How's your boy?

The WaPo has a story about Jim Webb that seems to indicate that Webb's a Dem with some spine and though liars like George Will will tut-tut, the results of the recent election indicate that the voting public likes people who stand up to Boy George.

At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn't long before Bush found him.

"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

Webb was narrowly elected to the U.S. Senate this month with a brash, unpolished style that helped win over independent voters in Virginia and earned him support from national party leaders. Now, his Democratic colleagues in the Senate are getting a close-up view of the former boxer, military officer and Republican who is joining their ranks.

If the exchange with Bush two weeks ago is any indication, Webb won't be a wallflower, especially when it comes to the war in Iraq. And he won't stick to a script drafted by top Democrats.

"I'm not particularly interested in having a picture of me and George W. Bush on my wall," Webb said in an interview yesterday in which he confirmed the exchange between him and Bush. "No offense to the institution of the presidency, and I'm certainly looking forward to working with him and his administration. [But] leaders do some symbolic things to try to convey who they are and what the message is."

Digby:

One of the Webb-sites writes that he has heard the exchange was even worse than reported. Webb's kid came under heavy fire a couple of weeks ago and three of his comrades died. Bush is said to have approached him with a snotty tone, like "nice boy you have there --- be a shame if anything happened to him" sort of thing. I have no way of knowing if this is true. But it is, at least, believable. Bush has a very nasty sense of humor and there's no doubt he could say something in that tone with crude intent. This is the guy who mocked Karla Faye Tucker begging for her life. He doesn't have a lot of limits.

OK, listen carefully while Glenn explains it one more time...

I've written before lauding Glenn Greenwald for his patience because it gets tested so often by the neocon shills he confronts. Responding to the cries of "I told you so" from the right after GWB's hand-picked yes-men on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board reported that they had been told (yes, that's right, they have no authority to investigate on their own) by the government that all the wiretapping was kosher, Glenn explains, yet again...

It is truly astounding to watch people incapable of understanding the point that the reason it is wrong and dangerous for the President to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants is because doing so is against the law. Shouldn't that be a simple enough proposition that every functioning adult ought to be capable of understanding it? It doesn't mean that everyone has to agree with that proposition -- if people want to continue to cling to the theory that the President is unbound by the law concerning matters of national security, obviously they are free to do so.

But there is no excuse for failing to comprehend the objections to the President's behavior, particularly since the central objection is not all that complicated. To the contrary, it is what we all learn in seventh-grade civics.

One more time: the principal problem with the President's warrantless eavesdropping is not that he is abusing the secret eavesdropping powers he seized (that is something we do not yet know, because the Congress has not yet investigated that question). Instead, the "problem" is that the President is engaging in the very conduct which the American people, through their Congress almost 30 years ago, made it a felony to engage in, punishable by up to five years in prison -- that is, eavesdropping on Americans without judicial oversight.

Thus, even if Lanny Davis and the other Republicans on the panel think the President is using his illegal powers carefully, his conduct is no less illegal. Why is it necessary even to point that out? This has been the obvious and paramount point from the beginning, as I wrote in my book (at pages 25, 60) (emphasis in original):

The heart of the matter is that the president broke the law, deliberately and repeatedly, no matter what his rationale was for doing so. We do not have a system of government in which the president has the right to violate laws, even if he believes doing so will produce good results. . . .

The NSA eavedsdropping scandal, as its core, is not an eavesddropping scandal. It is a lawbreaking scandal . . .

The American people don't have what it takes to win in Iraq

Apparently there are people out there who would have you believe that the problem is that "the American people don't have what it takes to win in Iraq". Well, Josh Marshall will have none of that. Quite simply BushCo lied about almost everything and were wrong about the rest. If they had been honest about what they intended, there would not have been anywhere near enough support to get this lead balloon off the ground and the world would have been better off. Yes, hard as it may be to believe, the chaos that BushCo has caused in Iraq makes rational Iraqis conclude that they would have been better off under Saddam.

Josh:

Consider a thought experiment. Let's go back to late 2002 and early 2003. Assume that the build up on the WMD front is more or less as it transpired. But assume, for our counterfactual, that the costs of what we were getting into had been made pretty candidly clear. Half a million troops to secure the place, maybe years of occupation and nation-building. Then you get to early 2003 when it was clear that even if there was some mustard gas hidden away somewhere, that beside those lamo rockets the inspectors found, there really weren't any big WMD programs or stockpiles. Remember, that was clear, before the war started. Once that was clear, and if people knew the costs of what we were getting ourselves into, is there any way the president would have had any support for still going to war, pretty much just for the hell of it?

This is the key. Yes, the American people probably won't support what it takes to make this happen. That's because they make a perfectly rational calculation that so much blood and money for no particular reason just isn't worth it. They're only in this situation because President Bush and his advisors gamed the public into this war on false pretenses knowing that once they were it would be almost impossible to get back out.

Josh again:

I don't like to use such words but I can only think to call the denial and buck-passing sickening. I can't think of another word that captures the gut reaction.

Here's the lede to Mort Kondracke's new column in Roll Call (emphasis added) ...

All over the world, scoundrels are ascendant, rising on a tide of American weakness. It makes for a perilous future.

President Bush bet his presidency — and America’s world leadership — on the war in Iraq. Tragically, it looks as though he bit off more than the American people were willing to chew.

The U.S. is failing in Iraq. Bush’s policy was repudiated by the American people in the last election. And now America’s enemies and rivals are pressing their advantage, including Iran, Syria, the Taliban, Sudan, Russia and Venezuela. We have yet to hear from al-Qaida.

Let's first take note that the 'blame the American people for Bush's screw-ups' meme has definitely hit the big time. It's not Bush who bit off more than he could chew or did something incredibly stupid or screwed things up in a way that defies all imagining. Bush's 'error' here is not realizing in advance that the American people would betray him as he was marching into history. The 'tragedy' is that Bush "bit off more than the American people were willing to chew." That just takes my breath away.

Now come down to the third graf. Bush gets repudiated in the mid-term election ... "And now ..." In standard English the import of this phrasing is pretty clear: it's the repudiation of Bush's tough policies that have led to the international axis of evil states rising against us. Is he serious? The world has gone to hell in a hand basket since the election? In the last three weeks? The whole column is an open war on cause and effect.

This is noxious, risible, fetid thinking. But there it is. That's the story they want to tell. The whole place is rotten down to the very core.

Still more Josh:

Watching the president snap back to his usual state of denial, what I've been thinking about recently is how much of a difference it would have made if the White House had publicly recognized, say back in 2004, that Iraq was on a slow slide toward anarchy and started rethinking things enough to stem the descent to disaster. Let's say early 2005. Earlier the better. But let's give the benefit of the doubt and say it would have been hard to make the course correction in the midst of a presidential election. How much could have been accomplished? How much of this could have been avoided if the White House hadn't continued to pretend, for political reasons, that things were going well? And since the president now seems inclined to continue with his disastrous policy for the next two years, should we ask in advance what could have been avoided over the next two years if he'd only had the courage to confront reality today.

If it's good for the gander, it's good for the goose

Trust Glenn Greenwald to see through the crap surrounding the choice of Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. We've heard a lot about the failings of impeached judge, Alcee Hastings, but let's look at the other contender, Jane Harman. As Glenn tells us:

So Harman has a history of defending the administration's illegal intelligence activities. She was among the most gullible and/or deceitful when it came to disseminating the administration's most extreme (and most inaccurate) intelligence claims to "justify" the invasion of Iraq. She supports the administration's efforts to criminally investigate, if not prosecute, journalists who reveal illegal intelligence activities on the part of the President (including illegal activities about which Harman knew but said nothing).

Given her position as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Harman was repeatedly used by the administration -- with her consent -- as a potent instrument to shield itself from scrutiny, by creating the "Responsible Democrat" (Harman, Lieberman) v. "Irresponsible Democrat" dichotomy and then arguing that they enjoyed bipartisan support from the Good, Sensible Democrats like Harman. That's why, just like Joe Lieberman, Harman's most vociferous defenders are the most extreme Bush followers and neoconservatives. It is their agenda whom she promotes (which is why they defend her).

In light of that history, why would anyone think that Nancy Pelosi should choose Jane Harman to be the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, a key position for exercising desperately-needed oversight over the administration's last two years of intelligence mischief and, as importantly, for investigating and exposing the administration's past misconduct? She instinctively supports, or at least acquieses to, the administration's excesses, and would be among the worst choices Pelosi could make.

