Bat-shit crazy

George Bush's radio address this weekend illustrates the truly bizarre morphing of everything into his GWOT. Bush has already referred to Israel's bombing of Lebanon as "our war". He says that we need to "change the course of the Middle East -- by fighting the ideology of terror and spreading the hope of freedom" and he said this the day after the horror at Qana. Yeah, that's the ticket, spread the hope of freedom by bombing the shit out of children. It's madness, I tell ya... or as Glenn puts it: "This view is, in addition to everything else, unbelievably incoherent and internally inconsistent".

Glenn Greenwald writing about the possible expansion of the conflict into something involving Syria notes that "escalation is more often than not unintentional, or at least the by-product of recklessness rather than a deliberate choice". The Jerusalem Post shares this frightening tidbit: "Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria".

Yet, the neocons are saying that the problem is that we haven't killed enough people yet to show the "terrorists" that we mean business: "They don’t fear us yet because we have not punished them enough".

As Glenn says:

That really is the essence of neoconservativsm. It's nothing more noble or complex than a base belief that we have to wage as many wars as possible and kill as many people as possible until people are sufficiently fearful of the U.S. that they will comply with our mandates. It is psychopathic and deranged, and the fact that it is typically cheered on by the likes of Mark Levin -- people who plainly lack feelings of physical power themselves -- is not insignificant. The contrived chest-beating and transparent desire to feel like a feared warrior, with none of the risk, is manifest, and it is what has shaped our foreign policy for the last five years and, by all appearances, continues to do so.

[...]

To neconservatives, everything that made the U.S. a respected superpower over the last six decades is all obsolete and worthless. To them, foreign policy experts from both political parties are responsible for 9/11 and the rise of Islamic extremism because they believe too much in diplomacy and restraint. They didn't wage enough wars and the wars they did wage weren't ferocious enough. There weren't enough Qanas, and as a result, we aren't sufficiently feared. People around the world need to know that they either comply with our instructins or fire and brimstone will rain upon their heads.

I still consider Jonah Goldberg's explanation for why he favored the invasion of Iraq to be the Gold Standard for illustrating the impulses which lay at the heart of the neoconservative syndrome:

Q: If you're a kid and you've had enough of the school bullies pants-ing you in the cafeteria, what's one of the smartest things you can do?

A: Punch one of them in the nose as hard as you can and then stand your ground.

That is why we hear that the "people who are fighting this war" include Michael Ledeen, Cliff May, and Mark Steyn. It's why we hear someone like Jonah Goldberg -- who still has to move his nepotistic umbilical cord so that it doesn't get in the way when he types -- warn us in his best tough-guy, no-nonsense voice that we are becoming "A Nation of Wimps" because "Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children." This is all about a personal craving for feelings of power and superior strength, to be fulfilled through endless war waged on those who have not been placed in sufficient fear of our warrior greatness.

All of this is why George Will recently called neoconservatism a "spectacularly misnamed radicalism." It is opposed to every guiding principle of American foreign policy under both political parties, and seeks to transform the U.S. into a rogue state which operates with no moral limits or ethical constraints, and for which unrestrained war is always the preferred option. All failures can be and are explained away by the fact that we just haven't killed enough people yet. It is homicidal madness, real derangement, masquerading as some sort of serious philosophy, and it is a true indictment of our political life that its advocates are taken seriously at all, let alone often listened to at the highest levels of our government.

Hello...? Anyone remember Iraq?

Glenn Greenwald is just wondering...

One of the most bizarre and disturbing media phenomena in some time is the very sudden, and virtually complete, disappearance of the war in Iraq from the media radar. That country is literally falling apart, engulfed by what even war proponents are acknowledging increasingly appears to be an inevitable civil war and growing anarchy. And yet for the last week, Iraq was barely discussed

[...]

What rationale exists for not holding accountable the architects and authors and advocates of this debacle? It is not irrational that political challenges are being made against war proponents. What would be irrational is if there were no such challenges. Those who advocated this invasion -- and, worse, those who continued to insist that things were going well long past the time when it was clear that such claims were false -- have revealed themselves to be completely lacking in judgment if not integrity and honesty. It is self-evident that removing that faction from political power is a critical goal, arguably the most critical.

It really seems as though the "plan" now in Iraq is just to step back and allow the whole country to collapse. That impression is strongly bolstered by the fact that war proponents seem eager to ignore Iraq and focus on other matters just as the civil war and destruction of that country seems to be reaching the point of no return. War proponents continuously argued that chaos, violence and instability in Iraq would be a grave threat to American security and a great ally of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. And yet exactly that situation has resulted from our invasion, and now the proponents of the war -- and apparently much of the media -- want to just forget about all of that.

Bending The GWOT

Digby links us to a "must-read" article by Michael Hirsh in Newsweek on the plastic nature of the GWOT and the inevitable consequences when the definition of a "terrorist" is whoever we don't like.

The Bush administration has fought the "war on terror" as a series of Jerry Springers, one lunatic leap of logic after another based on unreliable sources, linking up enemies that had little to do with each other. The White House's failure to understand counterinsurgency in Iraq is, writ large, its failure to understand the radical Muslim enemy as a whole. The president has used Al Qaeda to gin up the threat from Iraq, just as he is now conflating Hizbullah and Hamas with Al Qaeda as "terrorists" of the same ilk. Actually these groups had little connection to one another—or at least they didn't until America decided to make itself their common enemy.

[...]

But inexorably, month by month, the Bush administration broadened the war on terror to include ever more peoples and countries, especially Saddam's Iraq, relying on thinner and thinner evidence to do so. And what began as a hunt for a relatively contained group of self-declared murderers like bin Laden became a feckless dragnet of tens of thousands of hapless Arab victims like the sons of the hostel owner in Samarra, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terror, just as Saddam had little to do with Al Qaeda, just as the Iraqi insurgency had little to do with Al Qaeda (at least at the start), just as Hizbullah has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. And as the war broadened beyond reason, and the world questioned the legitimacy of the enterprise, our friends dropped away. Worse, we have found ourselves making enemies in the Islamic world faster than we could round them up or kill them.

Yes, the war against Al Qaeda called for a stretching and changing of the rules. We had to be ruthless with the maniacs who struck us on 9/11. But for that very reason, it required that we be very precise in identifying the enemy. Just the opposite occurred. "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush declared on Sept. 25, 2002, as he made the case for the Iraq invasion. This was the kind of thing Bush often repeated as he sought to wheel the nation 90 degrees, in the middle of the fight against Al Qaeda, toward Iraq. The truth was quite the contrary: not only could you distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was imperative that you do so, that you wage this fight with precision analysis as much as precision weaponry. We could not afford to let our soldiers see all military-age men as potential enemies.

Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the "war on terror" has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone's counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it.

.

Bush - Blair Press Conference

Oh-My-Gawd!!!

Look at this, if you dare.

Josh Marshall says:

Let me make an additional point about this answer. We know the president isn't very articulate in news conference settings. But national leaders don't have to be articulate to be good leaders. In fact there have been a number very good ones who could scarcely speak coherently for thirty seconds.

But if you watch this passage I think you see something different. Namely, that pretty much everything that's happened over the last three years, and certainly over the last three months has just gone in one presidential ear and out the other. He is, in both the deepest and most superficial sense, out of it.

From Digby we get this:

Bush's press conference with Blair today was even more frightening in its arrogant incoherence than usual

[...]

I remember as a child a strange little neighbor girl who was found in her backyard swinging her cat by the tail against the sidewalk screaming "you're gonna love me!"

I'm pretty sure it didn't work.

