diagnarfl

Here is what can be done.

2008-07-14T17:09:00.004-03:00

Three cheers for Glenn Greenwald and The Accountability Now PAC and Strange Bedfellows for providing an answer to those who, in the face of the litany (see below) of disgraceful actions by Congress in enabling the Bush administration, ask: what can we do...?

In the 2006 mid-term elections, Americans handed The Democratic Party a sweeping, staggering, and historic victory -- as the GOP was removed from power and Democrats given control over both the House and Senate. It marked only the third time in the last 60 years that there was a change in control of the Congress. The Democrats defeated six GOP Senators, and picked up 31 House seats. Six Governorships switched from the GOP to the Democrats. Not one single Democratic incumbent in Congress and not one Democratic Governor lost -- only the second time in U.S. history in which one of the major parties failed to defeat even a single Congressional incumbent from the other party.

Since that overwhelming Democratic victory, this is what the Democratic-led Congress has done:
Repeatedly funded -- at the White House's insistence -- the Iraq War without conditions;

Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- Jim Webb's bill to increase the intervals between deployments for U.S. troops;

Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- a bill to restore habeas corpus, which had been abolished by the Military Commissions Act, enacted before the 2006 election with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support;

Enacted -- at the White House's insistence and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous Republican support
-- the so-called Protect America Act, vesting the President with extreme new warrantless eavesdropping powers;

Overwhelmingly approved the Senate's Kyl-Lieberman Resolution, to declare parts of the Iranian Government a "terrorist organization," an extremely belligerent resolution modeled after those which made "regime change" the official U.S. Government position towards Iraq;

Deleted from a pending bill -- at the direction of the House Democratic leadership and at the insistence of the White House -- a provision merely to require Congressional approval before the Bush administration can attack Iran;

Overwhelmingly enacted -- at the White House's insistence, and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support -- the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008," to vest the President with broad new warrantless eavesdropping powers and to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, all but putting an end to any chance for a real investigation and judicial adjudication of the Bush administration's illegal NSA spying program;

Confirmed, with the indispensable support of two key Democratic Senators, Bush's nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, despite his support for radical Bush theories of executive power and his refusal to oppose torture;

Stood by passively and impotently while Bush officials flagrantly ignored their Subpoenas and refused to comply with their investigations.
[...]
These assaults on core Constitutional freedoms and the rule of law are coming from a toxic union between the radical neoconservative, Bush-loyal Right (represented in every meaningful way by John McCain) and craven, principle-free leaders of the Democratic Party establishment and their dominant "Blue Dog" contingent. Meanwhile, huge numbers of citizens across the ideological spectrum vehemently oppose these assaults, but have had no mechanism for being heard.
The Accountability Now PAC and Strange Bedfellows coalition we've created is designed to change that. Its fundamental purpose is to find ways to force accountability on these issues and to stop the political establishment from continuing to trample on these political values.

Outrageous: FISA bill and telecom amnesty

2008-07-06T12:56:00.003-03:00

Outraged by yet another apologist's op-ed spouting the standard talking points and lies, the incomparable Glenn Greenwald makes it clear exactly how the FISA legislation is a complete travesty.

I would really like to know where people like Soderberg get the idea that the U.S. President has the power to "order" private citizens to do anything, let alone to break the law, as even she admits happened here. I'm asking this literally: how did this warped and distinctly un-American mentality get implanted into our public discourse -- that the President can give "orders" to private citizens that must be complied with? Soderberg views the President as a monarch -- someone who can issue "orders" that must be obeyed, even when, as she acknowledges, the "orders" are illegal. That just isn't how our country works and it never was. We don't have a King who can order people to break the law.

[...]

So much of this comes from the constant fetishizing of the President as the Supreme Leader, "our" Commander-in-Chief, rather than -- as the Constitution explicitly states -- "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States." In the U.S., private actors don't have government "commanders" who can "order" or "direct" them to do anything. Even soldiers, for whom the President is actually the Commander-in-Chief, are prohibited from obeying unlawful orders. Yet here is Nancy Soderberg -- in tandem with the rest of the political establishment -- claiming that private telecoms were justified, even compelled, to obey unlawful "orders" from the President, and are therefore entitled to be immunized from consequences.

[...]

Contrary to what the Nancy Soderbergs of the world want people to believe, these [FISA] laws enacted by the American people in order to prevent spying abuses weren't only directed at the Government but specifically at the telecom industry as well. The whole point was to compel telecoms by force of law to refuse illegal Government "orders" to allow spying on their customers. That's why Qwest and others refused to "comply", but the telecoms that were hungry for extremely lucrative government contracts agreed to break the law. They did it because, motivated by profit, they chose to, not because they were compelled. Breaking the law on purpose and then profiting from the lawbreaking is classic criminal behavior. The conduct which those laws were designed to make illegal -- and which they unambiguously outlawed -- is exactly what the telecoms did here.

[...]

What all of this is really about -- the reason why political elites like Nancy Soderberg are so eager to defend it -- is because they really do believe that lawbreaking isn't wrong, that it doesn't deserve punishment, when engaged in by them rather than by commoners. People who defend telecom immunity or who say that it's not a big deal are, by logical necessity, adopting this view: "Our highest political officials and largest corporations shouldn't face consequences when they break our laws as long as they claim it was for our own good." That's the destructive premise that lies at the heart of this deeply corrupt measure, the reason it matters so much. Just like the pardon of Nixon, the protection of Iran-contra criminals, and the commutation of Lewis Libby's sentence, this bill is yet another step in cementing a two-tiered system of justice in America where our highest political officials and connected elite can break our laws with impunity.

Sound familiar?

2008-07-04T23:28:00.006-03:00

From Dave at Cathie from Canada, I got this flash from the past, about the future, which sounds a lot like the past seven years.

In 1997, a full three years before George W. Bush was appointed president of the United States, a full five years before Bush invaded Iraq based on manufactured intelligence, almost 10 years before the treatment of wounded veterans became a national scandal, a full 10 years before oil prices skyrocketed and the US economy started a flat spin downward, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, two relative newcomers to big-screen Hollywood, wrote an Academy Award winning script for the movie, Good Will Hunting.

This is a monologue by Matt Damon in his character, Will Hunting:

Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.

--quote from imdb

Don't let the fear-mongering work again.

2008-06-10T20:41:00.002-03:00

Glenn Greenwald calls bullshit on the GOP and their media enablers who claim "terrible things will befall us -- scary, "unthinkable," "severe," "dangerous" things -- unless we all harmoniously comply with the President's demands for the power to spy on our communications without warrants and without oversight, and unless we immunize telecoms that broke the law." He implores the Dems to do the right thing and not cave in yet again.

There's one reason and one reason only why the Protect America Act expired last February and why the orders obtained under it are set to expire in August. It's because the President and Congressional Republicans blocked an extension of the PAA because the President said he would veto any FISA amendment unless telecom amnesty was attached to it (Lichtblau notes: "Democrats have offered temporary extensions in the surveillance law, but the White House has resisted that idea").

[...]

That is the hallmark of the Democratic Party leadership: they are afraid of looking weak, and the way they try to solve that problem is by being guided by their fears and allowing themselves to be bullied into complying with the President's instructions. They actually still think that being bullied and always being afraid to take a stand will make them look strong. They have yet to figure out that it is that craven behavior which makes them look weak, and appropriately so, since it is weak.

But even that ostensible political fear makes no sense whatsoever. Democrats control the agenda in Congress. They determine what bills are voted on. All they have to do is force a House and Senate vote on a bill that does two simple things: (a) exempt foreign-to-foreign calls from FISA's warrant requirements and (b) extend the PAA surveillance orders by 6 or 9 months. When the GOP filibusters that bill, or when George Bush vetoes it, then that will obviously preclude the GOP from using the expiration of those PAA orders as a club to beat Democrats, since it will be as clear as day -- so clear that even our national press corps can understand it -- that it was the President and the GOP, not Congressional Democrats, which caused those orders to expire.
Whatever else happens, the excuse that will be offered by Democrats -- that they were pressured and forced into accepting this "compromise" because they would be politically harmed if the PAA orders expired in August -- is patently false. They could easily obviate that weapon by simply offering a bill to extend the orders. When they don't do that, and instead agree to a "compromise" that gives the President virtually everything he has been demanding, it will not be because they were coerced or pressured into doing so, but rather, because they, too, favor warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty.

Identity Politics

2008-06-08T17:22:00.002-03:00

I had a epiphany years ago when a friend of mine was expounding on the enormity of the Holocaust and I felt I had to ask him to clarify that: "it's the fact that so many people were exterminated that made it so awful, right, not the fact that they were predominately Jews? i.e. it would have been just as horrible if the victims had been some other group?"

More recently, in conversation with another friend who was actively and passionately involved (with me and many others) in a particular political issue, I made the point that I was in complete agreement with him on this issue because it was yet another example of corruption: decisions being made to benefit a few friends of those whose responsibility and obligation it was to do what was best for the whole group. He seemed stunned at first because (it seemed to me), this was his big issue, perhaps his only political issue and therefore (at least implicitly) more important than other (people's) issues.

I was not trying to take anything away from this issue but, rather, I was trying to make the point that it was one of many examples of a more general issue. I hate injustice, not just injustice that negatively affects me and mine. I am in support of resistance to all injustice but, as anyone who has scarce resources to allocate, I have to make choices. The fact that I focus on some issues or causes more than others doesn't mean that I think the others are less valid. But it's easy for people to lose sight of this truth in the heat of the moment. On this topic, Barbara O’Brien at the Mahablog makes a really good point about what she calls "identity politics".

The Wiki definition of “identity politics” is “political action to advance the interests of members of a group supposed to be oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalized identity (such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or neurological wiring).” That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a critical aspect of IP that this definition leaves out. And that is the tendency of IP activists to care and work passionately only on behalf of the marginalized group with which they share identity (hence the name, “identity politics”).

Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because the end result is a balkanization of advocacy groups that compete with each other for donations and attention and sometimes even work against each other. And that end result is one of the reasons the Right has been able to dominate American political discourse for the past quarter century or so.

[...]

As I wrote a couple of days ago, equality by definition has no preferences.
I intensely dislike “identity politics.”

Identity politics are not about “fighting for one’s equality.” They are ultimately about celebrating inequality and responding to divisiveness with more divisiveness. They are about attaching one’s ego and self-identity to a partisan group and favoring that group at the expense of other groups.

“Fighting for equality” is fighting for equality. Equality by definition has no preferences. If you are fighting for equality only for your particular slice of the demographic pie, then you aren’t fighting for equality but for favoritism.

Complicit Enablers, indeed!

2008-06-07T18:30:00.003-03:00

You really should read regularly the incomparably and consistently excellent Glenn Greenwald. His signature principled and articulate outrage is directed at the hypocritical "complicit enablers" in the media who greeted with silence the Senate report documenting BushCo's lying the country into starting a war. These people, who swooned and howled when Clinton lied about a blow job, are unblinkingly "calm and quiet" when confronted with evidence that the administration is made of up war criminals.

Greenwald:

No matter how many times one sees it, it will never cease to amaze that the exact same media mavens who righteously strutted around demanding that Bill Clinton be impeached or forced to resign because the "honor" of our political system demanded that, continue casually to dismiss every crime of the last seven years as nothing more than a garden-variety, good faith "policy dispute" which only shrill rabble want to see "turned into a criminal or impeachable affair." So the Senate issues a report documenting that the President and Vice President repeatedly made false statements to induce the citizenry to support a war against another country that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead for no reason -- added on to the piles of outright lawbreaking under this administration -- and to David Broder, those are just mere "policy disputes" which (unlike Bill Clinton's grave crimes) merit no punishment.
The only news made by that Senate report is that, in our country, a report like this -- documenting that the Government lied us into a war -- is no longer news at all. Extraordinary conduct of that type has been converted by the David Broders of the world into commonplace "policy disputes." As a result, our press corps -- which literally spent hours and hours on the air Thursday night pitifully staking out Hillary Clinton's house and breathlessly reporting on the movement of every SUV and have spent days (with no end in sight) sharing with each other their moronic fantasies about what Clinton and Obama might have said to one another -- have ignored almost completely the issuance of that Senate report, as well as the fact that John McCain now says he embraces the extremist theories of presidential power that have led to the panoply of these abuses.
It's not difficult to understand why our media stars are so dismissive of the crimes committed by the Bush administration. It's because, with very few exceptions, they've endorsed and defended those crimes.

[...]

The same stars of the Liberal Media who paralyzed the country for two years with their fixation on Bill Clinton's sex scandal -- and who relentlessly insisted that he be forced from office -- have spent the last seven years calmly telling us that there is no reason to get all excited or upset by what the administration has been doing. As the administration repeatedly broke multiple laws and degraded every last realm of our political culture, most of our Broder-led media class remained nice and "calm and quiet." Of course they don't believe there should be any consequences for the crimes that have been committed by this administration because, as complicit enablers in all of it, those crimes are also their own.

These people are war criminals and need to brought to justice and their media enablers need to be thoroughly discredited as journalists. Otherwise, it will just keep happening. As Digby wrote yesterday:

This is another edition of "when you let Republicans get away with murder, they will do it again." In this case, it's literally true. The worst decision Bill Clinton ever made was letting Iran-Contra slide in the name of healing and "getting things done." He got impeached for his trouble and these people came back and perpetrated the Greatest Strategic Blunder In Modern Memory.

The SSCI waited until nearly the end of Bush's term to bring this up in order that it be relegated to the "healing" file and nobody ever pays the price. It's how the establishment protects itself. (See: Libby, Scooter.) Maybe somebody thinks we can just wait for Michael Ledeen to die. But there is a whole new generation weaned on conservative movement tactics and they will keep the zombie alive until they get their next chance unless it's stopped once and for all.

You don't know Dick

2008-04-18T23:33:00.001-03:00

Dick Cheney was never a "grown-up"

A hard look at how one man changed the face of neoconservatism.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Apr. 14, 2008 | After Dick Cheney shot a friend in the face on a Texas hunting trip in February 2006, the national press corps began to speculate about him as one of the great mysteries of Washington, the Sphinx of the Naval Observatory, his official residence. Cheney had been known in the capital for decades through a career that carried him from congressional intern to the most powerful vice president in American history, but now his supposedly changed character became a subject of intense speculation. Brent Scowcroft, who had been George H.W. Bush's national security adviser, and had counseled against the invasion of Iraq, told The New Yorker magazine in 2005, "I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." Scowcroft's judgment was less about Cheney's temperament than his policy positions. The press, however, sought to disclose the sources of his "darkening persona," as a cover story in Newsweek described it. "Has Cheney changed? Has he been transformed, warped, perhaps corrupted -- by stress, wealth, aging, illness, the real terrors of the world or possibly some inner goblins?" A cover story entitled "Heart of Darkness," published in The New Republic, suggested that Cheney's heart disease had produced vascular dementia. "So, the next time you see Cheney behaving oddly, don't automatically assume that he's a bad man."

In 2000, when Cheney, as head of George W. Bush's search committee for a running mate, selected himself, opinion makers in Washington greeted the choice as proof positive of the younger Bush's deference to wisdom and therefore personifying prudence. Cheney's "manner gives him immunity from the extremist label," assured David Broder, the longtime leading political columnist of the Washington Post. "Voters who saw his televised briefings during the Persian Gulf War remember the calm voice and thoughtful expression that are his natural style ... By choosing a grown-up, Bush gave evidence of his own sense of responsibility."

Five years later, in 2005, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, by then the former chief of staff to the former Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking publicly at a Washington think tank, the New America Foundation, was less concerned with the press corps' obsession with Cheney's shifting images than with exposing his unprecedented manipulations. "What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made." Though he had had extensive experience in government, Wilkerson had never before encountered such "secrecy," "aberration" and "bastardization" in decision-making. "It is a dysfunctional process," he said. "And to myself I said, okay, put on your academic hat. Who's causing this?"

Previously fixed on the stereotype of the "grown-up," pundits projected a new stereotype of dementia. But had Cheney, in fact, been fundamentally transformed, becoming unrecognizable to those professional observers of the press who believed they knew him well? Both Scowcroft and Wilkerson had encountered Cheney within councils of state. Had even Scowcroft misjudged Cheney as a team player when he was Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War? Was Cheney a regular, conservative minded Republican who had just gone mad? Or, if he were a member of a "cabal," did it involve more than Rumsfeld?

George W. Bush jettisoned the tenets of traditional Republicanism -- fiscal responsibility, limited government, separation of church and state, and realism in foreign policy. Instead the doctrines that had been nurtured in the hothouse of the Counter-Establishment since the Reagan period achieved their most radical expression. At every point, Cheney exercised his power.

The supply-side theory of tax cuts -- that slashing tax rates especially on the upper brackets would produce a flood of new government revenues -- was applied with a vengeance even after the Reagan experiment had disproved the notion, having fostered extraordinary deficits. On Nov. 15, 2002, after Bush's tax cuts had passed, then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill spoke at a White House meeting of the senior economic team about an impending "fiscal crisis" because of "what rising deficits will mean to our economic and fiscal soundness." Cheney quickly knocked down his argument. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said. "We won the midterms. This is our due." O'Neill was soon fired. He concluded that Cheney and "a praetorian guard" governed Bush's presidency. "It's not penetrable by facts," he said. "It's absolutism."

Conservative lawyers were installed throughout the administration and appointed to federal judgeships while radical legal doctrines were imposed. As soon as he took office Bush ended the American Bar Association's pre-screening of judicial nominees, a practice that had begun in 1948. The ABA was considered a hopelessly "liberal" organization. In its place de facto vetting was now performed by the Federalist Society, a group that "has created a conservative intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community," according to its website. Founded in 1982 and infused with more than $15 million in grants from conservative foundations, the Federalist Society has become the principal network for lawyers on the right. Nearly every Bush judicial nominee, every Justice Department official, every general counsel in every federal department and agency, and dozens of senior cabinet and sub-cabinet secretaries was a member.

The congressional investigation into the political purge of U.S. Attorneys uncovered evaluation forms with a column to be checked about whether or not the applicant was a Federalist Society member. On every issue, from the gutting of the civil rights division of the Justice Department, where 60 percent of the professional staff was driven out and not a single discrimination case was filed, to the implementation of the so-called "war paradigm," including abrogation of Article Three of the Geneva Convention against torture, (which then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales termed "quaint" in a memo to the president), Federalist Society cadres were at the center. David Addington, Cheney's counsel and later chief of staff, directed the tight-knit group of "torture lawyers" within the administration.

Foreign policy was dominated by the neoconservatives whose agenda was galvanized after the terrorist attacks of September 11. The 2000 manifesto issued by the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative group that advocated "regime change" in Iraq, contained a cautionary line that "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." September 11 became that "new Pearl Harbor," providing long hoped for political momentum the neoconservatives channeled for an invasion of Iraq.

The influence of the neoconservatives over the national security apparatus was heavy-handed and pervasive. More than 17 signatories of the Project for the New American Century statement held posts within the Bush administrations, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense), Richard Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board), and John Bolton (Undersecretary of State for Policy and later Acting U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations). But these eminences were the tip of the iceberg. Neoconservatives also staffed the Office of the Vice President, comprising the largest national security team ever assembled by a vice president. Neoconservatives were strategically placed throughout the National Security Council—for example, Elliott Abrams, NSC director of Middle East affairs, a convicted felon in the Iran-contra scandal. And neoconservatives were packed into the Office of the Secretary of Defense and his Office of Special Plans, a new office created to "stovepipe" intelligence to the White House without having it vetted by the CIA or other intelligence agencies.

The Iraq war was largely a neoconservative production conducted under the guidance of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Cheney took command of the intelligence process, even arranging for Bush to sign Executive Order 13292, written by Addington, giving the vice president the same power over intelligence as the president. The disinformation campaign that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was a joint enterprise of the Office of the Vice President and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, providing a steady stream of evidence that was later revealed to be false and fabricated.

The occupation of Iraq was undertaken as a grand experiment in conservative ideology. The experienced hands in nation building at the State Department, who had prepared for the complexities of Iraqi reconstruction, as well as senior professionals from the departments of Treasury, Energy and Commerce, were blackballed by Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neoconservative aides. The hiring for the Coalition Provisional Authority was run by Rumsfeld's liaison to the White House (mainly OVP), who gathered resumes from the slush piles of conservative think tanks, and subjected prospective employees to rigorous tests of political loyalty, asking whether they had voted for George W. Bush and were opposed to abortion.

Cheney's reliance on neoconservatives was essential in carrying out his long conceived project of creating an imperial presidency, an executive unfettered by Congress or the press, that under the banner of war could enact any policy and obey or ignore any law that it wished. Cheney's use of the neoconservatives to attain his aims -- the core goals of the Bush presidency -- was hardly happenstance or an alliance of sudden convenience. "Has Cheney changed?" asked Newsweek. The answer to that question required delving deeply into the hidden history of neoconservatism.

Richard Nixon was the first Republican president to cultivate the neoconservatives. They were considered a potentially fresh source of ideas to deal with racial turmoil, student unrest over the Vietnam War, and the discontents of the working and middle classes. Nixon's first encounter took place on March 12, 1970, when Irving Kristol was invited to dinner with the president. Kristol was a former Trotskyist who maintained a consistently cynical view of liberalism as he drifted to the right, acting as an editor at a succession of small journals. The diary of H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, records: "Tonight P (President) stag dinner with key staff and Irving Kristol. Got off to slow start and through dinner P talked with (George) Shultz (Secretary of Labor) about labor matters, Kristol just listened. Sort of a waste of time and talent. In Oval Room [Office] after dinner the talk heated up, about whole subject of condition of the country, focused on radicalization of large number of college students, strength of nihilistic groups (in influence, not numbers), and how to deal with it all ... Must say, Kristol didn't add much."

Nixon did not recall Kristol from that dinner. Kristol, after all, had been uncharacteristically quiet. Nonetheless, Nixon's aides kept sending him articles Kristol wrote on such subjects as pornography and censorship. After Kristol endorsed Nixon for reelection in 1972, causing a stir among the New York intellectuals, Nixon's most conservative aides, Patrick Buchanan and Charles Colson, recommended that Nixon hire Kristol as a domestic policy expert to replace the departing Daniel Patrick Moynihan. For whatever reason, whether Nixon's or Kristol's demurral, Kristol did not receive the appointment.

With Nixon's resignation and Gerald Ford's assumption of the presidency, a new aide arrived with the portfolio to gather ideas from conservative thinkers. Robert Goldwin was himself little known among intellectuals. He was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the oldest conservative think tank in Washington; founded to combat the New Deal, it functioned as the brain trust for Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964. Goldwin had published no notable articles or books of his own and believed generally that intellectuals did not "even have much to say to the ordinary citizen." His notion was less an idea than an impulse, a deeply seated resentment against liberalism that took the form of anti-intellectualism.

Goldwin's gruff contempt expressed the common opinion of conservatives, even conservative thinkers, of the period. AEI was less a hive of activism than a small, stagnant world apart. Its scholars had not achieved distinction in peer-reviewed academia; nor were they known for interesting articles in major publications. Kristol was an experienced provocateur and organizer, whose neoconservatism was a Leninist strategy for the right: intellectual cadres would act as a vanguard to guide the masses of Nixon's "Silent Majority" against the class enemy.

Goldwin's first service to President Ford was to arrange an hour long private meeting with Kristol, who soon began recommending neoconservatives to positions on the National Endowment for the Humanities and Library of Congress.

Goldwin also called Kristol's work to the attention of Ford's chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld, who in turn handed it over to his deputy Dick Cheney. (Cheney had also been Rumsfeld's assistant when Rumsfeld served as counselor to President Nixon.) Cheney had earned a master's degree in political science at the University of Wyoming and pursued doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin before dropping out to work as an intern for a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. According to documents in the archives of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Cheney wrote Goldwin on Jan. 25, 1975. "I greatly appreciate receiving the stuff you've been sending me… Anything like that that comes in from Kristol or others, I'd love to see."

Five days later, Kristol wrote Goldwin a letter explaining the political necessity of fostering a conservative Counter-Establishment:

"I do think the White House ought to do something for a relatively small group of men who are, unbeknownst to it, being helpful to this Administration, to the Republican party, and to conservative and moderate enterprise in general. I am referring to the men who head small and sometimes obscure foundations which support useful research and activities of a kind that the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations take a dim view of. I have got to know an awful lot of them these past years, and they never have received the barest recognition which I think they are entitled to. I am thinking of people like R. Randolph Richardson of the Smith Richardson Foundation, Donald Regan from the Merrill Trust, someone from the Earhart Foundation, the head of the Scaife Family Trust, and the head of the Lilly Endowment, etc. I say ‘head' because, in each case, one would have to determine whether it is the chairman of the board of the executive director who is the appropriate person to receive this recognition. But it would be nice if, say, the White House were to invite these gentlemen and their wives to a State dinner occasionally. If you think this can be done, I'd be happy to draw up a list for your guidance."

On Feb. 14, 1975, Cheney wrote Goldwin, "Bob, why don't you come see me on Irving Kristol. We need to come up with a specific proposal as to how he might be utilized full time." Kristol was soon sending a flow of letters and articles containing his views on a wide range of subjects to Goldwin that were also shared with Cheney. One Goldwin memo, dated Nov. 18, 1975, appended to a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Kristol on small business, "The New Forgotten Man": "In case you missed it, this Kristol piece is excellent and addressed very directly to us in this Administration." At Kristol's suggestion, Goldwin also launched a series of seminars for senior officials within the administration that included a number of neoconservative luminaries. Cheney, who had become White House chief of staff, and Rumsfeld, who had been named Secretary of Defense, were regular attendees.

After Ford's defeat in 1976, Kristol's influence in directing the funding of right-wing foundations made him the widely acknowledged godfather of the neoconservative movement. During the Reagan years, he moved from New York to Washington, settling as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, which under his influence had shed its traditional Republican origins and become a neoconservative bastion. (In 2002, George W. Bush awarded Kristol the Presidential Medal of Freedom.) Kristol's son, William, meanwhile, continued the family business, serving as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, an isolated outpost of neoconservatism during the elder Bush's administration that its denizens called "Fort Reagan." William became editor of a neoconservative journal of opinion, The Weekly Standard, part of press lord Rupert Murdoch's media empire that included Fox News, where the younger Kristol holds forth as a regular commentator. Two years after establishing The Weekly Standard, Kristol co-founded and chaired the Project for a New American Century, whose office was housed at the American Enterprise Institute.

The abbreviated history of the Ford administration, reaping the whirlwind of Nixon's failed presidency, besieged on all sides by the Congress, the press and an insurgent Republican right, scarred Cheney. His encouragement of Kristol and the neoconservatives reflected his efforts to move the Ford administration rightward. Along with Rumsfeld he pushed for the creation of a parallel commission dubbed the Team B to second-guess the CIA on Soviet military capability. The Team B's report projecting a rapidly expanding Soviet threat turned out to contain faulty data. Then CIA director George H.W. Bush, who had acceded to Team B's creation, later condemned it as having set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy." Nonetheless, Team B served as an important milestone in legitimating neoconservatism within the Republican Party.

Elected to the House of Representatives from Wyoming in 1978, Cheney quickly rose within the Republican leadership, becoming the party's senior figure on intelligence matters. As the ranking Republican on the joint congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal Cheney issued a report (written by his then counsel Addington) that attacked the Congress for encroaching on the president's prerogatives in foreign policy, although the scandal involved secret offshore bank accounts, rogue sales of missiles to Iran and bribery of White House officials. This parallel and illegal foreign policy was constructed to avoid adherence to the congressional Boland amendments that prohibited covert military aid to the Nicaraguan contras. Cheney's minority report was a brief for the imperial presidency. It stated: "Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down." In 2005, he told reporters that the report best captured his views of a "robust" presidency.

When I published this book in 1986 it appeared just months before the Iran-contra scandal was revealed. I had set out to examine the ways that conservatives had created an infrastructure for institutionalizing and magnifying their influence in national politics and throughout the federal government. Then on the national staff of the Washington Post, I knew Dick Cheney as the House Republican Whip. But I didn't imagine then that his crusade for unfettered presidential power and a unitary executive would culminate during a subsequent presidential administration.

As Secretary of Defense in the elder Bush's administration, Cheney was always the most ideological member of the national security team. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Cheney's Pentagon senior staff "a refuge for Reagan-era hardliners." After the Gulf War, in 1992, the neoconservatives engaged in a new Team B-like operation under Cheney's aegis. Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and his deputies, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (later VP Cheney's chief of staff) and Zalmay Khalilzad (later U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the U.N.), after consulting with leading neoconservatives, produced a draft document for a post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy, simply called Defense Policy Guidance. The memo argued for unilateral use of U.S. force, preemptive strikes, preventing the emergence of powerful rivals including nations that were formally allied to the U.S., and pointedly did not refer to international order or multilateral organizations. Once the document was leaked to the New York Times, however, Bush administration officials killed it as contrary to their foreign policy. But Cheney was proud of the memo and issued a version of it under his name as a departing gesture in 1992 as the administration left office. "He took ownership of it," said Khalilzad. The ideas contained within it resurfaced in the 2000 manifesto of the Project for a New American Century (Wolfowitz, Libby, Khalilzad, and Cheney were signatories) and in 2002 as the basis for President George W. Bush's "National Security Strategy of the United States of America."

