorical "war" is largely a crock.

Inconvenient Truth

Paul Krugman tells about what it's like when the search for truth comes up against those for whom the truth is inconvenient, I never quite get used to these despicable people.

Swift Boating the Planet - New York Times: A brief segment in "An Inconvenient Truth" shows Senator Al Gore questioning James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA, during a 1989 hearing. But the movie doesn't give you much context, or tell you what happened to Dr. Hansen later.

And that's a story worth telling, for two reasons. It's a good illustration of the way interest groups can create the appearance of doubt even when the facts are clear and cloud the reputations of people who should be regarded as heroes. And it's a warning for Mr. Gore and others who hope to turn global warming into a real political issue: you're going to have to get tougher.... Dr. Hansen was one of the first climate scientists to say publicly that global warming was under way. In 1988, he made headlines with Senate testimony in which he declared that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now." When he testified again the following year, officials in the first Bush administration altered his prepared statement to downplay the threat. Mr. Gore's movie shows the moment when the administration's tampering was revealed.

In 1988, Dr. Hansen was well out in front of his scientific colleagues, but over the years that followed he was vindicated by a growing body of evidence. By rights, Dr. Hansen should have been universally acclaimed for both his prescience and his courage. But soon after Dr. Hansen's 1988 testimony, energy companies began a campaign to create doubt about global warming, in spite of the increasingly overwhelming evidence. And in the late 1990's, climate skeptics began a smear campaign against Dr. Hansen himself.

Leading the charge was Patrick Michaels, a professor at the University of Virginia who has received substantial financial support from the energy industry. In Senate testimony, and then in numerous presentations, Dr. Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global warming was falling far short of Dr. Hansen's predictions. As evidence, he presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Dr. Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that has actually taken place.

In fact, the chart Dr. Michaels showed was a fraud -- that is, it wasn't what Dr. Hansen actually predicted. The original paper showed a range of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it seem as if Dr. Hansen's prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being "on the high side of reality."

The experts at http://www.realclimate.org, the go-to site for climate science, suggest that the smears against Dr. Hansen "might be viewed by some as a positive sign, indicative of just how intellectually bankrupt the contrarian movement has become." But I think they're misreading the situation. In fact, the smears have been around for a long time, and Dr. Hansen has been trying to correct the record for years. Yet the claim that Dr. Hansen vastly overpredicted global warming has remained in circulation, and has become a staple of climate change skeptics, from Michael Crichton to Robert Novak...

Iraq today... courtesy of George Bush

Christy at FDL puts it this way:

Only George Bush could take a country run by a violent dictator, where the people were oppressed and murdered and terrorized by secret police and tortured for disagreeing with the government…and turn it into an even less stable country where people are murdered and tortured and kidnapped and killed in cold blood and worse, inflaming sectarian and tribal rivalries and raising the bar on the fight to control Iraq’s valuable oil reserves, as armed militias for each faction fight amongst themselves and US troops for control.

It’s the Katrina piss poor response writ large in the Middle East, and we are spiraling toward a civil war of our own making in Iraq with no end in sight for our troops if we keep going the way things are.

All because this President chose to fight a preemptive war of his own making, based on ginned up false reasons that were sold to the public with the threat of a looming mushroom cloud hanging in the air — a threat that the President either knew or should have known was altogether false, had he bothered to listen to someone outside his circle of crony yes men.

There still is no War on Terror

Digby follows up on the There is no War on Terror meme:

I have long thought, and written, that the "GWOT" is a false construct. And common sense says to most people that it is pretty nonsensical. We might as well have a war on sadness or a war on jealousy or a war on hate. As Pach writes in this post from the week-end, terror is a human emotion and you can't fight a war against it. In fact, war creates it.

But then it isn't really fair to deride it as a "war on terror," is it? That's just the shortcut phrase. The real term is "war on terrorism" which makes just as little sense but in a different way. Terrorism is a method of warfare --- a specific type of cheap and dirty violence which is not eradicatable, certainly not eradicatable by force. It is special only in the sense that it makes no distinctions between civilians and warriors. (And if you could eliminate a particularly harsh and inhumane method of warfare, it would certainly make no sense at all to try to do it by throwing aside all civilized norms and engaging in even more odious taboos like torture.)

[...]

Setting Iraq aside, which was a simple imperialist invasion with no ties to this threat of terrorism, we are dealing with a "war" against certain stateless people who are loosely affiliated with Muslim extremism but could just as easily be nationalists or Christian fanatics or even environmentalists, as our justice department has recently decreed. Make no mistake: the GWOT is not a simple shorthand for fighting the "islamofascists." Islamic extremism is an ideology centered in a religion and it has no "place" --- it is not a nation or even a people. Warfare as it has been understood for millenia will not "beat" it. The GWOT masterminds knew this which is why the phrase War on Terrorism was coined: it represents a permanent state of war, which is something else entirely.

This is the problem. This elastic war, this war against warfare, this war with no specific enemy against no specific country is never going to end. It cannot end because there is no end. If the threat of "islamofascim" disappears tomorrow there will be someone else who hates us and who is willing to use individual acts of violence to get what they want. There always have been and there always will be. Which means that we will always be at war with Oceania.

[...]

But it is long past time for people to start the public counter argument, which has the benefit of appealing to common sense. Many Americans are emerging from the relentless hail of propaganda that overtook the nation after the traumatic events of 9/11. Iraq confused people for a while, but that confusion is leaving in its wake a rather startling clarity: the "war" as the government defines it is bullshit. It will take a while for this common sense to become conventional wisdom, but it certainly won't happen if nobody is willing to say it out loud.

[...]

But there is no war on terrorism. The nation is less secure because of this false construct. We are spending money we need not spend, making enemies we need not make and wasting lives we need not waste in the name of something that doesn't exist. That is as politically incorrect a statement as can be made in America today. But it's true.

How out of touch can the pundit class be?

David Sirota asks this question, then provides this illustrative answer:

This out of touch...

Check out the headline in this piece by George Will. So, as I understand it, if, like Peter Beinart, you aggressively advocate for the Iraq War as a prime-fighting-age pundit, then refuse to enlist in the war you helped create the rationale for (and refuse to display even flippant concern for the blood-and-guts consequences of your advocacy), then admit you were wrong about the Iraq War, then chastise Democrats for not being more consistent on foreign policy and not more willing to indiscriminately bomb other countries - then, by Washington pundit standards, you are a "Democrat Who Will Fight for America."

And some people still wonder why most Americans see the Beltway's self-important pundit class as completely and totally out of touch with reality...

There is no "War on Terror"

Pachacutec at FDL has written an article for Memorial Day making a point that I have made many times before: There is no "War on Terror". In fact, as I have said before, the Terrorist-in-Chief has made it his mission to make the American public afraid, very afraid. His technique: if you scare people, they won't pay attention to the bad stuff you're doing and even better, if you promise to save them, they'll love you for it. It's long past time for people to stop using that phrase. It legitimizes it. Refuse to accept it. We should say: I don't know what you mean... do you mean the illegal invasion of a sovereign state? Do you mean when Bush started a war in Iraq? I still can't get over that fact that people blithely accept the fact that, under Bush, the United States started a war!

Update: Atrios says: ""The war on terror" was always a sham, in the sense that it was a hideously inappropriate metaphor which provided cover for a bunch of hideously inappropriate policies."

I liked Pachacutec's article so much that I'm quoting it in its entirety:

There is no "War on Terror".

There is, however, a "war" on the U. S. Constitution.