Living the Apocalypse

DK at TPM has this background to the current fiasco:

This passage from Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty has special resonance given current events. The scene is the White House Situation Room in January 2001, where Bush is meeting for the first time with his National Security Council, 10 days after taking the oath of office. Bush has just asked who in the room has met Ariel Sharon:

He'd met Sharon briefly, Bush said, when they had flown over Israel in a helicopter on a visit in December 1998. "Just saw him that one time. We flew over the Palestinian camps," Bush said sourly. "Looked real bad down there. I don't see much we can do over there at this point. I think it's time to pull out of that situation."

And that was it, according to [Paul] O'Neill and several other people in the room. The Arab-Israeli conflict was a mess, and the United States would disengage. The combatants would have to work it out on their own.

[Colin] Powell said such a move might be hasty. He remarked on the violence on the West Bank and Gaza and on its roots. He stressed that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon and Israeli army. "The consequences of that could be dire," he said, "especially for the Palestinians."

Bush shrugged. "Maybe that's the best way to get some things back in balance."

Powell seemed startled.

"Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things," Bush said.

With that, the rest of the meeting was devoted to Iraq.

Josh Marshall adds:

It actually goes way beyond the incoming administration's decision to ignore the Israel-Palestine track from the get-go, though that has played a very big part in this unfolding disaster. The Bush administration has always seen the situation in Israel-Palestine as essentially a side issue in the larger context of the Middle East, one to be solved through overthrowing regimes either in Baghdad or Damascus. The Israelis and the Palestinians themselves had already done quite a lot to make a mess of things by January 2001. But by comparison with today things six years ago seem almost idyllic.

The thinking of the Bush administration was that the Clinton folks had put tons of time into the Peace Process and what had it gotten them? Just a big headache and no achievements, either political or substantive.

But what I think you learn when you watch the region over time is that things can always get worse. And quite a lot of effort is often required to keep things on the barely tolerable level of miserable without slipping into the truly horrible. To prevent going from one to the other is a job of international management that really a greater power alone can accomplish. Us. Us with the Europeans. Probably also the Russians and even the Chinese. Easy? No. Do these different countries have different agendas, not all of them wholesome? Sure. But that's life. Or rather, that's running the world.

Is this crisis the Bush administration's doing? No, it has deep roots that go well beyond it. Would things have gotten quite this bad if the administration hadn't basically ignored these problems for six years and simultaneously blown up the Fertile Crescent? No way.

This is the Bush administration's apocalypse. We are, to borrow the phrase, just living in it. But then, that's quite bad enough, isn't it?

Israel - Lebanon

No thoughtful person can not have thought about what's happening in the Middle East (it seemed fitting to use a double negative because what's happening is so negative). Lashing out is understandable because the parties feel wronged but that doesn't make it effective or right. Surely we realize that the reason we (I saw 'we' because I think that we're all in this together) are having so much trouble (lack of success) with our policies is because they are bad policies. It's not that the U.S. didn't start a war and invade and occupy a country well -- it's that it did it at all. It's not that Israel is doing a bad job of bombing Lebanon -- it's that doing so is not a effective way to accomplish anything positive. How many times must we employ these failed policies before we realize that it's the policy not the implementation that is broken?

Commenting on those who argue that Israel is too nice to win*, Gregory Djerejian writes:

I'm just honestly baffled and stunned that people are writing this kind of stuff, and seriously debating it as if it's even within the outer reaches of the rule-book. It's not, it's bat-shit crazy, it's absurd, it's insane.

[...]

Hannah Arendt once wrote:

No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.

The cornerstone of our polity and civilization, that what distinguishes us from our fanatical, nihilistic foes, is our respect of law, including the laws of war enshrined in the post-WWII, post-Holocaust era. To throw these by the way-side, in favor of the law of the jungle, is to defeat ourselves.

* From Fontana Labs: "On a lighter note, do check out the Podhoretz piece, which is remarkable because it contains not a single declarative sentence."

UPDATE: Digby says it better:

I'm not sure I really get why the US and Israel haven't yet come to terms with the fact that this fourth generation war cannot be won with classic military action. I suspect it is the neocon influence which, throughout many decades, never gave a passing thought to terrorism or assymetrical warfare. They have been stuck in a cold war mindset (a mindset that was wrong about the cold war too) and have consistently seen the world through the prism of rogue totalitarian states. This is why, in spite of the fact that everything is going to hell in a handbasket in a hundred different ways, they persist in focusing on Iran (formerly Iraq) and ignoring all the moving parts that make their aggressive plans to "confront" these regimes simpleminded and doomed to failure.

For Israel and the US it couldn't be worse. They have systematically chipped away at any moral authority they had while demonstrating that their military, diplomatic and economic power are paper tigers. What an excellent strategy for all concerned. Oh, and too bad about all the dead bodies that have been produced to create that sad outcome.

Fiasco

Great title for a book about Democracy Boy's adventure in Iraq. Fiasco was written by Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, and there is a review of it in the NY Times today. Reviewer Michiko Kakutani refers to it as a "devastating new book" in which Ricks "serves up his portrait of that war as a misguided exercise in hubris, incompetence and folly with a wealth of detail and evidence that is both staggeringly vivid and persuasive."

From the review:

“President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy,” Mr. Ricks writes. “The consequences of his choice won’t be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information — about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda’s terrorism — and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices and a global economic shock.”

[...]

Mr. Ricks’s narrative is based on hundreds of interviews and more than 37,000 pages of documents, and many of the book’s most scorching assessments of the White House and Pentagon’s conduct of the war come from members of the uniformed military and official military reports.

An after-action review from the Third Infantry Division underscores the Pentagon’s paucity of postwar planning, stating that “there was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring that the judicial system was operational.” And an end-of-tour report by a colonel assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority memorably summarized his office’s work as “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.”

[...]

Mr. Ricks argues that the invasion of Iraq “was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history,” an incomplete plan that “confused removing Iraq’s regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country.” The result of going in with too few troops and no larger strategic plan, he says, was “that the U.S. effort resembled a banana republic coup d’état more than a full-scale war plan that reflected the ambition of a great power to alter the politics of a crucial region of the world.”

The Specter spectacle

Sen. Arlen Specter has a bill before the Senate which will essentially allow the President to do whatever he wants -- free of Congressional or Judicial oversight -- and will do so retroactively thus making all the sins of the past now legal. It's outrageous yet it would appear that almost no one is paying attention.

When I first wrote about the Hamdan decision, I heaved a sigh of relief because this significant decision could easily have gone the other way. I followed up with some comments about how the decision might not prove to be all that significant depending on what followed. My prime concern was that the Dems would not follow up strongly (which they have not) and that the Rovians might successfully spin the story through the medai so as to mitigate the damage. But the spectacle of Specter's whitewash bill is breath-taking. As Glenn Greenwald says:

In essence, Specter's bill repeals each and every restriction on the President's ability to eavesdrop, all but forecloses judicial challenges, and endorses the very theory of unlimited executive power which Hamdan just days ago rejected (and in the process, rendered the administration's FISA-prohibited eavesdropping on Americans a clear violation of the criminal law). With this bill, Specter -- the self-proclaimed defender of Congressional power -- did more to bolster the administration's radical executive power theories than anything the administration could have dreamed of doing on their own, especially in the wake of Hamdan (permit me here to apologize for all of those times I tepidly defended Specter by characterizing as unduly pessimistic and cynical predictions that he could cave completely; the humiliations he is willing, even eager, to publicly endure are without limits).