So, with this before us, why would people be pushing Jane Wrong-about-Everything Harman for the role of Chair? As Glenn see it:

At first I thought that the media's obsession with smearing Pelosi was some combination of its adolescent cravings for cattle-like demonization of the unpopular, loser Democrats, combined with the surprisingly (at least to me) strong and obvious discomfort with a woman being this politically powerful in her own right, not dependent upon appointments or derivative popularity from political spouses. And there is definitely a lot of that driving this chatter.

But now I believe that what is really responsible for this amazing obsession with undermining Nancy Pelosi before she even starts -- over matters as seemingly irrelevant (in the grand scheme of things) as Steny Hoyer and Jane Harman, no less -- is that institutionalized Beltway personalities fear a repudiation of the rotten system on which they depend and of which they are such integral parts.

They were so petrified by the possible rejection of Hoyer in favor of the anti-war Murtha because that would have been viewed by them as a repudiation of their brand of Serious Washington Centrism -- the disease which enabled the Bush administration and brought us this war. It would have meant that those who continue to prop up this war and this administration, either actively or passively, are going to suffer a loss of prestige and credibility. And that is exactly why it is so important to them that Jane Harman become House Intelligence Chair and why Pelosi's refusal to allow that will unleash even more hostility towards her.

There is nothing "credible" about Harman. Yes, she is smart and knowledgeable, but she has been wrong about everything that matters, particularly in the intelligence area. But she was wrong in exactly the same way that the Beltway geniuses and The New Republic and David Broder and Fred Hiatt were wrong. For that reason, they don't want her to be repudiated and rejected because that would constitute a repudiation and rejection of them. So they build up and glorify the "credible," responsible Harman because she represents them, and they hate Pelosi in advance for rejecting Harman for being wrong about everything because they feel rejected by that choice.

As a result, Pelosi and her opposition to Harman have to be belittled and removed from the substantive arena. Harman supported the most disastrous strategic decision in our nation's history and repeatedly defended the administration's worst excesses. That ought to be disqualifying on its face. But the Beltway media are guilty of the same crimes, so they want to pretend that Harman -- just like Steny Hoyer -- did nothing wrong and the only reason not to anoint her to her Rightful Place is because of petty, womanly personality disputes that have no place in the public arena.

For the same reason, they decree that Pelosi must prove that she's a "responsible" and serious leader. How does she do that? By embracing the Beltway establishment types, including those -- especially those -- who have been so wrong about so many things.

That's why the media has taken such an intense interest in the otherwise mundane matter of who will be House Majority Leader and House Intelligence Chair. Jane Harman, like Steny Hoyer, is the symbol of official Washington, the broken, rotted, corrupt Washington that propped up this war and enabled this administration in so many ways. Pelosi has to prove that she's one of them, or else suffer the consequences of being mauled and scorned.

What will happen when the White House refuses to respond to subpoenas?

Tristero points out that, while Dick Cheney's goal of an imperial Presidency was well known long ago, the MSM didn't deem that worthy of note until recently. He points to a long-overdue article in the Boston Globe in a post of his own with the sick-joke title: Cheney Agrees To Cooperate Fully With Democratic Congress And Abide By All US Laws. Yeah... right!

I know, I know. That headline was a really bad joke:

A close look at key moments in Cheney's career -- from his political apprenticeship in the Nixon and Ford administrations to his decade in Congress and his tenure as secretary of defense under the first President Bush -- suggests that the newly empowered Democrats in Congress should not expect the White House to cooperate when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects.

Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor, predicted that Cheney's long career of consistently pushing against restrictions on presidential power is likely to culminate in a series of uncompromising battles with Congress.

The real issue is not going to be serving subpoenas. Oh, they'll serve them all right. Nor will the issue be whether or not the White House will obey them. They won't.

No, the real issue is what will happen when the White House refuses to respond to nearly any subpoenas. One thing is for sure: Bush and Cheney are prepared to bring down the the US government rather than comply. What will Congress do then? And how far will Congress be willing to push?

[UPDATE: A question for all of you: Does anyone remember any article like this in the mainstream press or media back in 2000, that Dick Cheney has a long history of advocating replacing the president with an emperor and breaking the law? I don't. Would've been nice for the American people to know that back then....]

[emphasis is mine --bill]

Myth-mashing

Read Glenn Greenwald every day! He keeps putting out gems, day after day. Today he debunks the myth "about Washington-style balance and "centrism"

Is withdrawal -- whether incremental or total -- considered to be an "extreme view" that the Washington "centrists" have not only rejected but have excluded in advance even from consideration? That's what this article seems to suggest, and that would definitely be consistent with conventional Beltway wisdom -- that withdrawal is advocated only by the fringe radicals and far leftists (such as the individual whom Americans just knowingly installed as Speaker of the House).

There is nothing "centrist" about a Commission which decides in advance that it will not remove our troops from a war which is an unmitigated disaster and getting worse every day. It just goes without saying that if you invade and occupy a country and are achieving nothing good by staying, withdrawal must be one of the primary options considered when deciding what to do about the disaster.

Even if that is not the option ultimately chosen, a categorical refusal in advance to consider that option -- or to listen to experts who advocate it -- is not the work of a "centrist" body devoted to finding a solution to this war. If the Commission begins with the premise that we have to stay in Iraq and then only considers proposals for how to modify our strategy on the margins, that is anything but centrist. To the contrary, that is a close-minded -- and rather extremist -- commitment to the continuation of a war which most Americans have come to despise and want to see brought to an end.

Yesterday, Glenn smacked down the "Christianist" apologists for their blatant hypocrisy.

And their "evidence" for anti-Christian "bigotry" consists of nothing more than statements and sentiments that are indescribably benign and innocuous, especially compared to the hostility and scorn that spews forth from them towards "Islamists," "Islamofascists," and similar terms. In their world, referring to people who believe that the law should comport to their Christian religious beliefs as "Christianists" is "sanctimonious," "snide" and "hostile" "bigotry" -- even though they are people who use exactly the same terms, and (in Reynolds' case) much worse, to refer to Muslims.

[...]

As Avedon points out in Comments, Tristero actually wrote about this topic back in June, 2003 in an excellent post which concluded: "In short, not only must we make a distinction between Islam, Islamism, and radical Islamism, I think it is important to distinguish between Christianity, Christianism, and radical Christianism."

Tristero made the same basic distinctions made by Sullivan, which Althouse, Reynolds and Hewitt are incapable of understanding (or unwilling to understand, though I think it's the former) -- namely, that Christians (like Muslims) can be divided into three groups: (1) those who believe in the religion ("Christians/Muslims"); (2) those who seek to have their religious beliefs dictate politics and law ("Christianists/Islamists"); and (3) those who are willing to use violence to enforce compliance with their religious beliefs ("Christian fascists/Islamofascists" - or "Christian terrorist"/"Muslim terrorist").

The Republican Party is dominated by those who belong to group (2) -- Christianists -- and to conflate that group with group (3) ("Christian terrorists") in order to discredit and mock the term "Christianists" (see Reynolds' "Update" for a particularly misleading example of that tactic) is nothing short of pure mendacity, driven by a desire to hide the fact that "Christianists" (along with their odd partners, the neoconservatives) now control and define the Republican Party.

McCain Watch - 6

Here's some straight talk about "Straight Talk" from Todd Gitlin at the TPM Café. As I've said before, watch out for McCain. He's worse than GWB.

No, it's not exactly pioneering to write about the ever camera-ready Arizonan now saddling up to gallop in from the West to rescue the rotten hulk of the Republican Party. But Welch has the audacity to write about...McCain's views! Imagine, the Senator has notions about the country! He's not just a straight shooter with an adorable face!

[...]

It flies in the face of mainstream horse-race and handicapping stories, but McCain is not just a rugged man in a white bus. He's carrying baggage.

Thanksgiving Special: Chickenhawk Served on a Skewer

Tristero has been a regular at Digby's for some time now and IMHO he is a real treat to read... passionate and articulate. I really like what he has to say. Here's another gem on the topic of Advocating War If You Haven't Served which has come up in the discussion of Charlie Rangel's talk about instituting a draft.

Rangel:

There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way.