After the first Bush administration, Cheney became the chief executive officer of Halliburton and a member of the board of trustees of the American Enterprise Institute. His wife, Lynne, who as chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993 had been a fierce cultural warrior on the right, became a senior fellow at AEI. On January 23, 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush delivered a speech at the annual AEI dinner bestowing the Irving Kristol Award. "You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds," he declared. The following year, Cheney did the honors. "Being here brings to mind my own days affiliated with AEI, which stretch back some 30 years," he recalled.

Cheney had not changed over the years; on the contrary, he could not have been more explicit and direct about his goals all along. There never was a real mystery about him. Early on, Cheney's notions for an imperial presidency and his relationships with the neoconservatives merged on to a single track. Since the beleaguered Ford White House, he sought out people to develop and implement such ideas, which became the governing policy of George W. Bush's administration. Only through Cheney was the rise of neoconservatism made possible. Now its next phase will revolve around finding a new sponsor to return them to power despite the catastrophic consequences of their ideas.

The Moron tries to redefine NATO

2008-04-18T23:21:00.003-03:00

Dave at the Galloping Beaver writes:

George W. Bush has decided that NATO forces are now inextricably tied to his great 10th Crusade to spread freedom, peace and American flags over as many oilfields as possible.
“NATO is no longer a static alliance focused on defending Europe from a Soviet tank invasion,” he said in Bucharest. “It is now an expeditionary alliance that is sending its forces across the world to help secure a future of freedom and peace for millions.”
You know, literacy requires that an individual be able to read as well as just write. NATO disagrees with Bush's view. In fact, The North Atlantic Treaty is pretty clear.
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .
NATO is completely and utterly a defensive treaty. It is nobody's expeditionary "freedom" spreading crusade machine. It is there to provide collective defence to its members - not the rest of the world.
Not that we can expect our man Steve to take a different stand than his hero-in-chief.
Hopefully the rest of the world recognizes Bush for what he is: a lame-duck sock puppet who is so in love with his title that he can't spend two minutes reading a treaty that hasn't changed in 59 years.
Bush might want to watch his yapping. His ill-advised and failed attempt to give the Ukraine and Georgia membership in the defensive alliance may prompt the need for renewed vigilance in the direction of the North German Plain.
President Vladimir V. Putin, after meeting with NATO members in Bucharest on Friday, bluntly declared that an expansion that included Ukraine and Georgia, both former Soviet republics with deep historical links to Russia, would constitute a threat.
Somebody needs to bring the clown home, strap him into a chair and unplug his telephone until the end of November.

Worst President Ever

2008-04-18T23:02:00.002-03:00

From an article in HNN, Robert S. McElvaine (author of Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America) writes about a recently released Pew Research Center poll:

The comments that many of the respondents included with their evaluations provide a clear sense of the reasons behind the overwhelming consensus that George W. Bush’s presidency is among the worst in American history.
“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of area: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”

One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: “the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . . . . God willing, this will go down as the nadir of American politics.” Another classified Bush as “an ideologue who got the nation into a totally unnecessary war, and has broken the Constitution more often than even Nixon. He is not a conservative, nor a Christian, just an immoral man . . . .” Still another remarked that Bush’s “denial of any personal responsibility can only be described as silly.”

“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

“George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States,” wrote one of the historians, echoing the assessments of many of his professional colleagues. “Bush does only two things well,” said one of the most distinguished historians. “He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.”

That just about covers it...

Going Nuclear

2008-03-09T01:31:00.006-04:00

First, compare these two ads.

---

Then remember what this guy said:

Ironic, huh...?

Hilzoy has an interesting thought...

Obsidian Wings: Crossing The Threshold: However, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that [Hillary Rodham Clinton] actually believes that Barack Obama cannot "cross the commander-in-chief threshold." One of the most important jobs a President has is to defend the country. If she thinks that Barack Obama is not qualified to do that job, then she should not support him over anyone who can. Specifically, she should support McCain over Obama.

That's why I think some enterprising reporter should ask her whether she would support Barack Obama if he were nominated. If she would, then she should be asked why she would be willing to support someone she does not believe is qualified to be commander in chief.

Whatever her answer, it would tell us something we need to know: either that her doubts about Obama are so serious that she would not be willing to support the nominee of her own party, or that she would support someone she thinks is unfit to serve, or that she does not believe a word she said about Obama, and is willing to impugn a fellow Democrat's fitness to serve as President because her own interests matter more to her than her party's or the nation's.

The "values" party

2007-09-10T21:47:00.000-03:00

Driftglass comments on the "values" party label:

Big question: “After the Larry Craig scandal, can the GOP continue to be the values party?”

My short answer; not so much. Maybe in the very short-term, but GOP Base voters are not just irrational creatures. They are proudly irrational creatures. They do not reason their way into logical policies; they rationalize their way backwards from their fears and hatreds into the Party of God.

And Party Leaders know it.

The pig people are all Hard Drive and no RAM. To compensate for their tiny brains, tiny penises and tiny futures, they ache to rain righteous fire down on some-fucking-body. And because there is no other category on Earth in which they will ever rate as Superior, they have concocted a Faith and a Dogma which tells them they are Superior at the one thing their Invisible Daddy in the Sky God (surprise!) says is most important: Rigid Morality.

Or at least their creepy, perverted, inverted definition of Morality.

And they are getting all twitchy because these days just as they get all wound up good and lynchy-tight, and work up a good head of steam, they run around the corner and smack into the fact that they are being led by the Mothers of All Moral Failures.

And y’know, repeatedly slamming your head into a solid wall of you-are-completely-fucking-wrong-about-everything is just the sort of thing that could lead a person to all kinds of existential crises and reevaluations...if this were not the Base of the GOP we were talking about.

Ah, but it is the Base we’re talking about.

And the moment someone gives them the right coded sound bite -- cranks up the fear a few more notches, amps up the talk of “San Francisco” liberals and plasters the church bulletins with Scary!Queer!Stuff! -- they will obediently return to their factory default setting and resume marching lock-step into the Dark Ages.

Because that’s is who they are.

And nothing short of their electoral extinction will ever stop them.

The next stage in the Cheney Plan for Iraq...?

2007-09-02T21:24:00.000-03:00

The incomparable driftglass rouses me from my retirement and demands that his pearls of wisdom be quoted in their entirety. He gets it...!

Has anyone here seen my old friend Ahmad?

Sure it seems silly to even bother mentioning Chalabi any more. I mean, he's a joke, right?

Zero credibility. A proven liar. Convicted in absentia in Jordan for massive fraud.

But for some mysterious reason, The Fraud abides.

He was, after all:
...interim oil minister in Iraq[1] in April-May 2005 and December-January 2006.
and
...deputy prime minister from May 2005 until May 2006.
And today he remains in Iraq, still working the press, trying to argue that his conviction in Jordan was,
'...part of a vast conspiracy against him, alleging that the Jordanian Central Bank and its officials "combined and conspired to destroy" him. He also said that his bank, which had a U.S. affiliate called PIBC, had been wrongfully seized, and that Jordan had in 1989 planned to hand him over to Saddam Hussein.'
And we also know that Conservatives, far from exiling their degenerates and criminals, simply wait a few months or years until the press gets distracted by another runaway blond or Shark!Attack!, and then recycles them.

So however disgraced and humiliated they may have been as... sleazy serial liars, convicted felons, and traitors or outright sociopaths...

...members of the Conservative Ruling Caste can always look forward to a new suit of clothes and new careers helping to kneecap American democracy as radio hosts, directors of domestic spying, or even Presidents.

And after nearly seven years of epic disaster and flagrant disregard for his oath of office, what do we know about Dick Cheney?
That he has nothing but contempt for the Constitution and the good order and discipline of the United States government.

A serial liar and war criminal who hacks up falsehoods as unselfconsciously as my cat licks her ass.

Once he gets the bit in his teeth, nothing turns him around. Uncooperative government? Overthrow it. Inconvenient law? Break it. Inviolable democratic principle? Shit on it.

And the Cheney Plan for Iraq...
Deliberately unleash chaos and keep adding accelerant to the conflagration until Hell on Earth is loosed.
Use the fog of war and the bright lights of the whore-media to help loot the valuable bits and get your cronies rich in the process.
Convert the entire country (except for the US Embassy) into a crusader's latrine: make the life of the average Iraqi so unbearable that it spawns a whole new generation of enemies. And make sure every inch of their tragedy it is stamped with bright, neon signs reading "Made In America" so they all know who to blame.
Point to the enemies his Plan has manufactured as proof that we need to smash more of the region to atoms.
Do it all with other people's money and other people's children.
...is coming along brilliantly.
Even the Play-At-Home Edition the Administration is operating in New Orleans is working out fabulously, and for pretty much the same reasons: the Base of the Republican Party does not give a shit about Those People.

Those Brown People.

Whether they live or die. Whether they're halfway around the world or in their own back yard. The Base doesn't have the slightest grasp of the responsibilities of being a genuine citizenship, a real Christian or an adult sentient being. They know only the hazy, terrifying dimensions of the swarthy bogey men they have been told forever stalk them, scheming tirelessly to tax away their hard-earned money (fear of "socialism"), fuck their woman (fear of "integration") or blow up their children (fear of fear itself).

They have no capacity to think outside of the parameters of their hate and fear for Brown People (And uppity women, liberals and gays), and can therefore be relied on to back the Bad against the Good every fucking time.

Consider this little nugget that passed almost uncommented on in the rip tide of lies that routinely come out of the White House (emphasis added):
August 31, 2007
Panel Will Urge Broad Overhaul of Iraqi Police
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 — An independent commission established by Congress to assess Iraq’s security forces will recommend remaking the 26,000-member national police force to purge it of corrupt officers and Shiite militants suspected of complicity in sectarian killings, administration and military officials said Thursday.

The commission, headed by Gen. James L. Jones, the former top United States commander in Europe, concludes that the rampant sectarianism that has existed since the formation of the police force requires that its current units “be scrapped” and reshaped into a smaller, more elite organization, according to one senior official familiar with the findings. The recommendation is that “we should start over,” the official said.
...
Got it?

In September of 2007, the National Iraqi Police force has 26,000 members. And is so deeply compromised that the general leading the independent commission charged with evaluating its effectiveness reports that it needs to “be scrapped”.

And what we were told almost exactly six friedmans ago, during the 2004 Presidential and Vice Presidential Debates?

Dubya on September 30, 2004:
"Let me first tell you that the best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job.

"And that's what we're doing. We've got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year. That is the best way. We'll never succeed in Iraq if the Iraqi citizens do not want to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves. I believe they want to. Prime Minister Allawi believes they want to."
And again...
"There are 100,000 troops trained, police, guard, special units, border patrol. There's going to be 125,000 trained by the end of this year. Yes, we're getting the job done. It's hard work. Everybody knows it's hard work, because there's a determined enemy that's trying to defeat us.
And Cheney, on October 2, 2004:
We've made significant progress in Iraq. We've stood up a new government that's been in power now only 90 days. The notion of additional troops is talked about frequently, but the point of success in Iraq will be reached when we have turned governance over to the Iraqi people; they have been able to establish a democratic government. They're well on their way to doing that. They will have free elections next January for the first time in history.

We also are actively, rapidly training Iraqis to take on the security responsibility.

Those two steps are crucial to success in Iraq. They're well in hand, well under way. And I'm confident that, in fact, we'll get the job done.
As sure and adamant as Cheney and Bush were about WMD in 2002 and 2003, they were that flat and categorical about progress in Iraq in 2004.

In 2004 we were told that we should calm the fuck down and re-elect President Stupid because the Dubya Administration had this shit under control; that 125,000 police, guard, special units, border patrol were cocked, locked and ready to Iraq.

And by the end of 2005, we were going to have 200,000.

Shit, just run teh maths out to 2007 and by now we should be closing in on half a million. In other words, a force the size of the Iraq Army before the Cheney Plan disbanded them and turned them into armed insurgents.

People who doubted those numbers and the credibility of those touting them were dismissed as disloyal or Bush-Deranged.

Instead, three years later, we find that have spent God alone knows how much blood and treasure to create a force less than 10% that size.

And that we now have to slag it and start from scratch.

But instead of outrage over being lied to -- instead screaming for blood over being punked by the same monsters again and again and again and again and again -- the pig people still loyally crouch in their smelly, little stalls in the GOP Men's Room With Benefits, obediently tapping their hooves and begging to be fucked over one more time.

Meanwhile, the cheap paint and sawdust of legitimacy we slathered onto our latest iteration of the Iraqi government is starting to flake off in huge chunks, and the wingnut purple finger brigade now talks causally and openly about tossing them over the side and wiring up of someone who is even more of a Bush Administration Muppet.

And at the end of this long, bloody trail Occam's Razor waits.

At each step along the way, the Administration has unhesitatingly lied to get us in even deeper.

At each step along the way, the Administration has unhesitatingly slandered and smeared anyone who pointed out their history of being wrong about everything every time.

And as we have been led deeper into disaster -- from planning, to troops levels, to policing, to infrastructure, to dissolving the Iraqi Army -- at every critical step this Administration has cavalierly dismissed and overruled the advice of professionals and made whichever decision would maximize misery, terror and and Halliburton shareholder value.

All to the thunderous applause of the Pig People.

Do I really-really think it'll be Chalabi?

Not literally, but if it were announced next January it honestly would not surprise me. Because Chaos has always been the Cheney Plan for Iraq. And while I make no claim to special knowledge of what's coming, I know this:
Whether your star rises or falls in the Court of Emperor Dubya has nothing to do with how smart or competent or able you are. In fact, those traits are in impediment. Your fortunes wax or wane depending entirely on how dog-loyal you are to the House of Bush, and how hard you are willing to push the Neocon Narrative in the face of Reality.

Oh, and that you are NOT GAY.

The next act of Dubya's Iraqi Debacle will be just like all of the preceding acts; an all-out blitz of a retooled version of the same old lies.

The Administration will soon be shopping for an Iraqi Strong Man they can work with. Someone into whose eyes Dubya can claim to have looked before slurring through the thousandth rendition his "he's a good man" speech.

The same Mighty Wurlitzer that can make a dry-drunk, frat-rat sadist and failure into a President and drive the last superpower on Earth into an endless, disastrous and unnecessary war against the wrong fucking country can surely slap a new coat of varnish on any Neocon-friendly fuckup and mount him on a white horse long enough for the next New, New Plan to be announced.

Whatever the form the New Plan take -- whatever smoke and dazzle it comes packed in -- in substance it will have the effect of steadily advancing Dick Cheney's Final Solution to the Iraq Problem.
And as a Neocon-artist who has proved again and again to be a man of limitless ambitions and limited conscience, no one is better suited to that role than Dick's old pal Ahmad C.

One cannot underestimate the GOP Base

2007-08-17T19:58:00.000-03:00

Driftglass reflects...

I remember how Dubya’s whole campaign during the run-up to the wide-open 2000 race was to sit in Crawford, whittle, mutter platitudes about humility, Small Gumint and Sweet Baby Jebus until the last possible moment.

To give every appearance to being reluctantly forced into the race because this Quiet Man of Action-Figure finally concluded that Party and Nation were in such desperate shape that he just had to run.

And the Base went for this ridiculous okey doke in their millions. And then went for the vastly more dangerous but equally transparently ludicrous Commander Codpiece narrative four years later.

Now my sofa cushion money’s on Mitt, but not my rent money, because at no point in the last seven…or ten…or 15…or 30 years has the Base of the GOP shown any signs of, as I once said elsewhere, growing opposable thumbs and climbing down out of the Stupid Tree.

Instead, after seven years of the utter, bloody and predictable (and predicted) collapse of every one of the tenets of their bullshit creed, they are arguably more fanatical and bunker-mad than ever.

They have become the impacted fecal matter in the colon of our Body Politic, starved not for a genuine leader to help guide them out of the mine-studded-rubble they have made of everything they've touched, but for a Sooper Dooper Dubya to lead them even deeper into the witchbag of their own nightmares. For the next Strong Man on a White Pickup with a Confederate Accent to lead their ignorant army in glorious Christian jihad against the monsters under their bed.

Dying of the toxins they have belligerently swallowed for the last generation, the Base now kneel in a deepening pool of their own vomit and their own children's blood and demand "More Poison Please!"

The Average American

2007-08-05T00:06:00.000-03:00

Here is the latest episode in the continuing series: Why I Love Driftglass

Schieffer (recounting a smattering of the sins and crimes of “Baby Face” Gonzalez: But does this even matter to the Average American?

Schieffer: Its all very, very arcane, which is why Average Americans has a problem following it.

driftglass: The Average American doesn’t vote. The Average American doesn’t read. For amusement, the Average American watches one game show after another featuring people pitted against each other like red and black ants in paint shaker. The Average American wouldn’t pay attention to the Second Coming if the Messiah were pureed, set afire and catheterized up their urethra.

Fuck the Average American.

Leahy: You follow the law. I follow the law. It is the Administration’s position that they do not have to follow the law.

Schieffer: So what should the Preznit do?

Leahy: Well some say he should fire Gonzalez. But he needs to go further and make it clear that no one is above the law as a matter of principle.

driftglass: It always sadly amuses me when media and political persons recount the reasonable things that any President should do in this or that crisis knowing full well but never, ever, ever daring to say that the reason it’ll never happen is because Dubya is out of his fucking mind and none of the gel-based Profiles in Courage over in the Impeach Bill Clinton Party At Any Cost have the guts God gave flatworms.

[...]

Driftglass reminder that the Department of Justice is to Justice what Fox New is to News.

For the umpteenth time... Why are they so afraid?

2007-08-04T23:06:00.000-03:00

The Dems cave again. Sadly, what else is new? Why are they so afraid to do the right thing?

Glenn Greenwald asks:

... why Democrats repeatedly engage in the same self-destructive behavior -- refusing to take a hard-core principled stance against the administration, and instead capitulating just enough to look like losers, but -- despite the capitulation -- still allowing the vote to be used against them. As always (see e.g., Iraq War Authorization, warrantless eavesdropping, Military Commissions Act), they capitulate in order to prevent the vote from being used against them, even though it ends up being used against them anyway because so many of them vote (with futility) against it, but do so without ever fighting for, explaining or defending their position.

[...]

... why, when they were in the minority, the Democrats were so afraid to filibuster anything, even something as drastic as the Military Commissions Act or the Alito nomination, whereas the Republicans run around filibustering everything they can find and don't care at all about being called "obstructionist." Why are the Republicans so aggressive with using their minority tools to block all Democratic initiatives whereas Democrats failed to filibuster for years?

The answer...?

Much of this was undoubtedly the by-product of the Democratic Beltway consultant geniuses who insist that Democrats not resist the President's instructions on terrorism lest they look "weak."

[...]

It is staggering, and truly disgusting, that even in August, 2007 -- almost six years removed from the 9/11 attacks and with the Bush presidency cemented as one of the weakest and most despised in American history -- that George W. Bush can "demand" that the Congress jump and re-write legislation at his will, vesting in him still greater surveillance power, by warning them, based solely on his say-so, that if they fail to comply with his demands, the next Terrorist attack will be their fault. And they jump and scamper and comply (Meteor Blades has the list of the 16 Senate Democrats voting in favor; the House will soon follow).

Pathetic cowards!

Contemptible Media

2007-07-21T11:51:00.000-03:00

Atrios points out for us what many (like Bob Somerby) have been saying for a long time: the people who cover politics in America are a disgrace. They are preening, sneering lightweights who care about nothing but themselves. They pleasure themselves with trivia and they have been the enablers of the wanton corruption that passes for government these days.

Quoting Charles Pierce at Altercation:

Here's what I think -- the majority of people who cover national politics believe that history is whatever happened in the MSNBC Green Room 15 minutes earlier. I believe the campaign is covered by people with a completely unjustified sense of their own superiority, since not many of them understand or ever care about most of the issues, much less the horrendous bills that are going to come due upon whichever of these poor sods winds up with the job. I believe these people care more about their reputation around the bar at the Wayfarer in Manchester than they do about the interests of the people they purportedly serve. And, were I an editor, and someone brought me a story about John Edwards' hair or Mitt Romney's skin, that person would do it once. The second time, the lazy bastard would find himself typing bowling agate on Wednesday night.

Atrios:

Reading Joe Klein lately I was reminded of something Oliver wrote recently:
A long time ago I used to believe that a lot of these people were just talking over my head, their discourse too lofty for a regular guy like myself. But that isn't true. They're just stupid.
Part of the problem we face is that too many people fail to understand this. A lot of our elite scribblers and chatters are just truly and profoundly stupid.

What's worth filibustering?

2007-07-18T00:58:00.000-03:00

Digby, in commenting on the Senate Dems new strategy, tells us about the last thing that Republicans were willing to filibuster.

This is a good start. The American people are not aware that the Republicans are standing in the way of every piece of important legislation before the nation and the press is, as usual, failing to tell them. Indeed, the Democrats in congress are being blamed for the GOP's obstruction. The Dems need to draw them a picture and this is one way to do it.

As Rick Perlstein notes here, the last time the wingnuts felt something was so important they were willing to go to the floor and talk till they turned blue was a long, long time ago:
History buffs, and those with long memories, will recall the last time conservatives found something important enough to stand up and obstruct all night long: the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The one that outlawed discrimination in public accomodations.
We'll have to see if protecting their lame-duck loser's Iraq policy is as important to them as Jim Crow was to an earlier generation. You never know with these people, it just might be.

None of the above

2007-07-18T00:47:00.000-03:00

Ah, yes... Good Old Mr. None-of-the-Above. This is pathetic... but funny:

From Josh Marshall:

I must say this really does make my day. "None of the Above" has surged into the lead in the new GOP primary poll out from AP/Ipsos. The only thing funnier is that this is even surprising. McCain's campaign has imploded. Giuliani's the fading pro-choice contender, which is sort of redundant. People seem to be catching on to the fact that Fred Thompson is a one-term senator and lobbyist not Reagan 2.0. And that leaves you with Mitt Romney, the avatar of transcendent phoney-baloneyism.

Okay, I'm done.

Double Gee

2007-07-18T00:26:00.000-03:00

I've said it before. Just read Glenn Greenwald... every day.

Re: McCain's freefall:

It is not support for the Iraq war which dooms a GOP presidential candidacy, but the opposite: any real questioning of the wisdom of the war or any agitating for withdrawal or opposition to Bush's commitment would immediately and single-handedly destroy the viability of a GOP candidacy.

[...]

The war in Iraq remains popular with the GOP base. They want to stay and keep waging war. They would immediately turn against anyone who advocated withdrawal or even questioned the wisdom of staying. The Republican Party continues to be the Party of the Iraq War, and -- directly contrary to the conventional wisdom that is arising -- loyal support for the Iraq War is an absolute pre-requisite for winning the nomination.

[...]

To claim that McCain's unapologetic support of the Iraq War is what destroyed his candidacy is to misapprehend completely the nature of the Republican Party base. What they demand, first and foremost, is unwavering loyalty to the Cause, and that Cause is shaped predominantly by Middle East militarism, beginning with Iraq.

[...]

Those who want to claim -- based on "impressions" and anecdotes and "feelings" -- that the rank-and-file of the Republican Party has turned against the war must confront actual empirical evidence proving the opposite. It is hard to overstate the distance between the views of the Republican Party on George Bush and the Iraq war and the rest of the country.
From the CBS News poll (.pdf) released at the end of June (Republican responses in yellow):

Republicans overwhelmingly approve of the job Bush is doing (66-23%):

They even overwhelmingly support the way Bush is handling Iraq (59-33%):

There is a huge gap between Republicans who think the surge is working and those who think it is not working (42-5%, with 41% believing it has had no impact):

And the vast majority of Republicans favors either keeping the current troop levels in Iraq or increasing troops levels (60-32%):

Whatever else is true, the Republican Party is not a party where a candidate's pro-war, pro-Bush position will doom the candidacy. Exactly the opposite is true. The GOP remains the Party of Bush and the Party of the Iraq War.

Haircuts... again.

UPDATE II: On his Atlantic Monthly blog, Marc Ambinder makes a common argument that I find completely bewildering -- namely, that the Edwards hair story was a legitimate news story because "the centerpiece of Edwards's campaign is his anti-poverty efforts" and "[h]is credibility as a messenger comes into question when he spends money ostentatiously." I hope Ambinder or anyone else who believes this will address the following.
Many of our nation's greatest advocates for the poor -- including Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt -- were born wealthy and lived rich lifestyles from infancy onward. Was their "credibility" as poverty advocates undermined as a result? By contrast, Edwards lived most of his early life in extreme poverty. Doesn't it stand to reason that he understands those issues and has an authentic commitment to them as a result of his own personal experiences, even if he ended up financially successful, solely as a result of his own efforts, later in life?

Beyond that, every politician claims to understand and be devoted to the plight of the "working family." Mitt Romney and George Bush, born to great wealth, certainly make those claims, even though they haven't been anywhere near "working families" since the day they were born. Ronald Reagan was endlessly held up as the fighter for "working families" despite his personal wealth. If Edwards' wealth makes him so suspect when he claims to be devoted to the poor, why doesn't the in-born, unearned wealth of Bush and Romney -- and every other non-poor politician -- make them equally suspect as advocates for "America's working families"?

Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson have made millions of dollars over the last several years. When they prattle on about America's middle-class, should we start digging into the luxury items they have purchased and the exorbitant fees they pay for a whole litany of services as proof that they are insincere?

Worse still, the claim that there is something "hypocritical" about Edwards' wealth -- now a pervasive premise of Conventional Wisdom -- is premised on a complete misunderstanding of "hypocrisy." The attribute of "hypocrisy" is one who advocates "Principle X" and then acts contrary to that principle (as in: "I believe in Traditional Marriage and I'd like you to meet my third wife," or "I believe in Traditional Marriage and I'm in a rush to make my appointment at the escort agency/to meet my young aide and mistress/to consult with my divorce lawyer").

John Edwards isn't advocating for the elimination of private property or for prohibitions on personal wealth, so his personal wealth isn't remotely "hypocritical." He is advocating for government policies designed to address the plight of America's poor. His own personal wealth -- just as was true for Robert Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt or even Lyndon Johnson -- is irrelevant and not even remotely "hypocritical" for those who understand that term.

UPDATE III: Unsurprisingly, Think Progress is able to unearth this quote from the endlessly pandering Mitt Romney, who previously responded to the Edwards haircut story by boasting that "he pays $50 for a hair cut including the tip" and then snidely added:
You know I think John Edwards was right. There are two Americas. There is the America where people pay $400 for a haircut and then there is everybody else.
Take note, Marc Ambinder: that -- Romney's scornfully mocking Edwards for paying unusually large amounts for beauty care while concealing the fact that he does so himself -- is an actual case of "hypocrisy."

Succinct

2007-07-18T00:18:00.000-03:00

Atrios can speak volumes with only a few words:

What Was That Word?

It's quite impressive how when the minority party's name began with D regular Senate actions were described as "obstructionism" or as "filibusters," while since the minority party's name started to begin with an R all the news consuming public has learned that fact of life that every Senate action requires 60 votes.

Freak Show

Yes the Politico sucks. No I don't care how much Mitt Romney spends on makeup. Yes, all intelligent people know that politicians need to figure out how to look good on the teevee. Yes, this costs money. No it isn't news.

Expose Obstructionists

2007-07-16T20:40:00.000-03:00

On June 29th, Robert Borosage wrote:

Americans elected a new Congress to get things done. But the conservative minority has chosen a strategy of obstruction in the Senate. They have used the threat of a filibuster to delay or block virtually every major initiative. Bills with majority support—raising the minimum wage, ethics reform, a date to remove troops from Iraq, revoking oil subsidies and putting the money into renewable energy, fulfilling the 9/11 commission recommendations on homeland security—get blocked because they can’t garner 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

In its first 40 hours, the new majority of the House of Representatives kept their promise to voters and passed legislation—increasing the minimum wage for the first time in a decade, empowering Medicare to negotiate lower prices on drugs, cutting interest rates on student loans in half, revoking big oil subsidies and using the money to invest in renewable energy—that provided a down payment for a new direction for this country.

These bills are overwhelmingly popular, and are simply common sense reforms. Yet every one of them—and many more—got held up in the U.S. Senate.

Conservatives boast about the “success” of their strategy in discrediting the new majority. As Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss., put it, “the strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it’s working for us.”

How is it working? It’s dragging the reputation of the Congress down to the level of the failed president. Conservatives lie in the road of progress and then complain that nothing is moving.

This values partisan posturing over reforms vital to the country. It must be challenged.