In another article Greenwald writes that

Specter here echoes the central myth which the President's most disingenuous followers have been disseminating ever since the NSA scandal began -- that because the President has the "inherent authority" under the Constitution to eavesdrop, Congress cannot restrict, regulate or limit that power in any way. That is just plainly wrong. The whole point of our system of Government is that the three branches share power in all areas. That is what "checks and balances" means. Congress has every right to regulate even those powers which the President possesses. That is beyond dispute at this point.

The Supreme Court in Hamdan just ruled not more than three weeks ago that even though the President has the Constitutional power to create military tribunals for war detainees (just as he has the Constitutional power to eavesdrop), he is required to do so in accordance with the laws enacted by Congress. That was the whole point of Hamdan -- that the President is required to abide by the law even with regard to the exercise of his Constitutional powers. And just to make certain that this point was not lost on the Arlen Specters of the world, the Court (f. 23; emphasis added) explained :

Whether or not the President has independent power, absent congressional authorization, to convene military commissions, he may not disregard limitations that Congress has, in proper exercise of its own war powers, placed on his powers. See Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 637 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring).

Justice Kennedy, in his Concurring Opinion, emphasized that this has been the law since at least Youngstown, which he quotes to make that point (emphasis added): "If the President has exceeded these [Congressional] limits, this becomes a case of conflict between Presidential and congressional action . . . And '[w]hen the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.'"

Most amazingly, when Alberto Gonzales testified before Specter's own Judiciary Committee, had told Specter that it is false to claim -- as Specter just did -- that Congress lacks the power to regulate or restrict "inherent Constitutional powers" of the President:

GONZALES: Well, the fact that the president, again, may have inherent authority doesn't mean that Congress has no authority in a particular area. And when we look at the words of the Constitution, and there are clear grants of authority to the Congress in a time of war. And so if we're talking about competing constitutional interests, that's when you get into, sort of, the third part of the Jackson analysis.

The whole premise of Specter's defense of the President and his bill is just indisputably false. It has been unambiguously rejected by Youngstown, Hamdan, and even Alberto Gonzales. Both Marty Lederman and Anonymous Liberal add their astonishment that Specter could articulate such a plainly false legal argument. And it is not some obscure legal error, but a principle that lays at the core of how our system of government works. The President does not have the power to operate outside of the laws of our country, and that's particularly true when it comes to actions he takes against American citizens on U.S. soil.

As always, the two things that allow this power-grab to succeed are the two faces of the lack of effective opposition -- in Congress and in the media. Glenn again:

But all of that can happen only if Democrats fail to resolutely stand up for themselves and articulate what is really at stake here. If they do, they can make this issue about what it really, in fact, is about: (a) do we want the President to be able spy on us in secret and with no limits or safeguards, as we had before 1978 with great abuse?; and (b) do we really need to abolish the long-standing safeguards which, as a country, we imposed on our Government in order to prevent abuses, all because George Bush claims he can't defeat Al Qaeda unless we fundamentally change how our government works, allow him to spy on us without oversight, and give him unchecked power?

[...]

The media's reports on this travesty illustrate, yet again, that the single greatest problem our country faces -- the principal reason the Bush administration has been able to get away with the abuses it has perpetrated -- is because our national media is indescribably lazy, inept, dysfunctional and just plain stupid, for reasons discussed in this comment from Jao and my response.

The reporters who write on these matters literally don't understand the issues they are reporting, even though the issues are not all that complicated. Notwithstanding the fact that this bill expressly removes all limits on the President's eavesdropping powers -- and returns the state of the law regarding presidential eavesdropping to the pre-FISA era, when there were no limits on presidential eavesdropping of any kind -- Charles Babington and Peter Baker told their readers in The Washington Post -- in an article hilariously entitled: "Bush Compromises On Spying Program" -- that "the deal represented a clear retreat by Bush" and that "the accord is a reversal of Bush's position that he would not submit his program to court review."

Anyone with a basic understanding of what FISA was and of the conflicts in play could read the Specter bill and see that the last thing it does is entail "compromises" on the part of the White House. Nobody who knows how to read could read that bill and think that. At this point, I believe they don't even read the bill. It's hard to see how they could read the bill and then write that article.

Useless Idiots

Billmon, in an article called Useless Idiots, has this to say about those on the right who have since seen the light and are now feeling persecuted by those still drinking the Kool-Aid:

It would take an almost superhuman sense of compassion not to relish the sight of the tormenters being tormented by the likes of Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds. And thank God, I'm only human. The sense of grim satisfaction I feel every time I hear Andrew Sullivan or Greg Djerejian whine about the viciousness of the "Malkin right" faintly echoes the emotions that must have been felt by the original socialist and anarchist prisoners of the Soviet state every time they saw an old Bolshevik getting the business from one of Stalin's NKVD thugs. Now you know what's it like to be an enemy of the people, you swine.

If that seems overly harsh, well, I'm not in a very forgiving mood, particularly when I hear pompous asses like Djerejian moaning about deranged neocon "radicals." It wasn't all that long ago -- like last year -- that Greg was bragging about his own "neocon light" credentials:

I guess I'm mostly a realist, but I have strong neo-conservative (neo-Reaganite?) inclinations. I've worked for some neo-con types in the past . . . and consider myself more closely attuned to many hanging their hats at the AEI rather than the Brookings.

I wonder: When did Greg first begin to suspect that he and Mike Ledeen weren't exactly on the same wave length after all? Was it when the neocons first brought up the idea of attacking Iran. No, that can't be right, because they started taking about that -- "Real men want to go to Tehran." -- more than three freaking years ago.

Was it after the 2005 elections put a pro-Iranian, pro-death squad government in power in Baghdad? No, that can't be it either, because at the time Djerejian was too busy sneering at lefty bloggers who were insufficiently enthusiastic about all those waving purple fingertips:

Kos and Atrios can't broach the big story, at least if it's a positive one, because they are merely playing to rabid partisan audiences and so are stuck tiresomely dwelling in their own provincial echo chambers. History moved forward today (though the road ahead remains fraught with peril, to be sure, and the Administration is well aware of this); and they remained silent or blogged diversionary side stories. That speaks volumes, doesn't it?

Well, yes it does, Greg -- it speaks volumes about what a clueless, naive chump you were. And because neither you nor your then-beloved Administration actually had the slightest clue just how "fraught with peril" the road ahead was, we now have to listen to your panic-striken pleas for somebody to do something about the chaos enveloping Democracy Boy's pet project:

This is where America must make its strongest stand in the neighborhood: namely to turn around the increasingly abysmal disaster that has become the US intervention in Iraq.

Well, it's a little late for that, Greg my boy. Failure isn't just an option, it's now the only option. Of course, if you and your fellow war hawks had listened to anyone who knew anything about the tortured history of Iraq, the Shi'a, the Middle East -- or the human species -- maybe you would have understood the risks from the beginning. But I doubt it.

It's very hard, after more than three years of anticipating, dreading and now watching the catastrophe blossoming in Iraq, to tolerate the pathetic whimpering of former hawks who've finally managed to drag themselves into the searing light of reality -- and feel ill used because they must suffer the slings and arrows of the deluded goons who still refuse to leave the cave of winds. Welcome to the camp, guys. Ivan over there will show you around.

On War

Billmon has written another good one.

Given that Israel is unlikely to achieve its strategic objectives (the destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah). Lind suggests the result is likely to be an unprecedented defeat for the Jewish state, with implications that will be felt worldwide:

A powerful state will have suffered a new kind of defeat, again, a defeat across at least one international boundary and maybe two, depending on how one defines Gaza’s border. The balance between states and 4GW forces will be altered world-wide, and not to a trivial degree.

Lind is almost certainly correct about Israel's inability to deal its antagonists a decisive blow.

[...]