Tristero:

the chickenhawks go even further than just excitedly embracing the prospect of waging war against Iraq for no reason. They have the unmitigated gall to denounce everyone who opposed Bush/Iraq as naive, as traitorous, as third-rate minds, as not really comprehending the nature of the threat, and so on. They are perfectly willing to describe the tens of millions of people who marched in February '03 in opposition to the war as "objectively pro-Saddam," a remark as utterly ignorant as high-five enthusiasm to fight a war is.

In short, it is the lack of even the slightest comprehension of what war really is, combined with their belligerent, dismissive arrogance that makes the question of the chickenhawks' own willingness to serve in the Bush/Iraq war a more than fair question.

[...]

It is the hysterical, clueless, and reality-free warmongering over Iraq that makes the question, "Well, since you feel so strongly about it, why don't you enlist and go fight? " an inevitable one. The question is really another way of saying, "You don't know a damn thing about what you're talking about, or you wouldn't talk about Bush/Iraq in such a foolish, callous way."

For my own part, I strongly believe that those advocating this war must, in some meaningful sense, get involved in the war effort. That doesn't mean staying in your pajamas and typing on a blog that your smarter countrymen are traitors. Nor does it mean that you have to volunteer for night patrols in Sadr City. But if you are as gung ho for bang bang as the National Review gang was, it behooves you to support the war in an active manner, by enlisting, by joining USO, by volunteering in hospitals, and so on. It is simply disgraceful how little responsibility or involvement the chickenhawks have. If the threat is that serious that you think your neighbor has to be willing to die to meet that threat, then the least you should feel obligated to do is to help confront that threat. That, my friends, strikes me as close to a moral absolute.

[...]

O'Donnell, in defending Rangel's call for a draft, gives us a very telling anecdote:

In my one conversation with Kissinger, which occurred on TV, I asked him if he knew anyone who got killed in Vietnam. He was completely thrown. He doesn't go on TV to be asked such small-minded questions, he goes on TV to pontificate and TV interviewers are happy to let him do it. Kissinger sputtered and ran away from the question, leaving the distinct impression that he did not know anyone who was killed in the war he managed. His memoir of the period does not mention a single casualty. If you have ever stood at the Vietnam Memorial and run your hand over the name of a relative on the wall, as my mother and I did last month, you can get as angry as Charlie Rangel does about people like Kissinger deciding how long our soldiers should be exposed to enemy fire in a war we know we can't win.

Of course, Rangel doesn't want a draft. But somehow the reality of this war must be made palpable to the American people. It is not, and as a consequence, the drooling warlust on display by the chickenhawks attains a credibility it doesn't deserve. It is a lot easier for a lunatic like Cheney to sound like he knows what he's talking about when he lies that the war is going "remarkably well" when there are no photos of coffins of American soldiers, no tally of Iraqi deaths, and no images of what war really looks like to the people unfortunate enough to be caught up in it.

Powerful stuff, full of righteous indignation. I love it and we need more of it, not less.

GWB: It ain't over 'til I'm singing

The always readable Josh Marshall makes a point we've made before... that there is no real truth in the statement: we only lose when we admit that we've lost. What this is really is just more of the same reality denial from the master practitioners of this form of deceit.

Josh says:

Recently I heard President Bush take a line I believe he said he got from Henry Kissinger to the effect that the only way the United States can be 'defeated' in Iraq is if we ourselves pull up stakes and leave. Thus the whole drama is one of national stamina and nerve.

I've seen little better illustration among the Iraq War advocates of the interrelationship of 'defeat', 'victory' and denial.

A very wealthy man can keep pouring money into a failed business venture forever. So, if he chooses to use his vast wealth to paper over his business failure, he can say pretty much the same thing: The keys to victory are in my hands. The only way this venture can fail is if I lose my nerve and stop investing.

But of course this is only the very questionable advantage of the very rich and the very powerful: the ability to fund or prop up denial indefinitely.

And so it is with the president and whoever is still buying into his arguments. If all reality can be denied, then there really is only one way you can be defeated: when you yourself say you've been defeated.

Read this!

I've been laid low with a tooth ache and haven't feel like blogging. But now I've got drugs and an appointment for a root canal... I mean, how good does life get? But I digress...

For some time now, I've been waiting (yearning, more like it) for an analysis of the Iraq fiasco -- what I imagine to be an early version of how history will treat this misadventure. Broad in scope but detailed and analytical -- and not something with "an agenda" like Woodward's latest insider's tell-some.

Well, I've just discovered one and it comes in the form of a review of three books. Entitled Iraq: The War of the Imagination it was written by Mark Danner, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and contributor to The New York Review of Books. I was going to provide excerpts but there were too many good ones and it's a long review so I resisted my inclination to quote it in its entirety. So, I'm going to strongly encourage you to read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: It would seem that I am not the only one to have been favourably impressed with this article. Here's Tristero at Digby's:

This article by Mark Danner is a superb summary of the spectacular series of mis-assumptions and downright idiocies that created the unmitigated disaster that is Iraq today. As Danner says several times in the article, some of the mistakes are simply unbelievably basic as, for example, invading and conquering a country without any idea about what to do afterwards.

Iraqis Overwhelmingly Demand U.S. Troops Withdraw Within One Year

From Think Progress we get a report that GWB may not think is quite on message. It would seem that Iraqis see the American troops are occupiers not liberators... who'd a thunk it?

In a September 19 speech to the United Nations, President Bush had a message for the Iraqi people:

To the people of Iraq: Nearly 12 million of you braved the car bombers and assassins last December to vote in free elections. The world saw you hold up purple ink-stained fingers, and your courage filled us with admiration. You’ve stood firm in the face of horrendous acts of terror and sectarian violence — and we will not abandon you in your struggle to build a free nation.

In a recent poll by WorldOpinion.org, the Iraqi people had a message for President Bush — they’d like to be abandoned and fairly quickly:

In sum, “Seven out of ten Iraqis overall–including both the Shia majority (74%) and the Sunni minority (91%)–say they want the United States to leave within a year.” Note: less than 10% of Iraqis nationwide support a U.S. withdrawal only as “the security situation improves,” the current policy of the Bush administration.

Olbermann to Bush: the Lessons of Vietnam

Keith Olbermann "rips 'em a new one" in showing how the lessons of Vietnam have been lost on GWB. With a generous dose of contempt, KO skewers GWB with his own words: "we'll succeed unless we quit". There are dozens of lessons to be learned from Vietnam but that is not one of them. As usual, Crooks and Liars has video and transcript.

Keith: "It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again"

[...]

Keith: "We'll succeed... when you quit".

Do-Nothing to the very end

From new dad, Josh Marshall, we learn that Republicans plan to walk away from Congress without doing any more work. It's so typical, the GOP creates another budgetary mess and then leaves it to the Dems to clean up.

Pretty amazing stuff. And it seems like it's being treated with a near total media blackout. Stung by the voters' rebuke, the out-going Republican Congress has decided to close its doors without doing it's mandated job, finishing the budget bills for next year. By all rights they should send back their paychecks too.

From the AP ...

Republicans vacating the Capitol are dumping a big spring cleaning job on Democrats moving in. GOP leaders have opted to leave behind almost a half-trillion-dollar clutter of unfinished spending bills.

There's also no guarantee that Republicans will pass a multibillion-dollar measure to prevent a cut in fees to doctors treating Medicare patients.

The bulging workload that a Republican-led Congress was supposed to complete this year but is instead punting to 2007 promises to consume time and energy that Democrats had hoped to devote to their own agenda upon taking control of Congress in January for the first time in a dozen years.

We're their employers. Shouldn't there be some sort of garnishment?

McCain Flip-Flops

Think Progress has two more examples of flip-flops by John McCain -- the man who would be President. In October, he was advocating sending 100,000 more troops to Iraq; today he's admitting that to do so would "put a terrible strain on the Army and Marine Corps. Absolutely, it would be terrible," he said, "we’re going to be asking people to go back again and again, maybe even extend their tours." McCain said he "saw a broken Army in 1973" and didn’t want to see another. WTF?

But, not content with that, he next performs a double flip-flop with a twist regarding Roe v. Wade:

In 1999, the “moderate” version of John McCain said that overturning Roe v. Wade would be dangerous for women and he would not support it, even in “the long term.” Here’s McCain in the San Francisco Chronicle:

I’d love to see a point where it is irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary. But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations.

