Iraq in a nutshell

Do you have trouble telling who's on which team? Maybe it's because you're old and can remember when Osama Bin Laden and Saddham Hussein were American allies. But Atrios can help you understand some of the more recent player trades.

Short version of the story: We toppled minority Sunni leadership of Iraq, installing majority Shia leadership in power. Now, according to Hersh, we're funding Sunni interests elsewhere in the region to prevent the rise of Shia dominance.

Thanks wise old men of Washington, for putting the grownups back in charge.

Is that clear?

The Phuquetard Buddha

My jaw falls open yet I remain silent before the oracle that is the driftglass and I marvel...

Cross posted over at The News Blog.

“Peace comes from within. Which is why we need bunker busting nukes to get at it.” -- sayings of the Phuquetard Buddha (Also known as the Guantanamo Buddha.)

If you ever wake up and find yourself in the middle of a holy war -- involuntarily or otherwise -- it is advisable strategery to get ahold of the local maps and read 'em hurryupquick.

To get the lay of the land, and understand the dogmatic shape and size of the orbits your enemies.

And in the theopolitical headspace of the followers of Phuquetard Buddhism -- those lunatics and mouthbreathers who wage a fulminating 24/7 culture war on everyone one inch Left of Sean Hannity and one head smarter that Doug Feith

“Whatever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings…kill it immediately and sell its children for beer money.” -- sayings of the Phuquetard Buddha

-- there is only the Perfect, Eternal, Conservative Now.

There is no “future”.

No tomorrow.

There is no imaginary place down the timestream where the consequences of doing immensely reckless, stupid things might catch up with us.

And because there is no such place, people who persist in trying to apply “logic” or “common sense” or “causality” or “reason” or any variety of thinking that would generally not be associated with “massive head trauma, multigenerational inbreeding or gas sipping” in some linear, temporal way to show that decisions made in the perfect, eternal, Conservative Now might come with a terrible price down the road…

…are obviously traitors and terrorist lovers.

Their agenda is obviously Al Qaeda's agenda.

“A generous heart is…available on the Thai black market for the right price. I’ve got seven on dry ice in the White House mess just in case, plus the CardioBot 5000 that my pals at Halliburton knocked together for me.” -- sayings of the Phuquetard Buddha

For the Phuquetard Buddhist there is also no “past”. What happened five years ago, five weeks ago, five days ago or five minutes ago isn’t simply irrelevant; except in cases of Democratic blowjobs and bad land deals, the “past” does not exist at all.

Because if it did, it would be bursting at the seams with all kinds of scary stuff. Like Dirty Hippies talking about the “future” and being shouted down as traitors and terrorist lovers.

Like the leaders of the GOP lying over and over and over again.

Confident/shrill pronouncements about the turning of corners and even louder and shriller pronouncement about the disloyalty those who point out that the makers of those shrill pronouncements have been wrong about ever single fucking thing.

So when the only product you have to sell is toxic, and the only leverage you have on Monday to move product is people’s fear and gullibility…

…by Wednesday you will come to require their willful ignorance...

…and by Friday you will begin to demand it.

And this is the terrible dynamic the GOP have roped themselves into.

That to survive they have become The People of the Lie.

A band of the corrupt and insane who cannot -- dare not -- tell the truth about…anything anymore. Anything. And for whom the past six years have truly been a sifting process.

“All suffering comes from indictment” -- sayings of the Phuquetard Buddha

In six short years, the Right has compounded their own lies so many times with so much vigorish in human lives and suffering. They have held the military hostage for so long now – alternately treating them like slaves and ass paper, while cowering behind them shrieking that any who speak ill of the Dear Leader are terrorsymps who hate the men and women in uniform, whenever they need to shut down honest debate. They have spent us so broke in treasure and reputation, that I do not exaggerate when I say that you can no longer be a Good American and a Good Republican.

Because while it is one thing to make poor decisions because you are not in possession of all the facts, it is entirely another thing to run screaming from the facts.

To hide from the facts in your Mommy’s basement like a Yellow Elephant dodging an Army recruiter, and then to slime the hell out of anyone who tries to sneak a few facts into you Cheetohs.

“Avoid aiming at anything less than the ruin of others.” -- sayings of the Phuquetard Buddha.

The Party of Lincoln has been abandoned to the cowards, the looters, the monsters and the insane. There is nothing left at its hollow heart. No place left for it to go but deeper into the abyss of doctrinally willful ignorance and the aggressively unexamined life.

No one left steering the ship but the acolytes of the Guantanamo Buddha who look neither forward nor back, but train their tiny, beautiful minds to live only in the perfect, eternal Conservative Now, which is why they cannot allow this “past” thingie to exist.

Because if it did, it might track its muddy, bloody, impeachable footprints right back into the Present and all over their nice, Lysol-fresh, perfect, eternal, Conservative Now.

“Right conduct is to form a proper livelihood to prosper by. Preferably something indoors, in the petroleum industry, with obscenely high margins, where your lies can topple governments and send a lot of people off to die, and yet you never go to jail.” -- sayings of the Phuquetard Buddha.

Just like those Dirty Hippies who, years ago, kept referencing some imaginary “future” and talking about “consequences” of invading Iraq, these Dirty Hippies who keep harping on the “past” and talking about “evidence” are obviously equally traitorous, and equally bent on helping terrorists destroy America.

What the Dirty Hippies traitors refuse to comprehend is that Time and Truth are Liberal Illusions.

There is no “future” full of pain and failure. There is no “past” full of lies and hypocrisy.

There is only the Phuquetard Buddhist Present within which all words of the Dear Leader glow with a special light of truthiness, and all decisions are glorious and sinless and perfect and pure, and will be so forever and ever.

Because nothing exists outside of the Conservative Now.

Which will always be -- Perfectly and Eternally – exactly one friedman long.

“To conquer oneself is a greater task than conquering others. But conquering others is a fuck of a lot more profitable.” -- sayings of the Phuquetard Buddha.

Cheney Madness Watch - Part 666

At the best of times what Dick Cheney says bears little resemblance to the reality that most of us know but, as Glenn Greenwald observes, Cheney's insistence on anonymity in this case is just bizarre.

The interview Cheney gave to pool reporters on his plane yesterday as it returned home from Afghanistan is striking in several respects. Initially, as Dan Froomkin notes, Cheney demanded that journalists not identify him by name when reporting on the interview (but instead refer to him only as a "senior administration official"), even though Cheney himself makes unmistakably clear in the transcript that it is him.

In fact, the very first words out of his mouth were: "The reason the President wanted me to come, obviously, is because of the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world." He discussed at length the comments he made recently about Nancy Pelosi wanting to "validate Al Qaeda's strategy. So even though there was not a single security reason for the anonymity, Cheney insisted upon it anyway. The official White House transcript (linked above) refers to him only as a "senior administration official," and reporters were required to identify him only as such.

Cheney's petty demand that he not be identified -- like a petty tyrant's demand that his name never pass anyone's lips -- is just an assertion of secrecy and authoriatarian power for its own sake (even under the rule of Emperor Hirohito, "commoners were no longer forbidden to speak his name or look at his face"). But unlike Hirohito, Cheney is an elected public servant of American citizens and this attempt to prohibit journalists from attributing his own words to him is just bizarrely megalomaniacal and contemptuous, particularly in light of how he virtually went out of his way in the very first sentence to make clear that it was him.

Cheney's pants are on fire

Christy at FDL points us to this op-ed.

Joe Conason has a doozy of an op-ed in the NYObserver. And he calls Vice President Cheney out for being the king of duplicity:

Seeking to intimidate the Congressional leaders last week, he recited the misleading old formula conflating war in Iraq with the struggle against Al Qaeda. His theories on that subject have been blown up with the same force and frequency as those daily explosions on Baghdad’s streets. Only a few days ago, the Pentagon Inspector General issued a devastating report describing how Mr. Cheney’s agents in the Defense Department distorted intelligence to “prove” the mythical linkage between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Moreover, every credible analysis of the Iraq insurgency estimates that only a tiny fraction of the fighters are linked to Al Qaeda in any significant way. While the jihadist movement is growing, Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants can profit from our mistakes without leaving their strongholds thousands of miles away.

But Mr. Cheney cares nothing for those facts. As the official who most vehemently assured us of the certain existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he remains immune to the kind of embarrassment that would have required an honorable man to resign from office long ago.