The key question, of course, is whether Israel will then proceed to fail upwards -- turning its frustrating cat and mouse game with Hezbollah into a more satisfying, if equally indecisive, air war against Syria or Iran. Lind paints the possible results of a war with Iran in apocalyptic terms, although more for the first 50 states than for the 51st:

If Israel does attack Iran, the “summer of 1914” analogy may play itself out, catastrophically for the United States. As I have warned many times, war with Iran (Iran has publicly stated it would regard an Israeli attack as an attack by the U.S. also) could easily cost America the army it now has deployed in Iraq. It would almost certainly send shock waves through an already fragile world economy, potentially bringing that house of cards down. A Bush administration that has sneered at “stability” could find out just how high the price of instability can be.

It's hard to argue with that -- not when you consider that whatever Hezbollah has managed to do the Israeli Navy and the Egyptian merchant fleet is probably less than 10% of what a hostile Iran could do to the tanker fleet in the Persian Gulf.

The larger point here, which Lind suggests but doesn't actually articulate, is that the United States is now a global trading and commercial power (instead of a continental industrial power as it was when it entered World Wars I and II.) Such powers can become vulnerable if protracted wars threaten their far-flung interests -- as demonstrated by the abrupt collapse of Dutch power in the last half of the 17th century. It takes an exceptional position of strength, such as the one enjoyed by Great Britain during the Napoleanic Era, to both fight a world war and defend a global economic empire. Does the USA still have what it takes? Do our ruling elites really want to find out?

Lind closes with an historical analogy of his own, arguing that "Israel is to America what Serbia was to Russia in 1914." But here I think Lind's Germanophilia is showing. Under the circumstances, it seems more accurate to say that Israel is to America what Austro-Hungary was to the Second Reich -- a reckless ally bent on vanquishing a weak but troublesome neighbor, whom Kaiser Wilhelm foolishly allowed to start a chain reaction that no one, him least of all, could control.

I've already said who I think is playing the role of Kaiser Wilhelm this time around.

Groper-in-Chief

From Jesus' General we get this:



Here we see the Groper-in-Chief in action:

Veto Number One!

So, on which bill does Bush choose to lose his Veto Virginity? Embryonic Stem Cell Research. The explanation via Tony Snow:

The President believes strongly that for the purpose of research it's inappropriate for the federal government to finance something that many people consider murder; he's one of them. . . .

The simple answer is he thinks murder is wrong. . . .

[T]he President is not going to get on the slippery slope of taking something that is living and making it dead for the purpose of research.

So let me get this straight... these stem cells, which came into being as a result of in vitro fertilization are about to be destroyed because the parents have determined they no longer want them, as is their right. With this murder, Bush seems to have no ethical problems. But, if instead, these stem cells were to be used by researchers in an attempt to save or improve lives, rather than just destroyed, then Bush feels compelled to cry murder and dust off his never-before-used veto power. I'm sure that his gut told him to do this, because it feels like the right thing to do... but my gut feels like disgorging when I see such anti-scientific, anti-intellectual pandering by this buffoon.

Bush blocked probe

UPDATE: Senior Justice Officials "Stunned" Prez Ordered NSA Probe Blocked.


It was bad enough when the DOJ dropped it's investigation into potential wrong-doing by the White House involving the internal NSA spying but now we find out that Bush himself was the one who refused to allow lawyers for the DOJ have access to the necessary files. That's right... Bush stops the inquiry into his own wrong-doing.

As Christy at FDL says:

Let me say that again: the President himself refused to give the DoJ attorneys clearance to continue their investigation, thus killing any look at the scope or the legality of his Administration’s actions in spying on American phone calls, e-mails or other communications without a warrant and without going to FISA for approval as required by law.

Jane covered this in May:

Much as I have been enjoying myself this evening watching the latest installment of the current left/right blogger food fight (here and esp. here for history), it appears play time is over. The Bush Administration has killed the Justice Department’s investigation into its illegal NSA wiretaps by refusing to grant the attorneys security clearance:

The inquiry headed by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers’ role in the program.“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey.

It’s right in line with what they did last week — finally agreeing to Nancy Pelosi’s request to draw up a list of the members of Congress who were briefed on the program, and then classifying it so she couldn’t see it. It was the childish move of a petulant, power-mad emotional 8 year-old.

And now we know that the order to deny security clearance to the Justice Department attorneys for clearances came from George Bush. Just what is the President so afraid that the DoJ attorneys will find out?

Bush Shit

It's not the use of the word "shit" that is noteworthy but, rather, the way the word is an unfortunate description of the what passes for "the Killer B's" understanding of the situation in the Middle East.

As Billmon puts it:

I mean, how much more out of touch with reality could the killer Bs possibly be? Their own wishful thinking about the consequences of their own pathetic follies appears to have left them with some wholly fantastical ideas about what motivates their enemies in the region. Either that, or they've completely bought the sugar coated lies being spoon fed them by their subordinates. My guess is that it's probably a bit of both -- creating a perfect, impenetrable feedback loop of flattery, deception and wish fulfillment.

Juan Cole sees it this way:

It is a little window into the superficial, one-sided mind of the man, who has for six years been way out of his depth.

I come away from it shaken and trembling.

Josh Marshall posts a comment from Reader WD:

People ask why the U.S. is in the midst of this crisis. This recording provides a simplistic but understandable answer. While none of the major media will directly offer this intepretation, I think it's clear that they feel that this brief clip captures a president who does not look emotionally or intellectually capable of leading in this crisis.

In a world where our media is incapable of directly stating that view, clips like this exist as a proxy for honest analysis. It's news because of it stands for what the media feels it cannot say.

Digby gets the final word:

Meanwhile, the titular president of the United States says something so stupid, even for him, that it's crystal clear that the administration cannot effectively stop these people. From Ezra:

A live mic at the G8 Summit caught Tony Blair and George Bush talking privately about the conflict in Lebanon. Given the relative opacity of Bush's thoughts on the situation, the frank discussion offered a fair amount of insight and a couple nuggets of news, including that he was going to send Condi to the region (or possibly the UN -- but she's going somewhere to deal with this), that he blamed neither Israel nor Lebanon for the violence, and that "the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over."

That's a big deal: Bush believes it within the Syrian government's power to calm the conflict. Theoretically, that should have major implications for American diplomacy and, possibly, policy.

(Ezra says "theoretically" because the focus of the event has been on the fact that Bush said "shit.") But think about this. Bush is at a meeting of the world's most powerful leaders and he says, off the cuff, something that betrays such a misunderstanding of the situation that it's clear he hasn't even been properly briefed. Condi, too, has been incoherent. So who's really running the show?

I think we all know his name is Dick Cheney, original signatory of the PNAC and the man who stated baldly that he came into office with ideas about executive power and America's place as a sole superpower that he's been percolating since the late 70's. Cheney has been playing a long game, much longer than anyone else in the administration. Like a shark, he is single minded, focused and relentless. By his standards, and the standards of his multi-national corporate and neocon theorist patrons, he has been tremendously successful so far. They do not see the dangers staring them in the face, or if they do they truly believe the risk (and the blood and money) are worth it. They have no doubts.

It's tempting to write them off as a bunch of kooks, but it is their kooky vision that is right now playing out in the mid-east. It's not that they are necessarily directing it, to be sure. But they are always prepared to take advantage of circumstances that advance it. And like all historical leaders of aMarch of Folly they believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that everything will turn out ok in the end.

Cold Turkey

I'm going on vacation to the white sandy beaches of Prince Edward Island for the next eight days which sounds wonderful except... no Internet access. I got the DTs just thinking about it and... what if I get used to it? This may be my last post...