This morning on ABC, McCain — now aggressively courting the likes of Jerry Falwell — expressed his unequivocal support for overturning Roe v. Wade.

As I said before, this man scares me.

Worse than racism

Here's something from poputonian at Digby's which I think is great. I have long been outraged by people who speak and act as if "the other" didn't feel pain the same way that "we" did. I even heard someone say that it wasn't as bad for "them" because they were used to it.

Let's try this one more time. Sharkbabe said:

Sadly the mass of Americans are no more moved by Iraqi deaths than they were by Vietnamese deaths.
...
How hard is it to imagine your own neighborhood in ruins, your husband and children dead, your job gone, basics of life gone (clean water, electricity), future gone - why does nobody seem to grasp this or care? I still don't get it. It's more than racism, it's something worse.

When I first read that, I tried to find a previous comment made by the brilliant aimai, but couldn't locate it. Now I have. Aimai was correcting me for calling Jose Chung a racist. Jose had rationalized the Haditha massacre in part because Iraqis were so barbaric as to distribute DVDs of themselves killing American soldiers. In his mind, otherwise innocent Iraqis therefore deserved to be massacred. He even stated that Iraqi children preferred the DVDs to cartoons. Jose said he couldn't see any logic in me calling him a racist. As aimai pointed out, he was right:

aimai: Got to side with the josebot on this one, poputonian--his haditha anecdote makes him a soulless, would be mass murderer posing as a human but it doesnt *necessarily* make him a racist. In fact, I'd bet all lombard street to a china orange that jose would happilly see lots of people killed in revenge for lots of perceived and imaginary infractions on jose's world. And I'm sure that some would include members of jose's own ethnic group,whatever that is, and possibly even members of his own family. Jose's postings clearly point to both a massive and a fragile ego, a boundless and childish sense of rage, and an unlimited and utterly improbable sense of inflated self worth. But he's not necessarily a racist. As if that could possibly make it any worse, or any better.

Me: Maybe so, aimai. What I took from his comment was that he sees a group of barbaric people, and from it then concludes that other people who look and dress like them must be sublimated into a culture he knows and understands. In other words, to his small and feeble mind, all Iraqi people must be tamed. Isn't that racism?

aimai: poputonian, you know, no one despises the josebot and what it spits out more than I do, but it doesn't make it racist. Jose is concluding--or trying to argue in a pathetic fashion--that all iraqis should be subject to some kind of strict group punishment in which even small children and non-combatants must pay for the sins of their countrymen. But I think jose probably thinks that about a lot of groups if he thinks they are "not on his side." I don't doubt that in practice jose finds that, oddly, lots of non-white people are "really evil" and need punishing but he will always think it's because of something they 'really did' and not because he is over-categorizing due to a racist impulse which confuses individual with group. But I also think jose would cheerfully see lots of people of his own race killed, if it didn't cost him anything and he determined they were "on the wrong side." The idea of collective guilt and collective punishment is very old, and very retrograde. Its been abandoned by every civilized society. But jose still advocates for it, pathetically and by implication, with a sidewise wink and a kind of "omlettes must be made" attititude.

Here's the thing, pop, Jose is not really human. He lacks intelligence, and he certainly lacks empathy. All he has is a persistence of bad faith and a deep and abiding cowardice. It's not even worth trying to discern his motives--frankly, even a true racist whose every impulse came from race hatred could be a more admirable figure than Jose. Such a person could be loving (to some) noble (to some), courageous in conflict, honest and upright in argument (to some). They could even be peaceful, generous, and empathetic in all things except their chosen fixation (race). Jose can never be any of those things. So no need to smear racists by tying them rhetorically to Jose. He's lower than that.

Here's Digby's original Haditha war crime post (from May), and the corresponding comment thread from which the above comments are extracted.

Darth Cheney

Q. How do you know when Dick Cheney is lying?

A. When his lips are moving.

When Dick Cheney emerged from his darkened lair to spread his execrable lies, one could almost see them spread like a foul slick on the seas of reality. This man is malevolent. His assertion was that "the Terrorist Surveillance Program rests on firm legal ground". Fortunately for all of us, there are good people like Glenn Greenwald and Anonymous Liberal with the legal training and the articulation (and the stomach) to parse Cheney (and in in Glenn's post, do it line-by-line) and debunk his vile bunkum.

Anonymous Liberal:

It’s hard to understate just how wrong Cheney is as a matter of law and how deeply delusional he should sound to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the legal issues involved here. But then again, this is the Federalist Society, so naturally his speech was interrupted repeatedly by applause.

[...]

Rather than be repetitive, let me just add that if Cheney truly is confident that the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” rests on “firm legal ground,” then he is utterly detached from reality and entirely insulated from the people actually running things in the West Wing. After all, there’s a reason the White House has been trying so hard, post Hamdan, to secure legislation legalizing the TSP. There’s a reason why, after Hamdan, they were suddenly interested in working with Arlen Specter where they hadn’t been before. It’s because they know that, absent legislation, the program is sure to be struck down. Indeed it already has been by one court (a decision Cheney is “confident” will be overturned).

Let’s do a quick review of the relevant law. Cheney claims that the AUMF “provides more than enough latitude for these activities” and “[t]herefore the warrant requirements of the FISA law do not apply to this wartime measure.” That is just such rubbish. No serious person bought this argument even before Hamdan, but post-Hamdan, it is entirely frivolous.

The Court observed in Hamdan that “there is nothing in the text or legislative history of the AUMF even hinting that Congress intended to expand or alter the authorization set forth in . . . the UCMJ.” All you have to do is substitute “FISA” for “UCMJ” and you know exactly what the Court would say about Cheney’s argument. You’ll never see a Supreme Court precedent more precisely on point.

[...]

But these cases most certainly do not stand for the proposition that the president can act in direct violation of a duly enacted statute. Again, as the Court made clear in Hamdan:

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.

Again, just substitute the phrase “conduct warrantless surveillance” for “convene military tribunals” and it’s perfectly clear what the Court thinks about Cheney’s position. Let me repeat: everyone knows this. I know that Cheney (and Addington and Yoo) have a deep desire for the law to be something other than what it actually is, but I don’t see what is to be gained by simply asserting, and with unmistakable condescension, that up is down. This sort of arrogant disregard for the actual state of the law can’t really be helpful to Cheney’s case. It’s only going to anger those in the Senate whom the White House is hoping will pass some version of the “Terrorist Surveillance Bill” passed by the House prior to the election.

Glenn:

It is worth reminding ourselves -- as the Vice President just made quite clear again-- that the pathological individuals who occupy the White House do not recognize the power of the law or the power of the courts to limit what they can do. Therefore, the fact that Democrats now control the Congress will be of little concern to them, because the most the Democrats can do is enact little laws or issue cute, little Subpoenas --- but, as the Vice President just said, they think that nothing can "tie the hands of the President of the United States in the conduct of a war." And he means that.

I hope Democrats in Congress recognize that and are prepared to do something about it. This constitutional crisis will exist until it's confronted.

Frivolous and Out of Touch

Glenn Greenwald has a good post on the topic of my last two posts -- that these reprehensible self-styled pundits are "frivolous and out of touch". As Glenn observes:

The Bush administration has spent six years completely obsessed with personal loyalty to the President and intolerant of the slightest independence. The entire Congress was kept strictly in line for the last five years. Every official who showed the slightest independence was replaced by obedient Bush loyalists. Yet Pelosi does nothing other than support an ally rather than an opponent for the position immediately underneath her, and that makes her some out-of-control egomaniac consumed by personal vanity and emotional impulses.

[...]

Americans just elected new leadership quite deliberately. They are obviously fine with Nancy Pelosi. Republicans tried to make the election be about her -- constantly reminding everyone that a vote for Democrats would mean installing super-liberal Nancy Pelosi and her San Francisco values in power -- and the Democrats won. So voters have no problem with Pelosi. They want Congressional Democrats to take the lead in policy and governance because the Republicans have failed so miserably. I have no idea whether Pelosi will be a good Speaker, but I'm going to withhold judgment until she actually at least starts, and Americans are obviously doing that as well.

Yet the Beltway media mavens know better, and so they are already out in force attacking Pelosi's character with petty and baseless chattering. This country has extremely serious issues facing it, and yet these self-styled "serious" journalists are already trying to cripple Pelosi's ability to do anything before she has even begun, all based on giggly chit-chat and gossipy garbage that has no legitimacy other than the fact that they all repeat it in unison on television and in print.