After September 11, 2001, we’ve learned that we can take a punch and move on. We’ve faced far worse threats to our national survival in our history - the Civil War, the War of 1812, World War II to name a few - but we never abandoned our Constitution. Until now.

Terror is an emotion. Emotions are part of human nature and cannot be eradicated. A "War on Terror" is therefore a war on humanity. The Bush administration has exploited the fear and shock of a nation in the wake of a surprising and dramatic act of violence to whip national fear and paranoia into a constant boil. Why?

The evidence suggests the whole point has been to seize power and steal money. We are witnessing a creeping coup in the United States, the overthrow of the idea, promulgated by our founders and by writers like Tom Paine, that the "Law is King:"

But where says some is the king of America? I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.

The Bush administration has explicitly denied this, claiming unlimited executive power under the president’s war powers against civilians and citizens. The president is not your "Commader in Chief" if you do not serve in the armed forces. On the contrary, he works for you, and he works for your representatives in the Congress.

There is no "War on Terror." There is only a war on the law, a conscious destruction of the U. S. Constitution. This is not the first time right wing interests have attempted to overthrow the U. S. government. An attempt was thwarted during the FDR administration. Then as now, America’s greatest enemies come from among the ranks of America’s ruling master class.

Bushco has enslaved Americans into a psychological reign of "War on Terror" that amounts to a criminal protection racket. We are told we must be afraid. That is, we are told we must live in terror. This is to protect us from. . . terror. Then, because we feel terrified, we must give up our freedom - freedom to write what we believe without fear of reprisal, freedom of due process and habeas corpus protection, freedom from secret intrusion into our private lives by government.

Today is Memorial Day. Today we remember countless patriots who died and fought for those freedoms our president tells us we must abandon. . . in the name of "freedom."

If there were really a "War on Terror," an emotion, Wes Craven would be hiring a lawyer: he scares people. The "War on Terror" is a sham. You know what changed after September 11th? We, the people of the United States, forgot how strong we are. We gave in to fear, when the only thing we should have feared was fear itself. Osama bin Laden wants you to be afraid. So does George Bush.

I know I’m not alone when I say, I’m an American and I’m not afraid. I know I’m going to die. I accept that I’m going to die, no problem. What I do not accept and will not accept is the notion that I must live as a slave to fear for the purposes of craven, cowardly men who, in their time, pissed the bed rather than fight an actual war, later to become powerful and use that power to line their pockets with my tax dollars. Give me liberty or give me death. Take your "terror" and shove it.

We went after the criminals who attacked us when we invaded Afghanistan, then quickly abandoned any pretense of being concerned with actual terrorists by fighting a ginned-up war of aggression against a tin-pot dictator for whom our chickenshit president and his buddies have always had a hard-on. If the U. S. were serious about thwarting terrorism or about minimizing our exposure to acts of violence designed to make us afraid, we would have rigorous port security and massive international goodwill and cooperation in the lawful identification of anarchic, violent networks. But we don’t have that. We have our sons and daughters fighting to maintain bases in the sand near oil fields, sacrificing their lives, bodies and minds for a pack of lies.

Ann Coulter and other right wing totalitarian cheerleaders like to talk about traitors to America. George Bush and the Republicans have betrayed America, the actual laws of America and the very idea of America. On Memorial Day, as we remember our sons and daughters who have sacrficed their lives in the blistering sands of Iraq, it does their memory due honor to point this out. Noble men and women fallen, their blood cries out for lawful justice.

In each of our minds lies the beginning of our return to freedom, so please, say it after me: "There is no ‘War on Terror.’"

It’s high time for America and Americans to remember our strength. We need not be afraid. When we surrender to fear, we lose our country, we lose our faith in each other, we lose our future and we lose our freedom. The best way to honor the sacrfices of our nation’s men and women killed in battle is to embrace, once again, that precious liberty.

It’s time to be America again.

Congress discussing Search Warrants, hmmm...

There has been a lot of debate recently about the warrant executed by the FBI to search Rep. William Jefferson's office. It's pretty bizarre to see Majority Leader, Denny Hastert, standing up to defend his Democratic colleague. I can't help thinking that this is a "pre-emptive strike" by someone looking for himself because he feels that he may already be in the crosshairs. It's so inspiring to see this do-nothing Congress to stand up on principle about search warrants.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), puts it very well in a speech from the floor...

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Madam Speaker, I disagree with the bipartisan House leadership criticism of the FBI's search of a Member's office. I know nothing specifically about the case, except that the uncontroverted public evidence did seem to justify the issuance of a warrant.

What we now have is a Congressional leadership, the Republican part of which has said it is okay for law enforcement to engage in warrantless searches of the average citizen, now objecting when a search, pursuant to a validly issued warrant, is conducted of a Member of Congress.

I understand that the speech and debate clause is in the Constitution. It is there because Queen Elizabeth I and King James I were disrespectful of Parliament. It ought to be, in my judgment, construed narrowly. It should not be in any way interpreted as meaning that we as Members of Congress have legal protections superior to those of the average citizen.

So I think it was a grave error to have criticized the FBI. I think what they did, they ought to be able to do in every case where they can get a warrant from a judge. I think, in particular, for the leadership of this House, which has stood idly by while this administration has ignored the rights of citizens, to then say we have special rights as Members of Congress is wholly inappropriate.

Remember Afghanistan...?

Remember the "good" war? Remember the search for Osama Bin Laden ? Remember Bush saying: We will not forget our Afghani friends? Well, check out Geoffrey York's story in the Globe & Mail, written after his fourth visit to Afghanistan, from what is now one of its most dangerous regions. What a colossal screw-up! Based on lies, with no understanding, no plan, no commitment... the result, no surprise. Pity the poor Afghani people...

In much of southern Afghanistan's vast countryside, the militant Taliban insurgents have already achieved their victory, leaving only the cities and a few isolated outposts in the control of the Canadians and other coalition forces. And day by day, they are creeping closer to the cities, operating openly on the outskirts of Kandahar and other major cities.

[...]

"In the rural areas, the Taliban do whatever they want -- even in the daytime, not just at night," said Dr. Sadat, a pediatrician who himself was forced to give up his work in a rural clinic after four doctors there were killed.

"The doctors and teachers have all left the rural areas because they are afraid of the Taliban. The rural areas are out of the government's control. Day by day, it is getting worse."

For three months now, Canadian troops have been struggling to extend their presence into Kandahar's rural districts. It might be too late. Some officers admit privately that the coalition has wasted the past four years by failing to push beyond the main cities. Instead of bolstering the new government's reach in 2002 when it was popular, the coalition is now trying to prop up what's become a much-hated authority that has squandered most of its public trust.

Since their defeat in 2001, Taliban militants have been allowed to regroup, re-arm and re-exert their influence. Most of the southern countryside is now paralyzed, beyond the influence of Afghanistan's central government, lacking any government services and unable to break the Taliban's stranglehold. Just as it was in the 1980s during the Soviet occupation, the foreign troops control the major cities while the guerrillas control the mountains and villages.

[...]

While the coalition has struggled to build a political commitment for its presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban are recruiting a steady stream of volunteers, churned out by religious schools in Pakistan that propagate a militant anti-Western brand of Islam. The Taliban have enjoyed a haven in Pakistan, where the government has turned a blind eye to their sanctuaries. And the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is too porous for the Afghan security forces to control.

[...]

Just like the U.S. troops in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the coalition is trying to prop up a corrupt and unpopular government. Local governments are dominated by so many warlords and gangsters that many Afghans express nostalgia for the Taliban regime of 1996 to 2001, which at least was not perceived as corrupt and immoral.