It’s time to take the gloves off.

The first step is to expose the obstruction to the American people. Let’s urge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to force a real filibuster. Keep the bills on the floor and force vote after vote, exposing the obstructionists. We’ll organize in states across the country to insure that their constituents know exactly who is standing in the way of progress.

On July 14th, Ian Welsh at FDL says:

What the Republicans have been doing is “filibustering” everything, then turning around and claiming that Democrats are the “do nothing Congress”. The response is to make it clear who’s holding everything up.
Make them physically filibuster. Choose a very popular bill (say drug reimportation from Canada), put it up straight with nothing else attached, and make them go 24/7. The news cycle will be dominated by the filibuster. Nobody will be talking about anything else but how Republicans are filibustering to make old people pay more for drugs (or whatever other “mom and apple pie” issue you choose.) I would personally put film in the can of old folks talking about how they have to eat dog food to pay for their meds, and start running ads which juxtapose “Old folk in horrible distress” then ask “And what does Senator McCain think of this” and show 15 seconds of him reading from a phone book. Note that you get ready to do ad buys not just because it hammers the message home, but because you know that media coverage may be unfavorable to you and you are prepared to get around the filter - you are not putting yourself at the mercy of other actors - including actors in the media.

There are two ways to deal with bad faith actors; to dealing with people who understand only force. One is to decide you’re willing to let them have what they want because you won’t pay the cost of opposing them. If they say “I’m going to hit you if you don’t give me your wallet” you can say “ok”. The second is to escalate. In the words of the Untouchables - if they bring a knife, you bring a gun; if they put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue. When people understand only force, you must respond with maximum force. Anything else is taken as weakness and they will walk all over you.

Republicans walk all over Democrats because they can - because they know Democrats, at the end of the day, will fold nine times out of ten. It’s a good odds play. If Democrats want it to stop, they need to make the cost unbearable. Civility will return only when the costs of what amount to political violence have become to great for both sides to bear.

It would appear that Sen. Harry Reid listened and apparently so did Sen. Kent Conrad.

From Chris Bowers at OpenLeft:

In an interview with the Young Turks on Friday, Senator Kent Conrad indicated that there was "growing consensus" in the Democratic Senate caucus to actually make Republicans stand in the well of the Senate and filibuster popular Democratic legislation.

Transcipt:
Cenk: Exactly, that's a perfect situation. We're actually going to make you physically filibuster it. Go ahead and give speeches for 24 hours a day. We're removing the rule that out of politeness and courtesy that we don't make you do that anymore. We're going to have you go and read the phone book, and tell us how much you're against stem cells or the minimum wage, or for rest for the troops.

Senator Kent Conrad: Yeah, I think there's a growing consensus that we ought to do that...I think that we could do a better job making our points, and one part of that is to let the American people see just how obstructionist this Republican minority is being. The leader has had to file cloture now over 40 times already this year. And cloture, as you know, is a special procedure to stop debate, to stop filibusters, in order to reach conclusion on legislation. I had a Republican colleague tell me it is the Republican strategy to try to prevent any accomplishment of the Democratic Congress. That is set in their caucus openly and directly that they don't intend to allow Democrats to have any legislative successes, and they intend to do it by repeated filibuster.

Finally...!

2007-07-16T20:23:00.000-03:00

Can it be...? Have the formerly spineless, aimless Democratic Senators finally grown some balls?

From Think Progress:

Moments ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that in response to conservative obstructionism, he plans to force war supporters to physically remain in the Senate and filibuster Iraq withdrawal legislation.

Reid accused conservatives of “protecting the President rather than protecting our troops” by “denying us an up or down vote on the most important issue our country faces.” He said that if a vote on the Reed/Levin Iraq legislation is not allowed today or tomorrow, he will keep the Senate in session “straight through the night on Tuesday” and force a filibuster. From Reid’s speech:

Republicans are using a filibuster to block us from even voting on an amendment that could bring the war to a responsible end. They are protecting the President rather than protecting our troops.

They are denying us an up or down — yes or no — vote on the most important issue our country faces.

I would like to inform the Republican leadership and all my colleagues that we have no intention of backing down.

If Republicans do not allow a vote on Levin/Reed today or tomorrow, we will work straight through the night on Tuesday.

The American people deserve an open and honest debate on this war, and they deserve an up or down vote on this amendment to end it.

UPDATE: Watch the video:

OpenLeft, Firedoglake and others have also called for Congress to call the conservatives’ bluff and force them to filibuster the Levin-Reed Iraq bill.

Josh Marshall agrees:

It's about time on the Iraq filibuster. But it's a very good move. There has been little if any press attention to the fact that senate Republicans are filibustering practically every piece of legislation to come before the senate. But Iraq is the sui generis issue. And the Democrats need to make it clear that the Republicans won't allow anything on Iraq to even come to the floor.

The Republicans have every right to filibuster. But it should be clear that that's what they're doing.

Filibusters and fools

2007-07-14T23:31:00.000-03:00

I don't get it. I don't get why the Dems are such cowards. I don't get why they're so inept. Why don't they make the Republicans actually filibuster? Make them go on the record actually arguing against sanity and for insanity. Why do the Dems let them off the hook so often?

This unwillingness to do the right thing, makes it easier for the MSM to misrepresent what's happening on the rare occasions when they actually have the vote on cloture.

And then I realize that, once again, this is another example of What Digby Said, even to the point about having been away.

You may have noticed that I've been posting less than usual the last few days...

[...]

First, as I wondered earlier in the week, is there some reason that the Democrats didn't force the Republicans to actually filibuster the Webb legislation the old fashioned way and force them to publicly justify why they don't think the troops in Iraq should be allowed to spend some time at home before being redeployed? I still can't figure that one out --- it seemed like a no-brainer to me. Let Huckelberry Graham and Holy Joe explain why the president's prerogatives are more important than the troops and their families. I still don't get it.

Digby goes on to talk about the Liebermann amendment to Defense Spending Bill and makes the important point that the answer to why the Dems are behaving so incomprehensibly better not be because they're trusting the Republicans to be honorable.

I cannot believe that the Democrats voted for this en masses on the merits. It had to be a deal of some sort, or some kind of assurance from the powers that be or something that I'm just not getting. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out the kabuki of these inexplicable legislative actions but in this case, I'm stumped.

It makes no sense at all for the Democrats to empower this administration in any way, shape or form to do anything with respect to Iran. Nada. It certainly doesn't make political sense -- nobody in the country wants war with Iran and nobody will suffer at the polls for failing to sign off on the president and Lieberman's crazy schemes. The idea that Democrats need to be scared of seeming soft on Iran is ludicrous. And even if it did, all they had to do was scuttle the amendment anyway ---they didn't have to call for a vote. I just can't find any political benefit to this at all, and tons of serious, substantive risk.

(It's possible that their little friend Lieberman is blackmailing them, but if that's the case they should just turn the Senate over to the Republicans, return their pay to the taxpayers and go home. Let the war with Iran commence without their compliance.)

On the substance, it's just plain nuts. If they think they can depend on the military to hold Bush and Cheney back, I hope they talked to the air force, because the flyboys have to be chomping at the bit to get in on the action. There have been few medals and promotions for them in the GWOT so far --- they sure could use a good bombing campaign. (And if the Dems believed any assurances from Bush, they should be the ones who are impeached.)

Like I said, I've been busy and so perhaps didn't catch all the nuance. But between the flummoxed Dem response to the Bush officials' three stooges-style committee testimony and defiance of subpoenas, to the inability to force the Republicans to take responsibility for their obstruction to this sloppy wet kiss-up to Joe Lieberman, I don't understand what the hell is going on with the congress at all.

Seriously, do they really think that these lawless Republicans are going to comply with some quaint rules or live up to their "word"? That they will see the light and come over from the dark side? The GOP is looking down the barrel of an electoral defeat so extreme they may never recover. The party is falling apart under the leadership of a misfit and a certified lunatic and more than a quarter century of political philosophy has just been proven to be complete rubbish. They are cornered animals.

And anyway, the Republican Party has not acted with restraint for more than a decade, using whatever institutional power they had without regard to consequences, precedent or effect on the constitution --- a partisan impeachment by a reckless Republican majority in the congress, a stolen election by a ruthless political machine in Florida in concert with a blatantly partisan Supreme Court majority --- and now the lawless rule of the Republican executive branch under Bush and Cheney. The wholesale corruption and decadence of their rule should be more obvious to them than it is to us. There is not one political act of the last decade that should give anyone the least bit of assurance that the Republicans are acting in good faith.

This isn't really about Bush and it isn't really about Cheney. It is about the malignant political aberration that calls itself the modern Republican Party.

I don't know what kind of "strategy" the Democrats think is in play when they sign off on a bizarre statement about Iran that opens up all kinds of avenues for the president to start another war, but they are engaging in a very dangerous game. Arming the Republicans with any excuse to shoot the moon right now is political malpractice. On their best days, the Republicans are reckless and delusional. Now that they're desperate, anything could happen. Why did the Dems just hand them a loaded gun? I don't get it.

Life is a beach...

2007-07-14T17:08:00.001-03:00

I've been away... just like last year -- a week at the beach with no Internet access. I know that I've got lots of catching up to do but, right now, I'm feeling relaxed. I'll get to it as I slowly get back up to speed.

Clarification please...

2007-07-06T00:39:00.000-03:00

Christy at FDL shares with us Judge Walton's comments on the implications of the commuting of Libby's sentence:

In case you were wondering how truly unusual it is for a President to swiftly commute the prison term of a loyal minion (via NYTimes) in an effort to continue to obstruct justice, wonder no more (via Sentencing Law blog):
On July 2, 2007, the President of the United States commuted the term of incarceration imposed on the defendant by the Court, “leaving intact and in effect the two-year term of supervised release, with all its conditions, and all other components of the sentence.” Grant of Executive Clemancy at 1. It has been brought to the Court’s attention that the United States Probation Office for the District of Columbia intends to contact the defendant imminantly to require him to begin his term of supervised release. Strictly construed, the statute authorizing the imposition of supervised release indicates that such release should occur only after the defendant has already served a term of imprisonment. 18 USC Sec. 3583(a) (stating that the defendant “[may] be placed on a term of supervised release after imprisonment”) (emphasis added). That is, despite the President’s direction that the defendant’s prison sentence be commuted and his term of supervised release remain intact…Sec. 3583 does not appear to contemplate a situation in which the defendant may be placed under supervised release without first completing a term of incarceration.

In other words, Reggie has taken the President and his bumfuzzled legal advisors to the statutory woodshed for their sloppy reading of the law. And this President, who has grown so used to doing as he pleases without anyone questioning his authority, has just been given a small lesson in “strict construction” by a conservative jurist who holds the rule of law to actually mean something beyond an inconvience that the President can disregard at will.

It is the footnote on page two of the opinion that really brings this home:

If either party believes that it would be helpful to solicit clarification from the White House regarding the President’s position on the proper interpretation of Sec. 3583 in light of his Grant of Executive Clemancy, they are encouraged to do so.
Shorter Judge Walton: clean up your own damned mess, George, because I’m not covering for you.

[...]

The one good thing that may come from this entire mess is that we have needed to have a discussion about the sentencing guidelines for a long time — that President Bush opened the door to that discussion with blatant favoritism for a political crony as a reward for his obstruction of justice is appalling. That Judge Walton is doing his part to make certain that the President and his legal toadies understand that they don’t get to construct the laws they want out of thin air, cobwebs, and Presidential edict is a good start.

That dog won't hunt

2007-07-06T00:26:00.000-03:00

Josh Marshall makes an excellent point here in debunking claims that partisan politics played a role in the Libby case.

The case had profound political overtones. And certainly there are no end of people in the country who became deeply invested in this case who normally wouldn't get overly bent out of shape about a run-of-the-mill perjury and obstruction case -- which, at least narrowly speaking, this is.

But Libby never found his fate in one of those people's hands. Not once. There's just no getting around that point.

Go down the list.

1. Attorney General John Ashcroft. Decided a special prosecutor was needed and then recused himself from the decision because of his proximity to the probable targets of the investigation.

2. James Comey. Yes, he's the darling of the Dems now because he spilled the beans about the hospital stand-off. But Comey is, dare we say it, a REPUBLICAN. And not just any Republican but a pretty tough law-and-order type who only months earlier had been appointed Deputy Attorney General by President Bush. He had it in for Scooter? He let his partisanship get in the way?

3. Patrick Fitzgerald. Again, a darling of the Dems now for obvious reasons. But anyone who knows the guy's history knows that while this registered independent may not lean ideologically right (in the way movement whacks might recognize) he certainly doesn't lean to the left. It's no accident that his appointments have come under Republicans.

4. Judge Reggie Walton. Let's start with this: He was appointed by George W. Bush. And if that doesn't do it for you, he was appointed to previous judicial appointments by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

A mere calling of the roll like this puts into a razor-sharp relief just how silly these claims are. At every step in the process Libby's fate was in the hands of someone who was either himself a staunch Republican or had been repeatedly appointed by staunch Republicans. The only thing is that no one ever passed him off into the hands a Bush loyalist. And that's the key. Alberto Gonzales never got the hand-off. Whatever else you can claim about this case, it's about as clear as it can be that partisan politics played no role in Libby's fate. [emphasis is mine --bill]

Except, that is, in the commuting of Libby's sentence by GWB. Now that was partisan politics rearing its ugly head.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush...

2007-07-04T22:33:00.000-03:00

K.O. knocks another one out of the park. Crooks & Liars has the video here.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of you becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

Speaking of Bush/Cheney, Keith says:

You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday.
Which one of you chose the route, no longer matters.

Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant.

But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics, is the only fact that remains relevant.

It is nearly July 4th, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a King who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them — or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them — we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms.

Answers in Genesis

2007-07-04T17:18:00.000-03:00

ah... driftglass.... brilliance and eloquence shine out of his keyboard. Here is his take on Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis "museum" to creationism. Calling a spade a spade, drifty tells us that stupidity is a prerequisite for GOP "baseness". I've written before about the GOP problem of getting people to vote for them. Very few intelligent and informed people will do so, so... let's make some more. Bring on the fear and lies...

Driftglass imagines that "Future historians" digging up Ham's paean to willful ignorance may conclude that...

Clearly the Americans, being a generous and noble people, had found a wise and humane was of dealing with the residuum of mentally stunted halfwits that every society will inevitably produce. Those few angrily underclocked child-men who cannot cope with the rigors of math or science or conjunctions or hitting the bowl when they pee.

Like Colonial Williamsburg or South Dakota, Americans had manufactured another wholly fake community for some socially intriguing reason that our descendants (or the descendants of the people we speak to when we call the 800-number on the back of our major appliances when they flake out) will theorize cleverly about.

That rather than efficiently generically engineering the incapacitating disease of conservative fundamentalism out of our blood, we humanely gave them their own s-l-o-w children’s camp. It was a dim-but-cheery place with its own, comforting fake history of the planet, its own cartoon God, and even its own news network that told the stupid people that God loved them better than anyone else. That they didn’t need sense enough to pound sand or as much compassion as God gave a Pitcher plant, as long as they were “Saved”.

Note: I really was going to excerpt just the good parts but... it's all so good * sigh *

And anyway, they weren’t really stupid.

The “elites” were stupid.

And maybe these “Flowers For AlgernonLand” designers even had a few chuckles at the expense of their devolved fellow citizens; perhaps once in a while laughing themselves to tears as the dense denizens of the place scared themselves over and over again scampering down “The dimly lit Corruption galleries, by comparison, will feature videos of pain and suffering, noxious odors and the heat, literally, turned up.”

Dumbing down by several orders of magnitude a complex allegory about the inherency of pain and loss in a dualistic Universe within the field of Time…into God’s own a Pull-My-Finger joke.

At least I hope that’s the tale they’ll tell themselves, because the truth is so much simpler and sadder.

The truth is that for all of its think tanks, fake media and Small Gummint bluster, the Republican Party would evaporate tomorrow like dew in a firestorm if it were not kept lavishly stocked with bigots and idiots. Without its bumper crop of racists yielded from the Southern Strategy, its millions of fanatically anti-Enlightenment Christopaths and the millions of garden variety stupids, the GOP would be one dead fucking parrot…and the people running the Party like a Long Con damned well know it.

Which is why every strategy is aimed at creating more stupid people.

Because the more logic-intolerant the base, the easier everything gets.

For example, imagine how much less you have to spend on marketing when you no longer have to worry about making a well-reasoned argument…about anything.

Piss in their hair and when they start to notice something is wrong, all you need to do is flash a picture of two men kissing and they’ll charge obediently off of whatever cliff they’re led.

Take a massive dump in their mouths and when the start to gag on it, and all need to do is scream “Ted Kennedy!” at them as loud as possible and they’re swallow your excrement like baby birds and beg for more.

Lie them into a ruinous war, send their kids off to die for the greater glory of Exxon, and when they verge dangerously on the edge of beginning to add two and two together correctly, all you need is (HT to the irreplaceable Billmon at the Whiskey Bar for his brilliant post from which I nicked this)…
The programmes of the Two Minute Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teachings.
George Orwell
1984
1948
However, in the end the stupids already have buildings -- constitutionally inviolate buildings -- in which they can enact their own, ridiculous creation mythology over and over again to their widdle heart’s content.

They’re called “churches”, so why do they need a museum?

Because this is about the distinction between form and function.

Deep, deep down these people suspect they’re morons, which is why they need the constant reassurance of their Leaders and their God that they are not. They’re a mob, and a mob can always provoke fear, but in the end they crave the one thing they do not, and never will have: respect.

Respect, and the matriculation into the halls of wisdom of their idiotic ideas.

And since that’s never, ever going to happen, they need an alternative. One that their leaders are happy to provide.

Because part of the tragic deficiency of these people is that they cannot comprehend the difference between an Idea and a Representation Object. A pathetic fact they prove over and over again.

This is what every American Flag Burning debate boils down to: the rage of people who reflexively choose to value a Symbol over the Constitutional Ideal for which that symbol is a proxy.

This is what every Confederate Flag Worship debate boils down to: the rage of people who demand that the fake, manufactured history of their hate rag efface its actual history as a calculated symbol of segregation, lynching and Southern terrorism for much of the 20th century.

This is what every Fundamentalist punch-up comes down to: the rage people who furiously fetishize the literality and inerrancy of a book which is neither, and demand that their Idol trump both the Constitution and genuine religious scholarship.

These are the people to whom the GOP panders because these are the people on whom every one of their victories depends. And to that end they are they are cultivated, fertilized and praised to rafters.

And since they cannot comprehend the distinction between a Building and the Academy, WTF? Animate a few dinos frolicking with Adam and Eve, call it a Museum and Bingo!

Instant parity with actual Science!

Sure it’s every bit as childish and ridiculous as me putting a pair of Eisenhower’s underpants on my head and claiming that I'm the co-architect of the D-Day invasion.

But of course, I’m not the GOP’s target demographic.

(Oh and one correction to the actual article. Ms. Anderson explains the several words and phrases at the end of the article under the heading of "Terms of debate".

She is mistaken.

There is no debate.)

The Power and The Glory

2007-07-04T00:03:00.000-03:00

... of driftglass. Drifty tosses off gems like the following as he savages his favourite foil, David Brooks, who has written another execrable column in the NYTimes, this time praising GWB for commuting Libby's sentence as "exactly right".

Which, first and foremost, considering that Brooks is not so much a boil on the ass of journalism, but an ingrown zit just inside the rim of journalism’s right nostril, is terribly, terribly funny.

Because this pathetic little fraction of a journalist has one and only one schtick: Defender of the Faith.

[...]

Over every fake protestation they want to register over how terrible the partisanship has become, Conservative Kingmaker Grover Glenn “bipartisanship is just another word for date rape” Norquist looms.

Rumbling just below the surface of every reckless demand for “More War!” when we have no more troops to send anywhere is the conspicuous absence of Republican cowards ages 18-45 that are staying away from the war they demanded in their millions.

And ringing in the air are voices of millions of Dirty Hippies. Those who have spent the last 30 years begging, pleading, warning and lecturing the Party of God not to please-please-please not tear down our vital institutions and erect a labyrinth of barbed wire, nitroglycerine and hate.

That the day would come when you may actually need to solve genuine problems, and the machinery you are giddily smashing today for narrow, short-term, partisan gain is the very machinery you will need to solve those problems tomorrow.

Well, that day has now come.

What was foretold has come to pass, and the very best regime dead-enders like Bobo can do now is mill around, take the occasional potshot at a Clinton, and every so often freak out at their confinement and beat their faces against the invisible bars of this prison of their own making.

[...]

Those who think poorly of a White House willing to sanction burning an undercover agent as part of a larger, pre-cooked plot to panic America into the war Neocons wanted all along are full of "fevered vapors and gleeful rage”.

The Plame Story “pretended to be about the outing of an undercover C.I.A. agent.”

Anyone in the media who wss genuinely pissed at how far into the cesspit the Bush Regime had sunk was merely “artificially appalled”. Fitzgerald was “throwing journalists in jail” and the whole of it was “like watching a city of Ahabs getting deliriously close to the great white whale.”

Libby was “the only normal person in the asylum.” “People who knew him thought him discreet, honest and admirable.”

Translation: I knew him. We had lunch, and he paid for his own salmon! And such a sweet-sweet smell of English Leather coming off of that man! This is not some swarthy cutpurse; Libby is a friend to inbred D.C. establishmentarians, and a dog-loyal thrall to his demon master. What higher virtues can there be?

Then:
“Fitzgerald, having lost all perspective, demanded Libby get a harsh sentence as punishment for crimes he had not been convicted of. The judge, casting himself as David against Goliath, demonstrated an impressive capacity for talking about himself.”
Translation: The Republican-appointed prosecutor asked the Republican-appointed judge to use the Republican-approved sentencing guidelines to determine the amount of time Libby would do in Club Fed. But jail is for little people, brown people and Democrats.

And those who are outraged are simple acting out their “assigned posture in this drama.”

So let’s cut through the fog and the moss and the carnival mirrors, and to the marrow.

As sure as the shitty Greek place that goes up in a convenient fireball one night, what happened to gin up a war with Iraq is case of arson.

A case of something destroyed by bad men for criminal ends, that has now leaped far past the original boundaries envisioned by the match-flicking, gas-spreading Neocon sociopaths.

Something that has grown from an insurance scam to a Dresden, but however complex the story, it is still a group of conspirators acting in secret to the detriment of society. Still a crime to be solved.

And if the crime of lying the nation into a war and discrediting anyone who stood in the way is arson, Patrick Fitzgerald’s team are the firemen,

trying first to put the conflagration out, then trying to sift the crime scene for evidence of who did this and why.

Libby, then, was the faithful rat, in charge of blocking the hydrants

and slitting the hoses so that the firemen could not do their jobs.

And what appalls Bobo is the simple fact that Libby -- a loyal “Cheney’s Cheney” Conservative -- was actually tried, convicted and sentenced in open court.

The terrifying reality that, however weakly, oversight has returned, and the reckless, arrogant, treasonous activities of his friends and sponsors in this Administration may now actually start coming with price-tags that cannot be ducked, dodged, draft-deferred or bribed away. (Pardoned and commuted, yes.)

And the worst nightmare of members of the Party of Personal Responsibility is actually being held personally responsible for anything they say or do.

Transparency

2007-07-03T19:31:00.000-03:00

Josh Marshall reflects on the latest GWB lie.

There are just too many ways to pick apart the hollowness, the transparency of President Bush's fear-based commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence. Thirty months was apparently 'excessive', despite the fact that this is what the federal sentencing guidelines recommend and numerous people are thus today sitting in prison under a similarly excessive term.

But, okay, let's say it's excessive. What would be appropriate? One year? Six months? A month? Can anyone really say that the prosecution was legitimate (which the president does) and that the verdict was legitimate (which the president does) and that probation with no jail time is the appropriate penalty?

Paris Hilton did more time than Scooter Libby.

The whole thing is just too transparent. To borrow the Army phrase, President Bush wasn't willing to let Libby make first contact with the federal prison system. There's only one argument that makes sense of this decision: no jail time. That's the argument. Scooter's price. Otherwise, he might have been tempted to go the Fitzgerald route to reduce his sentence.

The key dividing line is who's telling the truth

2007-07-03T19:26:00.000-03:00

Josh Marshall wants to make one thing perfectly clear... "What Wilson said was true".

Here on the Times Oped page you'll see David Brooks column claiming that the information Joe Wilson brought before the public four years ago turned out to all be a crock, a bunch of lies. And we'll let Brooks' scribble be a stand-in for what you will hear universally today from the right -- namely, that just as Scooter Libby was charged with perjury and not the underlying crime of burning an American spy, the deeper underlying offense, the lie about uranium from Africa, didn't even exist -- that at the end of the day it was revealed that Wilson's claims, which started the whole train down the tracks, were discredited as lies.

You'll even hear softer versions of this claim from mainstream media outlets not normally considered part of the rump of American conservatism.

There aren't many subjects on which I claim expertise. But this is one of them. I think I know the details of this one -- both the underlying story of the forgeries and their provenance and the epi-story of Wilson and Plame -- as well as any journalist who's written about the story. The Fitzgerald investigation is probably the part of it I know the least about, comparatively. (It is also incumbent on me to say that in the course of reporting on this story over these years I've gotten to know Joe Wilson fairly well. And I consider him a friend.)

And with that knowledge, I have to say that the claim that Wilson's charges have been discredited, disproved or even meaningfully challenged is simply false. What he said on day one is all true. It's really as simple as that.

There's a tendency, even among too many people of good faith and good politics, to shy away from asserting and admitting this simple fact because Wilson has either gone on too many TV shows or preened too much in some photo shoot. But that is disreputable and shameful. The entire record of this story has been under a systematic, unfettered and, sadly, largely unresisted attack from the right for four years. Key facts have been buried under an avalanche of misinformation. The then-chairman of the senate intelligence committee made his committee an appendage of the White House and himself the president's bawd and issued a report built on intentional falsehood and misdirection.

No one is perfect. The key dividing line is who's telling the truth and who's lying. Wilson is on the former side, his critics the latter. Everything else is triviality.

From day one this story has been about official lies -- corrupt power buttressed by fraud. Along the way it became a story about the president's hireling commentators who lost their honor by becoming part of the fraud. What Wilson said was true. His attackers are all parties to the same lie. Don't forget that.

George Bush Obstructs Justice

2007-07-03T09:01:00.000-03:00

I'm not surprised but I'm still outraged. It's so blatantly corrupt...

Marcy says:

Well, George did it. Made sure that Scooter wouldn't flip rather than do jail time. He commuted Libby's sentence, guaranteeing not only that Libby wouldn't talk, but retaining Libby's right to invoke the Fifth.

This amounts to nothing less than obstruction of justice.

Digby says:

So Bush did it. The bastard commuted little Scooter's sentence, leaving the conviction in place. I'm not a lawyer, but I have to assume that this means he can still appeal --- which means he can still take the fifth if the congress calls him to to testify. Very convenient.

Fitzgerald says:

We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.
We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as “excessive.” The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.
Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.

Jane says:

As Marcy points out, the idea that the President who is currently pushing to restore minimum sentencing guidelines would give a happy hootie about an “excessive” sentence for Scooter Libby or anyone else is laughable. (He is, after all, the man who openly mocked Karla Faye Tucker before putting her to death.) By commuting Libby’s sentence rather than pardoning him, Bush insures that Scooter will remain silent and be able to invoke the fifth before before Congress and not risk being cited for contempt. This president’s contempt for the rule of law is thorough and complete.

Fitzgerald is an honest prosecutor who worked like a dog for this conviction and got mocked by pissy members of the beltway entitlement set for his efforts. Now his work gets swept away by the chief crook seeking to obstruct justice. I’m gonna guess he’s righteously pissed. I know I am.

Josh says:

Many others will note this but I feel obliged to do so for the record. The real offense here is not so much or not simply that the president has spared Scooter Libby the punishment that anyone else would have gotten for this crime (for what it's worth, I actually find the commutation more outrageous than a full pardon). The deeper offense is that the president has used his pardon power to shortcircuit the investigation of a crime to which he himself was quite likely a party, and to which, his vice president, who controls him, certainly was.

The president's power to pardon is full and unchecked, one of the few such powers given the president in the constitution. Yet here the president has used it to further obstruct justice. In a sense, perhaps we should thank the president for bringing the matter full circle. Began with criminality, ends with it.

A nation gone mad with amnesia

2007-07-02T00:37:00.000-03:00

Digby has this to say about the SCOTUS

My personal feeling is that this court is going to practice a form of radical right wing judicial activism that will transform our country over the next generation. (Remember, everything the right accuses the left of doing is what they actually are doing.) Democrats will spend a major amount of time when they are in power trying to find legislative and executive remedies for the dramatic judicial tilt toward big business, fundamentalist religion and racist, discriminatory outcomes --- which will have been made in service to the Republican party and its donors. (After Bush vs. Gore I think we can finally dispense with any notion that the justices are non-partisan.)But we knew that didn't we, when the gang of 14 decided they needed to keep their powder dry for a rainy day?