During his latest foreign trip, he warned Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Jack Murtha (D-Penn.) that the redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq would “validate the Al Qaeda strategy,” as if Mr. bin Laden somehow lured the United States into invading Mesopotamia. Reiterating the point later, he added: “Al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That’s their fundamental underlying strategy: that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we’ll quit and go home.”

Actually, we now know that the occupation of Iraq—the Cheney strategy—has strengthened Al Qaeda immeasurably by recruiting thousands of young Muslims to its cause. We know that because the National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the Bush administration a year ago said so. According to The Washington Post, a newspaper whose editorial page supports the war, officials familiar with the classified document said the N.I.E. concluded that “rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position.”

Let's be clear, shall we? Under the Bush/Cheney Administration, we are less strategically prepared, less militarily capable due to poor decision making that has weakened our troop strength and stretched our supply lines beyond the safety point, and more universally despised. Our diplomacy yields discord, our strategy leads to more failures. And neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney will be honest with anyone else — let alone themselves — with regard to accountability or the need for fundamental changes in what we have been doing. In short, we are stuck in a cycle of failure — and it has Dick Cheney and George Bush's names written all over it. How, exactly, does that make us safer?

'nother non-story

Josh Marshall:

Solomon lands another lunker! Sen. Clinton failed to list charitable contributions on ethics report. Jon Chait picks it apart.

This of course comes on the heels of his bogus McCain story.

Basically, once you take the hocus pocus and disingenuousness out of his pieces, this is what they end up like. Doesn't this stuff make the Post look a touch silly putting this on the front page? It's barely worth a blog post.

Late Update: Here's the shocking truth revealed -- the Clinton Foundation's publically available 990 forms with their donations listed on page 18 and 19.

Digby:

But now that we've seen the full rundown of the Clinton Family Foundation, what exactly was the point of this article? The reporters outline donations to charities founded by Hillary's best friend, her alma mater, some Arkansas Children's programs, the tsunami fund, and some thoroughly respectable middle eastern charities. We found that wealthy people often have these charitable foundations and that some of them, including the Clintons, don't spend every penny of the money each year. We also know that this foundation is run by a Senator and presidential candidate, her husband the ex-president of the United States and that their highly accomplished daughter is a director, which would be a dream masthead on any charity in the United States.

There is no evidence that they cheated on their income taxes or that this foundation has contributed to anything that could even remotely be construed as a conflict of interest or even slightly hypocritical. Indeed, after all this investigation, there is not even the slightest hint of irregularity in the foundation and certainly no illegality, merely that she failed to report this on her disclosure form. had she reported it, it would have revealed exactly nothing of interest to anyone.

So,why all the breathless hinting around about some unnamed nefarious deed? It's the classic bogus Whitewater narrative that never actually turns up anything but makes the country think that there just must be "something" there or the media wouldn't report it. We saw a very similar report recently on John Edwards from the same reporter and even the WaPo's limp ombudsman thought it was questionable and said "accurate stories can be misleading." It appears the editors have no intention of reining Solomon in.

One final thought: if the press had applied the Clinton Rules to George W. Bush's strangely enriching-for-him-and-losing-for-others oil business schemes during what turned out to be the closest election in history, we might not be saddled with this godforsaken presidency today. But they didn't. Why do you suppose that is?

Progress is being made

I have been fascinated by the role of the blogosphere versus, and its effect on, the MSM (see here, here, and here) . So has Glenn Greenwald and, in a post about the rather mild rebuke (but rebuke nevertheless) in the same NYTimes that published the load that the execrable Michael Gordon dumped in that same paper, Glenn says that this criticism "stems directly from the same criticisms of Gordon's articles first voiced in the blogosphere".

It is difficult to quantify the influence which the blogosphere has on our broader political debates. There are the blogging triumphalists who seem to think that bloggers are taking over the world and can change whatever they want with a few posts. And then there are those on the opposite end of the spectrum -- the gloomy, whiny defeatists -- who think that all is hopeless because the Big Bad System is so powerful and ingenious and Machiavellian as to be invulnerable (attributes of omnipotence often assigned to the Rove-led Republican political machine -- until the 2006 midterm elections). But most people seem to reside somewhere in between those two poles, which is where the truth is also likely to be found.

Bloggers plug away every day with their media criticisms, their political assaults, and their demands for greater accountability from the political and media institutions which have been so profoundly and glaringly failing the country. Most of that work does not produce immediate results, and whatever work does produce results cannot typically be quantified or documented. No single blog post, by itself, is going to radically transform our political landscape or engender some spontaneous reawakening from our citizenry or political and media elite. And that lack of immediate satisfaction sometimes produces the misleading sense that no meaningful change is occurring.

But changes of this sort -- like the growth of a child with whom one lives -- are gradual and therefore imperceptible, but they are still occurring. Mainstream journalists can no longer ignore the criticisms and complaints that come from the blogosphere. They hear them and are affected by them and that has the effect of changing their behavior. The Michael Gordons in our press corps are not going to be able to aid and abet the efforts of Bush followers to fan the flames of war against Iran without substantial impediments, criticisms and attention -- not as much as is merited, but certainly far more than before.

For a long time, most national journalists studiously ignored the blogosphere completely, trying to demonize it and dismiss it away as some sort of frivolous cesspool of vulgarity and partisan hysteria (some still cling to that tactic). But in terms of size, impact and sophistication, the blogosphere has evolved beyond the point where it can be easily caricatured that way and it has grown beyond the point where it can be simply ignored. The instances where our nation's most influential journalists are compelled to respond to criticisms from blogs are now so numerous as to be routine, even expected.

And that criticism, provided it is persuasive and well-documented, will inevitably have an effect in re-shaping and improving our political discourse -- not immediately or flamboyantly, but gradually and inexorably. When it came to Iraq, it took almost a year-and-a-half for criticisms of the NYT's Gordon-type reporting to appear in its own pages. Yet this time, when Gordon tried the same stunt with Iran, it took less than two weeks for his own paper to criticize him, and numerous other articles on the same topic were published that were far more substantive and responsible.

That is genuine progress, and much of it is attributable to blogs, the influence of which will only continue to grow. People like Tony Snow, Richard Wolffe, and Lieberman-consultant Dan Gerstein feel compelled to scream that the blogosphere is a frivolous and inconsequential echo chamber not because it is, but precisely because they know it is not. If it were, they would continue to ignore it, rather than feel a need to lash out at it.

Media outlets know they are being watched and that a lack of adversarial reporting will be detected and severely criticized. There is much to complain about in our political and media institutions, and there is no shortage of those complaints, but it is also worth noting -- to dilute pervasive defeatism if for no other reason -- that there is also progress being made.

Bipartisan -- not!

Stuart Rothenberg cites some interesting stats about Dem claims about the "bipartisan" nature of anti-surge resolution vote.

In fact, support for the Iraq resolution was bipartisan only in the technical sense that the vote on the resolution was not completely along party lines. But it was awfully close to that, and referring to the final vote as bipartisan has more to do with Democratic strategy and nervousness than reality.

Only 17 Republicans - or 8.4% of GOP House members - joined 225 Democrats in voting for the resolution, while over 90% of Republicans opposed passage of the resolution. Republicans constituted just 7% of the 242 House members who supported the resolution. Only two House Democrats voted with 185 Republicans against the resolution.

Democrats had enough votes to pass the resolution without any GOP support, and given national polls showing widespread dissatisfaction with the Bush policy, just 17 Republican votes for the resolution is stunningly small, and little or no indication of a bipartisan consensus.

Clearly, the vote on the resolution was very much partisan, though with a handful of defections. We can argue over what would constitute a truly bipartisan vote, but 92% of Republicans voting against something and 99% of Democrats voting for it surely doesn't come close to passing the threshold.

Atriois' advice is that the Dems should take this and run with it -- just call it as it is.

Republicans want to continue the war and Democrats want to end it. It's that simple.

Any other debate is about what the best method to get George Bush to end the war is. I think even now too many Democrats are a bit stupid about the political reality - people hate George Bush and people hate the war - and are scared they're going to be painted as traitors by the wingnut noise machine. But that's about politics and strategy, not the desired result. Democrats want to end the war, Republicans want to continue it. If some Republicans want to defect and join with the Democrats to end the war, good for them, but that doesn't change the fact that Democrats want to end the war and Republicans want to continue it.