"The Afghan population is throwing up its hands," a veteran aid worker in Kandahar said. "The disorder today is coming from the government itself. Its mandate was to clean out the warlords, but instead it's engaged in an endless dance with them. Everyone says that the Taliban regime, if nothing else, at least stopped the corruption and created law and order."

The media have not yet been adequately bashed

James Walcott has a way with words and these few capture for me the problem with the press "corpse":

As Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby reminds us with the persistence of a saint, we have a disastrously unserious press corps fatuously amused with itself.

Reading Somerby today, he cites a Krugman column (unfortunately it's behind the NYTimes subscription wall) which says:

Krugman:

“An Inconvenient Truth” isn't just about global warming, of course. It's also about Mr. Gore. And it is, implicitly, a cautionary tale about what's been wrong with our politics.

Why, after all, was Mr. Gore's popular-vote margin in the 2000 election narrow enough that he could be denied the White House? Any account that neglects the determination of some journalists to make him a figure of ridicule misses a key part of the story. Why were those journalists so determined to jeer Mr. Gore? Because of the very qualities that allowed him to realize the importance of global warming, many years before any other major political figure: his earnestness, and his genuine interest in facts, numbers and serious analysis.

And so the 2000 campaign ended up being about the candidates' clothing, their mannerisms, anything but the issues, on which Mr. Gore had a clear advantage (and about which his opponent was clearly both ill informed and dishonest).

I won't join the sudden surge of speculation about whether ''An Inconvenient Truth'' will make Mr. Gore a presidential contender. But the film does make a powerful case that Mr. Gore is the sort of person who ought to be running the country.

Since 2000, we've seen what happens when people who aren't interested in the facts, who believe what they want to believe, sit in the White House. Osama bin Laden is still at large, Iraq is a mess, New Orleans is a wreck. And, of course, we've done nothing about global warming.

But can the sort of person who would act on global warming get elected? Are we—by which I mean both the public and the press—ready for political leaders who don't pander, who are willing to talk about complicated issues and call for responsible policies? That's a test of national character. I wonder whether we'll pass.

Somerby then concludes:

Oh yes, “The Editors” are in highest dudgeon in this fine piece of work! Boldly posturing—pretending to fight—they type the first half of Krugman’s column, the part which hasn’t yet let us know that the mainstream press corps has been behind the long, outrageous War Against Gore. Go ahead—read what they write! They buy you off by shaking their fists at the latest, easy right-wing targets. But they forget to report what actually matters; they forget to say that the War Against Gore was conducted, not by some right-wing think tank, but by those jeering scribes in that press room—the ones who “groaned, howled and laughed” at almost everything Gore said, then made up those stories about him.

Why do “The Editors” neglect to tell you? Let’s guess—they’re still protecting their future careers! After all, the people discussed in Krugman’s column are, in fact, the corps’ Biggest Players—the people who decide which brilliant young scribes will go on to have multimillion-dollar careers. So even this week, even now, Peter Beinart still won’t tell you—won’t explain what has actually happened to Gore. He invites you to rail at those easy targets—and forgets to name the hard ones. He forgets to name the people who have actually been running this war—the people who will make his career, the people who will make him very famous.

People who don't understand how America works

Glenn Greenwald wages what must at some times seem like a lonely battle against the forces that would create an Imperial Presidency. As hard as this may be to believe, this actually happened:

The United States Congress openly debated yesterday whether the federal government should begin imprisoning journalists who publish stories containing information which the Bush administration wants to conceal.

[...]

As one can say for so many core American political principles, the U.S. Government under 42 different Presidents has thrived and defended the nation for 220 years without the need to imprison journalists for the stories they publish, but the Bush administration is the first to claim that it has to dismantle these liberties because it is too weak -- and America is too weak -- to maintain national security unless we radically change the kind of country we are.

[...]

That's how this group of Bush followers thinks America is supposed to work. If you are a U.S. citizen, the President can unilaterally order you abducted and imprisoned; does not have to charge you with any crime; can block you from speaking with anyone, including a lawyer; can keep you incarcerated indefinitely (meaning forever); and can deny you the right to any judicial review of your imprisonment or any mechanism for challenging the accuracy of the accusations. And oh - while it would be nice if we could preserve all of that abstract lawyer nonsense about the right to a jury trial and all that, we're really scared that Al Qaeda is going to kill us, so we can't.

Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia understands that this isn't how it works and explained in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld why the Constitution bars the Government from imprisoning U.S. citizens without a trial.

The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive. . . .

As Scalia makes so clear -- but shouldn't need to -- if there is any defining American principle, it is that the President can't throw U.S. citizens in jail without charges and a trial. Since the 13th Century Magna Carta, not even the British King could do that. But there are virtually no American political principles left which are not being called into question, if not overtly attacked, by Bush followers. Prohibitions on torture, the right to a jury trial, the obligation of the President to obey the law, the right of the press to publish stories without criminal prosecution -- all of the values which have distinguished this country and defined who we are as a nation for the last two centuries are all being debated and assaulted.

Double Standards

I've wondered for a long time how it could be that there were so many people who were not as outraged as I was by the behaviour of BushCo. I suspected that it was because they didn't know about it and that they were ignorant because they just didn't care enough to become informed. But why didn't they learn of some of the wrong-doing just by osmosis from the background discussion, from what was just out there? Well the answer to that seems to be that the major media weren't even discussing BushCo's behaviour, let alone criticizing it.

Yet the same media had been obsessed with other, not nearly so important, stories in the recent past. So what's with the double-standard? the inconsistency? the hypocrisy? I mean, it's not like there isn't some really important bad stuff happening now, right? So, why isn't it being covered comparably? I don't claim to know the answer but, surely, there is no disputing that the question reflects an accurate assessment of what's happening, or more accurately, is not happening.

Jamison Foser at Media Matters, has written a very worthwhile article on this topic and he calls it the "defining issue" and "dominant political force of our time".

Time after time, the news media have covered progressives and conservatives in wildly different ways -- and, time after time, they do so to the benefit of conservatives.

He debunks the claims that it was just because "sex sells" or "that Clinton's "scandals" were easier for consumers of news to understand" by providing many examples wherein the Clintons were hounded over unsubstantiated (and certainly un-sexy) allegations of wrong-doing which (in the case of Whitewater) were incomprehensible even to the initiated. He makes a very compelling case demonstrating this double-standard and I have excerpted rather liberally:

And that's how it was for eight years: obsessive media coverage and hype of made-up Clinton "scandals" that never went anywhere because they never existed anywhere other than the fevered imaginations of a few far-right Clinton-haters and the credulous news media that took them seriously.

How bad did it get? As we're fond of pointing out, the Washington Post editorial board called for the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Whitewater "even though -- and this should be stressed -- there has been no credible charge in this case that either the president or Mrs. Clinton did anything wrong." That's right: The Post called for an independent counsel to investigate "no credible charge."

Boehlert offered a comparison to the Bush era:

But during the 24 months between Sept. 2003 and Sept. 2005, Nightline set aside just three programs to the unfolding CIA leak investigation, for which Libby, an assistant to the president, was indicted. On the night of the Libby indictments, Nightline devoted just five percent of its program to that topic.

And that's pretty much how things have been for the past five years: Clear, conclusive evidence exists that Bush and his administration have committed countless transgressions far more serious than whatever it is reporters thought Bill Clinton might have done. And it has received far less coverage than Clinton's non-scandals.

[...]