Roberts is a particularly unctuous character, with his sunny smile and youthful energy, while he dishonestly passes off wingnut bumper stickers like “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” as judicial reasoning. (I can hardly wait for him to read his decision on gun rights where he says "guns don't kill people, people kill people")

Rick Perlstein nails him to the wall with this passionate post about Roberts' other fatuous punchline: "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin."

If I were a high school teacher and young Johnny Roberts wrote this on an exam on civil rights history, I would give him an "F." The idea that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could cough up such a ludicrous hairball is evidence of a nation gone mad with amnesia. Or, if you prefer, a conservative intellectual class that knows the history full well, and has simply let itself lie.

Do educated people really need this explained to them? It wasn't merely "before Brown" that "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on their color of their skin." It was long, long after the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka - for the next seventeen years at least.

[...]

Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act had provided that no segregated public institution could get federal funds, this was, finally, a chance to punish the vast, vast majority of Southern school districts who - read this carefully, Justice Roberts - eleven years after Brown outlawed telling schoolchildren where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.

By that point only 6 percent of Southern schoolchildren attended classes with kids of another race. How did we know? Because the federal government counted.
The decision last week said that counting --- the mechanism that showed that school districts were simply refusing to adhere to the law --- is now illegal. Neat, huh? And in perfect inverted GOPtalk, Roberts smugly claims that he's actually advancing the cause of school integration. He's doing his mentors proud.

It is clear that the major legacy of the Bush administration will be this court. But then, the man became president in the first place due to a blatantly partisan Supreme Court decision, so I suppose there's some symmetry in that.

Blogs and the establishment media

2007-06-28T00:02:00.000-03:00

Glenn Greenwald shares sheds some light on the relevance of blogging and why it "can't get no respect" from the MSM.

One can debate the true influence of blogs and whether they will continue to grow in size and influence. But what seems beyond reasonable dispute is the fact that nothing can match bloggers and their readers in terms of political interest, intensity and energy. And, most importantly, the ability of blogs to be self-sustaining is growing rapidly.

Blogs are increasingly able to engage in their own in original reporting and widely and effectively to disseminate opinion and information without reliance on establishment media organs. If anything, establishment media organs are growing increasingly dependent upon blogs to sustain interest in their products. And one should not underestimate the vital role this development plays in so much of the establishment media's hostility towards bloggers and their endless reliance on caricature to belittle and demonize blogs.
[...]
There is simply no question that so much of the establishment media's hostility towards (and purported "concern over") blogs is grounded in the role blogs play in scrutinizing their conduct and offering an alternative to replace the opinion-making monopoly they held previously.
[...]
In almost every case, media figures who lash out at bloggers -- purporting to offer some sort of objective, terribly worried critique about the "recklessness" of bloggers -- were themselves the subject of criticism and exposure by blogs. Zengerle is not alone. From Jonathan Chait to Dan Gerstein to Richard Wolffe (seen here valiantly defending the integrity of the White House Correspondents Dinner from the criticism of bloggers), those who have assigned themselves the role of warning about the Dangers of Bloggers are clearly fueled, at least in part, by having been the target of blogger scrutiny and critique.
"Bloggers," like every other group, include some irresponsible members, and can benefit from meaningful and vigorous criticisms. But the vast bulk of anti-blogger hostility -- particularly the criticisms offered by establishment media figures -- are motivated not by any genuine concern over journalistic ethics and responsibility (witness how steadfastly they ignore their own breaches), but instead by the fact that bloggers have shined light on the mistakes and corruption in their profession which previously festered in the dark, and by the fact that blogs are increasingly rendering what they do less important, and in some instances, even irrelevant. This amazingly whiny and substance-free attack on bloggers by Joe Klein in Time -- following months of constant criticism from bloggers about Klein's "journalism" -- illustrates this self-absorbed process perfectly.

For the foreseeable future, large media organizations will be necessary to enable cetain types of critically important investigative journalism. There are some truly superb and courageous journalists whom bloggers cannot replace. Indeed, so much of the blogger critique of the media is grounded in a desire for more of that. And there are many journalists who are receptive to the work of bloggers and use it as a resource. But the overwhelming sentiment towards the work of bloggers from media figures, especially our media stars, is to scorn it except when they ignore it. Their self-interest in relegating blogs to the "unserious" fringes is obvious and overwhelming.
But blogs are on their way to becoming self-sufficient, to enable -- entirely apart from media institutions -- the widespread dissemination of ideas, narratives, and viewpoints that the media excludes from our rotted public discourse. That development plays no small role in the increasing hostility one witnesses towards blogs from those who thought they had an entitlement to conduct and shape -- without any challenge or criticism -- how our political discussions proceed.

Ship of Fools or Titanic

2007-06-27T23:45:00.000-03:00

Digby comments on the story in the New Republic by Johann Hari who signed up for the National Review cruise and shares a bizarrely frightening insight into the lizard brains of those who claim to be conservatives today. As Digby says: "It's so disturbing and yet so funny" and she concludes:

They were all there, Kate O'Beirne, Kenny boy Starr, even William B Fuckley himself, dyspeptic as ever, proclaiming victory over communism (again) while trying to sidle away from the modern nazi generation he spawned as quietly as possible.

If there is ever any doubt in your mind as to what truly gets these people up in the morning, this lays it to rest. They are so afraid of dark people they must have a supply of Depends on hand at all times. Dinesh D'Souza, who is quite dark himself, tries awfully hard to be one of the "Real Americans" but he must wonder what they think when they see him out of the corner of their eye when they are alone in a ship's corridor after a few too many martoonis. (If he doesn't, he's an even bigger fool than he seems.)

It nearly impossible to believe that these are the people who have been running the world for the last six years --- and they are. These are Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld's people. We put a bunch of rich, deluded, paranoid racists in charge of the most powerful nation on earth. It's a miracle we're still alive.

Republicans, ready... set... jump?

2007-06-27T13:53:00.000-03:00

Josh Marshall sees the writing on the wall...

The front blurb on the new CNN Iraq poll is sufficiently to-the-point that I'm going to quote it in its entirety ...

Public support for the war in Iraq has fallen to a new low and Republican support is beginning to waver, a poll published Tuesday found. In the latest CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll, 69 percent of those polled believe things are going badly in Iraq, and anti-war sentiment among Republican poll respondents has suddenly increased.

Dick Lugar's very public pulling of the plug on the president's policy is an indicator of the trend.

The number referenced toward the end is 38% -- the number of self-identified Republicans who say they oppose the war. (I wasn't able to find a partisan break-out of the numbers in the CNN data. So I'm not clear what the number jumped up from.)

This all puts in stark terms the intense anxiety now palpitating Republican hearts in Washington, DC. One number is 38%. Another number is 17, the number of months before the 2008 election.
[...]
The truth is that the president is playing a very high-stakes game of chicken with his fellow Republicans. He's driving a hundred miles an hour toward the cliff, way too fast to jump out of the car without risking serious injury. But as the cliff gets closer, they'll start to jump.

A Tragic Legacy

2007-06-27T13:23:00.000-03:00

Glenn Greenwald's latest book A Tragic Legacy has been released today. Glenn's track record makes me feel confident about recommending it without having read it...yet.

Says Glenn:

I wrote the book for the same reason I blog: because I believe that arguments can be advanced, evidence marshalled and facts revealed which can serve as an antidote to our deeply dysfunctional political discourse and, through reasoned-based (though impassioned) persuasion, constructively influence our political process. A book's success can force media outlets to provide a platform for the book's arguments and to expand the range of voices and perspectives which are heard.

The book begins:

A Tragic Legacy
How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency.
By Glenn Greenwald
Jun. 20, 2007 | We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell.
-- Sir Karl Popper, twentieth-century British philosopher of science

One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness -- who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a crusade against Evil -- is that the moral imperative driving the mission will justify any and all means used to achieve it. Those who have become convinced that they are waging an epic and all-consuming existential war against Evil cannot, by the very premises of their belief system, accept any limitations -- moral, pragmatic, or otherwise -- on the methods adopted to triumph in this battle.

Efforts to impose limits on waging war against Evil will themselves be seen as impediments to Good, if not as an attempt to aid and abet Evil. In a Manichean worldview, there is no imperative that can compete with the mission of defeating Evil. The primacy of that mandate is unchallengeable. Hence, there are no valid reasons for declaring off-limits any weapons that can be deployed in service of the war against Evil.

Equally operative in the Manichean worldview is the principle that those who are warriors for a universal Good cannot recognize that the particular means they employ in service of their mission may be immoral or even misguided. The very fact that the instruments they embrace are employed in service of their Manichean mission renders any such objections incoherent. How can an act undertaken in order to strengthen the side of Good, and to weaken the forces of Evil, ever be anything other than Good in itself? Thus, any act undertaken by a warrior of Good in service of the war against Evil is inherently moral for that reason alone.

It is from these premises that the most amoral or even most reprehensible outcomes can be -- and often are -- produced by political movements and political leaders grounded in universal moral certainties. Intoxicated by his own righteousness and therefore immune from doubt, the Manichean warrior becomes capable of acts of moral monstrousness that would be unthinkable in the absence of such unquestionable moral conviction. One who believes himself to be leading a supreme war against Evil on behalf of Good will be incapable of understanding any claims that he himself is acting immorally.

These principles illuminate a central, and tragic, paradox at the heart of the Bush presidency. The president who vowed to lead America in a moral crusade to win hearts and minds around the world has so inflamed anti-American sentiment that America's moral standing in the world is at an all-time low. The president who vowed to defend the Good in the world from the forces of Evil has caused the United States to be held in deep contempt by large segments of virtually every country on every continent of the world, including large portions of nations with which the U.S. has historically been allied. The president who vowed to undertake a war in defense of American values and freedoms has presided over such radical departures from the defining values and liberties of this country that many Americans find their country and its government unrecognizable. And the president who vowed to lead the war for freedom and democracy has made torture, rendition, abductions, lawless detentions of even our own citizens, secret "black site" prisons, Abu Ghraib dog leashes, and orange Guantánamo jumpsuits the strange, new symbols of America around the world.

In sum, the great and tragic irony of the Bush presidency is that its morally convicted foundations have yielded some of the most morally grotesque acts and radical departures from American values in our country's history. The president who insists that he is driven by a clear and compelling moral framework, in which the forces of Good and Evil battle toward a decisive resolution, has done more than almost any American in history to make the world question on which side of that battle this country is fighting. The more convinced President Bush and his followers become of the unchallengeable righteousness of their cause, the fewer limits they recognize. And America's moral standing in the world, and our national character, continue to erode to previously unthinkable depths.

Check out Matt Stoller's partial review here.

Reading about Bush's Presidency with some distance is a strange experience, since the events are so clearly etched in my memory. And yet this book puts distance between the reader and Bush, almost as if he is out of office. And with that distance, I'm beginning to appreciate just how destructive his Presidency has been, how thoroughly he has corrupted our system of laws and our political fiber. When put together like Greenwald has done, it sort of feels like another country, only one whose history is very familiar. Bush is accurately portrayed as a President whose sole motivating ideology is a sure-fire belief that whatever he does is good, and any opposition or disagreement - even by former allies - represents an evil that must be crushed. The vicious behavior towards enemies is actually a need for enemies, a Manichean culture devouring itself.

Dick "no oversight for me" Cheney

2007-06-26T23:32:00.000-03:00

More from Digby on the "Cheney answers to no one" issue.

This looks like a week for action, which is always a good thing. It's difficult getting our representatives to move on the things we care about but it can be done.

First of all, Move-On is working to push our representatives to restore habeas corpus. (I can hardly believe I have to write that.) If you have a few minutes, make a phone call or two. Christy at FDL has all the particulars. (And here's a YouTube of Chris Dodd giving a rousing speech at the ACLU Rally today.)

Second, while you are dialing your congressman, give a thought to calling the members of the Financial Services Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, who will be deciding whether to pass out Rahm's proposal to cut off fund for Cheney. This is a very nice moment to make a statement about Cheney's nonsense, and with Sally Quinn reporting that the sycophantic courtier phone tree is ready to toss Dick overboard, this is a propitious time to keep this in the press.

Todd Gitlin made the case for pushing this yesterday over at TPM Cafe:
Rahm Emanuel has introduced a bill to delete spending for Cheney's office on the ground that Cheney claims, when convenient, that the vice-president's office is not "an entity within the executive branch." Rep. Emanuel, who's taken a beating from the liberal wing of the Democrats for refusing to stand up, is standing way up. The House is supposed to vote later this week.

Is this not one of those extraordinary moments when the people's representatives will actually vote on whether to fund the horrific farce that is this administration?
The Republicans keep daring the Dem majority to stop funding the things they object to and the Democrats keep getting tied up in knots over it. I don't know if this is constitutional or if it is practical, but I do know that a debate on the floor of the House over Vice President Cheney's assertion that he answers to no one is the kind of thing that might be able to compete with Paris Hilton and some roid-raged killer wrestler on the evening news and bring home the fact that our government has gone completely batshit crazy.

Survey says...

2007-06-25T21:20:00.000-03:00

I can just hear Edna Krabappel saying: "The children a right to laugh at you" when I read stuff like the following. Willful ignorance, once again. I feel contemptuous.

Steve Benen at TPM shares this depressing bit of polling data:

As part of its cover story on "what you need to know now," Newsweek conducted a broad poll on a variety of political and cultural affairs. There were plenty of interesting results, but one section was particularly noteworthy.

Even today, more than four years into the war in Iraq, as many as four in ten Americans (41 percent) still believe Saddam Hussein's regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11, even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection. A majority of Americans were similarly unable to pick Saudi Arabia in a multiple-choice question about the country where most of the 9/11 hijackers were born. Just 43 percent got it right -- and a full 20 percent thought most came from Iraq.

For that matter, one in five Americans (20%) believe that we did find chemical/biological weapons "hidden by Saddam Hussein's regime."

Perhaps most troubling, the number of people who are confused about Iraq's non-existent role in the 9/11 attacks has gone up in recent years. When Newsweek asked the same question in the fall of 2004, 36% said Saddam Hussein was "directly involved" with the attacks. Nearly three years later, that number is 41%.

Sure, Bush administration officials have been careless with their rhetoric, leading to some confusion. And sure, there were probably some Fox News viewers included in the poll, skewing the numbers.

But that still doesn't explain a result like this one.

Treated As: Top Secret

2007-06-24T22:21:00.000-03:00

Steve Benen at TPM has read chapter one of the WaPo piece and observes...

That Dick Cheney is secretive is hardly news, but seeing just how secretive is striking.

Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."
Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch," and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance.

Stick it in a time capsule; future generations won't believe it.

You don't know Dick.

2007-06-24T22:14:00.000-03:00

The Wapo has quite the story about this special V.P. It begins thusly...

Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch.

In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.

Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court -- civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed "military commissions."

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part.

Vice President Cheney, standing behind the president's desk during a July 2003 meeting, circumvented Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in 2001 on the military commissions order.

The episode was a defining moment in Cheney's tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. "Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before. This article begins a four-part series that explores his methods and impact, drawing on interviews with more than 200 men and women who worked for, with or in opposition to Cheney's office. Many of those interviewed recounted events that have not been made public until now, sharing notes,e-mails, personal calendars and other records of their interaction with Cheney and his senior staff. The vice president declined to be interviewed.

Two articles, today and tomorrow, recount Cheney's campaign to magnify presidential war-making authority, arguably his most important legacy. Articles to follow will describe a span of influence that extends far beyond his well-known interests in energy and national defense.
In roles that have gone largely undetected, Cheney has served as gatekeeper for Supreme Court nominees, referee of Cabinet turf disputes, arbiter of budget appeals, editor of tax proposals and regulator in chief of water flows in his native West.

Branches of Government

2007-06-23T23:26:00.000-03:00

Eli at FDL comments on the latest Cheney fiasco.

I am, to put it mildly, not Rahm Emanuel’s biggest fan, but his response to Dick Cheney’s claim to be exempt from executive branch oversight is priceless:

Today, we discovered that everything we learned in U.S. government class was wrong. Evidently, the Vice President does not consider himself a part of the executive branch, and therefore believes he can obstruct meaningful oversight and avoid being held accountable. If the Vice President truly believes he is not a part of the executive branch, he should return the salary the American taxpayers have been paying him since January 2001, and move out of the home for which they are footing the bill.

CREW piles on, and their take might be even better:

Under his argument, if Mr. Cheney is not subject to executive branch security requirements, surely he must be subject to Senate rules.

To safeguard sensitive information, in 1987 the Senate created the Office of Senate Security, which is part of the Secretary of the Senate. The Security Office’s standards, procedures and requirements are set out in the Senate Security Manual, which is binding on all employees of the Senate.

(…)

In addition, Mr. Cheney and his staff would be subject to investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee, which has the responsibility to investigate allegations of improper conduct which may reflect upon the Senate, including violations of law and the rules and regulations of the Senate.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said Mr. Cheney’s arguments raise new questions:

“Since there is no fourth branch of government to which Mr. Cheney could belong, by claiming the Office of the Vice President is within the legislative branch does Mr. Cheney agree that he is subject to Senate security procedures?”

Now, it seems to me that, as CREW observes, Cheney must be in one branch or the other (or both) but there’s no way he can be in neither. And if he has to pick just one branch to belong to, I would think it would behoove him to pick the one controlled by his own party. Not to mention, y’know, the one that his nominal boss is in. Because, call me crazy, but Cheney’s claim that he does not belong to the executive branch sounds like an admission that he does not work for the President. Or, indeed, for anyone. While this is probably accurate, I’m pretty sure it was never intended to be common knowledge.

If you want a little more serious coverage, check out this LA Times story (registration required). My favorite bits:

In his letter to the vice president, Waxman said two Cheney staffers — including Libby — have been criminally prosecuted in the alleged illegal disclosure of classified information.

(…)

“Your office may have the worst record in the executive branch for safeguarding classified information,” Waxman wrote.

(…)

“Here’s a guy who raises ‘executive privilege’ to historic levels to exempt himself from all rules and oversight, and now he says he’s not part of the executive branch?” said [Berkeley Constitutional scholar Gordon] Silverstein. “Here we have a subordinate part of the executive branch asserting independent constitutional authority even against its own superior. It is flabbergasting.”

You’d think that this is the sort of thing that a bold, decisive leader like Dubya would want to clear up boldly and decisively, but so far the official White House line appears to be, “We don’t really know if he’s right or not, but it’s none of the legislature’s business how we enforce executive orders.” But if Cheney’s part of the legislature…

Of course, the simplest explanation is that the Bushies just make shit up so they don’t have to come right out and admit that they find the Constitution too confining, but what are the odds of that?

In your face Dick!

2007-06-23T23:19:00.000-03:00

Atrios shares this gem of a response from Rahm Emanuel.

Washington, D.C. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel issued the following statement regarding his amendment to cut funding for the Office of the Vice President from the bill that funds the executive branch. The legislation -- the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill -- will be considered on the floor of the House of Representatives next week.

"The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot ignore executive branch rules. At the very least, the Vice President should be consistent. This amendment will ensure that the Vice
President's funding is consistent with his legal arguments. I have worked closely with my colleagues on this amendment and will continue to pursue this measure in the coming days."

Steve Benen at TPM provides some context:

The background details are surprisingly straightforward. In 1995, the Clinton White House issued an executive order establishing uniform rules for protecting classified information. In 2003, the Bush White House revised it. The order plainly includes any executive-branch agency, any military department, and "any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information." The entire branch of government, the order said, is subject to oversight.

This week, however, in light of revelations about the White House ignoring its own E.O., the Bush gang started spinning like a top.

The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information.
An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 -- amending an existing order -- requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said.

Look, I can appreciate the fact that the White House is in a jam here. Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the gang repeatedly mishandled classified materials during a time of war, got caught, ignored their own rules, and is now struggling to rationalize their conduct. When the federal agency responsible for oversight tried to do its job, the Vice President reportedly tried to abolish the agency. This isn't a fact-pattern that's easy to spin.

But the explanations thus far have been transparently ridiculous, up to and including the notion that the Vice President, as defined in Article II of the Constitution, isn't actually part of the executive branch of government.

Benen again:

In yesterday's painfully-amusing White House press briefing, spokesperson Dana Perino argued, without explanation, that the president exempted Dick Cheney from an Executive Order on preserving classified materials. In fact, she got rather specific about it, telling reporters that on page 18 of the E.O., "There's a distinction regarding the Vice President versus what is an agency." Perino added that this is "clear."

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's staff looked at page 18. Take a wild guess what they found.

"No exemption at all for the Vice President on page 18. So we emailed the White House, which referred us to section 1.3 -- which is about something else altogether -- and 5.2 -- which makes no mention of the Vice President. In fact, there is no exemption for the President or the Vice President when it comes to reporting on classified material.

Faiz added that the language of the E.O. is rather sweeping: "Sec. 6.1(b) of Bush's 2003 executive order governing classified material explicitly states that it applies to any 'Executive agency...any 'Military department'...and any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information.'"

Sounds "clear" to me.

Digby outs himself as... herself!

2007-06-23T22:54:00.000-03:00

Digby has long been one of my blogospheric heroes and the only thing that will have to change as a result of her coming out on Tuesday is my use of pronouns when I gush about her in the future. Digby accepted an award on behalf of all liberal bloggers at the Take Back America Conference in Washington. Her acceptance speech is here.

Digby:

Now that I'm back in my (heavenly coastal cool) secure bunker, I want to get back to regularly scheduled programming. But first I have to thank all of you who have sent me kind emails and written comments here and around the blogosphere. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but I feel much better now --- not just because it's over, but because I realize that my tribe is filled with such generous, warm hearted people that I should never have been so terrified in the first place.

Back at it:

I hate to retreat so quickly to my vituperative blogger persona, but this is just outrageous. Via Julia, I see that George Bush once again shows his philosophical depth:
Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical -- and it is not the only option before us.
Right. That's a perfectly respectable philosophy that's been held by many great people for centuries. It's called pacifism and it's about as far from the philosophy of this bloodthirsty boor as you can get.

In fairness, he may not realize that because when his briefers discuss the wanton killing of little Iraqi or Afghan children, it's not called "destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life" it's called "collateral damage."

This man led an invasion of a country that posed no immediate threat in the name of "giving birth" to a new democracy and saving the Iraqis from a madman. He is responsible for a whole lot of killing of fully formed human lives which he constantly claims was in the hopes of saving other human lives. In fact, he continues to insist that all this Iraqi carnage will be worth it one day because the US will have brought all the survivors freedom, which is a wonderful value, but since George W. Bush's idea of freedom could more accurately be defined as chaos, it's likely that many Iraqis hardly find the trade-off worthwhile.

I'm not sure we need to hear any more lectures on ethics from a man who thinks that blastocysts in a petri dish cannot be destroyed in the interest of saving the lives of others, but hundreds of thousands of people can be violently killed in order to carry out a deluded American Enterprise Institute political science experiment.

Keeping the lights off

2007-06-19T23:22:00.000-03:00

The incomparable, indefatigable, Glenn Greenwald nails it with this post on the complicit media enablers.

Richard Cohen's Washington Post column this morning is a true tour de force in explaining the function of our Beltway media stars. Cohen's column -- which grieves over the grave and tragic injustice brought down upon Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- should be immediately laminated and placed into the Smithsonian History Museum as an exhibit which, standing alone, will explain so much about what happened to our country over the last six years. It is really that good.

One could write media criticisms for the next several years and not come close to capturing the essence of our Beltway media the way Cohen did in this single paragraph:
With the sentencing of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Fitzgerald has apparently finished his work, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, to make a mountain out of a molehill. At the urging of the liberal press (especially the New York Times), he was appointed to look into a run-of-the-mill leak and wound up prosecuting not the leaker -- Richard Armitage of the State Department -- but Libby, convicted in the end of lying. This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.
That really is the central belief of our Beltway press, captured so brilliantly by Cohen in this perfect nutshell. When it comes to the behavior of our highest and most powerful government officials, our Beltway media preaches, "it is often best to keep the lights off." If that isn't the perfect motto for our bold, intrepid, hard-nosed political press, then nothing is.
That is the motto that should be inscribed at the top of Fred Hiatt's Editorial Page in pretty calligraphy. And let us acknowledge what a truly superb job they have been doing in keeping the lights off.

Eric Boehlert (h/t Attaturk) previously documented just a few of Cohen's heroic light-blocking efforts over the years ("The case for war is a good one," pronounced Cohen in February of 2003), and my personal favorite is here, where Cohen mocked Howard Dean as a "fool or a Frenchman" for daring irreverently to question the obviously conclusive case made by the Serious Colin Powell about Iraq's massive WMD stockpiles. As is true for so many of our Beltway elite, the fact that war opponents turned out to be so right, and our serious Beltway geniuses so wrong, has increased the contempt for those who were right; hence, in defending the pro-war Libby, Cohen hurls one insult after the next at war opponents and blames the Libby injustice on "them."

Beyond coining the perfect motto for our political press, Cohen -- in that special paragraph quoted above -- also manages to pack in multiple falsehoods in service of his Libby defense. He tells his readers, for instance, that a special prosecutor was appointed to investigate the Plame leak "at the urging of the liberal press," and later on in the column he pins the blame for Libby's terrible plight on "Antiwar sanctimony." So sayeth the individual who plays the role of "liberal columnist" at the Washington Post, whose script on the Libby case would seem notably zealous even if it were published in National Review.

The Libby prosecution clearly was the dirty work of the leftist anti-war movement in this country, just as Cohen describes. After all, the reason Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate this matter was because a left-wing government agency (known as the "Central Intelligence Agency") filed a criminal referral with the Justice Department, as the MoveOn-sympathizer CIA officials were apparently unhappy about the public unmasking of one of their covert agents.

In response, Bush's left-wing anti-war Attorney General, John Ashcroft, judged the matter serious enough to recuse himself, leading Bush's left-wing anti-war Deputy Attorney General, James Comey, to conclude that a Special Prosecutor was needed. In turn, Comey appointed Fitzgerald, the left-wing anti-war Republican Prosecutor and Bush appointee, who secured a conviction of Libby, in response to which left-wing anti-war Bush appointee Judge Reggie Walton imposed Libby's sentence.

In other words, it all happened exactly the way Cohen described it this morning (Plame investigation and Libby conviction occurred because of "the liberal press," "an unpopular war," "opponents of the Iraq war," "a vestigial Stalinist-era yearning for abasement," and "Antiwar sanctimony"). Perhaps the most revealing part of Cohen's column is this gem, where he protests how unfair it is that Patrick Fitzgerald was so mean and threatening in his investigation, and made all of those poor journalists so scared ("Much heroic braying turned into cries for mercy"):
As any prosecutor knows -- and Martha Stewart can attest -- white-collar types tend to have a morbid fear of jail.
Indeed, it is so terribly unfair to investigate powerful government officials because, as "white-collar types," they have a "morbid fear of jail" -- in contrast, of course, to blue-collar types, and darker ones still, who really do not mind prison at all. Why would they? It's their natural habitat, where they belong. That is what prison is for.
That has been the real point here all along. The real injustice is that prison is simply not the place for the most powerful and entrenched members of the Beltway royal court, no matter how many crimes they commit. There is a grave indignity to watching our brave Republican elite be dragged before such lowly venues as a criminal court and be threatened with prison, as though they are common criminals or something. How disruptive and disrespectful and demeaning it all is.

The most valuable lesson of Cohen's column -- almost certainly the same lesson of the forthcoming pro-Libby book by Time's Norman Pearlstine, a book hailed by Cohen as a "vigorously written account" of the "train wreck" of the Libby investigation -- is that the overriding allegiance of our permanent Beltway ruling class is to the royal court which accords them their status and prestige. That overarching allegiance overrides, easily, any supposed partisan, ideological or other allegiances which, in their assigned roles, they are ostensibly defending.

Thus, neoconservative Lewis Libby and "liberal pundit" Richard Cohen are peers and colleagues and comrades in every way that matters, which is why Cohen (and Hiatt and Pearlstine and all their friends) have so vigorously protested the Libby injustice. High members of the royal court are, first and foremost, defenders of their bloated and insulated swamp. And particularly the most revered and highest-ranking among them should never be punished, let alone imprisoned (said with whispered disgust), for their "dark politics" -- whether that comes in the form of illegal eavesdropping, illegal torture, or illegal obstruction of justice.

And what is to be avoided first and foremost is any light being shined on the underbelly of how the royal court functions. How dare Patrick Fitzgerald, urged on by International A.N.S.W.E.R. and the other rambunctious anti-war street protestors, stick his nose into their business. It is often best to keep the lights off.