Make it partisan. The Republicans are. Let them have their war.

Stupidville

I'm not saying that you're stupid. I'm just saying that I think that you should read driftglass regularly but you don't. So for the thousands and thousands or the dozen who read this and not driftglass, I give you an example of driftglass:

How many Iraqis have perished since “Mission Accomplished”?

A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? A trillion?

As the old joke goes --

Q: "What is the difference between ignorance and apathy?"

A: We don't know and we don’t care. (emphasis added)

Americans underestimate Iraqi death toll

By NANCY BENAC, Associated Press Writer
Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. forces have lost their lives in Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. But they woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed.

When the poll was conducted earlier this month, a little more than 3,100 U.S. troops had been killed. The midpoint estimate among those polled was right on target, at about 3,000.

Far from a vague statistic, the death toll is painfully real for many Americans. Seventeen percent in the poll know someone who has been killed or wounded in Iraq. And among adults under 35, those closest to the ages of those deployed, 27 percent know someone who has been killed or wounded.
…

The number of Iraqis killed, however, is much harder to pin down, and that uncertainty is perhaps reflected in Americans' tendency to lowball the Iraqi death toll by tens of thousands.

Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated at more than 54,000 and could be much higher; some unofficial estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. The U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq reports more than 34,000 deaths in 2006 alone.

Among those polled for the AP survey, however, the median estimate of Iraqi deaths was 9,890. The median is the point at which half the estimates were higher and half lower.

Christopher Gelpi, a Duke University political scientist who tracks public opinion on war casualties, said a better understanding of the Iraqi death toll probably wouldn't change already negative public attitudes toward the war much.

"You have to look at who's doing the killing," said Neal Crawford, a restaurant manager in Suttons Bay, Mich., who guessed that about 10,000 Iraqis had been killed. "If these people are dying because a roadside bomb goes off or if there's an insurgent attack in a marketplace, it's an unfortunate circumstance of war — people die."

Gelpi said that while Americans may not view Iraqi deaths through the same prism as American losses, they may use the Iraqi death toll to gauge progress, or lack thereof, on the U.S. effort to promote a stable, secure democracy in Iraq.

To many, he said, "the fact that so many are being killed is an indication that we're not succeeding."
…

American culture is completely schizophrenic on three subjects, all interrelated: Sex, Faith and Stupidity.

Sex is a true, flat-out blessing. Period. And everyone damned well knows it. But while we soak our entire culture in it to the point of complete saturation, we also insist it is Harmful or Fatal if Swallowed!

Faith can be a blessing. It can almost miraculously nourish us and sustain us when we have nothing else. In utter darkness it can help lead us into an ascending path towards greater love, greater compassion and greater joy. And yet we use it as a sword to cut the legs out from under the Enlightenment. As a club to beat men down to the level of obedient beasts. And as a whip to form those beasts up into the ignorant armies that clash by night.

And then there is Stupidity. And to understand American culture you must first understand that it's not that some people don’t like to be stupid. Lots of people love being stupid, and lots of other people make millions of dollars every year telling them that it is perfectly OK to be stupid.

That it is a holy and noble and All-American thing to be stupid. That their God, in fact, requires it. That “elites” have ruined this country, and that only good, old-fashion, dumb as drywall morons can save us from their predations.

We generally refer to these people by the taxonomically correct term of “Republican”.

However while lots of people enjoy steeping in their own stupidity and bigotry, paradoxically, they are terribly frightened of appearing stupid.

So, for example, back in the Jesse Helms era of universal, Rightwing berserk condemnation of all things international, the general feeling on the Right was that we spend waaay too much on foreign aid.

Back then I used to have this kind of argument rather a lot; back before I finally learned that arguing with drywall about time-shares is more productive than arguing with a Republican about foreign policy. Or domestic policy. Or, really, anything.

They were and are absofuckinglutely convinced that something like a third or a quarter of our budget goes to ungrateful furriners. They’re willing to get into punch-ups over it.

What are the facts?

From Kevin Drum, in May of 2003:

...this Q&A from the Council on Foreign Relations:

Do Americans understand how much of the U.S. budget goes to foreign aid?
No. A 2001 poll sponsored by the University of Maryland showed that most Americans think the United States spends about 24 percent of its annual budget on foreign aid—more than 24 times the actual figure.

Do Americans support increasing foreign aid?
Yes. According to [a University of Maryland poll], the typical American would like to spend $1 on foreign aid for every $3 spent on defense; the real ratio in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2003 is $1 on aid for every $19 spent on defense.

24%! The average American thinks we spend a quarter of the federal budget on foreign aid!

The ignorance of Americans about the real world never ceases to amaze me. Ask them what percent of the population is black and they guess it's about a third. Ask them how much they pay in income taxes, and they figure about 50%. Ask them how big the foreign aid budget is and they're off by a factor of 24.

Is it any wonder our political decisions are so screwed up?

Anybody wanne bet that the people who had no fucking clue what we spend on foreign aid but are willing to come out swinging when the facts insult their ignorant opinions are the same people who think that maybe nine thousand Iraqis have died in George Bush’s war?

Ten thousand, tops.

Which is not to say that being a moron is not every man or woman's God given right.

One may choose to live one’s life in bewildered rage.

Choose to walk the Earth proud of being uncontaminated by contemplation, or doubt or mere realism.

Choose to die in fear and ignorance.

This is no kind of life for any sentient being, but it is certainly the right of any citizen live with his or her head up his or her ass. However what will no longer be tolerated is their loutish, pinheaded inferiority to go politely unmentioned and unmocked.

Because the hell on Earth in Iraq exists today because stupid people were allowed to unleash it.

Stupid people were allowed to kick over the Iraqi wasp’s nest and pound on it with a hammer.

Instead of being pelted with rotten produce and sold to a passing circus for beer money, stupid people in suits were actually listened to as if they were not stupid people.

And for the next generation we will all being paying a dear price for letting the Flowers for Algernon crowd (who will no doubt forget sometime in the next eleven minutes that it was their stupidity that got us into this mess in the first place) play at governance.

Which is why we can no longer allow you drag our country down into Stupidville with you any more.

The disgrace that is Joe Liebeman

People have been wondering about whether Joe Lieberman will jump ship. I think there is a case to be made that he should be made to walk the plank. This hypocritical slop that he is spreading (this time in the Wall Street Journal) surely is justification for him to be thrown overboard from the Good Ship Reality-based Community. As Glenn Greenwald writes...

So whereas Lieberman is claiming now that everything is different today because we had no real strategy before for ensuring security, it was Lieberman himself who promised Americans in 2005 that we did have exactly such a strategy and that it was working so well that "we can have a much smaller American military presence there by the end of 2006 or in 2007."

[...]

On what conceivable basis is Joe Lieberman accorded even the most minimal respect or credibility? He is obviously a person who will say anything at any time in order to defend this war, and, now that everything he said in the past is revealed to be completely false, he does not have even an iota of integrity or honesty to admit any of that. Instead, he stands up and pretends that he never said any of those things -- he actually pretends that he knew all along that our military strategy was wrong -- and simply makes the same promises and commitments as he has been making all along with a sense of entitlement that he has credibility on these matters and should be listened to.

Many Americans believed before that we did have an effective strategy designed to preserve security in Iraq and that this strategy was working because people like Joe Lieberman assured them that this was true. Yet now he is claiming that everything has changed in Iraq because, for the first time, we have a strategy for preserving security. The logical conclusion from assembling his own statements is that the assurances he gave in the past were simple lies.

It's one thing for people like Joe Lieberman to have spent almost a full year prior to the invasion spewing one falsehood after the next about the state of Iraq's military capabilities, its relationship to Al-Qaeda, and the likely effects of our invasion. But the absolute deceit of the American people by the Joe Liebermans in this country extends -- in both duration and substance -- far beyond merely those pre-war claims.

George Bush was re-elected, and Americans tolerated the occupation of Iraq long after it was clear that things had gone terribly awry, because the Joe Liebermans in our country continuously lied about what was taking place there, falsely assuring Americans that things were going well, that we were on the precipice of success, that the press accounts of the violence and chaos there were fiction and were merely the by-product of a politically biased media seeking to embarrass the President by concealing the great progress we were making -- progress which Lieberman insisted he witnessed himself during his visit.