The Complete Duke Cunningham Story

Vanity Fair has the story by Judy Bachrach. Here's a teaser:

California Republican congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham traded military contracts for $2.4 million in antiques, cash, and other booty. He is now in jail, but his case exposed a world of bribery, booze, and broads that reaches into the Pentagon, the C.I.A., and Congress. Washington is wondering: Who's next?

Osama Who?

Steve Benen says:

Wanted dead or alive — or whenever.

The president's interest in capturing Osama bin Laden has evolved over time. After the al Queda Qaeda leader orchestrated the attacks of 9/11, Bush pledged to get bin Laden "dead or alive." Six months later, after bin Laden proved to be elusive, the president said, "I truly am not that concerned about him."

So it should come as no surprise that the CIA unit dedicated to getting bin Laden is no more.

The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA official who was the first head of the unit, said the move "will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda."

The official response is that there are still plenty of officials responsible to tracking bin Laden and that the terrorist remains a "high priority." But I'm curious, if President Kerry had allowed the CIA to disband the intelligence unit tasked with hunting bin Laden, would conservatives just shrug their shoulders?

Update: Funny Steve should ask, for apparently Sen. John Kerry has "fired off a letter to Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence" demanding that the CIA reopen the bin Laden unit.

Foreign concept, foreign policy

Kevin Drum on BushCo's foreign policy vacuum.

But that's really just a single piece of a broader, and even more remarkable turn of events: the Bush administration literally seems to have no foreign policy at all anymore. They have no serious plan for Iraq, no plan for Iran, no plan for North Korea, no plan for democracy promotion, no plan for anything. With the neocons on the outs, Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and Dick Cheney continuing to drift into an alternate universe at the OVP, the Bush administration seems completely at sea. There's virtually no ideological coherency to their foreign policy that I can discern, and no credible followup on what little coherency is left.

As near as I can tell, George Bush has learned that "There's evil in the world and we're going to stand up to it" isn't really adequate as a foreign policy for a superpower but is unable to figure out anything better to replace it with. So he spins his wheels, waiting for 2009. Unfortunately, the rest of us are left spinning with him.

Delay departure delayed

"DeLay Forced to Remain on Ballot" and "Even GOP's Hand-Picked Judge Didn't Buy DeLay Scheme" scream the headlines. Ah, the thrill of schadenfreude...

It does not look good for Tom DeLay and the Texas GOP.

Today was the big show for Texas Republicans who are vying to keep DeLay off the ballot and handpick his successor. And they lost.

After the Democrats filed their initial suit, the GOP made a motion to move the case from state court to federal court. They thought they'd find a sympathetic friend there in Judge Sam Sparks, who was nominated to his position by Pres. George H. W. Bush in 1991.

In his opinion, Sparks doesn't sound like he was ever the least bit convinced by DeLay's scheme to be declared ineligible (we've posted the opinion for you to read here):

Political acumen, strategy, and manufactured evidence, even combined with sound policy in mind, cannot override the Constitution. The evidence presented in this case provides no basis for [Texas Republican Chairwoman Tina] Benkiser’s declaration that Tom DeLay was not eligible to remain the nominee of the Republican Party under state or federal law… there is no evidence that DeLay will still be living in Virginia tomorrow, let alone on November 7, 2006, the only day that matters under the Qualification Clause of the United States Constitution....

DeLay was chosen as the Republican nominee by the voters in the Republican primary, and he is still eligible to be the party’s nominee. He may, of course, withdraw as is his right, but neither political parties, state legislatures, secretaries of state, nor the federal courts may rewrite the United States Constitution. [my emphasis]

The Republicans have ten days to file their appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. If they lose, DeLay might be forced to shame-facedly reenter the race -- or Democratic Nick Lampson will take the seat unopposed.*

*Update: TPMm Reader WS points out that there is also a Libertarian candidate running for the seat, Bob Smither.

[...]

Democrats have won their suit to foil the scheme by Texas Republicans to have Tom DeLay replaced by a hand-picked successor:

The Texas Republican Party cannot replace former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay on November's ballot, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks ruled today....

Sparks' order prevents state Republican Chairwoman Tina Benkiser from completing the process of naming a DeLay successor. Although the Republican Party is expected to appeal, Sparks' order keeps the campaigns of possible GOP candidates for congressional District 22 in limbo.

Under state law, a political party cannot replace a nominee who resigns in mid-election. But Benkiser said she could replace DeLay because he had become ineligible to represent the GOP on the ballot when he moved to the Virginia condo he has owned for the past 12 years.

Looks like the appeal is the next battle. But in the meantime, the Dem candidate Nick Lampson will just keep raising money....

Coulter accused of plagiarism

Ann Coulter issued a non-denial denial of the plagiarism accusation and, along with unleashing "her trademark venom," she took time to accused a tabloid of being... well, a tabloid.

EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it...! Here.

Billmon waxes historical on Two Americas

It's such a treat that Billmon is back with such regularity. He's always worth reading. Check out A House Divided. Here are a couple of excerpts but check out what he thinks is a better comparison of the situation today than the old Civil War division. I think that you'll find it surprising, apt and troubling. I know I did... and in that order.

If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology) libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government.

[...]

But this too puts a premium on hot button politics -- in order to pull what would otherwise be a diverse collection of individuals with diverse interests and opinions (conservative on gun control, for example, or liberal on the environment) into one politico-cultural camp or the other. I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the biggest political success stories for the traditionalists lately has been the rise of the megachurches, which often draw from a broad cross section of suburban society, generally offer an extremely generic brand of Protestantism, but indoctrinate their members in a very specific brand of conservative politics, usually built around abortion, homophobia and hyper-patriotism.

The result of all this is a political conflict that grows steadily more vituperative, uncivil and tinged with overtones of violence -- a dynamic which, given the emotional and philosophical tendencies of the two camps, definitely favors the authoritarian right (i.e. the traditionalists.)

Trying to make sense of Iraq

Matt Yglesias writes:

Max Boot makes an important and neglected point in his column today -- the bulk of what the US military presence in Iraq is doing is . . . maintaining the continued viability of the US military presence in Iraq. Which is to say that the largest part of our activities there are dedicated to maintaining and defending bases, the supply lines to those bases, and so-called "force protection" (i.e. preventing our troops from getting killed). This is important because I think a lot of the people warning of the dire consequences of an American withdrawal (civil war, whatever, etc.) tend to drastically overstate the extent to which our troops are actually helping Iraqis with the dire situation they face. In practice, as Boot says, they're (understandably, in my view) mostly trying to protect themselves in a very dangerous situation.

So why would this be the case? Why would you keep troops in Iraq, if all they're doing is trying to stay alive? When one tries to infer motive from behaviour, one tends to assume that the
"behaver" is behaving rationally i.e. that, if they are doing A, and A leads logically to B, then we can infer that B was the goal. Based on their behaviour, it's clear to me that BushCo has no plan to leave Iraq. Permanent bases are the giveaway... and the plan. As I have said before, they are there for the long haul and what appears to be a colossal failure may well be part of the plan. A conventional "success" -- a strong Iraqi government -- would not prove conducive to what may be BushCo's real goals.

As commenter BruceW07 said:

What's the objective of the Iraq War?

If it is a permanent American presence in Iraq, then that objective requires a very, weak Iraqi government, or, at least, a very weak Shia core.

The American goal has been a coalition or unity government, including Kurds and Sunnis, who would, for their own reasons, want to keep the U.S. there, as a counterbalance to Shia ambition. Finding Sunnis, who have any stomach for the Americans, is increasingly hard, since all of their passion leans in another direction. The Shia, unfortunately for U.S. policy, appear to be eager to turn to Iran for support. Even a moderately strong Shia-led government would probably be willing to gamble on expelling the Americans, assured that Iran would prevent a Sunni restoration, and that a threat of Iranian and Turkish intervention would keep the Kurds quiet.