It's what these pundits and journalists do. They have pre-conceived, vapid notions about everything and everyone -- all driven by deep self-love for their own superior wisdom -- and they distort reality and crowd out sober analysis of everything that matters. Nancy Pelosi, and really everyone, would be well-advised not to listen to them and, above all, never adopt as a goal trying to please or satisfy them. They are frivolous and out of touch with everything that matters and should be treated as such.

Clinton Rules Redux

The always perceptive Digby notes how quickly the despicable pundit class has switched gears from solemn serious reflection of the revered Commander-in-Chief and War on Terror to sniggering "little [...] snots enjoying their full-on Demo bitch fest. They are partying like it's 1999."

I knew it would happen in one form or another. (We caught a glimpse of it with the John Kerry apology treatment.) The DC press corps hates having to criticize Republicans. Republicans make them feel all icky and call them liberals (which they so, like, aren't!) I confess, however, that I'm a little bit awed by how smoothly they have transitioned back into their assigned roles. I thought there might be a moment or two of cognitive dissonance as they went from grim and serious reports about terrorism and war to shallow personality politics and tabloid character assassination. I assumed they would at least wait until the presidential campaign took off to contrast the manly Republican Alpha with the loser Omega Dem, but I guess I didn't realize how much they've missed their fast times at DC High.

[...]

There are no honeymoons for Democrats. Remember that. And "moral authority" is about haircuts and Hollywood, not torture and illegal wars. It is not merely a fight against the Republicans or a fight over politics and policy. It is a non-stop battle with the press to cover events with seriousness and responsibility. For some reason, when Democrats are in power the press corps immediately goes from being merely shallow to insufferable, sophomoric assholes.

Lazy & Shallow

Digby has written a great post on a scary subject which Matt Yglesias raised -- that it is "the Washington political press" that actually determines the presidential candidates:

Yglesias:

This elite, lacking an actual stake in the outcome, can afford to let self-interest essentially dictate a policy of laziness. Hence, we may be doomed to an endless cycle of Senators (who DC political reporters already cover), governors from Virginia and Maryland (whose exploits are detailed in the Metro section of The Washington Post), and scions of famous families.

Digby:

This is one of the best explanations for what has seemed to be the very shallow bench of viable potential presidential candidates. The press corps is picking them. Oy vey.

And, as if channeling Bob Somerby, Digby concludes, after reading this shameless crap in the National Journal, that there is no design on the part of these pundits other than having some self-indulgent fun.

What can I say? This is what we are dealing with and there's no getting around it. These are not serious people, they are immature fools. And apparently, they are proud of it.

We have had a president for the last six years who is so stupid he can barely eat and breathe and who has single handedly destroyed more than 50 years of American leadership in the world. The American people have spoken loudly and clearly and have elected a new congress to provide some checks and balances to his reign of incompetence and executive power-mongering. They did not elect Democrats to provide the puerile putzes of the DC press corps with entertainment.

If these blindered fools can't see how many real stories are now potentially theirs for the taking, they should get out of the business. This could be the most fertile time for investigative reporting since Watergate --- Republicans are talking out of school for the first time in six long years. And the Democrats have the investigative tools to get to information that's been hidden. It should be great moment for DC journalism if DC journalism actually existed. Instead we are already back in the truthiness and fake news business, which they do very badly (particularly since we now have professional comedians who do truthiness and fake news far more entertainingly than these witless bores could ever hope to.)

The shallow cliches in that article are not just lighthearted good times. They illustrate the narrative that cost Al Gore an election and motivated an eight year media withchunt against President Clinton. But it's no joke, which events of the last six years should have pounded home to every person who works in the journalism business. This sophomoric approach to covering politics was largely responsible for the empowerment of the most destructive political leadership in American history.

And apparently they haven't learned a damned thing.

Update: Rick Perlstein wrote about the Pundit Primary sometime back.

It has long been a truism that Democrats pay way too much attention to elite opinion. Gore was criticized heavily for it. I think I always assumed, however, that the pundits and the press corps had a specific agenda for their choices. It never occurred to me before that it was sheer laziness and shallowness that led them to their choices.

Inhofe: Don’t Worry About Global Warming Because ‘God’s Still Up There’

From ThinkProgress we glean yet more evidence that the current chair of the Senate Committee on Environment is a... crackpot:

In an interview with Fox and Friends this morning, outgoing Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works James Inhofe (R-OK) argued that the current wave of unprecedented warming is due to “natural changes.” “God’s still up there,” Inhofe said, and to the extent there is warming going on, it is “due to the sun.” He added, “George Soros, the Hollywood elitists, the far left environmentalists on the committee that I chair — all of them want us to believe the science is settled and it’s not.”

[...]

Despite Inhofe’s repeated efforts to muddy the picture, there is no real scientific debate over whether global warming is manmade or naturally-caused.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body which involves thousands of scientists from over 120 countries who develop detailed reports on climate change, produced a report in 2001 which was reviewed by more than 1,000 top experts, including so-called “climate skeptics” and representatives from industry. The report stated, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”

Most recently, the National Academy of Sciences has unequivocally concluded that natural causes cannot explain the unprecedented warmth over the last 400 years. Rather, “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming,” the report states.

Ah, yes...the spirit of compromise

UPDATE2: Jessica at Feministing has more on this "nut". It seems that he has some unorthodox ideas about more than birth-control.

But apparently if you’ve had sex with too many people you use up all that oxytocin: "People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.” Hear that? Too many sexual partners and you’ll never love again!

UPDATE: Here's Tristero's take on it... it was all a joke!

It would appear that the hand that GWB is extending across the aisle has its middle finger extended. Via TPM Muckraker we learn of this WaPo article:

The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as "demeaning to women."

Eric Keroack, medical director for A Woman's Concern, a nonprofit group based in Dorchester, Mass., will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the next two weeks, department spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday.

[...]

The appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, was the latest provocative personnel move by the White House since Democrats won control of Congress in this month's midterm elections. President Bush last week pushed the Senate to confirm John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations and this week renominated six candidates for appellate court judgeships who have previously been blocked by lawmakers. Democrats said the moves belie Bush's post-election promises of bipartisanship.

The Keroack appointment angered many family-planning advocates, who noted that A Woman's Concern supports sexual abstinence until marriage, opposes contraception and does not distribute information promoting birth control at its six centers in eastern Massachusetts.

[...]

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called Keroack's appointment "striking proof that the Bush administration remains dramatically out of step with the nation's priorities."

Taken together, Keroack's appointment, the Bolton push and the judicial renominations suggest that although Bush may work for consensus with Democrats on selected issues, he does not plan to avoid decisions simply because lawmakers will disagree, and he may in fact seek fights in some instances when he feels they may be useful politically.

Confirmation of Bolton and the judicial nominees are popular causes with Bush's conservative base, and a family-planning chief from an organization that opposes contraceptives may appeal to disaffected social conservatives.

White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino cautioned against reading a larger pattern into the recent moves, saying, "You have to look at these things in isolation."

She added: "The president has said we will look to reach common ground where we can find it. However, he's not going to compromise on his principles."

Sectarian Strife in Iraq Imperils Entire Region

As Atrios coarsely puts it: "Ellen Knickmeyer observes that there is no good way to unshit the bed".

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 16, 2006

BAGHDAD -- While American commanders have suggested that civil war is possible in Iraq, many leaders, experts and ordinary people in Baghdad and around the Middle East say it is already underway, and that the real worry ahead is that the conflict will destroy the flimsy Iraqi state and draw in surrounding countries.

Whether the U.S. military departs Iraq sooner or later, the United States will be hard-pressed to leave behind a country that does not threaten U.S. interests and regional peace, according to U.S. and Arab analysts and political observers.

"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman, Jordan.

"The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body," Hiltermann said.

"All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on U.S.-Arab relations.

As Iraq's neighbors grapple with the various ideas put forward for solving the country's problems, they uniformly shudder at one proposal: dividing Iraq into separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and then speeding the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

"To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said Oct. 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited."

"When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently. "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences."

Billmon and Jim Webb are "now on the roughly same side on the big issues of the day"

If that's true then, as Billmon writes, "it tells you something has fundamentally changed in American politics".

