The Eternal War President

Following up on my post about BushCo repeating the same old lines (lies) about why we had to attack Iraq, only this time it's about Iran, I see that Bush is still at it. Glenn Greenwald has written an article pointing this out and concludes that Bush is serious about another war... to salvage his party's political goals. Greenwald warns that to prevent this, the Dems have got to jump "on this debate in as straightforward and unambiguous a manner as possible -- offensively".

The similarities between what the President said about Iraq in the months before our invasion and what he is saying about Iran now are too glaring to miss. They seem to be intentionally repeating most of their rhetoric, almost verbatim, complete with the same incoherence (if Iran is such a crazed, Nazi-like regime, how can we ever trust that they have given up nuclear weapons development? And even if they do that, they still "sponsor terrorists," and thus must be "held to account" under the "Bush doctrine"). Don't all of those premises make regime change via war not an option, but an inevitability?

[...]

The President is saying the same things about Iran and Syria as he said when he induced the country to follow him into the disastrous war in Iraq. When he did so regarding Iraq, he said Iraq was a "unique" threat in order to assure Americans that there would not be a series of similar wars. But a series of more wars exactly like Iraq -- but more difficult, more dangerous, more draining -- is exactly what the President is now making clear he intends to bring to this country. It is reckless, destructive war mongering that is going to drag the country into more inflammable, interminable conflicts, and drain America even further of its resources, weaken it immeasurably, and make us more vulnerable on every level.

[...]

If Americans are vigorously opposed to the war in Iraq, as they are, does anyone think they want to replicate that disaster in more Middle Eastern countries? The White House's only chance to salvage this election is to have it center around war debates, but that presents a big problem for them -- the only war they have is politically unusable because it's so unpopular, so they have to create new ones in order to obscure the old one. That new-war strategy is a highly risky one to try to impose on a very war-weary country. They can get away with that only if Democrats let them, which will happen if Democrats are tepid and uncertain and defensive about whether they want the menu of new wars the President is threatening.

Today's Murrow...?

I've been a fan of Edward R. Murrow since I first heard about him and love reading transcripts of his broadcasts and addresses. I really enjoyed the recent movie Good Night and Good Luck about his battle with Sen. Joe McCarthy. More recently, I've become a fan of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann who has become a bit of a modern day Murrow -- though, to his credit, Olbermann modestly refuses to make that claim.

Last night, Olbermann did a very convincing Murrow imitation as he blasted Rumsfeld's ridiculous but dangerous attack on critics of the administration as enemy sympathizers. I've quoted Murrow before but Olbermann really nails this one (and quotes Murrow in doing so). Here is a video link so that you can see for yourself. Here is a link to the transcript on his blog and it's well worth a read.

But there is still some risk in telling the truth to power these days, though not what it was in Murrow's time, but a risk none the less. As Sara at the Last Hurrah says:

In essence, I see Olberman out there on a very very tender limb, and without a back-up, able to be cut down quickly. The key is to make certain that doesn't happen, even though some parts of his commentary are somewhat problematic. The overall point is a fight back on the crazy notion that anyone who is a critic of Iraq is somehow in league with neo-fascists or whatever.

For a taste of what I'm raving about, here is how Olbermann closes:

That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused, is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.

And, as such, all voices count -- not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience --— about Osama Bin Laden'’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein's weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina's impact one year ago --— we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their "omniscience" as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have --— inadvertently or intentionally --— profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor's New Clothes?

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

The confusion we -- as its citizens -- must now address, is stark and forbidding.

But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note -- with hope in your heart --— that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld's other main assertion, that this country faces a "new type of fascism."

As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that -- though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism - indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.

But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: "confused" or "immoral."

Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty," he said, in 1954. "We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular."

And so good night, and good luck.

Sen. Reid smacks down Rummy

Harry Reid makes this response to Rumsfeld's absurdity and it's not too shabby.

Secretary Rumsfeld’s reckless comments show why America is not as safe as it can or should be five years after 9/11. The Bush White House is more interested in lashing out at its political enemies and distracting from its failures than it is in winning the War on Terror and in bringing an end to the war in Iraq. If there's one person who has failed to learn the lessons of history it's Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld ignored military experts when he rushed to war without enough troops, without sufficient body armor, and without a plan to succeed. Under this Administration's watch, terror attacks have increased, Iraq has fallen into civil war, and our military has been stretched thin. We have a choice to make today. Do we trust Secretary Rumsfeld to make the right decisions to keep us safe after he has been so consistently wrong since the start of the Iraq War? Or, do we change course in Iraq and put in place new leadership that will put the safety of the American people ahead of partisan games? For the sake of the safety of this country, it is time to make a change.

Big Matt's Trifecta

Matt Yglesias has been guest-blogging at TPM in Josh's absence and, IMHO, he's doing a great job. He scored a hat-trick today with these three posts:

First, he nails Donald Rumsfeld for the absurdity of what Matt calls

"the full wingnut monte. America faces an undifferentiated fascist menace. Bush's critics are appeasers who don't understand the lessons of history who blame America first and hate freedom. The media is treasonous and a free press is a luxury we can ill-afford in this time of crisis. Etc."

[...]

Rumsfeld is a buffoon. A punchline. A well-known liar. He and his bosses -- Bush and Cheney -- are running around the country trying to cite the failures of their own policies as a reason to entrust them with additional authority in order to continue and intensify those same failings. We're witnessing the bitter, bitter fruits of the Iraq War. Other nations learned that they must seek nuclear weapons as soon as possible to safeguard themselves from a newly trigger happy United States of America. Muslim opinion was sharply polarized against us. Iran and Syria were told that their cooperation against al-Qaeda was no longer needed because their governments would topple soon enough. A power vacuum was left on the streets of Baghdad that parties aligned with Iran have rushed to fill. The Arab-Israeli conflict was sidelined as something that would magically resolve itself once Saddam Hussein was out of the way. And America's allies were taught that our government was not to be relied upon -- that we operated with bad intelligence and initiated wars of choice without any real plans or ideas about how to cope with the aftermath.

That's how we got here. By listening to Bush. By listening to Cheney. By listening to Rumsfeld. The idea that we should keep on listening to them is absurd.

Second, he comments on the surreal nature of the debate surrounding Iran.

You have the "Islamofascist" locution jumping from the fever swamps of rightwing punditry into the mouth of the President of the United States. You have the Secretary of Defense issuing dire warnings of another Munich. These things are being done by the exact same people who, four years ago, were utterly dismissive of claims that invading Iraq was likely to serve Iranian interests better than American ones. Indeed, you have the exact same people who two years ago were assuring us that it made sense to commit American blood and treasure to fight Sunni insurgents on behalf of Iranian-backed Shiite militias now saying we need to commit more blood and treasure in Iraq to stop . . . Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

[...]

So, here's Iran. Outgunned by its two leading religio-ideological antagonists, Israel and Saudi Arabia, in the region. One immediate neighbor is Pakistan, with a larger population base and a nuclear arsenal. Another immediate neighbor, Afghanistan, is occupied by soldiers under the command of an American president who has spurned peace offers and threatened to overthrow the Iranian government. A second immediate neighbor, Iraq, is occupied by a larger number of soldiers from the same country. The Iranian military's equipment is outdated and essentially incapable of mounting offensive operations. So Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. Under the circumstances, wouldn't you? Don't you think a little deterrence capability would serve the country well under those circumstances?

I'm sorry to have gone on at such great length here, and a little nervous about stepping outside the "sensible" zone with my commentary on this topic, but somebody needs to call bull$#*t on the prevailing elite consensus about Iran. Of course it would be better to find a way to persuade, cajole, whatever Iran out of going nuclear -- the spread of nuclear weapons is, as such, bad for the USA. But there's no need -- absolutely no need -- for this atmosphere of panic and paranoia.