Consequently, the U.S. has had no interest in a successful reconstruction. To keep permanent bases, Iraq has to be kept so weak, as to be in serious danger of spinning completely out of control.

A U.S. withdrawal will be the culminating disaster of the catastrophic policy, which led Bush into Iraq. Boot, like all the traitorous Republican pukes building a fascist State, want to be able to blame the Democrats for failure in Iraq. That's his only goal at this point.

Democrats would be well-advised to draw as much attention as possible to the failure of the Reconstruction, as the key factor dooming the American intervention, and the reasons why that failure was a deliberate, intended one.

Trying to be re-assuring about the consequences of withdrawal is just a set-up for the Right to blame Democrats for failure in Iraq. Everywhere the spokes-morons of the Right, of the Bush Administration, and the military speak as if "winning" in Iraq is just a matter of "staying the course" for 10 years or more.

Of course, staying in Iraq for 10 years would be winning in the limited sense that staying in Iraq, indefinitely, was always a key aspect of the Bush agenda in Iraq.

But, a strong Iraq is incompatible with that objective, because the Iraqis do not want us there.

That's the strategic vulnerability of the Bush policy, which Democrats appear too stupid to exploit. Bush has acted to keep Iraq weak, as a means to an end. Accuse him of keeping Iraq weak, and point out how: the failure of the Reconstruction, the failure to produce oil (and a secure financial footing for the government), the failure to train and adequately equip an Iraqi Army and Police. And, then connect the how with the why: the desire for permanent bases.

The blind (quotes) leading the blind

Charles Pierce at TAPPED hits the nail on the head. We criticize the media when they don't do a good job of getting the facts out and filtering out the propaganda and the rightwingers are up in arms when the media does anything that makes their guys look bad. Typical fundamentalist stuff, not dealing with the actions but just looking at the actors -- if he's wearing a red shirt, he's a good guy, etc. As I have said before, for me it's not about winning, it's about getting it right. Now look at this pitiful excuse for reporting.

If you want to know how political journalism came to be in the state it's in -- c.f. "prone" -- and, therefore, how the present administration came to run merrily amuck, look no further than the following paragraph from Saturday's Washington Post, in which various West Wing moles 'n trolls try to make Hamden chicken salad out of that which our fathers told us one could not make chicken salad. To wit:

"A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the issue is still being debated internally, seemed to hint at the potential political implications in Congress. "Members of both parties will have to decide whether terrorists who cherish the killing of innocents deserve the same protections as our men and women who wear the uniform," this official said."

Leave aside what you may think of the notion. Why does any reporter allow a source to remain anonymous on a quote like this, and why does any editor allow the quote to appear without a name attached to it? The stated reason -- "because the issue is still being debated internally" -- is transparent bullshit. Look at the quote. Does any sentient primate believe that it took this White House longer than eight seconds to "debate" this particular line of political attack? "Seemed to hint" at political implications? Is the WaPo now written by four-year-olds or does it presume it's written for them? There is only one reason to blind this quote --- to make sure that when the really high quality slime comes out of the White House, you're still on the delivery route.

It is a way to volunteer to be part of a political dirty-tricks operation robed in constitutional privileges. This is the kind of stuff that was supposed to stop after Jayson Blair and Judy Miller and, I swear, there's at least a half-dozen examples of this nonsense in major newspapers every week.

Here's a hint, guys and gals. They hate you. They will always hate you. They will hate you if you help them transmit their slanders and they will hate you if you don't. Look at the last week if you don't believe that. Judy Miller's newspaper hauled before the public bar for treason. You owe them nothing. You owe the country more courage than this.

Billmon piles on

I could have posted this as an update on the previous post but it's just too funny to tack on the end of a post... not just Billmon's comments, but the claims by David Horowich that precipitated them.

This evening I had an extremely weird e-mail conversation with David Horowitz -- yes that David Horowitz -- stemming from a trivial comment I left on his latest screeching rant about the Cheney-Rumsfeld vacation home flap.

Horowitz (on his blog): The fact that Rumsfeld responded to the Times request to take the pictures means what? What else could he say?

Me: How about "no"?

Horowitz killed the comment (or at least, I don't see it displayed on his blog) but he e-mailed me a rambling response that began by pointing to his proposed explanation for why Rumsfeld muscled under to those street toughs at the Times: "If Rumsfeld had said 'no' . . . that would merely have confirmed their view of this administration as secretive and repressive" (again, that's from Horowitz's blog, not his e-mail.)

So in what parallel universe has "confirming that the administration is secretive and repressive" ever stopped Rummy before?

[...]

I mean the notion that the New York Times could use the threat of bad publicity to literally extort the Secretary of Defense into letting them publish a picture of his house is just falling down, can't breathe, snot-spurting-out-of-your-nose funny. Hell, in the real world, Rummy would just have Dick come over and shoot the Times photographer in the face with his shotgun. Problem solved.

The point is, nobody in their right mind could possibly believe what Horowitz wrote. And judging by the rest of his email, plus the two others he sent me in quick succession, Horowitz is every bit as loony as people keep telling me he is -- a real meshuggeneh, to borrow that fine Yiddish phrase.

[...]

he apparently can't even let a silly three-word comment from a minor-league lefty blogger go unanswered. I would have thought David would have more important things to do with his time: running his rat lines into the Middle East Studies Association, tracing the sinister links between Harry Belafonte and Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman -- above all, figuring out new and nasty ways to draw media attention to himself.

But apparently not. I guess even the slander business has its slow nights.

Travelgate

Sometimes it's hard even for a cynic to believe how extremely the Rightwingers operate in their fact-free zone. I've been reading about this non-issue that is being fanned by the Right-wing fanatics -- that the NYTimes committed treason by publishing something that reflects badly on Commander Codpiece -- and I've come across the next installment. This is the one from the Times travel section that featured the summer homes of Rumsfeld and Cheney in some posh suburb in Maryland. Somehow the wingnuts feel that this has endangered the lives of these patriots. This story is (what else is new) completely without merit. In fact, as Glenn Greenwald put it today:

If you wanted to debunk that accusation (that the NYTimes is "deliberately endangering the security of Rumsfeld and Cheney by printing that travel article") and had the power to have the best possible evidence magically materialize, you would wish for it turn out that the photographs were taken with the permission of Rumsfeld himself, that right-wing media outlets previously published the same information, and that the Secret Service would make clear how ludicrous the accusations are. And, lo and behold, that's exactly what materialized here. And yet the accusers, even in the face of that dream evidence, still insist that they were right all along and that this Travel article is highly suspicious.

There are no facts which matter. Literally, virtually every political controversy we have is generated by this fact-impervious mindset, this refusal to accept that what one wishes is true is not, in fact, true.

It gets worse. Don Davis has written a post called Traitorous New York Times Reveals Bush Lives in White House and it's all true, they have!

As pointed out by Michelle Malkin, one of the few non-blonde nut-job right-wing females, The New York Times has conspired to assassinate Cheney and Rumsfeld, by mentioning the location of their summer homes in the Times’ Escapes/Travel section.

But wait, it gets worse. The “Paper of Record,” the record will show, has mentioned no less than 1799 times over the last six years, that President Bush actually resides in the White House, thus making him a sitting duck for Al-Qaeda.

A Lexis-Nexis search further reveals that the Times has also consistently given away the location of Bush’s weekend retreat in Camp David, as well as his summer ranch home in Crawford, Texas, which has enabled crazies such as Cindy Sheehan to harass our poor Commander-in-Chief, while he tries to recharge his batteries after five-hour work days.