In the months before the 2000 election, newly disclosed documents revealed that shortly before he dumped his Harken stock, George W. Bush had been told that the company faced a "liquidity crisis" and was "in a state of noncompliance" with lenders and that its plan to raise money was being abandoned. The documents revealed that the SEC -- which, at the time, was run by a close ally of Bush's father, then-President George H. W. Bush -- never bothered to interview Bush about his stock sale during its investigation of the matter.

And The New York Times completely ignored it. Completely. The Washington Post completely ignored it. USA Today completely ignored it. ABC, CBS and NBC? Ignored, ignored, ignored. CNN? CNN is an all-news channel; it has a whole day to fill with news every single day. Surely CNN managed to squeeze in a mention or two of new evidence that a major-party presidential candidate may have made a fortune in an insider-trading scheme that was covered up by cronies of his father the president? No, CNN didn't even mention it. Not a word.

[...]

Why do we insist on revisiting ancient history? Because the same garbage keeps happening over and over again. Because too many people -- journalists, activists, progressive leaders -- downplay the media's failings. Sure, they went overboard with Clinton, they say, but sex sells. But it wasn't just sex, and it wasn't just Clinton. Sure, they were a bit unfair to Al Gore, someone might concede, but he had it coming -- he was stiff and insincere. But it isn't just Al Gore. Sure, too many reporters may have been complicit in the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's smears of John Kerry, but he invited it by speaking openly and honestly about his service. Sure, Howard Dean's "scream" was overplayed, but he had it coming -- it was crazy! Sure, media elites fawn all over Bush, but he's just so likable! And John McCain, too. And Rudy Giuliani. They're all just so real and authentic.

At this point, you'd have to be blind to miss the pattern. Every prominent progressive leader who comes along is openly derided in the media as fake, dishonest, conniving, out-of-the-mainstream, and weak. We simply can't continue to chalk this up to shortcomings on the part of Democratic candidates or their staff and consultants. It's all too clear that this will happen regardless of who the candidate or leader is; regardless of who works for him or her. The smearing of Jack Murtha should prove that to anyone who still doubts it.

Meanwhile, any conservative who comes along is going to be praised for being strong and authentic and likable. Ask yourself: What prominent Republican is routinely portrayed in the media as a phony the way Al Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton are?

(We can't say this often enough: Anyone interested in the way the media fit news reports into pre-existing storylines should make a habit of reading Bob Somerby's Daily Howler weblog, as well as Eric Boehlert's columns and book and Peter Daou. And, of course, Eric Alterman.)

[...]

The New York Times -- the same newspaper that couldn't be bothered to report a single word about new evidence suggesting that George W. Bush possessed insider information when he dumped his Harken stock -- this week devoted 2,000 words and a portion of its front page to examining the state of the Clintons' marriage, tallying the days they spend together and rehashing long-forgotten baseless tabloid rumors of a relationship between former President Bill Clinton and Canadian politician Belinda Stronach.

Rather than ignore or denounce the Times' decision to interview 50 people for a story about the Clintons' private lives, the Washington media elite embraced it, turning the pages of the nation's most influential newspapers into glorified supermarket tabloids. And television, predictably, was worse.

[...]

But if the media are going to put candidates' personal lives on the table, it's time they do so for all candidates. If common decency and the shame that should accompany behaving like voyeuristic 10th-graders aren't enough to convince the David Broders and Chris Matthewses and Tim Russerts of the world that the Clintons marriage is none of their damn business -- or ours -- then basic fairness dictates that they treat Republican candidates the same way. Because the only thing worse than a bunch of reporters peering into bedroom windows of candidates is a bunch of reporters peering into the bedroom windows of only one party's candidates.

[...]

We expect that some of our readers are angry that we're raising these matters. Good. You should be angry that anybody would raise John McCain's wife's addiction to painkillers, or a supermarket tabloid report about George and Laura Bush's marriage. It is, as David Broder once wrote, no way to pick a president.

But if you're angry about this, you should be far more angry that for years, the media has employed a double-standard in covering progressives and conservatives. You constantly hear about the Clintons' personal lives on television; you read about it in the newspaper. John McCain doesn't get the same treatment; nor does George Bush or Rudy Giuliani. Intrusive, irrelevant tabloid-style coverage of candidates is wrong. Intrusive, irrelevant tabloid-style coverage of some candidates, while others are afforded an appropriate zone of privacy is even worse. And it can't go on.

Getting Real

I've written before about those who don't seem to get it about blogging. Barbara O'Brien gets it, but Matt Bai will be previewing the upcoming Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas (June 8-11) for The New York Times magazine and it doesn't appear the he does.

O'Brien:

Sure there is still plenty of politicking going on in banquet halls and airport hangars. But these days most politics happens in media, not in the flesh. And the biggest part of that media is electronic — television and radio — with political hacks and professional insiders serving as the self-appointed proxies of We, the People.

In the mass media age political discourse devolved into something like puppet theater. We turn on the little puppet theater box in our living rooms and watch representative partisans bash each other like Punch and Judy. And we know their strings are being pulled by more powerful forces hidden behind the scenery. The performance may be entertaining, but the audience can only watch, passively. The audience has no part in the script.

Exactly how is that more “real” than the Internet?

It is telling that the artificiality of mass media politics is invisible to a mainstream political journalist like Mr. Bai. For many years professional pundits, Washington journalists, political operatives, and elected officials have been carrying on the nation’s political discourse by themselves inside the puppet theater, and the discussion reflects their perspectives, their interests, their biases. The vast and silent audience may have entirely different concerns, but the audience doesn’t get to take part in the discussion.

[...]

The Blogosphere has created a place where We, the People, can bypass the media and talk to each other about what interests us. Here we decide what topics are “hot.” We decide what information we need to make informed decisions, and collectively we find that information and publish it. It’s true that only a small portion of adult Americans have become active bloggers and blog readers. So far. But I believe this portion will grow, especially as more people have access to broadband and learn that joining in the Grand Discussion is as easy as breathing. And audio-visual blogging — for those who don’t like to keyboard — is on the way.

Mass media politics is not just oblivious to the audience. It’s also expensive, and the need for politicians to raise obscene amounts of money to wage a media campaign has nearly destroyed even the pretense that our elected representatives in Washington are looking out for their constituents. No, they are looking out for their big campaign contributors. They are looking out for lobbyists that represent special interests capable of raising lots of money. The Enron story highlights the way politicians and corporations look out for each other. Enron is an exception only in the fact that the execs got caught before the Bush Administration was able to save them. Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay, even Rupert Murdoch’s recent fundraiser for Hillary Clinton — it’s all about money, and it’s all about mass media politics.

This trend has got to stop, somehow, or we might as well dissolve Congress and hand the government over to the suits in the boardrooms. So far, the Internet seems to be our best hope of breaking the mass media monopoly on politics.

That’s what’s “real,” Mr. Bai.

Kenny Boy

Funny isn't it? Ken Lay and Boy George were awfully tight in the good old days but now that the jury has convicted Lay on all six counts for his part in the Enron debacle, well, as Jon Stewart would say: eeh... not so much. Bob Somerby had it right all along, the media had/has it in for Clinton/Gore and has given (and continues to a great extent to give) the Bush man a free ride.

Holden:

Pathetic... The big story of the day is that Chimpy's former BFF and largest contributor Kenneth Lay was found by a jury of his peers of committing multiple felonies and yet the name Lay did not grace the lips of any of today's gagglers.

Digby:

But let's also hear it for the White House press corps who after eight long years of investigating every transaction that members of the Clinton administration ever made, never really gave a damn about Kenny Boy's very intimate connection to George W. Bush and apparently still don't.