Worse still, people like Joe Lieberman attempted -- and are still attempting -- to bully and stigmatize those who were trying to alert Americans of the reality of what was going on in Iraq by depicting anyone who challenges the rosy-eyed deceit of the President and Lieberman as the ones who actually bear responsibility for the failures in Iraq, even as subversive and traitorous.

[...]

The reason our mission in Iraq has proven to be so disastrous and corrupt is very simple -- the advocates and architects of that war are completely corrupt, inept, and deceitful. Recognizing this fact and ceasing to accord people like this respect and credibility is infinitely more important than any specific debates over particular policy or strategic questions. Everywhere Joe Lieberman goes, he should be asked by journalists why anyone should listen to anything he says, or believe anything he says, in light of his history of deceitful statements and tragically wrong assertions, beginning with his 2005 Op-Ed which today he completely repudiates while pretending he never said any of it.

These are people who are completely bereft of judgment and integrity, and their behavior has wreaked incalculable and arguably unprecedented damage on our country. Holding them accountable, and recognizing them for what they are, is critical not only for cleansing our deeply poisoned political system, but also for averting identical, or worse, tragedies in the very near future.

Why things are the way they are.

Josh Marshall says:

"The reason our mission in Iraq has proven to be so disastrous and corrupt is very simple -- the advocates and architects of that war are completely corrupt, inept, and deceitful." The words are Glenn Greenwald's. And though many others have said the same thing in slightly different words, it bears repeating again and again. The corruption and ineptitude aren't unfortunate add-ons to the effort. They're at the heart of it. It's a stain like original sin. And the same goes for the democratizing element of the mission. Even among critics of the war, it's often accepted as granted that a key aim of this effort was democratization -- only that it was botched, like so much else, or that the aim of democracy, in a crunch, plays second fiddle to other priorities. Not true. The key architects of the policy don't believe in democracy or the rule of law. The whole invasion was based on contrary principles. And the aim can't be achieved because those anti-democratic principles are written into the DNA of the occupation, even as secondary figures have and continue to labor to build democracy in the country.

The guy in charge

Josh Marshall opines about Scooter's boss, "Shooter" Cheney:

Okay, it seems we need more updates on why Dick Cheney is too dangerously incompetent to have in any position of authority, let alone the vice presidency. You'll see for instance that this morning Cheney showed up in Islamabad warning President Musharraf that al Qaeda is "regrouping" along the Pakistani border. Musharraf must be a little confused since, didn't we sign off on the armistice his government signed with the jihadists and their protectors just a few months ago?

More to the point, last week Cheney claimed that Nancy Pelosi's position on Iraq would validate al Qaeda since al Qaeda's goal in Iraq is to show that our will can be broken. Reed Hundt chimed in and pointed out that it's far more likely that al Qaeda's goal is to bait us into ridiculous and unwinnable wars that will sap our military strength and financial power.

Now, as it happens, in response to Reed's post, commenter Tom Hilton flagged this passage from the article James Fallows wrote last year in which he wrote ...

Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.

Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially. Many al-Qaeda documents refer to the importance of sapping American economic strength as a step toward reducing America’s ability to throw its weight around in the Middle East.

In other words, the actual intelligence we have about what al Qaeda wants -- not the usual stuff Dick Cheney makes up or gets from Ahmed Chalabi or his butler or whoever -- suggests we're playing right into their hands.

How many American deaths is this goof responsible for? And who in this country has done more to advance the al Qaeda agenda and make the US more vulnerable to attack?

Cartoon credit Cagle Cartoons.

Serve your country and it will never forget its debt to you -- not!

Go read Christy's post at FDL about supporting the troops, BushCo style.

As E.J. Dionne says today in the WaPo:

The fabricate-and-smear cycle illustrated so dramatically during the case of I. Lewis "Scooter'' Libby explains why President Bush is failing to rally support for the latest iteration of his Iraq policy. The administration's willingness at the outset to say anything, no matter how questionable, to justify the war has destroyed its credibility. Its habit of attacking those who expressed misgivings has destroyed any goodwill it might have enjoyed. Bush and Cheney have lost the benefit of the doubt….

…those words illustrate the administration's political methodology from the very beginning of its public campaign against Iraq. Back in 2002 and early 2003, it browbeat a reluctant country into this war by making assertions about an Iraqi nuclear program that proved to be groundless and by inventing ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that didn't exist.

Then, once our troops were committed, anyone who had second thoughts could be trashed and driven back as a pro-terrorist weakling. The quagmire would be self-perpetuating: Once you checked in, you could never leave.

The evidence presented at the Libby trial has demonstrated how worried Cheney was that this scheme could unravel….

Whatever price Scooter Libby pays, the country is already paying for the divisive practices of a crowd that wanted to go to war in Iraq in the very worst way — and did exactly that. As a result, we confront the mess in Baghdad and the continued threat of terrorism as an angry, polarized nation.

And what price are we, as a nation, paying at the moment? The Europeans, even our staunchest allies, are disgusted by our fundamental lack of understanding of even basic diplomacy — we are making a mess of the Iran situation and Bush's inability to be anything but a pigheaded, stubborn jerk on the world stage has played a large role in toppling the Italian government. As if this were even possible, the American public trusts the Bush Administration even less this month with regard to their conduct of the war in Iraq.

As for the treatment of the very soldiers who risk their lives in our nation's uniform for these failed Bush policies? Hundreds are homeless. And the lack of care they are receiving is heartbreaking.

After returning from Iraq in late 2005, Jonathan Schulze spent every day struggling not to fall apart. When a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic turned him away last month, he lost the battle. The 25-year-old Marine from Stewart, Minn., had told his parents that 16 men in his unit had died in two days of battle in Ramadi. At home, he was drinking hard to stave off the nightmares. Though he managed to get a job as a roofer, he was suffering flashbacks and panic attacks so intense that he couldn't concentrate on his work. Sometimes, he heard in his mind the haunting chants of the muezzin—the Muslim call to prayer that he'd heard many times in Iraq. Again and again, he'd relive the moments he was in a Humvee, manning the machine gun, but helpless to save his fellow Marines. "He'd be seeing them in his own mind, standing in front of him," says his stepmother, Marianne.

Schulze, who earned two Purple Hearts for wounds sustained in Iraq, was initially reluctant to turn to the VA. Raised among fighters—Schulze's father served in Vietnam and over the years his older brother and six stepbrothers all enlisted in the military—Jonathan might have felt asking for help didn't befit a Marine.

But when the panic attacks got to be too much, he started showing up at the VA emergency room, where doctors recommended he try group therapy. He resisted; he didn't think hearing other veterans' depressing problems would help solve his own. Then, early last month, after more than a year of anxiety, he finally decided to admit himself to an inpatient program. Schulze packed a bag on Jan. 11 and drove with his family to the VA center in St. Cloud, about 70 miles away. The Schulzes were ushered into the mental-health-care unit and an intake worker sat down at a computer across from them. "She started typing," Marianne says. "She asked, 'Do you feel suicidal?' and Jonathan said, 'Yes, I feel suicidal'." The woman kept typing, seemingly unconcerned. Marianne was livid. "He's an Iraqi veteran!" she snapped. "Listen to him!" The woman made a phone call, then told him no one was available that day to screen him for hospitalization. Jonathan could come back tomorrow or call the counselor for a screening on the phone.

When he did call the following day, the response from the clinic was even more disheartening: the center was full. Schulze would be No. 26 on the waiting list. He was encouraged to call back periodically over the next two weeks in case there was a cancellation. Marianne was listening in on the conversation from the dining room. She watched Jonathan, slumped on the couch, as he talked to the doctor. "I heard him say the same thing: I'm suicidal, I feel lost, I feel hopelessness," she says. Four days later Schulze got drunk, wrapped an electrical cord around a basement beam in his home and hanged himself. A friend he telephoned while tying the noose called the police, but by the time officers broke down the door, Schulze was dead.

This is appalling. It is unconscionable. And it is well past time that the Bush Administration was called to account, along with the Republican members of Congress who allowed this abysmal situation to continue to deteriorate for the last six years under their watch.

For shame. Our nation's soldiers deserve far, far better than this. And so do all Americans. The time for honesty and accountability is now.