Thirdly, he rips apart this notion that we must have learned the "lessons of history" with regard to Hitler if we are to deal with Iran appropriately.

So the "lesson" people want to draw from the 1930s isn't that we should take people's statements more seriously. Rather, the "lesson" they've learned is that we should always adopt the most alarmist possible interpretation of every given situation. But, of course, they never put it that way. Why don't they? Well, because when you put it that way it sounds like a stupid lesson. Which, obviously, it is. If you want to draw lessons from history, you need to really look at history as a whole. Have countries, as a general matter, been well served by adopting maximally alarmist interpretations of events abroad? I don't think that's a remotely justifiable view. If anything, history teaches the reverse lesson.

Now, that's a trifecta!

Soowee! Soowee! Calling all porkers...

The TPM muckraker has been doing some good work lately unmasking the culprit who had placed the secret hold on the "bill that would create a free, searchable database of government contracts and grants". As Justin Rood had said earlier:

The government spends or gives away hundreds of billions of dollars each year. But there's no easy way to see where it goes.

Two senators have championed a searchable database of federal spending and grantmaking. But now that it's on the brink of becoming law, an anonymous senator has stepped in to block it.

I guess it should come as no surprise that the guilty party is none other than "The King of Pork", Sen. Ted "Tubes" Stevens (R-AK) who is infamous for his earmarking of $200+ million for the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere". The Muckraker had eliminated 95 other senators before Stevens' office, no doubt sensing the noose tightening, admitted his guilt. John Hart, a spokesman for the bill's co-sponsor, Sen. Sen. Coburn (R-OK), questioned Stevens' motive: "The only reason to oppose this bill is if he has something to hide".

Read all about it here.

Vonnegut - a man without a country

poputonian at Digby's has posted an article which quotes extensively from the A Man Without A Country, the newest book of one of my favourite authors (and certainly my favourite 84-year old author), Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Digby's trying to explain to a neocon why it's worth listening to wise people, even if they're elderly. Here's an illustrative excerpt from Vonnegut's book followed by a reprise of a favourite of mine by Digby.

Vonnegut:

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

Digby:

I will repeat my favorite little story to illustrate:

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!"

That's neoconservatism. It's so insane, I believe almost anything is an improvement.

War and image

In a zero-sum game, if one side loses, the other side gains, but according to Matt Yglesias at TPM...

War is typically a negative sum endeavor that leaves both sides worse off than they would have been had the war not begun. Think of Iraq -- the US seriously damaged our interests by invading, but Saddam Hussein didn't benefit at all from the war.

It sounds sufficiently dippy that I hesitate to express the view, but the simple fact of the matter is that going to war is rarely a good idea. The benefits of international cooperation -- or simple lack of active conflict -- are sufficiently large that there are almost always alternatives that would have been more conducive to both sides' interests.

That should be obvious, don't you think? Yet people keep advocating war at the drop of a hat. Go figure...

Matt also shares some thoughtful analysis of "the centrality of 9/11 to Bush's political persona". When all is said and done, the attacks succeeded on his watch and the evidence shows that there was ample warning that were going to occur. Afterwards all Bush did was give a few speeches.

Providing inspirational rhetorical leadership in a time of panic is legitimately part of the president's job. But it still doesn't add up to very much. A speech is just a speech. It's not, moreover, like this was a DeGaulle or Churchill type situation where the disaster struck and then a new leader stepped forward to take the reigns of authority from those who had failed and gave a speech to mark a new beginning. His popularity skyrocketed because, having failed to foil a serious terrorist plot, he made a series of pleasing remarks about the plot. And ever since that day, I think this dynamic has been infecting our national strategy. The main goal, in essence, is to do things that signify the adoption of an appropriate attitude toward hostile elements in the world rather than to evaluate possible courses of action in terms of their effects.

The debate on Iraq is just awash in this. The war gets discussed as if it's a metaphor of some kind. A good opportunity to demonstrate resolve or commitment, or else the lack thereof. A place where our stick-to-it-iveness will show how strongly we feel that democracy is good. A shadow theater wherein we send messages to al-Qaeda or Iran or what have you have. But, of course, Iraq is a real place. The soldiers and civilians in that country are real people. They shoot real bullets and detonate real explosives. And so the question has to be, what, actually, is being achieved? What more might realistically be achieved? What are the consequences -- not intentions, not desires, not hopes, but consequences -- of our policies?

Poor Matt... he's stuck in the reality-based community. He doesn't understand that in GWB's world, image is everything -- his reality is a photo-op.

More progress?

Earlier, I wrote that I had noticed some hopeful signs that the public is cottoning on to the fact that BushCo had lied to them about the connection between 9/11 and Iraq. When people lie to you, it's a reasonable for you to be skeptical the next time they tell you a story. Well, I see another sign that there may be some hope for at least part of the MSM. This time it's a NY Times editorial -- yes, the same NY Times that gave Judith Miller the front page to hype the invasion of Iraq -- titled Wanted: Scarier Intelligence which warns us about getting burned again. It opens and closes with the following paragraphs and it's almost as if someone has learned a lesson. Can't you just hear GWB saying: "Fool me once... uh... fool me... uh... "

The last thing this country needs as it heads into this election season is another attempt to push the intelligence agencies to hype their conclusions about the threat from a Middle Eastern state.

That’s what happened in 2002, when the administration engineered a deeply flawed document on Iraq that reshaped intelligence to fit President Bush’s policy. And history appeared to be repeating itself this week, when the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, released a garishly illustrated and luridly written document that is ostensibly dedicated to “helping the American people understand” that Iran’s fundamentalist regime and its nuclear ambitions pose a strategic threat to the United States.

[...]

All in all, this is a chilling reminder of what happened when intelligence analysts told Vice President Dick Cheney they could not prove that Iraq was building a nuclear weapon or had ties with Al Qaeda. He kept asking if they really meant it — until the C.I.A. took the hint.

It’s obvious that Iran wants nuclear weapons, has lied about its program and views America as an enemy. We enthusiastically agree that the United States needs every scrap of intelligence it can get on Iran. But the reason American intelligence is not certain when Iran might have a nuclear bomb is because the situation is so murky — not because the agencies are too wimpy to tell the scary truth.

If the Republicans who control Congress really wanted a full-scale assessment on the state of Iran’s weapons programs, they would have asked for one, rather than producing this brochure.

The nation cannot afford to pay the price again for politicians’ bending intelligence or bullying the intelligence agencies to suit their ideology.

So wrong that it re-defines "wrongness"

Glenn Greenwald has another good post up which echoes and amplifies my earlier attempts here and here to decry how the so-called "pundits" who got Iraq "so wrong" have managed to preserve their privileged perches. One of the worst, Mark Steyn, "whom Bush followers think is a visionary and prophet whom we should also listen to now with regard to what we should do about Iran and the broader Middle East got it "so wrong that it re-defines "wrongness"". The kind of wrong that, in another world, would have warranted taking one's service revolver and going off into another room and doing the right thing. On May 4, 2003, Steyn crowed thusly:

This war is over. The only question now is whether a new provisional government is installed before the BBC and The New York Times have finished running their exhaustive series on What Went Wrong with the Pentagon's Failed War Plan. . .

On the other hand, everything that has taken place is strictly local, freelance, improvised. Many commanders have done nothing: they're the ones I wrote about, the ones so paralysed by the silence from HQ that they're not even capable of showing the initiative to surrender; they're just waiting for the orders that never come.

Others have figured the jig's up, discarded their uniforms and returned to their families. Some guys have gone loco, piling into pick-ups and driving themselves into the path of the infidels' tanks. A relatively small number have gone in for guerrilla tactics in the southern cities. . . .