[...]

That story was never of any interest to the press corps. (Perhaps if Kenny Boy had worn a striking yellow pantsuit things would have been different.) The fact that the biggest campaign contributor to the occupant of the white house was in charge of the biggest corporate ponzi scheme in history should have been news. It wasn't.

The Death of Policy

Kevin Drum posits his "Grand Unified Theory of Bush" which answers the question: "what it is that makes Bush so different from other presidents?" My own answer is Dubbya's profound lack of curiosity which, on reflection, is not inconsistent with Kevin's thesis. By Jove, I think he's on to something!

The White House has been searching for a replacement for Treasury Secretary John Snow for quite a while, but apparently Robert Zoellick isn't on the list. Why not?

One influential Republican with close ties to the White House said Mr Zoellick was leaving “soon” because he was not getting the Treasury job. The Republican added that the White House wanted someone who would be a better salesman. Mr Zoellick is more widely admired for his policy knowledge.

Rule #1 in the Bush White House: never admit that you take policy analysis seriously if you want to get ahead. As near as I can tell, you can overcome nearly any other obstacle but that one.

This is actually my Grand Unified Theory of Bush. Pundits keep trying to figure out just what it is that makes Bush so different from other presidents, but most of them start by trying to figure out what he values. For example, maybe he's far more dedicated to hardline conservative ideology than any other president? That seems reasonable at first glance, but even a cursory look at the evidence turns up way too many exceptions for this to account for his record.

Pure, ruthless political calculation? There's plenty of that, but it really doesn't explain things like No Child Left Behind, the Iraq war, or his immigration policy.

Pandering to the Christian right? Nah. In fact, Bush's most striking feature in this regard is his cynical willingness to promise the Christian right the moon and then deliver almost nothing. They're right to be pissed off at him.

Unbridled fealty to business interests? That's probably the closest to the truth, but what about Sarbanes-Oxley or McCain-Feingold?

The fact is, all presidents rely for their decisions on a complex stew of ideology, interest group pandering, and political calculation. So what is it that makes Bush so different? Just this: until Bush they also all cared about serious policy analysis. This was obviously more striking in some (Clinton) than in others (Reagan), but they all paid attention to it and it informed their actions.

But not Bush. He's subject to the same stew of competing interests and factions as any other president, but what truly makes him unique is what's missing: a respect for policy analysis. After eight months of working in the Bush White House, John DiIulio reported that "the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking." Paul O'Neill described Bush in cabinet meetings as "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." A senior White House official told Ron Suskind that the Bush White House is "just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know nothing. It’s depressing." The meltdown at FEMA, the war with the CIA for being insufficiently hawkish, the lack of a serious plan for Social Security privatization, the staffing of postwar Iraq with inexperienced ideologues — all of these things have the same root cause: a belief that ideas are all that matter.

Of course, that also means that President Bush's initiatives fail at a truly spectacular rate. After all, policy is all about figuring out how to implement ideas so that they actually work. If you believe that policy is something for effete liberal wonks — as George Bush evidently does — your ideas are doomed to failure. In the end, ironically, the one thing that Bush disdains so utterly is the very thing that guarantees his utter failure.

Simpson's Paradox

Kevin Drum has a post up about CAFE fuel economy standards. It's interesting but I wouldn't have written about it if he hadn't written "I think Bush's proposals would raise fleet averages: if you raise the standards for every category of vehicle, the average for all of them put together almost has to go up". As I wrote in the comments:

"For shame Kevin, you seem to have fallen victim to Simpson's Paradox which (and this is over-simplified) says: one cannot meaningfully average averages. Check out the examples at Wikipedia. They illustrate the fact that intuition (or as W would put it: "your gut") is no substitute for the evidence.

I have been fascinated by Simpson's Paradox ever since a math prof made a statement that just couldn't be true: "Hey Bill, you like baseball... what do you think of the fact that Player A can have a higher batting average against lefties than Player B, Player A can also have a higher batting average against righties than Player B, yet Player B has the higher overall batting average?"

After confirming that I had heard and understood him correctly, I replied confidently that, barring the possibility that there was some category of pitchers other than "lefties & righties", it had to be impossible. A few minutes at the chalk board (yes, it was a while ago :-) and I was wiser and more humble. Thinking is fun...!

Cheney to testify?

Let's see now... in a story today, AP says:

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald suggested Cheney would be a logical government witness because he could authenticate notes he jotted on a July 6, 2003, New York Times opinion piece by a former U.S. ambassador critical of the Iraq war.

Fitz is quoted as saying:

In a filing last week, Libby’s lawyers said Fitzgerald would not call Cheney as a witness and would have a hard time getting the vice president’s notes admitted into evidence.

“Contrary to defendant’s assertion, the government has not represented that it does not intend to call the vice president as a witness at trial,” Fitzgerald wrote. “To the best of government’s counsel’s recollection, the government has not commented on whether it intends to call the vice president as a witness.”

I didn't say I wouldn't... hmmm, this strikes me as a definite maybe... but fun to think about.

Baghdad ER

Crooks & Liars:

Mike Farrell, who most of you know from the TV series "Mash," allowed C&L an exclusive to publish his review and feelings about HBO's documentary, "Baghdad ER."

I saw "Baghdad ER" on HBO last night (Sunday, May 21). I'd heard that the Defense Dept. had issued warnings urging servicemen and women back from Iraq to be wary of watching as it might trigger PTSD symptoms. Perhaps they hoped those about to go wouldn't watch as well, for fear they might not show up.

"Baghdad ER" is a documentary about a "CASH," a Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. I recommend it for every American, but the queasy be warned: it is excruciating. I cringed at the gore, was sickened by the death, wept at the frustration and resignation of the medics, at the faith of the chaplain, at the simple, shocked, blank expressions on the faces of kids younger than my son; victims of this fool's war. Listening to the bravado of some, aching to comfort those who came in knowing they were hurt but not how badly, made me want to scream. Watching this horrifying, endless process, the tears on my face kept drying from the heat of my anger. Glorious, generous, talented, dedicated human beings forced to be part of this circus of carnage made me so furious I couldn't speak at the end.

I loathe the people who have created this monstrosity. I want the criminals who lied and cheated and pretended and twisted and perverted reality - and those who rationalized their crimes - so they could send over 2400 servicemen and woman to their death, nearly 18,000 to come home torn - some never to be whole again - thousands more to suffer mental damage, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians to be swept into the garbage can of "collateral damage," to pay. These bastards and their apologists should be stripped naked and forced to walk the main streets of America, allowing every city and town that has lost a loved one to injury or death in this shameful catastrophe to heap on them the scorn they deserve.

John F. Kennedy said America would never start a war. Well, it has now, and its architects have damaged our character, poisoned our standing in the world and soiled the soul of what was once the greatest nation in the history of the world.

Do the Right Thing 3

As my faithful readers are by now well aware, one of my favourite themes is the exhortation to Do the Right Thing. For a refresher, you can check here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Well, you know the old expression: if it's worth saying eight times, it's worth saying nine times...

Once again, the Democrats (with a few noble exceptions), are trying to prove to a public seriously dissatisfied with the Republicans, that they're not really much better as an alternative. The Senate Intelligence Committee has overwhelmingly endorsed Michael Hayden's nomination as Director of the CIA. What's with these people!? The guy is complicit in the illegal NSA spying on Americans and won't even testify that he'll comply with the law and most of the Democrats on the committee sing his praises!

What are they afraid of? This is one of the times when it would be easy to do the right thing. This is pathetic.