If even our Beltway media -- rather, especially them -- argues that criminality by government officials should not be punished, and that light should not be shined on what they do, then pervasive government corruption and deceit are inevitable. That is just obvious. And that is why Cohen's column so perfectly captures what has happened in our country and the truly indispensable role which most of our political press has played in all of it.
Our media stars have not merely stood idly by while our highest government officials engage in endless deceit and corruption. They actively defend it, enable it, justify it, and participate in it. Keeping the lights off is their principal function, one which -- with rare and noble exceptions -- they perform quite eagerly.

Taguba talks

2007-06-17T23:54:00.000-03:00

Think Progress excerpts (see below) some of Seymour Hersh's latest article in the New Yorker. As is usually the case, Hersh's piece is well worth reading. Taguba is one of the good ones and has been victimized as a result. The article ends with Taguba saying:

“There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

Think Progress:

In a New Yorker article today, Seymour Hersh interviews Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Pentagon’s investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. This article is the first time that Taguba has publicly spoken out about the scandal, revealing that the Pentagon forced him to retire early because of his aggressive pursuit of the issue.
Taguba also reveals that he believed high-level military officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew about the abuses but feigned ignorance, putting all the blame on low-level soldiers. Key highlights:

Taguba was threatened by Gen. John Abizaid:

A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. … Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”

“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.“

White House “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”:

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad” — in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’”

Taguba was demoted and eventually forced to retire because of his investigation:

Taguba had been scheduled to rotate to the Third Army’s headquarters, at Fort McPherson, Georgia, in June of 2004. He was instead ordered back to the Pentagon, to work in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. “It was a lateral assignment,” Taguba said, with a smile and a shrug. … A retired four-star Army general later told Taguba that he had been sent to the job in the Pentagon so that he could “be watched.” Taguba realized that his career was at a dead end. …

In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. “This is your Vice,” he told Taguba. “I need you to retire by January of 2007.” No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, “He offered no reason.”

Pentagon pressured Sen. John Warner (R-VA) “to back off” the investigation:

A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned “to back off” on the investigation, because “it would spill over to more important things.” A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it — insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great displeasure.

U.S. commander in Iraq “knew exactly what was going on”:

Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003 — when much of the abuse took place — Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, “Sanchez knew exactly what was going on.”

Rumsfeld’s claims of ignorance about the abuse were “simply not true”:

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” …

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him — if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said.

National Republican Treasonal Affective Disorder

2007-06-17T00:32:00.000-03:00

driftglass tells us that...

Sunday, June 17th is “National Republican Treasonal Affective Disorder” Day.

Here is the story behind the day we honor.

You see, once upon a time -- I know this is hard to believe -- a Republican President obsessed with a disastrous war that his every lie and surge made worse, obsessed with his enemies, obsessed with power, tried to set himself up as a king.

In his paranoia, he illegally wiretapped American citizens.

He abused the US intelligence system to achieve his own, petty, partisan ends.

He made a joke out of the Justice Department.

His nationalized and routinized slander. smear, race-baiting, crying “traitor” and backstabbing as the acceptable political wetwork and the calling card of the GOP.

He gave Lincoln the boot, and welcomed the Klan with open arms.

He targeted the press for GOP-brand abuse and intimidation.

He was protected by a shield wall of degenerate, morally-dead, robot-loyal political Myrmidons who ass-raped the Constitution three times before breakfast from onside the White House and smiled.

And his Party wuuuuuved him: even though he had a clear, decades-long record of being a degenerate monster, they elected and then re-elected him anyway.

Because the other guys were Dirty Fucking Hippies who obviously Hated America.

A man whose departure in humiliation and disgrace was perfectly summarized by Saint Hunter Thompson thusly:

"Jesus! How much more of this cheap-jack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he's lonely and depressed down there in San Clemente? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark. "
Amen.

And on June 17, 1972, the Nixon Administration nicked itself while shaving. Something it had to do six, seven times a day.

Nicked itself near an artery.

Of course they didn’t realize it; In their Pride and Paranoia (The admittedly least-brilliant novel of Jane Austen) they assumed it was something trivial. Something they could lie or cheat or bribe or blackmail their way out of as they had so many, many, many times before.

Because that is how Republicans do business.

But the wound bled. And it bled. And an infection set in. And after a year the skin began to slough and breach enough for everyone but the 27% to see the writhing horror underneath.

And it all began 25 35 years ago this Sunday (thanks, anonymous) when this guy -- Frank Wills – a security guard at the Watergate Hotel discovered a break in in-progress and called the cops. The PD arrested five men -- Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James W. McCord, Jr., Eugenio Martínez and Frank Sturgis – and then we were off to the races.

Make no mistake, Nixon laid down the political DNA of the modern Republican Party: What came after was no accident, kids, and they aren’t going to just up and disappear simply because they’re evil and stupid and wrong about every single fucking thing in the Universe.

They are a disease.

So this “National Republican Treasonal Affective Disorder” Day, please give generously of your time and money to a Progressive cause or candidate, so another generation won’t have to wake up to a Constitution again left in tatters by the Traitor Right. To more American’s dying in an illegal and catastrophic war. To a nation kept deliberately terrorized and divided because that is how fascists hang on to power.

Because isn’t 25 35 years of Republican treachery, deceit, slaughter and contempt for the rule of law enough?

Neocon II: Lie Hard with a Vengeance

2007-06-16T23:18:00.000-03:00

Matt Taibbi explains that there is no stake through the neocons' heart yet.

Call it the Leslie Nielsen effect. Your first attempt at a show-biz career fizzles out and dies, but your failure is so quirky and charming that it wins you a whole second career. Think Robert Goulet, Bill Shatner, even John Travolta. America loves a brave second act, particularly one that doesn't mind doing a take or two with egg still on his face.
What the Zucker brothers did for actors, the neocons are now doing for politics. In the first six years of the Bush presidency the administration's ideological nucleus -- a tribe of humorless conservative revolutionaries led by Dick Cheney and including the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith and Elliott Abrams -- racked up a startling record in matters of official policy. From their juking of the case for the Iraq War to their Jacobin-esque purges within the government's intelligence apparatus to their paranoid and sometimes criminal fragging of political enemies great and minor, the neoconservatives working for George Bush botched virtually every important move they made in the last six years.
Moreover, each time they used the presidency's bully pulpit to make a prediction, be it about the post-invasion spread of democracy in the Middle East, the utility of Iraqi oil revenues in financing the occupation, or the chilling effect our presence in Iraq would have on Palestinian resolve, more or less exactly the opposite ended up taking place.
And yet, despite the walloping defeat of the Republicans in the 2006 midterm elections that seemed to spell the end of neocon rule in Washington, the clowns are once again spilling out of the Volkswagen. Lately the neocons seem to be all over the public airwaves, and not as the targets of purgative public flogging or tarring ceremonies, but as the subjects of serious interviews, with respected journalists treating them like real human beings with real opinions. Even worse, a few are still in office, and appear to be cooking up a last-minute encore before the curtain finally comes down in '08.
Richard Perle, the former head of the Defense Policy Board, known in the Beltway as the "Prince of Darkness," has been on TV a lot lately in a much-publicized public spat with former CIA director George Tenet, who recently accused Perle of targeting Iraq days after 9/11. John Bolton, former UN-hating ambassador to the UN, recently won the Bradley Prize for "outstanding intellectual achievement" -- achievement that presumably includes helping make the case for the Iraq disaster and support for a future invasion of Iran. In his acceptance speech, Bolton cheekily credited Tehran, Pyongyang and other rogue nations for his success, thanking them just for "being themselves." And while Scooter Libby crashed at trial, Doug Feith soft-landed into a tenure track at Georgetown, where he will now teach history, a subject he spent the past five years or so violently misinterpreting.
he neocons remain a bold presence in the media for a number of reasons. Number one, they still have real political power. Dick Cheney is still the vice president, and the Pentagon is still guided heavily by the neocon-dominated Office of Special Plans (OSP), where the power is now reportedly concentrated in an office called the Iranian Directorate, charged with helping make the case for war with Iran. Amid all the public hand-wringing about a congressional demand for an Iraq withdrawal timeline, Washington is abuzz with rumors that the neocons are loading up for one last historical Hail Mary, a "long bomb" to throw at Tehran before Bush leaves office. The knowledge that they are crazy enough to try something like that makes people in the capital take them seriously.
But beyond that, there just hasn't been any effort in the media to identify and really make clear the root causes of the Iraq policy failure. In the current Washington mythology -- a mythology reflected in public statements of everyone from John McCain to Hillary Clinton -- the Iraq War blew up in our faces for logistical reasons, because we didn't send enough troops, or have a sound occupation plan, or have an "understanding of the insurgency." It was the right war, wrong execution, wrong defense secretary. The failure had nothing to do with the mistake of placing our bets on a radical revolutionary policy of "pre-emptive invasion," or with the White House's authoritarian efforts to castrate the Pentagon and the CIA and replace them with their own intelligence-gathering and policymaking apparatuses.
The neocons may have been proven wrong in the particulars, and to ordinary people their legacy may turn out to be a nightmarish Middle East bloodbath and decades of debt, but in Washington they're still revered as canny operators who swept two election seasons with a drooling mannequin for a candidate and for years ruled Washington with almost Caligulan abandon. They were idiots in terms of how the world worked, but they understood power in the Beltway better than Nixon, better than Clinton, better really than any White House clan since the Roosevelt years. That's why they'll keep getting top billing on talk shows and invites to all the best Washington parties, even if, as seems likely, they leave office 18 months from now with half the planet in flames.
In Washington there is no shame in being wrong; there's only shame in losing. The neocons were wrong as hell, but they were also winners. That's why no one should expect them to go away now. That's especially true since their only real competition in the intellectual arena is the cynical third-way corporatism of the Democratic party, a tenuous and depressing alliance of business interests and New-Deal interest groups whose most persuasive "idea" is that it is not neo-conservatism. The neocons, wrong and stupid as they might be, at least represent a clearly-articulated dream of unchecked greed, power and big-stick foreign conquest that appeals in an elemental way to the dark side of the American psyche. Until America rejects that dream -- and don't hold your breath for that -- don't count on the Boltons and the Perles disappearing from view.

Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine. His book, Smells Like Dead Elephants, is due out next year.

Sanity prevailing...?

2007-06-16T23:17:00.000-03:00

Anonymous Liberal tells us that there may yet be a spark of sanity in the courts:

Earlier this week, a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the government did not have the authority to detain Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri–a Qatari national who had come to the United States on a student visa–indefinitely without process. Al-Marri, who the government claims is a terrorist, has spent the last four years in a military brig in South Carolina. He has not been charged with a crime or even an immigration violation.
In its court filings, the Bush administration argued that Congress had implicitly provided statutory authority for this sort of detention when it passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) shortly after 9/11. The Fourth Circuit rejected this argument, noting that “if Congress intended to grant this authority it could and would have said so explicitly.”

The Court then pointed out an obvious historical flaw in this argument:

In fact, shortly after Congress enacted the AUMF, it enacted another statute that did explicitly authorize the President to arrest and detain “terrorist aliens” living within the United States believed to have come here to perpetrate acts of terrorism. . . .

[T]he Patriot Act establishes a specific method for the Government to detain aliens affiliated with terrorist organizations, who the Government believes have come to the United States to endanger our national security, conduct espionage and sabotage, use force and violence to overthrow the government, engage in terrorist activity, or even who are believed likely to engage in any terrorist activity. Congress could not have better described the Government’s allegations against al-Marri — and Congress decreed that individuals so described are not to be detained indefinitely but only for a limited time, and by civilian authorities, prior to deportation or criminal prosecution.

In sum, Congress has carefully prescribed the process by which it wishes to permit detention of “terrorist aliens” within the United States, and has expressly prohibited the indefinite detention the President seeks here. The Government’s argument that the President may indefinitely detain al-Marri is thus contrary to Congress’s expressed will.

Bush's European disaster

2007-06-15T12:12:00.000-03:00

Sidney Blumenthal at Salon files this sad commentary about GWB's trip that was "a pageant of disdain, delusion and provocation masquerading as a respite from his troubles at home".

I returned from Europe a week before President Bush departed for the G8 summit in Germany. In Rome and Paris I met with Cabinet ministers who uniformly said the chief issue in transatlantic relations is somehow making it through the last 18 months of the Bush administration without further major disaster. None of the nonpartisan think tanks in Washington can organize seminars on this overriding reality, but within the European councils of state the trepidation about the last days of Bush is the No. 1 issue in foreign affairs.
One of the ministers with whom I met, who had supported the invasion of Iraq and had been an admirer of outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair's, ruefully cited Blair's remark about Iraq at his joint press conference with Bush on May 17 at the White House: "This is a fight we cannot afford to lose." "Cannot? Cannot lose?" mocked the minister. "Should not have lost."
High officials of European governments describe U.S. influence as squandered and swiftly eroding (one minister went down a list of Bush administration officials, rating them according to their stupidity), the country's moral authority nil. Lethal power vacuums are emerging from Lebanon to Pakistan, and Europeans are incapable on their own of quelling the fires that burn far closer to them than to the United States through their growing Muslim populations and proximity to the Middle East. They have no illusions that they will be treated seriously as real allies or that there will be a sudden about-face by the Bush administration. Their faint hope -- and it is only a hope -- is that they have already seen the worst and that it is not yet to come. Even worse than Bush, from their perspective, would be another Republican president who continued Bush policies and also appointed neoconservatives. That would toll, if not the end of days, then the decline and fall of the Western alliance except in name only, and an even more rapid acceleration of chaos in the world order.
Bush's procession through Europe was a pageant of contempt, disdain, delusion, provocation and vanity masquerading as a welcome respite from his troubles at home. In Albania he landed at last in a place where he was hailed as a conquering hero. His demolition derby of U.S. influence was presented as a series of bold moves, but it confirmed the fears of the other world leaders at the G8 summit (and elsewhere) that the rest of Bush's presidency will be an erratic series of crashes. His performance ranged from King Nod, issuing proclamations oblivious to and even proud of their negative effect, to King Zog (the last king of Albania). No president has had a more disastrous European trip since President Reagan placed a wreath on the graves of SS soldiers in the Bitburg cemetery. Yet Reagan's mistake was unintentional and symbolic, a temporary and superficial setback, doing no real damage to U.S. foreign relations, while Bush's blunders not only reinforced counterproductive policies but also created a new one with Russia that has the potential of profoundly undermining U.S. national security interests for years to come.

Bush's foreign policy has descended into a fugue state. Dissociated and unaware, the president and his administration are still capable of expressing themselves as if it all makes complete sense, only contributing to their bewilderment. A fugue state should not be confused with cognitive dissonance, the tension produced when irreconcilable ideas are held at the same time and their incompatibility is overcome by denial. In a fugue state, a trauma creates a kind of amnesia in which the sufferer is incapable of connecting to his past. The impairment of judgment comes in great part from a denial of distress. Bush's fugue state involves the reiteration of a failed formula as though nothing has happened. So he proudly reasserts the essence of his Bush doctrine: Our acts are independent of other countries' interests. And he adds new corollaries: Other nations must forgive our unacknowledged mistakes even if we threaten their national security. To this, Bush overlays cognitive dissonance: Our policy is working; it just needs more time. Thus the incoherent becomes coherent.
Bush's amusing gaffes should not divert attention from the gravity of his underlying decline. Though his verbal hilariousness has been present since the beginning, his miscues, misstatements and mistakes now highlight a foreign policy in utter disarray.
Upon meeting Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican last weekend, Bush presented him with a gift of a wooden cane carved with English words. When the pope asked the president what they were, Bush told His Holiness, "The Ten Commandments, sir." To sir? With love?

In Rome, on June 9, a reporter asked Bush about setting a deadline for Kosovo independence. "What? Say that again?" "Deadline for the Kosovo independence?" "A decline?" "Deadline, deadline." "Deadline. Beg your pardon. My English isn't very good." Bush then declared, "In terms of the deadline, there needs to be one. This needs to come -- this needs to happen." The next day, asked when he would set a deadline, he replied, "I don't think I called for a deadline." Reminded of his previous statement, Bush said: "I did? What exactly did I say? I said, 'Deadline'? OK, yes, then I meant what I said."
Before offering that tongue twister, Bush quite deliberately upset German Chancellor Angela Merkel's proposal for climate change at the G8. She put before the summit a program for carbon limits and an emissions trading system supported by, among others, Tony Blair, as his final gesture to burnish his reputation before he leaves office on June 27. Bush countered with a proposal for voluntary limits that would have to be approved by China, India and other major industrial countries that would not agree. In short, Bush's program was no program at all, except as a gambit to push aside Merkel's. With that, Bush demolished the possibility of any positive plan emerging from the summit. He also deprived Blair of a last achievement. Were it not for his relationship with Bush and support for his Iraq policy, Blair would not be leaving Downing Street. He has sacrificed his career to Bush's fiasco. His advice on the reconstruction of Iraq ignored, his advocacy grew more passionate. From whom much has been asked, nothing has been given.

While Bush was undermining traditional allies, Russian President Vladimir Putin was making child's play of him. Bush's proposal to put tracking stations for a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic gave Putin his opening. In response, he offered a radar site in Azerbaijan to be jointly operated by the United States and Russia. Bush had deployed the wrong tactic on behalf of the wrong strategy. Bush's missile shield has not been proved to work, has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and has an uncertain purpose. Is the plan meant to reassure eastern European nations of the former Warsaw Pact, Donald Rumsfeld's "new Europe," against Russia, or is it a short-term ploy to rally support in the one region in the world that still likes Bush because of deep residual pro-Americanism? If Bush intended to persuade Putin to temper his authoritarianism, he only succeeded in antagonizing the Russian leader. As Bush's "freedom" agenda has collapsed, he has reverted to a Plan B for a new ersatz Cold War. His ham-handed move allowed the adroit Putin to change the subject and corner him. Meanwhile, the engagement of Russia in areas of mutual interest -- containing Iran -- languishes.

In Iraq, Bush's policy is now to arm all sides in the sectarian civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. He claims to be devoted to nation building, which he previously dismissed, while he presides over a mass exodus of 2 million Iraqis, upholds law and order while holding tens of thousands of prisoners without due process, and conducts a "surge" of troops to secure the capital city of Baghdad whose main effect has been to facilitate its ethnic cleansing. The Iraqi government, for its part, has not met any of the benchmarks in reforming its laws demanded by the United States as the sine qua non of continuing support.

And where in the world is Condoleezza Rice? While Bush was in Europe, the secretary of state was at home. Instead of attending the summit, she delivered a speech at the Economic Club of New York, announcing that the new doctrine of the administration henceforth should be called "American realism." Until that moment, we were supposed to refer to it as "transformational diplomacy." Rice, the former realist turned neoconservative fellow traveler, seemed to have come full circle. But what was it exactly that she was doing with her rhetorical adjustment?

Rice's frenetic but feckless diplomacy in the Middle East has been fruitless. She is unwilling or unable to break beyond the bounds that Bush establishes, forbidding relations with Syria, for example, and thus guaranteeing her failure.

As she shuttles endlessly and meaninglessly, neoconservatives within the White House undermine her foredoomed initiatives. Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security advisor for policy, in briefing a meeting of Jewish Republicans, said that Rice's "talks are sometimes not more than 'process for the sake of process,'" the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on May 14. According to Haaretz, "Those attending the meeting of Jewish Republicans understood Abrams' comments as an assurance that the peace initiative promoted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice doesn't have the full backing of President George W. Bush." As she engages in an academic exercise to rebrand empty rhetoric with new empty rhetoric, the neocons continue to create a parallel foreign policy.

Rice contradicts herself but forgets that she has. Bush continues to prattle about "freedom" but cannot remember his benchmarks. Only Dick Cheney remains consistent. The new mission statement is the old mission statement. The new scenarios are the old delusions. Time marches on.

This is Iraq, now that al Sadr is back...

2007-06-13T22:53:00.000-03:00

McClatchy Newspapers report that "The anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is reasserting authority over his movement after disappearing from public view for three months." As driftglass puts it...

On the one side, we are being targeting by the people we “liberated” and who who now clearly want us the fuck out of their country by any means necessary, and we operate hoping that their most powerful leader will somehow not keep kicking us in the throat.

On the other, we now arm and train the same people we overthrew and ousted four years ago, knowing that by night they reconstitute as death squads and kill each other and us.

Because they, too, want us the fuck out of their country.

The Bush regime’s lies and treasonable incompetence have left our armies stranded in a no-win killbox, hostage to forces that hate us, and our futures hostage to events rapidly spiraling beyond our control.

And the only solution being sold by from the back of the Dear Leader’s snake oil wagon is an even bigger bottle of Clap!Even!Louder!

His lapdog Republicans in Congress are so terrified of debating the rank criminality that now reeks off of Abu G’s Justice Department and erupts daily into the media like gangrene that they refuse to allow it to come to a vote.

And he personally is so terrified of having to answer hard questions about his failed war that he has refused to re-nominate Peter Pace to his own jobb; the same man in which the Dear Leader placed such limitless confidence less than two years ago. Effectively firing Pace just to make sure that nobody in his Administration who knows the dirty, tragic realities of what is really unfolding in Iraq is ever put under oath in front of a Congress that is no longer permitted to function as Dubya’s personal shit-scraper, glory hole and getaway car.

While in the wilds of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden laughs and laughs and laughs.

All of which is brought to you courtesy of the Republican Party, because in the Age of Dubya, you can either be a Good American or a Good Republican, but you can no longer be both.

Libby gets 30 months, Republicans get a touch of the vapours

2007-06-13T22:44:00.000-03:00

This is the latest installment of What Digby Said:

I don't know why Scooter is so damned special that everybody in Washington is having the vapors over the fact that he may have to do time. (I know if I were Jack Abramoff, I'd be a little bit miffed that nobody is lifting a finger after the tens of millions I'd funneled to all my good friends.)I mused yesterday that it was because the town elders are circling the wagons around one of their own, and I think that's part of it.

But it appears that this is actually something more and it's beginning to smell very ugly to me. The political and media establishment are making an explicit argument that high level Republicans really should be held to a lower standard than other Americans --- the exact opposite of the argument they made in the Clinton impeachment, where they insisted that a non-material lie about a private sexual matter in a dismissed case was so important that it required a duly elected and successful president be removed from office. Perhaps the problem is simply that the it's a capitol full of lawyers, who tailor their arguments for each individual case. Unfortunately, the only client seems to be the Republican party.

The fact is that the Libby case is simply not partisan. The Democrats were completely out of power and had nothing to do with it, so the cries of witchhunt and prosecutorial misconduct are absurd on their faces. Patrick Fitzgerald is the kind of prosecutor Republicans usually revere --- a by-the-book believer in the letter of the law. Yet they are making these specious arguments anyway and they are quite likely, in my estimation, to make them work, through sheer insider power.

I frankly never cared if Scooter did time or got probation or did community service. But nice people get jail sentences that seem harsh every day in this country and all of Scooter's friends are the first ones to say the judge should throw away the keys. Certainly, George "please don't kill me, please don't kill me" Bush is not known for his compassion when it comes to matters of sentencing. So all this special pleading is especially distasteful coming from these people.

I'm not big on blog triumphalism, but if there is one thing we bring to the table it's that our distance from that milieu brings some perspective to it. And from where I sit we have a decadent elite who rule on behalf of a political party that finds authoritarianism quite appealing --- as long as they aren't personally subject to it. Pardon me for thinking that might not be the best thing for the country.

Bush: Iraq like Korea

2007-05-30T23:48:00.000-03:00

Josh Marshall:

The president says so many stupid things about Iraq that it's sort of hard to know which ones to focus on. But in purely political terms if no others I would think the president's critics would want to focus in on what the White House said about how long the president thinks US troops should stay in Iraq.

By saying that Korea is the model for the US military presence in Iraq, the president is saying that he envisions the US military presence in Iraq continuing for many decades into the future.

Or let's put that in more stark terms, for most of you reading this post, the president envisions US troops remaining in Iraq long after you're dead.

Talking about drawdowns in late 2007 or by the end of 2008 is basically a joke, in other words. Countries can really only think on forty or fifty year horizons. So what this means is that the US military presence in Iraq is permanent.

As TPM Reader DS made clear in the email we posted earlier [see below -- bill], there's only one goal that makes sense of that strategy. And that is to permanently dominate the cluster of oil fields in southern Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. Nothing to do with democracy, as though that needed saying. But also nothing to do with terrorism. We're permanently occupying Iraq to lock down the world oil supply.

But all that is commentary. The headline is clear enough to get the message out: the president wants US troops in Iraq for decades to come.
TPM Reader DS follows up on the White House's new Korea/Iraq analogy ...

I have believed, from the beginning – though I have always hoped to be proven wrong – that the Bush White House (i.e. Cheney) has had as its principal goal in Iraq the establishment of a permanent military presence in that country. The neocon dream of transforming the region (from the PNAC manifesto and elsewhere) has always envisaged such a military presence. These people see America’s long-term national interest in terms of (overwhelmingly, though not exclusively) energy security and therefore the control of energy supplies. This means control of the flow of oil from the Middle East. [Relying on a mutual-interest-between-sovereign-states approach, à la western Europe, is considered naïve when it comes to Arab countries.] Everything else – from the initial justifications for the war to the current rhetoric-of-the-day (we have to ensure stability, we have to fight them there or they’ll follow us here, etc.…) – is aimed at making such control, by means of long-term military presence, possible. When 9/11 took Saudi Arabia off the table as a viable base, some other country had to be found – but of significant size. Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, et al. are simply not big enough.
Cheney, in particular, is vicious enough to contemplate a long-term presence at the cost of a daily toll in the dozens or hundreds as well as ongoing domestic opposition. He’s convinced that the US needs to be there to keep an eye on – and always to be in a position to intervene in the affairs of the region, with particular attention to the the Arabian Sea oil fields, but also the Caspian Sea oil and gas fields. Bin Laden was the publicly accepted casus belli for the invasion of Afghanistan; but finding Bin Laden is irrelevant to the true purpose: to be on the ground, to have bases, to be able to project force in the region. [Remember that, within a month or two of 9/11, Bush and his people are known to have talked about going into Iraq in order to control the southern oil fields. This was explicit, and it has been widely reported, through seldom dwelt upon as explanatory of the whole enterprise.] Similarly with Iraq: WMD, democracy, removing a tyrant, fighting Al Qaeda,… all offered for public consumption, but none of any real importance to the White House and all irrelevant to the actual goal. When the public rationales evaporate, or when events make the achievement of any of the rationales still being offered in fact impossible of achievement, the White House will still keep troops on the ground – even when their presence makes the stated goals even harder to achieve (e.g. reconciliation between Iraq’s factions), the White House will find some other justification for staying, no matter how weak. Because staying is itself the objective.

Occam’s Razor supports me in this; the creation and maintenance of a long-term military presence is the only policy objective that unifies, aligns and makes sense of everything Bush has done. If any other goal is posited, his policies and actions are incoherent; but if this goal is posited, they all make sense.

An unfortunate confluence

2007-05-26T16:20:00.000-03:00

The always readable Barbara O'Brien has this to say about the disgraceful (and now disgraced) Paul Wolfowitz:

As for Wolfie’s part, do read Sidney Blumenthal’s recent article, “Wolfowitz’s tomb.”

With the end of the Cold War the cold warrior without a mission fastened onto a new id´e fixe. As the undersecretary of defense for policy in the first Gulf War, serving under Secretary Dick Cheney, Wolfowitz had concurred in the decision not to pursue Saddam Hussein to Baghdad after expelling him from Kuwait. He had been present at the Feb. 21, 1991, meeting where that policy was approved and uttered not a skeptical or contrary word. But when the elder Bush was defeated, Wolfowitz in exile became the champion of regime change. He developed an elaborate utopian scheme based on the overthrow of Saddam — instant democracy in Iraq, inciting democratic revolutions throughout the Middle East, accompanied by the equally sudden quiescence of the Palestinians, creating peace for Israel while doing away with any negotiations involved in a peace process. And he imagined Saddam, a brutal enough tyrant, as an octopus, his tentacles manipulating nearly every horror. Even after every available piece of evidence and trials proved otherwise, he continued to insist that Saddam was behind the Oklahoma City and 1993 World Trade Center bombings. …

… [After becoming a deputy to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld] Wolfowitz set to work at once to implement his master plan. He brought up overthrowing Saddam in the first National Security Council meeting with the president, eight months before 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Wolfowitz hammered on the idea of striking at Iraq.

Less than a month before the invasion, for which his intelligence operation had provided the justifications (later all disproved as sheer disinformation), Wolfowitz was approaching an ecstatic state of being. He could see the shape of things to come through the fog of war. On Feb. 19, 2003, in an interview with National Public Radio, he held forth on the new dawn: “But we’re not talking about the occupation of Iraq. We’re talking about the liberation of Iraq … Therefore, when that regime is removed we will find one of the most talented populations in the Arab world, perhaps complaining that it took us so long to get there. Perhaps a little unfriendly to the French for making it take so long. But basically welcoming us as liberators … There’s not going to be the hostility … There simply won’t be.”