Indeed, The New York Times has even had the audacity to report on the precise location of that pathetic-looking brush that Dubya’ pretends to clear, in his desperate attempt to emulate Reaganesque wood-splitting or horse-riding.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist denounced the Times, not only for their disclosure of Bush’s whereabouts, but for giving away the specific location — the Senate floor — from which Frist regularly makes long-distance medical diagnoses.

Finally, according to William Donohue, President of The Catholic League, The New York Times has consistently demonstrated their anti-religious bias by disclosing that the Pope resides in the Vatican.

Can rats weave tangled webs?

Christy at FDL follows up on the White House finger pointing which was revealed in the latest Murray Waas' article regarding the Plame outing. It would just be too delicious if it comes down to a Bush v. Cheney final, wouldn't it?

There’s a whole lot of throwing under the bus going on in the finger-pointing mess of ass-covering mendacity, isn’t there? George Bush points the finger at Cheney — I told him to get the word out, but I didn’t mean for him to have anyone betray a CIA agent. Irving is protecting Cheney’s flank…all the while Cheney and Addington are protecting Cheney’s flank. Which leaves Irving where, exactly? All the monetary donations to his legal trust fund in the world can’t disguise the fact that Scooter was hung out to be the bait if they got caught…and his loyalty to the boss would be the firewall. How does it feel to be the scapegoat, Scooter? You gonna bet the farm — and your family — on these clowns?

And Rover? When push came to shove, he testified on five separate occasions — that we know about — and his loyalty is to himself and to Bushie. Which begs the question, if the President pointed the finger squarely at Dick Cheney, dumping any responsibility and accountability into his lap, how likely is it that Rover did the same thing? And truly, if Mr. Dirty Tricks himself is working on the backdoor double cross, how much behind the scenes machinations do we not know about at this point — and how comfortable are you right now if you are Dick Cheney?

Oh, what a tangled web we weave…I’m just glad Murray’s still working his sources on this, because I have this nagging feeling that a whole lot more is about to spill out any second.

This guy is in charge of the Internets!

As Christy said: Holy. Crap.

From Ryan Singel and Kevin Poulsen at 27B Stroke 6 we get the following. Sit down and read it and weep... or laugh.

The Senate Commerce Committee deadlocked 11 to 11 on an amendment inserting some very basic net neutrality provisions into a moving telecommunications bill. The provisions didn't prohibit an ISP from handling VOIP faster than emails, but would have made it illegal to handle its own VOIP packets faster than a competitor's.

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the amendment and gave an amazing primer on how the internet works.

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn't going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.

We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [...]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time. [?]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.

[...]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.

It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

The full audio can be found here.

A Voice of reason

I love it when I meet (or read something written by) someone with whom I disagree on some particular issues but with whom I am in a more fundamental agreement and this allows me to respect (and often, like) the person while still disagreeing with them. I have just "met" such a person via an e-mail interview posted on Andrew Bard Schmookler's blog. He's Bruce Fein, "life-long doctrinaire conservative and former Reagan administration Justice Department official". Here are some (rather extensive) excerpts, but go read the whole thing. What a breath of fresh air!

I have never perceived our magnificent constitutional dispensation as a partisan issue. As Thomas Jefferson explained in his first inaugural, we are all Federalists, we are all Republicans when it comes to the rule of law and the Constitution’s sacred architecture. The Founding Fathers built on a profound understanding of human nature and the propensity of absolute power to deteriorate into absolute corruption and abuses. My convictions about the signature features of the United States that occasioned its blossoming from a tiny nation into a global superpower made my criticisms of Bush’s usurpations natural and spontaneous, even though I voted for him twice and praised many of his measures or appointments, e.g., Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sam Alito. I do not think my actions especially praiseworthy, and pale in comparison to the many who have given that last full measure of devotion to preserve government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I would surmise that the majority readily succumb to partisanship over principle because they have never struggled with the lofty ideas and ideals of great philosophers and the Founding Fathers sufficiently to appreciate that the history of liberty is the history of procedural regularity and the rule of law.

[...]

I would suggest that it is both the rare conservative and rare liberal who have struggled with the history of the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government, and comparable state papers to give them a palpable feel for Bush’s treason to the Founding Fathers, for example, insisting that "trust me" should be the measure of our civil liberties.

[...]

I have been more disappointed than surprised over the deafening silence of conservatives over Bush’s scorn for the rule of law. My reading of human nature lowered my expectations of intellectual courage. Socrates, my childhood hero, or Sir Thomas More are the rare exceptions. In 2000, my list of vocal critics of Bush’s lawlessness would have approximated 20. Only one has satisfied my expectations, but more with inaudible body language than with verbal shafts. To amplify on my earlier explanation, I believe the learned conservatives generally remain silent because their law and lobby practices require them to maintain access to the Bush administration, and access is power in Washington, D.C. Most people will sell their souls for a mess of pottage.

[...]

The best explanation I have for my devotion to intellectual honesty and principle is my early adulation of Socrates. His defense to the Athenian jury was spellbinding. The unexamined life is not worth living. Never cease asking not whether something promises riches or power or glory, but whether it is moral and the thing you would be eager to enshrine on your gravestone. Taking the hemlock gave Socrates immortality, and his judges ignominy. Without moral and intellectual courage, we would still be living in the Stone Age. I have always felt deeply indebted to our ancestors who sacrificed so much in the name of free minds and self-government. I have previously written that it remains to us to consecrate what they have done, and to act with such moral vision that if the nation endures for ten thousand years nature will still stand up and say to all the world, this was mankind’s finest hour. Between ashes to ashes and dust to dust, there is no higher calling.

With regard to voting in 2004, I would never know whether a vote for Kerry as opposed to a write-in would be the vote that defeated Bush. But if knowing what I know now about Bush and knowing that my vote alone would determine the outcome in 2004, I would vote for Kerry in lieu of a write-in.

[...]

Bush’s precedents are dangerous, and will lie around like loaded weapons readily unleashed by any incumbent in times of strife or conflict, e.g., a second edition of 9/11. Political science, however, remains in its infancy. To predict with exactness the ramifications of lawless precedents on the rule of law and liberties would be folly. For instance, FDR’s lawlessness in WW II, including the odious internments of Japanese Americans, the lawlessness of McCarthyism, the lawlessness of Jim Crow, the lawlessness of Nixon and Clinton’s lying under oath were all serious but have not shipwrecked our constitutional enterprise, at least not yet. But as Justice Brandeis amplified, all government lawlessness is dangerous because it teaches people by its example. We are more likely to lose democracy on the installment plan like the Roman Republic as chronicled by Gibbon than by a military-industrial coup. In addition, we should never be satisfied by simply avoiding being a police state, but as Washington lectured at the Constitutional Convention, we should strive to set a standard to which the wise and honest may repair.

[...]

I am worried about Bush abusing his own precedents along with worries over what his successors might do. At present, the scope of his surveillance or other spying abuses is unknown because they remain largely secret, which is why I have strenuously urged muscular congressional oversight. There may be abuses ongoing that will not be known until years later, just as the abuses discovered by the Church Committee, e.g., illegal mail opening, interceptions of international telegrams, and misuse of the NSA for non-intelligence purposes were not discovered until more than two decades after the fact. If another 9/11 abomination occurred, I think there would be a strong probability that Bush would brandish his precedents to vanquish the Fourth Amendment and to detain citizens based on religion or ethnicity. Everything in life is a matter of degree, and while FDR, Nixon, McCarthyism, and Clinton were occasionally lawless, Bush is systematically so. Thus he is the greater danger. The rule of law can survive a beating once every five or ten years; it cannot survive beatings every five or ten minutes.