Digby and Glenn offer some insight into why this is happening but understanding it doesn't make it commendable.

Digby:

National security has the Democrats so spooked they are paralyzed and for some reason they don't seem to understand that every time they retreat they look like they are frightened of their shadows --- and thus appear to the American people to be incapable of protecting the country. And what's depressing is that their primary political concern can be rather easily alleviated by doing the right thing and standing up for their principles. George Bush has no credibility. Perhaps some people don't grasp the significance of the illegal wiretapping per se, but they are certainly open to argument if someone would care to make one. It's not as if they trust this president to make good decisions.

More importantly, for electoral purposes, the Democrats simply have to show that they are willing to fight this weakened unpopular president or people will see no point in kicking the bums out --- and certainly will not believe that the Dems are capable of taking on someone of real strength. As bad as it was in 2002 and 2003, how pathetic is it that the Democrats rubber stamping Bush when he's at 29%? How unpopular do his policies have to get before Democrats take the side of the majority?

Glenn:

In other words, there are serious questions about whether Gen. Hayden will comply with the law and whether he believes in the rule of law, so perhaps it's not a good idea to install him as CIA Director. Is there some reason Democrats were afraid to make that clear, straightforward, critically important point?

Yet again, Senate Democrats show that they have no more concern for the rule of law and for the excesses of this administration than Senate Republicans do. Due to their really pitiful passivity, they are every bit as much to blame for the excesses and abuses of the administration as the compliant Republicans are.

The beat goes on...

Not to be left out...

ABCnews:

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, is under investigation by the FBI, which is seeking to determine his role in an ongoing public corruption probe into members of Congress

It would seem that convicted lobbyist, Jack Abramoff is cooperating with prosecutors and it's his information that linked the investigation to Hastert.

The Cult(ure) of Corruption is being exposed to the light and it ain't pretty. Where will it end?

Tom Delay's new ally

You may find this hard to believe but Tom Delay is counting on the support of Stephen Colbert in his attempt to defend himself from the many charges brought against him. That's right, on his Defend Delay website, there is a link to a Colbert Report interview with Robert Greenwald, the maker of the movie "The Big Buy: Tom Delay's Stolen Congress".

It can't be that they think Colbert is a real conservative, can it? Surely it's just that they're so desperate, that anything that sounds like support is welcome... like when Colbert starts off by asking Greenwald: "Who hates America most, you or Michael Moore?"

I have already said that there is almost no depth to which they might stoop that would surprise me but this...! this is just bizarre. Their defense is literally a joke!

Imprisoning journalists

Glenn Greenwald notices what the MSM doesn't: that the Bush administration is threatening to imprison journalists who published leaked information embarrassing to the Bush administration.

It really is hard to imagine any measures which pose a greater and more direct danger to our freedoms than the issuance of threats like this by the administration against the press. If the President has the power to keep secret any information he wants simply by classifying it -- including information regarding illegal or otherwise improper actions he has taken -- then the President, by definition, has complete control over the flow of information which Americans receive about their Government.

An aggressive and adversarial press in our country was intended by the founders to be one of the most critical checks on abuses of presidential power, every bit as much as Congress and the courts were created as checks. Jefferson said: "If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter." The only reason the Founders bothered to guarantee a free press in First Amendment is because the press was intended to serve as a check against Government power.

And the only reason, in turn, that the press is a check against the Government is because it searches for and then discloses information which the Government wants to keep secret. That is what investigative journalism, by definition, does. The Government always wants to conceal its wrongdoing from the public, and the principal safeguard in this country against that behavior is an adversarial press, which is devoted to uncovering such conduct and disclosing it to the country.

Virtually every issue of political controversy during the Bush administration has been the result of the disclosure to a journalist by a concerned Government source that the administration is engaging in illegal, improper and/or highly controversial conduct. Whatever criticisms one wants to make of the American press -- and such criticisms are numerous -- it is still the case that what we do know about this Administration's conduct is the result of the press. Literally, if George Bush had his way -- if government sources were sufficiently intimidated out of disclosing classified information and journalists were sufficiently intimidated out of writing about it -- we would not know about any of these matters:

* Abu Ghraib

* The Bybee Torture Memorandum

* The use of torture as an interrogation tool

* The illegal eavesdropping on Americans without warrants

* The creation of secret gulags in Eastern Europe

* The existence of abundant pre-war information undermining and even negating the administration's WMD claims

* Policies of rendering prisoners to the worst human rights-abusing
countries

[...]

That is what this is all about. There is not a single instance -- not one -- which reflects any harm to our national security as a result of any of these disclosures. The press goes out of its way to avoid disclosing information which could harm national security -- the Times concealed all operational details of the NSA program when it disclosed that the President was eavesdropping without warrants and the Post concealed the location of the secret gulags in Eastern Europe when reporting that they existed. These disclosures trigger public debate over highly controversial matters and, as a result, often harm the President politically. But none of them is an example of gratuitous disclosure of secret information intended to harm national security.

That is how our country has operated for at least the last century, through two world wars and scores of other military conflicts. The press reports classified information to the extent that doing so brings to the public's attention legitimate matters of political debate, and it exercises self-restraint by concealing information which could harm national security and which is unnecessary for the debate to be had. And unlike many other countries whom we have never (until now) aspired to copy, we do not threaten journalists with prison or prosecute them for publishing such stories, precisely because that conduct is a critical and necessary component of the checks and balances which preserve liberty in our country.

[...]

There simply is no American president, at least in the last century, who has waged war against a free press the way George Bush has. Not even close. Not even Richard Nixon, who hated the press with a consuming passion, tried to imprison journalists. And there is a reason why the Bush administration has as its highest priority these attacks on the press. And Jefferson told us the reason why: because the press is the "first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions."

[...]

Why were we able to defend our national security throughout the 20th Century without imprisoning journalists? Why have we suddenly reached a point where our Government is too weak to defend our country without trying to stifle a free press by threatening journalists with imprisonment? Why can't George Bush defend the country without destroying almost every traditional institution and practice in our country to which presidential administrations of both parties have, for decades if not longer, managed to adhere?

A prohibition on imprisoning journalists for fulfilling the function which the Founders intended is just another defining tradition and principle of our country which the Bush administration is attempting to dismantle. Whether they actually prosecute journalists or not, the threat to do so -- combined with the knowledge that they possess the means to investigate their telephone calls -- by itself has a highly damaging deterrent effect on vigorous investigative journalism. This administration is obsessed with eliminating the few remaining checks on their ability to operate in secret, and there is nothing which can advance that goal more than official threats of imprisonment of journalists -- which, as amazing as it is, is exactly what happened this weekend.

Let's close our eyes, cross our fingers and hope really, really hard... now there's a plan!

Matt Yglesias comments on a Jackson Diehl column which he labels:

... a pretext to engage in a lot of unsupported slurs about "Internet noise" and people who want to withdraw from Iraq. He quotes the following from Will Marshall and Jeremy Rosner as his big, substantive rebuttal to us silly Internet noise makers:

The fact that President Bush and his team have mismanaged virtually every aspect of postwar reconstruction does not justify an immediate or precipitous withdrawal. Instead we should rally the American people for an extended and robust security and reconstruction presence.

Let me be blunt: This is not an argument. This is cant. It's silly and it's insulting. If you're going to spend your time, as Diehl does, sneering at the Internet for not being substantive then you might want to put an actual substantive argument down on your precious newsprint. Where is the evidence, for example, that this plan is feasible? For that matter, what's the plan? And if President Bush and his team have mismanaged virtually every aspect of postwar reconstruction then why on God's earth would we expect them to suddenly implement a brilliant plan?