It takes two to quagmire. In Vietnam, America had an enemy that enjoyed significant popular support and effective supply lines. Neither is true in Iraq. Isolated atrocities will continue to happen in the days ahead, as dwindling numbers of the more depraved Ba'athists confront the totality of their irrelevance. But these are the death throes: the regime was decapitated two weeks ago, and what we've witnessed is the last random thrashing of the snake's body.

By the time you read this, Tariq Aziz and the last five Ba'athists in Baghdad may be holed up in Fisk's Ba'athroom, and he'll be hailing the genius of their plan to lure the Americans to their doom by leaving his loo rolls on the stairwell for the Marines to slip on.

But, for everyone other than media naysayers, it's the Anglo-Aussie-American side who are the geniuses. Rumsfeld's view that one shouldn't do it with once-a-decade force, but with a lighter, faster touch has been vindicated, with interesting implications for other members of the axis of evil and its reserve league.

Now that really stands the test of time well, doesn't it? Shameless idiot! Let's keep waiting for him to admit he was wrong, shall we...?

*cricket* *cricket*

It took Zealand to put the 'New' in News

Crooks & Liars informs us the we needed to find out from New Zealand that Speaker Denny Hastert "nullified the San Diego Congressional race" when he swore in the Republican candidate while the election result was being contested by his Democratic opponent who cited many irregularities. The article began with "It appears the US media overlooked one of the great political stories of the year. In what is becoming something of a pattern"

In a filling in San Diego Municipal Court yesterday, attorney Paul Lehto outlined the core in stark terms:

Defendants are in effect arguing for the remarkable proposition that unilateral self-serving actions by a majority party in the House of Representatives to shuttle in a member of the same party can be effective, even if those actions do violence to and amount to circumvention of other sections of the US Constitution as well as the California constitution. Document available here.

Lehto is one of the two attorneys representing citizens who are challenging the election. Shortly after the last vote was cast, citizens discovered disturbing facts. Prior to Election Day, several poll workers had taken home voting machines for periods of a day to a week at a time without supervision or even consistent tracking procedures. Other irregularities like vote switching on touch screen machines emerged. Brad Friedman of www.BradBlog.com conducted an extensive investigation that uncovered a series of sloppy procedures by County Registrar Haas.

Comment Of The Day

Digby shares this gem:

Dover Bitch responding to the JC Watts insanity on Plan B:

Yesterday, they said life begins with conception.

Today, they say life begins with intercourse.

Tomorrow, they will tell us life begins with dinner and a movie.

Musings on the GWOT

While dramatic sounding and apparently important, The Global War on Terror is a fraud. I have commented before on my taking issue with the use of this term, especially when it is used in connection with the invasion of Iraq.

I refuse to legitimize the term War on Terror, both the use of the term and most of the acts committed under its banner, because it perpetuates the conflation of 9/11 and Iraq.

But there are many other problems with the use of the term GWOT. Among them are the facts that it's not really global (any American war-making ability is essentially bogged down in Iraq) and it's not a war -- the only real war was in Iraq (and it wasn't "on terror") and it's no longer a war. But the aspect that I want to address here is the use of the word: terror (and its progeny, terrorists and terrorism, and more recently, Islamofacism).

Much is lost from the discussion when terms like 'terrorists' and 'terrorism' are employed so frequently and so casually. Things could be clarified greatly if we were to endeavour to speak more precisely. I understand that those who first pressed these terms into service (the Rovians of BushCo) did so deliberately, so as to confuse and mislead people, but my concern here is with those among us who have embraced the terms -- who have accepted them into the public lexicon and legitimized them with their use.

When I speak of precision I am referring to the importance of making precise distinctions about what exactly we mean when we talk about terrorists i.e. what characteristics distinguish the terrorist from anyone else. This is the opposite of the conflation practiced by the Rovians whose over-generalizations are deliberate (and akin to Colbert's "truthiness") and whose goal is to make people feel a certain way and to predispose them to support a certain course of action because it "feels true". Indeed, if what is being asserted or framed or "truthied" were true, then what was being suggested might well be the appropriate course of action. But there is no substance behind these assertions -- they don't stand up to scrutiny.

In order to act correctly, one must understand the situation or circumstances in which one finds oneself. In order to understand this, one must have complete and accurate information and have performed some rigorous analysis on it. So, to get back to the so-called terrorists and their antipathy towards the U.S....

There are indeed people "out there" who are angry and the focus of their anger is directed rather generally towards "America", but I think it worthwhile to try to be a little more precise --for example, to distinguish between whether it's the country and its citizens, on the one hand, or it's the leaders and their policies, on the other, which are the target of this ill will. It's equally important to determine who exactly "these people" are and the nature and degree of their antipathy and, perhaps more important still, whether or not they would act on their hatred. Using the term, as BushCo does, to refer to anyone they don't like, is not how it's done.

First of all, this is not a homogeneous group. The fact is that one could define a group made up of self-described "America-haters" and find that you haven't described anyone in the group well enough to locate them on a map, let alone, pick them out of a line-up. The fact that you might have grouped them doesn't make them a group in any meaningful sense of the word. They don't know each other, they don't have the same goals, they don't work in concert (they probably don't even like each other) and they don't even hate the same things about America. So you can see that it is a pretty useless exercise if your goal was to describe or understand these people. But, as I have said before, that wasn't the Rovian's purpose.

As for the causes of this hatred... they hate America because of what the U.S. represents to them or what the U.S. has done to them or to those with whom they empathize. It's not true, as GWB claims, that "they hate us for our freedom". I'm confident that if we got this malevolent group to articulate why they hated America, there would be a long and varied list of grievances. To the extent that there is any commonality in the rationales for this hatred, it is most likely American foreign policy and its consequences for the people we're discussing.

It's interesting to note that very little of this hatred results from American domestic policy -- for America simple being America -- the so-called "hating us for our freedoms". There are lots of people (and I include myself in this category) who feel disgust or contempt for many aspects of western society and its ways. One only has to watch a few minutes of almost any TV programming to see what I mean. But this doesn't make us want to blow up anything or kill anyone. The superficial, materialistic, decadent nature of much of American life doesn't breed terrorists. Sadly, it elicits mostly envy.

As for the degree of this hatred, I'm sure that it is as varied as its causes. At one extreme there are some, as we well know, who would gladly give up their lives to kill indiscriminately as many Americans as possible. But at the other, there are also those who confess to a feeling of schadenfreude when things don't go well for America... but they feel guilty doing so. Surely the spectrum of people between these extremes who make up this anti-American group should not be treated as one. Surely our focus should be on those who would do harm to America(ns). Only these deserve to be called enemies of America, certainly not those who just wouldn't mind if someone gave America a comeuppance, nor even those who would delight in the deed, for these latter groups pose it no threat (unless America is going to stoop to the point of attacking those who simply don't like it).

So we've reduced this group still further... to those who would actually do harm to America. But even within this group of "enemies of America", not all can accurately be called terrorists. For terrorism is a technique not an ideology. Terrorists (whatever cause they might embrace) do things like drop bombs onto crowds of civilians. Their goal is to terrorize the population so that the whole group will start (or stop) doing something that the terrorists would otherwise have been powerless to compel. The key element is that they are terrorizing the civilian population. By contrast, the use of guerilla tactics in fighting against the occupation of one's country by an invading army can hardly be construed as a act of terrorism even if the techniques employed do terrify the invading soldiers. After all that's the goal of war -- to kill or threaten into submission the enemy combatants.