It is well past time for questions to be asked, and for Congress and the public and the media to demand that they be fully answered. The lives of every American soldier and our national security depend on the Bush Administration making the right choices for all of our safety over the long haul. Be honest with yourself: do you trust George Bush and Dick Cheney to make these decisions with the nation's interest in mind? Or do you think that maybe, just maybe, they'll be making more decisions and maneuvers that do nothing more than cover their own behinds as they stall in place — in this failed, miserable place — until the clock runs out on the Bush Presidency, leaving this mess for someone else to clean up for them?

Update: The Senate to investigate the Walter Reed Scandal

I read the news today...

I've been away visiting a sick friend and have come back with a renewed sense of how fortunate I am. But we are not all this lucky and not all of us who are the beneficiaries of good fortune are even trying to use it to make the world a better place. I see hateful intolerant people obsessed with sex and claiming religious superiority. I see people obsessed with money and power who are spreading destruction and corruption to satisfy their greed. I'm going to keep calling it as I see it and do what I can to make the part over which I have any influence, a little better for all of us.

One of the first requirements is to be informed and for this reason, I suggest the you read this article by Seymour Hersh about the actual effects of American policy in the Middle East and this one in the Independent about what The True Extent of Britain's Failure in Basra.

Perjury, regardless of what you are covering up, is wrong

Larry Johnson writes:

Boy, what a difference six years makes. The Wall Street Journal online edition shed crocodile tears today over the suffering of poor Scooter Libby.

[...]

Somebody track down the author of the editorial, Daniel Henniger, and let him know that Libby is charged with PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE. Henninger must be a new guy and completely unaware or misinformed about the Wall Street Journal's stand on issues of PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE. Yes sirree. The Wall Street Journal certainly sang a different tune way back in 2001.

[...]

Let's get this straight. Lying about a blow job is an impeachable offense. But lying about the leak of a covert agent's secret identity is silliness?

Here's my position--perjury, regardless of what you are covering up is wrong. That was a position I thought that genuine conservatives touted. But now I know that is wrong. After watching the spectacle of apologists for Scooter Libby insist "no harm, no foul" we are now asked to conclude that charges of perjury and obstruction of justice are meaningless. If that's the case we owe Bill Clinton a big apology and the tax payers deserve a rebate for any money spent to impeach a President over an act (perjury) that the rightwing and neocons now concede is simply abuse by an overzealous prosecutor.

We cannot change history. President Clinton ultimately took responsibility for his actions and was punished. The future is before us. If Scooter Libby is found guilty will he be man enough to take responsibility? I doubt it.

What is wrong with America

I first heard about Riverbend's Baghdad Burning from Billmon here. Here we have driftglass pointing us to her again. Heart heavy stuff...

Riverbend has this up (h/t to Mia Culpa)

The Rape of Sabrine:

It takes a lot to get the energy and resolution to blog lately. I guess it’s mainly because just thinking about the state of Iraq leaves me drained and depressed. But I had to write tonight.

As I write this, Oprah is on Channel 4 (one of the MBC channels we get on Nilesat), showing Americans how to get out of debt. Her guest speaker is telling a studio full of American women who seem to have over-shopped that they could probably do with fewer designer products. As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can’t talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.

She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute- shame on you in advance.
…

And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.

Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.

Go read the whole thing, but be forewarned: it is utterly heartbreaking.

To it I have nothing to add but this:

If you read what Riverbend wrote and your reaction is something like “Merciful Christ. How will we ever be forgiven for what we have done to that country? How will we atone? And how can we still be debating this? How can anyone with a sliver of conscience still be invoking God and Homeland, Freedom and Faith, 9/11 and 'Fight Them Over There' to keep us trapped in this hell we sired?” you’re a Liberal.

If you read it, get halfway through, and your brain locks down and starts desperately scurrying around like a rat in a dumpster fire, looking for a way to rationalize it, to excuse it, to pick at its methodology…

Looking for a “Yeah, but…” to absolve you for having sown this wind and reaped this whirlwind…

Looking for today’s Magic Coward Words from Fox High Command that will let you complete the sentence “But the Democrats…” in some way that permits you to wriggle out from under your complicity in the Iraq Disaster…

Looking for some rebuttal, no matter how slight – maybe some anonymous email from somebody’s second cousin who has a friend, who knows a guy, whose half-sister is married to a guy, who went to high school with this dude who served in Iraq and says things aren’t really that bad – that will let you off the hook…

Or if you just sneer, say “Fuckin’ raghead bitch prolly had it comin’” and go about your business unmoved…

…then you are a Conservative.

And if you find that you are a Conservative, then you can quit bothering to hunt for phantom enemies within, like the Liberal Press and the Dirty Hippies, because you – personally and specifically -- are the enemy.

You – personally and specifically -- are what is wrong with America.

Egyptian blogger jailed for insulting Islam

First they jailed the Egyptian blogger...

Well, we couldn't have any insulting of presidents going on, could we? The latest from the country that gets the second largest amount of U.S. foreign aid and uses it to represses democracy and the freedom of speech. I bet BushCo they could do that here.

Reuters:

An Alexandria court sentenced an Egyptian blogger to four years in prison on Thursday for insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Abdel Karim Suleiman, a 22-year-old former law student who has been in custody since November, was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for his Internet writings. He was convicted in connection with eight articles he wrote since 2004.

H/T Karla

Resolve

Mom: Dick, stop throwing rocks at the school! There are kids inside and they're getting hurt.

Dick: I'm sorry, Mom, but I can't quit throwing rocks. The other guys will think I'm weak and lack resolve. Why, if I were to stop, they'd laugh at me and call me a coward.

Mom: OK, dear. We can't have your feelings getting hurt. Keep on throwing rocks and hurting the kids. That's the manly thing to do... I guess.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

One of the hallmarks of the Bush presidency -- arguably the central one -- is that we have adopted the mentality and mimicked the behavior of "our enemies," including those whom we have long considered, rightfully so, to be savage and uncivilized. As a result, our foreign policy consists of little more than flamboyant demonstrations of our own "toughness" because that, so the thinking goes, is the only language which "our enemies" understand, and we must speak "their language" (hence, we stay in Iraq not because it makes geopolitical sense, but because we have to prove to Al Qaeda that they cannot "break our will").

Thus, any measure designed to avert war -- negotiations, diplomacy, compromise, an acceptance of the fact that we need not force every country to submit to our national Will -- are scornfully dismissed as "weakness," which, in turn, is "provocative." Conversely, war-seeking policies are always desirable because they show how tough and strong we are.

Historian Richard Hofstadter, in his influential 1964 Harper's essay entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics, described this dynamic perfectly:

Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. [...] At least in terms of these impulses, there really are virtually no distinctions between the mindset of the neoconservative Civilization Warriors and the Islamic extremists to whose eradication they are so devoted.

Their obsessions with displays of power and their (quite related) intense fear of being perceived as weak are, as Hofstadter documented so conclusively, more psychological and personal than political, and it is what binds them to the Islamic radicals who are driven by the same impulses (as Andrew Sullivan recently noted in response to a horrific story of a British Muslim man killing his whole family because the women wanted to be "too Western": "So much of Islam's violence seems to stem from men's fear of losing control of women").

Those consumed by feelings of their own weakness are always desperate to find ways to be perceived as strong. Seeking out and fighting wars (or, in the case of George Bush and his neoconservative comrades, cheering them on from a distance), is an ideal way to accomplish that. Conversely, in this mental paradigm, a willingness to negotiate and explore peaceful ways of conflict resolution is nothing more than a pitiful sign of weakness to be avoided at all costs.

Cheney Unbowed

Dan Froomkin writing in WaPo about an unrepentant Darth Cheney

Vice President Cheney is going out of his way to make it clear that he doesn't think he has anything to apologize for.

In an unprecedented display of public verbosity from the typically taciturn vice president, Cheney spoke for the second time in three days with ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl. During today's 22-minute interview in a Sydney restaurant, Cheney showed no sign of backing down from controversy. Rather, he:

* Repeated and amplified his opinion that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's proposed course in Iraq would validate al Qaeda. (After Cheney's last interview with Karl, Pelosi called upon President Bush to repudiate the comments.)

* Refused to acknowledge any failure of U.S. policy in Iraq.

* Stood by his 1991 prediction that an invasion of Iraq would result in a quagmire -- but said that 9/11 changed the dynamics such that it had to be done anyway.

* Expressed pride in having done "some very controversial things" since 9/11 that he said have averted further terrorist attacks within our borders.