Nobody doubts that the best thing to happen for Iraq would be for the United States to put together a crackerjack "stability and democracy and ponies" plan and then put it into place. Iraq would end up stable, democratic, and everyone would have ponies. It'd be great. The trouble is that it's become very clear that nobody actually has such a plan on hand. And not, fundamentally, because they aren't thinking hard enough. The issue is that there are actual limits to what our troops can accomplish. They're soldiers, not magicians. They can't conjure up a sense of national identity or widespread social support for liberalism.

What Iraq needs is a political settlement among the important factions such that everyone would prefer living under the terms of the agreements to fighting with each other. Absent such an agreement, the American military can't "fix" Iraq. Given such an agreement, the American military would be superfluous.

Sorry about that...

I've been away from my blogging (both reading and writing) for a variety of reasons, some positive, some negative, which I don't want to get into here -- remember, "Too shy to talk about myself publicly". But I stuck my toe in the water this long weekend, and it wasn't too uncomfortable so here goes...

Welcome to the age of electronic accountability

It's open season on Richard Cohen and this time he takes a direct hit from William Rivers Pitt. You can read the whole "open letter" here but here's a sample:

Why the anger? Because that lesson didn't take, at least with this crowd. Why the anger? Because millions of people are staggered by the idea that, yes Virginia, we have to go through this again. We have to watch soldiers slaughter and be slaughtered for reasons that bear no markings of truth. We have to watch the reputation of this great nation be savaged. We have to watch as our leaders lie to us with their bare faces hanging out.

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children's future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran's nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

[...]

I am sorry you were so wounded by the messages you received. I wish that hadn't happened; I am personally from the more-flies-with-honey school of journalistic correspondence. But in the end, truth be told, I don't feel too badly for you. It isn't an excess of outrage that plagues this nation today, but an abject lack of it. Instead of castigating those who take an interest, who have gotten justifiably furious over all that has happened, I suggest you take a moment within yourself and ask why you don't share their feelings.

This isn't Vietnam, Mr. Cohen. This is a whole new ballgame, and the stakes are higher by orders of magnitude. It took almost ten years of Vietnam for people to reach the boiling point you are so apparently horrified by (and worthy of note, that rage may have elected Nixon, but also served to stop the killing in Southeast Asia). Should those of us who are angry today wait until 2013 to raise hell?

At a minimum, I suggest you head down to your local hardware store and buy a few sheets of 40-grit sandpaper. Apply it liberally - pardon the pun - to any and all parts of your body that may be exposed to the scary anger of the anti-war Left. Toughen up that hide of yours, and greet the coming days with a leathery mien impervious to a few angry emails.

Afterwards, you could perhaps figure out why the anger of those who see this war as a crime and this administration as a disaster is so terribly threatening to you. Anger is a gift, after all, one that inspires change. If you don't think we need a change, real change, I can only shake my head.

P.S. Another reason for the anger you have absorbed can be laid, frankly, at your own feet. There are enough of us around who can still remember your words from November of 2000: "Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush."

Locate a mirror, Mr. Cohen. Stare deep within it. Know full well that today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, will recast all your yesterdays as having passed like a comforting dream. Your ability to remain within the safe bubble of the beltway clubhouse, drifting this way and that in some meandering, rudderless fog, has ended. Al Gore invented the internet, or so we are told, and some bright-eyed editor decided to staple your email address to the bottom of your works. Welcome to the age of electronic accountability.

Celebrity pundits are on their way out

Gene Lyons starts out commenting on the pundits negative reaction to Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents dinner and then goes on to explain some of the finer points of satire. He concludes by predicting the demise of the influence of the "celebrity pundit".

The larger point is that Beltway courtiers like Cohen, Time’s Joe Klein and others currently succumbing to the vapors over critical e-mails from fans thrilled by Colbert’s gutsy performance are on their way out. The brief reign of the celebrity pundit began with cable TV and appears to be ending with the Internet. Washington socialites are quickly being replaced in public esteem by politically oriented bloggers like Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, the inimitable Digby, Glenn Greenwald, Billmon, Atrios and many others. As Greg Sargent recently pointed out in The American Prospect, “Readers are choosing between the words on a screen offered by Klein and other commentators and the words on a screen offered by bloggers on the basis of one thing alone: The quality of the work.” Sure, there’s a danger of groupthink. That’s true of all mass media. But there’s also a fierce independence and an intellectual honesty among the best online commentators that are making Washington courtiers awfully nervous.

The lamest of defenses...

I think I cite Glenn Greenwald more than any other source. He's so knowledgeable, reasoned and articulate that he's always a treat to read. Today he demolishes the pathetic excuse for Bush's illegal NSA spying -- the claim that, because Roosevelt "did it", it's OK for Bush to have done it.

He makes three key points in refuting this claim:

1) showing that someone else did something wrong does not make your wrong-doing right.

2) "Roosevelt understood the law to permit the eavesdropping activity he ordered. He therefore believed he wasn't breaking the law but was acting in compliance with it. By fundamental contrast, Bush understood perfectly that FISA prohibited exactly the eavesdropping he ordered -- there can be no doubt that FISA covers exactly this situation -- but he ordered the eavesdropping anyway because he believes he has the power to act even in violation of Congressional statutes. Roosevelt believed that he was complying with the law. Bush knew he wasn't but did it anyway because the theories of lawbreaking he has adopted vest in him the power to break the law. Those acts are not comparable. They are opposites."

3) The law that Bush admits breaking was passed in 1978 -- Roosevelt couldn't have broken it.
"In 1978, Americans made it a crime for their government to eavesdrop on them without judicial approval -- and they expressly applied that prohibition both to peacetime and wartime. The fact that an argument can be made that Franklin Roosevelt may have violated a much more ambiguous statute does not even remotely justify George Bush's violations of the crystal clear FISA. George Bush has no right to engage in behavior which the American people through their Congress made it a criminal offense to engage in. Period. That his followers are scraping around for arguments such as "55 years ago, Roosevelt did something similar" is a pretty good indication of how sparse are the available defenses."

Glenn then provides an update wherein he makes clear:

One other point is worth making here. Whatever doubts existed as to whether national security demands entitled a President to violate the law were fully and unambiguously resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952, when it ruled in Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952) that President Truman's claimed need to sieze the steel factories in order to support the nation's Korean War effort did not entitle him to act contrary to Congressional intent that he not have seizure power. As Justice Jackson put it in his Concurring Opinion:

The essence of our free Government is "leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the law" - to be governed by those impersonal forces which we call law. Our Government [343 U.S. 579, 655] is fashioned to fulfill this concept so far as humanly possible. The Executive, except for recommendation and veto, has no legislative power. The executive action we have here originates in the individual will of the President and represents an exercise of authority without law.

No one, perhaps not even the President, knows the limits of the power he may seek to exert in this instance and the parties affected cannot learn the limit of their rights. We do not know today what powers over labor or property would be claimed to flow from Government possession if we should legalize it, what rights to compensation would be claimed or recognized, or on what contingency it would end. With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.

Any presidential claim of lawbreaking powers was smashed by Youngstown. And let's just repeat that last excerpted line again: "men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations."

More on the pundit-ocracy

I just read a nice quote of Jefferson's via Jonathan Schwarz that follows up on the points I cited over the last few days regarding the kinship felt by the chattering classes and those in office:

If you're not part of their little charmed circle, believe me, all your worst suspicions about them are true. They do think you're stupid. They do lie to you. They do hate and fear you. Most importantly, they think you can't be trusted with the things they know—because if you did know them, you'd go nuts and break America. They are Thomas Jefferson's aristocrats:

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still, and pursue the same object. The last appellation of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.