In retrospect, I think the Bush administration from the outset believed their loyalty was to their own power or the Republican Party, not to the Constitution or country. I think its intellectual universe is confined to distinctions pivoting on “wedge” issues or strategies calculated to win politically no matter what the cost to the rule of law or constitutional practice. It is temperamentally, intellectually, and morally incapable of statesmanship.

Nations that confront no serious external enemy to remind them of the reasons for their success are inclined to internal rot. That is one lesson from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. After the Soviet Empire disintegrated in 1991, the Superpower status of the United States became unrivalled. We are no longer encouraged in any respect to think about how we became a Superpower and the citizen virtues that underlie great civilizations. Generally speaking, the questions and issues we have explored in these exchanges never make it on the radar screen of the overwhelming majority who neither understand nor care about the philosophical underpinnings of their freedom and prosperity. But these observations are made with a high degree of conjecture. If I knew the answer as to why moral invertebracy in the United States as reached its apogee, I would be a genius, which I am not.

[..]

Wisdom is more an intellectual and moral attitude than a store of knowledge. No one enjoys a monopoly on truth. No one is infallible. No one is pure saint. Humility and charity should guide action and inquiry into moral truths. The way in which that quest is undertaken is the difference between civilization and barbarism.

Glenn Greenwald was so impressed with the interview that he wrote:

If I could force every self-proclaimed conservative to read one interview, it would be this one.

Fein is particularly persuasive when it comes to imparting the depressingly difficult-to-convey point that critiques of the Bush administration's theories of executive power have nothing to do with liberal or conservative ideology, except to the extent that unlimited executive power is squarely at odds with ostensible conservative principles

Christy at FDL has this to say:

... the concept of liberty and of rule of law and all of the concerns that we have, individually and collectively, regarding the Bush Administration’s and the Republican Rubber Stamp Congress’ disregard for the long-term consequences of their appalling failure to live up to balance of powers expectations and the poor precedent that is being set by a number of their ill-considered actions [...] seems perfect for this Fourth of July holiday period.

Holy Joe!

Joe Lieberman has announced that if he doesn't win the Connecticut primary, he'll run as an "independent Democrat". He's not being selfish and refusing to recognize the will of the Democratic Party members. He's not desperately clutching onto power. It's not that at all. Oh no, it's that...

"I am very loyal to the Democratic Party, but I have a loyalty higher than that to my party. That is to my state and my country," he said.

What a crock! The people of Connecticut are fed up with Joe and find Ned Lamont a far more attractive candidate and that frustrated Joe's sense of entitlement.

Bush to Fitz: I Ordered Secrets Leak -- But Didn't Know about It

Murray Waas has another article in the National Journal entitled Bush Directed Cheney To Counter War Critic which contains some pretty damning allegations. As Justin Rood puts it: "Yes, I ordered the vice president to leak secret information [...] But I didn't know how he'd do it, or who he'd have do it, or when he'd do it".

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's statement.

[...]

But Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, to covertly leak the classified information to the media instead of releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal governmental declassification processes.

Bush also said during his interview with prosecutors that he had never directed anyone to disclose the identity of then-covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife. Bush said he had no information that Cheney had disclosed Plame's identity or directed anyone else to do so.

[...]

One senior government official familiar with the discussions between Bush and Cheney -- but who does not have firsthand knowledge of Bush's interview with prosecutors -- said that Bush told the vice president to "Get it out," or "Let's get this out," regarding information that administration officials believed would rebut Wilson's allegations and would discredit him.

A person with direct knowledge of Bush's interview refused to confirm that Bush used those words, but said that the first official's account was generally consistent with what Bush had told Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Libby, in language strikingly similar to Bush's words, testified to the federal grand jury in the leak case that Cheney had told him to "get all the facts out" that would defend the administration and discredit Wilson.

The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy.

Seymour Hersh has another must-read article in the New Yorker, this one called The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy. Hersh has a good reputation with me for getting his facts straight and this article is good stuff about bad stuff. I encourage you to read the whole thing here, it may be long but it's worth it to understand what's going on with regard to Iran and what's behind it . Here are some choice excerpts from the article.

Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President’s plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States.

[...]

The high-ranking general added that the military’s experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. “We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq,” he said. “There is a war about the war going on inside the building,” a Pentagon consultant said.

[...]

A former senior intelligence official told me that people in the Pentagon were asking, “What’s the evidence? We’ve got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert, and these guys”—the Iranians—“have been working on this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? We’re coming up with jack shit.”

[...]

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior aides “really think they can do this on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the adversary,” he said.

[...]

“Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “And Pace stood up to them. Then the world came back: ‘O.K., the nuclear option is politically unacceptable.’ ” At the time, a number of retired officers, including two Army major generals who served in Iraq, Paul Eaton and Charles Swannack, Jr., had begun speaking out against the Administration’s handling of the Iraq war. This period is known to many in the Pentagon as “the April Revolution.”

[...]

The retired four-star general also described the commanders’ conference as “very fractious.” He added, “We’ve got twenty-five hundred dead, people running all over the world doing stupid things, and officers outside the Beltway asking, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”

Pace’s supporters say that he is in a difficult position, given Rumsfeld’s penchant for viewing generals who disagree with him as disloyal. “It’s a very narrow line between being responsive and effective and being outspoken and ineffective,” the former senior intelligence official said.

But Rumsfeld is not alone in the Administration where Iran is concerned; he is closely allied with Dick Cheney, and, the Pentagon consultant said, “the President generally defers to the Vice-President on all these issues,” such as dealing with the specifics of a bombing campaign if diplomacy fails. “He feels that Cheney has an informational advantage. Cheney is not a renegade. He represents the conventional wisdom in all of this. He appeals to the strategic-bombing lobby in the Air Force—who think that carpet bombing is the solution to all problems.”

[...]

“The Chiefs all know that ‘shock and awe’ is dead on arrival,” the Pentagon consultant said. “All except the Air Force.”

“Rumsfeld and Cheney are the pushers on this—they don’t want to repeat the mistake of doing too little,” the government consultant with ties to Pentagon civilians told me. “The lesson they took from Iraq is that there should have been more troops on the ground”—an impossibility in Iran, because of the overextension of American forces in Iraq—“so the air war in Iran will be one of overwhelming force.”

[...]

Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council aide for the Bush Administration, told me, “The only reason Bush and Cheney relented about talking to Iran was because they were within weeks of a diplomatic meltdown in the United Nations. Russia and China were going to stiff us”—that is, prevent the passage of a U.N. resolution.

[...]

Leverett told me that, without a change in U.S. policy, the balance of power in the negotiations will shift to Russia. “Russia sees Iran as a beachhead against American interests in the Middle East, and they’re playing a very sophisticated game,” he said. “Russia is quite comfortable with Iran having nuclear fuel cycles that would be monitored, and they’ll support the Iranian position”—in part, because it gives them the opportunity to sell billions of dollars’ worth of nuclear fuel and materials to Tehran. “They believe they can manage their long- and short-term interests with Iran, and still manage the security interests,” Leverett said. China, which, like Russia, has veto power on the Security Council, was motivated in part by its growing need for oil, he said. “They don’t want punitive measures, such as sanctions, on energy producers, and they don’t want to see the U.S. take a unilateral stance on a state that matters to them.” But, he said, “they’re happy to let Russia take the lead in this.” (China, a major purchaser of Iranian oil, is negotiating a multibillion-dollar deal with Iran for the purchase of liquefied natural gas over a period of twenty-five years.) As for the Bush Administration, he added, “unless there’s a shift, it’s only a question of when its policy falls apart.”