* Said it was "probably inaccurate" to call him an all-powerful vice president.

* Refused to address any of the serious accusations leveled against him during the course of the trial of his former chief of staff, Scooter Libby.

* Refused to rule out military action against Iran.

Here is the full transcript of the interview. Here is the text and video of Karl's report for ABC News.

My favorite part was this -- the old everything-change-on-9/11 line -- where Cheney explains that what changed was rational thinking went out the window i.e. let's attack Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11) because Al-Qaeda struck on 9/11. WTF...?

I'm not sure, but this may have been the first time a reporter asked Cheney to respond to his now-famous assertion in 1991 that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would result in a quagmire.

Here's the complete quote from 1991 ( YouTube has the audio): "The notion that we ought to now go to Baghdad and somehow take control of the country strikes me as an extremely serious one in terms of what we'd have to do once we got there. You'd probably have to put some new government in place. It's not clear what kind of government that would be, how long you'd have to stay. For the U.S. to get involved militarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who's going to govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire."

From today's interview:

"Karl: Back in 1991, you talked about how military action in Iraq would be the classic definition of a quagmire. Have you been disturbed to see how right you were? Or people certainly said that you were exactly on target in your analysis back in 1991 of what would happen if the U.S. tried to go in --

"Cheney: Well, I stand by what I said in '91. But look what's happened since then -- we had 9/11. We've found ourselves in a situation where what was going on in that part of the globe and the growth and development of the extremists, the al Qaeda types that are prepared to strike the United States demonstrated that we weren't safe and secure behind our own borders. We weren't in Iraq when we got hit on 9/11. But we got hit in '93 at the World Trade Center, in '96 at Khobar Towers, or '98 in the East Africa embassy bombings, 2000, the USS Cole. And of course, finally 9/11 right here at home. They continued to hit us because we didn't respond effectively, because they believed we were weak. They believed if they killed enough Americans, they could change our policy because they did on a number of occasions. That day has passed. That all ended with 9/11.

"In Iraq, what we've done now is we've taken down Saddam Hussein. He's dead. His sons are dead. His government is gone. There's a democratically elected government in place. We've had three national elections in Iraq with higher turnout that we have in the United States. They've got a good constitution. They've got a couple hundred thousand men in arms now, trained and equipped to fight the good fight. They're now fighting alongside Americans in Baghdad and elsewhere. There are -- lots of the country that are in pretty good shape. We've got to get right in Baghdad. That's the task at hand. I think we can do it."

So if I read this correctly, Cheney is saying: Yes, it's a quagmire. But after 9/11 we needed to prove that we weren't weak.

Is that now the official White House position?

A Time For Heroes

Christy at FDL makes the very simple but good point that 'of course' Plame was covert and explains why this is obvious to anyone without an interest in obfuscating this fact. She goes on to say something dear to my heart (and which I've written about before but can't locate... yet) about how there is something that each of us can do: "Today, stand up and be the hero that your nation needs you to be".

[Y]esterday, Dana Priest had a very interesting chat on the WaPo regarding national security issues. In the middle of the chat, she was asked a question about the Libby case and the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's name, and had this to say (H/T to allan_in_upstate and LaFourmiRouge for the heads up on this.):

Pauling, N.Y.: Is it possible that Valerie Plame was covert but would not be covered by the IIPA? Why is it that no government official will comment about Ms. Wilson's employment and covered status?

Dana Priest: Because she was covert! No, she's covered. If she were not, you could not have this trial in the first place.

And there, with the simplicity of a three sentence response, Dana Priest says what ought to be obvious to any thinking person who has ever worked around anyone who is undercover in any way. The CIA referral would have gone nowhere, very quickly, with the DoJ had Valerie Plame Wilson not been covert. In fact, the referral would never have been made in the first place. But the fact that John Ashcroft, partisan Attorney General that he was, allowed an investigation to be opened — and followed through on by the FBI for months and months under his supervision, before passing it off to an appointed Special Counsel pretty much says it all in terms of substance as to the reason for a referral in the first place.

The fact that Valerie Plame Wilson and those working with her either as fellow agents, assets, or even innocents who happened to travel with her on what they thought were simply ordinary business trips, but are now connected with the CIA in the minds of external intel agencies in any country in which she and they may have travelled…and it just keeps rippling outward from there…were exposed by the very government that ought to have held their secrets as closely as they possibly could? By their OWN government — at the highest levels?

The betrayal in this act of vengeance is breathtaking in its scope — and its stupidity.

But the repercussions of this conduct? Not just of revealing Valerie Plame Wilson and her network, but across the broad spectrum of intelligence agencies and people who work in them over the last six years of Bush Administration pressures, of Dick Cheney demanding intel to fit his warped world view, of the war between the WHIG and the CIA, of all of this — the repercussions are enormous. The losses that the intelligence community has seen of experienced field officers, of experienced analysts with a commitment to do the job well, has been staggering.

And the cost to our nation's safety as a result of these losses? There is a cost, and one that will not easily be paid back because the years of training and work that go into achieving that level of proficiency in a job which requires a high level of integrity and skill and understanding is not easily won back in a short term. And the fact that political cronies may be doing the recruiting for the very people we so desperately need to fill these jobs — in an environment of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush's making? You'll have to pardon me if I do not feel comfortable with where this may lead us.

And this is true across the board in a lot of civil service jobs in Washington, DC. I have heard this from countless readers and friends and current and former officials and peons — to a person — that there has been a concerted effort to decimate the collective understanding of how to make government work in the public name of efficiency. But privately, it has resulted in the insertion of political cronies at all levels and facets of government service, which has in turn resulted in the insertion of political hackery, cronyism and ideological zeal into decisions as diverse as research grants at the NIH or environmental policy or no-bid contracts that have resulted in vast profit schemes and war profiteering.

All of which has been allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged for far too long by the Republicans who controlled Congress.

This is a time for heroes. I selected the clip of the West Wing above for a very good reason. This is one of my favorite Jed Bartlett moments, and it comes at the end of an emotionally difficult episode — and truly shows the difference that some uplift and a call to the service of your fellow citizens when the nation most needs you to take action can mean for us as a nation. The actions of one person, in the right place at the right time, can change the course of history.

What if you are that person?

This nation of ours needs heroes, now more than ever. Heroism comes in many forms but, for my money, the biggest hero that any of us can be is to be an active, involved, and attentive person who holds both their governmental representatives and themselves accountable for their community, for their nation, and for our place in the world. Today, stand up and be the hero that your nation needs you to be.

I have had enough of self-dealing, backstabbing, short-term-power-grabbing, don't care about anything other than what's in it for me falseness. This is a time when our nation has substantial problems. And it will take all of us — pulling together — to even begin to make a dent. This is a time for true leadership in this nation of ours. But we will not see it, we will continue to get this half-baked, self-dealing idiocy unless and until we all stand up and say "enough!" and demand much better — for ourselves, for our children's sake, and for this nation of ours.

Today, stand up and be the hero that your nation needs you to be. Let us all stand up together. For America. For ourselves and our children and our children's children. For liberty.

Joe go now?

I was concerned after the election last November that, with Lieberman holding the balance of power, we could expect him to start threatening to switch parties. I was initially mollified somewhat but the whispers are starting anew. Greg Sargent tells us:

The Politico tries to muscle in on all the Lieberman-switching-parties action today:

"I have no desire to change parties," Lieberman said in a telephone interview. "If that ever happens, it is because I feel the majority of Democrats have gone in a direction that I don't feel comfortable with."

Asked whether that hasn't already happened with Iraq, Lieberman said: "We will see how that plays out in the coming months," specifically how the party approaches the issue of continued funding for the war.

He suggested, however, that the forthcoming showdown over new funding could be a deciding factor that would lure him to the Republican Party.

"I hope we don't get to that point," Lieberman said. "That's about all I will say on it today. That would hurt."

As we noted earlier today, Lieberman told Time magazine that there was a "remote possibility" he could switch parties. And, as also noted below, Lieberman said multiple times before Election Day 2006 that he would caucus with the Dems:

Our question: If the big news orgs report on this tomorrow, how many of them will share this simple, incontrovertible historical fact with their readers?

Interesting comment from joejoejoe.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out Sen. Liar.