... instead, nearly two decades later, Webb's now the newly elected Senator from my native state (a stronghold of the Confederacy and the national "right-to-work" movement) who's lined up shoulder to shoulder with Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and is writing op eds for the Wall Street Journal explicitly calling for what the Republican chattering classes sneeringly condemn as "class warfare":

[...]

That's beautiful stuff. Paul Wellstone could have written it. So could Bernie Sanders, although Bernie actually might find it a little too radical for his tastes. But the last person -- well, almost the last person -- on earth I would expect to emerge as a tribune of good old-fashioned New Deal populism (or, dare I say it, democratic socialism) is fightin' Jim Webb, Ronald Reagan's favorite Marine.

Not only that, but Webb's now against the war -- just like us unreconstructed '60s (or, in my case, '70s) radicals. I just hope he doesn't mind being tarred as a stabber of backs or a spitter on the troops by the modern-day equivalents of the old Jim Webb. It kind of goes with the territory.

If this is the new Democratic "conservatism" the Washington punditburo keeps bleating about, then all I can say is three cheers for conservatism. But Webb's op ed definitely left me with a profound case of political vertigo. My sense of direction (this way is left; that way is right) is getting pretty scrambled. Former Reagan cabinet officers now sound like Abby Hoffman. Connecticut Senators who started out trying to impeach Richard Nixon now sound like John Mitchell. Where's it going to end?

I don't know. But if Jim Webb and I are now on the roughly same side on the big issues of the day -- the war, globalization, corporate power, economic fairness, social justice -- it tells you something has fundamentally changed in American politics. It may not be a realignment (a political system this polluted and decrepit may not be capable of such a thing) but when Senators from Virginia start talking like Walter Reuther, it sure the hell isn't business as usual.

Time for answers to the right questions

Tristero writing at Digby's makes a point I'm fond of: let's have less of those pundits who were so completely wrong, and a little more of those who got it right at the time. He also wants answers to some questions that are not being asked:

Indeed, Spencer Ackerman is quite right:

"Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not 'Were we wrong?' but 'Why were we wrong?' and 'How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?"

In fact, I said the same thing on October 18, 2003:

Bush's foreign policy, the too-late-to-save-us release of "America Unbound" and the bamboozling of Joshua Micah Marshall just before the war point to a very serious crisis. It is an intellectual crisis that gives credence to obviously terrible and self-destructive ideas. It makes them seem fit not only for academic debate, and not only for public discussion, but - incredibly -also fit for adoption as policy by the most militarily powerful country the world has ever known. It is an intellectual crisis that permits such long-discredited siren calls as America's "manifest destiny" to sing out once again and seduce nearly every class in this country into believing the clearly delusional notion that by prosecuting a clearly unnecessary war we could ensure peace.

How could this crisis have happened? I don't have a clue. I don't know how anyone could have heard what Josh heard and not think that the person who said them was a candidate for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. I don't know how anyone as smart and eloquent as Nicholas Lemann could understand the neo-con fairy tale so well and claim it was "breathtakingly ambitious" instead of screaming yellow bonkers.

But we are going to have to find out how it happened. Not to punish Wolfowitz, Perle and the rest of the self-described Cabal (although what they did was surely criminal) and certainly not to punish the media which, to be kind, fucked up royally for two years. No, we must figure out how this crisis happened so that we can prevent it ever happening again.

And now I'd like to add some questions to that list Spencer Ackerman has for The New Republic to address:

1. How come I, along with most of the world I might add, got it so right? Not only, "What did we see that that the official grand poohbahs missed" but also, "How did we know enough, and what did we know, to judge that Bush/Iraq would without doubt be a total disaster so clearly in the spring of '02?*

2. How can we hear from more people who got it right in the mainstream media? I don't mean me, duh, I mean the Jessica Tuchman Mathews of the world.

I think the second question really requires not only an immediate answer, but immediate action. The very same clowns are still in place for the most part, making a total hash of our national discourse. I'm not saying merely that we need knowledgeable liberals appearing regularly on tv, although heaven knows we need them. We also need real moderates, real conservatives, and real leftists - we got plenty already of real rightwingers, thank you very much.

Furthermore, we need the ignorant lunatics - I'm talking Bill o'Reilly and Robert Novak and Sean Hannity here, among others - marginalized. It is inexcusable that a president of the United States would give interviews to such people. It is outrageous that a man as morally bankrupt as William Bennett can still appear as a responsible spokesman on a so-called mainstream network like CNN. Etc. Etc.

* It's worth repeating again, as the "good idea to invade Iraq, too bad Bush was the one who did it" line has become the CW:

In 2002, when I first started to hear about the planned invasion, I was convinced that only a damn fool would take anything like that seriously. There was no chance in hell that good would come out of it. And let me be clear. It was not because the Bush administration was incompetent at implementing an invasion and conquest of Iraq that could have worked, although there was their incompetence to deal with, of course. It never could have worked. (And in fact, one would expect an incompetent government to take just such an incompetent idea seriously.) And of course, most importantly it was immoral and completely illegal.

Hoyer wins

TPM reports:

Hoyer prevails, 149-86 . . .

It's done.

Steny Hoyer (D-MD) will be the new House majority leader, holding off an upset bid by John Murtha (D-PA), who had the backing of Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi.

The final tally was not far off from predictions. Hoyer had long been the favorite. Until Pelosi's active involvement on behalf of Murtha this week, there wasn't much doubt about the outcome. But Pelosi's last-minute aggressive advocacy for Murtha did throw the race into turmoil.

More here.

Problem Solving 101

David Kurtz at TPM has something to say about the rapidly spreading consensus that the ISG "will save the day in Iraq". It may be a "first step" but David sounds like he may be an evidence-based thinker like me and he's questioning some of the underlying assumptions and he's finding them wanting (in the 'lacking' sense, not in the 'yearning' sense though, gawd knows, there's a lot of yearning going on when thinking about Iraq).

In the Daily Digest this morning I touched on the growing expectations that the Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group, in combination with the installation of Bob Gates at the Pentagon, will save the day in Iraq.

It has become the consensus view, crosses party lines, and seems to be based in part on the assumption that anything is better than the current Iraq policy and its chief implementer, Don Rumsfeld.

But there are some other assumptions--some faulty, some overly optimistic--inflating those expectations:

(1) That the ISG recommendations will be substantive, well-founded, and more than mere political cover for a change of strategy yet to be unveiled. Perhaps they will be prudent recommendations, but I don't know why anyone would assume that yet.

(2) That the Administration will first embrace and then effectively implement the ISG recommendations. This assumption seems wildly at odds with this Administration's track record in both respects. Today's Washington Post reports that the Administration is doing its own policy review parallel to the ISG's, which does not suggest any kind of warm embrace:

The two reviews are not competitive, administration officials said, although the White House wants to complete the process before mid-December, about the time the Iraq Study Group's final report is expected.

The White House's decision changes the dynamics of what happens next to U.S. policy deliberations. The administration will have its own working document as well as recommendations from an independent bipartisan commission to consider as it struggles to prevent further deterioration in Iraq.

I'm also not willing to buy all the pop psychology about the prodigal Bush 43 finally returning to the orbit of Bush 41, chastened by his experience in the international arena.

(3) That Bob Gates is going to make a dramatic difference over the next two years. First, I remember the last time we were promised wisdom, experience, and a steady hand from a member of Bush 41's old team. That was Dick Cheney. Second, the options available to the U.S. for proceeding in the Middle East range from very bad to horrendous. Neither Gates nor anyone else is going to be able to clean up this mess in the next two years.

(4) That things can't get any worse. Things can always get worse. We could see Turkey and Iran militarily staking claims to parts of Iraqi territory. We could have terrorist brigades from Iraq running missions into Saudi Arabia and Jordan to destabilze the regimes there. Iran could assert itself militarily in the Gulf. The Middle East is Murphy's Law squared.

(5) That the sooner we start implementing the ISG recommendations, the sooner our troops come home and the more American lives will be saved. First, see (1) through (4) above. Second, I still have a hard time envisioning a Republican Administration bringing home all the troops in short order and leaving oil-rich Iraq in chaos in the midst of a vital oil-producing region. We may very well witness a spike in the number of American troop casualities in the process of trying to extricate ourselves or in the process of trying to prevent a larger regional conflict.