Interestingly, in my endless years of school, this Jefferson quote was never once part of the assigned reading.

See, it's like professional wrestling...

In my post yesterday about pundits not only not supporting but actually agitating against actual investigations into wrongdoing, I quoted Jane Hamsher's thesis that it's the pundits complicity in the wrongdoing that is at the root of their resistance. However, Glenn Greenwald offers the explanation that it is also the fact that the pundits actually identify more with the people they pontificate about than they do with those for whom they ostensibly are doing the bloviating.

There seems to be an emerging consensus among the coddled, effete Beltway media stars that it would be highly improper and uncouth for the Democrats -- should they take over one or both houses of Congress in November -- to launch investigations into the various, thus-far-uninvestigated lawbreaking and corruption scandals surrounding the Bush administration. Regardless of political differences -- which the Beltway media will allow -- the media stars are proclaiming that Democrats should pledge in advance not to engage in any of that nasty investigative business.

[...]

The media is supposed to be inherently pro-investigation. It's intended to be an investigative body, to subject government conduct to aggressive scrutiny and be devoted to the exposure of information which the Government is attempting to conceal from its citizens. To listen to these media stars effetely condemn investigations as though they're something which only hateful, rabble-rousing radicals would want to pursue tells you all you need to know about how fundamentally broken the national media is.

The reality is that people like Tim Russert and Chris Wallace are so entrenched in the national political Beltway system that it becomes the first source for how they perceive themselves. They are not journalists first. They are national Beltway stars first. As a result, they don't see high government officials as their adversaries because those high government officials are part of the same Beltway elite institutions and are their friends, partners and allies before they are anything else.

Journalists like Russert identify with the political figures they are supposed to be investigating and fighting against more than they identify with anyone else. They see them as their partners, as one of them -- all members of the same Beltway elite institution which is the source of their wealth, their fame, their prestige, their self-esteem. They derive everything that matters to them from that institution, and so that institution is the one that demands their principal allegiance and becomes the principal source of their identities. And while those who are assigned the journalist part in the Beltway Play will go through the motions of playing their roles -- pretending to question political figures aggressively, to disclose secret facts about them, etc. -- they really feel affinity and friendship and affection more than they feel anything else towards them.

That is why they find the idea of mean-spirited investigations so distasteful and wrong. It's one thing to play the role of having political disagreements with someone. Like WWF wrestling, the rules of the game are well-known to everyone and as long as everyone abides by those groundrules, it's all in good fun. They entertain the crowd with their faux conflict and nobody gets hurt. But investigations hurt people. Sometimes, people get accused of criminal behavior! They have to pay for lawyers which can be really expensive. It impacts their lives and can really harm a person's career, so it's out-of-bounds.

Accusing someone of being inept or wrong -- sure, that's all good, clean fun. But prosecutors and subpoenas and accusations of criminal wrongdoing -- that's just nasty. It disrupts the fun and it's unnecessarily mean. Besides, they personally know all the gentlemen and ladies in the Bush administration - they've met their spouses and kids, laughed together at the same jokes, helped their friends and associates get jobs. These are good people, even if they are politically wrong. They are not corrupt and they are not criminals, and it is wrong to treat them as such.

Bush vs Nixon

By the numbers, Tom Tomorrow has them neck-in-neck.

Six months ago I graphed Bush and Nixon’s approval and disapproval ratings against each other. Then I did it again last week. I wasn’t planning to update it for a while—but the newest Gallup poll shows Bush’s approval rating dropping from 34 to 31%, and his disapproval rating rising from 63 to 65%.

While Bush’s approval rating is still a bit higher than Nixon’s at a comparable point, his disapproval rating now exceeds or equals that of Nixon’s in every Gallup poll except one. This sole exception is the final poll in July, 1974 just before Nixon left office, when Nixon’s disapproval rating was a single point higher at 66%.

What’s really remarkable is this is WITHOUT any congressional investigation of Bush’s misdeeds, plus an economy far better (as much as it sucks for many) than in summer 1974. So Bush really has nowhere to go but down. This one is going to make sporting history.

Pundits in peril

Jane Hamsher has her suspicions about why it is that the big-shot pundits are almost as afraid as the Republicans themselves are of the possibility of Congressional oversight and investigations come November -- it's their own complicity in the disemination of BushCo's lies that's got them fearful of exposure. She also shares a favourite quote from Fitz regarding Tim Russert's shameful past.

We’ll leave aside for now the high hilarity of George Stephanopoulos having Tom DeLay on to talk about ethics, and letting him blather on about corrupt Democrats virtually without challenge (I can think of 20 things a good journalist would’ve started hammering DeLay about on the spot, but obviously DeLay took the gig because he had no fear of anything like that happening). Howard Dean did an excellent job of scoffing at the absurdity of the situation, but then came Father Tim recounting practically the same narrative. So did Maura Liasson. The thing that they all seem to be terrified of is that the Democrats will gain a majority and start impeachment proceedings (or at least launch investigations) of the White House (it seems to be Chris Matthews’ deepest, darkest fear).

I have to ask — is this matter really polling that well? Are Americans trembling in fear that the GOP might have it’s dirty laundry tossed by the Democrats? It all sounds a bit Tell Tale Heart to me. Now I know why DeLay doesn’t want it to happen, but why are Matthews and Russert so consumed with fear of Congressional oversight?

I’d like to harken back to probably my favorite story I’ve ever written on. It has to do with a footnote in a Fitzgerald filing when Russert was fighting tooth and nail to keep from having to answer the Special Counsel’s questions. Russert was claiming that the general waiver signed by Scooter was "coerced," and that if he testified his "sources" would never trust him again. To which Fitzgerald said:

It is also relevant to note that Russert has treated an asserted waiver of the reporter’s privilege quite differently when convenient. When Richard Clarke published his book Against All Enemies and testified before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the September 11 Commission), Clarke became subject to intense media scrutiny. On March 24, 2004, the White House disclosed Clarke’s identity as the "senior administration official" who gave a "background" briefing in August 2002. When Clarke appeared as a guest on Meet the Press on March 28, 2004, Russert noted the White House had been aggressive in attacking Clarke’s credibility and had identified Clarke as the source for the background briefing — without indicating any concern about the "voluntariness" of the waiver, in which Clarke apparently played no role. (Copy of the March 28, 2004, Meet the Press transcript, Exhibit 1). Russert did not hesitate to broadcast out of any concern that such disclosure might chill future background sources.

I just love that tight, brutal paragraph. I have to resurrect it every now and again if only for my own amusement.

Russert fucked Richard Clarke, Fitzgerald knew it and he called him on it. Russert was willing to sell the high journalistic principles he claims to cherish so much down the river for the party and the access he values even more. He fought relentlesslyl to keep from helping Fitzgerald (and the public) nail Scooter Libby. How is he going to feel when people like John Conyers (whom he smeared this morning — and Conyers fires back here) start looking into the all-too-cozy relationship that the press had with the White House in leading the country down the garden path to war?

The next time Russert and Matthews start quaking in their shoes at the thought of Democrats with subpoena power, I think it’s time to remember that it’s not their beloved Republicans they fear for, and given their ecstatic participation in the Cliniton hunt it sure isn’t the public. Could it be their own sorry asses they fear being exposed? Is that why they’re working overtime to spread GOP narratives and attempting to strike fear in the hearts of their viewers at the specter of impeachment?

You know, I think it just might be.