So, rather than terrify the American public into condoning an inept lashing out at vaguely defined boogey-men, which is what BushCo's GWOT has unleashed on the world, it would seem that the goal of a more appropriately named strategy should have been twofold: 1) to prosecute those who have wronged America (Osama Bin Laden et al) and 2) to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks by both preventing the terrorists from succeeding (e.g. better security in American ports) and by understanding the root causes and dealing with them in such a way as to result, as much as possible, in people no longer choosing to attack American civilians (e.g. stop invading and occupying countries and propping up corrupt dictators for starters).

In other words, if one does not wish to live under the threat of attack from one's enemies, one should act in a way that does not antagonize people but, rather, do things that make people become one's allies. However, I suspect that some of the "reason" for the America-hatred that does exist is not rational, thoughtful or reason-based in its origins and against this, America must be prepared to protect itself. These defensive measures are legitimate and, in fact, the duty of the government of any sovereign nation and, taken responsibly, would not provoke the hatred of other citizens of the world. Unfortunately, this is not what BushCo has been doing since 9/11.

Instead, they have cynically used the tragedy of 9/11 to pursue a bone-headed neocon vision of American global hegemony that has resulted in a multi-faceted failure -- the surviving 9/11 perpetrators remain at large, the world is less stable, more people hate America and the military has been incompetently over-extended. The net result of the so-called GWOT is that America is less safe.

McCain Watch - 3

I would hate to be right, but I'm afraid that I might be. I think the Sen. John "Straight Talk" McCain may be the GOP presidential candidate in 2008 and, if the Dems don't do a good job (or if BushCo doesn't do a bad enough job), he may win. This would be dreadful because, as I have said before, I think he's every bit as bad as GWB. Digby has a good post today indicating why.

The truth is that McCain is actually more hawkish and deceitful than Bush. The only difference in their rhetoric on national security is that McCain pretends he didn't cheer every single move Bush made until it started to go wrong. Senator Straight Talk is very, very slick, I'll give him that.

[...]

Slicker than owlshit, as my father always says.

[...]

The key to the mission that McCain and Bush sold was always to have large a multi-national force, which Codpiece and Unka Dick did everything but spit in the world's face to avoid. McCain knows this very well but continued to argue publicly that we could just easily conjure up a larger military to "fix" Iraq and just slides on through like the oily political conman he really is.

It has certainly set him up nicely for a presidential run, though. He gives speeches more stirring than anything Michael Gerson ever dreamed of about liberty and freedom. He made the argument before Bush did that "some say" arabs can't govern themselves, but he begs to differ! Remember, he's Mr "National Greatness" which is all about the Glory That Is Imperial America. And somehow he manages to convince people that he would have magically won this stupid war and we'd all feel better about ourselves today if he'd been in charge --- even though he backed Bush's cock-up every step of the way and only came along later to carp about troop levels once it was already too late.

[...]

And if anybody thinks that McCain is more sane on some of the other foreign policy challenges, think again:

"The greatest single threat that we are facing right now to our national security is Iran," he said. "If they get that weapon, and they have the capability to deliver it, put yourself in the position of the government of the state of Israel. This could be one of the most unsettling and difficult challenges that we have ever faced."

See... yet another example of hyping the Iranian threat.

Second verse, same as the first...

Those of us old enough to remember Vietnam were amazed, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, by how many people seemed to have never learned or to have forgotten the lessons of that military disaster. But it occurred more then thirty years ago so, I guess, that would help to explain part of it. But for people to have failed to learn from the fiasco that is the occupation of Iraq, or worse, to have already forgotten it (I know of goldfish with better retention) is mind-boggling.

So here we have the public discourse being primed and framed to accept the notion that America may be forced to attack Iran -- I mean what's a trailing consonant among friends. The technique is the same -- get the word out, get Iran on people's minds (the current issue of Reader's Digest, for gawd's sake!), hype the threat, gin up the evidence, get people scared, treat ridiculous suggestions as reasonable, get several of the scenarios "out there" and frame the discussion such that it is just a matter of choosing from among the several ways of attacking Iran that is being debated not whether we should even be considering it at all.

We've been here before, people! There using the same tired and false (as opposed to tried and true) M.O. -- fear and smear. Billmon predicted this and called it the flight forward -- having screwed the pooch in Iraq, they seem to be saying: let's try to salvage something of our tattered reputation by doing something bigger and bolder in Iran. It is to weep...

I almost don't blame BushCo for being contemptuous of the voting public if it can be sold a bill of goods like this... again!

Attack dogs in action

Glenn Greenwald has a couple of good posts on the subjectof the attacks on Judge Taylor. The first cites the personal nature of the attacks which he concludes with this observation:

Look at any individual over the last five years who has prominently and aggressively criticized the Leader, and see if you can find one who has not been the target of vicious, personal assaults designed to destroy their reputation and credibility.

In the second, he elaborates on the point he made yesterday that the criticisms are woefully uninformed and "completely bereft of reasoning".

The fact that something is "immensely difficult" for Ann Althouse to figure out does not mean that it is, in fact, "immensely difficult." Most actual legal experts, across the ideological spectrum, have found nothing challenging -- let alone "immensely difficult" -- about concluding that the President of the United States does not have the power to break the law by engaging in the very conduct which the law criminalizes.

Althouse thinks that the President's claim that neither courts nor Congress can interfere in his conduct with regard to national security "is a serious argument, and judges need to take it seriously," but she never says why that argument is "serious" or what the court failed to consider in rejecting the administration's theories of presidential omnipotence. Althouse apparently thinks that repeating the words "serious" and "difficult" enough times will bestow on her little platitudes the scholarly weight which her analysis so plainly, so embarrassingly lacks.

[...]

Althouse did not follow this case and had no idea what happened in it. She formed her views about the court's ruling and then proceeded to express them loudly and publicly without bothering to do the smallest amount of work which would be necessary for forming a responsible opinion -- including even reviewing what the DoJ argued here or finding out what happened previously in this case (she even aggressively criticized the court's opinion while admitting that she only had time to "skim it"). Even after that, it is clear that she just read the opinion and then spat up some trite political slogans attacking the court, exhibiting precisely the intellectual sloth and undisciplined approach of which she thinks she is qualified to accuse Judge Taylor.

But this gaping lack of relevant knowledge did not stop Althouse from writing an Op-Ed, nor stop The New York Times from publishing it, in which she pretended to be some sort of legal expert on the issues decided by Judge Taylor. The fact that someone can be paraded around as an expert on a lawsuit about which they know next to nothing is as good of an explanation as any for the sorry, distortive state of our political discourse.

Did Bush really say that?

David Adesnik at OxBlog shares tidbit. Do you think Bush is even aware of his hypocrisy? Is he such a buffoon or is he just completely shameless?

The WaPo quotes the President as saying:

"There must be consequences if people thumb their nose at the United Nations Security Council, and we will work with people in the Security Council to achieve that objective."

Now that's chutzpah. I stand with the President on Iran and Iraq, but it really would be heard to come up with a statement more capable of inciting widespread laughter at Turtle Bay.

(And yes, Bush actually said it. Transcript here.)

Drum roll

Kevin Drum has a nice turn of phrase:

It turns out that approaching foreign affairs like a guy at a bar with six beers in him hasn't worked so well.

So the beery Bush insists that we have to keep drinking (stay the course) simply because sobering up and confronting the havoc he's wreaked would be too painful for him to contemplate. Remember when "a democratic Iraq would be a long-sought beacon for the oppressed Shiites of the world"? Referring to his own recommendation last year for starting "a phased withdrawal of troops from Iraq because it seemed like the best of a bad set of options", Drum now sees the options as being much more grim.

Was that right? There's no telling, because there's no way of knowing what would have happened if we had begun pulling out troops back then. But the decision is even starker today. On the one hand, the argument for withdrawing is stronger than ever because it's even clearer than it was last year that our troops are simply unable to cope with the emerging civil war in Iraq. On the other hand, a year ago it was at least possible that a withdrawal might help cool things down. Nobody thinks that today: a pullout now would almost certainly unleash an unbelievable bloodbath in Baghdad and beyond. This virtual certainty of slaughter is a painful reality, and it makes it harder than ever to continue counseling withdrawal.