Sens. Collins, Hagel, and Sununu would all have a better shot at re-election in 2008 running as independents. Lieberman acts like he is the only show in town. If he flips I'm guessing one of the above (or all of the above) flip in the 110th Congress. You can cut a better deal switching immediately after Lieberman finally completes his diva act (seniority, committee assignments) than you can in January '09 when the next class of Democratic freshman Senators won't let you keep your seniority in the 111th Congress.

Do it Joe! Please do it!

Unlikely to succeed or virtually certain to fail?

In a article in Newsweek, called In For the Long Haul, Michael Hirsh explains that "The British are leaving, the Iraqis are failing and the Americans are staying—and we’re going to be there a lot longer than anyone in Washington is acknowledging right now."

Josh Marshall, referring to this article, opines:

The 'surge' isn't a ramped up effort to get a hold of the security situation in Iraq so that American troops can come home. The whole policy is based on the assumption that Iraqis can't police or stabilize Iraq, that the American military will have to do it for them and that we'll be there for five or more likely ten or more years more before we have any hope of leaving.

Under Petraeus’s plan, a U.S. military force of 160,000 or more is setting up hundreds of “mini-forts” all over Baghdad and the rest of the country, right in the middle of the action. The U.S. Army has also stopped pretending that Iraqis—who have failed to build a credible government, military or police force on their own—are in the lead when it comes to kicking down doors and keeping the peace. And that means the future of Iraq depends on the long-term presence of U.S. forces in a way it did not just a few months ago.

There's a really biting irony here, which is that this really is how you run a successful counterinsurgency, albeit with many more troops than we have available or in theater. And, in a modified form, it's also how you prevent an insurgency from coming into existence or spiraling out of control. I know there's this often doctrinaire debate about whether the occupation was destined to come to this bleak point or not. But things wouldn't have been nearly as bad if the White House and the Secretary of Defense hadn't insisted on the shiftless, lackadaisical and incompetent approach we've followed, ignoring the reality of the situation until domestic politics in the US forced their hand.

But what's done is done.

Set aside whether the Petraeus plan is unlikely to succeed or virtually certain to fail. [empahsis mine. --bill] And set aside -- for the sake of clarifying a separate set of issues -- how many more US troops would die with this new approach. (With this sort of intensive involvement in securing Iraq, the answer has to be, a lot.) The question that we need to ask is whether it's worth trying to prevent the Iraqi civil war from running its course given our now depleted resources and how many other vital national interests are now imperiled by our continued presence in the country.

Central to the Republican line on Iraq and much more to the Democratic one than I think is sometimes realized, our whole vision is now governed by Iraq-myopia, the delusion that our national destiny is at stake in Iraq. But it's not. [finally someone is saying it --bill] We've done horrible harm to ourselves and the Iraqis. It's a disaster, a catastrophe. But it's not everything. It's actually not even close to everything. And until we really get our collective heads around that fact I doubt we'll ever get ourselves free of this mess.

On defending the indefensible

For those of you who have the good fortune of not knowing about Glenn Reynolds a.k.a. Instapundit (and his very high-traffic rightwing blog) are probably also unaware of his recent statement. Oh yes, he's also a law professor at the University of Tennessee.

We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc. Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003.

Many people have responded to this post which is, alas, not atypical of Reynolds' spew. One of my favorites is this one by a more principled and law-abiding law professor from the University of Colorado Law School, Professor Paul Campos, who wrote an op-ed in the Rocky Mountain News.

As Glenn Greenwald tells us:

Reynolds replied to Campos' column three separate times, each time with increasing shrillness, dishonesty, and name-calling -- first on his blog, then in a guest column in The Rocky Mountain News, and then again yesterday on his blog. He also repeatedly linked to multiple right-wing bloggers engaged in all sorts of name-calling attacks on Professor Campos. This morning, Professor Campos e-mailed me and asked if he could post his response to Reynolds on this blog, and I happily agreed. Following is Professor Campos' reply:

Glenn Reynolds' response to my column suggesting that it might strike some people as odd that a law professor is using lies to advocate murder is a classic of the genre: the genre in question being the unhinged polemic disguised as pseudo-academic discourse (It was Reynolds' proclivity for this sort of thing that led me to point out the extent to which Reynolds and his ilk are right-wing versions of the infamous Ward Churchill -- the difference being that you'll never find Churchill within a thousand miles of any mainstream liberal or Democratic party figure, while Reynolds somehow remains the soul of Republican respectability).

One could linger over such symptomatic features as the pompous neologism ("beclowned") deployed as a substitute for argument; the assumption that scholarly expertise can be acquired by a ten-minute Google search; the subsequent citation of "authorities" of whose existence the author was unaware ten minutes earlier; or the inevitable if rather surreal violation of Godwin's Law (we bombed the Nazis so what's wrong with assassinating Iranian civilians?). But let's stick to Reynolds' substantive claims, such as they are.

First, Reynolds argues there are circumstances under which government-sponsored assassination is both legal and morally defensible. Yet whatever merits that general claim might have, it has nothing to do with the legality and mortality of Reynolds' specific recommendation that the United States government should be "quietly" assassinating Iranian mullahs and atomic scientists, today if not sooner. Obviously there is a world of difference between speculating on whether it would have made sense to assassinate, say, Saddam Hussein, or the Iranian head of state (presumably at some time when we weren't funneling arms to them), and advocating the assassination of civilian research scientists.

As for Reynolds' claim that killing scientists wouldn't be murder because it's only against the law until the law is changed, what can one say? Lawyers' claims to find a statement shocking often sound a lot like Capt. Renault claiming to be shocked to discover there's gambling in Casablanca, but I'm not saying this rhetorically: It's shocking that a professor of law would dare make such a despicable argument in print. In fact assassinations are currently prohibited by law -- something Reynolds cannot of course dispute -- and the law would have to be changed before what Reynolds says our government should be doing at the present moment could even arguably begin to be considered legal.

Sensing, perhaps, that he's saying something too ridiculous for his audience to swallow, Reynolds starts arguing in the alternative, by claiming that assassinating research scientists isn't really assassination. His basis for this is the argument that when research scientists are present at legitimate military targets, their deaths from lawful military attacks on those targets aren't assassinations. But this is about as relevant to his original argument as the claim that scientists who die from lung cancer because they smoked a lot haven't been assassinated. Remember, Reynolds argued originally that we should be "quietly" terminating research scientists with extreme prejudice, and that this was preferable to, for example, bombing Iranian military installations. Yet the examples he gives of the legitimate killing of scientists all require precisely the course of action he claims his assassination scheme is designed to prevent.

Reynolds' idea of a response to the fact that his scheme to "quietly" assassinate research scientists is an egregious violation of international law is to point out that a Reagan administration lawyer once said it was OK to try to drop a bomb on Moamar Quaddafi. If this is Reynolds' idea of persuasive legal reasoning, how does he justify ever giving one of his students a poor grade?

That war is sometimes necessary doesn't make it any less hideous. Yet it's made even more hideous when nations make no effort to comply with the laws of war. Assassinating a research scientist is no more permissible under the laws of war than shaking the hand of an off-duty out-of-uniform soldier having a meal in a restaurant, hundreds of miles from a battlefield, and then shooting him in the head.

None of this has even touched on the fact that Reynolds' central claims, upon which his whole argument hinges, are false. The United States isn't at war with Iran, and the Iranian regime has never threatened to use nuclear weapons against our nation. My column emphasized these points, and in doing so essentially called Reynolds a liar. Yet he hasn't even bothered to try to refute that charge -- for the simple reason that he can't.

And, since others have already done so, I won't bother to elaborate on why Reynolds' scheme, even if a respectable argument for its supposed legality could be found, is as a purely practical matter pretty much insane.

A final note: My column suggested that, given the support of people like Reynolds and Hugh Hewitt for disciplinary action against Ward Churchill, it wouldn't be untoward to inquire if the University of Tennessee's employment policies require unlimited toleration of, for example, a law professor who uses lies to justify murder. Again, this isn't a rhetorical question: it genuinely interests me. Obviously, academic freedom isn't unlimited. No one, I presume, would defend a professor's "right" to, for instance, verbally abuse students with racial slurs, or to appropriate the work of others without proper citation, and so forth. And I certainly respect the views of people like Glenn Greenwald and Scott Lemieux, who if I understand them correctly go very far toward arguing that no expression of opinion per se should ever be a basis for the sanctioning of an academic. How far I myself would go in that direction is something on which, not being an administrator, I can afford to keep an open mind.