Five months later, on July 23, 2003, after his trip to Iraq, Wolfowitz was still in an elevated state. “There is no humanitarian crisis,” he said. “There is no refugee crisis. There is no health crisis. There has been minimal damage to infrastructure — minimal war damage … So, fortunately, much of what … we planned for and budgeted for has not proved necessary.”

Historians often write about the founding of our country with a reverent wonder — isn’t it remarkable that so many giants among men could have been alive at the same place and the same time? We still defer to the Founders respectfully — Washington. Jefferson. Hamilton. Madison. Franklin. A fortunate confluence. But on 9/11 we had the unfortunate confluence of the worst pack of losers and idiots that ever ran a government — Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. Rice. Names which will in infamy.

Shameful betrayal

2007-05-24T23:56:00.000-03:00

What Keith says:

Pathetic

2007-05-24T23:04:00.000-03:00

House passes Iraq funding bill without timelines. Truly pathetic!

Dem Leadership: If We'd Confronted Bush On Iraq, White House Would Have Criticized Us

By Greg Sargent

With the House set to vote on the no-timelines Iraq War funding bill later today, The New York Times provides a glimpse into the thinking among top Dems that led to the current proposal:

...in recounting the leadership’s thinking, senior Democrats and other officials said that by early this week they had concluded there was no alternative but to give ground to President Bush despite their view that he had mishandled the war and needed to be put under tighter Congressional rein.

Democrats said they did not relish the prospect of leaving Washington for a Memorial Day break — the second recess since the financing fight began — and leaving themselves vulnerable to White House attacks that they were again on vacation while the troops were wanting. That criticism seemed more politically threatening to them than the anger Democrats knew they would draw from the left by bowing to Mr. Bush.

Oooooooooooooo, scary! If we didn't give Bush his way, the White House would have criticized us!

Sen. Russ Feingold says: This Is No Time To Back Off

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) responded today to congressional war critics who dropped the Iraq timeline because they feared that “White House attacks” would be “politically threatening“: “Tell that to the families who lose their loved ones in the next few months while we’re dillying and dallying.”

Speaking on MSNBC, Feingold took aim at the “toothless supplemental” currently working its way through Congress. Calling the bill “weak” and “a step backward,” Feingold said, “This is no time to back off. We have ratcheted-up the pressure successfully in the last few months.”

He warned lawmakers seeking to delay action on Bush’s Iraq strategy until September that the White House will use the opportunity to prolong the war even further:

You know what’s going to happen in September? They’ll bring General Petraeus back and he’ll say, Just give me until the end of year. I think things are turning around. And then we’ll be out of session, come back in late January, February, and the fact is a thousand more troops will lose their lives in a situation that doesn’t make any sense and it is hurting our military, hurting our country. This should not wait till September.

The 27% Problem

2007-05-22T21:29:00.000-03:00

The incomparable Driftglass writes:

Left in complete darkness we will infer patterns and causalities. Left there a little longer, we will invent Gods and angels and a retinue of ritual that must be performed to keep our deities happy.

Left longer still and we’ll start killing each other over the imaginary differences among our make-believe Olympians.

[...]

Ms. Tucker has just laid her finger directly on one of the two most important stories of our time; that a mass of the American public (27% of the population? 75% of the GOP? A horde perhaps the size of modern Germany?) aren’t simply mistaken or misunderstood or misled by villainous men.

They are unfit citizens. They are Bad Americans.

They are the evil gift that keeps on giving. The residue of centuries of impacted racism, Dominionism, homophobia and assorted other spices, set ablaze by to warm the electoral ambition of everyone from George Wallace to George Bush.

They are pandered to and flattered by Fox teevee and Hate Radio, and they are all gathered conspicuously together under the same political banner.

There is finally no other explanation that will bear the weight of the fact of the short, catastrophic arc of the Bush Administration and the longer, brutal malevolence of the 30 Year Long March of the Wingnut GOP.

The good men have long since fled the Party. The barely adequate men have fled the Party.

Hell, anyone who can swirl a shotglass-full of synapses and not come up with “Commie fem’nazi queers” as the punchline to every joke and the answer to every question has fled the Party.

The honest answer to the question raised by Frank Luntz – “Why do Republicans keep winning if their candidates are so shitty?” – is that the GOP base is morally subhuman at a deep and probably incurable level.

That selling fascism to brownshirts and racism to intractable bigots is like any other kind of narcotics trafficking. Like selling hillbilly heroin to Limbaugh. Users are not necessarily going to score out loud and in public, but they don't exactly need a whole lotta persuasion to get them to buy and mainline the lethal shit the Right is slinging.

Luntz’s “solution” is the most recent GOP Talking Point being handed around the Conservative Pundit glory holes as eagerly as Hillary snuff porn anime: That Liberals need to stop being so “angry”.

When your party is led by outright lunatics and liars, traitors and thieves…

When after thirty years your base can only take nourishment suckling on the poison that oozes from Cheney’s bile sacs, Coulter’s fangs, Hannity’s tongue, O’Reilly’s wheezing pores, Falwell’s ingrown soul…

When your official cult house organs have been spewing raw hatred it the noosphere for thiry years…

...and your advice is that the other side who have finally had it with playing nice with these moral locusts are” too angry”?

It boggles the mind.

But then again, Luntz isn’t stupid; he knows perfectly well that he serves evil. He simply doesn’t care. Selling out his country is a good buck, and as an obedient whore he will form his mouth to say whatever it is his paymasters wish him to say.

However this is the problem:

What do you do when 1/4 of the people in your country are the enemy of your country?

We cannot be a United State when 1/4 of the nation does not believe in Uniting. When they believe only in capitulation and conquest?

When their point-of-view – their superstitious, eliminationist, Hate Radio-barbered point-of-view – is impervious to reason, compassion or mercy,

Because while they may not possess the basic cognitive and empathic functions the Good Lord saw fit to endow flatworms with, they do stomp and scream and vote, and it is high time – long past time – to start speaking of the 27% that props up the GOP as The Problem.

A Problem every bit as destructive as global warming, and that requires every bit as much of a sea-change in attitude and a generational perspective.

[...]

While the lies and half-truths provide some kind of parasitic sustenance for the half-wits that prop up this President, his War and his Party, this firehose of unabashed McCarthyesque propaganda has also flattened most of “legitimate journalism”

No wonder they have always been so baffling, smugly at ease supporting a President who lied the nation into war and disaster: This is a Party that always, always, always fixes the facts around its bigotries.

Because no one with a Big Voice will challenge them. No one with Big Ink will push back on them even slightly.

These droolers are allowed to decide deep in the reptilian pylons of its Unitary brain who it will hate, who it will fear, who it will scapegoat and to which Dear Leader it will swear its eternal fucktard fealty unchallanged by the press. And then cherry-pick history, philosophy and the Bible for snips and sentence fragments that support its deranged ideology. Romp across the headlines for seven years, screeching for Bill Clinton’s blood like macaques going through heroin withdrawal, because no one in the MSM will make it their business to report on this as a story.

This Party of God who fall alternately and obediently into cheering ranks and leaden, smirking silence as their Dear Leader runs through everything of value in this nation like a junkie going through a fistful of stolen credit cards, and not a single soul in all of Punditville has balls hairy enough to stand up and say: “These people are what is wrong with America”.

It is as if a nuclear reactor were melting down in the apse of the National Cathedral and the press corps had decided to take a collective pass on it and focus on the pretty cherry blossoms.

For, y’know, “balance”.

And in doing so, willfully abandon the work of reporting on the most important story of our generation to latter day pamphleteers. To bloggers, who bang away at the perimeter of this vast and tragic darkness with little more than a handful of thoughtful readers, a second cuppa coffee and some occasionally pungent language.

Instead of journalism, we get Captain Obvious …

What Digby said...

2007-05-22T20:53:00.000-03:00

Abortion is a difficult subject and Digby tackles it after reading, yet another, argument that goes: if you can't be sure when life begins, then you should err on the side of enforced pregnancy.

This is not the first time I've heard this argument and it's always quite compelling to hear a man make such a stark and simple logical argument about something which others seem to find so complicated. I suspect that is because there is one person involved in this great moral question who is rarely mentioned in such pieces. In fact, if you read the whole thing you will find that this man has managed to write an entire article about fetuses, pregnancy and abortion without even noting in passing the fully formed sentient human being involved so intimately in this that the whole argument takes place inside her body.

The "great moral issue" of when life begins is fascinating I'm sure. Much more fascinating than whether the state can compel people to bear children against their will. But I guess that's an argument for another day. Today, we are talking about the meaning of "life" and that has no bearing on the vessel that contributes its DNA and lifeblood, incubates it for nine months inside itself and potentially bears its siblings. Certainly that vessel's personhood and agency is irrelevant to the much greater issue of blastocyst rights. Why even bring it up?

After abortion, why not address Iraq. Digby has this to say:

The Bush administration and its neocon muses have long said that the most dangerous thing the US could do would be to give the terrorists a victory by "proving" that we don't have the ballocks to stand and fight. They firmly believe that a failure to kick ass and take names, going all the way back to Reagan and the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, is what caused the Islamofascists to think they could attack us. They know this because bin Laden has trash talked this line on various tapes and missives over the years so it must be true. (He wouldn't lie, would he?)

And when they hear him saying "bring it" like big dumb bulls they see red and immediately start snorting and stomping the ground and rush headlong into some half baked scheme designed to prove that we can't be intimidated. But what if the Islamoboogeymen are actually waving their capes in front of the big, dumb United States in order to get them to do exactly that?

[...]

Basing your decisions upon your stated enemy's threats and taunts and holding fast so they can't yell "psych!" is not a foreign policy --- it's a WWF advertising campaign. It isn't real and it doesn't address any real problem. The US is the most powerful country on earth and the Islamoboogeymen are not going to take over our government and make us all wear burkas and pray to mecca. Really. Sophisticated thinkers would find solutions to the real problems of islamic fundamentalism and energy dependence and Israel and all the rest rather than launch invasions as PR exercises, but this is what we are dealing with. Marketing is the only thing the Mayberry Machiavellis know.

This isn't some scripted TV "throw-down." It's a serious and complicated challenge and we desperately need to get some people in power who don't depend on "Jack Baur" for their policy prescriptions. Every single day these jokers continue with their little playground game, they make things worse.

Presidential criminality

2007-05-21T20:58:00.000-03:00

It's pretty clear now why A.G. the A-G wanted to keep former Deputy A-G, James Comey, from testifying before Congress. The after shocks of Comey's bombshell are still being felt, yet there is surprisingly little uproar in the media. As Glenn Greenwald wrote Thursday:

There is just no excuse left for allowing the administration to keep this behavior concealed from the country. What James Comey described on Tuesday is the behavior of a government completely unmoored from any constraints of law, operating only by the rules of thuggery, intimidation, and pure lawlessness. Even for the most establishment-defending organs, there are now indisputably clear facts suggesting that the scope and breadth and brazenness of the lawbreaking here is far beyond even what was known previously, and it occurred at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

We are so plainly beyond the point of no return with this criminality. It is now inescapably evident even for those who struggled for so long to avoid acknowledging it. Here is one of the most establishment-friendly voices of the Bush administration proclaiming the Attorney General of the United States to be a chronic liar and accusing the Bush administration -- as part of events in which the President was deeply and personally involved -- of engaging in deliberate cover-up of blatant lawbreaking.

The enormity of the wrong-doing is made clear by Glenn here.

Comey then made clear that he and Ashcroft met, determined that the NSA program lacked legal authority, and agreed "on a course of action," one whereby the DOJ would refuse to certify the legality of the NSA program. Yet even once Ashcroft and Comey made clear that the program had no legal basis (i.e., was against the law), the President ordered it to continue anyway. As Comey said: "The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality."
Amazingly, the President's own political appointees -- the two top Justice Department officials, including one (Ashcroft) who was known for his "aggressive" use of law enforcement powers in the name of fighting terrorism and at the expense of civil liberties -- were so convinced of its illegality that they refused to certify it and were preparing, along with numerous other top DOJ officials, to resign en masse once they learned that the program would continue notwithstanding the President's knowledge that it was illegal.

The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law.

Recall that the only federal court to rule on this matter has concluded that the NSA program violated both federal law and the U.S. Constitution, and although that decision is being appealed by the Bush administration, they are relying largely on technical arguments to have it reversed (i.e., standing and "state secrets" arguments) and -- as has been true for the entire case -- are devoting very little efforts to arguing that the program was actually legal or constitutional.
Yet even once Bush knew that both Aschcroft and Comey believed the eavesdropping was illegal, he ordered it to continue anyway.

[...]

Even The Washington Post Editorial Board -- long tepid, at best, concerning the NSA scandal -- recognizes that Comey has offered "an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source." And as I documented yesterday, these "shocking" revelations were long concealed due to Alberto Gonzales' patently false assurances that the testimony of Comey and Ashcroft -- which Democrats on the Senate Judiicary Committee sought last year -- would not "add to the discussion." What more glaring and clear evidence do we need that the President of the United States deliberately committed felonies, knowing that his conduct lacked any legal authority? And what justifies simply walking away from these serial acts of deliberate criminality? At this point, how can anyone justify the lack of criminal investigations or the appointment of a Special Counsel? The President engaged in extremely serious conduct that the law expressly criminalizes and which his own DOJ made clear was illegal.

[...]

The NSA scandal has always presented two equally critical but completely distinct issues: (1) the eavesdropping was against the law; and (2) precisely because it was conducted in secret, we do not know whether the administration engaged in the eavesdropping abuses which the law (by requiring judicial oversight) was designed to prevent.
Proposition (1) has long been established, and ought to result in serious consequences by itself. But we still do not know the answer to (2) -- were these eavesdropping powers used for improper purposes? -- and whether anyone in Congress yet knows is still a mystery. But Comey's testimony yesterday adds some obviously significant information that ought to heighten the concern about whether there was such abuse.

There is one other aspect of Comey's testimony worth highlighting. This is part of what he said when describing the scene in Ashcroft's hospital room:
I tried to see if I could help him get oriented. As I said, it wasn't clear that I had succeeded. I went out in the hallway.
Spoke to Director Mueller by phone. He was on his way. I handed the phone to the head of the security detail and Director Mueller instructed the FBI agents present not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances.
Comey repeatedly stated that it appeared that Ashcroft was not even oriented to his surroundings. Compare that to Tony Snow's disgustingly dismissive defense yesterday of the behavior of Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales: "Trying to take advantage of a sick man -- because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn't work?"
But more revealingly, just consider what it says about this administration. Not only did Comey think that he had to rush to the hospital room to protect Ashcroft from having a conniving Card and Gonzales manipulate his severe illness and confusion by coercing his signature on a document -- behavior that is seen only in the worst cases of deceitful, conniving relatives coercing a sick and confused person to sign a new will -- but the administration's own FBI Director thought it was necessary to instruct his FBI agents not to allow Comey to be removed from the room.

Comey and Mueller were clearly both operating on the premise that Card and Gonzales were basically thugs. Indeed, Comey said that when Card ordred him to the White House, Comey refused to meet with Card without a witness being present, and that Card refused to allow Comey's summoned witness (Solicitor General Ted Olson) even to enter Card's office. These are the most trusted intimates of the White House -- the ones who are politically sympathetic to them and know them best -- and they prepared for, defended themselves against, the most extreme acts of corruption and thuggery from the President's Chief of Staff and his then-legal counsel (and current Attorney General of the United States).

Does this sound in any way like the behavior of a government operating under the rule of law, which believes that it had legal authority to spy on Americans without the warrants required for three decades by law? How can we possibly permit our government to engage in this behavior, to spy on us in deliberate violation of the laws which we enacted democratically precisely in order to limit how they can spy on us, and to literally commit felonies at will, knowing that they are breaking the law?

How is this not a major scandal on the level of the greatest presidential corruption and lawbreaking scandals in our country's history? Why is this only a one-day story that will focus on the hospital drama but not on what it reveals about the bulging and unparalleled corruption of this administration and the complete erosion of the rule of law in our country? And, as I've asked many times before, if we passively allow the President to simply break the law with impunity in how the government spies on our conversations, what don't we allow?
If we had a functioning political press, these are the questions that would be dominating our political discourse and which would have been resolved long ago.

The President's Secret Program: A Timeline

2007-05-19T16:12:00.000-03:00

A TPM Reader provides us with the timeline.

We’re starting to see a timeline emerge on the confrontation between the White House and Justice on domestic spying.

The first date to mark on your calendar, I think, is October 3, 2003. That’s when the Senate confirms Jack L. Goldsmith as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. In June, with Goldsmith’s nomination before the senate, John Yoo had left his job as the deputy at OLC to return to his teaching gig at Boalt.

Fast forward to December 11, 2003, when Comey is confirmed as Deputy Attorney General. He immediately assumes a more aggessive posture than his predecessor, Larry Thompson. The Times reports this morning that “with Mr. Comey’s backing, Mr. Goldsmith questioned what he considered shaky legal reasoning in several crucial opinions, including some drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.”

But that was just the beginning. Thompson had not been authorized access to the details of the NSA program. But, reports the NYTimes, “Comey was eventually authorized to take part in the program and to review intelligence
material that grew out of it” (1/1/06). He set Goldsmith to the task of sorting through the program’s dubious legality. Goldsmith’s “review of legal memoranda on the N.S.A. program and interrogation practices became a source of friction between Mr. Comey and the White House,” the Times reports today. And we know from Comey’s testimony that by “the White House,” we mean, principally, Dick Cheney and David Addington.

Up until this moment, Ashcroft had been signing off on the program every 45 days. That means his signature was last required in late January, shortly after Comey assumed his post, and perhaps even before he’d been authorized access to the program. Suddenly, the March 11 date comes into clearer focus. For the first time, trained and qualified attorneys within the Justice Department had conducted a careful review of the program. Comey took the evidence he had gathered to Ashcroft, as he testified on Tuesday: “A week before that March 11th deadline, I had a private meeting with the attorney general for an hour, just the two of us, and I laid out for him what we had learned and what our analysis was in this particular matter.” By the end of that meeting, Ashcroft and Comey had “agreed on a course of action,” to wit, that they “would not certify the program as to its legality.”
Thereupon follows the late-night drama that’s already been exhaustively chronicled. I’d simply note that one of the people in that hospital room was Goldsmith. On March 11, the President made the determination that the program was appropriate and lawful, and reauthorized it without Justice signing off.

On the morning of March 12, the president, faced with open revolt, backed down. The Times reported on what happened next last year: “The White House suspended parts of the program for several months and moved ahead with more stringent requirements on the security agency on how the program was used, in part to guard against abuses. The concerns within the Justice Department appear to have led, at least in part, to the decision to suspend and revamp the program, officials said. The Justice Department then oversaw a secret audit of the surveillance program” (01/01/06). Comey’s testimony refines that a little. He claims that it was a matter of weeks before the program was brought into compliance.

There’s a sad coda to this story. On June 17, 2004, Goldsmith announced his resignation after scarcely a year on the job.

What to make of this long narrative?

Simply this. The warantless wiretap surveillance program stank. For two and a half years, Ashcroft signed off on the program every forty-five days without any real knowledge of what it entailed. In his defense, the advisors who were supposed to review such things on his behalf were denied access; to his everlasting shame, he did not press hard enough to have that corrected.

When Comey came on board, he insisted on being granted access, and had Goldsmith review the program. What they found was so repugnant to any notion of constitutional liberties that even Ashcroft, once briefed, was willing to resign rather than sign off again.

So what were they fighting over? Who knows. But there’s certainly evidence to suggest that the underlying issue was was whether constitutional or statutory protections of civil liberties ought to be binding on the president in a time of war. The entire fight, in other words, was driven by the expansive notion of executive power embraced by Cheney and Addington. And here's the kicker - it certainly sounds as if the program was fairly easily adjusted to comply with the law. It wasn't illegal because it had to be; it was illegal because the White House believed itself above the law.

PS: There’s hope we’ll find out what was really going on. I’d highlight this portion of Specter’s remarks from the hearing: “Mr. Comey, it's my hope that we will have a closed session with you to pursue the substance of this matter further. Because your standing up to them is very important, but it's also very important what you found on the legal issue on this unnamed subject, which I infer was the terrorist surveillance program. And you're not going to comment about it. I think you could. I think you could even tell us what the legalisms were. Doesn't involve a matter of your advice or what the president told you, et cetera. But I'm going to discuss it with Senator Leahy later and see about pursuing that question to try to find out about it.”

And then Leahy, in response: “We will have a closed-door hearing on this. Senator Specter and I are about to have a briefing on aspects of this.” Can’t wait to hear what leaks out of that.

Alter-nate Reality

2007-05-12T00:48:00.000-03:00

Glenn Greenwald shares a classic contre-temps wherein one person claims that his speculation is more valid than another's facts. It would seem that Jonathan Alter's slap at Jebediah Reed gets him smacked down in return.

Glenn:

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, at The Huffington Post, in a post last night:
There's one dimension of the blogosphere that never ceases to amaze me: Some people disbelieve nearly everything they read in the "mainstream media" -- and believe nearly everything they read online. Never mind that the ground-breaking reporting on which they base their opinions often comes from the MSM publications like Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
That's because until now, few online publications have invested enough money to undertake original reporting, which is much more expensive than mouthing off at home. I'm happy to see that the Huffington Post is moving to change that disparity by hiring top-flight and highly experienced reporters like Tom Edsall.

I'm also glad to see the magazine Radar sending young reporters like Jebediah Reed out to cover politics. The more the merrier. Unfortunately, Reed is a bad reporter, and his bad reporting of a 30-second sidewalk conversation involving me, Edsall and former Sen. Mike Gravel is now rocketing around the web. . . .

Why do I bore you with this? Only to reinforce the point to be careful of believing everything you read. Just because it's in Radar or online somewhere doesn't make it true. The same goes for reading me or Tom Edsall or others who happen to have worked at first-rate news organizations.

But our batting averages--and David Broder's--are a helluva lot higher than the Jebidiah Reeds of the world, which is only one of the reasons why the readers of Huffington Post are lucky to have Edsall aboard.
When I first saw that Alter had written about this Radar article and called Reed a "bad reporter," I assumed he was going to claim that Reed conveyed the Gravel/Edsall/Broder exchange inaccurately. But he didn't. Instead, he offered this, one of my absolute most favorite statements in a long time:
I don't remember [Edsall] calling Broder "the voice of the people," but if he did, it was said with a pleasantly arch tone, neither serious nor sarcastic.
And while there's exactly no one on the face of the earth that grizzled reporters like us would "matter of factly" call "the voice of the people" (No, not even Mike Gravel), Edsall and I both know that whatever disagreements we may have with recent Broder columns, he is an honest reporter and no ivy tower thumb-sucker.
Alter, Edsall and Broder all work for "first-rate news organizations," while Reed works for some crappy low-level thing on the Internet that Tim Russert never even heard of. Therefore, the way that Alter fantasizes that the conversation would have occurred had he remembered it (which he doesn't) is more reliable than Reed's first-hand account of it.

Here is Reed's response: An Open Letter to Jonathan Alter

Radar is perfectly happy to ignore the occasional ribbing, but cite us for bad journalism and we might just break form to respond. In this edition of "Minding the Store," Jebediah Reed addresses criticisms of his recent piece on Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel by Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter ...
Dear Jonathan,

The last thing I had in mind when I wrote that profile of Mike Gravel at the Columbia rally was getting into a Web tiff with you. I've read and enjoyed many of your columns. So when you called me out as a "bad reporter" in your HuffPo screed, it would have been traumatic if I wasn't sure my reporting from that day was bulletproof. Fortunately, it is.

It's kind of funny, isn't it, all this hubbub over one little remark? But reporter Tom Edsall did say that David Broder is the "voice of the people," and he did say it as I reported. In the conversation I documented, in fact, Gravel was accusing Broder of not believing in popular democracy. He referred to the Iraq war and mentioned Broder's book, Democracy Derailed, which, as I understand it, argues that ballot initiatives often yield undemocratic results. Gravel, of course, is a huge believer in ballot initiatives. Edsall, without changing the tone of the conversation, said: "He [Broder] is democracy. He's the voice of the people."

It sounds like you might not have heard Edsall, but—scout's honor—it was not said archly. I suppose you can criticize me for replacing a he with a David Broder and not bracketing it. I'll plead guilty to that. But if you doubt my account, you're welcome to pop by Radar HQ and listen to the exchange on tape.
Accusing me of being a bad judge of tone is one thing—accusing me of being unethical is quite another. (Writing defamatory falsehoods—even about online journalists—doesn't seem like a good habit to get into, either.) You say the lunch was off the record and that I accepted those terms and then broke the agreement. Here's what really happened: I made arrangements with Mike Gravel's press agent, Alex Colvin, to meet up with the candidate at the Columbia rally as part of a feature story for Radar. When the rally was finished, Alex invited me to join the senator for lunch. That invitation was extended to me as a reporter, not as a friendly guest at an off-the-record sit-down with Jonathan Alter. Throughout the lunch, you might remember, I had my tape recorder running and sitting on the table as I was taking notes. The question of what was on and off the record came up precisely once: You were talking about a segment you'd done about John Edwards for Today. You noticed that I had written something down and asked me not to use what you had just said, noting that the Edwards piece hadn't aired yet. I said no problem, made a somewhat exaggerated gesture of putting down my notebook, and, of course, abided by that agreement. I picked up my pad and started taking notes after the conversation turned back to Gravel.

Perhaps it didn't occur to you that there was any news value in what was said at the lunch. It was, by and large, an amicable and low-key affair. But I can't feel guilty for not abiding by retroactive efforts to move it all off the record. And here's the truth: My piece was not remotely unfair to anyone involved, including Edsall.

Sideswiped indeed.

Sincerely,

Jebediah Reed

PS—Thanks for the cup of black bean soup! (Actually, please thank General Electric.)

The roots of the netroots

2007-05-12T00:26:00.000-03:00

Atrios again...

Some of the discussion has been about when and why blogs and the netroots emerged. I'd say, roughly, online liberal activism began with Move On, the online liberal web generally grew in response to the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 recount/selection*, and the liberal blogosphere as a semi-definable distinct movement emerged in 2002 in response to the glorious summer of war.

Political blogging generally was a post-9/11 phenomenon, headed by the ole perfesser under the name "warbloggers." It was a subculture which consisted mostly of people who were conservative and self-described liberals who knew that the 2nd most serious the country faced was the all powerful The Left, which was generally represented by some anonymous poster on Indymedia, Some Guy With A Sign Somewhere, or occasionally Cythia McKinney. Subsequently a few actual liberals such as myself joined in, and for awhile it was a kind of semi-civil amateur debate club with the ole perfesser, the only person with significant traffic, acting as a one-hand-on-the-scales moderator of the conversation. That brief moment of relative comity faded quickly as the Iraq war debate began and people like me were regularly accused of treason, of supporting dictators, of "being on the other side," by our very civil non-swearing friends on the right side of the blogosphere.

The uniting feature of all of the catalyzing events - whitewater and impeachment, selection, the Iraq war - was that they were moments when it became clear that there was something tremendously flawed with our various elite institutions and of "the liberals" which supposedly represented people like me in them, especially in the mainstream media. They represented tremendous failures of our elite classes.

There were almost no anti-war voices in the media, and the few who were present were basically ridiculed. There were some "war skeptics," but they didn't really question the basic premises of the war - the existence of WMD, the concept of preventive war, the flowers which would follow - but instead nitpicked around the edges. You know, we need more allies, we need the UN's blessing, maybe we need more troops. There were no mainstream media voices who actively opposed the war. Joe Klein did in his heart, he claims, but in public he supported it.

Opposing the war seemed to many of us to be a perfectly non-crazy thing, yet that viewpoint was either completely ignored or actively ridiculed. Even many of our so-called liberals didn't simply support the war or fail to oppose it, but actively "opposed the opposers" by joining in with conservatives to attack and marginalize any one who dared suggest that their Great and Glorious Crusade might be a bad idea. There were only us dirty fucking hippie bloggers.

Radicalizing Moment

2007-05-12T00:23:00.000-03:00

Atrios tells us about his

In the post below I had meant to prominently include the 2000 election recount/selection as a cause of a major online lefty boom. While that was the time when I began to turn to the web for news/perspectives I couldn't find elsewhere, it wasn't actually until the inauguration that I finally concluded that something was seriously messed up, and that the problem was the media. I never had any illusions that Supreme Court Justices were noble people above reproach or that politicians could be trusted. I did at some point, however, have the sense that the mainstream media - CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, network news - while imperfect wasn't completely broken. It was the coverage of the inauguration that did it for me.