So the choice has gotten harder and the consequences worse. Unfortunately, as bad as they are now, they're likely to be even worse a year from now. No matter what we do, Iraq is not going to be a beacon for anything for a very, very long time.

Making progress

No, not in Iraq... but we seem to be making some slight progress in disabusing people of the notion that there is any legitimate connection between the fiasco in Iraq and what a reasonable response to bad guys ("folks" as GWB calls them) who attacked us. I refuse to legitimize the term War on Terror, both the use of the term and most of the acts committed under its banner, because it perpetuates the conflation of 9/11 and Iraq.

The reason for my feeling slightly hopeful is that today FDL and Crooks & Liars, among others, point out the fact that a NY Times/CBS News poll and a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll indicated that a majority of Americans "saw no link between the war in Iraq and the broader antiterror effort, a jump of 10 percentage points since June".

C&L also has some video of Paul Hackett and Chris Matthews on Hardball making life miserable for Van Taylor, the only Iraq vet running for the GOP this election, when he tries to make that specious link. The pathetic guy said that "We need to stay in Iraq until we get the job done. We've got to defeat the al-Qaeda terrorists who are trying to take over the country of Iraq" and the other two were all over him. Nice to see.

That line is right up there with the always outrageous Sen. Inhofe (R-OK) who won the "Outrageous GOP Quote of the Day" for uttering: "What'’s happened there is nothing short of a miracle". Yeah, right... the miracle of the triumph of insanity over reason.

Law profs fail to get facts straight

Glenn Greenwald continues to be my "go-to guy" on the many and varied legal issues that dog GWB's presidency. He's written another gem today from which I quote liberally (how else :-) below on the furor surrounding the illegal NSA eavesdropping decision. While there has been much criticism of the decision and the judge (surprise!) from Bush's apologists, Glenn predicts that:

At the rate things are going, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor is going to be due a serious apology some time soon, if she isn't due one already.

It appears that some of the most widely quoted law professors [Kerr, Althouse below] have been bloviating without having their facts straight (who woulda thunk it?). One of their most frequent complaints (and egregious gaffes) has been to fuss over the judge's use of the word "undisputed". Glenn is his delightfully reasonable, lucid, informed prose puts them straight.

... the reason she repeatedly said that certain propositions were "undisputed," is because the Bush administration either failed or chose not to dispute them.

[...]

... the Bush administration's refusal to address the merits of the claims (which is part and parcel of its general contempt for the role of the courts in scrutinizing its conduct) meant that Judge Taylor was not only entitled, but was required by the Rules of Civil Procedure (Rule 56), to treat the ACLU's factual claims as undisputed for purposes of deciding the motion.

But plainly, Kerr -- when issuing his widely cited condemnations of the court's ruling -- had no idea (a) that any of this (meaning the case's procedural history) had happened and (b) that on a Motion for Summary Judgment (which is what the ACLU filed and the court decided), the most basic rule is that any fact that one party fails to dispute (with evidence) shall be deemed "undisputed."

[...]

But far from being "bizarre," this proposition -- that facts which a party fails (for whatever reasons) to dispute on Summary Judgment are deemed "undisputed" by the court -- is one of the most basic principles of civil litigation in the federal courts, as any federal court litigator would know. Someone (such as Kerr) who is unaware of those rules might find it "bizarre" that the court repeatedly labeled as "undisputed" facts and propositions which Kerr himself might want to dispute, but given the DoJ's failure to dispute these propositions, the court was required to treat them as such. How can someone who is (a) unfamiliar with the case itself and (b) unfamiliar with the rules governing the key issues before the court be cited as the preeminent expert to opine that the court's opinion is so flawed?

[...]

In other words, Kerr's critique (which Althouse endorsed) of the court's opinion is just wrong -- factually wrong. The court directed the DoJ to address the substance of the claims and the DoJ simply failed and/or refused to do so -- facts which neither Kerr nor Althouse even knew when attacking the court's opinion. And there is nothing "arguable" about it -- if one party moves for Summary Judgment and presents competent evidence supporting its factual claims (as the ACLU indisputably did here), and the other party fails to dispute those facts with competent evidence (as the DoJ indisputably did here), then those facts are "undisputed," by definition.

[...]

It is true that there are parts of Judge Taylor's opinion which are surprisingly conclusory, but that does not necessarily make it flawed. It is amazing to watch virtually everyone who is trying to attack her opinion do so by making arguments which the DoJ never made in the case before her. A basic familiarity with this case and with the rules of civil procedure -- both of which many of her critics clearly lacked -- would reveal that Judge Taylor's opinion was infinitely more sound than the conventional wisdom (thanks to many of these law professors) now holds that it was.

[...]

UPDATE: Add Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, former Dean of the University of Chicago Law School and current constitutional law expert, to the list of admirers of Judge Taylor's opinion. Professor Stone says that he is "confident Judge Taylor reached the right result as a matter of law" (emphasis added; h/t Mona), and that it took "a good deal of courage for a judge to hold unlawful a program that the President of the United States maintains is essential to the national security."

It certainly did -- far more courage than almost anyone else has shown (in the Congress, the courts or the media) in the face of the administration's endless exploitation of terrorism to claim virtually unlimited power. It looks as though the little conventional wisdom claim that "All of the High Scholarly Distinguished Priests of Legal Wisdom Agree that this Decision is Undignified and Distasteful" is going to have to be re-written. Some public recanting is in order.

How could all those people get this mistaken idea of a connection...

Aargh! Where is the media? Lying down again while Bush makes a statement to a bunch of reporters that "nobody's ever suggested, in this administration, that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks." (video link) That's true, they didn't say precisely that. In fact, that's a perfect example of how they confuse people -- this statement sounds like a denial of the administration having linked Saddam & 9/11, doesn't it? But it's just weasel words -- what they so hypocritically accused Clinton of doing. BushCo has been deliberately misleading people into conflating Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, 9/11, WMD, terrorism, blah-blah-blah for years.

I recently posted something about how more people now think that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 than did a year ago! Gee, I wonder why? 9/11 happens, OBL is accused of being the main bad guy, Bush vows to fight the terrorists and the U.S. invades Iraq which becomes effectively the only front in the GWOT. There are so many examples that put the lie to Bush's claim that no one in his administration caused people to believe that Saddam was linked to 9/11.

Let's start with GWB himself in September 2002 saying: "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror" and Condoleezza Rice saying: "There clearly are contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented."

Josh Marshall at TPM has more as does the CAPAF in its Bush Flip Flopper-in-Chief section

The Pig in the Parlor

Glenn Greenwald has a great post about what he calls the pig in the parlor and others have called the elephant in the room. It's the glaringly obvious thing that virtually none of the talking heads is talking about -- the President broke the law.

This has been the most bizarre part of the NSA scandal all along: the President got caught red-handed violating an extremely clear law -- he admitted to engaging in the very behavior which that law says is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine -- and yet official Washington (the political and pundit classes) simply decided to pretend that wasn't the case.

[...]

And thus, a Washington ruling class which reveled in subpoenas and criminal investigations over such towering matters as Whitewater, Vince Foster and Monica Lewkinsky has collectively decided that talk of criminality on the part of the President for how he is spying on Americans is imprudent and unserious.

[...]