In the end, of course, it's up to the University of Tennessee to decide whether the spectacle of a law professor using lies to justify murder is something of which they should deign take notice. In any case, that spectacle serves as a cautionary tale to the rest of us -- of just how far it's possible to sink in the defense of the indefensible.

Dowdy

Here is Digby's take on Clinton vs. Obama and especially Maureen "Queen of Mean" Dowd's involvement.

I just love it when billionaires say things like this, don't you?

I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.

That's the back-biting David Geffen in the Queen of Mean's [Maureen Dowd] op-ed column today talking about the calculating Clinton while defending his chosen candidate, the man the QueenBee calls Obambi. What a Freudian field day we have at work on this one.

[...]

Jesus. Sometimes I don't think we deserve to win. We can't seem to stop helping the other side, even when they are down and out.

[...]

Here's a freebie link to the Modo column so that you can all assess whether I'm being "truthy" about Geffen. I chose that quote because it stuck out to me as being quintessential, big donor, privileged elitism, which is basically what the whole stupid column reeked of. I frankly do not give a damn what Geffen thinks of either Hillary or Obama.

I thought my post was quite clear that the whole shrieking lot of them were acting like a bunch of asshats, but if it wasn't: the whole shrieking lot of them, including the press, are acting like a bunch of asshats. [emphasis mine -- bill]

Digby is alluding to a point that Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler has been making forever -- and that is that the pampered press corpse has enabled the BushCo Reign of Error and has ceaselessly savaged Dems (especially the Clintons and collateral Gore). Commenting on noxious Dowd's using Geffen to trash the Clintons, Somerby writes:

Good God, what a loser! As these boys have done since the dawn of time, Geffen knows to slime the woman for daring to be so “ambitious.” And what does it mean when Geffen says that Clinton is “incredibly polarizing?” It means this: Right-wing nut jobs invented a string of ugly tales about Clinton —and Geffen is tired of fighting the fight. In fact, Hillary Clinton is “incredibly polarizing” because Maureen Dowd sat and stared while high-profile crackpots accused her and her husband of (for example) a long string of murders. Today, Geffen isn’t angry at the haters and crackpots for this sorry history. Not him! He’s angry at Clinton instead!

Crackpots invented wild stories about her.

And David Geffen is now blaming her.

Meanwhile, Geffen is too stupid to understand a basic fact about Obama, his own (perfectly reasonable) choice for the White House. Here’s that fact: Obama will turn out to be “incredibly polarizing” himself, as soon as he gets the nomination. (Or he’ll turn out to be a flip-flopper, like Kerry. Or he’ll turn out to be a big liar, like Gore.) The same Hate Machine which made Clinton so “polarizing” will make this brilliant man a big punch-line too.

[...]

But then, nothing is dumber than Maureen Dowd—unless it’s Dowd writing from Hollywood.

Let’s say it—these people are barely sane. And yes, Dowd will do this to Obama too; as we’ve seen (though you can’t quite accept it), she has already started. Libs and Dems can’t pick-and-choose their outrage over this sort of clowning. We have to react to it every time. We have to defend all our candidates.

Meanwhile, the Times should finally do the right thing. Maureen Dowd is barely sane. There are nice rehab centers near Beverly Hills. The Times should escort her to one.

Read Somerby's "incomparable archives" if you want to see it laid out chapter and verse back to the late 90's. Dowd is exceptionally bad but, sadly, not alone among the guilty.

Lap dogs

Glenn does it again. He skewers the "journalists" who make up the complicit media enablers who are such a big part of the problems we face.

At the National Press Club last night, White House spokesman Tony Snow sat down for a chat with what appeared to be some of his best friends -- our nation's elite "journalists" assigned to the White House -- and they all sat around amicably bemoaning how terribly unfair the criticism is that is directed at them by blogs (h/t Atrios). Apparently, one of the most pressing media problems in America is . . . that bloggers demand too much of the national journalists who are assigned to report on the activities and claims of the Government.

[...]

Really, what kind of warped and obsessive American would devote themselves to such an unnecessary task as "media criticism," as though our elite national journalists -- who are doing such "a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general" -- need anyone, let alone bloggers, telling them how to do their job.

[...]

See, all journalists are supposed to do is ask questions of their friends -- like that great guy, Tony Snow -- and that is how they "get information." Then, they pass it along. That's it. That's their job (that echoes what Gordon told Goodman: "the way journalism works is you write what you know, and what you know at the time you try to convey as best you can").

Those who think they should actually do more than that -- as embodied by the demand of bloggers that they actually be adversarial and skeptical about the information-gathering process, and that they actually investigate and scrutinize what the Government tells them, rather than mindlessly pass it along -- is all just a lamentable by-product of how unpleasantly political and angry bloggers are. Wolffe explained what we fail to understand:

It's not a political exercise, it's a journalistic exercise. And I think often the blogs are looking for us to be political advocates more than journalistic ones.

The reality, of course, is that most media-criticizing bloggers do not want journalists to be "political advocates." They want them to do what journalists are supposed to do -- which is not, contrary to Wolffe's belief, sit around with their good, trustworthy, nice-guy friends in the White House and simply "ask questions" and "get information," but instead to scrutinize that information, treat it with doubt, investigate it before passing it along to determine whether it's true. And the reason bloggers want them to do that, the reason that bloggers demand more of journalists like Wolffe, is not because bloggers are enraged, confused, unreasonable partisans. It's because bloggers are American citizens who are deeply concerned about what has happened to their country over the last six years and criticize the press and demand more of it because Wolffe's overly-friendly relationships with Bush officials like Tony Snow, and Wolffe's simplistic and lazy conception of what a reporter does, produces extremely destructive and shoddy "journalism"

[...]

And, as Wolffe explained last night -- with the narrow, slothful, and self-defensive mentality of a low-level bureaucrat -- that is his only job. They're not supposed "to take on the government and grill them" -- that would be terribly impolite, very "political," and beyond his job description. Bloggers who think that Wolffe should have done more than regurgitate what he was told by a war-hungry administration are the real problem here -- not Wolffe and his gullible journalistic colleagues who are doing a "fantastic job," nor the administration officials who fed them these falsehoods.

[...]

Reporters like Wolffe develop such close affection for the people that they are covering that they see themselves as part of the Government -- which is what they become -- rather than watchdogs over them.

[...]

It is truly astonishing that the people who enabled the administration to spew one falsehood after the next -- and who aided and abetted the worst strategic disaster in our country's history by mindlessly passing those falsehoods along to their readers, completely failing to investigate any of it, but instead obediently validating it all with journalistic approval -- now want to sit around in the most self-satisfied way and pronounce that they are doing an absolutely "fantastic job" and complain about the vulgar masses who disrupt their tranquility by criticizing them for being insufficiently vigilant.

And to those American citizens who remain rather angry about the complete failure of the press to scrutinize the war-justifying claims made by their friends in the government -- and who wake up every day and devote themselves to trying to prod the press into performing its intended adversarial watchdog role so that our Government has at least some checks on what it can say and do -- people like Richard Wolffe have nothing to say other than to agree with Tony Snow that they are vulgar and hateful and to lecture them -- in his snidest and most condescending tone -- that they are just ignorant, confused, and unreasonably demanding.

Truly, the spectacle of watching our country's leading White House journalists sitting there next to Tony Snow -- all of them oozing pomposity and self-satisfaction -- while Snow engineers the entire discussion and treats them like the friendly puppets that they are (Snow: "What do you think, Richard?" Richard: "Yeah, uh, well . . . I totally agree."), is quite difficult to endure, but is nonetheless truly revealing. How can someone who authored the above-excerpted articles, in which they disseminated to the world patent falsehoods that helped to unleash a grotesquely unnecessary and grotesquely brutal war, all on false pretenses, now parade around in public touting what a great job they have done and attack bloggers for criticizing them?

With rare exception, could our national press corps be any more self-regarding, empty, corrupt and worthless? Given that our national media is composed of "journalists" like Richard Wolffe (and Michael Gordon) -- who look at their behavior and conclude that they are doing a "fantastic job" and that the real problem lies with the ignorant, dirty barbarians who dare to criticize them -- is it really any wonder that our political discourse and our political institutions are as fundamentally degraded and as broken as they are?