If the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem, then we may be at that first step. Our long national denial may be over. But admitting you have a problem doesn't in and of itself solve the problem. And right now Iraq is a problem begging for solutions.

Bush To Usher In New Era Of "Bipartisanship" By Renominating Controversial Judicial Nominees

ThinkProgress reports:

Yesterday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT) noted that President Bush plans to renominate several of his rejected judicial nominees:

In the days following the election, the President spoke about becoming a uniter and working with Congress in a bipartisan way. Regrettably, it appears he will not be keeping that promise. I understand the President intends to renominate a number of controversial nominees. That unfortunate decision evidences that he intends to stay the partisan course when it comes to judicial nominations.

Bush has criticized lawmakers for their “partisanship” and called on them to give all his nominees an up-or-down vote. But 31 judicial nominees have been approved this year, nearly double the total number of judges (17) confirmed in the 1996 congressional session, when Republicans controlled the Senate.

Renominating failed nominees won’t get more judges on the bench in the 110th Congress. Current Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) has called on Bush to nominate more moderate judges. As Leahy notes, Bush needs to “change course and honor [his] pledge by working with us to confirm consensus nominees.”

In the Conservative Wake

Good old Digby has written gem of an article about how "I can't help but feel a little bit overwhelmed by the challenge we are going to face in the next few years". He's referring to the economic mess the conservatives have left and not just the bungled fiscal reality, but the mindset of seeing government as being bad and taxes being a burden.

The Republicans may have finally jumped the shark, after failing so dramatically at governance, but they have inculcated their thinking so thoroughly into people's minds that many people don't even know it. The way most people think about government, and the vocabulary they all use, comes from the Republican playbook. It's going to take a huge effort to get people thinking about it in new ways.

[...]

My first suggestion for this new vocabulary isn't really mine, but a reader's from some time back who pointed out my use of the term "tax burden" was an example of unthinking adoption of conservative rhetoric. He was right. He suggested that we start talking about it as "paying the bills" something that everyone understands. I think that makes sense. You can't blow smoke in people's faces by trying to tell them that taxes are "good." That's dreaming. But everyone knows that we have to pay the bills and our bill for the services we get --- national defense, social security for the disabled and elderly, medical research, roads and bridges,air traffic control, clean air and water, veterans benefits and on and on and on aren't free. It's a bill that has to be paid for both the individual and common good. We need the insurance it provides, the pension, the health care (universal someday, old age right now) the health and safety, the security. And there is no free lunch on that stuff, it's the price we pay to live in a first world, thriving democracy in the 21st century. If you don't want to pay those bills, move to a third world country and see what not having to pay them gets an average person.

Right now, we are going to have to deal with some rich kids who stole the car, blew the inheritance and ran up a bunch of debt and we are going to have to make them pay it back. Their bills are going to be high for a while. They have plenty of money. They won't suffer much, even though they should.

Minority Whip

Atrios shares this gem:

As Bunch suggests, Trent Lott's new title is certainly appropriate, though this farker said it best:

Trent Lott selected as Senate Minority Whip, because if there's one thing that Trent Lott likes, it's whipping minorities.

And, yes, that's over the top and highly uncivil. Of course, opposing anti-lynching laws was a bit uncivil too.

Atrios adds:

Well, after being demoted from the #1 Republican spot all the way down to the #4 Republican spot, Trent Lott has triumphantly clawed his way back to the #2 spot.

Like Shooting Ducks in a Barrel

Glenn Greenwald takes on the distasteful task of reading the prognostications of Richard Cohen and Mark Steyn and then performing the relatively easy task of demonstrating that they were and are full of it.

That really is why we are in the situation we confront in Iraq. Because Richard "Only-a-fool--or-possibly-a-Frenchman--could-conclude-otherwise" Cohen and his ilk demonized and caricatured the Howard Deans of the world as pacifist, amateur, naive, stupid, frivolous, dangerous French hippies even though everything Dean was saying was true and prescient and everything Cohen was saying was false and idiotic. And they're still doing that.

Cohen wrote a column in June of this year (yes, he is still held out by the Post as someone to whom we should listen), entitled "Culpability Deficit Disorder," in which he oh-so-knowingly blamed everyone for the disaster in Iraq other than himself (including by blaming decisions that happened immediately after the invasion that he never criticized at the time, when he was still cheering loudly and worshipfully for the administration). He also now says that everything would have been great in Iraq if we had just left once Saddam was removed (something he never advocated at the time), and still rails against "the people who are so certain of their moral righteousness when it comes to the Iraq war."

Same story for that other shill, Mark Steyn. Glenn quotes some Steyn and then asks:

Is it even possible to be more wrong than that? And that's why we stayed, doing what we were doing. Because the self-serving propagandists like Mark Steyn paraded around as experts -- and were hailed as such -- and kept telling Americans that the Iraqi Army was almost self-sufficient . . . just a little bit longer because we're making really great progress . . . . those who keep telling you that violence is escalating and we're not making progress are cut-and-run cowards who hate America and want us to lose. . . . ignore the reports from the Bush-hating media because they are inventing stories about violence . . . Churchill would stay and so should we.

[...]

That is the most tragic part about what is happening in Iraq. None of it was unforeseeable. To the contrary, it was all not only foreseeable, but foreseen and warned about -- by the unserious, frivolous, America-hating crazies who were demonized and laughed at (and unbelievably, still are) by the warmongers (in both parties) and their mindless allies in the press.

I know I've written about this several times before, but it is truly unfathomable that the people who are responsible for this disaster -- not just the ones who advocated it in the beginning, but much worse, the ones who continued to insist that things were going well and that everything was progressing nicely and that reports to the contrary should be dismissed and ignored -- continue to be accorded respect and treated as though they have great credibility. Why is that?

And conversely, why are those who were so right and prescient and wise in their counsel treated as though they are lightweight, laughable morons who can't be "trusted with national security"? Why is it that when one watches news programs, one still encounters all of those smug, all-knowing little sneers whenever there is a reference to Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi and national security, whereas John McCain and Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan and Lawrence Kaplan -- Iraq War lovers all -- are addressed with whispered reverence as we wait for their wise and weighty pronouncements about What We Should Do Next?

Glenn points us to a "a great post highlighting some of the underlying assumptions of the pundit class, prompted, appropriately enough, by a personal encounter with Richard Cohen."

Internal Faux News memo

Lest anyone still be in doubt that FauxNews is anything more than the media relations department of the White House, HuffPo has obtained a memo that should disabuse you of that notion. So much for "Fair and Balanced".

Be On The Lookout For Any Statements From The Iraqi Insurgents...Thrilled At The Prospect Of A Dem Controlled Congress"...

More Murtha

While it looks like Murtha won't win the Majority Leader position, it's still interesting to note the muck the TPM is raking up about John from Roll Call:

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) told a group of Democratic moderates on Tuesday that an ethics and lobbying reform bill being pushed by party leaders was “total crap,” but said that he would work to enact the legislation because Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports it.

Murtha and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) are locked in a battle for the House Majority Leader post, and both men made presentations for to the Blue Dog Coalition on Tuesday in a bid for their votes.

“Even though I think it’s total crap, I’ll vote for it and pass it because that’s what Nancy wants,” Murtha told the Blue Dogs, according to three sources who were at the meeting. . . .

Murtha office’s did not comment for for this article.

And TPM digs this up from the ABSCAM annals:

ABSCAM was the media's name for an FBI undercover operation to catch corrupt lawmakers. Around 1980, agents and an informant met with several lawmakers posing as representatives of a fictional "sheik Abdul" to offer them $50,000 in cash for legislative favors. Murtha was one of the lawmakers who met with them.

Ultimately, six lawmakers went down on corruption charges stemming from the operation, nearly all of them Democrats. Murtha wasn't one of them -- but not, as Murtha implies, because his innocence was ever demonstrated.

[...]

With comments like that, and a zealous special prosecutor for the House ethics committee examining the evidence, how did Murtha avoid even a slap on the wrist? Easy: he was protected from even becoming the subject of investigation by Democratic leadership at the time.

In 1980, Tip O'Neill was House Speaker and the center of Democratic power in Washington, George Crile wrote in his book, "Charlie Wilson's War." Murtha was a member of O'Neill's inner circle.