You may remember that this was a cold and rainy day, truly miserable. Nonetheless thousands of protesters had gathered. However, most Americans would have no idea this was happening. Switching back and forth between coverage by the television networks, and the somewhat more raw footage carried by C-SPAN, it was apparent just how much effort the networks were expending to hide this fact from their viewing public. They would frequently cut away from the parade, provide odd camera angles, and do anything to maintain the illusion that the coronation was proceeding blissfully. The following day, for its inauguration coverage, the New York Times published a photo of George W. Bush walking the parade route. As discussed in Dennis Loy Jonson's The Big Chill, this was an entirely staged photo. Bush had been unable to follow in the tradition established by Carter and carried on Ronald Reagan, Bush's father, and Bill Clinton. The presence of the protesters prevented this, and it wasn't until after Bush had left the public parade route, and was behind a barrier, that he could briefly hop out of the limousine and wave for the cameras. The Times had established a practice which impacted much of the media's reporting on the activities of the Bush administration. They signaled a willingness to report things not as they necessarily were but as the administration wished to present them.

Peace of Paris 2

2007-05-08T23:36:00.000-03:00

Driftglass reflects on America's roots and sees therein the seed of an idea for Iraq.

File under: Shut up, sign it and get off the stage you horrible little man.

In honor of the Queen Mum’s visit to our troubled land, it seemed a good time to reflect on the fact that, once upon a time, we were the oppressed.

We were the ones who didn’t like it one bit that the mightiest power on Earth was shoving us around and telling us how to live from the safety of thousands of miles away.

We were the ones with oppressors who fought to bend us in directions of their choosing against our will year after year because the though of losing us was too militarily, culturally and economically abhorrent to contemplate.

And even though we shared a common language, a common faith, a common history and heritage with our oppressors – and even though our oppressors thought they had perfectly valid and rational reasons for everything they did -- the desire to get their boot off our throat was strong enough that we took up arms against them.

We were the ones who shot from the weeds; who chivvied and harassed our occupiers. We were the ones who lost almost every battle but won the war because we finally made it clear to the English that defeating the American Insurgency from the other side of the world was either impossible, or would come at such a cost that it could not be borne.

We were the ones who were so indelibly affected by the experience that we encoded protections against it into our Constitutional DNA:
The Third Amendment to the United States Constitution"
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
We were the ones who made it clear to our invaders that we were home and they were not and that, in the end, settled it.

And so, because intelligent, practical men concluded there was no hope of a Military Solution to the problem of the American Rebels, a Political Solution was found.

We all gathered around a table and signed a treaty. The Treaty of Paris. And – Surprise! -- the British Empire did not fall.

It is a remarkably sturdy document; so much so that with a minimum of tweaking and fiddling (and trading the original Article that dealt with where and how Americans could catch and dry fish for a newer one that deals with how the problem of foreign fighters might be adjudicated) I think we could repurpose the 1783 agreement into something we and the Iraqis could sign virtually intact.

A Black Matter for the King

2007-05-08T22:18:00.000-03:00

Deanie Mills writes:

But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all "We died at such a place"--some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it, whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.--Shakespeare, King Henry V, Act IV, Scene I.

For all the patriotic flag-waving and yellow-ribbon magneting, there is nothing particularly patriotic or romantic about death in combat.

Even if you are lucky enough to survive the IED or the sniper or the rocket propelled grenade that killed your buddies or blew off their legs and hands and arms and burned them, you have to be there for them. You have to pull them from burning vehicles when their skin slips off in your hands like a glove. You have to tie a tourniquet around spurting stumps to save their lives.

You have to watch them die.

It's not pretty, when a buddy dies in combat. Sometimes they fight to live, and you can see them fighting, and you can see the young medic working valiently to save them, and you can see the life leave their eyes.

And then you have to go back to where you lived together, and help gather up their photographs of wife and children or mom and dad and girlfriend, and the letters from home they have saved, and other things.

And then you have to live.

You have to go home and hug your family and know that they won't be able to, and you have to go on with your life as best you can. You have to live the life they would have lived if only they could have. You have to honor them--as best you can--with your life.

And that's a pretty heavy burden for a kid barely out of his or her teens.

According to the March/April 2007 issue of Mother Jones magazine (sorry, I had this copied over in Word and did not save the link):

94% of soldiers & Marines in Iraq have been shot at

86% know someone who was seriously injured or killed

77% have shot at or directed fire at the enemy

68% have seen dead or seriously injured Americans

51% have handled or uncovered human remains

48% said they were responsible for the death of an enemy combatant

28% said they were responsible for the death of a noncombatant

It's not enough that they are exposed to intense combat conditions 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end, but this is the first war in our history where they have not been permitted to rotate in and out of a rear area where some measure of rest and recreation was possible.

This is the first war I know of in our history where you don't just serve your deployment. You serve it knowing you will have to go back, and the whole time you are "home" you are training for more combat for your next deployment, and then you have to go back.

And then you have to go back.

There is no time, I told my son, for you guys to recuperate from the traumas you have witnessed, before you have to go back.

According to Benedict Carey, writing for the New York Times:

The Iraq war, experts say, is a new kind of war--a 360-degree battle space with no front or rear, no safe zone outside the large fortified bases, and the compounded physical uncertainty of roadside bombs and mortar attacks. The lack of any control over these factors, and the generally limited sense of progress, only intensifies the stress for troops.

"You can endure a lot of physical and mental exhaustion as long as you feel you're having an impact, you're accomplishing something and that you have some control over your situation," said Dr. Andy Morgan, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University who has worked extensively with regular and Special Operations troops. "If you don't feel you have any of that, you quickly get to a point where the only thing that's important is keeping yourself and your buddies alive. Nothing else much matters."

As pointed out by one of the finest war correspondents I know, Tom Ricks of the Washington Post, the stress of multiple deployments increases with each new tour of duty.

Marriages are cracking up, kids are suffering, and the odds of a soldier or Marine showing more symptoms of post traumatic stress are increasing exponentially--not to mention the danger of suffering a traumatic brain injury from getting "blown up" and then sent back to duty the next day.

And yet, at the same time, unbelievably, the Bush administration has slashed benefits for mental health care of active duty troops and combat veterans.

That's not even the beginning of the outrages.

According to Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe, the fancy new task force created by the DoD to study the best and most effective way of protecting troops from vicious IED's, has been--like everything else--outsourced to so many contracing firms for so many millions of dollars with virtually no progress being made while, at the same time, operating in virtual secrecy--that the Democrats in Congress are getting ready to crack that nut and find out what the hell is going on.

Meanwhile, yet another defense contractor gets rich on the blood of American troops. God bless America, eh?

This whole bullshit Bushspeak about "supporting the troops" is OVER.

The troops themselves want out--ask them. "We can't stay in Iraq for the next thousand years." said one soldier on CBS news.

Over on Morgan Pardee's incomparable blog entry, she wrote about the personal cost of the recent news flash that six more soldiers died in a fiery IED explosion in the Diyala province. Those men were friends of her son's. His wife was shopping in a mall with the fiancee of one of the men who died. The poor girl got a cellphone call telling her about the death, and she collapsed in the middle of the mall.

One can only wonder what others were thinking as they moved around her on their way to the latest sale at Sears.

Like Shakespeare, I am afeared there are few who die well that die in battle.

My only hope in life these days is that it will be a black matter, indeed, for the king--and all his enablers--that led them to it.

World Wide War

2007-05-06T19:11:00.000-03:00

The incomparable driftglass watches Newt on teevee and explains it all as only driftglass can...

Newt: We are caught up in a World Wide war. Against an enemy that is evil evil evil. There was a 12 year old kid who beheaded someone! And this couple who wanted to use their baby to smuggle a bomb.

driftglass: And there were White high schoolers at Columbine who committed mass murder. A White Christian milk-truck driver who walked into an Amish schoolhouse and started shooting children.

A loyal Militia Conservative Christian and embodiment of Newt’s own “The Government is Evil” ideology named McVeigh who blew up an entire building.

There is Eric Rudolph.

There is Fred Phelps.

By Newt’s reasoning, each of these incidents involving White, Christian lunatics who either volubly advocate violence or commit actual violence demands to be stitched together to “prove” that we are really in a World Wide War against violent White American Christian extremism.

So if I understand correctly, by Newt’s reasoning, we need to nuke Alabama.

Like, immediately.

Newt: Whether it’s Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran…

Because the racist Republican doctrine that dare not quite speak its name is as simple as this: The Great Swarthy Hordes are all in it together!

Like the army of bigoted wingnuts for whom he speaks, to Newt they’re all ragheads. They’re all the same. They all believe the same thing. They’re all savages. They all need to be “defeated”. And steered by this White Power, imperialist doctrine, we lashed wildly out at a non-radical people who never, ever threatened us.

Who happened to be sitting on an ocean of oil.

And then proceeded to fuck up their country, turning it into a gaping, bloody wound.

And now, four years later, for reasons which are unfathomable to me, charlatans and fascists like Newt still have an open invitation to sit in front of the nation’s cameras and opine as if they were not insane.

To calmly cite the chaos that their own perverse ideology nourished and metastasized as “evidence” that we should continue doing exactly what got us into this quagmire in the first place.

Because without the Viagra of an Endless Cold War to engorge the wee dabs of shriveled gristle between their legs, the Conservatives have nothing left in the sock drawer to stuff down their Grand Old Party Pants but corporate feudalism, gay dread and Negrophobia.

Under-briefed, lazy, arrogant, stubborn

2007-05-06T18:43:00.000-03:00

Brad Delong reminisces about the pass that the media gave Incurious George who was "under-briefed ... "lazy"... "arrogant" ... "stubborn".

It was the summer of 2000 when I began asking Republicans I know – generally people who might be natural candidates for various sub-cabinet policy positions in a Republican administration – how worried they were that the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, was clearly not up to the job. They were not worried, they told me, that Bush was inadequately briefed and strangely incurious for a man who sought the most powerful office in the world. One of President Clinton’s problems, they said, was that the ceremonial portions of the job bored him – and thus he got himself into big trouble.

Look at how Bush had operated as president of the Texas Rangers baseball club, they said. Bush let the managers manage the team and the financial guys run the business. He spent his time making sure the political coalition to support the Texas Rangers in the style to which it wanted to be accustomed remained stable. Bush knows his strengths and weaknesses, they told me. He will focus on being America’s Queen Elizabeth II, and will let people like Colin Powell and Paul O’Neill be America’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

By the summer of 2001, it had become clear that something had gone very wrong. By that point, Bush had rejected O’Neill’s and Christine Todd Whitman’s advice on environmental policy, just as he had rejected Alan Greenspan’s and O’Neill’s advice on fiscal policy, Powell’s and Condoleezza Rice’s advice on the importance of pushing forward on negotiations between Israel and Palestine, and – as we learned later – George Tenet’s and Richard Clarke’s advice about the importance of counterterrorism.

A strange picture of Bush emerged from conversations with sub-cabinet administration appointees, their friends, and their friends of friends. He was not just under-briefed, but also lazy: he insisted on remaining under-briefed. He was not just incurious, but also arrogant: he insisted on making uninformed decisions, and hence made decisions that were essentially random. And he was stubborn: once he had made a decision – even, or rather especially, if it was glaringly wrong and stupid – he would never revisit it.

So, by the summer of 2001, a pattern was set that would lead British observer Daniel Davies to ask if there was a Bush administration policy on anything of even moderate importance that had not been completely bollixed up. But if you relied on either the Washington Post or the New York Times, you would have had a very hard time seeing it. Today, it is an accepted fact that the kindest thing you can say about the Bush administration is that it is completely incompetent, which is the line now taken by hard-line Bush supporters like the National Review and the commentator Robert Novak.

Why didn’t the American press corps cover the Bush administration properly for its first five years? I really do not know. I do know that the world cannot afford to rely again on America’s press for its information: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So I appeal to all of you working for newspapers, radio, and television stations outside the United States: it is to you that we – including those of us in America – must look to discover what our own government is doing.

There are honorable exceptions. Ron Suskind. Paul Krugman. McClatchy--the news service and organization formerly known as Knight-Ridder. David Wessel and the crew at the Wall Street Journal's Washington Bureau got medieval on economic policy missteps early. The Financial Times was measured but accurate, and didn't follow the strategy of keeping its good reporters off the front page.

Doesn't anybody notice the battleship in the room?

2007-05-06T18:29:00.000-03:00

Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch notes:

But something was missing -- as it is regularly from American reporting on the U.S./Iranian face-off. The Bush administration is, at this very moment, sending a third aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, to the Persian Gulf. Although the three carriers and their strike forces will add up to a staggering display of American military power off the Iranian coast, American journalists aren't much impressed. Evidently, it's not considered off the diplomatic page or particularly provocative to mass your carrier battle groups this way, despite the implicit threat to pulverize Iranian nuclear and other facilities. Journalistically speaking, this is both blindingly strange and the norm on our one-way planet. If Iranians send the materials to make some roadside bombs into Iraq (as the Bush administration, at least, continually claims is the case), it's a huge deal, if not an act of war; but put the most powerful fleet in history off the Iranian coast. No sweat.

Tom quotes Michael Klare:

President Bush keeps insisting that he would like to see these "diplomatic" endeavors -- as he describes them -- succeed, but he has yet to bring up a single proposal or incentive that might offer any realistic prospect of eliciting a positive Iranian response.

And so, knowing that his "diplomatic" efforts are almost certain to fail, Bush may simply be waiting for the day when he can announce to the American people that he has "tried everything"; that "his patience has run out"; and that he can "no longer risk the security of the American people" by "indulging in further fruitless negotiations," thereby allowing the Iranians "to proceed farther down the path of nuclear bomb-making," and so has taken the perilous but necessary step of ordering American forces to conduct air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. At that point, the 80 planes aboard the Nimitz -- and those on the Eisenhower and the Stennis as well -- will be on their way to targets in Iran, along with hundreds of TLAMs and a host of other weapons now being assembled in the Gulf.

The Tip of the Iceberg

2007-05-06T18:17:00.000-03:00

Booman tells us what the U.S. Attorney scandal is all about in case you are confronted with a right-winger who, feigning ignorance, says: I don't understand what all the fuss is about. This is what it's about... and it's only the tip of the iceberg.

If you are Jerry Lewis, the chairman of the House Appropriations committee, and you have a federal prosecutor sniffing up your ass, what do you do? Well, one thing you can do is hire a staunchly Republican law firm to represent you. And then you can get that law firm to hire the prosecutor. Suddenly, you have not only disrupted the investigation, but you have all the dope on the case that is being developed against you.
But it isn't that simple. Jerry Lewis needed to give the prosecutor a little nudge, just so she knew her choice was between unemployment and enrichment.

Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department staff member in charge of the firings, told investigators last month in still-secret testimony that Harriet Miers, the White House counsel at the time, had asked him more than once about Ms. [Debra Wong] Yang. He testified, according to Congressional sources, that as late as mid-September, Ms. Miers wanted to know whether Ms. Yang could be made to resign. Mr. Sampson reportedly recalled that Ms. Miers was focused on just two United States attorneys: Ms. Yang and Bud Cummins, the Arkansas prosecutor who was later fired to make room for Tim Griffin, a Republican political operative and Karl Rove protégé.
Harriet Miers, you might remember, was George W. Bush's choice for the Supreme Court. Of course, Bernie Kerik was Bush's choice for Director of Homeland Security even though he was a mob-connected, incompetent crook. Go figure.
What's emerging in the Attorney scandal is a clear pattern. All the prosecutors appear to have been either pursuing corruption scandals or failing to pursue baseless voter fraud cases. And no one in the Department of Justice will take responsibility for making up the list. There is only one suspect left in the Justice Department that has not denied responsibility (Monica Goodling), and she has taken the fifth amendment. The problem is that Ms. Goodling was the liaison to the White House. If she made up the list we can be sure that it was dictated to her by someone in the White House.
Back on August 13, 2005, after Jack Abramoff was indicted, the Washington Post reported:

In Washington, a task force that includes the Justice Department, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Interior Department's inspector general has been picking through thousands of Abramoff's e-mails and lobbying records for more than a year to determine if any favors or gifts to lawmakers amounted to bribes for official actions. The two Senate committees -- Indian Affairs and Finance -- are investigating Abramoff's representation of tribes and the alleged abuse of charities for political purposes.
Legal analysts agree that this first indictment is typical of government prosecutions of people who are under investigation in more than one case. The first indictment sends a signal that prosecutors are serious, and then they typically wait to see if lawyers want to begin discussions about possible cooperation. If not, prosecutors often bring another set of indictments.
"What they're looking for is how many names can they give -- and by names I mean members of Congress or other prominent people -- and what kind of message do they want to send," said Mike Missal, a former government lawyer now practicing white-collar-crime defense in Washington. "If just Abramoff goes down, it is not that big a deal for prosecutors. If he brings down members of Congress, it is a much more noteworthy case. That would be the ultimate target here."
It was on December 14, 2005 that the House filed the conference negotiated Patriot Act renewal that contained the language allowing Bush and Gonzales to bypass Senate confirmation for filling prosecutor vacancies. It's no accident that this all got started in the fall of 2005. Washington was swirling with rumors that the Abramoff scandal was going to take out as many as a dozen Republican congresspeople. Look at this article from the Washington Post's Susan Schmitt that appeared on December 21, 2005.

Former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, facing trial on fraud charges Jan. 9 in Florida, is negotiating a possible deal with the Justice Department, in which he would agree to plead guilty and cooperate in the wide-ranging political corruption investigation focused on his dealings with members of Congress and executive branch officials, people familiar with the talks said last night.
Abramoff would provide testimony about numerous members of Congress and their staffs if he and the Justice Department reach an agreement, the sources said. Negotiations have been ongoing for several months, people knowledgeable about the discussions said, but pressure is mounting because of the pending trial.
Abramoff's co-defendant in that case, Adam Kidan, agreed last week to plead guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud, and to testify against his former business partner. Abramoff would face significant jail time in any plea deal, the sources said.
You think the timing of this was all an accident?
What we have here is a massive conspiracy that was hatched to cover up rampant corruption that was raging all throughout the Republican Party. They did their best to limit the fallout by interfering in the investigations of Congressmen Doolittle, Renzi, Jerry Lewis, fallout from Duke Cunningham, etc.
Meanwhile, they transformed the civil rights division at DOJ from an outfit that defends voting rights to an outfit that pursues baseless voting fraud cases.
It was a criminal process from beginning to end, and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Slam Dunk

2007-05-06T00:18:00.000-03:00

Bob Somerby debunks the "slam-dunk" myth with a little time-line analysis.

We pre-discussed this recent history on Wednesday, so we’ll keep it short and sweet today. But we think the following point is worth noting: George Tenet was surely right when he said, on Sixty Minutes, that his “slam dunk” comment in December 02 didn’t drive the nation to war. That said, it’s important to recall the major role this silly narrative played in Bush’s re-election.

How silly was the “slam dunk” anecdote in Bob Woodward’s ballyhooed Plan of Attack? The book appeared in April 2004. The weekend before the book was released, the Washington Post ran a 2800-word front-page report; it summarized what Woodward’s book said. Written by reporter William Hamilton, it was the nation’s first real glimpse of the book’s contents. Hamilton started like this:
HAMILTON (4/17/04): Beginning in late December 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Right away, Hamilton said that Bush’s war planning had been “fueled in part” by Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark. A few grafs later, he went into more detail. But this passage, which referenced the “slam-dunk” meeting, made no earthly sense:
HAMILTON: [Colin] Powell agreed to make the U.S. case against Hussein at the United Nations in February 2003, a presentation described by White House communications director Dan Bartlett as "the Powell buy-in." Bush wanted someone with Powell's credibility to present the evidence that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, a case the president had initially found less than convincing when presented to him by CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin at a White House meeting on Dec. 21, 2002.
That’s the meeting where Woodward says Tenet saved the day by telling Bush it was all “a slam-dunk.”

In his front-page Post report, Hamilton highlighted this 12/02 meeting—but his narrative made no apparent sense. By December 21, 2002, Bush and Cheney had been already touring the country for four months, warning voters about Saddam’s WMD, saying there was “no doubt” he had them and wanted to use them against the U.S. and its friends. But according to Hamilton’s report (see above), Bush had “initially” found the case for WMD unconvincing—at that December meeting, which took place four months after this push began! So no, this didn’t make much sense. The real question was the following: Why did Bush and Cheney start making their claims back in August 2002? What sort of briefing did they receive before that? Why did they start telling the world, without qualification, that Saddam had those weapons—and was planning to use them? It was then, back in August, when they started making these claims. What had led Bush to think, all the way back then, that the case was as strong as he said?

But that obvious question wasn’t asked, because Hamilton’s account of this matter took hold. Pundits cited the ”slam dunk” anecdote more than any other part of Woodward’s book. The anecdote painted Tenet as the loudmouth bad guy—the guy who oversold the weapons. And not only that—in his account of the “slam dunk” meeting, Woodward included this pleasing passage, in which a conscientious Wise Leader urged caution on Tenet—several times:
WOODWARD: The president told Tenet several times, “Make sure no one stretches to make our case.”
Gag me! It was right out of a Boy’s Life bio—so Woodward typed it on up. Several times, Bush warned Tenet against stretching the intel—four months after he himself began stretching it! Other silly, Bush-friendly anecdotes littered Woodward’s book—perhaps the price one pays now for big access.

If you read Woodward’s book very carefully, you could possibly torture the real rationale for that 12/21/02 meeting. Most likely, this was the meeting at which the Admin began planning Bush’s State of the Union and Powell’s UN presentation. But pundits (including Hamilton) read the anecdote differently, and the image they portrayed became a big help to Bush on the trail. Had the Bush Admin stretched the intelligence? The question was already being asked as Campaign 04 unfolded. But Woodward’s book seemed to show something different—a good, wise leader being misled by a wild and crazy CIA head. Chronologically, the passage made no earthly sense. But Bush’s job approval was still at 50 percent, and the press corps agreed not to notice.

In the past few weeks, Tenet has complained about the way the public got played by that silly “slam dunk” anecdote. (Cheney was still pimping this pleasing nonsense on Meet the Press last September.) Whatever else Tenet may have done, he has surely been right in this critique. Woodward put a silly anecdote right at the heart of his blockbuster book. Hamilton built the Post’s news report around it, and the bullsh*t ran downhill from there.

Wise Leader Bush had wisely urged that no one—but no one—should stretch the intelligence! For the full text of Woodward’s “slam dunk” anecdote, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/25/05.

Go for it!

2007-05-05T21:06:00.000-03:00

Greg Sargent thinks that the MSM (this time the WaPo) is misrepresenting public opinion. Who could have believed it?

In a front page Washington Post article today by Jonathan Weisman and Lyndsey Layton about how the Democratic Congress is faltering, the reporters quote Leon Panetta making the case that Dems had better watch out and not be too confrontational with the White House:

[...]
But let's put that aside and ask a larger question: Is it really true that the public is fed up with partisanship and "sick and tired of the fighting," as Panetta says, and as David Broder and Joe Lieberman keep lecturing?

No doubt one could dig up polls showing that people don't like generically defined "fighting" or "gridlock." But here's another way to look at this: The polls show clearly that the public strongly supports efforts by Dems to confront Bush both on Iraq and on corruption. Check out the numbers in this recent Pew poll:

Do you think Democratic leaders in Congress are going too far or not far enough in challenging George W. Bush's policies in Iraq, or are they handling this about right?

Too far 23%
Not far enough 40%
About right 30%
Don't know/Refused 7%

So 70% say that Dems are being appropriately or even insufficiently aggressive in challenging Bush. Multiple polls show that solid majorities back Dem efforts to end the war -- efforts which by nature are confrontational and basically partisan, since the GOP more or less (with a few exceptions) continues to back Bush's Iraq policies. What's more, multiple polls have also found that solid majorities support Dem efforts to probe GOP malfeasance -- also efforts which by nature are confrontational and partisan.

Bottom line: Asking whether the public opposes generic "partisanship" in the current environment is utterly meaningless. Here's the deal: Bush and the GOP are doing a bunch of things. The American people don't like those things, and want them changed. But Bush and the GOP just keep on doing them, anyway. So Dems are the ones now trying to force Bush and the GOP to change. In other words, the choice the public faces isn't between "fighting" and "gridlock" on the one hand, and "bipartisan cooperation" on the other. Rather, it's between (a) accepting the disastrous Bush/GOP status quo; and (b) backing Democratic efforts to change it. And the public supports the latter. Even though those efforts are partisan and confrontational. Is that really so hard to fathom?

A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away.

2007-05-02T22:52:00.000-03:00

I have written before about the problem that the right wing faces wherein they could not get elected if the voters knew what they would be voting for. For this reason, it is vital for the wingers to confuse the voting public about its true agenda. But every once in a while a true believer makes the mistake of telling the unvarnished truth. Glenn Greenwald, points out one such candid piece and it is appalling.

A Harvard professor of government actually writes in that bastion of right-wingedness, the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, that:

Much present-day thinking puts civil liberties and the rule of law to the fore and forgets to consider emergencies when liberties are dangerous and law does not apply [...] In some circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law," but "the rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule."

These people are such cowards! They are so willing to throw away freedom when faced with the slightest threat to their security. Wasn't it Franklin who said something like: those who would give up their freedom for security, do not deserve, nor will they have, either.

Glenn writes in conclusion:

That is why -- as jarring as it is -- it is actually necessary to ask presidential candidates whether they intend to exercise the power to imprison American citizens with no charges of any kind. The dominant political movement in this country believes in that power and has defended and exercised it. Mansfield's beliefs may be twisted and tyrannical and radical and profoundly un-American. But they are also the beliefs that have propelled our government for the last six years and -- absent some serious change -- very well may continue to propel it into the future.

[...]

Much of the intense dissatisfaction I have with the American media arises out of the fact that these extraordinary developments -- the dominant political movement advocating lawlessness and tyranny out in the open in The Wall St. Journal and Weekly Standard -- receive almost no attention.
While the Bush administration expressly adopts these theories to detain American citizens without charges, engage in domestic surveillance on Americans in clear violation of the laws we enacted to limit that power, and asserts a general right to disregard laws which interfere with the President's will, our media still barely discusses those issues.

They write about John Edwards' haircut and John Kerry's windsurfing and which political consultant has whispered what gossip to them about some painfully petty matter, but the extraordinary fact that our nation's dominant political movement is openly advocating the most radical theories of tyranny -- that "liberties are dangerous and law does not apply" -- is barely noticed by our most prestigious and self-loving national journalists. Merely to take note of that failure is to demonstrate how profoundly dysfunctional our political press is.

Bush vetoes Iraq funding bill

2007-05-01T23:56:00.000-03:00

"Mr. President, you can veto a bill. But you can't veto the truth."

Mission Accomplished

2007-05-01T23:35:00.000-03:00

Four years ago today, GWB gave his "Mission Accomplished" speech. Do you think anyone is celebrating this anniversary today... except, maybe, Osama Bin Laden & friends?

- tell us the mission

No Prodigal Son, He

2007-05-01T01:06:00.000-03:00

Tristero has this to say about the book-touring George Tenet:

This fine open letter protesting Tenet's recent book implicitly makes an important point about redemption and forgiveness. You earn it, you don't cash in on it. And you do so not merely by writing a self-serving book that cashes in on the present (well-deserved) disgust with the Bush administration's bloody and totally immoral war, but you take the symbolic action of returning the medal you received from your fellow scoundrels and you also take the very real action of refusing to profit from your cowardice and culpability. In short, Tenet needs to behave like a truly honorable human being instead of a Bush-league hustler.

Whether or not this moral dwarf ever redeems himself isn't that important, however. More to the point is that we shouldn't waste any more time listening to him. That has been one of the major problems of the US in the 21st Century. Both the national government and the public political discourse have been dominated by people who are so utterly worthless they make one appreciate Paris Hilton all the more for the qualities of her incisive mind.

It's high time that those who were right all along about Iraq have a significant national voice. The country should be listening to - ie, the networks should be running numerous interviews with - Brady Kiesling, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, and many, many others. And no one should be bothering to pay attention any further to the likes of Peter Beinart, Kenneth Pollack, George Tenet, Francis Fukuyama, Willaim Kristol, Rich Lowry, George Will, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Ledeen. Whether or not they now recognize they were wrong, the fact is that they were when it counted most. Time to listen to those who got it right from the start.

Fat chance. But I thought I should mention it.

Would that it were so...

2007-04-29T03:10:00.000-03:00

Glenn Greenwald writes about a Genuine Political Sea Change:

Taken together, these two seemingly unconnected incidents reveal: (a) just how radical, extremist and dishonest are the people who have been running this country for the last six years, the whole Bush-led neoconservative Republican edifice loyally supported by most of the "conservative" movement, and (b) outside of the hard-core Bush followers and the stuck-in-2002 Beltway media establishment, there is a rapidly growing recognition of (a) in this country, which is beginning to engender a very potent sea change in political opinion and political power.
And most critically of all, the joint forces of the Beltway media and the right-wing machine have been almost completely impotent in trying to stem the tide. No matter what they do, public anger with the president, his party and the war just continues to grow.
[...]
This is the sea change America needs so profoundly, and there are many signs that it is emerging and growing in strength. The 2006 election -- a truly crushing defeat for the President's political movement -- was but a glimpse of it, and the amount of wrongdoing and sleaze that has been revealed in just three months of real Congressional oversight is but a small sampling of what is to come.