Notwithstanding all of the professorial angst-ridden deliberations, the NSA scandal is and always has been extremely simple. Congress, by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, passed a law 30 years ago making it a felony to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants and George Bush got caught violating that law -- a law nobody ever suggested was invalid until he got caught violating it. People who violate criminal laws are criminals, even if -- at least in the United States -- they hold high government positions. In decisive and unapologetic tones, Judge Taylor ruled -- consistent with the consensus of most legal experts -- that the President has been continuously breaking the law without any excuse, and that is something which our pundit and political classes simply want to ignore.

He then goes on to compare the behaviour about the NSA ruling to something I have written about before, the way the media (because of their own complicity) refuses to hold to account those who initiated and supported the fiasco in Iraq.

Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney and on and on -- all of them treated by the national media as Important, Wise, Serious foreign policy figures despite their being fundamentally and recklessly wrong about virtually everything with regard to our Iraq disaster. The one thing which the permanent Washington class does not want is accountability -- not for tragic errors, not for lawbreaking -- because being held accountable is the one real threat to their fiefdoms.

Great post! The emperor has no clothes.

McCain Watch - 2

I've written before that I think what makes the threat of Sen. John McCain a big threat is that he flies under people's radar screens -- people don't see him as dangerous. IMHO, he is another GWB and I think that he's the front-runner for the GOP Presidential candidate in 2008. I'm afraid that this Bush twin is seen as an attractive package by the voting public because they don't look very closely and because (so far) he's hasn't been given the opportunity to generate the track-record of dangerous incompetence.

Well, how's this for stupid and dishonest? Atrios reports that, on Meet the Press today, McCain said:

The administration has done the wrong thing for the last 3 and a half years which leaves us with no option other than staying the course.

[...]

Most Americans, when they're asked if they want to set a date for withdrawal, say no.

Yes, you read that correctly... we've done the wrong thing for 3 1/2 years, so we'd better keep doing it. That's the stupid part. The fact that a clear majority has, for some time now, favoured setting a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq shows how dishonest Mr. Straight-talk is (not!).

He did it his way

David Kaiser has good post on his blog History Unfolding called the Lebanon War which included this bit which seemed to mesh nicely with my recent post on the failed Bush Doctrine -- what a pompous label for smashing things and hoping that they get better -- I prefer to call it The Anus Touch.

The President’s statement, like so many of his statements on Iraq, insists that eventually the population of the Middle East will see things our way. He apparently believes this despite the lack of any evidence that they do, or that his policies are doing anything but making them more anti-American. More serious is his statement that the international force could help seal the Syrian-Lebanese border, which it has no intention, according to published reports, of doing.

Ironically, these statements begin to recognize, in a backhanded fashion, that the United States cannot accomplish all that much in the world without an international consensus behind it. That is why the foreign policy establishment has opposed the thrust of Bush Administration foreign policy from the beginning, and events are proving them right.

Milestone or Millstone

From The Nation we learn that, as of August 18, 2006, the U.S. has been in Iraq for 1,247 days -- three days longer that the U.S. involvement in World War II. Hmmm, let's see... save the world from the scourge of Nazism vs start a civil war in Iraq. Some legacy, George W. Churchill.

Germany declared war on the US on December, 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor. The US announced victory in Europe on May 8, 1945. That's one thousand, two hundred and forty-four days.

We've been in Iraq one thousand, two hundred and forty-seven days---and still the Administration has no exit strategy, no plan for victory and no clue what it is doing. In case you'd forgotten, George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard an aircraft carrier over three years ago.

"In the battle of Iraq," Bush said, "The United States and our allies have prevailed."

Perhaps that pronouncement was a little premature. Twelve hundred and four days later, our troops are still paying the price.

Treatment worse than the disease

While I understand and sympathize with the urge to do something, it is usually wise to limit one's action to cases where it is probable that said action will result in a significant improvement in the situation for an appreciable period of time. I really like how Kevin Drum, in a few words (which I have highlighted), sums up the problem with the BushCo modus operandi.

The big problem with the militarism inherent in the Bush Doctrine is that even if it does manage to kill off a bunch of terrorists and disrupt al-Qaeda's current operations — itself a debatable proposition — it's still a bad strategy because in the long run it encourages jihadist sympathies and creates far more new terrorists than the ones we kill off today. As with George Bush's domestic policy, it creates the illusion of present-day action at the expense of long-term disaster.

Would you buy a war from this man?

John in DC at AmericaBlog tears into George Bush for his refusal to "cut and run". John says that's what losers do and George has lost... whether he wants to admit it or not. More bloodshed and devastation won't change that fact. But George doesn't care... as long as it's not on his watch.

Big surprise. The man who single-handedly oversaw America's greatest foreign policy defeat since Vietnam, has nothing left to say so he's repeating himself.

President Bush said critics of his Iraq policies are advocating a "cut and run" strategy that would draw terrorists to American soil.

"Leaving before we complete our mission would create a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, a country with huge oil reserves that the terrorist network would be willing to use to extract economic pain from those of us who believe in freedom," Bush said Wednesday.

"If we leave before the mission is complete, if we withdraw, the enemy will follow us home," he said.

Unfortunately, George Bush is describing what very well may happen in Iraq because of his own incompetence.

Iraq is lost. It's over. Bush fought a war that was unnecessary and based on a lie and with no plan for victory and then he lost. So now he's going to have to withdraw, either sooner or later. It's only a question of when (Bush and the Republicans hope they can keep our troops there until the next president gets elected, so they won't get blamed - putting aside the fact that this war is costing us $100 billion a year and thousands of lives of US troops). And when he does withdraw from Iraq in shame Bush will have created the very terror state he's warning us about.

Bush has no policy to avoid cutting and running. And cutting and running is exactly what he will have to do because the Iraq war is over, Bush lost. Have you noticed how he constantly tells us how bad things are going to be if we lose, but he never actually tells us how he plans to win.

Iraq Forced To Import Oil To Tackle Shortages

Oh the irony! Amanda at Think Progress juxtaposes two quotes (a la Billmon) about the powers of neocon prescience. Yup... stay the course, uh-huh... looks like things are going according to plan rather nicely, aren't they?

Paul Wolfowitz, 3/27/03:

There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. … We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.

AP, 8/17/06:

Iraq has doubled the money allocated for importing oil products in August and September to tackle the country’s worst fuel shortage since Saddam Hussein’s 2003 ouster, a senior Iraqi official said Thursday. Even though Iraq has the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves, it is forced to depend on imports because of an acute shortage of refined products such as gasoline, kerosene and cooking gas. Sabotage of pipelines by insurgents, corruption and aging refineries have been blamed.

It's a question of priorities

Glenn Greenwald follows up on the recent NSA ruling and focuses on the complaints in a WaPo editorial that it "isn't scholarly and "complex" enough for the intellectual tastes of Fred Hiatt". So after sitting around saying nothing about BushCo's wrong-doing, the editors now decide that the issue worth complaining about is how the judge wrote her opinion, not the criminal wrong-doing. My gawd!

This Editorial, with all of its condescension and self-important open-mindedness to administration law-breaking, illustrates a common character flaw among our political and journalistic elites. In their world, the way you should how show smart and thoughtful and serious you are is to see two or more sides to everything, to treat every argument (especially from the Government) seriously and respectfully and be open to it because your great intellect and non-partisan fair-mindedness allows you to avoid the shrill, definitive conclusions in which the emotional and partisan masses traffic.

This borderline religious belief in the need to be open to every claim is enhanced -- severely -- when it comes to claims made by the Bush administration that are justified with the use of the word "terrorism." Particularly with regard to such matters, we are subjected to an endless parade of self-consciously "serious" journalists, law professors and editorialists who mistake indecision and an inability to take a definitive stand on anything -- along with acquiescence to morally and intellectually corrupt behavior as long as it masquerades under a veneer of high-minded grappling with terrorism complexities -- as a sign of moral and intellectual superiority.

[...]