When O'Neill learned that the special prosecutor, Barrett Prettyman Jr., had set his sights on Murtha, "the Speaker immediately summoned [then-Texas Dem. congressman] Charlie Wilson into his office with an offer he couldn't refuse" -- a seat on the House ethics committee.

[...]

"[S]hortly after Charlie's arrival the rules of the game changed completely and before [special prosecutor] Prettyman could fully deploy his investigators to move on the Murtha case, he was informed that the committee had concluded there was no justification for an investigation. 'This matter is closed,' proclaimed the newly appointed Ethics Committee chairman Louis Stokes, another of the Speaker's reliables."

Prettyman was stunned, Crile said, and resigned his congressional post in protest. Murtha kept his -- and, come Thursday's secret ballot election among his fellow Democrats, may take the top seat in the House.

They're not tax cuts, they're tax deferrals!

Brad DeLong weighs in on BushCo's fiscal mismanagement. His salient point: "every single fiscal policy move of this administration has carried us in the wrong direction" -- something I have previously called the Anus Touch. Whether BushCo is incompetent or evil (or both), when they're lowering taxes and borrowing money to pay for expenditures, they're not cutting taxes... they just postponing them. And these blighters called themselves conservatives! Arrgh!

I would dispute Max's division. Of the $5 trillion ten-year swing in the deficit, $3.2 trillion--64%--is due to the Bush failure to properly fund the defense buildup--its insistence on cutting taxes even after it becomes clear that it wants to spend another fortune on defense.

The other 1.8 trillion--36%--is also the fault of the Bush administration: increases in other categories of spending above the 2001 projection baseline. Appropriate fiscal policy would have had us running a large surplus--a more than $2 trillion ten-year surplus--to prefund the expenditures that will be needed because of our aging population. No matter whether you think spending should be higher or lower than it currently is, every single fiscal policy move of this administration has carried us in the wrong direction, away from the surpluses we should be running right now, and collectively they have been a huge mistake. That tax cuts are not the overwhelming proportion of mistakes speaks not about the innocucuity... innocuousness... innocularity... whatever... of tax cuts, but of the magnitude of unfunded spending increases.

GWB's "lettre de cachet" *

Glenn Greenwald has a powerful piece today about the disgraceful effect the abominable Military Commission Act has had on the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri "a citizen of Qatar, was in the United States legally, on a student visa" in 2001. Glenn does provide a glimmer of hope when he notes what Sen. Pat Leahy, soon-to-be Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is planning (see below).

In December, 2001 he was detained as a "material witness" to suspected acts of terrorism and ultimately charged with various terrorism-related offenses, mostly relating to false statements the FBI claimed he made as part of its 9/11 investigation. Al-Marri vehemently denied the charges, and after lengthy pre-trial proceedings, his trial on those charges was scheduled to begin on July 21, 2003.

But his trial never took place, because in June, 2003 -- one month before the scheduled trial -- President Bush declared him to be an "enemy combatant." As a result, the Justice Department told the court it wanted to turn him over to the U.S. military, and thus asked the court to dismiss the criminal charges against him, and the court did so (the dismissal was "with prejudice," meaning he can't be tried ever again on those charges). Thus, right before his trial, the Bush administration simply removed Al-Marri from the jurisdiction of the judicial system -- based solely on the unilateral order of the President -- and thus prevented him from contesting the charges against him.

[...]

Instead, the Bush administration simply asserted the right to detain him indefinitely without so much as charging him with anything.

Last month, Congress endorsed this behavior and expressly vested the President with the power of indefinite, unreviewable detentions when it enacted the so-called Military Commissions Act of 2006. And the Bush administration has wasted no time relying on that statutory authority to justify the exercise of this extreme detention power.

[...]

The denial of habeas corpus rights is the most Draconian aspect of the MCA, as it authorizes detention for life with no real review and no meaningful opportunity to prove one's innocence. Sen. Chris Dodd said prior to the election that he regrets the decision not to filibuster the MCA: "I regret now that I didn't do it . . . This is a major, major blow to who we are." And Sen. Pat Leahy, soon-to-be Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has confirmed that he is "drafting a bill to undo portions of a recently passed law that prevent terrorism detainees from going to federal court to challenge the government's right to hold them indefinitely."

That has to happen. At the very least, re-establishing habeas corpus rights for detainees is an absolute imperative. We simply cannot be a country that vests in the President the power to order people imprisoned for life with no real review of the charges against them, particularly when the detainees are not detained on any battlefield, and particularly when they are detained inside the U.S.

There is no greater betrayal of the core principles of American political life than to have the federal government sweep people off the streets, throw them into a black hole with no contact with the outside world and no charges asserted of any kind, and simply keep them there for as long as the President desires -- in al-Marri's case, with respect to detention, now five years and counting.

As always, the most extraordinary and jarring aspect of cases like this one is that these principles -- which were once the undebatable, immovable bedrock of our political system -- are now openly debated and actively disputed by our own government. By itself it is astonishing -- and highly revealing about where we are as a country -- that such precepts even need to be defended at all.

* Lettre de cachet

Dean credit

From The Hotline:

Who won the election for Democrats last week? Apportion a large measure of credit to the national environment and to Republican mistakes. Give the Democratic grassroots, who cultivated candidates, knocked on doors and raised money for people and causes ignored (at first) by the national party. Certainly, Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer deserve their accolades.

And then there’s Howard Dean, the unorthodox, insurgent chairman of the Democratic Party. For more than a year, many of the party’s familiarly named strategists, consultants and hangers-on have been convinced that Dean wanted to shape the national committee as a counterweight to the party committees. So if party committees get credit for the victory, Dean should get none, right?

Wrong. [MARC AMBINDER]

Dean ran for chairman on a platform to devolve power and spending authority to state parties. Dean believed the national party committees were too closely aligned with – and therefore only serviced – the interests of the Washington establishment. He redirected the flow of money and responsibility outward to his patrons in states. He legitimized the grievances and complaints of the party’s grassroots army, who had grown frustrated with their status as outsiders looking in. The RNC pioneered a ground-game first approach in 2004; Dean became the first Democratic chairman to validate the work of volunteer ground warriors.

Whether Dean was right, in the normative sense of the word, is irrelevant. He did what he did, and the consequences speak for themselves.

Three years ago, Howard Dean-style politics was too outré for the Democratic Party to bear. Today, arguably, Dean Politics is Democratic politics. Embedded within Dean's campaign theme was a broad critique of the Republican approach to power. Iraq was simply its worst manifestation. But Dean also evinced his distaste with Republican "corruption." He talked about how Democrats - and independents and even Republicans -- were interested in results, not ideology. In his eyes, Americans wanted a fresh approach. He urged, first Democrats, then Americans, to take their country back. He also urged the party to overlook interest group apostasy; remember that Dean got an “A” rating from the NRA as Vermont's governor. He clumsily endorsed an outreach to "the guys with confederate flags on the back of their pick-up trucks."

Leave the Internet aside: the architecture of Dean Politics has become the de mode style for the entire party. Dean promoted a vocal, confrontational style of campaigning, one that did not cede an inch to Republicans. His primary campaign was predicated on a 50 state strategy. He urged Democrats to adopt issues that would drive wedges between the Republican base and the party’s weaker adherents (mostly in the suburbs). He rejected the politics of inoculation, pronouncing himself proud to be the talisman of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. He intuited that the party (and voters) wanted the Democrats to be the opposition party.

When Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. and Iraqi troops in December of 2003, then presidential candidate Dean called the arrest "a good thing which I hope very much will keep our soldiers in Iraq and around the world safer." Then he uttered the words that would hasten his cataclysmic collapse as the Democratic frontrunner: "The capture of Saddam has not made America safer." At the time, it was an outrageous statement, and one from which Dean quickly retreated.

In retrospect -- three years later, amid a sluggish, intractable civil war that's left 2500 more American troops and untold Iraqis dead, Dean was prescient. Few who voted in last Tuesday's elections would disagree. They couldn't disagree; the facts on the ground have proven Howard Dean right.

As the result of Dean's own 50 state funding initiatives, when states like Indiana and Wyoming and Nebraska suddenly featured competitive races, the DNC had trained field staffers on the ground. But even Dean’s admirers admit that there’s no concrete way to know whether the 50 State Project gave these races a bigger boost than the DSCC and DCCC efforts.

But give Dean credit for setting the tone and style of Democratic politics. Successful, Democratic politics, that is, in an environment that Dean first detected three years ago.