Most of what has occurred in this country under the Bush presidency has been effectively concealed -- mostly due to a broken, corrupt media and a malfeasant Congress -- but all of it is beginning to emerge, and the consequences will likely be as extreme as the corruption and deceit itself have been.

Because Media Matters

2007-04-29T03:07:00.000-03:00

Jamison Foser at Media Matters hits the nail on the head with this one.

Washington Post reporter and columnist David Broder is widely known as the "dean" of political journalists. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has been named "Best Newspaper Political Reporter" by the Washington Journalism Review, and ranked as "Washington's most highly regarded columnist" by editorial page editors and by members of Congress in a Washingtonian magazine survey.

According to his Washington Week biography, Broder "has been called 'the high priest of political journalism' by author Timothy Crouse, 'the unchallenged "dean" of what many political reporters like to think is their "priesthood" ' by U.S. News, and 'probably the most respected and influential political journalist in the country' by columnist Richard Reeves. Esquire said Broder 'has few challengers as the most influential political journalist in the country,' and media critic Ron Powers on CBS-TV said 'Broder is not famous like Peter Jennings, he's not glamorous like Tom Brokaw, but underneath that brown suit there is a superman.'"

The accolades for Broder have shown no sign of slowing down in recent years: his colleagues routinely speak of him in the hushed, awed tone they typically reserve for John McCain and Joe Lieberman. NBC's Tim Russert -- himself often described as the nation's most influential journalist -- calls Broder "the most objective and respected reporter I know in this town." In 2005, Russert praised Broder's "superb" analysis and noted that he had appeared more often on Meet the Press than any other guest -- nearly 400 times in all. Just this week, the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza placed Broder alongside the late David Halberstam as "titans of journalism." Conservative pundit Bill Kristol says things like "I disagree with David Broder on this, which means I'm probably wrong..." While still working at The Washington Post, Politico executive editor Jim VandeHei wrote "Broder is the best of the best. His columns are fair and illuminating."

It is clear what political journalists say about Broder. But what does Broder's exalted position atop the media food chain say about the state of political journalism?

***

Broder's assault this week on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid touched off a new round of criticism of Broder's work. Twice this week, Broder lashed out at Reid over Reid's comments about the Iraq war. On Monday, Broder suggested that Senate Democrats might dump Reid as their leader, telling XM Radio listeners that "the Democrats are gonna have to have a little caucus and decide how much further they want to carry Harry Reid," accusing Reid of a "bumbling performance," and saying Reid is an embarrassment to the party. Broder went on to claim that "every six weeks or so there's another episode where he has to apologize for the way in which he has bungled the Democratic case."

As Think Progress noted, "It's apparently irrelevant [to Broder] that Reid's views are shared by President Bush's regular military adviser Henry Kissinger, or senior U.S. military officials, or the majority of the American people."

And Greg Sargent reported, "[I]t looks as if Broder completely butchered his facts in asserting that Reid has had to apologize 'every six weeks.' I just checked with Reid's office, and they told me in no uncertain terms that Reid has not apologized for any of his remarks during his first four months or so as majority leader. He certainly hasn't apologized for the 'war is lost' comment."

But Broder was just getting started. In his April 26 Post column, Broder compared Reid to embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, claiming that Reid, like Gonzales, is "a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance" and asserting that there is a "long list of senators of both parties who are ready for these two springtime exhibitions of ineptitude to end."

But Broder didn't name a single senator of either party to support his contention. Indeed, the entire Senate Democratic Caucus responded by sending a letter to the Post in which they praised Reid as an "extraordinary leader who has effectively guided the new Democratic majority through these first few months with skill and aplomb."

In claiming that Reid is as much an embarrassment as Gonzales, Broder cheated a bit: He not only distorted Reid's comments, he glossed over Gonzales' failings -- a complete description of which would have made the comparison laughable. Broder made only passing mention of Gonzales, downplaying his involvement in the scandal surrounding the Bush administration's purge of federal prosecutors, and omitting any mention of other Gonzales controversies.

In fact, Broder has written nearly nothing about Gonzales since he became attorney general, despite his involvement in several high-profile controversies. In his March 29 column, Broder wrote that Gonzales "has given his president plenty of reasons to fire him," noting "the Justice Department ... has been reduced in stature and has lost the trust of both the public and its career employees under Gonzales." But Broder didn't bother to explain what Gonzales has done to reduce the DOJ's stature and erode public trust in the Department. Instead, he took a stroll down memory lane, devoting the bulk of the column to Ronald Reagan's decision not to fire his budget director.

And that was the first column Broder had written that so much as mentioned Gonzales in more than a year.

This "dean" of the Washington Press corps, this "titan[] of journalism," this "superb" analyst, this "most influential political journalist in the country," this "superman" thinks that the attorney general of the United States should be fired; that he has reduced the Justice Department in stature and caused both the public and career DOJ employees to lose trust in the Department.

But this superman won't tell you why. He believes the attorney general -- one of the most important public officials in the nation -- has violated the public trust and should be fired. But he won't use his influence and credibility to explain his case. He won't tell his readers what one of their most powerful government officials is doing wrong. Not even a hint.

***

On October 7, 1969, The Washington Post published a lament by David Broder that the nasty anti-war activists were out to "break" an unfairly maligned president named Nixon:

The likelihood is great that they will succeed again, for breaking a President is, like most feats, easier to accomplish the second time around. Once learned, the techniques can readily be applied as often as desired - even when the circumstances seem less than propitious. No matter that this President is pulling troops out of Vietnam, while the last one was sending them in; no matter that in 1969 the casualties and violence are declining, while in 1968 they were on the rise. Men have learned to break a President, and, like any discovery that imparts power to its possessors, the mere availability of this knowledge guarantees that it will be used.

It may seem unfair to take advantage of the benefit of hindsight to note the absurdity of defending Richard Nixon from unfair attacks. But that probably wasn't the first time Broder displayed highly questionable judgment, and it certainly wasn't the last.

One of the most revealing statements Broder -- or, perhaps, any political journalist -- has ever made came in 1998. In November 1998, after nearly a year of public opinion polls showing, basically, that people liked Bill Clinton and wanted the Lewinsky investigation to just go away, and of the Washington journalist/pundit crowd vehemently disagreeing, the Post published an article by Sally Quinn attempting to explain the disconnect (which lives on to this day).

Quinn famously quoted Broder explaining why the "Washington Establishment" -- which under anybody's definition includes both Broder and Quinn -- was so angry at Clinton: "He came in here and he trashed the place ... and it's not his place."

Broder's implication -- that Washington was his place, not the president's -- is arrogant enough. But Broder's other comment speaks volumes: "The judgment is harsher in Washington. We don't like being lied to."

Try to imagine what would happen if, say, John Kerry made a comment like that. Just try. Try to imagine what the nation's pundit class and political reporters would say about John Kerry if he said that, unlike those immoral rubes out in the rest of the country, Washingtonians don't like being lied to. He would be relentlessly flayed as an arrogant elitist. And Broder would likely lead the charge, declaring that Kerry's "arrogance rankled Midwesterners such as myself."

But John Kerry didn't say it. David Broder did. That's what Broder thinks: He and his Beltway buddies, unlike the rest of you chumps, don't like being lied to. Keep that in mind the next time Broder criticizes a politician for being "arrogant" or "elitist."

You won't have to wait long. Broder can't seem to resist portraying progressives as arrogant elitists. Last year, for example, he described anti-war Democrats as "elitist" -- despite a majority of Americans agreeing with the stance. Being against a war that a majority of your fellow citizens also oppose isn't "elitist." Suggesting that you and your Beltway pals are uniquely offended by lying -- that's elitist.

***

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Broder used his perch at The Washington Post to heckle Al Gore for telling the American people, in detail, what he would do as president. No, we are not making this up. Broder described Gore's convention speech as "a request to step inside a seminar room, listen closely and take notes," adding, "Never has a candidate provided more detailed information on his autobiography and the program initiatives he plans. One more paragraph and he would have been onto the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. ... [M]y, how he went on about what he wants to do as president. ... For all his Washington experience, Gore does not seem to have grasped Bush's point that a chief executive is smart to focus on a few key reforms, rather than dissipating his leadership on a crammed agenda. Or perhaps Gore just felt it necessary to throw a bone to every one of the constituency groups in the Democratic Party."

Broder did write of his "hunch" that Gore's "approach was highly effective -- for what Gore wanted to do." (Indeed, as Bob Somerby has noted, the speech was a success, and Gore's standing in the polls improved afterward.) But Broder also made clear his lack of interest in Gore's details and plans: "I have to confess, my attention wandered as he went on through page after page of other swell ideas, and somewhere between hate crimes legislation and a crime victim's constitutional amendment, I almost nodded off." Even the headline on Broder's column -- "Gore tells all" -- seemed to be a shot at the vice president.

By contrast, Broder had nothing but praise for George W. Bush's 2000 convention speech:

Lifted by an acceptance speech of exceptional eloquence and powered by a party enjoying unusual unity, Texas Gov. George W. Bush embarks on the final stage of his quest for the White House with prospects that almost measure up to his brimming self-confidence.

[...]

[T]he acceptance speech he delivered Thursday night was a success.

It contained almost everything good political rhetoric can provide -- humor, personal warmth, effective jibes at the opposition and glimpses of what his father, the former president, used to call "the vision thing." And Bush had rehearsed it enough to make it his own.

Reading Broder's reaction to Bush's speech, you wouldn't have known whether Bush made mention of a single policy, proposal, or issue in his speech. You would, however, have learned that "Bush is seen by the public as a stronger leader -- and, by almost any measure, a man more likely to help cure the poisonous partisanship of the capital city."

With a superman like David Broder leading the fight for less substance and fewer details, nobody should have been surprised by Thursday night's Democratic debate, in which moderator Brian Williams asked candidates about haircuts and horse-race polls, and repeatedly dumbed down the debate with questions instructing the candidates to raise their hands in response, or to "say a name or to pass." No details, please -- our titans of journalism might nod off. Just raise your hand and move on.

For those (progressives, at least) who do dare offer details and facts, Broder is quick to deride them as know-it-alls. "Gore tells all," Broder mocked in 2000. Then, in 2006, he wrote, "Bush was elected twice, over Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry, whose know-it-all arrogance rankled Midwesterners such as myself." That same year, he similarly took Hillary Clinton to task:

For those who remember the former first lady's effort at comprehensive health-care reform in 1993-94, the scope of her energy initiative is a throwback to those days. She called for the creation of a Strategic Energy Fund, financed in part by taxes on oil company profits, and a National Institute of Energy, with a multibillion-dollar bankroll for financing innovative conservation and efficiency plans.

She offered her proposal with the same self-assurance that she had brought to the health-care debate -- a tone that suggested that "if you just listen carefully to all the things I can tell you on the basis of the study I have given this subject, you will know exactly what to do."

Well, at least Broder is consistent: he doesn't like "know-it-alls"; too many details, and he's bound to fall asleep.

Well, maybe "consistent" isn't the word. Earlier this month, he wrote:

Obama's soaring rhetoric has left some of his audiences hungry for more substance from the senator. That was the case at a March 24 health-care forum in Las Vegas, where Obama promised to achieve universal coverage as president but had to admit that -- unlike former senator John Edwards of North Carolina -- he had not yet formulated a plan for getting there. And it was the case again Wednesday, when he was one of seven candidates addressing several thousand members of the Building and Construction Trades, AFL-CIO, at their convention in Washington.

Got that? Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton? Know-it-alls. Barack Obama? Light on substance. George Bush? Just right.

***

Like Brian Williams, we're running short on time, so we'll move to the lightning round:

In 1998, Broder suggested President Clinton should resign, apparently because he "he may well have lied to a federal grand jury." Read that again: Broder wasn't even sure if he thought Clinton lied to a federal grand jury, but thought he should resign. Because maybe he lied. About an affair.

But in 2006, Broder wrote that President Bush "has proved to be lawless and reckless. He started a war he cannot finish, drove the government into debt and repeatedly defied the Constitution." Did he think this "lawless and reckless" president who "repeatedly defied the Constitution" should resign? If he thought so, he did not tell us. Broder believes his president is a lawless man who repeatedly defies the Constitution -- yet this superman, this titan, this great and influential man will not say it is time for the president to step down. Now, if Bush "may well have lied" about sex ... then, perhaps this titan would be stirred to speak out a little more boldly.

Broder has repeatedly and disingenuously defended his window-peering coverage of the Clintons' marriage, despite having previously denounced such journalism. He hasn't entirely abandoned his earlier stance, though: when asked if he would write a similar article about Republican candidates, Broder replied: "Why would I write such an article? I know of no occasion for that." He is, however, "the most objective and respected reporter" Tim Russert knows.
In 2002, when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a prominent leader in the Republican Party, was forced to step down from his leadership position after suggesting the country would have been better off had we elected a segregationist president in 1948, David Broder explained that the "losers" in the matter were ... Democrats, because four years earlier, they hadn't impeached President Clinton.
In 2005, Broder blamed Democrats -- who were in the minority in both the House and the Senate -- for Congress' failure to conduct oversight hearings. Which, of course, they didn't have the power to do, being in the minority and all. Then, in March 2007 -- just two months into Democratic control of Congress -- Broder complained that the House had "slowed to a crawl," doing little other than "filling time with investigations." Later that month, Broder claimed "Democrats find it easier to investigate than to legislate. ... Accountability is certainly important, but Democrats must know that people were really voting for action on Iraq, health care, immigration, energy and a few other problems. Investigations are useful, but only legislation on big issues changes lives." In yet another March column, Broder warned, "It seems doubtful that Democrats can help themselves ... with more investigations ... At some point, Democrats have to give people something to vote for. People already know what they're against -- the Republicans."

So, when Democrats didn't control Congress, David Broder thought that oversight hearings were good, and blamed Democrats -- who lacked the authority to conduct such hearings -- for their absence. Now that Democrats control Congress, Broder warns Democrats not to conduct oversight investigations.

In 2005, Broder actually touted President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina. 'Nuff said.
In December 2006, Broder praised Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as "stalwarts of economic and national security policy." No, really.
In 2006, he called on journalists to apologize to Karl Rove for suggesting he was part of the campaign to out Valerie Plame, despite the fact that ... Karl Rove was part of the campaign to out Valerie Plame.
In August 2006, Broder warned that if Joe Lieberman was defeated in the Connecticut Senate primary, it would portend general election disaster for the Democrats. Lieberman lost that primary, and yet the Democrats thoroughly trounced the GOP in the fall.
In June 2006, Broder criticized Hillary Clinton for her "shortsightedness" after she had criticized the media for kowtowing to the Bush administration. In arguing that Clinton was off-base, Broder noted a "front-page story" in that morning's Post about the Downing Street Memos, concluding, "Who does she think is doing this work if not investigative reporters? Give us a break." Broder's invocation of a Washington Post article about the Downing Street Memos as evidence that the Post has aggressively reported stories that are bad for Bush seems disingenuous given that even Post Ombudsman Michael Getler and reporters Howard Kurtz and Jefferson Morley acknowledged that the paper was slow to cover the Memo story.
Last September, Broder wrote a column ostensibly about the "moral scale" of the debate over torture that somehow managed to avoid his own newspaper's report, three days earlier, that the U.S. had "secretly whisked" an innocent Canadian citizen to Syria, where he was beaten, forced to make a false confession, and "kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months." Instead, as we explained at the time, "while paying lip service to the 'moral scale,' Broder suggested to the reader that he is kept awake at night by the 'loud' and 'vituperative' statements of bloggers and Democratic congressmen -- rather than by the thought that the Bush administration's pro-torture stance not only results in inhumane treatment of those we torture, but increases the risk of our own troops facing similar treatment from foreign regimes." In that column, as he so often does, Broder expressed confidence that the likes of Joe Lieberman and John McCain -- "these are not ordinary men," Broder stressed -- would step in and put an end to U.S. torture.
Earlier this year, Broder claimed that The New York Times is "not normally solicitous of Republicans' feelings." Broder's attack on the Times was not only a pitch-perfect rendition of a common GOP talking point, it was also clearly false: The Times actually has a "conservative beat" ... but no "progressive beat." That's small change, however, compared to Broder's recent slur that Democrats have little "sympathy for" the military. If this whole "dean of political reporters" thing doesn't work out, Broder can always start a new career as a speechwriter for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Earlier this month, the Post was criticized for running an op-ed by Mary Cheney in which she echoed attacks on Nancy Pelosi made by her father, the vice president, without disclosing the relationship between the two. Despite the fact that the lack of disclosure was apparently a violation of Post policy, Broder declared that it would have been "gratuitous" to include such a disclosure.
In mid-February, Broder predicted a political comeback by President Bush, declaring "he is demonstrating political smarts that even his critics have to acknowledge." Instead, Bush's poll ratings (28 percent approval in the latest Harris poll) remain so dismal that conservative columnists have taken to arguing that the fact that Bush has spent a year in the mid-30s is a good thing, as it demonstrates consistency. No, really. On March 30, Broder was asked about that prediction during an online discussion:

Seattle: Remember your column about President Bush being on the verge of regaining his political footing? Isn't it about time you revisited that tidbit of political prognostication?

washingtonpost.com: Bush Regains His Footing (Post, Feb. 16)

David S. Broder: I remember that column well. It is time to revisit and revise. Stay tuned.

Bush remains as popular as a kick in the head, but rather than revising his absurd prediction, as promised, Broder declares Harry Reid a political incompetent.

Think about where the Democrats were when Harry Reid became their leader in the Senate. Think about where they are now. Think about David Broder's recent prediction of a Bush comeback; his touting of Bush's response to Katrina; his praise for Cheney and Rumsfeld; his claims that journalists should apologize to Karl Rove for saying he did something he did; his call for fewer details and less discussion of policy from candidates; his defense of Richard Nixon; his prediction that if Joe Lieberman lost his primary, Democrats would perform poorly in the general election; his double standards in his coverage of candidates personal lives; his suggestion that Bill Clinton should have resigned because he "may well have lied" about sex; his unwillingness to say that a "lawless" president who "repeatedly defied the Constitution" should step down; his elitist and arrogant statement that he and his pals care more about being lied to than you do; his hypocritical statement that Kerry's and Gore's "arrogance rankled Midwesterners such as myself."

Think about all that, and ask yourself: If you were David Broder, wouldn't you -- just maybe -- think twice before accusing someone else of "bumbling" and "ineptitude"?

Truth

2007-04-26T21:56:00.000-03:00

It was going to take a lot to get me to post something again... and it did. Read what Glenn has to say and watch Bill Moyer's documentary and learn the truth about BushCo corruption and media complicity.

Glenn:

If you didn't watch Bill Moyers' documentary last night regarding the joint, coordinated behavior of our government and its media in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I can't recommend it highly enough. You can watch it here.

For those who have been following these issues, there was no single, specific blockbuster revelation that was not previously known, although Moyers' focus on the superb (and largely ignored) pre-war work of Real Journalists at Knight-Ridder (now at McClatchy) does cast a new light on the profound malfeasance of our most influential media outlets. Most of all, the documentary very powerfully compiles some of the most incriminating facts, and it unapologetically identifies many of the guiltiest and most destructive wrongdoers in our government and in the press.

For that reason, the documentary is -- in one sense -- a very valuable historical account of the corrupt behavior by our dominant political and media institutions which deceived the country into the invasion of Iraq. But on another, more significant level, it illustrates the corruption that continues to propel our political and media culture.

One of the most important points came at the end. The institutional decay which Moyers chronicles is not merely a matter of historical interest. Instead, it continues to shape our mainstream political dialogue every bit as much as it did back in 2002 and 2003. The people who committed the journalistic crimes Moyers so potently documents do not think they are guilty of anything -- ask them and they will tell you -- and as a result, they have not changed their behavior in the slightest.

Just consider that, as Moyers notes, there has been no examination by any television news network of the role played by the American media in enabling the Bush administration and its warmonger propagandists to disseminate pure falsehoods to the American public. People like Eric Boehlert have written books about it, and Moyers has now produced a comprehensive PBS program documenting it. But the national media outlets themselves have virtually ignored this entire story -- arguably the most significant political story of the last decade -- because they do not think there is any story here at all.

The fraud that was manufactured by our government officials and endorsed by our media establishment is one of the great political crimes of the last many decades. Yet those who are responsible for it have not been held accountable in the slightest. Quite the contrary, their media prominence -- as Moyers demonstrates -- has only increased, as culpable propagandists and warmongers such as Charles Krauthammer (now of Time and The Washington Post), Bill Kristol (now of Time), Jonah Goldberg (now of The Los Angeles Times, Peter Beinert (now of Time and The Washington Post), and Tom Friedman (revered by media stars everywhere) have all seen their profiles enhanced greatly in our national media.

And while Judy Miller became the scapegoat for the media's failures, most of the media stars responsible for the worst journalistic abuses -- from Michael Gordon to Tim Russert to Fred Hiatt to most of The Washington Post, to say nothing of the Fox stars and cogs of the right-wing noise machine -- continue merrily along as before, with virtually no recognition of fault and no reduction in their platforms.

Moyers did a superb job of questioning both Tim Russert and Peter Beinart, and both were -- appropriately and enjoyably -- extremely defensive about their behavior. Beinart, along with his good friend and mirror image Jonah Goldberg, participated in one of the most vile -- though not all that unusual -- smear campaigns against a war opponent, Scott Ritter. The smear campaign was necessary precisely because Ritter was one of the very few individuals in this country who (completely unlike Goldberg, Beinart and all of the other faux warrior-experts parading across television screens loyally reciting the Bush line) actually knew what he was talking about when it came to the Iraqi weapons program and its "relationship" to Al Qaeda, and continuously warned (to little effect) about all of the warmongers' false claims about those topics.

But credit is at least due to both Russert and Beinart for appearing on Moyers' program and facing his appropriately confrontational questions. Their willingness to account for their conduct stands in stark contrast to the long list of cowards who still constantly strut around self-lovingly touting their own courage, resolve, Churchillian backbone, and all of their other little self-glorifying platitudes, yet were too afraid to face questioning from a real journalist about all of the fact-free, false propaganda they spewed for years (and continue to spew).

That disgraceful, dishonorable roster of Great Warriors hiding under their beds from Bill Moyers includes Fox's Krauthammer, Fox's Kristol, Fox's Roger Ailes, Bill Safire and Judith Miller. As The Washington Post's own Tom Shales put it:
Among those who declined -- and thus became a part of the story more than they already were -- are Judith Miller of the New York Times, a reporter who became a relentless drumbeater for war; Times pundit William Safire, who'd predicted that Iraqis would welcome Americans as liberators when they marched into Baghdad; columnist Charles Krauthammer, another hawkish columnist who's usually anything but camera-shy; and Fox boss Roger Ailes.
William Kristol, a conservative columnist who, Moyers says, "led the march to Baghdad behind a battery of Washington microphones . . . has not responded to any of our requests for an interview, but he still shows up on TV as an expert, most often on Fox News."
People like Bill Kristol and Krauthammer will only go and sit with the likes of Brit Hume and speak only to Fox audiences, so they are never reminded of the literally countless falsehoods they churned out not only to justify the invasion but to profoundly mislead Americans for years about the ongoing occupation. And they both continue to issue one-way decrees from the pages of Time and The Washington Post, where they are never held to account for what they have done.
Moyers' documentary is a superb piece of journalism and makes inescapably clear how profoundly corrupt our dominant political and media institutions were prior to the invasion. But most national "journalists" will simply ignore the whole program (as Digby notes, The New York Times, one of the principal culprits, did not even review it).

They will almost certainly dismiss Moyers as a liberal partisan, not a real journalist, and continue to insist that they are doing a superb and even-handed job. They will continue to revere the most guilty parties responsible for the deceit and destruction of the last six years.

And, worst of all, the sicknesses documented so potently by Moyers will continue to pervade our dominant media and political institutions. Comparing 2002 and now, however, there is a significant difference: as Moyers' documentary illustrates, as does the emergence of political blogs, more and more people are increasingly recognizing how pervasive those deficiencies are, and consequently, are developing multiple alternatives to the rancid governing Beltway system.

UPDATE: Tom Tomorrow is one of those radical, unserious, untrustworthy extremist commentators who saw exactly what was going on back in 2002 and was right about virtually everything. As a result, Fred Hiatt and Richard Stengel will never invite him onto the Op-Ed pages of The Washington Post or Time alongside our Brilliant Foreign Policy Luminaries like Charles Kruathammer, Joe Lieberman and Robert Kagan, but -- to celebrate the four-year anniversary of our Glorious War -- he does have a small though rich sampling over at the Huffington Post of the great wisdom showered on us by Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and many of their other media and neoconservative friends.

UPDATE II: CBS White House Correspondent Mark Knoller watched Moyers' documentary and he is absolutely befuddled that anyone could possibly suggest that our White House Press Corps was insufficiently skeptical of the White House's pre-war claims or that they were too deferential to the Leader:
To hear Bill Moyers tell it last evening on his PBS program "Buying The War," the White House press corps was a willing participant in its own deception about the President's case for war in Iraq.
He portrays us as easily-manipulated stooges on bended-knee to the President and his top aides.

Now, I'm the first to concede there are plenty of good reasons to criticize the White House Press. We're an irascible and unlikable bunch. I'm one of us and I don't like us very much. But the point made by Bill Moyers at the start of his program last night is just off base. . . . Now, I can understand if Moyers didn't like the President's answers. Fair enough. But to portray reporters as mindless conduits of White House policies is unfounded.
Really, what can one even say about this? Like most of his colleagues, he is drowning in total self-delusion. Note how he pretends to criticize White House journalists for being "irrascible and unlikable" -- the implication being that they are a really tough, ornery and contentious bunch of hard-core reporters who may not be likable or agreeable, but boy, they sure are feisty.
After describing (though understandably not quoting) several of the oh-so-super-tough questions he claims were asked at the pre-war Press Conference -- the one where reporters pretended to raise their hands in the hopes of being called upon, even though they knew Bush had a pre-scripted list of which reporters would be allowed to ask questions and they were only doing that to create a false perception of a free-wheeling press conference -- Knoller ends with these paragraphs:

Did we report what the President said about his case for war? Of course we did. That's our job. Did we also report that his views were challenged or disputed by others? Absolutely. Were questions raised about the veracity of the president's arguments? Certainly.

Did reporters stop the U.S. from going to war in Iraq? No. Could reporters have done a better job? Always.

But to charge that the White House press was "compliant" and cheered the President's arguments for war plainly misrepresents the facts.
I wonder if Knoller is aware that seven out of 10 Americans believed even six months after the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein personally planned the 9/11 attacks. But Knoller just cannot believe that anyone would suggest that the national press corps was too compliant.
This is the point I have realized only recently which I cannot stress enough. They really do not think they did anything wrong. They think that their pre-war "journalism" (which, they will admit with great humility, could "of course" -- like everything in the world -- have been better) was perfectly excellent journalism, and anyone who suggests otherwise simply does not understand the elevated role of journalists, and is probably just a lowly partisan hysteric.
That's how they think. Just go read Knoller's response to the Moyers' documentary. Our government deceived the entire country into a war based on a whole set of blatantly false claims -- all of which were shoveled into the public's minds by our nation's media outlets -- and they continue to say what a great job they did.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut (1922-2007)

2007-04-12T21:07:00.000-03:00

"And so it goes..."

I have loved Kurt Vonnegut's writing since I first "discovered" him in the late 60's and I think I have read all his books. This fall, I bought, what turns out to have been, his last book -- A Man Without a Country. I loved his gentle, worldly-wise tone that was both bleak and full of love. He had a twinkle in his eye for us like a favorite uncle would and he wrote poems like this.

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!

Andrew Leonard in Salon:

Kurt Vonnegut was a good man, a kind man, a mensch. Our world is a shallower, drearier place without him. But anyone who has enjoyed any of his work, or been lucky enough to bask in his twinkle, can still rejoice, because we will always have him, in all his idiosyncratic twisted-chess perversity. The world is less without him, but it will always be more because of him.

Steven D at the Booman Tribune:

An atheist, his books were nonetheless filled with discussions of war, poverty and injustice that reflected his progressive beliefs. Some might say he was a pessimist, even a nihilist, but they would be wrong. What he was was a modern day version of the prophet Jeremiah ranting at the America which he loved, but whose failures he did not deny or overlook. Failures he constantly decried in his books, failures of vision, compassion, justice and the everyday betrayal of our highest ideals in the service of our collective greed and lust for power as a nation. He was the antithesis of everything for which George W. Bush stands. We did not deserve him.
Please forgive me Kurt, but God bless you Mr. Vonnegut, and thank you for your service to your country.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country:

If I should die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.

Kurt again:

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can't be a man unless he'd gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."