Thank you to Jon Henke for leaving this comment, which I know will be the reaction of those who fail to see the point (how can you complain that "the Washington Post insist(s) on a substantive and comprehensive legal analysis and conclusion about this vitally important legal issue"?). This was my reply:

It's an issue of priorities, Jon. If you sit on the street corner and watch 3 criminals assault a pedestrian with a gun, and the pedestrian begins screaming in a really shrill and unpleasant voice, and all you do is complain that the victim's voice is unpleasant, you will be engaged in behavior worthy of condemnation, even though what you are saying might actually be true.

Some of the issues before the court are debatable (standing and the First Amendment claims, and some would say the Fourth Amendment claim), but some issues are not debatable (the administration's violation of the law with no excuse). Some parts of the Judge's opinion are poorly reasoned even when her conclusion is right. But between Anna Diggs Taylor's opinion-writing abilities and the fact that we have a President who is systematically violating the law because he thinks he can, it is not a difficult challenge to see which is the most important problem. The Post Editorial Board and others appear incapable of making those distinctions.

Orwellian

Digby has a post today about a couple of events that are outrageous yet they have become so commonplace that we have become complacent -- more praise and promotion for the corrupt wrong-doers. First there's General Geoffrey Miller who was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal,"for exceptionally commendable service in a position of great responsibility" when he retired recently.

Digby says:

His role was never adequately examined in the press. He was an artillery officer with no experience in interrogation who was called in to do some leg-breaking in Guantanamo when the former commandant refused to torture the prisoners. And when he showed himself to be sufficiently capable of overseeing a torture regime there he was sent to Abu Ghraib to show them how it was done. For some unknown reason, he kept leaving rotten apples in his wake everywhere he went.

And then there's the guy sitting in judgment of any potential criminal conduct in the notorious deaths in Haditha. Reuters reports:

The defense officials were quoted as saying the report also found commanders had created a climate that minimized the importance of Iraqi lives, particularly in Haditha, where insurgent attacks were rampant, The New York Times said.

Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the new top Marine general in U.S. Central Command, is due to decide on whether charges are warranted, officials said this week.

But as Digby points out:

the guy [General Mattis] who declared that "it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them" is ruling on a report that found "commanders had created a climate that minimized the importance of Iraqi lives." That's just SOP in Bushworld

Bush is now caught in a trap of his own making

Digby has written a great post on the cognitive dissonsance evident in the destruction of Iraq to save it, and the killing Iraqis to protect them. This was bound to happen when all your reasons for invading turned out to be (at best) wrong, but more often, to have been lies.

Damn Iraqis, sapping our budget and costing our lives like that. Why won't they understand that we came in and killed them, occupied their country and indiscriminately threw thousands of them in jail for their own good?

[...]

From the very beginning he framed his war on terror as being "with us or with the terrorists." He then consciously conflated Iraq with 9/11 and sent many soldiers over there with the idea that they were fighting those who attacked us. But the facts never supported that and they knew it. Since we live in a world in which outright conquest is no longer acceptable, once his WMD rationale evaporated, he was forced to lean on the idea that we are there to help the Iraqi people and "spread democracy." He obviously came to believe it.

He has tried to make distinctions between the good Iraqis who are "with us" and the bad ones who are "against us" --- "terrorists" "bitter enders" "insurgents" --- but many of the soldiers over there and their families back home and Bush's racist supporters see the "enemy" as simply Iraqis --- or just arabs or muslims. And I suspect that a whole lot of other Americans are just plain confused. It's very hard to finesse all that and it's one of the reasons why the occupation has been such a disaster. Nobody really knows what we're doing there, not us, not them. Now Iraqis are boldly demonstrating in favor of terrorists and even Bush can no longer hide his own confusion and dismay.

In that sense, this war makes Vietnam a moment of foreign policy clarity. It was certainly a mistake to put so much importance on the idea that the US could not afford to fail in a small proxy war or risk communism taking over the far east. But at least everyone understood the premise and could either agree or disagree with it. This war in Iraq is totally incomprehensible to everyone. We invaded for dozens of disparate reasons none of which were entirely compelling and all of which have been proven to be mistaken. We are throwing away hundreds of billions and yet there are now many more terrorists in Iraq than there were before the invasion and many more all around the world because of it. Oil prices are sky high and rising. The middle east is more unstable than its been in many decades. Lots and lots of people are dying.

This is all because after 9/11 we had a leadership who ruthlessly exploited the crisis for political gain and an influential advisory cabal who had waited for 30 years to unleash their half-witted ideological experiments on the world. None of it ever made any sense and now that the fog of 9/11 has lifted, that much, at least, is starting to become clear to most people. The problem is that the mess they've left is so huge it's virtually impossible to clean up. Damn, I don't think I've ever seen a case of "sow the wind, reap the whirlwind" unfold so quickly and so starkly right before my very eyes.

A Different Kind of Cluelessness

Billmon speaks, I listen. On a day when he admits that he agrees with Rush Limbaugh, Billmon references an article in the WaPo which opens with"blatant, obscene lie"

For the past month the United States has worked urgently to end the violence that Hezbollah and its sponsors have imposed on the people of Lebanon and Israel.

Billmon, a giant in the eyes of this blogosfan, offers a gem of a post today called A Different Kind of Cluelessness, Part II. Normally I try to quote selectively, but sometimes I get so overwhelmed by his wise word-smitherey that I feel compelled to quote his work in its entirety. So here goes... read it and be educated.

In which George Will demonstrates that he's more out of touch than the neocons he criticizes:

The [administration] official is correct that it is wrong "to think that somehow we are responsible -- that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies." But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere think like that.

Note the straw man Will uses to try to knock down the straw man set up by his anonymous neocon. This is intended to distinguish himself from those who do think U.S. policies are, at least in large part, responsible for the rise of the jihadis. He's turned us into the functional equivalent of Ward Churchill and sentenced us to wander for eternity in the "fog of paranoia."

I think we can best describe this as the "pseudo-realist" approach to foreign relations. Will wants us to understand that he's a hardheaded guy and doesn't buy into Shrub's democracy illusion. But that doesn't mean he's willing to let go of his illusion, which is that the United States has been a beneficient force in the Middle East, virtuously upholding "stability" for the benefit of all -- the proverbial cop on the beat.

The truth, of course, is quite different. The United States has tried to enforce stability in the Middle East because until Commander Codpiece came along foreign policy elites and American presidents alike viewed it as inherently in our interests to do so -- to protect the flow of oil, keep the Soviets out of the region, open markets to Western capital, and keep the Arab-Israeli conflict from getting out of hand.

However, this most emphatically was not done for the benefit of the people of the Middle East. It was for our benefit, and, secondarily, for the benefit of the colonized elites who transferred their loyalties -- or at least their services -- to America after the old colonial powers exited the region.

You can argue (imperialists almost always do) that the masses benefited from this stability because it created security, promoted economic growth and improved living standards. The British crown tried that same argument on the American colonists in the 1770s with a notable lack of success -- and they were all Englishmen. But there is some validity to it.

However, our stability fetish (and our commercial interests) also required us to do business with brutal dictators and/or prop up corrupt feudal elites -- many of them little more than rent-seeking parasites perched on oil fields disguised as countries. Where authentic or semi-authentic nationalist movements appeared -- in Egypt, for example -- we either tried to crush them or buy them off, and usually managed to do one or the other.

We also encouraged our "friends" in the region to Westernize themselves, to abandon or at least dilute their Islamic identities and become part of the globalized culture of capitalism (not that they needed much encouraging). As the energy importance of the region increased and the penetration of Western capital and culture deepened, so did the level of U.S. intervention -- always in the interests of that precious stability.

It may sound like I'm just reciting the plot from Syriana. But these were real policies, deliberately pursued over many years. And they were, by and large, extremely successful -- both for us and for our clients in the region. They were, however, abhorrent to the fundamentalist, anti-colonial Islamic movements (like the Muslim Brotherhood) that had existed in the region since the days of the British and the French. And they became increasingly abhorrent as our political and military presence in the region expanded and our alliance with Israel became increasingly open-ended. Abhorrence turned to rage as our campaign to contain Saddam degenerated into a long, grinding seige of Iraq (with the Iraqi people trapped inside) and the CIA and the Pentagon helped our Egyptian puppets crush the Islamist revolt on the upper Nile.

Did these policies "justify" the rise of the jihadist movement? Ah, that's a moral argument and Will should know that realists -- real realists, unlike his pseudo variety -- don't do morality. All that's necessary is to recognize that the jihadis regard themselves as fully justified, and are acting on that belief. Like all policies, our relentless promotion of stability in the Middle East had a price, and now we're paying it.

In that sense, if no other, America is "responsible" for the rise of what Shrub likes to call Islamofascism. His own rhetoric about democratization (a.k.a. the "forward strategy of freedom") implicitly recognizes this. It's an effort, albeit a hopelessly naive and contradictory one, to address a problem that Will has decided simply doesn't exist -- that is, outside the blogosphere's "fog of paranoia."

So who's the realist and who's the fool here? Or rather, who's the bigger fool?

Judge Rules NSA Wiretap Program Unconstitutional

Whew! That's refreshing! And, of course, here's the immediate and unsurprising White House response:

White House press secretary Tony Snow said the Bush administration "couldn't disagree more with this ruling."

AP reports from Detroit where the ACLU "filed the lawsuit on behalf of journalists, scholars and lawyers who say the program has made it difficult for them to do their jobs".

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy.

Excerpts from the Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's decision are delicious:

From page 23-24:

...it is important to note that if the court were to deny standing based on the unsubstantiated minor distinctions drawn by Defendants, the President's actions in warrantless wiretapping, in contravention of FISA, Title II, and the First and Fourth amendments, would be immunized from judicial scrutiny. It was never the intent of the Framers to give the President such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The three separate branches of government were developed as a check and balance for one another. It is within the court's duty to ensure that power is never condensed into a single branch of government." [my emphasis]

From Page 33:

"The President of the United States, a creature of the same Constitution which gave us these Amendments, has undisputedly violated the Fourth [Amendment] in failing to procure judicial orders as required by FISA, and accordingly has violated the First Amendment Rights of these Plaintiffs as well."

From page 40:

"The Government appears to argue here that, pursuant to the penumbra of Constitutional language in Article II, and particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution. So all "inherent power" must derive from that Constitution." [h/t and emphasis from Paul Kiel]

Glenn Greenwald opines:

Thus, judicial decisions are starting to emerge which come close to branding the conduct of Bush officials as criminal. FISA is a criminal law. The administration has been violating that law on purpose, with no good excuse. Government officials who violate the criminal law deserve to be -- and are required to be -- held accountable just like any other citizens who violate the law. That is a basic, and critically important, principle in our system of government. These are not abstract legalistic questions being decided. They amount to rulings that our highest government officials have been systematically breaking the law -- criminal laws -- in numerous ways. And no country which lives under the rule of law can allow that to happen with impunity.

And again here:

Let's resoundingly clear up two widely disseminated misconceptions, the first of which is being quite deliberately tossed around:

(1) Even with this Order, the Bush administration is free to continue to do all the eavesdropping on terrorists they want to do. They just have to do so with approval of the FISA court -- just like all administrations have done since 1978, just as the law requires, and just as they did when eavesdropping as part of the surveillance they undertook on the U.K. terror plot.

(2) The court's ruling that warrantless eavesdropping violates the Fourth and First Amendments clearly means (although the decision is far from a model of clarity) that Congress cannot authorize warrantless eavesdropping with legislation, which would preclude enforcement of the Specter bill.

Christy at FDL says:

A federal district court judge in Detroit has issued an injunction, halting the NSA domestic spying program unless and until the Bush Administration follows the nation’s laws and obtains FISA warrants as every other Administration has done since the 1970s, and calling this end-run of the nation’s laws unconstitutional in very straightforward language.

Spare Cash

Speaking of Loose Change just because I refer to something doesn't mean that I endorse it -- any more than it means, if I question something, that I'm against it. Ideas that have merit can withstand scrutiny and those who refuse to submit to questioning, usually have something to hide.
However, asking questions isn't proof that the thing questioned isn't valid. And questioners must be held to the same evidentiary standards as those they question.

There are many web sites devoted to debunking the 9/11 conspiracy theorists and, in the interests of equal time, here are a couple: PM and CFF.

We present, you decide...

Loose Change

I heard about this movie at The Liberal Journal and I just watched it. Pretty heavy stuff. Check it out for yourself here.

When legitimate questions go unanswered, it's only natural for people to come up with their own explanations (however strange) to fit the facts. And as Sherlock said: when you eliminate the impossible, what you are left with, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

So, is there truth to this? We present, you decide.

Pot Pourri

Arianna Huffington was on CNN and made a good point about the necessity (and the lack) of media accountability not just for images but for words too (e.g. calling Ned Lamont the al-qaeda candidate). Crooks & Liars has the video.

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Sen. George Allen (R-VA) has apparently referred to a volunteer for his opponent’s campaign as a "macaca" (a kind of monkey) ." Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia” he said to S.R. Sidarth who was born and raised in Virginia. YouTube has the video.

From FDL comments:

If you don’t know it, macaca is a derogatory and very prejudiced term used in Tunisia in reference to blacks and dark-skinned people.

Guess what? George Allen’s mother is Tunisian so I can bet you, he knew exactly what he meant when he called the guy “macaca”.

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Digby says nice things about Joe Klein! Probably because Klein wrote "the essential felony of the Bush White House—that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support. Indeed, it has often attempted to use the war for partisan gain".

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Many people have commented on U.N. ambassador John Bolton's decision to be interviewed on the eve of the U.N. ceasefire resolution by.... well here's the always worthwhile Glenn Greenwald's assessment:

But all of that pales in comparison to the fact that U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, on Saturday, in the middle of the most pressing crisis the U.N. has faced since he was appointed to that position, decided to sit for an hour-long, one-on-one "interview and chose as his journalistic interrogator . . . LGF commenter Pamela "Atlas" Oshry of the blog AtlasShrugs, whose views are so far outside of what is mainstream, in equal parts inane and despicable, that it would be impossible to describe fully. I could never do the interview justice -- you really must listen to it to believe it

60 Minutes

Interesting juxtaposition on 60 Minutes last night -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the first two segments and then Stephen Colbert for the last one. Each was interesting in his own way. Ahmadinejad made some good points:

"Please tell me, are the Lebanese inside the occupied lands right now or is it the other way around, that the Zionist troops are in Lebanese territory?" Ahmadinejad replied. "Lebanon is defending its independence. We are not at all happy with war. That is why on the first day we condemned these recent — conflict. And we asked for an immediate cease fire."

[...]

"We think that Mr. Bush's team and the parties that support him want to monopolize energy resources in the world. Because once they have that they can impose their opinions, points of view, policies on other nations and, of course, line their own pockets."

[...]

"Well, Saddam's story has been finished for close to three years, I would say. He belongs in the past. … And the Americans are openly saying that 'We are here for the long run,' in Iraq that is. So, a question for you, according to international law, the responsibility of providing security rests on the shoulder of the occupying, rather army. So, I ask them why are not — why are they not providing security?"

Colbert was... truthier.

Asked to define "truthiness," Colbert tells Safer, "Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support."

[...]

Asked whether the character he plays is smart, proud or stupid, Colbert says, "I think of him as a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot."