Hullabaloo

Sunday, April 30, 2006

 
Happy Codpiece Day Everyone

by digby



It seems like only yesterday that the country was enthralled with the president in his sexy flightsuit. Women were swooning, manly GOP men were commenting enviously on his package. But there were none so awestruck by the sheer, testosterone glory of Bush's codpiece as Tweety:

MATTHEWS: Let's go to this sub--what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I've got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on--onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I'm not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn't do it for me personally, especially not when he's in a suit, but he arrived there...

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: ...he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn't he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa--I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just--I can't think of any, any stunt by the White House--and I'll call it a stunt--that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It's not a stunt if it works and it's real. And I felt the faces of those guys--I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of--the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he--you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That's what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you're watching that from--say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We're coming.' Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not--we've allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it's time to tell them, you know what, `You're going to be help accountable for this.'

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

A Cod-piece can fool them all
Make them think you're large
Even if you're small
Just be sure you don't fool yourself
For it's still just imagination
And to be sure it works like a lure
And will raise a wench's expectations
But have a care you have something there
Or the night will end in frustration



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digby 4/30/2006 11:54:00 PM |

 
Quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere

by digby

Oh fewgawd's sake. Last week Joe Klein said:

Klein: And, by the way, we're very much well liked among the young, educated Iranians. But this is not Iraq we're dealing with here. This is an ancient country, a very strong country, and a very proud country. And so, yeah, by all means, we should talk to them, but, on the other hand, we should not take any option, including the use of nuclea-....tactical nuclear weapons off the table.

Stephanopoulos: Keep that on the table?

Klein: It's absolutely stupid not to.

Stephanopoulos: That's insane.

Klein: Well I don't think we should ever use tac-...I think that...

Stephanopoulos: Well, then why should they be on the table?

Klein: Why?

Stephanopoulos: Why do we want that specter of crossing that line?

Klein: Because we don't know what the options on the other side...what their options are on the table.

Stephanopoulos: Well we know that they've got 40,000 possible suicide bombers but I also think that line is one that we have to be very, very careful to cross.

Klein: Listen. I don't think. I think the use of force here would be counterproductive. But I think that when you're dealing in a negotiation you can't take stuff off the table before it starts.

In this week's TIME magazine Klein writes A Mea Culpa, Sorta:

A few weeks ago, I made a mistake while bloviating on the Sunday morning television program This Week With George Stephanopoulos. I said that all military options, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons, should remain on the table in our future dealings with Iran. I was wrong on three counts.

First, my words were a technical violation of a long-standing protocol: A diplomat friend tells me that while it is appropriate to say, "All options should remain on the table," the direct mention of nukes — especially any hint of the first use of nukes — is, as Stephanopoulos correctly said, "crossing a line." If George had asked, "What about nukes?" the diplomatic protocol would have been to tapdance: "I can't imagine ever having to use nuclear weapons," or some such, leaving the nuclear door open, but never saying so specifically.

In truth, I was trying to make the same point, undiplomatically — which comes easy for me: If the Iranians persist in crazy talk about wiping Israel, or New York, off the face of the earth, it isn't a bad idea if we hint that we can get crazy, too.

One can easily imagine the unthinkable: a suitcase nuclear weapon, acquired from the former Soviet Union by Iranian agents, detonated in New York, London or Tel Aviv. A nuclear response certainly would have to be on the table then — and the military would be negligent if it weren't studying all possible nuclear scenarios.

No, he was not making the same point as his diplomat friend, undiplomatically or otherwise. The friend said that one should say "I can't imagine ever having to use nuclear weapons." That is the oppsite of hinting that we are going to "act crazy."

Now, not explicitly ruling out nuclear retaliation against a nuclear attack is not "crazy." It's called "deterrence." It's worked for decades.

But Klein is still talking about a tactical nuclear first strike:

But I can't imagine a first use of nukes, and certainly not the unilateral use of nuclear weapons — or military force of any kind — against Iran by the Bush administration now. This was the second level on which I was mistaken: I failed to give the proper context for my remarks. I should have said, "Look, I believe the President has squandered our credibility in the world, and it would be disastrous for us to act unilaterally, given our unwarranted — and tragically incompetent — invasion of Iraq." (I did get around to saying something like that a few sentences later.)

One can only assume by this statement that he believes that a more credible president could launch a first strike with tactical nuclear weapons. But then, doing that would actually be crazy, so that makes no sense either. That would make the invasion of Iraq look like child's play.

(He does go on to write, "As a general principle, I'm opposed to the unilateral first use of U.S. force in all but the most extraordinary circumstances." That's reassuring.)

Here comes the "sorta":

Let me give credit where it's due: I probably would not be writing this were it not for all the left-wing screeching. The Stephanopoulos moment came and went ephemerally, as TV moments do, leaving a slight, queasy residue — I knew that I hadn't explained myself adequately, but that happens a lot on television. So thanks, frothing bloggers, for calling me on my mistake. You can, at times, be a valuable corrective.

How touching. And a nice place to end this. But no:

At other times, though, your vitriol just seems uninformed, malicious and disproportionate. You seem to believe that since I'm not a lock-step liberal — and we can talk about what a liberal actually is some other time — I'm some sort of creepy, covert conservative. Of course, most conservatives consider me a liberal. I call myself a moderate — a radical or flaming moderate, take your pick — because in this witlessly overheated political environment, you've got to call yourself something. But the conservatives do have a point: I disagree with Ronald Reagan's famous formulation, "Government is part of the problem, not part of the solution." I believe that government action can, when judiciously applied, make life better for people — and that we, as a society, have a responsibility to provide equal opportunity for all. I've had some problems with the methods liberals use to accomplish those goals, especially when they do not recognize the corrosive effects of entrenched bureaucracies and special interests, like the public employees unions, on the lives of the poor. I've also had problems with the reflexive tendency of Democrats to oppose the use of U.S. military power, even when that power has been sanctioned by the UN or NATO; I have absolutely no patience for those who believe the United States is a malignant or immoral force in the world.

Ok. Let's take this one step at a time.

Creepy, covert conservative? Why ever would we think that:

Hugh Hewitt: Joe, as I was reading the credits, because I love credits, and it seems that you don't know any Republicans, but I love the credits anyway. You single out as your pals...

Joe Klein: (laughing) You think I don't know very many Republicans?

HH: (laughing) Well, we got Elaine Kamarck, William Galston, Mandy Grunwald, Adam Walinksy, Richard Holbrooke, Leslie Gelb. They get the first paragraph. I said wow, you run in that East side circle that you talk about in here.

JK: Well, you know, I also run in the kind of faith based circle. In fact, one of Bush's nicknames for me is Mr. Faith Based.

HH: Well, that's good.

JK: And at the very end of the book, I acknowledge Bill Bennett as giving the best advice on how to judge a presidential candidate.

HH: At a Christian Coalition meeting. Yeah, it's a great anecdote.

JK: And Bill's a good friend of mine. But I've kind of got to give these guys cover.

You don't want to be praised by what you call a traditional liberal, do you?

Traditional liberal? He writes in TIME:

I call myself a moderate — a radical or flaming moderate, take your pick — because in this witlessly overheated political environment, you've got to call yourself something.

"Radical" or "flaming" moderate is is a cute little appellation that means nothing. Moderate, by definition cannot be radical --- or flaming. It is a perfectly respectable political position, but Klein doesn't seem to be one. Moderates don't support privatising social security, as Klein does. Nor do they hate public employee unions. Social conservatives, which Klein calls himself, are certainly not moderates.

When people say they don't understand what Democrats stand for, it's Joe Klein they are thinking of. Sadly, he and others like him speak for us in the media. That's what's killing us.

And I don't actually see what Klein finds objectionable about Reagan's famous dictum of the government being the problem. It's boilerplate GOP bullshit and the same boilerplate GOP bullshit he spews all the time. For instance:

The Great Society was an utter failure because it helped to contribute to social irresponsibility at the very bottom.

Klein has "problems" with the methods liberals use to accomplish their goals, especially when "they do not recognize the corrosive effects of entrenched bureaucracies and special interests, like the public employees unions, on the lives of the poor." Yet, the Great Society which lifted vast numbers of Americans out of poverty was a failure. (But hey, it makes for great cocktail party chatter by a "liberal" doesn't it?)

I don't know what this pernicious effect the public employee unions are having on the poor is, but I've read his critique of bureaucracies and it's completely incomprehensible. He wrote:

In the Information Age, Clinton knew that the paradigm was the computer, that the government had to be more decentralized, that bureaucracies had to become more flexible, and that our social safety net had to reflect that--the fact that people had more information and have to have more choices about where they get their health care, where their money for their retirement is held, and so on.

Klein has never explained why the social safety net has to reflect the fact that people have "more information and more choices" about where their money is held for retirement or where they get their health care. You can use medicare anywhere, and most people are very happy to have part of their retirment income secured by the full faith and credit of the US treasury. It gives them some ability to take some chances with the rest of their money. Klein simply makes assertions that he seems to have formulated sometime around 1994 and never revisited after the tech bubble burst.

I have absolutely no patience for those who believe the United States is a malignant or immoral force in the world

I have to say that when the US starts "acting crazy" and torturing people and threatening to launch a nuclear first strike it is very hard to argue that it's not becoming a malignant force.

Civilized people don't talk about torture and nuclear war like they're just another form of muscle flexing. That's Dr Strangelove shit and the fact that gasbags like Klein throw this stuff around like it's yesterday's news is a big fat clue that this country has taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Are we a malignant force? Sometimes. Nobody's perfect, not even the great USA. It's not unpatriotic to admit that. Indeed, it's necessary if we aren't to be taken in by hucksters and despots like the Bush administration and their enablers in the press.

Klein winds up with a typical mushy centrist's arrogant assertion that his politics are the only way anything ever gets done, which is total nonsense.

George W. Bush has proven that governing from the right can't work; but governing from the left won't work either. The only way that real change — a universal health-care system (along the lines enacted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts), a real alternative energy plan, progressivity in taxation and entitlement reform, a cooperative non-toxic foreign policy—will come is through coalitions built from the center out.

Here's the "real change" that Klein envisions:

You know, I'm pretty much a social conservative on a lot of stuff. I'm certainly opposed to late term abortion, and I think the deal to be made is morning after pill is legal, anything after that probably shouldn't be...in the past year, I've stood for the following things. I've taken the following positions. I agreed with the President on social security reform. I supported his two Supreme Court nominees, and I support, even though I opposed this war, I support staying the course in Iraq, and doing whatever we have to do in order to stabilize the region.

Klein and his ilk have been hanging around the far right so long that it looks like the center to them now.

"one of the problems that I have with being called a liberal by someone like you is that there are all these people on the left in the Democratic Party who are claiming to be liberals, and I don't want to be associated with them."

That goes both ways. Guys like Klein give liberalism a bad name in my mind --- meaningless, mushy, split-the-baby dreck with no intellectual consistency except an arrogant belief that those who muddy their hands in the daily dog-eat-dog of a partisan era we didn't create are uncouth for fighting to survive. Klein's ineffectual political style hasn't been relevant for quite some time; it's just that nobody's called him on it until now.

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digby 4/30/2006 05:14:00 PM |

 
Constitutional Crisis

by digby

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

[...]

Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.

[...]

Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws -- many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military.

Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush's theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts.

Phillip Cooper, a Portland State University law professor who has studied the executive power claims Bush made during his first term, said Bush and his legal team have spent the past five years quietly working to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White House.

''There is no question that this administration has been involved in a very carefully thought-out, systematic process of expanding presidential power at the expense of the other branches of government," Cooper said. ''This is really big, very expansive, and very significant."

For the first five years of Bush's presidency, his legal claims attracted little attention in Congress or the media. Then, twice in recent months, Bush drew scrutiny after challenging new laws: a torture ban and a requirement that he give detailed reports to Congress about how he is using the Patriot Act.

[...]

...Bush is according himself the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution. And he is quietly exercising that authority to a degree that is unprecedented in US history.

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation's sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ''signing statements" -- official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills -- sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.

''He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises -- and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened," said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.

At what point does this country begin to recognise that we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis?

Somebody asked Howard Dean the other day whether he thought Bush should be impeached and I wished that he had answered by pointing out that the Republicans lowered the bar so low that it's difficult to see how he could NOT be impeached. Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we, and revisit what House Manager and head of the judiciary committee, Henry Hyde, had to say about the "rule of law" just eight years ago:

The rule of law is no pious aspiration from a civics textbook. The rule of law is what stands between us and the arbitrary exercise of power by the state. The rule of law is the safeguard of our liberties. The rule of law is what allows us to live our freedom in ways that honor the freedom of others while strengthening the common good.

[...]

Senators, the trial is being watched around the world. Some of those watching, thinking themselves superior in their cynicism, wonder what it's all about.

But others know, political prisoners know, that this is about the rule of law, the great alternative to arbitrary and unchecked state powers. The families of executed dissidents know that this is about the rule of law, the great alternative to the lethal abuse of power by the state. Those yearning for freedom know this about the rule of law -- the hard, one structure by which men and women can live by their God-given dignity and secure their God-give rights in ways that serve the common good.

Unless, of course, the president is a Republican who is creating a new constitutional theory of presidential infallibility. Henry doesn't seem to have a problem with that. But then, he pretty much said it then:

Senators, as men and women with a serious experience of public affairs, we can all imagine a situation in which a president might shade the truth when a great issue of national interest or national security is at stake. We've been all over that terrain.

We know the thin ice on which any of us skates when blurring the edges of the truth for what we consider a compelling, demanding public purpose.

Morally serious men and women can imagine the circumstances at the far edge of the morally permissible when, with the gravest matters of national interest at stake, a president could shade the truth in order to serve the common good.

But under oath for a private pleasure?

That is what the leadership of the GOP believes. We are watching it in action. A president can be impeached for lying about a private sexual matter but "morally serious men and women" understand that a president could "shade the truth" in order to serve the common good.

Are we all clear on how this works now? Lying about fellatio leads to lethal abuse of power by the state. Flatly refusing to obey the laws he signed and lying about national security serves the common good. This is your modern Republican party in a nutshell: A dictatorship of puritanical busybodies.

As I watched the White House Correspondents dinner this morning, I couldn't help thinking about all those shrieking harpies and stone faced journalists who spent months pursuing an impeachable crime in president Clinton's pants. It was one of the most hallucinatory events in modern history --- shocking, freakish and bizarre. They believed along with Henry Hyde that this was the most serious of offenses --- so serious that it merited removal from office.

Here's an example of how the White House press corps functioned during the 90's when confronted with purported lawlessness on the part of the president:

According to Starr himself, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke on Jan. 21, 1998, Starr's top deputy, Jackie Bennett, spent the day talking "extensively" with a handful of reporters, including ABC's Judd, the one TV reporter on the shortlist at Starr's office...On Jan. 25, 1998, Judd appeared on ABC's "This Week" and reported, "Several sources have told us that in the spring of 1996, the president and Lewinsky were caught in an intimate encounter in a private area of the White House." The revelation set off a month's worth of cable TV chatter, but the report that Clinton and Lewinsky were found out proved to be fictitious.

Or how about Michael Isikoff who wrote:

"I was convinced Clinton was a far more psychologically disturbed individual than the public ever imagined."

This one was particularly good:

MATTHEWS: And also I’m told today that one of the reasons Republicans are voting for impeachment is that they know more than we do. There’s more in this report that’s over at the Ford Building on Capitol Hill that contains dirty stuff about this president that for whatever reason wasn’t formally released but is apparently infecting the thinking of a lot of Republicans and a lot of the borderline guys are gonna vote for impeachment tomorrow because of what they’ve read

.

That was then. This is now:

MATTHEWS: Bob, can you promise that if the Democrats win the majority of House seats this fall, they get to the 218 magic number, that they will not use the subpoena power to go after the president?

Something is very wrong with our political system. And part of what is wrong is the political press corpse who are so insular and socially embedded with the players that they can't see how this looks to us rubes outside the beltway.

I'm grateful that at least some reporters are coming around on this story. It's long overdue (although I suspect that the administration's antipathy for unapproved leaks might have something to do with it) But you really have to wonder why they were so rabidly and openly anti-Clinton, to the point of trying to affirmatively help the Republicans drive him from office, while this time trying to extract promises that the Democrats won't hold Bush accountable for anything he has done.

Today we are in a real constitutional crisis and it seems the press are only belatedly beginning to focus. And, once again, the American people are way ahead of these elitist snobs who always seem to misjudge what they really care about.


Glenn Greenwald has more on this.



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digby 4/30/2006 01:58:00 PM |

 
Heavens To Betsy

by digby

... I think Stephen Colbert forgot his place.

At last year's White House Correspondent's dinner, you'll remember that when the president joshed and giggled about not finding the weapons of mass destruction, the press laughed and laughed. They just love it when the president makes fun of himself. It reminds them of why they love him --- and why they are better than he is.

I sorry to report that this year, in an alarming lack of decorum, Stephen Colbert went way over the line --- he lampooned the press corps itself in such a way as to make it seem as if they might be partly responsible for why 70% of the nation feels the country is on the wrong track. Making fun of politicians is one thing. They are a slightly lower life form. But the press itself? Implying they are complicit in all this unpleasantness with war and what not? Well, that simply isn't done.

I'm sure Joe Klein was appalled. Colbert, with his horrible little parody was no better than a left wing blogger from the fever swamp who doesn't respect his betters. He even had the temerity to ask the question that dare not be asked in polite circles:

Why did we invade Iraq?

That will not do. Why if anyone asks that question the public might notice that the White House press corps behaved like bunch of lovelorn eunuchs until about 20 minutes ago --- at which point their hilarious, down-home moron of a president began to threaten to throw them in jail.

All hail Stephen Colbert --- the man who coined the word for what the Washington press have been feeding us for the last decade. The truthiness hurts, doesn't it kids?

Crooks and Liars has the video. I think it may be one of the most revealing moments I've ever seen in American politics.

Peter Daou has some thoughts and recommends Eric Boehlert's book "Lapdogs" which I'm sure is as popular as Stephen Colbert's video with Helen Thomas --- the only person with guts in a whole room filled with pearl clutching little old ladies.


Update: Atrios checks into the "Why did we invade Iraq?" question and finds that Bill Kristol's answer to Colbert last week was truthiness. I'm stunned.



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digby 4/30/2006 10:36:00 AM |

Friday, April 28, 2006

 
Honoring Culture and Heritage

by digby

A reader writes in to ask:

Please tell us again why the Spanish translation of the National Anthem is making wingnut heads explode when they all but genuflect at the waving of the Confederate Rebel flag?

Tell me please, which of these was meant to turn hearts to America, and which is meant to tear the country apart?

I don't know the answer to that. Apparently honoring the confederate flag is ok because it's a tribute to the heritage and culture of some Americans' forebears.

But that's the only culture and heritage to which Americans are allowed to pay such tribute. The one that seceded from the United States and created its own country.

Those whose forebears didn't secede from the US to form their own country but rather came to America to become Americans should not be allowed to honor their culture in any way shape or form. That would be un-American.

I can't explain this.


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digby 4/28/2006 04:54:00 PM |

 
"I'm The Delegator"

by digby

If anyone has fantasies of what it would be like to see George W. Bush on the witness stand in his own trial, check out his good friend Kenny Boy's performance:

Enron Corp. founder Kenneth L. Lay — Kenny Boy to his friend President Bush — is renowned for his courtliness, his philanthropy, his rise from a dirt-poor boyhood in the Missouri Ozarks to a nine-digit fortune.

Codefendant Jeffrey K. Skilling, who invented Enron's most profitable business and ran the company during most of its heyday, also is known for getting in a bar fight while under indictment and for publicly calling an investment analyst by another name for a sphincter.

At the start of their federal fraud and conspiracy trial three months ago, the betting was that the volatile Skilling's performance on the witness stand might drag Lay down, not the other way around.

Former Chief Executive Skilling, 52, shares some of the obsessiveness of Queeg, the Navy skipper of "The Caine Mutiny." But unlike Queeg, Skilling didn't unravel on the stand. Where mastery of Enron's finances was at issue, he overpowered co-lead prosecutor Sean M. Berkowitz. When the nimble Berkowitz pushed certain buttons, Skilling showed flashes of anger and arrogance, but he generally kept his head.

For Lay, however, it's been a rockier ride. Although nobody knows what the 12 Texans in the jury box are thinking, during his first four days on the stand, Lay, 64, has shown some attributes that clash with his reputation as affable, openhanded and shrewd.

His worst moment came Wednesday, when prosecutor John C. Hueston jolted Lay with questions about his attempts to reach actual or potential witnesses in the case — efforts that persisted even after Lay's lawyers told him to stop.

"You've got to question the judgment of the person," said Mark C. Zauderer of New York law firm Flemming Zulack Williamson Zauderer. "No lawyer would have his client in the dock calling potential witnesses. It could be very suspect in the minds of the jury."

Lay probably didn't help matters by responding to Hueston's blitz with sarcasm. The jury of eight women and four men has hardly been immune to humor during the trial — even Skilling's mordant wit sometimes connected — but nobody cracked a smile at Lay's comebacks Wednesday.

Noting Lay's $120,000 investment in a company whose main customer was Enron, Hueston asked whether he had made conflict-of-interest filings required by Enron's code of conduct.

"I don't know," Lay shot back. "Have you checked it? I imagine you have. You guys are pretty thorough."

After describing himself in early testimony as "more of a delegator" than a micromanager, Lay quickly proved himself adept at delegating blame. If something worked out, it was his idea. If it blew up, it was somebody else's.

Asked to name his biggest mistakes at Enron, Lay unhesitatingly listed "hiring Andy Fastow" and promoting him to chief financial officer.

Andrew S. Fastow turned out to be a crook who secretly stole millions from Enron and allegedly helped cook the books. Lay didn't mention it, but he had to know the jury would recall that hiring and promoting Fastow was entirely Skilling's doing.

It wasn't the only time Lay subtly undercut his codefendant. He cited Skilling's surprise resignation in August 2001 as a source of uncertainty in the financial markets that set the stage for the investor and creditor panic that Lay said ultimately brought Enron down.

Moreover, by praising Skilling as an executive who "really gets into the details, the guts of how things work," Lay may have signaled that Skilling, far more than Lay, would have grasped the intricacies of Enron's accounting and financial reporting — the things at the heart of the criminal case.

Lay blamed two aides for what turned out to be one of the biggest PR gaffes of the century: rebuffing the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2001 when the paper had questions about Fastow and his mysterious LJM partnerships — complex financial structures that the government says let Enron hide problem assets and falsely pump up profit.

With Enron offering only a brief statement written by its lawyers, the company lost any control over the debate and was powerless when the resulting stories eviscerated its stock. A livid Skilling even called from retirement to ask why Enron wasn't defending itself.

In Lay's view, his own instincts had been right all along. Stonewalling the Journal, he testified, went "against every bone in my body."

One of the witnesses whom Lay admitted trying to reach was a former Enron risk manager named Wincenty "Vince" Kaminski. Jurors would remember him as a professor type with a Polish accent and a healthy ego who testified that he tried vainly to warn higher-ups that Fastow's LJM partnerships were a stupid idea and that Enron shouldn't be involved with them.

In testimony Tuesday, Lay seemed to impugn his former colleague's courage. He acknowledged that Kaminski had been an early skeptic of the LJM deals, but added that it was only after the Journal stories hit and the partnerships blew up in scandal that "his level of dislike intensified."

Can't you just see Bush stabbing Cheney and Rove in the back and blaming them for all his troubles? Being snotty to the prosecutor? The whole thing sounds like a typical Bush press conference to me.

Just as a reminder, Kenny Boy Lay was Bush's biggest contributor in 2000. His presidential campaign received $1.14 million from Enron. And Enron got its money's worth until the whole thing imploded:

Shortly after taking office, President Bush waged a battle against the imposition of federal price controls in California that allowed Enron to price-gouge consumers by extending the energy crisis in California, costing the state billions of dollars. Enron reported increased revenues of almost $70 billion from the previous year.

Two peas in a pod, Lay and Bush. Arrogant losers who drove their organizations into the ground.



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digby 4/28/2006 12:37:00 PM |

 
Venting The Hatred In Their Hearts

by digby


More sexual sadism from racist pigs:

Prosecutors won't immediately seek hate-crime charges against two white teens accused of brutally beating and sodomizing a 16-year-old Hispanic boy, who was clinging to life after being left for dead, authorities said.

The two attacked the boy after he tried to kiss a 12-year-old girl at an unsupervised house party Saturday night in suburban Spring, authorities said.

The attackers apparently were offended at the age difference between the victim and the girl, who is also Hispanic, and shouted racial slurs at him during the 10- to 15-minute attack, investigators said.

Authorities said the two dragged the boy from the party and into the yard, where they sodomized him with a plastic pipe from a patio table umbrella and poured bleach on him.

"After they got him down on the ground, they stomped his head with (steel-toed) boots," Harris County Sheriff's Lt. John Denholm said. "They actually kicked the pipe further into him with the boots."

County prosecutor Mike Trent described the pipe as being sharpened at one end. At one point, the teens tried to carve something on the boy's chest with a knife, he told CNN Friday.

"I don't know that the very beginning of the attack was racial," Trent said, "but there's no question that they were venting quite a bit of hatred in their hearts."

Oh really. He must have gotten the story from the young sadists themselves and bought their assertion that they were trying to protect this girl rather than the obvious fact that they are violent racists. And that is likely why they aren't charging these predators with a hate crime. They actually feel some sympathy for these guys. "They have quite a bit of hatred in their hearts" they say. Do they have hearts?

Of course "the beginning of the attack" was racial. Did they just become racists half way through their brutal rape and beating? They are racist psychopaths who poured bleach on the victim and called him racial epithets, for crying out loud. I somehow doubt that they would have done the same thing to a white kid.

And once again, I have to ask about the forced sodomy. Is it that men were always raping other men with objects and nobody talked about it, or is this becoming more common? This particular form of violence is showing up everywhere from Abu Ghraib to the less physically brutal but equally terrifying "hazing" of grade school kids. And the common denominator in all of this is that it's being excused by the rightwing moralists. What in the hell is up with this?

And don't be surprised if we start seeing more of this racial violence toward Latinos. The wingnuts are getting their hate on and reviving some of their favorite propaganda techniques:

AN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The creators of a video game called "Border Patrol" won't win any awards for graphics or creativity, but could take home a prize for bad taste.

(on camera): This isn't some expensive game for the Xbox. It's simple, free and on the Internet and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, dangerous.

JONATHAN BERNSTEIN, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE: It puts in the mind of the player that they should be resorting to violence.

SIMON (voice-over): The objective? To shoot and kill Mexicans crossing into the U.S. The game's targets? Mexican nationalists, drug smugglers and most outrageous, breeders, pregnant women running with children. The more you kill, the higher your score.

CRIS FRANCO, COMEDIAN/SATIRIST: You're killing a pregnant woman, and if you can feel good about that, well, have at it.

SIMON: Sarcasm comes naturally to Latino comedian Cris Franco. All joking aside, though, Franco was concerned when we showed him the game.

FRANCO: What sort of makes it innocuous is sort of the thing that makes it so very dangerous, is that you might have kids getting up there and they're killing Mexicans. You know? And now that's a fun thing to do I gather, in our world. I think most people of conscience would not think this was a good way to spend your time.

You can see this "game" here on a CBS News affiliate web site. The blood spattering the pregnant woman with kids when the bullet hits is especially "fun."

These video games and other violent racist paraphernalia are sure to be part of our culture forever, whether we like it or not. (In this post about rightwing "humor", Maha provides some fine examples of the kind of "jokes" that used to be prevalent during Jim Crow.) But when you have major politicians race baiting you normalize this stuff --- and that leads bigoted psychopaths to lose their inhibitions and feel that they have the support of the mainstream.

Just read Orcinus for how this works.


FYI: As I was gingerly tip-toeing through the racist "gamers" sludge online researching this game, I noticed a new epithet: "Mexcriments"



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digby 4/28/2006 10:01:00 AM |

 
Neil Young Sings For Free

by tristero

Neil Young's Living With War. What a great album! And you can listen to the thing for free here. It's everything rocknroll should be: angry, beautiful, dirty, dangerous, lyrical, sloppy, emotional, coldly-calculated, and indispensable for sanity in a world gone mad.

It's on my must-buy list. Speaking of which, My Smart Spouse got me The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, a collection of genuine rarities from the 20's and 30's wrapped up in some great R. Crumb artwork. Perhaps the rare Son House tracks will convince you. Perhaps the reputation of the Georgia Potlickers. But as flat-out great as the individual cuts are, it's the cumulative effect that's so overwhelming. I'm more of a very knowledgeable amateur than a professional when it comes to folk music, but I'm certain that this is the finest compilation of real American folk music since The Anthology of American Folk Music. The Anthology, in case you don't know it, is essential, and I mean that the way water and air are essential.

Getting back to Neil for a moment, be sure to see Jonathan Demme's documentary about the old coot. It's a great film. But best of all, it sets up Living With War perfectly because of the contrast with it. The concert is reflective, personal, country music (sort of). The album is uncompromisingly social, rocknroll (definitely).
tristero 4/28/2006 06:33:00 AM |

Thursday, April 27, 2006

 
It's Getting Hot In Here

by digby


Oooh. This is too good. Could Porter Goss be caught up in the developing Duke Cunningham hooker scandal? Justin Rood at The Muckraker thinks it's possible.

Yowzah.

Actually, make that a double-yowzah: Remember that Goss is the one who plucked one of Wilkes' old San Diego friends, the unusual and colorful Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, out of CIA middle-management obscurity to be his #3 at the agency. At the time of Foggo's appointment, no one could figure out where he came from, or how Goss knew him.

But if Goss was at the "parties," I wonder, was Foggo there too? Did they see each other? Is this where Goss had an opportunity to gauge Foggo's abilities, and determine he was qualified for the CIA executive director post

Ken Silverstein at Harper's blog describes the parties:

As to the festivities themselves, I hear that party nights began early with poker games and degenerated into what the source described as a "frat party" scene—real bacchanals. Apparently photographs were taken, and investigators are anxiously procuring copies.

My, my, my.

But there's more to it than that. Remember what we have all heard about old Duke:

What you won’t read about in these mainstream press accounts is the other double life led by the closet case, Duke, the anti-gay conservative.

Cunningham, who is married with grown children, has admitted to romantic, loving relationships with men, both during his Vietnam military service and as a civilian. That was the remarkable story that this publication reported two years ago, when Elizabeth Birch, the former Human Rights Campaign leader, inadvertently outed Cunningham at a gay rights forum.

Birch never mentioned Cunningham’s name, but she talked about a rabidly anti-gay congressman who asked to meet privately with her in the midst of a controversy over his use in a speech on the floor of the House the term "homos" to describe gays who have served in the military.

Alone with Birch and an HRC staffer, the unnamed congressman shared that he had loved men during his life. In telling the story, Birch offered up a few too many details about the closeted congressman.

A few Google searches later, the Blade reported that it had to be Cunningham, whose career was pockmarked with bizarre gay pronouncements, including a reference to the rectal treatment he received for prostate cancer, something he told an audience "was just not natural, unless maybe you're Barney Frank."

There’s every reason to believe Birch’s inadvertent outing, even as Cunningham denied it through a spokesperson.

This is, after all, a man without principles, who could "love men" in private, all the while condemning gays in speeches and in congressional votes. Little surprise that he could live a second double life, in which he sold those unprincipled votes to the highest bidder

The Dukestir and Porter Goss can hire Jimmy Jeff Gannon and perform a country version of "I'm gonna wash that man right outta my hair" in the House gym for all I care. But the massive fraud and corruption involved are unacceptable. If the Dukestir takes Goss down it would be a beautiful bit of poetic justice. I have a feeling that there are plenty of people at the CIA who will be happy to help the FBI with anything they might need to prove that case.



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digby 4/27/2006 06:23:00 PM |

 
Book Bags

by digby

Jane is righteously taking on the wingnut liars today (as she does every day) but this time on the subject of this dumb pissing match about liberal book sales. Just read it. it's so ridiculous it makes you want to laugh.

As she points out, the right has subsidized these lousy writers and thinkers for decades. They buy their crappy books for their crappy book clubs (whining all the way about totalitarian leftists bookstore owners who refuse to sell their crappy crap) and give the impresion that they are successfully indoctrinating the country with their crappy propaganda. From the numbers of rightwing propagandists who are allegedly great authors and thinkers, you would think that the Republicans would rule with an 80% majority. The truth is they have always rigged the numbers.

As Jane points out, what has them upset is that we managed to push Greenwald's book to number one on Amazon in a day. It drove them into such a tizzy that they are now outright lying about Kos and Jerome's book sales in an attempt to discredit it. (Sigh. Why do I feel like I am dealing with kids all the time?)

"Crashing the Gate" is the most discussed book about Democratic strategy in decades. The review on the NYRB is almost ecstatic. Very influential people are reading and discussing it. Its sales are great and they are only half way through their book tour. It is, by all possible measures, a success. And it's a success on its own merits. I don't think George Soros and Barbra Streisand bought the book in bulk so that it will be selling for a dollar in remainder bins by the middle of summer. Real humans are reading the book.

If you haven't yet bought CTG, do it. It's an easy read, humble and insightful. Supporting liberal writers and thinkers like Kos and Jerome and Greenwald are one great way to make sure that our ideas penetrate the media industrial complex. And, if nothing else, it really seems to freak out the wingnuts. Consider it part of your entertainment budget.

Update: Patrick Neilsen Hayden has more on this. So does Greenwald.

Kos suggests a new marketing slogan and I think it's brilliant: "Buy 'Crashing the Gate.' Make a conservative cry."

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digby 4/27/2006 04:00:00 PM |

 
Failing For Jesus

by digby


So now they want to dismantle FEMA. Isn't that just perfect? It worked great not five years ago but since the republicans got their hands on it, it's completely gone to shit.

Avedon Carol reminds us that this is, in fact, the plan:

We can still get the story if we dig deep enough in the papers, but you won't see the front page telling us that the purpose of this administration is to eliminate any competence in government to serve the public. No, let's just make sure the EPA doesn't do it's job so Republicans can say, "See? Government can't do anything! You pay taxes for this and you don't get it!" After which they can safely eliminate the programs without lowering your taxes. Eventually, the programs will be gone and you won't be hearing all that anti-tax rhetoric anymore - it will be patriotic to pay taxes, again.

In the meantime, they'll demand that we fork over huge amounts of money in the name of national security (or "fighting terror", she laughed bitterly), while making sure that any measure that would actually protect our security is round-filed. I mean, it's not like we should worry about nuclear materials being illegally imported into our country, undetected, by people whose purposes are not friendly to our citizens.

So first you wreck the program, then you claim its failures are the result of the fact that "government programs don't work" - relying on amnesia about the fact that it worked just fine before they started "fixing" it - and then they decide we need to abolish it rather than putting it back the way it was when it used to work.

Oh, and just to make it seem like it's coming from sensible people, we have some specially-labelled "moderates" - one from each party - to make a proposal to abolish, oh, say, FEMA. Like Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Leiberman (R-DLC). And the start of hurricane season just a month away, too!

Read the whole rant. It's great.

I fear that she has hit the nail on the head. We are going to be dealing with the fallout of these horrible eight years for a long time to come. As each failure reaches critical mass, they will say that it proves their point --- government doesn't work. They have spent more than a quarter century pounding that mantra and it's going to sound very "true" when people hear it.

It's quite a scam. Run on government being incompetent and stealing your hard earned money. Take power. Make government incompetent while lining your pockets with as much taxpayer money as possible. Lose office. Make Democrats clean up your mess. Rinse repeat.



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digby 4/27/2006 12:37:00 PM |

 
Portrait of The Racist As A Young Man

by digby


Ezra points to this fascinating profile of George Allen in the New Republic by Ryan Lizza. You really have to read it to believe it.

I know little about Allen except that he sounds even dumber than George W. Bush every time I see him speak on television. Yesterday he was blathering on about something and I was struck by how his rosy cheeks and strange purplish hair made him look a little like Reagan. So he has Reagan's looks and Bush's brains. Oh Jesus.

What I didn't know was that he was a racist, sadistic prick. I now understand why he is such a Republican favorite. I had heard that he kept a confederate flag around and that he had a cute little "noose" hanging from a ficus tree. I didn't know that he had been a neoconfederate since he went to Palos Verdes High, right here in LA. (He didn't live in the south until he was a sophomore in college.)

George saw himself as disconnected from the culture in which he lived. He hated California and, while there, became obsessed with the supposed authenticity of rural life--or at least what he imagined it to be from episodes of "Hee Haw," his favorite TV show, or family vacations in Mexico, where he rode horses. Perhaps because of his peripatetic childhood, the South's deeply rooted culture attracted him. Or perhaps it was a romance with the masculinity and violence of that culture; his father, who was not one to spare the rod, once broke his son Gregory's nose in a fight. Whatever it was, Allen got his first pair of those now-iconic cowboy boots from one of his father's players on the Rams who received them as a promotional freebie. He also learned to dip from his dad's players. At school, he started to wear an Australian bush hat, complete with a dangling chin strap and the left brim snapped up. He wore the hat for a yearbook photo of the falconry club. His favorite record was Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison. Writing of her brother's love for the "big, slow-witted Junior" on "Hee Haw," Jennifer reports, "[t]here was also something mildly country-thuggish about Junior that I think George felt akin to."

In high school, Allen's "Hee Haw" persona made him a polarizing figure. "He rode a little red Mustang around with a Confederate flag plate on the front," says Patrick Campbell, an old classmate, who now works for the Public Works Department in Manhattan Beach, California. "I mean, it was absurd-looking in our neighborhood." Hurt Germany, who now lives in Paso Robles, California, explodes with anger at the mention of Allen's name. "The guy is horrible," she complains. "He drove around with a Confederate flag on his Mustang. I can't believe he's going to run for president." Another classmate, who asks that I not use her name, also remembers Allen's obsession with Dixie: "My impression is that he was a rebel. He plastered the school with Confederate flags."

Politically, Allen's years in Palos Verdes were dominated by the lingering racial tensions from the riots in nearby Watts in 1965--when that neighborhood was practically burned to the ground--and the nationwide riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, which left other parts of Southern California in flames. It is with that context in mind that four former classmates and one former administrator at Allen's high school described to me an event for which Allen is most remembered--and the first glimpse that the château-raised Californian might grow up to become a defender of the South's heritage.

It was the night before a major basketball game with Morningside High. The mostly black inner-city school adjacent to Watts was coming to the almost entirely white Palos Verdes High to play. When students arrived at school on game day, they found graffiti spray-painted on the school library and other places. All five people who described the incident say the graffiti was racially tinged and meant to look like the handiwork of the black Morningside students. But it was actually put there by Allen and some of his friends. "It was something like die whitey," says Campbell. The school administrator, who says he is a Republican and would "seriously consider" voting for Allen for president, says the graffiti said, "burn, baby, burn," a reference to the race riots.

Karl Rove and Lee Atwater would no doubt high five such smart thinking. What a fine preparation for southern GOP politics. But then, Allen always played hardball:

...when his father was on the road, young George often acted as a surrogate dad to his siblings. According to his sister Jennifer, he was particularly strict about bedtimes. One night, his brother Bruce stayed up past his bedtime. George threw him through a sliding glass door. For the same offense, on a different occasion, George tackled his brother Gregory and broke his collarbone. When Jennifer broke her bedtime curfew, George dragged her upstairs by her hair.

George tormented Jennifer enough that, when she grew up, she wrote a memoir of what it was like living in the Allen family. In one sense, the book, Fifth Quarter, from which these details are culled, is unprecedented. No modern presidential candidate has ever had such a harsh and personal account of his life delivered to the public by a close family member. The book paints Allen as a cartoonishly sadistic older brother who holds Jennifer by her feet over Niagara Falls on a family trip (instilling in her a lifelong fear of heights) and slams a pool cue into her new boyfriend's head. "George hoped someday to become a dentist," she writes. "George said he saw dentistry as a perfect profession--getting paid to make people suffer."

According to Lizza, Allen explains "It's the perspective of the youngest child, who is a girl."

I am tempted to make a big deal out of Allen's phoniness, as Lizza does. After all, from the non-Virginian cowboy boots to the tobacco spitting, he has self-consciously adopted these neo-confederate affectations. He's not a real son of the south. But as a good friend explained to me some time ago, it would do no good to attack him on that basis. Despite Joe Klein's fantasy about "authenticity" being the lodestar of winning politics, George W. Bush has proven that being a phony southerner is better than not being a southerner at all. Indeed, a phony southerner can be better than a real one as long as they put their whole heart and soul into it as George W. Bush and George Allen do. It shows respect.

In Mudcat Saunders' new book about how the Democrats can win the south, he and his co-author go to great lengths to explain that politicians must have southern cultural tastes in order to win the presidency. Presumably a guy like Allen (who during his teen-age years in Southern California had a confederate flag on his mustang and wore a rebel flag pin in his graduation picture) is a man who has lived his bona fides even better than the the Yale fratboy, Junior Bush. Nobody can assail his good ole boy pretentions. Allen truly loves southern culture even if he has no blood ties to the south and his mother is (gasp!) French.

If winning the presidency in the country really rests on relative good ole boy-ness, then it's hard to see how anyone can beat Allen. Aside from his total immersion in southern culture, the article is full of examples of his youthful (and not so youthful) racism and I can only assume that this will help him when he goes up against John McCain in the south. The racist voters of the GOP will catch all his winks and nods with no problem.

The only question is whether the big money boys will get behind him. He is, after all, even dumber than George W. Bush and they may be having some second thoughts about running another empty suit:

...although Allen is undoubtedly the hot new thing within the Beltway's conservative establishment, some denizens of K Street and right-wing newsrooms have begun doubting whether he represents their best hope to snuff out the burgeoning campaign of their enemy, McCain. "If my choice is, 'Who do I want to go out with to a fun dinner to drink our brains out,'" says one of the party's top fund-raisers who has met with Allen many times, "there's no question, it'd be Allen. He's a guy's guy, but he didn't blow me away in terms of substance."

It's hard to believe that they can't find a southern Republican who isn't a sadistic idiot to run for president, but I'm beginning to think that's the real problem. Guys like Bush and Allen are the best they can do. Clearly, all the smart southerners are Democrats.



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digby 4/27/2006 10:33:00 AM |

 
No Double Clicking The Mouse

by digby

Lucy’s Love Shop employee Wanda Gillespie said she was flabbergasted that South Carolina’s Legislature is considering outlawing sex toys.

But banning the sale of sex toys is actually quite common in some Southern states.

The South Carolina bill, proposed by Republican Rep. Ralph Davenport, would make it a felony to sell devices used primarily for sexual stimulation and allow law enforcement to seize sex toys from raided businesses.

"That would be the most terrible thing in the world," said Ms. Gillespie, an employee the Anderson shop. "That is just flabbergasting to me. We are supposed to be in a free country, and we’re supposed to be adults who can decide what want to do and don’t want to do in the privacy of our own homes."

Not according to RepresentativeRalph who doesn't want the women of South Carolina to have unapproved orgasms.

Perhaps he feels that if he takes away women's sex toys they might want to have sex with him instead. Here is his picture.






I don't think it will work.



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digby 4/27/2006 12:01:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

 
There Were No Limits

by digby


Via Salon, I see that General Geoffrey D. Ripper has skated once again. He baldfacedly lied to the congress and nothing happens. Seems there's a difference between "briefing " someone and "directly discussing" something:

The Army inspector general has concluded that Miller, who set up detention operations at Abu Ghraib just before the infamous abuse there, did brief a top Pentagon intelligence official about his work at the Iraqi prison. Miller had been accused of lying under oath to Congress in May 2004, when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had "no direct discussions" with Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. He later admitted to delivering a briefing to five senior Pentagon officials, including Cambone.

In a report obtained by Salon through the Freedom of Information Act, the inspector general found that the two seemingly contradictory statements were both true, a distinction that has a Senate Democrat crying foul.

"Maj. Gen. Miller's apparent position that he did not discuss the subject with Undersecretary Cambone but that he briefed Cambone on the same subject is a distinction without a difference to me," said Sen. Carl Levin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Miller is a central player in the detainee abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was previously the commander. A separate Army investigation found Miller should be admonished in connection with the "degrading and abusive" treatment of so-called 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Kahtani at Guantánamo in late 2002. Miller's superior later rejected that recommendation.

Miller, you may recall, is the artillery officer who was sent in to Gitmo to "take off the gloves." He knew nothing about interrogation or prisons, but Rummy thought he was his kind of sadist. He did such a good job of torturing prisoners at Guantanamo that they sent him to Iraq when the "terrorist" Iraqis they were capturing by the thousands weren't giving over --- mostly because they were just poor schmucks who'd been captured in sweeps and knew fuck all about anything. We know what happened then.

For reasons we can only speculate about, Miller seems to be getting a lot of protection in the Pentagon. I don't suppose it could be because of this:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in the late 2002 interrogation of a high-value al-Qaida detainee known in intelligence circles as "the 20th hijacker." He also communicated weekly with the man in charge of the interrogation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the controversial commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center.

During the same period, detainee Mohammed al-Kahtani suffered from what Army investigators have called "degrading and abusive" treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan Rumsfeld had approved. Kahtani was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, and was forced to wear women's underwear and to perform "dog tricks" on a leash. He received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days.

Little more than two years later, during an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, Rumsfeld expressed puzzlement at the notion that his policies had caused the abuse. "He was going, 'My God, you know, did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy's head?'" recalled Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, an investigator who interviewed Rumsfeld twice in early 2005.

These disclosures are contained in a Dec. 20, 2005, Army inspector general's report on Miller's conduct, which was obtained this week by Salon through the Freedom of Information Act. The 391-page document -- which has long passages blacked out by the government -- concludes that Miller should not be punished for his oversight role in detainee operations, a fact that was reported last month by Time magazine. But the never-before-released full report also includes the transcripts of interviews with high-ranking military officials that shed new light on the role that Rumsfeld and Miller played in the harsh treatment of Kahtani, who had met with Osama bin Laden on several occasions and received terrorist training in al-Qaida camps.

In a sworn statement to the inspector general, Schmidt described Rumsfeld as "personally involved" in the interrogation and said that the defense secretary was "talking weekly" with Miller. Schmidt said he concluded that Rumsfeld did not specifically prescribe the more "creative" interrogation methods used on Kahtani. But he added that the open-ended policies Rumsfeld approved, and that the apparent lack of supervision of day-to-day interrogations permitted the abusive conduct to take place. "Where is the throttle on this stuff?" asked Schmidt, an Air Force fighter pilot, who said in his interview under oath with the inspector general that he had concerns about the length and repetition of the harsh interrogation methods. "There were no limits."

If I were Miller I wouldn't plan on taking any trips to foreign countries during my retirement. Many of them tend to be testy about sadistic war criminals.


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digby 4/26/2006 11:06:00 PM |

 
Preturnaturally Confident

by digby

Jane has a great Karl Rove Plamegate primer up tonight in case you've forgotten all the minutia of the case and want to get back up to speed.

Karl has now testified before the grand jury five times, which most lawyers say would never happen in a normal case. Karl, however, believes he can wiggle out of this so he keeps volunteering to go back to the grand jury and explain himself.

He has always thought he was very, very good at this kind of thing:

Rove was no lawyer but he carried a kind of preturnatural confidence in court cases. Like in his high school debates, he always felt better than anybody in the room. He could beat anybody with the strength of his argument or the weight of his will. When a team of blue-chip lawyers in a tobacco case grilled Rove for a deposition some years earlier, he was not just confident, but arrogant, fending off their questions with playful insults. On the stand in the Kay Bailey Hutchison trial, he was masterful in frustrating the prosecution. Now he had a former U.S. Attorney General in his cross hairs, and as Rove sat at the table in the federal courthouse, he turned his head slowly and looked over at the defense table with the thin sliver of a smile. It was a dark smile, determined, and there was not mistaking the message: You are my enemy and you will pay.(Bush's Brain p. 190)

Waddaya think? Does the recently demoted Karl still have that kind of mojo? Or was it his "preturnatural confidence" that led him to think he could lie his ass off to the FBI and the Grand Jury and nothing would happen?


He doesn't seem quite so formidable these days does he? A 32% approval rating and massive policy failure will do that to you.

Update: According to the Washington Post, Rove is using the "it would have been stupid to lie so it's ludicrous that I would have done so" defense. It sounds like he's as arrogant as ever.



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digby 4/26/2006 08:11:00 PM |

 
Net Neutrality Vote Today

by digby


Seeing The Forest has a list and relevant links to the representatives who can be moved on the Net Neutrality issue that comes to a committee vote today.

Click over and make a couple of calls if you have time. This issue sounds like the most boring thing in the world, but it could result in something quite terrible happening to the internet.

I saw this comment over on Political Animal yesterday that I think illustrates the issue quite well:

What the telecoms are trying to get away with is like this: suppose you ran a business, and your product was delivered by FedEx, with your customers paying FedEx for it. Now suppose FedEx came to you one day and said, "You are making a nice profit off our delivery service. Besides what your customers pay, I also want you to pay us for it, or else your deliveries are going to be a lot slower, if they make it there at all."

(If only my ISP were as reliable as Fed-ex.)

Basically this is what they are trying to do. They want to shake down the content providers like Google for a piece of their action even though they are already being paid for their service by their customers.

And, of course, once we abandon the idea that ISP's cannot decide what content to provide we open the door to them deciding they don't want to provide certain content. Some may very well decide that they don't like liberal bloggers who use the "f" word. And then where will we be?



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digby 4/26/2006 12:32:00 PM |

 
Fantasy Wednesday

by digby

So Rove is testifying before the GJ for the fifth time. John Amato says that Norah O'Donnell is reporting that he is going to be issuing a statement later today.

Am I the only one who thinks that's strange? Has any witness to the GJ issued a statement after their testimony? Certainly, Rove hasn't.

Allow me to don my tin foil sombrero for a moment here. What if this statement (if it even happens) is something truly meaningful? They just brought in Snow. Rove was demoted. Maybe he's getting ready to ...

Ok, I'm dreaming. Never mind.

update: Sid Blumenthal connects the Snow-Rove stories too.

update II: Luskin just released the statement, which says nothing. Actually, according to Wolf, it was written earlier and "embargoed" until after the testimony was over. Why the networks went along with that is anybody's guess.

The statement:

Karl Rove appeared today before the grand jury investigating the disclosure of a CIA agent's identity. He testified voluntarily and unconditionally at the request of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to explore a matter raised since Mr Rove's last appearance in October 2005. In connection with his appearance, the special prosecutor has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target of the investigation. Mr Fitzgerald has affirmed that he has made no decision concerning charges. At the request of the Special Counsel, Mr Rove will not discuss the substance of his testimony.

Odd lawyerly sentence, ripe for parsing:

In connection with his appearance, the special prosecutor has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target of the investigation.

Why not just say the prosecutor has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target?


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digby 4/26/2006 11:28:00 AM |

 
Crying Wolf

by digby

I was going to write about this Max Boot column, but Kevin beat me to it. Boot writes:

I want journalists to cover the present struggle as a fight between good and evil. And when the good guys — that would be U.S. officials — say that certain revelations would help the bad guys, I want them to be given the benefit of the doubt. So, I suspect, do most Americans.

Kevin replies:

Nice try, Max, but FDR earned the benefit of the doubt. This gang hasn't. They've made it crystal clear that they consider the war on terror little more than a good campaign topic of unlimited duration.

Can you believe it? No matter how big a fuck up (like the fact that they insisted that we needed to invade a country on the basis of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and it turned out there weren't any!) this administration is supposed to be given the benefit of the doubt. Even when it comes to their assurances that they are only illegally wiretapping terrorists. Or that they are only torturing and imprisoning guilty terrorists. Or that they aren't agitating for another war using exactly the same set of rationales they used for the earlier war. And on and on.

Apparently Boot would march off a cliff with Bush no matter what he does. Contrary to what he says, considering the current opinion polls, it appears that most Americans do not agree with him.



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digby 4/26/2006 10:42:00 AM |

 
MoDo

by tristero

Gotta give her credit: When she's on, she's on. And in her latest column, she's on:

Trying to calm the yips in his party and the country over exploding gasoline prices, the president sounded a bit like a wild-eyed Ozone Man himself yesterday, extolling the virtues of alternative fuel derived from cooking grease, sugar, grass, wood chips, soybean oil and corn.

But then he got ahold of himself. "You just got to recognize there are limits to how much corn can be used for ethanol," he said, standing in front of a bucolic mural. "After all, we got to eat some."

You could run a fleet of S.U.V.'s on the gas that W. was spewing about fuel.

...


The U.S. could have begun developing alternative fuels 30 years ago if Dick Cheney hadn't helped scuttle an ambitious plan in the Ford administration.

By the time these guys get gas from cooking grease, global warming will have us cooked.

tristero 4/26/2006 05:12:00 AM |

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

 
101st Fighting Keyboarder Uniforms

by digby


Whenever you visit a rightwing site, you are sure to see "those" tshirts. I saw an ad for them on the Washington Times the other day. Now, I know that wingnuts have great sense of humor as you can tell by the huge number of successful comedians and humorists on the right. (Dennis? PJ? Are you getting tired?)I assume that these t-shirts are what passes for humor in their lives.

They are big on gun stuff and death and violence but I just can't help but notice that with only a few exceptions, these t-shirts aren't about killing terrorists or fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. This is what they're all about:





Via TBOGG, I that Michelle Malkin, who has recently been posting the phone numbers of liberal college students on her blog and who subsequently had a full fledged fit claiming that her family was threatened in retaliation has a new web site (called "Hot Air," I kid you not) that is sponsored by these t-shirts.

I have said before that while the left has plenty of people who cannot be called angels, it's the right that makes a profit at this violent, eliminationist discourse. As long as they are selling this shit on their sites I can see no reason why we should listen to their whining about leftist incivility.



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digby 4/25/2006 09:01:00 PM |

 
The Lying King And His Money

by digby

Matt sez:

The GOP, as we all know, is desperately afraid of the possibility that the 2006 midterms will put Democrats in a position to hold some hearings. If we do get that lucky, I worry a bit that there may be a temptation to engage in overkill -- a hundred hearings a day on a thousand subjects -- when the smart play is to focus in a few key topics. The wildly underexplored subject of what's been going on with the money being spent in Iraq strikes me as something that should be a prime candidate.

I agree with Matt that the Democrats need to be smart about how they go about investigating the Bush administration and should concentrate on the key areas that best illustrate their massive failure. I also agree that war profiteering is an overlooked subject that focuses on the corrupt crony capitalism that has fueled this administration from day one. (Jane was on this a year ago.) It's long past time people started asking where in the hell all that money went.

I would suggest that the other two issues that are ripe for investigations, and which would capture the worst of the egregious actions of the Bush administration, are presidential abuse of power and the manipulation of intelligence and strategic errors of Iraq. Those are the areas in which it is important to demand accountability from the administration and demonstrate to the American people that mature, responsible leadership will not allow such behavior to go unpunished.

Republicans are working themselves into a frenzy about these impending investigations and they are worried for very good reason. They have treated the congress like their own private fiefdom and ignored every standard of normal political decency. It's not going to be pleasant for them. But it is essential that this happen. No forgive and forget this time. It was the Democrats' failure to follow through (after a good start in the post Watergate years) when Iran-Contra happened. They got spooked by Reagan's mystique and Republican cant and it led to the revival of these pernicious, undemocratic practices that came out of the Nixon era. This time they went so far as to openly launch a pre-emptive war of aggression. We cannot allow that to happen again.


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digby 4/25/2006 06:51:00 PM |

 
If You Build It

by digby

I've always thought that one of the perverse consequences of a libertarian utopian government that does nothing but national defense, policing and dispute resolution would be that this government would naturally seek to expand its powers in those areas. If a state's only function is policing, it functions as a ... police state.

We've watched the fake small government conservatives spend huge sums of money on war profiteering, oily pork and tax breaks for their rich contributors. But where they have really made their mark is with these ridiculously expanded executive and police powers. And they continue to suck up more of them every day:

Amid intense debate over how far the government can go to keep its secrets secret, Congress is taking up an expansive intelligence measure that proposes tougher steps in cracking down on leaks of classified information and authorizes broad arrest powers for security officers at intelligence agencies.

Provisions tucked into the legislation, which the House is expected to vote on as early as tomorrow, represent a major departure from traditional intelligence agency roles in plugging leaks and conducting domestic law enforcement, according to government watchdog groups and intelligence professionals.

If the measure is approved by Congress, the nation's spy chief would be ordered to consider a plan for revoking the pensions of intelligence agency employees who make unauthorized disclosures. It also would permit security forces at the National Security Agency and the CIA to make warrantless arrests outside the gates of their top-secret campuses.

The new proposals, which have received little public attention, dovetail with an ongoing Bush administration crackdown on unauthorized leaks.

[...]

Critics described the potential penalties outlined in the measure as "draconian."

"In a moment when the intelligence community should be looking forward toward what it does best, the arrest powers represent a step back toward the Nixon-era abuses," said Jason Vest, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.

The plan by Congress to target the pensions of intelligence agency employees would harm the overall spy effort, according to critics. Some, including former senior intelligence officials, warned that it would create an overly repressive environment within the agencies that could inhibit officers from speaking up, even internally, and discourage risk-taking.

The proposal to penalize leakers with loss of pension will do nothing "but keep good people from going to work in the [intelligence community] agencies," according to a senior intelligence official, who was quoted anonymously yesterday in a letter to the House Intelligence Committee from the Project on Government Oversight.

[...]

The measure also directs Congress to conduct a study of possible new sanctions against those who receive leaks of classified information, including journalists.

Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that such sanctions would represent a significant departure by the government, which usually targets only the person who leaks information, not the recipient.

"That is not the prevailing understanding under the law," he said. "If it were, [Washington Post reporter] Bob Woodward would not be a wealthy, best-selling author. He would be serving a life sentence."

At the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, the legislation would allow agency security forces at the NSA and CIA to make arrests outside the grounds of those agencies. Ware said the measure is "just clarifying the authority" of agency security officers "to arrest individuals."

It would apparently overrule a written opinion by the Maryland attorney general's office, which stated that the NSA's police powers are limited to the agency's grounds and to streets within a 500-foot perimeter of its Fort Meade campus.

The June 2005 opinion concluded that, under Maryland law, NSA officers "may make a citizen's arrest" and would have no immunity from liability for their actions if they are outside their jurisdiction. It notes that NSA officers can only carry firearms within that jurisdiction. The bill would allow them to carry guns.

[...]

Loch Johnson, a top Senate aide on the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses in the 1970s, called it a "worrisome" expansion of power.

"That's why we have the FBI and other law enforcement officials," he said. "I don't know that this needs to be an intelligence officer's function. I wouldn't think it should be."

Aftergood termed the proposal "shocking" and said "it raises the specter of a secret police force that is unaccountable and operates outside of the normal law enforcement parameters."

I know I feel safer already, don't you?

This is the kind of stuff that's going on right now in the Congress, even as the president's approval rating sits in the low 30's and the Republicans appear to be poised to lose their majority in the fall. They are like sharks, mercilessly pursuing their agenda no matter what is going on around them. They know that it is much more difficult to reverse this kind of thing than it is to enact it. Their gargantuan, national security bureaucracy replete with gun-toting NSA "security" authorized to arrest anyone they choose will be institutionalized and anyone who tries to end it will be tarred as a Democratic sissy for the next generation. If they can sneak this one through, they will.

This letter from the Project On Government Oversight to Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harmon outlines the various issues of concern. It's hard to believe that these people would have the gall to use this leak controversy as an excuse to create two new secret police forces in the CIA and NSA, but that's what they're doing (among other heinous things.)


I will look forward to another sanctimonious lecture from intelligence chairman Pat Roberts on the horrors of unauthorized leaking when this legislation gets to the Senate. He knows wehat he's talking about. After all, he committed one of the most egregious leaks in recent memory.




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digby 4/25/2006 05:41:00 PM |

 
Teen Sex Cults

by digby


We've discussed the strange phenomenon of wingnut fascination with bestiality, specifically sex with dogs. And recently we've been treated to the ick inducing sight of seven year old girls dressing up in ball gowns and pledging to their fathers to remain "sexually pure" until daddy turns them over to their husbands.

Via Septic Tank at Kos, here's another peek into the strange, disturbed world of rightwing moralist sexual imagination: teen sex cults. It has even infiltrated the hallowed halls of science at the FDA:

Attorneys for a New York women's group plan to grill Food and Drug Administration officials this week about their failure to decide whether an emergency contraceptive pill called Plan B may be sold without a prescription.

Former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy operations commissioner, and Dr. Steven Galson, director of the FDA's drug evaluation center, are to testify in court-ordered depositions to be taken by attorneys for the Manhattan-based Center for Reproductive Rights Wednesday through Friday in Washington, D.C., and Rockville, Md.

The women's group seeks to force approval of over-the-counter sales of Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse.

Simon Heller, one of the attorneys, plans to quiz Woodcock on a March 23, 2004, staff memo suggesting she was concerned Plan B might lead to teenage promiscuity.

The FDA is only supposed to consider the safety and efficacy of drugs.

In the memo released by the FDA, Dr. Curtis Rosebraugh, an agency medical officer, wrote: "As an example, she [Woodcock] stated that we could not anticipate, or prevent extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B."

Rosebraugh indicated he found no reason to bar nonprescription sales of Plan B.

"This was the level of scientific discourse," Heller said in an interview, referring to concerns attributed to Woodcock. "I find it very odd that these people who are supposed to be responsible scientists and doctors are making up wacky reasons."

Where do they come up with this stuff? I have to assume that Woodcock's dark fantasies came from her own twisted imagination because I haven't been able to find any other references to Plan B and teen-age sex cults. However, that's not to say that there isn't plenty of ludicrous paranoia out there about Plan B. The biggest purveyor of lies on this subject appears to be the Concerned Women For America (a cult if I've ever seen one) that writes volumes of misinformation and misleading blather about everything, but particularly sex.

Here are just a few of their lurid Plan B "talking points":

Rather than reducing the core problem of young people engaging in sexual activity (which carries life-long consequences), it encourages sexual activity. An official survey revealed that MAP use among teenage girls in the United Kingdom more than doubled since it became available in pharmacies, increasing from one in 12 teen-agers to one in five. Among them were girls as young as 12. A girl who said she was 10 years old told the pharmacist "she had already used it four times."

[...]

Even morning-after pill proponents agree that sexually active girls are likely victims of sexual abuse, and interaction with medical professionals is an important defense.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute reported: "The younger women are when they first have intercourse the more likely they are to have had unwanted or nonvoluntary first sex, seven in 10 of those who had sex before age 13, for example."

...The rush to choose "pregnancy outcome options" may preempt efforts to rule out sexual abuse. "Sexual abuse is a common antecedent of adolescent pregnancy, with up to 66% of pregnant teens reporting histories of abuse…. Pregnancy may also be a sign of ongoing sexual abuse…. Boyer and Fine found that of 535 young women who were pregnant, 44% had been raped, of whom 11% became pregnant as a result of the rape. One half of these young women with rape histories were raped more than once."

It should be noted that this same group enthusiastically endorsed the South Dakota abortion law that offers no exemption for rape or incest.

The Bangkok Post reported disturbing consequences of easy availability of the morning-after pill for the past 15 years, including:

Random studies showed that men are the most frequent buyers. "They buy the pills for their girlfriends or wives so that they don't have to wear condoms and feel they’re at no risk of becoming a father afterwards. Some women I've spoken to said that they didn't even know what they were taking; that the guy just said it was a health supplement," said Nattaya Boonpakdee, program assistant at the Population Council (an agency dedicated to promoting and developing contraception and abortion methods).

"Although many feminists believe that the morning-after pill gives them more control over their own bodies, it would seem, judging from the few studies conducted so far, that it is actually being used by men to exploit women."

This is more of that taking away women's autonomy is really giving them "freedom" gibberish that these robotic forced birth freaks spew. They might as well be speaking in tongues for all the sense it makes.

They believe that the morning after pill is an abortion. But they would be against it even if it weren't because it encourages promiscuity. Or it allows men to exploit women. Or it's unsafe. Or it will give women emotional problems. Or physical problems because women who have abortions are more likely to die than women who don't. Except they aren't. But no matter, even if that isn't true, there are always a thousand reasons why women should not be allowed to fuck. Pick one and run with it.

"The morning-after pill is a pedophile's best friend," Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women of America, a public policy organization, said in a statement after learning of Galson's decision. "Morning-after pill proponents treat women like sex machines."

Pedophiles and sex-machines. Hoo baby. But hey, if it's fantasies of teen sex cults that rev these gruesome, obsessive imaginations, have at it. It would be nice if the scientists at the FDA got their jollies elsewhere, however. This is important.


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digby 4/25/2006 11:35:00 AM |

 
The First Stab

by digby

I have had the privilege of reading Glenn Greenwald's new book, "How Would A Patriot Act" and I can't recommend it highly enough. It is not just a litany of the gross abuse of power, the novel unconstitutional theories or the excessive fear mongering of the Bush years, although he lays them all out in frightening simplicity. This book is about how these actions debase our national character. I would submit that in this unpredictable era of global change, an immensely powerful nation like the US cannot lead, or even participate in any positive way, if the world believes it to be crassly amoral.

I'm not naive about American history. I know that the last two hundred plus years are rife with examples of our government failing to live up to its ideals. But for many of us who have grown up in the post World War II world of American dominance, watching our country casually discard its hard-won moral authority in favor of a childish insistence on "might makes right" is beyond disturbing. It hurts.

This is an issue with which every American, regardless of party, should be concerned. The founders knew that relying on the good will of men in power is stupid and we are seeing their predictions come true before our very eyes. The modern Republican leadership may currently have a monopoly on authoritarian impulses, but they are by no means the only people in this country who could be seduced by this Republican notion of executive authority. The constitution is what protects all Americans from the dark side of human nature when it has power over others, regardless of party or political philosophy. Those of us who worry about this usurpation of the constitution and degradation of the Bill of Rights know that this is not a passing fashion that will easily be tucked back into its former shape. Once you allow powerful men to seize power it's awfully hard to persuade their successors to give it back.

As we go into this election season we are going to be talking a lot about what we stand for, what we believe and who we are as a party and as a country. This book is, in my view, necessary reading for everyone in the party who is working on our message. Unless we insist upon accountability for what these people have done, I fear that the country will not be able to recover. People need to see that our system of government can not only survive such assaults on its integrity, but that justice and the rule of law will reassert themselves under responsible leadership. It must be publicly demonstrated that this doctrine of unlimited presidential authority is unacceptable and Unamerican.

A distorted, authoritarian undemocratic view of American government has persisted now for more than a generation among certain conservatives. This philosophy has taken us from Watergate to Iran-Contra to Impeachment to the supreme court deciding a presidential election and the last five years of unprecedented assaults on the constitution in the name of a war that has no end. We need to drive a stake through the heart of this philosophy once and for all before it kills us. Greenwald's book is one of the first stabs at doing that and it's vital that the rest of us do our part.

If you believe as I do that this is the issue of our time, this book lays it all out in stark, clear prose. Send one to your Senator or congressman. They need to read it.




Read Glenn's post about the book here. Order it here.



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digby 4/25/2006 11:15:00 AM |

 
Bush = Lincoln? Sure. Like Dan Brown = Walt Whitman

In case you're not yet convinced, Arthur Schlesinger explains why Bush ain't Lincoln, and for the helluva it tosses in good reasons why Bush ain't Truman, Eisenhower, or Kennedy either. Also, notice how Schlesinger cleverly disses Bush by pointing out that these three were war veterans, not drunken, promiscuous fratboys who used their fathers' good name to avoid military service:

The issue of preventive war as a presidential prerogative is hardly new. In February 1848 Rep. Abraham Lincoln explained his opposition to the Mexican War: "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure [emphasis added]. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't.' "

This is precisely how George W. Bush sees his presidential prerogative: Be silent; I see it, if you don't . However, both Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out preventive war against Joseph Stalin's attempt to dominate Europe. And in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy, himself a hero of the Second World War, rejected the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a preventive strike against the Soviet Union in Cuba.

It was lucky that JFK was determined to get the missiles out peacefully, because only decades later did we discover that the Soviet forces in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons and orders to use them to repel a U.S. invasion. This would have meant a nuclear exchange. Instead, JFK used his own thousand days to give the American University speech, a powerful plea to Americans as well as to Russians to reexamine "our own attitude -- as individuals and as a nation -- for our attitude is as essential as theirs." This was followed by the limited test ban treaty. It was compatible with the George Kennan formula -- containment plus deterrence -- that worked effectively to avoid a nuclear clash.

The Cuban missile crisis was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before had two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to destroy the planet. Had there been exponents of preventive war in the White House, there probably would have been nuclear war.

tristero 4/25/2006 11:05:00 AM |

 
A Must Read On Evolution

by tristero

A thrilling, beautiful description of the new science of evolution. Ostensibly a review of three books, the authors have written a succinct lay-person's introduction (more like a toenail in the water) to the theory of "evo-devo," the function of HOX genes, and other fascinating contemporary science. Don't miss it.
tristero 4/25/2006 10:36:00 AM |

Monday, April 24, 2006

 
Playing By The Rules

by digby

Republican style...

Amid all the partisan rancor of congressional politics, the softball league has for 37 years been a rare case of bipartisan civility, an opportunity for Democratic and Republican aides to sneak out of work a bit early and take the field in the name of the lawmaker, committee or federal agency they work for.

This year, the league will be missing something: a lot of the Republicans.

During the off-season, a group of Republican teams seceded from the league after accusing its Democratic commissioner, Gary Caruso, of running a socialist year-end playoff system that gives below-average teams an unfair chance to win the championship.

The league "is all about Softball Welfare -- aiding the weak by punishing the strong," the pitcher of one Republican team told Mr. Caruso in an email. "The commissioner has a long-standing policy of punishing success and rewarding failure. He's a Democrat. Waddya' expect?" read another email, from Gary Mahmoud, the coach of BoehnerLand, a team from the office of Republican Majority Leader John Boehner.

Is every Republican in Washington the emotional age of seven? The rules require that some of the lesser teams get a chance to participate in the "playoffs" so the manly he-men who have shed their blood and sweat throughout the grueling season are angry that it denies them their rightful place atop congressional softball Olympus. After all, they deserve the glory:

The congressional league is a relaxed affair: No umpires call balls and strikes, so batters don't have to swing until they get a pitch they like. Fields are open to the public, so most teams dispatch an intern or junior aide to reserve a field several hours before game time.

Can someone tell me why these awesome GOP athletes aren't in Iraq instead of measuring their dicks in a slow-pitch softball league that a junior high girls team could easily dominate? Could it be because they are a bunch of pathetic, bedwetting chickenshits? I thought so.



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digby 4/24/2006 02:48:00 PM |

 
Disgrace

by digby

Thanks to reader Samela for pointing out this incredible series in the Chicago Tribune outlining contractor abuses in Iraq. It's rather surprising that no other papers or any of the networks have bothered to report the story (at least that I'm aware of) but I can understand it. The sheer volume on inhumane activity that the Bush administration has endorsed or perpetrated is so huge that it's hard to keep up.

The top U.S. commander in Iraq has ordered sweeping changes for privatized military support operations after confirming violations of human-trafficking laws and other abuses by contractors involving possibly thousands of foreign workers on American bases, according to records obtained by the Tribune.

[...]

The State Department launched an investigation and promised other actions earlier this year in response to a series published Oct. 9-10 by the Tribune, "Pipeline to Peril," that detailed many of the abuses now cited in the memos.

The stories disclosed the often-illicit networks used to recruit low-skilled laborers from some of the world's most impoverished and remote locales to work in menial jobs on American bases in Iraq.

Although other firms also have contracts supporting the military in Iraq, the U.S. has outsourced vital support operations to Halliburton subsidiary KBR at an unprecedented scale, at a cost to the U.S. of more than $12 billion as of late last year.

This issue with contractors and human trafficking is not unique to Iraq. We experienced problems with them in Bosnia, too:

...[he] witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased."

...women and girls were handed over to bar owners and told to perform sex acts to pay for their costumes.The women who refused were locked in rooms and withheld food and outside contact for days or weeks. After this time they are told to dance naked on table tops and sit with clients. If the women still refuse to perform sex acts with the customers they are beaten and raped in the rooms by the bar owners and their associates. They are told if they go to the police they will be arrested for prostitution and being an illegal immigrant."

This problem is compounded by the fact that there are a lot of questions as to whether or not there is any legal remedy. The military appears to be saying they will require contracts to include protections against human trafficking and abuses, but there's no word on how such contracts can be enforced or whether they fall under under US or Iraqi law.

Last week someone asked the president about this:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. It's an honor to have you here. I'm a first-year student in South Asia studies. My question is in regards to private military contractors. Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to these contractors in Iraq. I asked your Secretary of Defense a couple months ago what law governs their actions.

THE PRESIDENT: I was going to ask him. Go ahead. (Laughter.) Help. (Laughter.)

Q I was hoping your answer might be a little more specific. (Laughter.) Mr. Rumsfeld answered that Iraq has its own domestic laws which he assumed applied to those private military contractors. However, Iraq is clearly not currently capable of enforcing its laws, much less against -- over our American military contractors. I would submit to you that in this case, this is one case that privatization is not a solution. And, Mr. President, how do you propose to bring private military contractors under a system of law?

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that very much. I wasn't kidding -- (laughter.) I was going to -- I pick up the phone and say, Mr. Secretary, I've got an interesting question. (Laughter.) This is what delegation -- I don't mean to be dodging the question, although it's kind of convenient in this case, but never -- (laughter.) I really will -- I'm going to call the Secretary and say you brought up a very valid question, and what are we doing about it? That's how I work. I'm -- thanks. (Laughter.)

Despite all the hilarity, this is actually quite an important question. From Guantanamo to illegal wiretapping to military contractors, the law has been twisted or ignored by this administration. In the case of contractors who participate directly in the conflict, the law ironically suggests that they are "unlawful combatants." If they are caught breaking laws in Iraq, they fall under no enforceable legal system and are merely sent home. Meanwhile, the unlawful combatants we capture, many of whom have now been found to be factually innocent, are held indefinitely in Guantanamo and in secret prisons around the world.

You will all likely recall that strange moment a couple of months ago when General Peter Perfect publicly contradicted Rumsfeld on the issue of whether or not an American soldier or marine was honor bound to stop abuses if he or she saw them happening. Pace said yes, Rumsfeld said they should just be "reported." Guess what?

...there have been at least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers, most of them run by Iraq's Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry. Two sources involved with the inspections, one Iraqi official and one U.S. official, said abuse of prisoners was found at all the sites visited through February. U.S. military authorities confirmed that signs of severe abuse were observed at two of the detention centers.

But U.S. troops have not responded by removing all the detainees, as they did in November. Instead, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, only a handful of the most severely abused detainees at a single site were removed for medical treatment. Prisoners at two other sites were removed to alleviate overcrowding. U.S. and Iraqi authorities left the rest where they were.

This practice of leaving the detainees in place has raised concerns that detainees now face additional threats. It has also prompted fresh questions from the inspectors about whether the United States has honored a pledge by Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that U.S. troops would attempt to stop inhumane treatment if they saw it.

[...]

The Iraqi official familiar with the joint inspections said detainees who are not moved to other facilities are left vulnerable. "They tell us, 'If you leave us here, they will kill us,' " said the Iraqi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because, he said, he and other Iraqis involved with inspections had received death threats.

The U.S. official involved in the inspections, who would not be identified by name, described in an e-mail the abuse found during some of the visits since the Nov. 13 raid: "Numerous bruises on the arms, legs and feet. A lot of the Iraqis had separated shoulders and problems with their hands and fingers too. You could also see strap marks on some of their backs."

"I was not in charge of the team who went to the sites. If so, I would have taken them out," the U.S. official wrote, referring to the detainees. "We set a precedent and we were given guidance" from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "but for some reason it is not being followed."

Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, the commander of U.S. detention operations in Iraq, said in an interview, "I would strongly disagree with the statement that Americans are seeing cases of abuse and not doing anything."

There are other quotes by generals saying that no abuse of any kind has been seen, while other military officers admit that there has been torture including burning with cigarettes, dislocated shoulders from hanging from ropes etc. And the beat(ings) go on.

The US government has lost all moral authority and no longer even theoretically adheres to a consistent set of principles. It indefinitely imprisons citizens and non-citizens alike as non-combatants, some of them innocent, saying the "battlefield" comprises the whole planet, including Smalltown USA. Yet we place our own non-combatants on the real battlefield and protect them by saying there is no legal system that applies them. The taxpayers of this country are paying for human trafficking. The administration created a series of secret prisons for the sole purpose of circumventing American laws. The government advances theories of executive authority that kings and dictators could appreciate. And we are now in the process of enabling the country we liberated from a tyrant to create tyrannical institutions of their own in the name of democratic government.

Every one of those things will make us less safe and yet the perpetrators insist that they are all done to protect us. And they are finally admitting that most of this is done purely for domestic political reasons.


My God.



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digby 4/24/2006 12:09:00 PM |

 
Tinkerbloggers

by digby


Mark Kleiman finds that the rightwing bigotsphere has decided the secret prison story was an elaborate ruse to trap CIA leakers. There never were any prisons.

I'm not kidding. Clap louder boys and girls.



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digby 4/24/2006 10:56:00 AM |

 
Save The Internet

by digby

I urge everyone to click this link and read Matt Stoller's post about this threat to your access to Hullabaloo and other blogs if the rapacious greedheads get their way. This is no drill. The internet providers are trying to dismantle Net Neutrality, which is the principle that bars companies from blocking content they don't like. Up to now the internet has been open, allowing innovations like blogging to emerge on the same playing field as the commercial web sites and compete for readers without needing to pay money for the privilege. With the help of Republicans and certain misguided Democrats, corporate America is about to change all that if we don't stop them.

This isn't some arcane technological issue. It affects all of us who surf the internet. It means that the network providers will be able to make deals with certain companies to degrade or cut off your access to its competitors to give you an incentive to use their service. The providers complain that companies like Google or Yahoo are making big bucks and they should get a piece of the action. But the only thing they have to offer these companies is access --- and the only way they can assure them that they will get their money's worth is by assuring them that they can deliver customers. Right now, everybody competes openly for readers and customers. If this bill passes, that will change. Internet providers will be in the business of delivering customers to certain web sites and they will likely use all the technical capability they have to do it.

Watch this very short video for a simple explanation of how this will work. Read Matt's post on this subject. And contact your representative.

As Matt says:

Can we win this fight? Yes, we can. Congress isn't that set on giving away the internet. They just don't understand the issues involved and don't think anyone's paying attention.

I have been remiss in not publicizing this issue until now. This may very well affect what I do. If a telco or cable company decides they don't like this blog, for political or any other reasons, they could theoretically slow it down or block it so that their customers cannot see it. In this environment that is a very scary thing.

Keep in mind that when the Bush administration decided they wanted to shred the constitution and conduct warrantless wiretaps, they went to the telephone companies and the telephone companies said not a word about it.

Consider that the former owners of my own cable company and internet provider, Adelphia, were right wing religious zealots (and crooks) who refused to show certain content on their cable line-up. And consider that there are only a handful of high speed internet services even in a metropolis like Los Angeles.

If you think that this country would be better off politically with another corporate cartel deciding what information you can have access to, then don't bother calling your congressman. But if the internet has become an important source of news and information that you believe is important to a functioning democracy, get on the horn.

Here is a map showing where members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee stand on this subject. As it turns out my own congressman, a member, has not yet committed. He is going to hear from me today. Perhaps those of you who live here in Southern California (or not) would like to call or fax one of his offices and let him know where you stand.

Rep. Henry Waxman

California:
(323) 651-1040 (phone)
(818) 878-7400 (phone)
(310) 652-3095 (phone)
(323) 655-0502 (fax)

Washington:
202-225-3976
202-225-4099 (fax)



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digby 4/24/2006 09:44:00 AM |

 
Bush = Lincoln? Sure, And Ashlee Simpson = Yo-Yo Ma

by tristero

A week or so ago, Iran was the new Cuban Missile crisis. This week, Bush is the new Lincoln. Riiiiight.

For those who think this is a debatable comparison that deserves serious, thoughtful, and nuanced discussion, Bennet Kelley and Mahablog have saved the rest of us a lot of time.

Let's see - Churchill, Kennedy, Lincoln - who's next? Napoleon? Nope, he's French for starters. Gandhi? Ehhh, it would just irritate Pakistan. Me, I'm leaning towards this guy or this one. Or maybe, given the way his poll numbers are going, Bush will go down in history as someone akin to this.
tristero 4/24/2006 08:39:00 AM |

Sunday, April 23, 2006

 
Agitating For A Crackdown

by digby


I wrote yesterday about the re-emergence of the shrieking harpies as the Republicans go down to defeat. I was speaking specifically of the wingnut gasbags, but Robert Parry points out that it is more than rhetoric. They are agitating to criminalize dissent. He cites this column by Tony Blankley:

The upcoming, unprecedented generals' "revolt" described by Mr. Holbrooke, if it is not against the law, certainly comes dangerously close to violating three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice:

Article 94 -- Mutiny and sedition Text
(a) "Any person subject to this chapter who (1) with intent to usurp or override lawful military authority, refuse, in concert with any other person, to obey orders or otherwise do his duty or creates any violence or disturbance is guilty of mutiny; (2) with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or other disturbance against that authority is guilty of sedition; (3) fails to do his utmost to prevent and suppress a mutiny or sedition being committed in his presence, or fails to take all reasonable means to inform his superior commissioned officer or commanding officer of a mutiny or sedition which he knows or has reason to believe is taking place, is guilty of a failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition."

Article 88 -- Contempt toward officials Text...
Article 134 -- General article

[...]

Certainly, generals and admirals are traditionally given more leeway to publicly assess war policies than is given to those in lower ranks. But with that broader, though limited, discretion comes the responsibility not to be seen to in any way contradict the absolute rule of civilians over the military in our constitutional republic.

The president has his authority granted to him by the people in the election of 2004. Where exactly do the generals in "revolt" think their authority comes from?

Republicans truly seem to have the idea that when a president wins an election he becomes dictator (or a "decider" as some might call it) Keep in mind Blankley is talking here about officers who resign or retire and then speak out about the policy. He claims that if they did this en masse, by design, they would be guilty of mutiny and sedition and a whole bunch of other things. He's desperately reaching for a legal way to stop these people from objecting to Bush's policies, even after they are out o0f the military.

Meanwhile, Bill Bennett says that journalists should be in jail for reporting that the government is tapping the phones of would-be terrorists without a warrant. Parry rightly reminds everyone of what Alberto Gonzales himself said about that:

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Feb. 6, 2006, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Delaware, asked Gonzales, "How has this revelation damaged the program" since the administration's attack on the disclosure "seems to presuppose that these very sophisticated al-Qaeda folks didn’t think we were intercepting their phone calls?"

Gonzales responded, "I think, based on my experience, it is true – you would assume that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged in some kind of surveillance. But if they're not reminded about it all the time in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget" – a response that drew laughter from the citizens in the hearing room.

I know that the wingnuts don't want to admit that the illegal wiretapping story is not about national security but rather about a heretofore unknown executive authority to flush the fourth Amendment down the toilet whenever it chooses, but that's the issue.

The revelation of the secret prisons that is causing the harpies to foam at the mouth this week-end is equally ridiculous:

As for the secret prisons, the fallout appears to be largely political, causing embarrassment for countries that collaborated in what appears to be a clear violation of international law by granting space for "black sites" where torture allegedly was practiced.

The most likely consequence is that the Bush administration will find it harder in the future to set up secret prisons outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross, the United Nations and human rights organizations.

Certain allies who were bullied or cajoled into accepting our torture facilities were exposed. I would not be surprised to find out that they were relieved not to have to host our sickening little gulag. It's certainly hard to imagine they were entirely thrilled to have been drawn into our quixotic adventure in spreadin' freedom through torture by serving as our illegal prison hosts.

Parry concludes:

... what appears most keenly at stake in the escalating political rhetoric is the Bush administration’s determination to stop its political fall by branding its critics – even U.S. generals and CIA officers – as unpatriotic and then silencing them with threats of imprisonment.

Bush is trying to mark the boundaries of permissible political debate. He also wants total control of classified information so he can leak the information that helps him – as he did in summer 2003 to shore up his claims about Iraq’s WMD – while keeping a lid on secrets that might make him look bad.

The firing of CIA officer Mary McCarthy and the threats of criminal charges against various dissenters are just the latest skirmishes in the political war over who will decide what Americans get to see and hear.

The other signal to Bush’s critics, however, is this: If they ever thought he and his administration would accept accountability for their alleged abuses of power without a nasty fight, those critics are very mistaken.

This is why the Democrats need to be very tough and make it clear that they are serious about holding this administration accountable for what they've done. If they are not out front, visibly willing to get these generals' and these whistleblowers' backs, they are sending a signal that these folks are on their own while the harpies are circling. Democrats need to step up here.

In this very interesting article in the American prospect, Ruy Texeira and John Helpin offer this thesis: "Progressives need to fight for what they believe in -- and put the common good at the center of a new progressive vision -- as an essential strategy for political growth and majority building." I don't know about you, but I believe in the Bill of Rights. (I actually think it may be the single best thing the United States ever did.)

I know it's unfashionable to talk about rights at this political moment and that we are supposed to pull together and submerge our individual needs for the common good. But I've got to say that I think without a robust defense of the Bill of Rights, there is no common good. They are what allow the minority to participate in the common good. They are what allow the people to be heard and the truth to be spoken so that we can even know what the common good is. They are what restrains government from using its awesome power to repress its citizens instead of using it to promote the common good. In my mind, if Democrats don't stand for the Bill of Rights then they stand for nothing. It's the foundation upon which everything else we do is built.

So, as we go into this election season and we see the shrieking harpies like Bill Bennett and Tony Blankley agitating for the government to repress dissent, I hope the party keeps in mind that while braying about national defense, Republicans are increasingly "standing" for a police state. If we don't defend the constitution then who the hell will?



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digby 4/23/2006 05:24:00 PM |

 
Partisan Leaks

by digby

Can someone explain to me why it's assumed that Mary McCarthy leaked information for partisan reasons (because she gave money to the Kerry campaign) while her boss Porter Goss, who was a Republican congressman until a year and a half ago, is not assumed to have fired her for partisan reasons?

Remember, when Goss was head of the house intelligence committee, he had this to say about the alleged leak of covert operative Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak:

"Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation"

yeah, yeah, I know. IOKIY... whatever.



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digby 4/23/2006 03:51:00 PM |

 
The Shake Up

by digby

So, aside from rearranging the deck chairs, Josh Bolton has a new plan:

Deploy Guns and Badges

This is an unabashed play to members of the conservative base who are worried about illegal immigration. Under the banner of homeland security, the White House plans to seek more funding for an extremely visible enforcement crackdown at the Mexican border, including a beefed-up force of agents patrolling on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). "It'll be more guys with guns and badges," said a proponent of the plan. "Think of the visuals. The President can go down and meet with the new recruits. He can go down to the border and meet with a bunch of guys and go ride around on an atv."

I wonder what costume he'll put on for that photo-op. Chuck Norris is his favorite actor so I'm thinking Texas Ranger suit.

Hitch up those chaps, Junior.

Make Wall Street Happy

In an effort to curry favor with dispirited Bush backers in the investment world, the Administration will focus on two tax measures already in the legislative pipeline—extensions of the rate cuts for stock dividends and capital gains

What'll they think of next?

Brag More

White House officials who track coverage of Bush in media markets around the country said he garnered his best publicity in months from a tour to promote enrollment in Medicare's new prescription-drug plan. So they are planning a more focused and consistent effort to talk about the program's successes after months of press reports on start-up difficulties. Bolten's plan also calls for more happy talk about the economy.

Yeah, they've got a lot to brag about. And happy talk is a sure way to bring people around.

Court The Press

Bolten is extremely guarded around reporters, but he knows them and, unlike some of his colleagues, is not scared of them...His first move, working with counselor Dan Bartlett, was to offer the press secretary job to Tony Snow of Fox News radio and television, a former newspaper editorial writer and onetime host of Fox News Sunday who served George H.W. Bush as speechwriting director. Snow, a father of three and a sax player, is the bona fide outsider that Republican allies have long prescribed for Bushworld and would bring irreverence to a place that hasn't seen a lot of fun lately

They finally seem to have realized that Bush's biggest problem is the perception that the White House isn't irreverent enough.

So, Bolton's plan is to change marketing. Hey, maybe they can still sell this shit sandwich as a filet mignon, but I doubt it. There is one aspect of his little plan that is truly disturbing, however:

Reclaim Security Credibility

This is the riskiest, and potentially most consequential, element of the plan, keyed to the vow by Iran to continue its nuclear program despite the opposition of several major world powers. Presidential advisers believe that by putting pressure on Iran, Bush may be able to rehabilitate himself on national security, a core strength that has been compromised by a discouraging outlook in Iraq. "In the face of the Iranian menace, the Democrats will lose," said a Republican frequently consulted by the White House.

So it's confirmed that they view confrontatiin with Iran as a politicial winner.

Zbigniew Brzezinski points out the parallels with this marketing plan and the run-up to Iraq in this article in the LA Times today. After discussing the many disasterous consequences of a unilateral, pre-emptive attack on Iran, he also points out how counter-productive this moronic saber-rattling is:

Even if the United States is not planning an imminent military strike on Iran, persistent hints by official spokesmen that "the military option is on the table" impede the kind of negotiations that could make that option unnecessary. Such threats are likely to unite Iranian nationalists and Shiite fundamentalists because most Iranians are proud of their nuclear program.

Military threats also reinforce growing international suspicions that the U.S. might be deliberately encouraging greater Iranian intransigence. Sadly, one has to wonder whether, in fact, such suspicions may not be partly justified. How else to explain the current U.S. "negotiating" stance: refusing to participate in the ongoing negotiations with Iran and insisting on dealing only through proxies. (That stands in sharp contrast with the simultaneous U.S. negotiations with North Korea.)

The U.S. is already allocating funds for the destabilization of the Iranian regime and reportedly sending Special Forces teams into Iran to stir up non-Iranian ethnic minorities in order to fragment the Iranian state (in the name of democratization!). And there are clearly people in the Bush administration who do not wish for any negotiated solution, abetted by outside drum-beaters for military action and egged on by full-page ads hyping the Iranian threat.

There is unintended irony in a situation in which the outrageous language of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (whose powers are much more limited than his title implies) helps to justify threats by administration figures, which in turn help Ahmadinejad to exploit his intransigence further, gaining more fervent domestic support for himself as well as for the Iranian nuclear program.

It is therefore high time for the administration to sober up and think strategically, with a historic perspective and the U.S. national interest primarily in mind. It's time to cool the rhetoric. The United States should not be guided by emotions or a sense of a religiously inspired mission. Nor should it lose sight of the fact that deterrence has worked in U.S.-Soviet relations, in U.S.-Chinese relations and in Indo-Pakistani relations.

Sober up? Why, here I thought the problem was that they aren't irreverent enough. Cool the rhetoric? Sorry. It's an election year. If Bush has to launch nuclear war to prevent being held acountable for what he's done, that just how it has to be. Remember, they believe that "in the face of the Iranian menace, the Democrats will lose."


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digby 4/23/2006 02:57:00 PM |

 
Gilligan Security

by digby


Mike Stark at Calling All Wingnuts had a chance to talk to Joe Klein and he asked him about why he believed that nuclear war should be on the table.He said:

Joe: Oh… Oh… OK. I said that it should be an option. And I do believe that it should be an option. But let me tell you what I actually believe about this. First of all, it should be an option and I think it doesn’t do us any harm for the Iranians, if they are going to go around saying crazy things, to think that we might act crazily as well.

Mike: So it’s not really an option…

Joe: No, but let me say this. It’s not really an option because I don’t believe that the Bush administration, given the disastrous foreign policy of the last five years, has the credibility or the wherewithall to act unilaterally attack Iraq (sic)...And as a matter of principle, throughout my entire career, my entire career I’ve believed that we can only use force when we do it in concert with out allies as we did in the first Gulf War, as we did in Kosove when it was NATO. So for you to say that I am in favor of nuking Iran, you sound like one of those left wing bloggers who are so routinely innaccurate in everything they write about.

I believe that Klein accurately represents the level of sophistication we see in many American political circles these days, which is this notion that if we act crazy we will scare the hell out of the wogs.


Tom Friedman said much the same thing after 9/11:

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn't thought through - but that's what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: "We know what you're cooking in your bathtubs. We don't know exactly what we're going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you're wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld - he's even crazier than you are."

There is a lot about the Bush team's foreign policy I don't like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.

Suppose your local police department suddenly threw out all the rules and started acting "crazy" on the theory that the criminals would get scared and stay home. Would that actually make your town safer or more dangerous?

This is such a deeply immature view that I honestly don't know these influential middle aged men are even allowed to drive much less be taken seriously on foreign policy. The United States is a superpower. We do not need to "act crazy." Indeed, acting crazy is the last thing a superpower should ever do. It makes others miscalculate because they think we are unpredictable and dumb.

booga booga







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digby 4/23/2006 12:00:00 PM |

 
Insurance Policy

by digby

Do the American people know what they signed on to?

If you want an image of what America's long-term plans for Iraq look like, it's right here at Balad. Tucked away in a rural no man's land 43 miles north of Baghdad, this 15-square-mile mini-city of thousands of trailers and vehicle depots is one of four "superbases" where the Pentagon plans to consolidate U.S. forces, taking them gradually from the front lines of the Iraq war. (Two other bases are slated for the British and Iraqi military.) The shift is part of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plan to draw down U.S. ground forces in Iraq significantly by the end of 2006. Pentagon planners hope that this partial withdrawal will, in turn, help take the edge off rising opposition to the war at home—long enough to secure Iraq's nascent democracy.

But the vast base being built up at Balad is also hard evidence that, despite all the political debate in Washington about a quick U.S. pullout, the Pentagon is planning to stay in Iraq for a long time—at least a decade or so, according to military strategists. Sovereignty issues still need to be worked out by mutual, legal agreement. But even as Iraqi politicians settle on a new government after four months of stalemate—on Saturday, they agreed on a new prime minister, Jawad al-Maliki—they also are welcoming the long-term U.S. presence. Sectarian conflict here has worsened in recent months, outstripping the anti-American insurgency in significance, and many Iraqis know there is no alternative to U.S. troops for the foreseeable future. "I think the presence of the American forces can be seen as an insurance policy for the unity of Iraq," says national-security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie.

There is ample evidence elsewhere of America's long-term plans. The new $592 million U.S. Embassy being built at the heart of Baghdad's "international zone" is "massive ... the largest embassy to date," says Maj. Gen. Chuck Williams, head of the State Department's Overseas Building Operations office. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Williams called it the "most ambitious project" his office has undertaken in its history. Officials in both the executive branch and Congress say they are unaware of any serious planning, or even talk inside the national-security bureaucracy, about a full withdrawal. The Pentagon has one intel officer assigned to produce and update analyses regarding the consequences of a U.S. pullout. But the job is only a part-time assignment, according to a Pentagon source who asked for anonymity because of the sensitive subject matter. As President George W. Bush himself said in March, the final number of U.S. troops "will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."

We've known this for a long time, of course, although nobody ever discusses it. But nobody has yet factored in how our "superbases" and "super embassy" are going to fare in the middle of a civil war. What exactly does "the presence of the American forces can be seen as an insurance policy for the unity of Iraq" mean in light of events like this:

As the shooting died down Tuesday afternoon, the tired and frightened residents of Baghdad's Adhamiyah neighborhood packed their cars and prepared to flee. After two days of street fighting that had kept them locked in their houses, they did not want to see what might come next.

The details of the unusual street battle that began Monday remained shrouded by the fog of war. U.S. and Iraqi soldiers thought they were shooting at insurgents who were trying to ambush them. Local men on neighborhood watch in the predominantly Sunni Arab area thought they were shooting at Shiites who were coming to kidnap and kill them. Residents hiding in their homes, simply praying for survival, could only guess who was fighting whom.

American troops aren't ever going to be able to "insure" against this. They will end up withdrawing behind the walls of their military and diplomatic compounds. Yet our continued presence in the country will exacerbate the problems without solving anything. So what is going to be accomplished with these huge bases and embassy compounds?

And by the way, is it still politically incorrect to ask how much this is costing the American public? "Freedom" may be the Almighty's gift to the world but the American taxpayer is paying the insurance premium.



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digby 4/23/2006 10:39:00 AM |

Saturday, April 22, 2006

 
Gird Your Loins

by digby

The sublime Wolcott tries to prepare us for what's coming:

Like so many of her fellow insufferables on the right, the Anchoress has to grip and wield her nun's ruler of rectitude ever more fiercely now that the war in Iraq has gone so disastrously and Bush's poll numbers are eating through the floorboards. The rhetoric will escalate into the higher rafters of hysteria as they find themselves more and more in the minority, finding it harder and harder to scrape up a lynch mob to go after such dastardly varmints as the Dixie Chicks. Or it will delve deeper into the mire, as the Anchoress leads them into noble battle against the Cult of Mendacity with a crucifix in one hand, a toilet plunger in the other.

It's going to be bad, no matter what. Do you remember what it was like before Bush was president? The blond shrieking harpies with aneurysms the size of tennis balls pulsing wildly on their throats and temples? It's all going to come back, only worse. This time they really, truly believed they had embarked on a thousand year Reich.






Art by Rebekah Naomi Cox
Computer Wallpaper can be purchased at Conlan Press


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digby 4/22/2006 07:00:00 PM |

 
Hooyah!

by digby

Click here for the latest adventures of the Keyboard Kommandos and Battle-Action Bush: Treasonous Generals edition.



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digby 4/22/2006 06:44:00 AM |

 
The Unpopular Twins

by digby

California's not very fond of Republicans right now. When the two most famous failed Republican leaders get together it's not pretty:

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Bush's visit to Stanford was interrupted by protesters, who blocked the only road leading to the Hoover Institution, where Mr. Bush was to meet with fellows before dining with Mr. Shultz.

As a result of the protest, the meeting was switched to Mr. Shultz's house, and the dinner followed.

The get-togethers with Mr. Schwarzenegger and Mr. Shultz were the most significant events so far in Mr. Bush's visit.

For Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, Mr. Bush's visit presented a dilemma: The governor, who is facing a tough re-election fight, did not want to appear too often or too cozy with Mr. Bush, whose approval rating in this largely Democratic state is 32 percent, according to a Field Poll last week. That is even lower than Mr. Schwarzenegger's, 36 percent in the poll.

America seems to be waking up to the fact that stolen elections, bogus recalls, movie stars and guys you want to have a beer with don't actually add up to leadership. If they can be wised up to the fact that tax cuts for billionaires don't actually benefit them, then we might be getting someplace.



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digby 4/22/2006 06:37:00 AM |

 
In Our Blood

by digby


I was musing yesterday about the habitual misjudgment on the part of the Bush administration and why it all felt so familiar to me. The unique combination of hubris, emotionalism, and confident assumptions that through little effort the US would "win" by dint of its superiority in both goodness and courage. And that's when it came to me where I'd heard it before:

From a speech given at the centennial of the civil war by historian Stephen Z. Starr:

Granting the existence of cultural differences between the North and South, can we assume that they would necessarily lead to a Civil War? Obviously not. Such differences lead to animosity and war only if one side develops a national inferiority complex, begins to blame all its shortcomings on the other side, enforces a rigid conformity on its own people, and tries to make up for its own sins of omission and commission by name-calling, by nursing an exaggerated pride and sensitiveness, and by cultivating a reckless aggressiveness as a substitute for reason.

And this was the refuge of the South. For ten years before secession, Northerners were commonly referred to as "mongrels and hirelings." The North was described as "a conglomeration of greasy mechanics filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists ... hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman's body servant." And, most fatal delusion of all, Southerners began to credit themselves with fighting ability equal to that of nine, five, or more conservatively, three Northerners.

Once a nation or a section begins to speak and think in such terms, reason has gone out the window and emotion has taken over. This is precisely what happened in the South, and this is why the Cotton States seceded before Lincoln was even inaugurated and before his administration had committed, or had a chance to commit, any act of egression against them. Such behavior is fundamentally irrational, and cannot be explained in rational terms.

We seem to have a little glitch in our national psyche that won't go away. It isn't just southern anymore. The misadventure of the last five years has been run by a southern dominant political party, but its architects were elite, cosmopolitan intellectuals. This is an American problem and we are going to have to get rid of it if this country is going to survive.




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digby 4/22/2006 06:17:00 AM |

 
Every Wingnut For Himself

by digby


Uh Oh. The Republicans are starting to fight over the mouldering corpse of Ronald Reagan. The end is nigh.

The elites in the GOP have never understood conservatives or Reagan; they've found both to be a bit tacky. They have always found the populists' commitment to values unsettling. To them, adherence to conservative principles was always less important than wealth and power.

Unfortunately, the GOP has lost its motivating ideals. The revolution of 1994 has been killed not by zeal but by a loss of faith in its own principles. The tragedy is not that we are faced with another fight for the soul of the Republican Party but that we have missed an opportunity to bring a new generation of Americans over to our point of view.

Ah yes. But, remember, it's because these greedy elites like William Kristol aren't really conservatives, after all. The real conservatives are putting their tiny little feet down.

It was the populists under Reagan, and later under Newt Gingrich, who energized the party, gave voice to a maturing conservative ideology and swept Republicans into power. We would be imprudent and forgetful to disregard this. But it may be too late, because conservatives don't want to be part of the looming train wreck. They know that this is no longer Ronald Reagan's party.

Rats deserting the sinking ship of state. What a bunch of chickenshits.


Update: TBOGG finds some serious right wing doom and gloom over at The Corner.


Thanks to JM
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digby 4/22/2006 06:05:00 AM |

Friday, April 21, 2006

 
Taboos

by digby


Reading this interesting article in Forward about the potential consequences of bombing Iran's nuclear facilities (presuming we even know where they are) I am struck once again by the right's willingness to violate important taboos. (Some of you may not find this surprising considering their rather shocking public obsession with bestiality, but this goes beyond their usual bedroom hypocrisy.)

They talk a lot about the decline of western civilization and worry incessantly about gay marriage and changing gender roles, but they quite casually violate some of the most important taboos of the last half century or more. Big honking important taboos at that.

First, they declare that the taboo against wars of agression, formed in the blood of more than 70 million dead people in the 20th century's two world wars, is out. Not even a second glance at that taboo. They simply repackage it as "pre-emptive" war, changing the previous definition of troops gathering on the border to somebody some day might want to attack us so we must attack them first.

Then there's torture. This society used to teach its children that there is no excuse for torture. Indeed, until recently, people who torture were considered to be either evil or sick. We didn't make exceptions for "except when you suspect the person is a really bad person." We said torture is wrong. Now we have sent a message far and wide that torture is necessary and even good if the person who is committing it is doing it for the right reasons. Those right reasons are usually that we "know" that the victim has information but is refusing to tell us what it is. How we "know" this is never spelled out. All we know is that if the person is on our side they are "good" and the ones who are refusing to tell are "evil" and that should be good enough for anybody.

Finally, we seem to have crossed the rubicon with respect to nukes. We are openly discussing using them on television, much as otherwise decent people tossed around the idea of torture after 9/11. People like Joe Klein think it's not only ok for George W. Bush to say nukes are on the table --- but it's desirable becaue then people will think we are crazy and run like hell when we say boo. However, just as with torture, once you start talking about how it might be ok in certain circumstances, then you have begun to break down the taboo against it.

Much of our safety in the post-Hiroshima world has relied on the fact that nuclear war is too horrible to contemplate. It's not just the horror of the explosions themselves, it's the visions of radiation sickness and cancer and deformities and half lives of thousands of years. It's apocalyptic (which may be why the Left Behind faction thinks this is such a great idea.) For the sane among us, letting the nuclear genie out of the bottle is simply unthinkable. It's not and never can be "on the table" because once you start talking about it as if it's just another form of warfare somebody is going to do it.

I'm trying hard to think if there are any taboos left after endorsing launching pre-emptive nuclear war and I don't think there are. The only thing left is actually exploding a "tactical" nuke and considering this administration's determination to break as many civilized norms as possible we would be fools not to take them seriously.

Hat tip to Gene Lyons for the Forward article. Here's his excellent piece on this subject. I think this is particularly good:

Once again Bush has denied hostile intent, just as he did for many months after secretly ordering the Pentagon to draft detailed war plans against Iraq. Writing in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh suggests that all systems are go at the White House, including possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. He hints that the neo-conservative ideologues around Dick Cheney have deluded themselves that bombing Iran would lead to internal rebellion and the overthrow of the nation's Islamic regime.

Yeah, sure it would. Ever noticed how much the neo-cons' ignorance of basic human psychology rivals only Osama bin Laden's ?

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digby 4/21/2006 01:41:00 PM |

 
True Romance

by digby


Via Tristram Shandy I see that TIME's in-house faux liberal is at it again, this time giving Hugh Hewitt a private lap dance instead of dancing around the pole for everyone to see:

HH: I just have never seen them on PBS. But nevertheless, Joe, what I want to talk about is reverse Turnip Days, moments where candidates were not candid, and I think it hurt them. I want to start with an episode I find odd not finding it here in Politics Lost, which is the Florida recount, and the disastrous attempt by Gore and Lieberman to throw out the ballots of the military. Was that not the sort of authentic moment where we saw the soul of the modern Democratic Party on display?


JK: I think that the Florida recount in general...well, first of all, you're right about that. I mean, too often, the default position, especially in the left wing of the Democratic Party, is to not respect the military sufficiently, and to assume that anytime the United States would use force overseas, we would be wrong

.


And people wonder why liberals are popularly perceived as being cowards.

Here we have alleged liberal Joe Klein being confronted by alleged human Hugh Hewitt with a comment that the Democratic Party's [black]"soul" was on display when it argued that illegal ballots cast after election day shouldn't be counted (for good reason, as it turned out.) Does Joe Klein argue that the the Republicans staged fake uprisings and attempted to get the Cuban community to rise up (among many other things) thus showing that using the Florida debacle as an illustration of the "soul" of a party wasn't really a smart thing to do? No. Does he point out that the Republican party has a funny way of showing its "soul" when it supports torture? No. Does he laugh in Hugh Hewitt's supercilious face? Of course not.

He agrees with Hewitt. Indeed, this line is his foremost Scotty McClellanesque robotic talking point lately, called into use no matter what the question about the Democrats, whether it's about "soul" or nuclear war. Is there anyone in DC who can deprogram this guy? Or, at least officially relabel him a conservative so he an no longer be used as a liberal or "left of center" counterbalance on talking heads shows? Then he'll be able to officially join the right wing noise machine and he can take Hewie to the Conservative Prom.

Here are some highlights of Joe's bumps and grinds. It's true that he teases poor Hewie with some feints toward Democrats by saying the Swift boaters were wrong and a few other things, but he always comes back with a big gyrating bounce right where it counts:

JK: No, no. Hugh, in the past year, I've stood for the following things. I've taken the following positions. I agreed with the President on social security reform. I supported his two Supreme Court nominees, and I support, even though I opposed this war, I support staying the course in Iraq, and doing whatever we have to do in order to stabilize the region.

HH: All right. There are two critical aspects...

JK: So where do you put me on the spectrum?

HH: I'm going to put you as an old liberal with some hope of coming around.

JK: You know, I keep on getting hammered by the left.

HH: Oh, I know, but they're crazy now, Joe, as you write in this book. That's what's so wonderful about it. Your descriptions of the Democratic Party made me chuckle. It's lost. It's off the cliff.

JK: It made me cry.


[...]

JK: Well, you know, I also run in the kind of faith based circle. In fact, one of Bush's nicknames for me is Mr. Faith Based.

HH: Well, that's good.

JK: And at the very end of the book, I acknowledge Bill Bennett as giving the best advice on how to judge a presidential candidate.

HH: At a Christian Coalition meeting. Yeah, it's a great anecdote.

JK: And Bill's a good friend of mine. But I've kind of got to give these guys cover. You don't want to be praised by what you call a traditional liberal, do you?

[...]

JK: But can I just say this about the President? You were saying this before the break. Let me say that of all the major politicians I've covered in presidential politics in the last two or three times around, he is the most likely to stick with an issue, even if the polls are bad, and to govern from the gut as you said. I don't always agree with the decisions that he makes, but I think he is an honorable man, and when I've criticized him, I've tried to criticize him on the substance, and certainly not on his personality, because I really like the guy.


[...]


HH: When Michael Moore shows up in Jimmy Carter's box, the presidential box...

JK: Disgraceful!

HH: Disgraceful?

JK: Utterly disgraceful. I mean, one of the problems that I have with being called a liberal by someone like you is that there are all these people on the left in the Democratic Party who are claiming to be liberals, and I don't want to be associated with them.

HH: And Michael Moore is one of them?

JK: Oh, yeah. I mean, Michael Moore is reprehensible.

HH: How about when Al Gore shouted he betrayed us, he betrayed us? Was that reverse turnip time?

JK: Yeah, I thought that was pretty terrible. I mean, I think that Democrats have gotten so frustrated by their inability to win elections, that they're beginning to get pretty harsh and stupid.

HH: What's going on at the Daily Kos, and at Atrios, and these left wing bloggers? Do you read them?

JK: Only when they attack me, which is just about every day.

HH: Yes, they do. So what's happened...

JK: You know, last Sunday on Stephanopoulos, I said that we can't keep...that we have to keep the nuclear option on the table when dealing with Iran, if for no other reason than to make them worry a little bit, that we might be so crazy as to use it. That gets translated the next day by a number of left wing bloggers into me supporting a nuclear attack on Iran.

HH: Well, doesn't the Democratic Party have to distance itself from this fever swamp?

JK: Well, I think the Democratic Party has to, and I think the Republican Party has to distance itself from Creationists, and extremists on their side. You know, I was up with Newt Gingrich in New Hampshire last week, and someone asked him about intelligent design. And he said I think it's a perfectly fine philosophy, it just shouldn't be taught in science classes, because it has nothing to do with science. And those are the kind of politicians...I've always really respected Newt, because he's a man of honor, and he is a real policy wonk, and he really cares about stuff.

HH: We're out of time. Joe, will you come back when you're done with the hectic of the book tour?

JK: Sure.

HH: Because I would love to continue this on. In fact, as often as you want, you've got the open invitation to be our responsible Democrat on the show, because they're hard to find.

Joe loves you too big guy. You know just what to say to guy like him.


For the record, I can't speak for everyone in the left blogosphere, but I can say that I criticized Klein's comment about leaving nuclear war on the table as being insane because you don't want pre-emptive war (especially nuclear)on the table, not because I thought he actually wanted nuclear war. I think the first is stupid and insane, and the second is stupid, insane and evil. Klein wants it known that he is only stupid and insane and I'm happy to grant him that. Evil would require some actual substance.


Update: And, btw, he goes out of his way to support, of all things, gun control, which has pretty much been jettisoned by the Democratic Party. I'm beginning to think he's a paid agent of Richard Mellon Scaife. Everything he says, whether in "favor" of Democrats or against them is Karl Rove's dream.



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digby 4/21/2006 09:31:00 AM |

 
Another Traitor Speaks

by digby

Former National Security Agency Director Lt. General William Odom dissected the strategic folly of the Iraq invasion and Bush Administration policies in a major policy speech at Brown University for the Watson Institute- America’s Strategic Paralysis . "The Iraq War may turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history. In a mere 18 months we went from unprecedented levels of support after 9-11..to being one of the most hated countries…Turkey used to be one of strongest pro-US regimes, now we’re so unpopular, there’s a movie playing there- Metal Storm, about a war between US and Turkey. In addition to producing faulty intel and ties to Al Qaida, Bush made preposterous claim that toppling Saddam would open the way for liberal democracy in a very short time... Misunderstanding the character of American power, he dismissed the allies as a nuisance and failed to get the UN Security Council’s sanction… We must reinforce international law, not reject and ridicule it."

Odom, now a Yale professor and Hudson Institute senior fellow, was director of the sprawling NSA (which monitors all communications) from 1985-88 under Reagan, and previously was Zbigniew Brzezinski's assistant under Carter. His latest 2004 book is America's Inadvertent Empire.

Even if the invasion had gone well, Odom says it wouldn't have mattered: "The invasion wasn't in our interests, it was in Iran's interest, Al Qaida's interest. Seeing America invade must have made Iranian leaders ecstatic. Iran's hostility to Saddam was hard to exaggerate.. Iraq is now open to Al Qaida, which it never was before - it's easier for terrorists to kill Americans there than in the US.. Neither our leaders or the mainstream media recognize the perversity of key US policies now begetting outcomes they were designed to prevent… 3 years later the US is bogged down in Iraq, pretending a Constitution has been put in place, while the civil war rages, Iran meddles, and Al Qaida swells its ranks with new recruits.. We have lost our capacity to lead and are in a state of crisis - diplomatic and military."

That's harsh. Maybe they can charge him with a federal crime, like that woman who exercised her free speech in front of important people yesterday.


Via Carolyn Kay



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digby 4/21/2006 08:07:00 AM |

Thursday, April 20, 2006

 
The Actor

by digby

Kevin Drum links to this post by Mark Schmitt today in which Schmitt artfully deconstructs the McCain myth.

The most important point is this:

[The] whole analysis is based on the cult of authenticity of which McCain, and to a lesser extent Bush, have been the greatest beneficiaries....But as McCain demonstrates, authenticity is itself a pose, one he adopted and has now discarded.

I think it's cute that so many political journalists don't understand this. They so want to believe that the glamorous flyboy manly man is the real deal. But, he just originated the stage role that the second rate George Bush played in the TV series. Like all actors, some are better than others.

And that's the way to get McCain. As Schmitt says:

I assume that McCain's gamble is that he has so strongly established the "straight-talk express" brand with the general electorate that he can perform the ritual obsequies of the Republican nominating process and still emerge with his reputation intact. But he can't. [There are] too many Republican activists who simply aren't going to stomach his nomination, and he can't spend two years in his current mode and expect the independent moderate voters in New Hampshire and elsewhere to remember what they kind of liked about him for a period in 2000.

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digby 4/20/2006 10:17:00 AM |

 
The Key To Her "Heart"

by digby

You folks are going to love this. More from World O Crap on the Daddy's Lil' Virgin movement. Apparently there is some special chastity jewelry available for man and girl to exhange in the covenant ceremony:

The Heart to Heart™ program, created by jeweler Joe Costello, differs from other abstinence programs in some important, unique ways. [...]

First, the "key to her heart." This beautiful heart has a smaller heart in the front. Behind that heart is a keyhole. When making the covenant with your daughter, you explain that the covenant is between her, you and God. Since God has placed her in your care as a parent, you and only you can hold the "key to her heart."

God not trusting her enough to let her be responsible for her own heart.

You then explain to the child that you will hold the key to her precious heart until the day of her wedding. On that day, you will give her away like at all weddings, BUT in doing so you will also “give away” the key to her heart to her now husband. The key and lock are actually functional and your son-in-law will place the key in the heart to open it.

Nothing at all Freudian going on here!

Inside will be a small note that had been placed in the heart on the day you made the covenant. That note can say something like, "I do not know your name or what you even look like, but this is my promise to save myself for you this day. Love, Melanie."

Or, the note could say something like, "I've been saving myself for you for many horny years, so the sex tonight had really better be worth it!. Oh, and make sure my Dad gives you the key to my chastity belt too. Love, Melanie."

Read it all.Doctor assassination advocate Randall Terry, of all people, is peripherally involved in this scam, proving once again the the forced birth movement has less to do with fetuses than with vaginas.



Thanks Julia.
digby 4/20/2006 09:40:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

 
The Goldberg Variation

by digby

Jane had a great post up today about GOP nepotism and the inevitable decline in quality that always results from second and third generation copies.

This is exactly the kind of second-generation junk thinking being produced on the right by people like Ben Domenech, Jonah Goldberg and George W. Bush — people who vault into to highly paid, influential positions despite a complete and utter lack of talent or skill purely because of who their parents are and their willingness to say just about anything. Badly. A group who have tragically confused the wingnut welfare system for some kind of meritocracy, who think their megaphone comes as the result of skill and don’t acknowledge that both privilege and think tank underwriting are largely responsible for the opportunity to appear on the stage in the first place.

I always like the articles these pissy rich kids write about the welfare state and how it doesn’t encourage people to refine themselves and their ideas by engaging in competition. One need look no further than this article and those by people like Herbert Spencer scholar Jonah Goldberg (oh and let us not forget his work on Upton Sinclair) to see the utter hypocricy involved in this argument by those who are usually making it: nobody would pay for their crap if it wasn’t being underwritten by someone with a political agenda, and there is no need for their work to rise to anything above sub-mediocrity in order to keep getting subsidized.

It turns out that it isn't only those of us in the fever swamps who've noticed. Kevin Drum excerpts a review of "The Making of the Conservative Mind" written by one of the old guard writers from the halcyon days of National Review:

Hart is clearly uneasy about the rise of the younger generation, which, under the editorship of Richard Lowry, has been generally enthusiastic about the Bush administration. "Perhaps surprisingly, none of these now prominent figures at the magazine had been known for books or even important articles on politics or political thought," he sniffs. "Where they stood on the spectrum of conservative thought — traditionalist, individualist, libertarian, skeptical, Straussian, Burkean, Voegelinian — was completely unknown."

I don't think Jonah and K-Lo will want to have a beer with this guy.


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digby 4/19/2006 10:33:00 PM |

 
Common Goodness

by digby

There is much to recommend Michael Tomasky's essay today in The American Prospect. I agree with Atrios that it is important that the Democratic party give people something to believe in. Politics without heart is nothing more than crass deal making.

Tomasky prescribes a Democratic philosophy of the common good and posits that this is the basis of liberalism --- sacrifice for larger universalist principles. What's not to like? Certainly on a rhetorical level it's a positive philosophical message that serves as an umbrella for Democratic policies. The rub, of course, is in determining what the common good is in the first place.

Perhaps I'm a cynic, but I suspect that for most people, the common good is really the idea that what will be good for me will also be good for others. Very few people knowingly vote against their own self-interests. Tomasky admits this himself, in a way, with his argument (and I think it's a logical one) that policies are more easily sold when they benefit all rather than a few. FDR made sure that social security was universal for just that reason. He knew very well that while people may believe in the common good, altruistic self-sacrifice is rarely really on the menu. (I'm not talking about fancypants Tragedy of the Commons, Prisoner's Dilemma stuff here, although it's quite relevant.) I'm just saying that policies that benefit the most people always go down easier. That's why Republicans lie about their tax policies, after all.

The problem is that a political party cannot be all things to all people. And here's where the politics of the common good becomes complicated.

Tomasky charts the history of the New Deal through its dissolution in the late 60's, which he characterizes as a golden age of liberalism except for all those problems with, well, equality and civil liberties. He praises those who broke down those barriers but throughout the piece betrays a subtle distaste for those who still labor on behalf of civil rights and civil liberties. Like most liberal intellectuals of a certain age (although he's younger than most) he clearly believes that the New Left pretty much destroyed the party and by 1980 had left a legacy of rapacious, singleminded, special interest groups that have made it impossible for real liberalism to reassert itself.

Yet, without coming out and saying it, he is quite obviously aware of the polarizing racial and cultural politics that were at work in the 1980's when the realignment truly kicked in:

By 1980, Reagan had seized the idea of the common good. To be sure, it was a harshly conservative variant that quite actively depended on white middle-class resentment. But to its intended audience, his narrative was powerful, a clean punch landed squarely on the Democratic glass jaw. The liberals had come to ask too much of regular people: You, he said to the middle-class (and probably white) American, have to work hard and pay high taxes while welfare cheats lie around the house all day, getting the checks liberal politicians make sure they get; you follow the rules while the criminals go on their sprees and then get sprung by shifty liberal lawyers. For a lot of (white) people, it was powerful. And, let’s face it, manipulative as it was, it wasn’t entirely untrue, either!

Can you have a "common good" comprised of only the interests of resentful "regular" racists? I sure hope not.

I've always wondered what the Democrats are supposed to have done differently in light of this? Accede to this racist vision of the common good? Lower the boom on welfare and crime instantly to show how much we resented black people too? Tell Jesse Jackson to STFU?

Considering the huge sociological changes that came about in the post war world, (crescendoing in the 60's) wasn't it entirely predictable that there would be a backlash? Democratic special interests are responsible for all that, to be sure. But the alternative would have been to not pursue those goals in the first place. The forces that were pushing for equality were being pulled just as strongly from the other side. There wasn't just a New Left; there was the New Right too. As Thomas Mann, writing on a different subject today spells out:

The seeds of this partisan era were intially planted in the 1960s, with the counter culture, the war in Vietnam, the rise of conservative activists in the 1964 Goldwater campaign, the Voting Rights Act, and the beginning of the economic development of the South. Roe v. Wade set the stage for the political mobilization of religious conservatives within the Republican party. The tax-limiting Proposition 13 in California and the Reagan presidency lent the Republican party a more distinctive economic and national security platform.

Party realignment in the South, fueled by these developments associted with race, religion, economic development and patriotism, radically altered the ideological and regional composition of the two parties. That process was extended to the rest of the country by the increasingly distinctive positions taken by the national parties and their presidential candidates on a number of salient social and economic issues. As these developments played out over time, party platforms became more distinctive, those recruited to Congress were more ideologically in tune with their fellow partisans, congressional leaders worked aggressively to promote their party's agenda and message, and voters sorted themselves into the two parties based on their ideological views.

Action, reaction.

But Tomasky's view that the "special interests" overreached is not an uncommon view and it isn't new; it's partly what spawned the DLC. And that's why in some ways, I feel a sense of deja vu. If I didn't have this herniated disc and an aversion to tequila I'd think I was still in my 20's and I was reading the New Republic. Or pieces of it anyway. Tomasky admits as much and condemns the DLC's failure to follow through with its "responsibility" agenda by settling for welfare reform and failing to go after the corporate big spenders. (I don't remember that last part of the DLC agenda, to be perfectly honest, but then again, I hadn't given up tequila, so maybe I forgot.) In any case, he sees the DLC's failure as one of too much faith in markets and not enough in government, which I think it quite right. But from where I sit, the DLC's failure also stems from its insistence that instead of working with the embarrassing coalition that forms the heart of the Democratic party, they needed to marginalize them. It didn't work then, and I don't think it's going to work now.

Tomasky admiringly mentions "Crashing the Gate" in this context and I too like Markos and Jerome's book very much. I think it's one of the most important books in the last decade about Democratic politics. But I think the weakest part is its condemnation of the special interest groups and not because I have any particular affinity for them as institutions. It's just that I've heard it all before. Democratic "special interests" have been the bête noire of every Democratic strategist since 1980. The Republicans have made a fetish of them, and the Democrats have seen them as being stubbornly unwilling to "sacrifice." (This is not to say that I don't endorse pressuring them to stop with the outdated "bipartisan" tactics, as with the Sierra Club and Naral endorsing Chaffee. They might as well be wearing a mullet and singing "Power of Love" with that nonsense.)

But it's very easy to say you believe in the common good until you are told that your particular needs must be sacrificed, postponed, deferred to benefit everyone else. Promises to pick them up later are not very compelling --- as two great thinkers (John Maynard Keynes and George W. Bush) have both observed, "in the long run we'll all be dead." These are the contentious issues that make people uncomfortable and are therefore the most likely to be shunted aside by timid politicians if given half a chance. It's a lot to ask.

Tomasky asks:

So where does this leave today’s Democrats? A more precise way to ask the question is this: What principle or principles unites them all, from Max Baucus to Maxine Waters and everyone in between, and what do they demand that citizens believe?

As I’ve said, they no longer ask them to believe in the moral basis of liberal governance, in demanding that citizens look beyond their own self-interest. They, or many of them, don’t really ask citizens to believe in government anymore. Or taxes, or regulation -- oh, sort of on regulation, but only some of them, and only occasionally, when something happens like the mining disasters in my home state earlier this year. They do ask Americans to believe that middle-income people should get a fair shake, but they lack the courage to take that demand to the places it should logically go, like universal health coverage. And, of course, on many issues the party is ideologically all over the place; if you were asked to paint the party’s belief system, the result would resemble a Pollock.

At bottom, today’s Democrats from Baucus to Waters are united in only two beliefs, and they demand that American citizens believe in only two things: diversity and rights.

I'm not sure that Baucus and Waters actually agree on those things, but whatever. Let's suppose that Waters and Baucus simply agree that the common good is good government. They both sign on to universal health care. They agree on taxes and regulation. They agree to get the money out of politics. They agree that the future of the country depends upon all children getting good educations and they commit to devoting the time and energy to doing that. They go to the people and say, "this is the common good, and it's what we both believe we should fight for." Huzzah.

But then somebody (a Republican, no doubt) says, what about affirmative action? What about abortion? What about the ten commandments? What about wiretapping? Immigration? The war? And lets assume that Waters and Baucus, being from different regions with very different constituencies, have different views on those things? Who is asked to look behyond his or her special interests on those things? Who decides what is the common good?

Tomasky has an answer for that. He says that the special interest groups must justify their goals in universalist terms or not be taken seriously by anyone. He uses the example of an affirmative action argument, saying that it is a good thing that even corporate America embraces. I suppose one can make a similar argument about immigration. I'm not sure these arguments have much salience, but you can make them, saying that in a globalized economy we are all in this together and we need to be able to compete. (Or something like that --- Clinton used to say "we don't have a person to waste.") If that's all it takes, then I guess most special interest groups shouldn't have any problems complying. It's "framing" in service of an argument that lends itself very well to economic issues.

But how do you frame abortion as being for the common good? Or religion? How do you parse the fourth amendment? The war? These are huge issues --- represented I might add, by special interest groups that can't easily trust Max or Maxine to do whatever they think is right for "the common good." How do we construct arguments that will quell these contentious controversies with appeals to a common good when people can't find common ground? (And at what point are we talking about the common good of the party vs the common good of the country?)

Tomasky offers no compelling examples of "common good" rhetoric pertaining to these questions, so I think it's fair to assume that this is where the sacrifice comes in.

I don't mean to be dismissive. I think it's important to embrace big ideas and big philosophy and reach for some inspiration. The Democrats have been issuing stultifying laundry lists for as long as I can remember and I couldn't be happier that people are thinking in these terms. But I can't help but feel that we always end up back at the same spot somehow. The unions, the womens groups, the civil rights groups, trial lawyers, consumer advocates --- the whole array of narrow special interests being held responsible for the fact that half of this country really resents the hell out of minorities, women and working people getting a fair shake. And the Democrats continue to pay the political price for that resentment.

I'm all for finding our way out of it. Tomasky's message has real resonance; I like it very much. But I think that if the party stopped trying to figure out ways to get the "special interests" to shut up and started giving them some respectful assurances that they aren't going to be the sacrificial lambs in whatever the new paradigm turns out to be, they might find a little bit more cooperation.

I believe in the common good and I agree that it expresses the essence of the liberal philosophy. But the heart and soul of the Democratic party lies in its committment to freedom and equality for all Americans. I think we need to find a way to convince a majority of Americans that the common good is best served by not compromising those principles.



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digby 4/19/2006 12:50:00 PM |

 
On The Reservation

by digby

I noticed yesterday that the "military analysts" employed by the networks were not only helping the administration spin on Rumsfeld, but actually admitted on the air that they were giving the pentagon advice on how to handle the problem.

This post at TPM by Larry Johnson fills in the details of an ongoing propaganda effort that must be well known among the networks. Johnson prints a letter from his friend Pat Lang, who had been part of the arrangement for a while:

Over several months (this was in '04) I attended meetings in the Pentagon and participated in conference calls with very senior officials (both military and civilian). The Pentagon meetings were well attended by a variety of retired generals, colonels, Navy captains and a few retired NCOs, all of whom were familiar faces from TV news. Most of them were cable people, and there was a disproportionate representation from Fox News as well as people who were both TV commentators and think tankers, mostly from AEI and Heritage. There were several retired four star generals present whom I had never seen on the tube, but who may have been off camera consultants.

The Defense staff always made their case for the correctness of the policies followed by the administration and handed out "talking points" as suggestions. The retired officers listened politely with clear skepticism on the part of quite a few. There was always an opportunity for Q&A and a lot of the questions were both polite and very pointed. Some of the questions were not well answered. This was the period of the emerging Abu Ghraib mess, and many of the officers attending were bitter and unhappy over what had been happening in that matter.

[...]

My impression was that the media consultant officers at these events wanted and needed the access provided in order to be secure in their retirement employment. The media companies obviously valued that. After all, most of them are commercial enterprises and cannot afford to have their rival companies granted such access if they are not. This creates a certain pressure on the retired military people involved to stay "on the reservation."

Lang concludes that on the whole these retired officers try to do the right thing. Perhaps. But after the performance of General Shepperd on CNN yesterday, I think it's pretty clear that some of them, at least, believe they are full members of the administration's tribe --- and if they were critical it was because they were having a rough time making Rummy's case for him.

It would be very helpful if the public knew about these special briefings and knew especially that the pentagon was sponsoring these military analysts' "fact-finding" trips to Iraq. Why isn't this disclosed?



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digby 4/19/2006 10:22:00 AM |

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

 
Better Ask Jonah Goldberg

by digby

Here's a bunch of egghead know-nothings trying to tell the decider what he should decide. Fat chance.



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digby 4/18/2006 10:43:00 PM |

 
Innocent Schminnocent

by digby

In recent years many states and cities have moved to overhaul lineups, as DNA evidence has exposed nearly 200 wrongful convictions, three-quarters of them resulting primarily from bad eyewitness identification.

In the new method, the police show witnesses one person at a time, instead of several at once, and the lineup is overseen by someone not connected to the case, to avoid anything that could steer the witness to the suspect the police believe is guilty.

But now, the long-awaited results of an experiment in Illinois have raised serious questions about the changes. The study, the first to do a real-life comparison of the old and new methods, found that the new lineups made witnesses less likely to choose anyone. When they did pick a suspect, they were more likely to choose an innocent person.

Witnesses in traditional lineups, by contrast, were more likely to identify a suspect and less likely to choose a face put in the lineup as filler.

Advocates of the new method said the Illinois study, conducted by the Chicago Police Department, was flawed, because officers supervised the traditional lineups and could have swayed witnesses.

But the results have empowered many critics who had worried that states and cities were caving in to advocacy groups in adopting the new lineups without solid evidence that they improved on the old ones.

"There are people who'd say it's better to let 10 guilty persons free to protect against one innocent person being wrongfully convicted," said Roy S. Malpass, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and an analyst for the Illinois study, who served on a research group on eyewitness identification for the National Institute of Justice in 1999.

"I'm fine with that when we're dealing with juvenile shoplifters," Dr. Malpass said. "I'm not fine with that for terrorists. We haven't figured out the risk there."

Setting aside the efficacy or non-efficacy of the ID method being discussed, which I cannot assess, I can't help but be struck at how confident this Doctor is that he's not going to be that one innocent person. How I wish people like him would be wrongfully accused so they could see how it might feel. Like so many law and order types it's apparently too abstract for him to understand otherwise so he needs to personally experience it.

Blackstone's ratio is not some silly bleeding heart notion --- it's a recognition that while the system cannot be perfect, you must make a moral decision as to which side it will err on. For crying out loud, terrorism is not some magic word that changes every tenet of western civilization.

But maybe we aren't really about western civilization at all anymore. Maybe we are becoming more like Singapore, the wingnut dream:

If, in the event of effective crime prevention, a few innocent people are punished or a few guilty ones are over-punished, that would be a price worth paying.

And it's so nice and clean, too. With good prices.

Nobody wants to let the guilty go free. But the state imprisoning innocent people belongs in a special circle of hell and it taints us all. Terrorism certainly does not excuse it. When a state gives up that principle and simply accepts that a certain percentage of innocent people will be imprisoned because it's too difficult to sort them out from the guilty ones, it has lost its civilized moorings. Guantanamo says it all about where the US is on that.



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digby 4/18/2006 09:14:00 PM |

 
Asking The Generals

by digby


In case anyone ever had the mistaken impression that the network "military analysts," are any more neutral or non-partisan than the retired generals who have stepped forward to ask for Rumsefeld's resignation, think again:

BLITZER: And this is just coming in to CNN right now. The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has just wrapped up his meeting with retired U.S. generals who now serve as military analysts for the news media. Our own military analyst, retired U.S. Air Force Major General Don Shepperd, is fresh out of the meeting. He's joining us now live from the Pentagon.

General Shepperd, thanks very much. How did it go? Tell our viewers how the defense secretary specifically responded to all these suggestions from other retired military generals that he stepped down?

MAJ. GEN. DON SHEPPERD, U.S. AIR FORCE (RET.): Yes, very little, Wolf. Everybody expected the headlines out of this to be that the secretary says the following things and the focus of the meeting was very little on that. It came up from time to time, mainly from our own questions, but basically the focus was on how the war in Iraq is going, how it would have been different in the past if, and that type of thing. It was not about the retired generals' controversy although the secretary is clearly distracted by and it worried about and it concerned about it. And he listened to a lot of things from the group.

BLITZER: Well, did anyone -- any of the retired generals and admirals who were there, did any of them step up and offer criticism of the secretary of defense?

SHEPPERD: No, it wasn't criticism of the secretary of defense. We basically offered our ideas about the fact of, look, the message is not getting out. If you say that we're doing well in the war, what is the message for the American people? What is the next thing the American people are going to see in the way of an event they can see some progress?

And the answer was unanimous from both the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also the secretary. It's the formation of the Iraqi government. That's the next important event and from there, the continuing training of the Iraqi forces. That's the message, Wolf.

BLITZER: When you say that it was clear these calls from these retired generals for him to step down, including the commander of -- the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, former commander of the First Infantry Division, both of whom served in Iraq, it's weighing heavily on him, what does that mean? How could you tell?

SHEPPERD: Look, he has got to be concerned about this. His words -- evidence concern, no question about that. But, basically, General Pace kind of picked up the ball on this and said, look, I don't know where these guys are coming from. We had regular sessions.

The big generals, the combatant commanders, General Franks and the others, two chiefs of staff of the Air Force, two commandants of the Marine Corps, two chiefs of staff of the Army, two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs -- all of these people made their inputs, voiced their concerns, we talked it out.

Then we all agreed on General Franks plan, that it was a good one. We all had a hand in this. The fact that people say they weren't consulted was simply not true. They may not have had their own ideas accepted but they definitely were consulted and a lot of people had a voice on this.

BLITZER: How many general did he invite to this session today?

SHEPPERD: They weren't all generals by any means. It's the normal -- the usual suspects you see on TV as analysts and read in the print media, as well, and hear on radio. There were 15 of us there. I think probably a group of 30 or 40 was invited. Just about the same size group we usually had. It's been as low as 15 and as high as 30.

BLITZER: Was there any moment that really was a poignant or dramatic moment that stands out in your mind, General Shepherd? A moment of some tension or some humor, if you will?

SHEPPERD: Well, you know the secretary was really in a good mood, so was the chairman. These people are not troubled people. They are concerned people and they are concerned about what is going on. But our message to them as analysts was, look, you have got to get the importance of this war out to the American people.

The importance message is that this is a forward strategy. It's better to fight the war in Iraq than it is the war on American soil. And further, the message needs to be imagine an Iraq, imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt combined for tourists, combined with oil, water and land and resources, imagine the effect of that. That's a message that has to get out to the American people because the American people do not feel they are at war.

Both General Pace and also Secretary Rumsfeld basically said we have got to improve our message and improve our communication. We want to do that. This is a tough war. It's going to be a long war in many places. It's not going to be something that's going to come out with a bow in the next year or two years.

I'm awfully glad the network "analysts" told the Secretary what he needs to do to "get the message out." He certainly needs some professional advice. It just seems kind of funny that the analysts were retired Generals --- who we are told ad nauseeum are not supposed to have opinions.

I'm actually surprised CNN was invited. Usually this administration just checks in with Roger Ailes and he passes the word to the relevant people.



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digby 4/18/2006 03:28:00 PM |

 
Hissy Fit

by digby


If you didn't get to see Little Lord Fauntleroy have a temper tantrum in front of the press today, do yourself a favor and check it out.

HENRY: Mr. President, you make it a practice of not commenting on potential personnel move.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Of course, I did.

HENRY: Calling it speculation.

BUSH: And you can understand why. Because we've got people's reputations at stake. And on Friday I stood up and said I don't appreciate the speculation about Don Rumsfeld. He's doing a fine job. I strongly support him.

HENRY: But what do you say to critics who believe that you're ignoring the advice of retired generals, military commanders, who say that there needs to be a change?

BUSH: I say I listen to all voices, but mine's the final decision and Don Rumsfeld is doing a fine job. He's not only transforming the military, he's fighting a war on terror. He's helping us fight a war on terror. I have strong confidence in Don Rumsfeld. I hear the voices and I read the front page and I know the speculation, but I'm the decider and I decide what is best and what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense. I want to thank you all very much.

At which point he stomped off in a huff. Seriously.

This is particularly interesting in light of this amazing article in this week's Prospect about the Cheney cabal:

Says one insider deeply involved in U.S. policy toward North Korea: "The president is given only the most basic notions about the Korea issue. They tell him, 'Above South Korea is a country called North Korea. It is an evil regime.' ... So that translates into a presidential decision: Why enter into any agreement with an evil regime?"

I'm the decider! I yam, I yam! Evil, evil, evil.

Once again, I am stunned that the Republicans had the gall to foist this manchild on the United States of America --- and that so many Americans accepted it for so long. There's a lot of talk in the wingnutsphere about "Bush Derangement Syndrome" which says that we are all suffering form irrational hatred of Dear Leader. But it's not accurate. Bush is just a spoiled, deluded little boy, pushed into a job that was obvious to any sentient being would be too much for him. My righteous anger is for the big money pooh bahs like Dick Cheney who would gamble with this country's future by choosing a brand name in an empty suit for president. They proved that they can sell anything, I'll give them that. But as with their other colossal marketing success and business failure, Enron, the sales job couldn't cover the corruption and poor planning forever. Therefore, I blame the Republican Party more than little Junior. He's just a pathetic loser who believed his own hype --- responsible for his actions, of course, but not the mastermind.

From his little tirade today, it appears that he's feeling like his authority is being questioned. That's just funny. It took his this long to figure out that he's not really in charge?


Update: Joe Gandelman has more.

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digby 4/18/2006 10:35:00 AM |

 
More Purity Ball

by digby

Responding to the odd, disturbing nature of the Father-Daughter Purity Ball, about which I posted below, PZ Myers says:

"Daddies of the world, keep your hands off your daughter's sexuality, OK? Raise them to be independent and thoughtful and informed and able to make their own decisions, and then just trust them."

That sounds like common sense to me. Girls pledging to their dads to stay virginal in ritualistic ceremonies just doesn't seem like a healthy thing to do.

One of the commenters in the post below found pictures from one of the Balls. It's striking how young many of these girls are, some look to be no more than seven.



Apparently, this is common. Here's a testimonial from Generations of Light magazine:

"How can you measure the value of your eleven year old looking up into your eyes (as you clumsily learn the fox-trot together) with innocent, uncontainable joy, saying, 'Daddy, I'm so excited!' wrote Wesley Tullis in a letter describing his grateful participation. 'I have been involved with the Father-Daughter Ball for two years with my daughters, Sarah and Anna. It is impossible to convey what I have seen in their sweet spirits, their delicate, forming souls, as their daddy takes them out for their first, big dance. Their whole being absorbs my loving attention, resulting in a radiant sense of self-worth and identity. Think of it from their perspective: My daddy thinks I'm beautiful in my own unique way. My daddy is treating me with respect and honor. My daddy has taken time to be silly, and even made a fool of himself, learning how to dance. My daddy really loves me!"

I can understand why the little girls would want to do this. It's a chance to dress up and spend time with their father. If it were for another purpose, it might be sweet. But this is what that little girl is reading to her father from that card:

I pledge to remain sexually pure...until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband. ... I know that God requires this of me.. that he loves me. and that he will reward me for my faithfulness.

And this is what Daddy says in turn:

I, (daughter’s name)’s father, choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide and pray over my daughter and as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.

He's the "high priest" in his home. Are we getting the picture?

I wondered in the earlier post about the lack of mother-son purity pledges. Commenter Llamajockey hits the nail on the head with this:

The truth is is that in most Red-State/Fundy households the Dad is just as obsessed if not more so with the possiblity of his young son being gay as with his daughter's virginity. Therefore teenage males feel an acute pressure beyond their already out of control hormones to prove their heterosexuality. That is why athletic over anything resembling academic or intellectual, acheivement is so highly prized. It improves the young man's standing in the eyes of the young females and reassures Dad his son can not be gay. However, with it comes a double edge, for the young man is now supposed to act the role of stud.

Virgin girls and studly boys. Can we all see the problem with this?



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digby 4/18/2006 08:32:00 AM |

Monday, April 17, 2006

 
Giving Women Freedom

by digby


NOW did another one of its interesting shows on the South Dakota abortion ban last friday; it's now available on the website if you missed it. They went deep into the forced pregnancy movement in South Dakota and once again, I was struck by the profound dishonesty of many of its leaders. You will see spin and gibberish that even Karen Hughes would be ashamed of:

HINOJOSA:
MEET LESLEE UNRUH...SHE FOUNDED THE ALPHA CENTER IN 1984 BUT MOST PEOPLE NOW KNOW HER AS ONE OF THE MOST POTENT PRO-LIFE ACTIVISTS IN THE STATE...

UNRUH HAD AN ABORTION HERSELF IN THE 1970'S. AND WHILE SOME MIGHT THINK THAT BANNING ABORTION IS AN ATTACK ON WOMEN'S FREEDOM, UNRUH SAYS SHE WANTS TO BAN ABORTION PRECISELY TO PROTECT WOMEN'S FREEDOM.

UNRUH:
This freedom, sexual freedom is costing women and their lives. Where's the sexual freedom? There is none. Because those of us who have suffered through the abortion, we're not gonna be silent anymore. We're gonna speak up and we're gonna tell the truth. Because abortion hurts women. Silent no more.

[...]

UNRUH:
I've been that woman. There is no freedom after an abortion. You carry an empty crib in your heart forever. There's no freedom.

HINOJOSA:
And so, when you hear people saying, "Someone like Leslie is trying to actually take away women's rights and taking away their freedoms--"

UNRUH:
I'm giving women freedom. We are giving back the women what they really want. This is true feminism.

This woman is "giving" women back their freedom by taking away their right to abortion. She's smiling, upbeat, cheerful and sunny --- the all-American gal. And to me, she seems downright otherworldly. I don't know what she's talking about. She's babbling incoherently.

It turns out that Unruh is more interesting than your usual forced pregnancy zealot. She's also the prime mover of the state's abstinence only education movement. Freedom is having no sex at all.

And then there's this:

HINOJOSA: LAST FRIDAY NIGHT, YOUNG GIRLS FROM AROUND SOUTH DAKOTA CAME TO SIOUX FALLS FOR A SPRING BALL. THIS ONE IS CALLED "THE PURITY BALL" IT'S A YEARLY EVENT RUN BY LESLEE UNRUH'S ABSTINENCE CLEARINGHOUSE.

THE IDEA IS THAT THESE YOUNG WOMEN COME WITH THEIR FATHERS. TO CELEBRATE THEIR SEXUAL PURITY.

UNRUH:We think that its important for fathers to the be the first ones to look into their daughters eyes and To tell her that her purity is special, and its ok to wait until marriage.

HINOJOSA:IT MIGHT HAVE ALL THE TRAPPINGS OF A REGULAR PROM... BUT THIS ONE ENDS A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY.

GIRLS RECITING PLEDGE:"I make a promise this day to God...

HINOJOSA:
THE YOUNG WOMEN HERE ALL MAKE A PROMISE TO THEIR FATHERS THAT THEY WONT' HAVE SEX UNTIL THE DAY THEY GET MARRIED.

GIRLS RECITING PLEDGE:...to remain sexually pure...until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband. ... I know that God requires this of me.. that he loves me. and that he will reward me for my faithfulness.

You have to see it to believe it. They are all dressed up like prom goers, the dads in tuxes and the daughters in evening gowns looking all grown up. They dance, they laugh, they giggle. And then father and daughter stand up, holding each others hands, staring into each others' eyes and the girls make these vows as if in a wedding ceremony.

As I watch it occurs to me that this is why they don't have an exception for rape and incest. It's one of the creepiest things I've ever seen.

You will notice that there's no "mother-son" ceremony in which boys pledge to their mothers to stay pure until they give themselves as a gift to their wives. There is a Victorian impulse at work here that has nothing to do with fetuses. This is about women being autonomous, independent, sexual humans.

Here's Unruh again. If you aren't listening closely, the cadence of her speech makes it sound like she is perfectly reasonable. But she might as well be speaking in another language for all the sense it makes.

UNRUH:
I think there should be no abortions in my state.

HINOJOSA:
So to get to that point, you want to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

UNRUH:
Yes.

HINOJOSA:
And people might say, "Well, the way you prevent unwanted pregnancies is through contraception."

UNRUH:
No. It's wrong. We don't need, we don't have a shortage of condoms in this country. We should not be worshipping condoms. Let's start just telling the truth.

HINOJOSA:
But when some people say that truth might be, Leslee, that by limiting the information, by limiting access to contraception, that you may-- you may unintentionally be contributing to more unwanted pregnancies--

UNRUH:
No. I think it's-- by "limiting" is all spin. Let's quit making people think that everybody can go out there and just as long as they have a condom, they're safe. They're not safe emotionally. They're not safe physically. Let's just start telling the truth.

She might start by trying to make a persuasive argument instead of blurting out non-sequitors about "freedom" and "truth" without ever explaining why this is so. She's full of snappy slogans, but she never honestly says what's on her mind.

I'll let Lance Mannion do it for her:

Once upon time we were all good and well-behaved, if plagued by demons and temptations within. You know, back in the day, when lynching was a spectator sport, children were worked to death in factories and mineshafts, and employers thought nothing of hiring goons to beat and kill workers who dared strike for safer working conditions and decent pay.

Then came the Fall, and with it moral relativism, post-modernism, Freudianism, Marxism, feminism, birth control, Roe v. Wade, situation comedies that make dad into a buffoon, and black people who expect to live in our neighborhoods and send their kids to our schools...whoops, did we say that last one out loud? We meant entitlements, the nanny state, and the culture of dependence brought about by Welfare.

And the poor little wimmin just don't know what's good for 'em. Leslie Unruh's gonna set them free.


Update: Here's a piece from USA today that is surprising good. And important.



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digby 4/17/2006 04:36:00 PM |

 
"A Mean Sick Group Of People"

by digby

Crooks and Liars has a story up about Michelle Malkin posting phone numbers of college students who protested recruiters on the UCSC campus. Predictably, her readers are harrassing them, as she knew they would.

But that's not surprising. It isn't even partisan. Remember this?

Conservative CNN commentator Tucker Carlson's snide humor backfired on him -- and his wife.

While defending telemarketers during a segment on "Crossfire" last week, the bow-tied co-host was asked for his home phone number. Carlson gave out a number, but it was for the Washington bureau of Fox News, CNN's bitter rival.

The bureau was deluged with calls. To get back at him, Fox posted Carlson's unlisted home number on its Web site. After his wife was inundated with obscene calls, Carlson went to the Fox News bureau to complain. He was told the number would be taken off the Web site if he apologized on the air. He did, but that didn't end the anger.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Carlson called Fox News "a mean, sick group of people."

Fox spokeswoman Irena Briganti said Carlson got what he deserved. "CNN threw the first punch here. Correcting this mistake was good journalism."

Why would Malkin be held to a higher standard than the highest levels of the corporate rightwing media? Handing out private phone numbers is GOP SOP. On the right they call this "good journalism."


Update: Ezra pities Malkin. She is a sad case.



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digby 4/17/2006 02:03:00 PM |

 
He Blogs Too

by digby

Here's an erudite, attractive liberal speaking intelligently on an array of complex issues for 45 minutes. Where'd he come from?



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digby 4/17/2006 01:41:00 PM |

 
At The Precipice

by digby

I find myself feeling a little bit depressed today. It's not the spectre of war with Iran, although I admit that scares the hell out of me. It's this:

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal Monday from two Chinese Muslims who were mistakenly captured as enemy combatants more than four years ago and are still being held at the U.S. prison in Cuba.

The men's plight has posed a dilemma for the Bush administration and courts. Previously, a federal judge said the detention of the ethnic Uighurs in Guantanamo Bay is unlawful, but that there was nothing federal courts could do.

Lawyers for the two contend they should be released, something the Bush administration opposes, unless they can go to a country other than the United States.

A year ago, the U.S. military decided that Abu Bakker Qassim and A'Del Abdu al-Hakim are not "enemy combatants" as first suspected after their 2001 arrests in Pakistan. They were captured and shipped to Guantanamo Bay along with hundreds of other suspected terrorists.

The U.S. government has been unable to find a country willing to accept the two men, along with other Uighurs. They cannot be returned to China because they likely will be tortured or killed.


[...]

Lawyers for Qassim and al-Hakim filed a special appeal, asking justices to step in even while the case is pending before an appeals court. Arguments at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are next month.

Justices declined, without comment, to hear the case.

Bush administration Supreme Court lawyer Paul Clement told justices that there were "substantial ongoing diplomatic efforts to transfer them to an appropriate country."

Clement said that in the meantime, the men have had television, a stereo system, books and recreational opportunities: including soccer, volleyball and ping-pong.

The detainees' lawyers painted a different picture, saying that hunger strikes and suicide attempts at Guantanamo Bay are becoming more common and that the men are isolated.

"Guantanamo is at the precipice," Boston lawyer Sabin Willett wrote in the appeal. "Only prompt intervention by this court to vindicate its own mandate can prevent the rule of law itself from being drowned in this intensifying whirlpool of desperation."

I would say the US is at the precipice and the rule of law is breathing its last gasp. How can we have a system that operates this way and still call ourselves a country of laws? They are just making this stuff up as they go along.

Guantanamo is a vivid example of what happens when governments panic and make errors out of hubris, rage, greed and opportunism and refuse to right their wrongs after the fact. We have created a Kafka-esque nightmare that, unless we return to the rule of law very quickly, is going to be embedded in our system, ready to be exploited by any tyrannical figure who can trump up an emergency for political gain.

Don't the Republicans see how dangerous this is? It isn't a matter of partisanship. Any shallow reading of history shows that bad people can emerge from any movement, ideology, religion or party. That's why we have the rule of law --- so that our system doesn't depend upon the good-will of whomever is holding the office.

The Talking Dog (who is also a talking attorney in NYC) has been interviewing various lawyers who defend Guantanamo inmates for some time now. He happens to have one up this morning featuring an attorney who represents a legal US immigrant Ali Al-Marri, who has been held in the same limbo as Jose Padilla for years. I'd never heard of him:

Jonathan Hafetz: Certainly, his case has received less publicity than Padilla, who is, of course, a citizen, whereas Al-Marri is a legal immigrant. The fact is, the government's argument as a basis for holding him is the same as Padilla: that the entire United States is a battlefield in the administration's "war on terror." While the Hamdi case concerned a citizen engaged in hostilities on a foreign battlefield, thus far, the U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the legality of the government's detaining a civilian arrested in the United States itself (and it avoided the opportunity to do so recently in Padilla's appeal).

As to Ali's case, the District Court Judge Floyd, the same judge who ruled in Padilla's case, denied our motion for summary judgment but ruled the courthouse doors were open for Mr. al-Marri to challenge the government's allegations. We are presently litigating Al-Marri's entitlement to due process to challenge the government's factual basis for those allegations, and demanding a hearing consistent with due process of law.

The Talking Dog: Is it not the case that this is a still-live case presenting virtually the identical issue as Padilla (which the Supreme Court just ducked)?

Jonathan Hafetz: Certainly, the issue is very much live, and presents a danger to us all insofar as the government is asserting the right to strip any one of us of all due process rights and constitutional protections. So yes, that is definitely still the case– Al-Marri's immigration status as opposed to citizenship doesn't change that.

He concludes with this:

Jonathan Hafetz: The United States of America, since its inception, has stood for the rule of law. The actions of our government associated with the war on terror– notably, the arbitrary deprivations of due process, in violation of the Constitution, laws and treaty obligations - have fundamentally jeopardized that. What has been done has undermined our standing in the world, and is not an effective use of our resources, either. We have been holding some men over 4 ½ years, without charge or trial or any notion of due process, and insist on our right to detain them for life, even though they have never been, and may never be, charged with crimes. The war on terror will doubtless present us with more challenges. One of those challenges should not be the sacrifice of the rule of law.

In my view, the very existence of these issues speaks to the fact that we are not in a war at all. If we were, we would be able to invoke the many laws that have been in effect for eons regarding warfare. This is something else. We need to figure out what it is, and act accordingly. Going down this road is going to destroy us much more quickly than bin Laden could have dreamed.

If you are interested in this topic, be sure to read all of the Talking Dog's interviews with Guantanamo lawyers, linked at the bottom of his post. It may depress you, but you have to at least feel some gladness that there are lawyers out there willing to do this important work. After the government went after attorneys in the Stewart case, if would have been easy to walk away. They didn't.



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digby 4/17/2006 11:49:00 AM |

Sunday, April 16, 2006

 
The Object Of His Affection

by digby

Who wrote this?

It's almost always a joy listening to Gingrich when he's on a tear. And he's almost always on a tear of some sort. I caught up with Newt as he wandered around New Hampshire last week, which is what people who think they're running for President do. Please, God, no, you say. Not that angry guy again. "He's probably carrying too much baggage to be President," said Peter Bergin, a Republican state representative from Amherst, N.H. "But he sure is a terrific idea man. He needs to be part of the debate."

Absolutely. We might even create a new federal position to accommodate him, sort of like party ideologist in the old Soviet Union, except that the U.S. job would be the opposite of what it was in the U.S.S.R. Instead of imposing orthodoxy, the party idea-ologist—ideology is so un-American—would propose unorthodoxy. Gingrich was certainly wild with ideas last week, flicking them off at warp speed, like a dog shaking himself clean after romping through a pond.

William Kristol? Byron York? Kate O'Beirne? Hindquarters?


Here's a clue: His initials are JK and he's the liberal columnist for TIME magazine.


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digby 4/16/2006 07:50:00 PM |

 
On The Table

by digby


John at Crooks and Liars caught Joe Klein in a perfect example of shallow, knee jerk, beltway conventional wisdom that has made him the object of ridicule among everybody who observes the punditocrisy.

He goes on about how the young people of Iran love us, blah, blah, blah, but then makes an emphatic point that we must not take nuclear weapons "off the table." Apparently he doesn't understand the difference between nuclear weapons being "on the table" in the event of an attack and nuclear weapons being "on the table" as part of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptively attacking anyone who looks at us sideways.

Pre-emptive nuclear war has never been on the table. We don't want it on the table. It's, as Stephanopolous exclaimed, "insane." (The look on Klein's face when Steph did that was priceless. It was obvious that he thought he was saying something that everybody but the fever swamps believes is the sober centrist position.)

Klein sounds like he's repeating snippets of cocktail conversation he heard over the decades and just plugs in the one that sounds like it will make him appear to be the most serious. It's ridiculous that he's invited on all these shows when it's clear that he is not following the current debate.

I find it simply mind-boggling that after the unbelievable intelligence manipulation and incompetence that led us into the Iraq anyone in this country is willing to trust George W. Bush to launch another "pre-emptive" war. What exactly would he have to do to make the beltway courtiers question his good intentions? Get a blow job?



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digby 4/16/2006 03:20:00 PM |

 
The Rite Of Spring

by digby


This is the big day in the Christendom. In fact, I've always thought it was a bit strange that Christmas gets so much attention when Easter is the really big Kahuna. (Far be it for me to suspect cynical capitalistic motives, but ...)

Anyway, as readers of this blog know, I'm not religious. But I like the holidays I grew up with. And although I don't go to church on Easter anymore, (and despite my dark speculating below) I always think of it as the beginning of the season of rebirth, new life, spring and all that jazz. When the day is a brilliantly sunny 65 degree confection (with the cat lazily eyeing hummingbirds in the garden even) it's just inhuman not to feel gladness even if you are not a believer in the big Kahuna.

So, in that spirit, I offer you Matisse's "The Dance" which I believe was painted in homage to Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," a madly pagan ballet, but one that I think the human spirit of all creeds can appreciate.






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digby 4/16/2006 11:58:00 AM |

 
Are We There Yet?

by digby


Following up on my post from Friday highlighting Colonel Sam Gardiner's statement on CNN that the US already has troops in iran, I see (via robelicit at kos) that Dennis Kucinich has sent a letter to the president asking if such reports are true. He says:

Dear President Bush:

Recently, it has been reported that U.S. troops are conducting military operations in Iran. If true, it appears that you have already made the decision to commit U.S. military forces to a unilateral conflict with Iran, even before direct or indirect negotiations with the government of Iran had been attempted, without UN support and without authorization from the U.S. Congress.

Last Thursday, Raw Story had some interesting nuggets about the pentagon using MEK (an official terrorist group) to do dirty work in Iran:

One former counterintelligence official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information, describes the Pentagon as pushing MEK shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The drive to use the insurgent group was said to have been advanced by the Pentagon under the influence of the Vice President’s office and opposed by the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.

[...]

"We disarmed [the MEK] of major weapons but not small arms. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was pushing to use them as a military special ops team, but policy infighting between their camp and Condi, but she was able to fight them off for a while," said the intelligence official. According to still another intelligence source, the policy infighting ended last year when Donald Rumsfeld, under pressure from Vice President Cheney, came up with a plan to "convert" the MEK by having them simply quit their organization.

It is well known that MEK was given a strange dispensation, with some very odd ducks offering public support, one of whom was, of all people, that radical wierdo Tom Tancredo:

Washington, DC, May. 31, 2005 (UPI) -- U.S. lawmakers and former military officers are backing Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition group, despite its inclusion on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations and its role in the killing and wounding of U.S. military personnel and civilians in the 1970s.

Supporters acknowledge the status of the group, once funded by deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, as well as its role in the killings of U.S. military personnel and civilians in the 1970s in Iran when it was allied with Ayatollah Khomeini, but say the MEK has shed its past activities and is a potential ally against the theocratic regime in Iran.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, responded in a written statement saying he supports the MEK because it is an "asset to U.S. intelligence" and "the most reliable source of information for the region."

In recent years the MEK's political branch, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has provided information about Iran's nuclear facilities, which the Bush administration contends are being used to secretly make nuclear weapons.

Tancredo's press secretary, Carlos Espinosa, said it is not "too unusual" for members of Congress to support a group listed as a foreign terrorist organization, citing Sen. Ted Kennedy's support for the Irish Republican Army as an example.

"Are these guys saints? No." Espinosa said. But, "if there's a problem, it's that the MEK is on the list."

Read the whole article for the rundown on MEK if you are unfamiliar with them. I remember seeing Rep. Ileana Ross-Lehtinen making a public statement in favor of the group a year or so ago and wondered what in the hell was up with that.

So, what does it all mean? I don't really know, of course. But, as I wrote earlier, I am intrigued by Sy Hersh's article from last year, that the pentagon has created a new, clandestine service that has no obligation to report to the congress as the CIA does:

George W. Bush's reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as "facilitators" of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

[...]

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld's responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon's control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

[...]

The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it 'covert ops' it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs" the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran.

Here's what he wrote last week:

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

Today, Richard Clark and Steven Simon, former national security staffers say this:

So how would bombing Iran serve American interests? In over a decade of looking at the question, no one has ever been able to provide a persuasive answer. The president assures us he will seek a diplomatic solution to the Iranian crisis. And there is a role for threats of force to back up diplomacy and help concentrate the minds of our allies. But the current level of activity in the Pentagon suggests more than just standard contingency planning or tactical saber-rattling.

All of this may be some sort of advanced kabuki sabre rattling, of course. But Hersh's scenario from early 2005 sounds entirely plausible to me. I suspect that these actions have been ongoing since Bush was reelected. Remember his constant refrain about "using his political capital?" His reelection seemed to infuse him with even more grandiosity than he showed before. For instance, his first order of domestic business wasn't to disband the department of education, a longtime conservative goal. He set out to destroy social security --- long known to be the third rail of politics. He thought he was destined (by God?) to fundamentally change the nation and the world. His arrogance knew no bounds.

Within that framework, it is entirely believable to me that he could have ordered regime change in Iran more than a year ago. And it is almost certain that he could have authorized a new clandestine service in the DOD that is unanswerable to congress. The administration's understanding of presidential power during "wartime" allows him to do anything he deems necessary to "protect" the country.

Again, this is tinfoil hat stuff, connecting some very vague dots. A few years ago I would have dismissed it as conspiracy mongering of the worst kind and consigned myself to spend a month digging through illuminati web-sites to cure me of the disease.

After what we have seen, however, I don't think it's far-fetched at all:

• The administration has asserted a theory of unlimited executive power in wartime.
• The secretary of defense is committed to creating and using a new and "modern" fighting force using all kinds of unconventional and untried means.
• The president believes he was chosen by God to be his vehicle for spreadin' freedom.
• The power behind the throne is a devious, powermad greedhead who believes that military dominance is the only way America can stay on top.
• They all have a history of lying about their plans for war and believed that their reelection was a mandate to continue on the same path.

Here was Bush in his first press conference after winning the election:

And after hundreds of speeches and three debates and interviews and the whole process, where you keep basically saying the same thing over and over again, that when you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that's what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as the President, now let's work to -- and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let's work together.

And it's one of the wonderful -- it's like earning capital. You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That's what happened in the -- after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I've earned capital in this election -- and I'm going to spend it for what I told the people I'd spend it on, which is -- you've heard the agenda: Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror.

The most polarizing president in US history, who assumed office through one vote on the Supreme court the first time and won the second time because of a dubious swing of about 70,000 votes in Ohio says it's his style to spend the political capital he "earned" when "the people" endorsed all his views.

That's the kind of guy who thinks he can start secret wars to transform the middle east through sheer force. A megalomaniac child in the hands of manipulative men.



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digby 4/16/2006 09:01:00 AM |

Saturday, April 15, 2006

 
Ah, The Book Review Strikes Again

by tristero

Recently, the NY Times Book Review's been bending over backwards to find good things to say about "intelligent design" creationism, and assigning an intellectual lightweight to misread and review Daniel Dennett. Here's their latest attempt to solidify their reputation for blithering stupidity bordering on functional illiteracy. It's Pamela Paul's review of a collection of essays by Caitlin Flanagan on housewifery et, al (accompanied by a scrumptious picture of a 50's American housewife holding a freshly-baked cake. )

Flanagan is one of them anti-feminist types, apparently. And the reviewer wants us to know that she, too, has contempt for all those foolish feminist excesses. Unfortunately, well... in the spirit of the 50's, let's make it a quiz, boys and girls!

Can YOU spot the fundamental error of logic in the reviewer's - and Flanagan's - reasoning in the excerpt below?

As it stands, sensitivities are so attuned to the slightest insult of any one of women's myriad work-life choices that Flanagan's simplest observations — for example, when a woman works something is lost — are taken as an indictment of working women. Yet any working mother can see the truth in such a statement: time spent working = less time with children = something lost. What's appalling is that pointing this out raises such ire.

Sigh. I suppose it is too much to ask an editor to catch something like this. But really, there are people who can give Flanagan a fair review who are smart enough to avoid perpetuating her sloppy thinking. And yes, it's true that, considering the United States has a rogue executive branch that is in the early stages of what very well may escalate into nuclear war - and very few in the msm are willing to say it out loud - this is thoroughly trivial.

But this failure to understand basic logic in an influential literary publication points, and starkly, to a public intellectual culture that is profoundly empty of serious thought and discussion. A public culture in which serious thought and discussion really has to fight to get heard through muddle-headed thinking like Paul's and Flanagan's (Not their subject, duh. Their reasoning about the subject. Duh.). No wonder no one's discussing the imminence of a possible nuclear attack on Iran in the msm. They don't have the tools to comprehend it.

ANSWER: I found the "work vs baby-rearing" construction a classic false dichotomy, especially as framed here by Flanagan and Paul. The way they put it, *any* time away from baby could be construed as a loss - talking on the phone, eating lunch, going to the bathroom - all of these are losses to the mother/baby relationship; work is simply more loss. This strikes me as ipso facto a ludicrously crude position, and indefensible. Is part-time work less loss but still unacceptable? How about an hour a day? The false dichotomy becomes even more apparent if one considers mothers beyond Flanagan's and Paul's personal cohort of white, middle-to-upper-middle-class women. Which is not to say that there is even much truth to such a dichotomy within their own cohort.

This leads us to the question, "Why construct such a dichotomy in the first place?" And there are very few answers that don't revolve around making women feel guilty for abandoning their children for the hedonistic pleasure of being underpaid in the workforce. Thus, the structure of this false dichotomy is, by its very nature, sexist and oppressive.

I hasten to add that I don't know much feminist theory - since I agree with feminism, I would prefer to spend my time trying to understand things I have trouble agreeing with, or can never agree with - and so have no idea if any feminist has actually made this argument. It simply seems like common-sense to me.

Some commentators noticed that Paul makes a telling unconscious error, conflating "mothers" with "women." Indeed, that is the hidden assumption that lies behind the urge to advance this kind of false dichotomy.

Please note: I am not saying there are not very legitimate issues surrounding the issues of child-rearing and employment outside the house for mothers (and to a lesser extent, fathers). Of course there are, and they need to be discussed openly and with good faith all around. What I'm saying is that by framing these issues as a simplistic false dichotomy, Flanagan and Paul are indulging, whether they are aware of it or not, in a very nasty kind of guilt-tripping. It is not appalling to object to this worthless style of argumentation. Rather, it is moral as it is the first step towards finding a legitimate discourse that does not take as a given that women should feel guilty about the choices they make.
tristero 4/15/2006 06:59:00 AM |

 
All Paths Return To The Clenis

by tristero

What I want to know is this: Can Bill Clinton prove he wasn't in Dallas on November 22, 1963?

Think I'm kidding? If it's evil, Clinton had a hand in it. Think about it. There was Clinton's drug smuggling which led to Noelle Bush's drug addiction. And Clinton cavorting with two disciples of Sappho at a dinner party caused poor Mary Cheney to think that maybe it's ok to love someone who, chances are, will never adopt her dad's hairstyle. Not to mention that Clinton's gory familiar invented the internet, that swamp of filth. (And if you don't think the internet is perverted, just ask Jeff Goldstein or any other upstanding Republican whose done the research into how appalling it is. They'll send you a long list of sites they've compiled where men and dogs...shocking stuff.) And when Clinton admitted receiving fellatio from Monica Lewinsky, he sent a strong signal that it was ok for America to engage in a literal epidemic of oral sex, dooming thousands of hapless spermatoza to a horrible death, eaten away by stomach acids or left to wither and dry into an icky stain on a blue dress. Those are your children, America!

And now, this. Unforgivable. Iran today is all Clinton's fault.

See what I mean? Suddenly, Clinton's presence in Dallas '63 doesn't seem so far-fetched, now does it? And I'll bet if we could examine all the records from Bay of Pigs, we'd learn that Slick Willie called up his pal Castro - 'course they were buddies, still are, remember that Elian kid he made go back to Cuba? - and gave him all the details.

Pity poor George W. Bush. Six years after Clinton and he's still wasting time cleaning up Bill's mess. And people think BUSH makes mistakes? How could he? I'm serious, man. Bush doesn't have time to make his own mistakes, what with trying to correct all of Clinton's!
tristero 4/15/2006 06:28:00 AM |

 
Billmon On Iran

by tristero


Read it all:

And so the most promising opportunities for a rational settlement have all passed us by. Instead of a moderate reform president and a group of nervous ayatollahs anxious to cut a deal, America now has Ahmadinejad – and the dawn of what could conceivably become an explicitly fascist regime in Iran, or at least a very close substitute for one.

The good news, such as it is, is that Ahmadinejad's end-times ideology doesn't seem to include any grand territorial ambitions: no "Greater Iran" (Iran is already a greater Iran), no lebensraum in the east. We also have time – time to see how things shake out, to see if the ayatollahs can hamstring their troublesome protege, to see if the democracy movement can make a political comeback. Time for Ahmadinejad to lose some of his popular shine as Iran's internal problems worsen. Time for our own hardline warmongers to be booted out of power.

But unfortunately, our divinely ordained president may not be prepared to wait (and the last sentence of the preceding paragraph appears to be one of the reasons.) Which means at this point we probably should be worrying less about what happened in Munich in 1938, and more about what happened there in 1972, when the German police moved in and tried to disarm the terrorists.

Multiply that carnage by a thousand, or a million, and you've got more than a political slogan; you've got a war.

tristero 4/15/2006 02:52:00 AM |

Friday, April 14, 2006

 
Tancredo's Mistresses

by digby


McJoan at Kos has posted an action item that's worth checking out and taking a litle time to participate. It's about how to counter these bullshit lying radio ads that the RNC has cooked up to blame the Democrats for the GOP's attempt to turn undocumented workers into felons.

As I wrote yesterday, this is starting to gel as CW among the gasbags and the kewl kidz. I just heard William Schneider saying it as if it's a fact. That's not the most important thing, however. The most important thing is that the latino community not be misled. This requires a push back. The Republicans made their racist beds with Tom Tancredo and they have to wake up each morning to his creepy face across the pillow. He's their problem, not ours.

NDNBlog has more.



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digby 4/14/2006 01:50:00 PM |

 
Bush's Secret War

by digby


Colonel Sam Gardiner is the retired colonel who taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College and who found more than 50 instances of demonstrably false stories planted in the press in the run up to the war, back in 2003. He was just on CNN:

CLANCY: Well, Colonel Gardiner, from what you're saying, it would seem like military men, then, might be cautioning, don't go ahead with this. But what are the signs that are out there right now? Is there any evidence of any movement in that direction?

GARDINER: Sure. Actually, Jim, I would say -- and this may shock some -- I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way.

CLANCY: Why?

GARDINER: And let me say this -- I'm saying this carefully. First of all, Sy Hersh said in that article which was...

CLANCY: Yes, but that's one unnamed source.

GARDINER: Let me check that. Not unnamed source as not being valid.

The way "The New Yorker" does it, if somebody tells Sy Hersh something, somebody else in the magazine calls them and says, "Did you tell Sy Hersh that?" That's one point.

The secretary[sic] point is, the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year. I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, "Hey, I hear you're accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units."

He said, quite frankly, "Yes, we know they are. We've captured some of the units, and they've confessed to working with the Americans."

The evidence is mounting that that decision has already been made, and I don't know that the other part of that has been completed, that there has been any congressional approval to do this.

My view of the plan is, there is this period in which some kinds of ground troops will operate inside Iran, and then what we're talking about is the second part, which is this air strike.

CLANCY: All right. You lay this whole scenario, but there are still a lot of caution flags that one would see out here.

GARDINER: Sure. True.

CLANCY: If they do decide on a military option...

GARDINER: Right?

CLANCY: ... what's the realistic chance of success? What's your -- your prognosis for that kind of reaction here?

GARDINER: Yes. Let me give you two answers to that. First of all, the chance of getting the facilities and setting back the program, I think the chances go from maybe two years to actually accelerating the program. You know, we could cause them to redouble their efforts. That's on one side.

The other side is this sort of horizontal escalation by the Iranians.

My assessment is -- and it's because of regime problems at home -- that if we strike, they're likely to want to blame Israel. Now that's -- because that sells well at home.

Blaming Israel means that there's a chance that we could see Hezbollah, Hamas targeting Israel. We could very easily see this thing escalate into a broader Middle East war, particularly when you add Muslim rage.

You know, if you take the cartoon problem and multiply it times a hundred -- you know, the Danish cartoons, you could see how we could end up very quickly with a very serious problem in the Middle East.

CLANCY: Former U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner. Not a very rosy outlook here. A man who thinks the decision may have already been made.

Thank you for being with us.

GARDINER: Certainly.

My tin foil hat is beeping and honking like crazy right now. These generals coming forward is huge.

I really think it's possible that Bush and Rummy have already got a secret war going on, one that has not been revealed to congress in any form. It's designed that way. Bush is not going to fire Rummy --- he can't. He's already committed himself to this thing. This could be the ultimate action of the unitary executive.

Update: Crooks and Liars has the video, here.

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digby 4/14/2006 01:08:00 PM |

 
Black Reconnaissance

by digby


It's obvious to me that this call for Rumsfeld's resignation by six generals is about stopping this operation in Iran first and foremost. It is not a coincidence that the first salvo came from Sy Hersh last Sunday.

The question I had to ask myself was whether it was really about the nuclear thing or something more that had the military up in arms. In reading back over Hersh's articles of the last year or so, it became quite clear to me that this has something to do with the fact that Bush instituted the plan to invade Iran more than a year ago when he believed he had been crowned Emperor in the 2004 elections --- and that the plan has gone forward without any consideration of changing circumstances on the ground in Iraq. Furthermore, the plan itself comes from the same comic book from which Rummy and Newtie cooked up their RMA fantasy about invading Iraq with only 30,000 troops, a cell phone and a toothpick.

And the beauty of it is, the clandestine operation on which it depends has been folded into the Pentagon and has no congressional oversight.

February, 2005:

George W. Bush's reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as "facilitators" of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush's reelection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America's support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon's civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second guessing.

"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the former high level intelligence official told me. "Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah - we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."

Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s' vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld's dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt.

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld's responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon's control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it 'covert ops' it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs" the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. "Everyone is saying, 'You can't be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,' " the former intelligence official told me. "But they say, 'We've got some lessons learned not militarily, but how we did it politically. We're not going to rely on agency pissants.' No loose ends, and that's why the C.I.A. is out of there."

Bush just issued a statement of support for Rumsfeld. He is stubborn and refuses to change course, as we know. But if what Hersh reported back in 2005 is correct, Rumsfeld owns him. Back in the heady days of his 2% landslide, Bush authorized a covert war with Iran, with no congressional oversight and without even the cooperation of the CINQ's. This makes Iran-Contra look like the Canuck letter.

These retired generals are speaking for a military establishment that has been used like monopoly money by Rummy his fellow magical thinkers (like his "advisor" Newt Gingrich) who have spent the last five years attempting to destroy the military with their useless, incompetent war planning and their surreal Toffler-esque vision of a military that doesn't require an actual army.

I realize that the armed forces always resist change. But I think it's fair to assume, considering the Iraq cock-up, that Rummy doesn't know what in the hell he's doing. The military is finally saying "enough." We are witnessing a coup by media.

The congress has completely abdicated its oversight responsibility, the media is shallow and incompetent, our allies are considered irrelevant, the UN is being run by a nutcase even more far-out that Rummy and the wishes of the people are, as usual, not considered. It looks like the only institution in America that can bring us back from the brink of a tragic, tragic mistake is the military itself.

If these guys can't get through, and it doesn't appear that they will, then it's time for some of these active duty officers to resign in protest. It would take a lot of guts, but that's their business, right?

In an article about the possible revolt of the officer corps, Fred Kaplan writes this in Slate:

MacArthur's legacy in particular has kept even the boldest generals deeply reluctant to criticize civilian leaders over the decades. Rumsfeld's arrogance, his "casualness and swagger" as Gen. Newbold put it—which have caused so many strategic blunders, so much death and disaster—have started to tip some officers over the edge. They may prove a good influence in the short run. But if Rumsfeld resists their encroachments and fights back, the whole hierarchy of command could implode as officers feel compelled not merely to stay silent but to choose one side or the other. And if the rebel officers win, they might find they like the taste of bureaucratic victory—and feel less constrained to renew the internecine combat when other, less momentous disputes arise in the future.

Both paths are cluttered with drear and danger. Does President Bush know this is going on? If he does, he would do the nation—and the Constitution—a big favor if he launched a different sort of pre-emptive attack and got rid of Rumsfeld now.

The problem may be that Bush can't replace the person who is running his secret war.


Oh, and get ready for the swiftboating. I can hear them revving their engines already.
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digby 4/14/2006 10:42:00 AM |

 
Breeding Republicans

by digby


Following up on my post from yesterday about Chuck Colson's lament that about all the aborted babies who could be working in the fields today, the indefatigable Carolyn at MakeThemAccountable reminds me that she wrote about this sometime back --- and this is not just some isolated whim on Colson's part. It seems that there are conservatives who back all kinds of family support like universal health insurance that might place them as close to the progressive camp as the conservatives --- until you see what their motives are:

Does this mean that the progressive fight for economic justice now over? Can we sit back and relax?

Not exactly.

The problem is with the reasons Douthat and Salam give for making families’ lives easier. Maybe it’s idealistic, but some of us have thought the reason to encourage strong, economically secure, and loving families is because that is what is most likely to enable people to reach their human potential, and to live full and rewarding lives. Any government participation in that effort is geared toward fulfilling its obligation, stated in the preamble to the Constitution, to promote the general welfare.

Those are not the reasons these authors give. They are concerned that reduced baby production, especially the lack of "bonus babies" (presumably, more babies than the two per family most common in America today) will cause economic problems in the future. "Without a youthful population, the costs of supporting retirees are unsustainable, and the innovation and entrepreneurial zeal that make America the world's economic leader will slowly wither." An extra added attraction for helping families is that it will solidify Republican political dominance, these authors say.

Their ideas about how to support families are typical GOP claptrap that won't work (they don't have a clue about how to do anything but cut taxes and start wars) but I just love the idea that they think they can breed Republicans. My father is the most rightwing Republican in the universe.



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digby 4/14/2006 10:21:00 AM |

 
Krugman

by tristero

Paul Krugman socks the Bush administration right in the keister. It is a joy to read:

Now it can be told: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney based their re-election campaign on lies, damned lies and statistics.

The lies included Mr. Cheney's assertion, more than three months after intelligence analysts determined that the famous Iraqi trailers weren't bioweapons labs, that we were in possession of two "mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox."

The damned lies included Mr. Bush's declaration, in his "Mission Accomplished" speech, that "we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda."

The statistics included Mr. Bush's claim, during his debates with John Kerry, that "most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans."

Compared with the deceptions that led us to war, deceptions about taxes can seem like a minor issue. But it's all of a piece. In fact, my early sense that we were being misled into war came mainly from the resemblance between the administration's sales pitch for the Iraq war — with its evasions, innuendo and constantly changing rationale — and the selling of the Bush tax cuts.

Moreover, the hysterical attacks the administration and its defenders launch against anyone who tries to do the math on tax cuts suggest that this is a very sensitive topic. For example, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa once compared people who say that 40 percent of the Bush tax cuts will go to the richest 1 percent of the population to, yes, Adolf Hitler.*

And just as administration officials continued to insist that the trailers were weapons labs long after their own intelligence analysts had concluded otherwise, officials continue to claim that most of the tax cuts went to the middle class even though their own tax analysts know better.

How do I know what the administration's tax analysts know? The facts are there, if you know how to look for them, hidden in one of the administration's propaganda releases...

[explanation of how the "Tax Relief Kit" inadvertently demonstrates that 53% of the tax cuts went to the top 10% of the population and 32% of the tax cuts went to the top 1%]

I'm sure that this column will provoke a furious counterattack from the administration, an all-out attempt to discredit my math. Yet if I'm wrong, there's an easy way to prove it: just release the raw data used to construct the table titled "Projected Share of Individual Income Taxes and Income in 2006." Memo to reporters: if the administration doesn't release those numbers, that's in effect a confession of guilt, an implicit admission that the data contradict the administration's spin.

And what about the people Senator Grassley compared to Hitler, those who say that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans will receive 40 percent of the tax cuts? Although the "Tax Relief Kit" asserts that "nearly all of the tax cut provisions" are already in effect, that's not true: one crucial piece of the Bush tax cuts, elimination of the estate tax, hasn't taken effect yet. Since only estates bigger than $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple, face taxation, the great bulk of the gains from estate tax repeal will go to the wealthiest 1 percent. This will raise their share of the overall tax cuts to, you guessed it, about 40 percent.

Again, the point isn't merely that the Bush administration has squandered the budget surplus it inherited on tax cuts for the wealthy. It's the fact that the administration has spent its entire term in office lying about the nature of those tax cuts. And all the world now knows what I suspected from the start: an administration that lies about taxes will also lie about other, graver matters.

* In the interest of providing my dear Hullabaloo readers with extra value, Here's Charles Grassley's Hitler comparison as reported in the Congressional Record, October 1, 2002

"I am sure voters will get their fill of statistics claiming that the Bush tax cut hands out 40 percent of the benefit to the top 1 percent of the taxpayers. This is not merely misleading, it is outright false. Some folks must be under the impression that as long as something is repeated often enough, it will become true. That was how Adolf Hitler got to the top.

It's no longer surprising to read these scummy lies from Republicans, but nevertheless it never fails to induce a state of sheer awe and wonder at the audacity of it all.
tristero 4/14/2006 03:29:00 AM |

Thursday, April 13, 2006

 
Uptight, Crazy and Reactionary

by digby


In this post about the developing generation gap between Boomers and Millenials (which is child's play compared to the generation gap between boomers and the greatest generation --- now that was real hell) I read that boomers "express greater concern than any other generational grouping with virtually every specific issue examined in the survey" and "have substantially more negative and pessimistic perceptions of the political process than any other generational grouping." Evidently, boomers are also "uptight, crazy, and reactionary, featuring rightwing views on 'lifestyle issues and crime' and, generally speaking, 'are often characterized by taking strong, relatively extreme positions on issues.'"

Yglesias says this means we should chill. He's probably right. We've always taken strong, relatively extreme positions on issues. I used to think that was a function of being young, but I guess we are just extreme by nature.

However, I might also suggest that the fact that we are all in our mid forties to early 60's means we are taking care of both the elderly (who are living to amazing old age) and the young (who stay young a lot longer than they used to) while looking at a scary old age that some factions of the government are actively trying to fuck with, and who may very well succeed.

The younger cohort, like me, looks at greatly reduced opportunity in a shrinking job market that is unkind to older workers. Many cling to their pathetic jobs with their brittle fingernails for fear of having to pony up many thousands of dollars in health care premiums if they lose it (and having to take a shit job at Walmart when nobody will hire them at their formerly decent wage.) Health is becoming a big issue for us --- the system is quite inconveniently breaking down just as we enter our unhealthy years. This economy feels very unstable and if you are over 50 you know you will not be able to make it all back if it goes.

We are feeling a little bit stressed.

And as for our pessimistic view of politics, whether we are on the right (and refuse to admit it) or on the left (and are all to aware of it) we have all watched our government take us into two useless wars, first killing large numbers of us and now threatening to kill large numbers of our kids and grandkids for no good reason. A number of our big political heroes were literally gunned down. We have lived through a bunch of presidencies now, including Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush. One ended with assasination; one ended ignominiously through a total lack of support for his war from his own party; three of them featured major corruption and/or national security scandals, one of whom resigned in disgrace; one was a non-stop soap opera that ended in impeachment; the latest may be the biggest failure of all. All of them were tumultuous and ultimately disillusioning for a generation that grew up in America's most confident and hopeful era after America's triumph of World War II.

We'd have to be delusional not to be negative and pessimistic about the political process after all that.

I'd also point out that as much as everyone may want us to chill, we boomers are all entering the period of life in which voters typically begin to turn out to vote with a vengeance. We have huge numbers and we are shortly going to be concentrating almost exclusively on our aches and pains,the early bird special at Dennys --- and politics. Hoo boy. Like every other period in our lives, for good and ill, boomers are going to dominate until the day we die. We can't help it.

Blame the greatest generation. That's what we always did.


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digby 4/13/2006 07:16:00 PM |

 
Breeding Poverty

by digby

Here's an interesting new argument about abortion and immigration from Chuck Colson, via Media Matters:

But what's the root of the problem? Why do we have a shortage of workers? Aha, that's the unspeakable "A" word that the elite dread the most: abortion. The reason we must allow millions of illegal aliens in to fill these jobs is because we have murdered a generation that would otherwise be filling them: 40 million sacrificed since 1973 to the god of self-fulfillment. And Americans are barely maintaining a replacement-level birthrate of 2.1 children per woman.

Remember the compassionate stuff that the abortionists used to tell us: "We are just preventing these poor kids from growing up in deprived, impoverished circumstances"? Hah! False. What happens is that others come in from abroad to live in those deprived, difficult, and impoverished circumstances and at great public cost.

I don't get this logic. Assuming that anyone ever actually said this about abortion preventing kids from growing up in deprived circumstances, I doubt the meaning was that by having abortions, poverty would disappear. It was that some women would not be bringing unwanted children into poverty. What am I missing? How does that fact that "aliens" live in poverty make that statement false?

And is Colson really saying that we need to up the replacement-level birthrate in order to fill these low paying unskilled jobs that force people to live in deprived, impoverished circumstances? Doesn't that evoke unpleasant associations with orphan trains and breeding bonded or slave labor? Creepy.

Besides, I thought the illegal immigration problem was that the 12 million illegal immigrants were taking jobs from Americans who are already here. If we had 40 million more Americans competing for all those low-paying, unskilled jobs, the unemployment rate would be in the stratosphere and we'd be in economic meltdown.

Or perhaps Colson is suggesting that these tens of millions of poverty stricken Americans would be even more exploited than the "aliens" are now, with no rights, no legal protections and below minimum wage, off-the-books jobs. That would solve the illegal immigration problem, all right. Why didn't someone think of that before? (Oh that's right, they did. Back in the good old days the Republicans want to take us back to --- before we had labor laws.)

Like I said, a very creepy argument that leads to some very disturbing conclusions.



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digby 4/13/2006 04:34:00 PM |

 
Cost Effective Nativism

by digby


This is worthy of some serious push back from the blogosphere. For the past couple of days, the GOP has been circulating the fact that the Democrats refused to let the Republicans in the House strip their bill of the parts making illegal immigration a felony. This has been greeted with some "analysis" on the part of the media that the Democrats are just as hypocritical as the Republicans on the issue of immigration. The GOP is reportedly running ads on spanish language media saying Democrats voted for the bill to make illegal immigration a felony.

But that is misleading. Nathan Newman goes to the congressional record and finds out what the real argument on the House floor was when the amendment came up:

Mr. Chairman, under current law, illegal entry into the United States makes an alien subject to a Federal criminal misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of 6 months in prison...

In the base bill, the maximum penalty for illegal entry was increased to a year and a day, and the same penalty was set for unlawful presence, to make the enhancements for these offenses consistent with the other penalty enhancements of the bill.

The administration subsequently requested the penalty for these crimes be lowered to 6 months. Making the first offense a felony, as the base bill would do, would require a grand jury indictment, a trial before a district court judge and a jury trial.

Also because it is a felony, the defendant would be able to get a lawyer at public expense if the defendant could not afford the lawyer. These requirements would mean that the government would seldom if ever actually use the new penalties. By leaving these offenses as misdemeanors, more prosecutions are likely to be brought against those aliens whose cases merit criminal prosecution.

For this reason, the amendment returns the sentence for illegal entry to its current 6 months and sets the penalty for unlawful presence at the same level.

The Republican argument was that they wanted to make it a felony, but because it would enable the defendants to have a jury trial and have access to a lawyer, they were afraid that it would cost too much. They argued that they would get far more prosecutions against the "aliens" if they kept it at the misdemeanor level.

Now, we know that they were having second thoughts about this provision, probably doing some polling that it would inflame the latino community. And Democrats certainly did want to hang this bill around the GOP's neck and succeeded in doing so. But the Republicans' stated reasons for trying to withdraw it were hardly because it was wrong to use such harsh methods, only that it would cost too much and would allow the "aliens" to have a lawyer and a fair trial. The Republican party, as we know, is very much against that fundamental American principle these days. They know who's guilty and they don't need no stinkin' judges or juries telling them otherwise. (Unless you're one of the legions of Republican criminal suspects, that is.)

It would be very helpful if the Democrats got this out to the spanish language media too. This idea that the Democrats were the ones who voted against removing the felon language is becoming CW. There is no reason for them to take a hit with the latino community about this when we know that they were not really in favor of the felon language. As Nathan Newman says:

This is a bow to the impossibility of revving up millions of criminal trials, but it's all about how to most effectively criminalize undocumented workers.

And by the way, isn't it interesting that the Bush administration didn't exactly put its foot down either. All it did was request that the penalty for the convicted felon be lowered to six months. And here I thought old George was such a big latino lover.


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digby 4/13/2006 01:49:00 PM |

 
The Neocon Beast

by digby

Thank you Matt Yglesias for reminding everyone that this push for Iran is part and parcel of neocon ideology and not just some reflex of George W. Bush's messianic impulses.

... there's a widespread view on the American right that it's always a mistake to reach diplomatic agreements with "evil" regimes. There's also a widespread view on the American right that, contra the examples of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, nuclear deterrence won't work against "crazy" leaders. At the intersection of those two opinions is the conclusion that we ought to be very, very, very, very willing to use unilateral preventative military force against countries that have nuclear weapons programs or that we merely vaguely suspect of having nuclear weapons programs. Both of those ideas are foolish and dangerously wrong, but they're also widespread -- not private oddball notions of Bush's. If liberals want to push this country's foreign policy in a better direction over the next five-to-ten years, we need to attack the whole network of ideas (including a non-trivial number of ideas whose origins are inside the Democratic coalition) that gave us the Iraq War and that threaten to give us the Iran War.

There has been a substantial amount of brainwashing done on the American public that needs to be immediately countered. These ideas have been floated in the media as American policy for years now. It doesn't sound in the least bit jarring or inappropriate to many of the public. After all, Bush's biggest applause line --- and one that every American probably heard hundreds of times --- of the last campaign was:

Do I forget the lessons of September the 11th and trust a madman, or do I take action to defend this country? Given that choice, I will defend America every time

Iran is a member of the axis 'o evil. It is, therefore, already presumed to be batshit crazy and the new president has certainly helped with his holocaust denial and loony rhetoric. It will not be that difficult for Bush and his minions to transfer their earlier madman images to Iran.

The idealistic portion of the neocon fantasy has probably been discredited: creating democracy from the ground up through unilateral invasion and occupation is now seen as a non-starter by everyone but George W. Bush. But the dark side of the PNAC wet dream is alive and well. They are still convinced that there is only one way for America to maintain its hegemony (and by God it must be maintained) and that is for it to militarily dominate the world. Furthermore, they believe that they must constantly demonstrate American military might to sustain the world's belief in its overwhelming power. After out little boo-boo in Iraq, it may now be important to these people that we demonstrate our awesome, unmatched air power. Eventually a little nuke action might be necessary too. The only way to protect America from the boogeyman is to prove over and over again that we are willing and eager to use force.

We may very well have a president named John McCain after 2008, or some other Republican with a chip on his shoulder. They don't have to be card carrying neocons to buy into this notion. The Bush administration is still busily dismantling the post WWII system and Pax Americana, so far, is the only thing ready to take its place.

Democrats have a lot of good ideas, but until they develop a cogent narrative to counter the dominant neocon story, we are going to be in danger of this "madman" rhetoric rearing its ugly head every time the Republicans need a little boost in the polls or feel it's time to show some muscle and remind everyone who's in charge. Is there anyone besides the brunch bunch at AEI who thinks that's going to keep this country safe?


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digby 4/13/2006 12:52:00 PM |

 
Iran Is No Cuban Missile Crisis

by tristero.

There is a meme going around that Iran is the Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion. Short version: bullshit.

How do I know? Am I a scholar on the subject? No. But I've done a lot of deep research on the Missile Crisis and I know a lot more than David Ignatius does about it.

True: Ignatius doesn't distort history as willfully, deliberately, and maliciously as David Irving does. And I am not comparing him to Irving. But I am hard-pressed to remember the last time I read any history in a so-called mainstream media outlet that was so consciously, consistently, and dangerously misleading as the following excerpt, and that is saying a lot:

Kennedy's genius was to reject the Cuba options proposed by his advisers, hawk and dove alike, and choose his own peculiar outside-the-box strategy. He issued a deadline but privately delayed it; he answered a first, flexible message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev but not a second unyielding one; he said he would never take U.S. missiles out of Turkey, as the Soviets were demanding, and then secretly did precisely that. Disaster was avoided because Khrushchev believed Kennedy was willing to risk war -- but wanted to avoid it.

I started to annotate this but gave up because there simply isn't a single clause that has any undistorted truth to it. I am not kidding, I have rarely been so overwhelmed with the task of debunking rightwing stupidity. But in this case, I'd have to write some 10,000 words to start to straighten out all the errors, sins of omissions, idiotic conclusions, and bizarre misapprehensions in this paragraph. This is such sheer crap I don't know where to begin and therefore I won't waste my time.

Anyone who doesn't believe that what Ignatius wrote really is willfully malicious garbage crafted with ruthless cunning at the molecular level is invited to learn about the Missile Crisis first by going to democracy arsenal's takedown which is where I found the link to Ignatius. Then, you might want to click on this link which links to a pdf of speech I gave in October, 2002 contrasting Bush and Kennedy the first time Bush's lying acolytes tried to make this analogy. For those who are really interested, get a copy of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis and read the whole thing.* Or you can try this excellent sort-of-summary of the tapes, Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings

Then you can read Bobby Kennedy's Thirteen Days but whatever you do, don't base your opinions on the Costner movie, which, like Stone's JFK, is just a Hollywood film. Also, read One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Castro, 1958-1964 the Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That will serve as a brief (no irony) introduction to the Cuban Missile Crisis; I'm sure some of you folks have other books you like as well. For those who are new to the subject, once you start to learn what actually happened during the Missile Crisis you'll understand why I simply can't believe that the Washington Post permitted Ignatius's column to run: "inaccurate" is a gross understatement. The hiring of Ben Domenech is beginning to seem more and more like a conscious decision to ruin their reputation and not a dumb, aberrant mistake.

Like I said, I'm no scholar. But I have researched some subjects in considerable depth and seriousness, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reading Ignatius's column gives me considerable insight as to how a serious scientific expert like NIles Eldredge or Richard Dawkins must feel when they first encountered "intelligent design" creationism. Ignatius's column should be simply beneath notice. But someone who is far more sanguine about these things than I really should notice and carefully dissect all his misrepresentations. And he should be very detailed and cruel so Ignatius never dares to touch the subject of the Missile Crisis again. The kind of bullshit he is peddling could get a lot of innocent people killed.

*Note: Eric Alterman has pointed out that this edition - edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, the latter a counselor to Secretary Rice - is often inaccurate. I bought a far more expensive scholarly edition of the tapes and checked. Alterman is correct. But for non-scholarly purposes, my opinion is that the May/Zelikow is more than adequate.
tristero 4/13/2006 12:07:00 PM |

 
A Tiny, But Telling, Bush LIe?

by tristero

So I'm reading this obit about William Sloane Coffin in the Times, and when I was least expecting it, I run into Crawford's Own Messiah:

Another Yale man of the time, President Bush, has spoken of a less affectionate memory: After Mr. Bush's father lost a Senate race in 1964 to Senator Ralph Yarborough, Dr. Coffin told the young man, then a freshman, student that he knew his father and that the better man had won. (Dr. Coffin disputed the anecdote.)

Awwww, poor George. But then I started to think: Who y'gonna believe? So I thought I'd do some elementary googling.

Those who only care about Big Issues can safely skip this post. But for some reason this story gnawed at me a bit. Perhaps it just seemed so childishly wrong to have read about poor little W in the obit of a man who truly did great things (and a few he had the character to understand he would regret doing until he died). I'm not sure Bush lied here, but...well, here's what I found.

The earliest telling of this anecdote that I found was 1998 in the NY Times:

Several months after his father lost the 1964 Texas Senate campaign to Ralph Yarborough, the incumbent Democratic populist, Bush said he met Yale's prominent campus chaplain.
''I ran into William Sloane Coffin, who was the preacher at Yale, supposedly the guy that was there to comfort students,'' said the Governor. ''I introduced myself and he said, Yeah, I know your father, and your father lost to a better man.''

Even today, 33 years later, Bush is clearly offended by the statement, and it is one of the many reasons, he says, that he couldn't wait to get back to Texas, after his graduation in 1968: ''Texas people are more polite. I don't think a Texan would do that to a son.''

No mention is made of Coffin's denial. By the way, taken as whole, the Bush puff piece from the Times is a nauseating read. Bush, jokingly described as a "grizzled veteran of the sexual revolution." Ah, ha ha ha! Like he survived a war rather than (perhaps) managing to avoid the clap as he plowed his way through as many availabe partners he could, which the Times couldn't quite come out and say that bluntly because, well, because then people might think Bush was a fetid swamp of immorality no different than President You Know Who. But I digress.

Another interesting occurrence is this 1999 Bush puff from WaPo

When George W. Bush arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1964, his father was in the closing days of his first political race. Running against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat, he was the beneficiary of the largest Republican turnout in Texas history that November, but it was not enough. Riding the coattails of his fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Yarborough defeated his Republican challenger by 300,000 votes.

Not long afterward, Bush decided to look up someone has father had told him he should go see, one of his contemporaries, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain later famous for his anti-war activities.

The greeting he received was hardly what he expected. "I knew your father," Bush remembers Coffin saying, "and your father lost to a better man."

Coffin says he has no recollection of his conversation with Bush and says if it happened, he was making a joke. But for Bush it was a jarring signal that Yale was going to be different, a place where he might not effortlessly fit in, where his father's values were not universally admired.

"You talk about a shattering blow," said Barbara Bush in a recent interview. "Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I'm not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel]."

And now, Coffin is permitted a denial (Note: there may be an earlier denial, possibly in a letter to the Times, but I didn't find it) or a dismissal of the thing as a joke. Apparently, Coffin liked to joke around with Yale students so that's plausible.

But the story's not adding up as a joke, and oddly enough, Barbara Bush's seeming confirmation of Bush's little diss tale is one of the reason the story rings more and more false. Y'see, Bush the Elder (falsely being remembered as the "Good" Bush, rather than the Truly Awful But Probably Not As Dreadful As His Sons Bush) and Coffin were often friends as well as often enemies according to this biography. Indeed Bush The Elder told his son to say hello to Coffin. All this makes me think that if this incident actually happened, then I would imagine that George would have taken a break from all his balling and instead bawled his eyes out to Mama who would have cried to Papa who, in a huff would have gotten on the horn to Coffin and complained. Especially since both George and the Reverend were Skull and Bones (as later was George). And Coffin would have remembered this. Yes, it's still possible that Coffin forgot. It just doesn't seem that likely, given how well everyone knew each other, and how influential they were, even in 1964.

What's also interesting , en passant, is that in this biography we encounter a taste of Bush the Elder's Texas-style polite, gentlemanly style of campaigning:

In 1964, Bush ventured into conventional politics by running against Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, making an issue of Yarborough's vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which almost all Southern politicians (including the Republican Sen. John Tower of Texas) opposed. He called Yarborough an "extremist" and a "left wing demagogue" while Yarborough said Bush was a "carpetbagger" trying to buy a Senate seat "just as they would buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange." Bush lost in the 1964 Democratic landslide.

But I digress.

Needless to say this story has been repeated by the right many times. Here's John Tierney, but without extending the courtesy of Coffin to reprint his denial:

[George W.] soured on the Northeastern establishment his freshman year, when Yale's famously activist chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, brusquely informed him that his father had lost to "a better man" in the Senate race in Texas against Ralph Yarborough.

To sum up, I dunno if this story is true, but if my life depended on it, I'd say Bush was flat-out lying about Coffin. The story is too pat. For Bush is too innocent a victim of a devilish East Coast liberal lefty whatchamacallit. (Let's pass over that Young Churchill himself was born in Connecticut.) And it seems to me highly unlikely that any chaplain, even one that prided himself on his hail-fellow-well-met attitude with students would say this.

But again, I don't know. I"d be curious to hear from anyone who knew Coffin and could speak about his personality. Or anyone who has some information on this little incident. It's not that important in the scheme of things, but if I'm right and Bush lied about it, it tells us a great deal about his character, namely the extremes he will go to claim victimization. And if the story is true, it does provide insight into the pathological length of time Bush will hold a personal grudge and the truly troubling extremes to which he amplifies what was surely a petty poke in the ribs at Bush The Elder from a longtime friend into a 33 year-long angry, hurt-filled obsession.

To bring all this up to the present: Whether the story is a lie or true, just imagine in either case how psychologically unbearable it must be right now for him if he would dare to peek out of his bubble and realize that he's loathed by most of the world. The poor guy, it must be eating away at him all the time. No wonder he can't bear to read newspapers.

I feel sorry for him. Not.
tristero 4/13/2006 09:25:00 AM |

 
The Iraqi Document Dump

by tristero

Whad'ya know? Turns out the Iraqi document dump was "seeded." Imagine that.

Maybe not outright forgeries as I speculated, just enough stuff to mislead and misrepresent. Nevertheless, I continue to urge everyone on the right to devote all their resources to careful study of this archive. And to take as much time as they think they need to get it absolutely right.
tristero 4/13/2006 08:28:00 AM |

 
Trailers Were Reported Debunked By Early June, 2003

by tristero

There's a lot of hoo-hah regarding the trailers found in northern Iraq and claimed as WMD labs by Bush during the spring of '03. Josh Marshall thinks the trailer stuff wasn't publicly debunked definitively until after July 17, 2003.** Not quite. True, "administration heavies" kept on lying, but serious doubts surfaced in the American press about a week after Bush's lie, and the British press reported on a study a week after that. No reporters bothered to keep the story in the news or follow up with some hard questions. As you remember back then, only third-rate minds questioned the wisdom of the Iraq invasion or refused to trust what Bush and Blair told us. Here's the chronology:

May 27, 2003: A secret Pentagon-sponsored study concluded the trailers weren't evidence of WMD.

May 29,2003: Bush lied, oh excuse me... Bush, not informed abouty this study, said "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

Now, when did suspicions surface publicly that this was hogwash? Within days.

June 7, 2003: From the New York Times, in an article co-authored by Judith Miller no less, "American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs."

June 15, 2003: The Guardian reported that "An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist."

So, at least one month before the senate debate Josh refers to, both the British and American press had reported on grave misgivings and then followed up reporting on actual conclusions that the trailer wmd fable was hokum. But apparently, no one bothered, except for a few bloggers, to pick up and repeat the story.

And because no one - repeat, no one -in the press thought these reports were of any major importance to the unfolding story of Spring 2003 - a story of triumph over evil and the promise of freedom and democracy for Iraq - the administration felt no obligation to call any reporters' attention to them. And that means that Tenet possibly wasn't even asked any questions, let alone hard questions, during the 5 hours of closed testimony he gave on July 15, 2003 about those trailers. And that permitted Senators Durbin and McConnell later that day to mention the trailers as if they were real evidence of wmd and perpetuate the prevailing myth that substituted for the reality of Spring, '03.

One simply couldn't ask for a better example of the failure of the mainstream American press to focus on the important stories of their time. While Josh himself mentioned the Observer article it was within the context of a widening British scandal over no wmds. As for the June 7, 2003 Times article mentioning doubts about the trailers, Josh completely missed it, apparently. *

Now let me make this clear. This post really is not about Josh Marshall but about a criminally mendacious American president and the larger American press which failed, simply failed, to see what was in front its face until it was too late. Josh has done, is doing, will do great, great work - I could go on but everyone reading this already knows what I'd say about the importance both of TPM and TPM Cafe, not to mention Josh's articles. They are all invaluable, even if we take issue with them strongly sometimes. This is about the wider failure of the press.

For the life of me, I failed to see then, and fail to see now, why the fact that Bush lied about the trailers wasn't headline news in June, 2003. The country wasn't ready for the truth? Of course it wasn't, because the press had stopped doing its job in November, 2000, when the election was stolen. And that just walks the question back. Why wasn't the country ready for the truth in November, 2000? Because the press covered the 2000 election campaign in an utterly incompetent fashion. And, herdlike, everyone in the press - Krugman the only serious exception - chose to ignore what was staring them in the face. It was too uncomfortable to believe that a major presidential candidate would blatantly lie about his economic program, or that that same candidate actually would steal an American election. It was too painful to imagine that as president, that same incompetent liar would neglect the most dangerous threats to America, an incompetence so spectacular that a bunch of ignorant fanatics could pull off a still unbelievably horrible series of terrorist attacks. It was simply beyond the pale to imagine that this same unspeakable bastard would then lie the United States into a bogus war, causing the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people, American and Iraqi alike, and mind-boggling anarchy.

In short, it doesn't matter what the public is ready for, or what the press corps as a whole thinks is important to report. It's what the real story is. Hersh understands this. Danner understands this. Fisk, too, and a few others. Unfortunately, aside from these few, and what appears to be somewhat more aggresive reporting, what happened with the trailer story is still happening. Even now, the American press as a whole simply is not reporting the real story of this administration when it's still news.

And that brings me to my point from yesterday. Man, I hate to be a prick about this, but let's get serious here. We are talking about the very real possibility of Bush launching a first-strike nuclear war. Dammit, we should be pricks about it. Okay, Josh hasn't mentioned the tactical nukes yet in Hersh's article - nor did he find time to read Hersh's article right away. Big deal - it's not his job and he's chasing other stories in far more detail than I ever will. The problem is that the nuclear war plans angle has disappeared from the mainstream news. Just like the exposure of Bush's lies about the trailers disappeared. The only thing bloggers can do to influence the discourse, and that only rarely, is to keep the salient parts of a story alive until the msm picks up on it.

The fact that Bush is seriously planning to start a nuclear war must not be permitted to drop out of sight. If it is ignored, chances are we will learn that the first 21st Century nuclear war - but not the last - will have started when we weren't looking. Bush isn't going to ask for authorization to use nuclear weapons. He isn't even going to ask authorization to attack Iran. It is going to happen and if they are very nice, they'll boast about it afterwards to the right reporters. The use of nukes will ooze out, contributing to the anomie and "whatever" attitude that Bush has cultivated towards news about his behavior.

Unless the press holds Bush's feet to the fire and refuse to let this story suffer the same fate as the story about the trailers, we will slouch into Armageddon. It is sheer moral cowardice to ignore this, or minimize its importance. Hersh may be wrong - he's been wrong before. But as far as I know, he's never been wrong about the dangers of the Bush administration. The press must press the question: Does Bush plan to start a nuclear war?

*UPDATE: Thanks to DM and others, I realized I had made a careless mistake and misclicked 2002 instead of 2003 when researching the TPM archives. I deleted the erroneous sentence, which followed this one. Nevertheless, while Josh Marshall did address the issues of wmd lies in the summer of '03- I never said he didn't - he did apparently miss the Judith Miller co-authored Times article raising doubts about the trailer story. In any event, I apologize for the inadvertent error, and specifically to Josh.

**UPDATE: To make a subsidiary point clearer than it was in my post, I don't think the question Josh posed in his original post is all that important. The administration is - that's right, is - in no hurry to report its mistakes. In truth, no one should expect any administration to be that willing. Since the press in this country ignored the stories after one or two articles, the administration never bothered to make an issue out of it and it wasn't a pressing matter for them to inform Congress. Perhaps a lawyer can tell me whether they were even obligated to inform Congress about this.

The real story here is not, per Josh, that Bush was dilatory. It's that the US press was. And they are being so again regarding Bush's desire to start a nuclear war.
tristero 4/13/2006 04:13:00 AM |

 
30,000 Subpoenas A Year?

by tristero

It truly is obscene to label the so-called "Patriot Act"an act of patriots:

After fighting ferociously for months, federal prosecutors relented yesterday and agreed to allow a Connecticut library group to identify itself as the recipient of a secret F.B.I. demand for records in a counterterrorism investigation.

The decision ended a dispute over whether the broad provisions for secrecy in the USA Patriot Act, the antiterror law, trumped the free speech rights of library officials. The librarians had gone to federal court to gain permission to identify themselves as the recipients of the secret subpoena, known as a national security letter, ordering them to turn over patron records and e-mail messages.

It was unclear what impact the government's decision would have on the approximately 30,000 other such letters that are issued each year. Changes in the Patriot Act now allow the government discretion over whether to enforce or relax what had been a blanket secrecy requirement concerning the letters...

Ms. Beeson said yesterday that she believed the government's decision to drop the appeal was politically timed.

"The issue over whether the government was using its Patriot Act powers to demand library records was one of the hot-button issues in this debate," she said. "And our clients could have been extremely powerful spokespeople in opposing the reauthorization of the act, because they had actually received one of those national security letters."

Now that the debate in Congress is over, she said, "There's no longer any reason to keep our clients quiet."

By the way, the reason they dropped their objections is that the prosecutors had made a little boo-boo, inadvertently revealing the name of the group, the Library Connection, in court filings, which led to the name being published in the NY Times.

UPDATE: The original title of this post was "30,000 Subpoenas A Year To Libraries?" Several commenters noted that the article simply says that 30,000 subpoenas a year, in the form of "national security letters" are sent out. It is, as I read it, vague as to whether those are all sent to libraries. However, once you folks pointed it out, I obviously misread it: 30,000 subpoenas to libraries would be incredible even by the incredible standards of the Bush administration. I apologize for the mistake.
tristero 4/13/2006 03:05:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

 
Politics Lost

by digby


Feel the magic. Joe Klein has a new book coming out in which he excoriates the rich insider Democratic consultants. Apparently, Klein thinks the Democrats should listen to rich insider Democratic pundits instead.

He writes:

Roger Ailes was right when he predicted at the beginning of the television era that in the future all politicians would have to be performers.

How interesting. What to make of the fact that two paragraphs later he says this:

...let me give 2008 a try. The winner will be the candidate who comes closest to this model: a politician who refuses to be a "performer," at least in the current sense.

Whatever. Klein criticizing the Democratic consultants is like Charlie Manson criticizing Richard Jeffrey Dahmer as far as I'm concerned.

Eric Alterman reported on a foreign policy discussion that he and Klein attended yesterday:

It was a useful discussion with many useful tributaries and give and take with the audience and we all felt better for it.

That is right up until the very last moment when, after someone brought up the question of the whether the Democrats will be able to present an effective alternative to Bush in the next election, Joe Klein shouted out, "Well they won't if their message is that they hate America - which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years."

This is the man who is lecturing the Democratic party about losing politics.

He also appeared last night on Charlie Rose in an otherwise quite interesting round table about Democratic foreign policy and he refined his point a little:

I think the problem for Democrats now is this: there are some well-informed and intelligent and tough centrists, but there are challenges coming from two separate directions. One is coming from the left of the party which ever since Vietnam has assumed that any use of American force overseas is immoral.

And the more serious threat --- and this threat is coming to both parties --- and this is coming from below, it's this populist threat that I think is absolutely significant in this country and this is people who just want to make the world go away --- they want to pull the troops out of Iraq and not think about the consequences, who are anti-immigrant, anti-Chinese economic competition and just want to make the world go away.

That's his analysis. The party's big challenges are finding a way to deal with the pacifist left and the threat "from below" of the the barbarian populist hordes. What ever are the intelligent, well-informed, tough centrists supposed to do with these horrible people?

He sounds quite frightened of the Democratic voters who are getting sick and tired of being told that we should shut up and listen to people who seem intent upon helping the right use "values" and national security to bludgeon this country into accepting a religious police state.

It shows what a philistine he really is that he conflates pacifism with "hating America" which he quite obviously does. Pacifism is a respectable philosophy that has been a part of the American (hell, the Christian) experience forever. And it, at least, has some intellectual coherence, unlike this hawkish/centrist mish mash of nothingness you find among the so-called liberal hawks.

But most Democrats are not pacifists, even the liberals he seems to loathe with such a passion. Most of us simply do not believe that the United States' security, "honor" or credibility has been well served by hardliner hawks who are in a constant state of hysteria agitating for war all the time to prove the country's military prowess. They've been doing this as long as I can remember and it's always been absurd.

The vast majority of the country supported the Afghanistan operation, as did most of the world. But the left and the rest of the world checked out over Iraq, and obviously not because we believed that all use of American force is immoral --- it was because the plan was fucking hallucinatory. If there were intelligent, well-informed, tough centrists around you sure as hell didn't find them in the DC wading pool where Joe Klein was climbing into George W. Bush's codpiece as fast as his chubby little arms and legs would carry him. There were plenty of smart, well-informed tough liberals around the country, however, who understood that the Iraq war was a huge strategic error from the first moment the administration began doing the war dance.

Speaking only for myself, I do find the Bush Doctrine of preventive war to be immoral. Torture too. I also think it is wise to participate in international institutions and follow international law so that people around the world can have some confidence that we will not use our awesome power capriciously. Superpowers need to behave in a predictable, responsible, thoughtful, mature fashion lest ambitious enemies get the idea that we don't have control of the situation. When we fuck up, the ramifications are huge and very dangerous. We simply cannot afford to play out starry eyed neocon experimental fantasies because the opportunity presents itself. The stakes are much too high.

This is a complicated subject and one which we all debated in the run up to the last "preemptive" war that was sold as necessary to prevent a catastrophe that was not imminent, but inevitable. We later found out the war was not only strategically unsound, as we all knew, but that the future threat assessment was based on lies.

But even if we were to accept this doctrine as being useful some time in the future (which I don't) I think we can all agree that this administration has zero credibility. They are the last people on earth we or anyone else can trust to launch a "pre-preemptive" strike against anyone. That's not pacifism, that's common sense.

As for Klein's fear of the populist hordes, well Jesus: is he really surprised that many working people are "anti-chinese competition?" What in the hell did all the smart, well-informed centrists think was going to happen when the manufacturing base was decimated and the Republicans engineered income inequality not seen since the gilded age? (And he should thank his good friends on the right for pulling out their dog-eared nativist playbook. They've always found it's more convenient to blame the local brown foreigners than blaming free trade/free lunch utopians like Joe Klein.)

It's not that these populist hordes want the world to just go away. They want guys like Klein to just go away and stop blowing smoke up their asses about how much better off they are when their jobs are outsourced and how glorious it is to get your kid killed in a useless war.

As much as I agree that the Democratic strategists are lame, I actually think that the liberal punditocrisy is a bigger problem. They spend all their time kissing up to the right, disparaging elected Democrats and mischaracterizing the real concerns and beliefs of the grassroots of the party.

By the way, Klein's book is called (get ready)...

Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid

I would have thought he'd save that one for his autobiography.


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digby 4/12/2006 05:15:00 PM |

 
Flashback

by digby

Saturday, November 5, 2005;

President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.

According to a memo sent to aides yesterday, Bush expects all White House staff to adhere to the "spirit as well as the letter" of all ethics laws and rules. As a result, "the White House counsel's office will conduct a series of presentations next week that will provide refresher lectures on general ethics rules, including the rules of governing the protection of classified information," according to the memo, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post by a senior White House aide.

Since Bush himself did not attend, one assumes that he believes selectively and secretly declassifying national security information for political purposes is adhering to the "spirit as well as the letter" of all ethics laws and rules.



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digby 4/12/2006 09:25:00 AM |

 
How To Make A Tactical Nuclear Weapon

by tristero

The military scientists, engineers and war geeks have it all wrong. It really doesn't take much effort to make a tactical nuclear device. In fact, it's actually a rather straightforward two-step process:

1. Take one nuclear weapon with the destructive power of as many Hiroshima bombs as you like.

2. Add the word "tactical" to the description.

Voila! You now have a tactical nuclear weapon that magically always hits its target and only kills evil people, leaving all the good people alive and perfectly healthy.
tristero 4/12/2006 07:51:00 AM |

 
Bush's Nuclear Dictatorship

by tristero

Billmon's rightly praised post makes it all too clear why the US press must demand this administration answer the question: Does Bush Plan To Start A Nuclear War?

Billmon's discussion of the global and strategic consequences of American nuclear tyranny are as trenchant as his comments always are. And his impression of what the "day after" will look like in the US is quite realistic. But by focusing on the largest pictures, Billmon neglected to mention one very plausible and important reaction to an American nuclear war. That is a massive, and rapid, emigration from this country of people with brains, capital, and simple human decency.

Billmon is absolutely right: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other sociopaths in charge of this country's foreign policy think nuclear bombs don't count if they can be described as "tactical." But many Americans surely know that they do indeed count, they will want nothing to do with a government insane enough to use them, and will get the fuck out of here. And among those people will be hundreds of thousands of scientists and intellectuals that no country can afford to lose and thrive, even a nuclear dictatorship.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall is right. It's pointless to "engage" the Bush administration. The only thing to do is to hem them in. However...

In this post, Josh failed to mention the mushroom cloud in the room and, in fact, seems to want to avoid bringing it up. That is no mere "particular," Josh, but a brand new level of insanity. The way to hem them in is by focusing on that insanity, and then push from there. If Josh thinks a successful defense against Bush's latest madness can be had by ignoring the fact they are brandishing nuclear weapons in the world's face, then he has learned absolutely nothing from the run-up to the Bush/Iraq War, when Josh himself was far too late in understanding how seriously nuts Bush's plans were. In 2006, trying to brush anything as criminal as first strike nuclear war under the table is what Bush expects "thoughtful" liberals to do. NO. It has to be rubbed in their faces. Once nuclear weapons are made inconceivable again, then the rest of Bush's mad scheme can be confronted.

Josh promises a second post on the subject. Let's hope that in that one he fully understands that a failure explicitly to denounce the nuclear war plans of the Bush administration is not a shrewd tactic but sheer moral cowardice.

UPDATE: A couple of commenters think I'm coming down too hard on Josh's failure to mention nuclear war in his first post. I certainly hope they are right. But I have this in mind, where Josh cut the neocons some rhetorical slack when he should have simply denounced and ridiculed them. As I wrote then, Josh really isn't that important in the big scheme of things. However, every little bit helps to shape the debate. As I see it, Bush, et al, is hoping that everyone will be too embarassed to make nuclear war a salient topic until it is too late or think it is merely some kind of perverted saber-rattling that reasonable people should simply ignore.

That is all the reason to rub the mushroom clouds and the horribly mutilated children to come in their faces.
tristero 4/12/2006 03:15:00 AM |

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

 
Real Men Go To Khuzestan

by digby

Here's an intriguing theory about Iran from Grand Moff Texan.

It would be a brilliant diabolical plan were it not for the fact that Tony Soprano's drunk younger brother and his gang of thieving crony morons would be running the thing.



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digby 4/11/2006 09:03:00 PM |

 
They'll Have To Throw Their Daughters In Jail

by digby

Jumping off the shocking article in last Sunday's NY Times magazine about the criminalized abortion doctrine in El Salvador, Eric Zorn has begun an interesting dialog about why anti-choicers don't logically insist that women be tried for their crime? The usual answer seems to rest on the idea that women are so dumb or brainwashed that they don't know what they are doing so they can't be held liable for their crime.

I can see how that might have played in the years before Roe when it much more common to infantilize women. But I suspect they are going to have to completely turn back the clock to at least before WWII if they want to pull that off. Nobody is going to buy that women are all just victims of the "culture of Roe" and can't be held responsible for what they do. There are going to have to be prosecutions.

Zorn suggests that this be used against the forced pregnancy extremists the way that "partial birth" was used against the pro-choice movement and I agree. By using the extreme argument you expose the illogic of their most cherished delusion: that from the moment of conception, the fetus has the full rights of every other human being. Once they are forced to face the full implications of that argument they lose. In arguing this with a pro-lifer, Zorn said:

Your own logic locks you into prosecuting women who seek abortions for murder. You write of such women as "secondary victims" and hem and haw about transition periods and the ineffectiveness of coercion because you know how utterly unpalatable such prosecutions would be for the vast majority of Americans who do, in the end, see, feel and sense a real distinction between an embryo and, say, a one day old baby.

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digby 4/11/2006 08:12:00 PM |

 
Dark Vision

by digby





And I thought I was depressed about this Iran gambit. Billmon lays out a very convincing case that the US can probably launch an unprovoked nuclear attack against Iran --- and nobody will really care. Indeed, it might serve everybody's interests quite ably.

Damn if it won't be a heckuva show, the kind we really love with handsome flyboys taking off from aircraft carriers and big beautiful explosions that make us all feel good about how our high tech "surgical" weaponry only kills the bad guys.

For most Americans, then, the initial impact of war with Iran could play out in the same theatre of the absurd as the first Gulf War and the opening phases of the Iraq invasion -- that is to say, on their living room TVs. And if there's one place where a nuclear first strike could be made to appear almost normal, or even a good thing, it's on the boob tube.

After all, the corporate media complex has already shown a remarkable willingness to ignore or rationalize conduct that once would have been considered grossly illegal, if not outright war crimes. And the right-wing propaganda machine is happy to paint any atrocity as another glorious success in the battle for democracy (that is, when it's not trying to deny they ever happened.) Why should we expect something as transitory as a nuclear strike to change the pattern?

Let's be honest about it: For both the corporate and the conservative media, as well as for their audiences, a air campaign against Iran would make for great TV -- a welcome return to the good old days of Desert Storm and Shock and Awe. All those jets soaring off into the desert twilight; the overexposed glare of cruise missiles streaking from their launch ships; the video game shots of exploding aircraft hangers and government buildings, the anti-aircraft tracers arcing into the night sky over Tehran -- it would be war just the way we like it, far removed from the dull brown dust, raw sewage and multiple amputees of the Iraqi quagmire.

And to keep things interesting, we’d have the added frisson of nuclear weapons -- a plot twist that would allow blow-dried correspondents to pose in borrowed radiation suits, give Pentagon flacks the opportunity to try out new euphemisms for killing people, and encourage retired generals to spice up their on-air military patter with knowing references to blast effects, kilotons, roentgens and fallout patterns.

What I'm suggesting here is that it is probably naive to expect the American public to react with horror, remorse or even shock to a U.S. nuclear sneak attack on Iran, eve n though it would be one of the most heinous war crimes imaginable, short of mass genocide. Iran has been demonized too successfully -- thanks in no small part to the messianic delusions of its own end-times president -- for most Americans to see it as a victim of aggression, even if they were inclined to admit that the United States could ever be an aggressor. And we know that a not-so-small and extremely vocal minority of Americans would be cheering all the way, and lusting for more.

More to my point, though, I think it's possible that even something as monstrously insane as nuclear war could still be squeezed into the tiny rituals that pass for public debate in this country -- the game of dueling TV sound bites that trivializes and then disposes of every issue.

We’ve already seen a lengthy list of war crimes and dictatorial power grabs sink into that electronic compost heap: the WMD disinformation campaign, Abu Ghraib, the torture memos, the de facto repeal of the 4th amendment. Again, why should a nuclear strike be any different? I can easily imagine the same rabid talk show hosts spouting the same jingoistic hate speech, the same bow-tied conservative pundits offering the same recycled talking points, and the same timid Beltway liberals complaining that while nuking Iran was the right thing to do, the White House went about it the wrong way. And I can already hear the same media critics chiding those of us in left Blogostan for blowing the whole thing out of proportion. It’s just a little bunker buster, after all.

Read the whole thing. I don't think I'm a panic artist. At least I never have been. But after the last few years I have to say that Billmon's dark prediction sounds entirely believable to me. This Iran thing scares the hell out of me, and I'm not sure what anyone can do about it.

This president has asserted a doctrine of presidential infallibility. He does not believe that he can be stopped. And the way things are going I think he may think he has nothing to lose. There has been a sense of craziness in the air ever since 9/11, but it's just taken a very, very surreal turn.



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digby 4/11/2006 03:15:00 PM |

 
Neverending Story

by digby


This is an interesting attempt by the NY Times to suss out the "narrative" of Fitzgerald's case based upon his recent filing:

Every prosecutor strives not just to prove a case, but also to tell a compelling story. It is now clear that Mr. Fitzgerald's account of what was happening in the White House in the summer of 2003 is very different from the Bush administration's narrative, which suggested that Mr. Wilson was seen as a minor figure whose criticisms could be answered by disclosing the underlying intelligence upon which Mr. Bush relied.

[...]

Mr. Fitzgerald said he was preparing to turn over to Mr. Libby 1,400 pages of handwritten notes — some presumably in Mr. Libby's own hand — that could shed light on two very different efforts at getting out the White House story.

One effort — the July 18 declassification of the major conclusions of the intelligence estimate — was taking place in public, while another, Mr. Fitzgerald argues, was happening in secret, with only Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby involved.

Last week's court filing has already led the White House to acknowledge, over the weekend, that Mr. Bush ordered the selective disclosure of parts of the intelligence estimate sometime in late June or early July. But administration officials insist that Mr. Bush played a somewhat passive role and did so without selecting Mr. Libby, or anyone else, to tell the story piecemeal to a small number of reporters.

But in one of those odd twists in the unpredictable world of news leaks, neither of the reporters Mr. Libby met, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post or Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, reported a word of it under their own bylines. In fact, other reporters working on the story were talking to senior officials who were warning that the uranium information in the intelligence estimate was dubious at best.

I don't know why the NY Times fails to mention this but Fitzgerald makes it quite clear in his filing that this "piecemeal" story was designed to discredit Wilson not just with the selective (and misleading) leaks of the NIE but with the bogus notion that his wife sent him on this "junket." After all, Judy Miller wrote the words "Valerie Flame" in her notebook in the first meeting she had with Scooter in June of 2003. They were the same operation.

And that operation almost assuredly involved at least one other person who was conspicuously absent from Fitzgerald's narrative. That person told Fitzgerald all about the "concerted effort" inside the white house to discredit Wilson. Once again, here's Murray Waas:

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

The NY Times seems to take at face value that this secret cabal only involved Bush, Cheney and Libby --- and Bush only tangentially. That is very doubtful. Karl Rove is likely the mastermind of this campaign. Discrediting critics is his job.

The question for Bush, Cheney and Libby is whether Karl is cooperating even more fully with Fitzgerald than when he spoke proudly to the FBI of this campaign to discredit Joe Wilson (probably assuming that John Ashcroft would never let the information see the light of day.) His lawyer certainly has been tightlipped lately.

If Waas' story is correct, Karl Rove undercut Libby's defense from the get. No wonder Libby wants to see what Karl specifically said.



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digby 4/11/2006 01:11:00 PM |

 
Basket Case

by digby

This is funny.

Good work by the firedoglake brigade and Matt Stoller. There's more to come.

Needling is a tried and true political tactic. I recommend that people needle Republicans relentlessly for their blind support of every crackpot scheme that George W. Bush has set forth for the last five years. Tie them to that dramatically unpopular piece of work so tight they can't breathe. They deserve it.



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digby 4/11/2006 11:45:00 AM |

 
Blind Man's Bluff

by digby

Bush and Rumsfeld take questions from the press:

Q Sir, after you've studied today the military capabilities of the United States and looking ahead to future threats, one thing that has to factor in is the growing number of U.S. allies, Russia, Germany, Bahrain, now Canada, who say that if you go to war with Iran, you're going to go alone. Does the American military have the capability to prosecute this war alone?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, if you're asking -- are you asking about Iran? The subject didn't come up in this meeting. But, having said that, we take all threats seriously and we will continue to consult with our friends and allies. I know there is this kind of intense speculation that seems to be going on, a kind of a -- I don't know how you would describe it. It's kind of a churning --

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: Frenzy.

THE PRESIDENT: Frenzy is how the Secretary would describe it. But the subject didn't come up. We will obviously continue to consult with our friends and allies. Your question makes certain assumptions that may or may not be true. But we will continue to talk with our -- with the people concerned about peace and how to secure the peace, and those are needed consultations. Not only will we consult with friends and allies, we'll consult with members of Congress. Yes, Terry.

[...]

Q He has said that he is drawing up war plans to provide you with credible options. Now, should the American people conclude from that that you're reaching some critical point, that a decision is imminent?

THE PRESIDENT: ... one of the jobs that the Secretary of Defense has tasked to members of his general staff is to prepare for all contingencies, whether it be in the particular country that you seem to be riveted on, or any other country, for that matter. We face a -- the world is not stable. The world changes. There are -- this terrorist network is global in nature and they may strike anywhere. And, therefore, we've got to be prepared to use our military and all the other assets at our disposal in a way to keep the peace.

Would you like to comment on that?

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: I would. As the President indicated, one of the things we discussed here today was the contingency planning guidance that he signed. I then meet with all of the combatant commanders for every area of responsibility across the globe. I do it on a regular basis. We go over all the conceivable contingencies that could occur. ... That's my job. That's their job, is to see that we have the ability to protect the American people and deal effectively on behalf of our friends and our allies and our deployed forces. So it is their task to work with me and ultimately with the President as the chain of command goes from the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States, to me, to the combatant commanders. And they're doing exactly what I've asked them to do and what the President has asked me to do.

Ooops. I made a typo. This press conference was from August of 2002 and the country in question was Iraq. We suspected then and now know for a fact that Bush had already set in motion his inexorable plan of attack when he made these remarks. Now Bush expects the world to take him at his word again when he says that he isn't planning to launch an attack against Iran. Unfortunately, he no longer has any credibility so when he says these things, the default position of most people is to assume he's lying, and that includes the leadership of Iran.

Kevin Drum addresses this and rightly takes to task the thick literalists who say it's ridiculous to worry about this Iran thing because "of course he has contingency plans." With Bush's history, that is entirely beside the point. He says:

...what's important isn't the existence of the contingency plans. Rather, it's the fairly obvious fact that the Bush administration is publicizing them as part of a very public PR campaign in favor of a strike against Iran. The problem is that even if this is a bluff, it's one that has a profound effect on both Iran and the American public. As James Fallows says:

By giving public warnings, the United States and Israel "create 'excess demand' for military action," as our war-game leader Sam Gardiner recently put it, and constrain their own negotiating choices.

In other words, if the PR campaign is too successful, then Bush will have boxed himself in. Eventually he'll feel obligated to bomb Iran solely because he's now under pressure to make good on his threats and doesn't want to look like he's backing down. World Wars have started over less.

His "PR campaign" unfortunately may very well be successful (as it was the last time.) This is deja vu all over again. But Bush no longer has the option of bluffing even if he wants to. He tossed that in the toilet along with America's integrity and reputation back in the summer and fall of 2002. After the Iraq debacle, bellicose saber rattling has the perverse effect of bringing about the event it's designed to avert.

There can be no doubt that Iran believes we are planning a strike and there is every reason to fear that Bush's threats will push them to make decisions that will force the US into the corner that Fallows predicts. The only question is, as Sy Hersh reports, whether the military will go along this time.

After five years of disasterous foreign policy, the Bush administration has left this country with almost none of the tools it used to have to shape world events. He pushed arrogant military unilateralism for years and now he's stuck with it as his only option. We are weaker as a world power, we have no moral authority and nobody trusts this government's intentions. The US now exists in a universe of vastly reduced maneuverability because of what he's done and not just because of our stretched military. Our credibility is in shreds.

Kevin says that World Wars have started over less than this and that's absolutely true. Bush may have pushed this country to the point where the only option it has is military force because nobody believes a word our government says. This may be the scariest moment we've faced since 9/11.


Update: Just to scare everybody witless even more on a Tuesday morning, Josh Marshall writes:

It is also not too early to point out that the evidence is there for the confluence of two destructive and disastrous forces -- hawks in the administration's Cheney faction whose instinctive bellicosity is only matched by their actual incompetence (a fatal mixture if there ever was one), and the president's chief political aides who see the build up to an Iran confrontation as the most promising way to contest the mid-term elections. Both those groups are strongly motivated for war. And who is naive enough to imagine a contrary force within the administration strong enough to put on the brakes?

Not me. These people are like cornered animals desperate to recapture that bullhorn moment and redeem their failed ideology. It's a very, very dangerous combo.

Oh and is everyone aware that Dick Cheney's daughter is "freedom agenda co-ordinator" and "democracy czar" in charge of the Iran propaganda group at the State Department? She is. I knew that would make you feel better.


Did I hear something about Cheney accusing Joe and Valerie Wilson of nepotism? I didn't think so.


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digby 4/11/2006 11:07:00 AM |

 
What IS It About Republicans And Their Dogs?

by tristero

Santorum. Woof! Goldstein. Woof! And now, an unhealthy dog obsession from a fellow that knows a helluva lot about barking up the wrong tree:

Billionaire right-wing godfather Richard Mellon Scaife — who famously funded an investigation of Bill Clinton's sex life that resulted in a presidential impeachment — is having female troubles of his own.

Police responded to a call last week when Scaife's estranged and apparently enraged second wife, Margaret (Ritchie) Scaife, arrived at his estate in Pittsburgh. She allegedly assaulted his housekeeper, his security chief and his cancer-ridden secretary while a cook fended off her violent attempt to take the family dog.

"He's in a trauma. He was almost choked to death when she was grasping the leash," the 73-year-old Scaife, who almost never gives interviews, complained to Lowdown's Nicole Pesce yesterday. "She claims that the dog belonged to her because the dog is in her name on the registration papers. But she gave the dog to me nine years ago. So he's my dog."

There is no truth to any rumors that the estranged Mrs. Scaife was trying to rescue the pooch from unspeakable abuses. Yet.
tristero 4/11/2006 10:32:00 AM |

 
Hitchens Encounters A Pink Elephant

by tristero

Christopher Hitchens seems to be arguing with hallucinations. In a recent Slate article, Hitchens makes the claim that, contra-Joe Wilson, Iraq indeed did seek to buy uranium from Niger.

However, unless I am misreading Wilson's original op-ed, Wilson never disputed that, for the simple reason he never discussed what he learned about Iraq's seeking behavior. What he said, and quite clearly, was regardless of what Iraq may have been seeking, such a transaction was extremely unlikely, given the amount of oversight and the politics of the countries involved in the Niger uranium mining. That is, Iraq may have sought yellowcake, but they did so in vain.

In fact Wilson's mission was not to learn whether Iraq was seeking uranium. Instead, according to Wilson, his mission was in response to a report which described "a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake." From his time sipping mint tea in Niger, Wilson learned this report was mistaken; no such sale could have taken place (in fact, Wilson says, the "memorandum of agreement" appeared, from press reports, to be a crude forgery ).

True, in re-reading the op-ed, Wilson does seem to go somewhat further than this simple assertion (which may be part of the reason for Bob Someby's numerous howls at Wilson). Without saying so directly, he seems to imply that it was so utterly unlikely for Iraq to have succeeded in seeking yellowcake from Niger that by simply including the 16 words in such an important speech as SOTU, Bush grossly and irresponsibly exaggerated how far Iraq had gotten with whatever inquiries Iraq may have made. That implication is what made Wilson's op-ed so alarming to the White House.

Nevertheless, Wilson does not dispute that Iraq was seeking yellowcake, only the seriousness with which those inquiries can be taken. (To be clear to our cognitively challenged rightwing pals: Wilson knew Iraq was serious; the question is whether there was a serious possibility they could ever succeed. He concluded there wasn't.)

Assuming I haven't misread Wilson, his focus is on whether a deal went down and if so, then Hitchens is debunking a pink elephant. Furthermore, if Wilson is right about the contents of the initial report that sent him to Niger in the first place, then Hitchens is dead wrong in asserting that "It has never been claimed that an agreement was actually reached." Apparently, someone did.
tristero 4/11/2006 08:17:00 AM |

 
Translations From Republican Into English

by tristero

""Wild speculation" is defined as "I'm gonna nuke Iran. Try and stop me."

"Preposterous" means "Of course it's true."

Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.

The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down.

The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin, says the contacts involved routine election business and that it was "preposterous" to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.

The Justice Department has secured three convictions in the case but hasn't accused any White House or national Republican officials of wrongdoing, nor made any allegations suggesting party officials outside New Hampshire were involved. The phone records of calls to the White House were exhibits in Tobin's trial but prosecutors did not make them part of their case.

Democrats plan to ask a federal judge Tuesday to order GOP and White House officials to answer questions about the phone jamming in a civil lawsuit alleging voter fraud.

Repeated hang-up calls that jammed telephone lines at a Democratic get-out-the-vote center occurred in a Senate race in which Republican John Sununu defeated Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, 51 percent to 46 percent, on Nov. 5, 2002...

While national Republican officials have said they deplore such operations, the Republican National Committee said it paid for Tobin's defense because he is a longtime supporter and told officials he had committed no crime...

Virtually all the calls to the White House went to the same number, which currently rings inside the political affairs office. In 2002, White House political affairs was led by now-RNC chairman Ken Mehlman. The White House declined to say which staffer was assigned that phone number in 2002.

tristero 4/11/2006 12:04:00 AM |

Monday, April 10, 2006

 
Odd and Ends

by digby

Ugh, what a day. No blogging for my poor neglected Hullabaloo until tomorrow, but I have a wee contribution to firedoglake's otherwise great series on the bigotsphere, if you care to check it out.

And here's a truly fabulous review of Crashing the Gate with an overview of the blogopshere in the New York Review of Books. People are gettin' it.

For those of you who missed Jack Cafferty's bid to beat Lou Dobbs for "the angriest middle aged white male on the planet" award today here's the transcript:

JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, Wolf. Once again, the streets of our country were taken over today by people who don't belong here.

In the wake of Congress failing to pass immigration legislation last week, America's cities once again were clogged with protesters today. Taxpayers who have surrendered highways, parks, sidewalks and a lot of television news time on all these cable news networks to mobs of illegal aliens are not happy about it.

With every concession by the Bush administration, and the ever- growing demands of Mexican president Vicente Fox, America's illegal aliens are becoming ever bolder. March through our streets and demand your rights. Excuse me? You have no rights here, and that includes the right to tie up our towns and cities and block our streets. At some point this could all turn very violent as Americans become fed up with the failure of their government to address the most pressing domestic issue of our time.

Here's the question: What effect will the immigration protests have?

E-mail your thoughts to caffertyfile@CNN.com or go to CNN.com/caffertyfile -- Wolf.

BLITZER: A lot of these demonstrators, you know, Jack, are legal. And many of them are citizens of the United States. They're not all illegal immigrants, the people protesting.

CAFFERTY: How do you know?

BLITZER: Because I as out on the streets. I saw.

CAFFERTY: Well, where's the immigration service? Why don't they pull the buses up and start asking these people to show their green cards? And the ones that don't have them, put them on the buses and send them home.

BLITZER: There's a -- well, that's an expensive proposition, as you know -- 12 million -- 12 million of them.

CAFFERTY: As opposed to the cost we're enduring by having 12 million of these people running around the country.

BLITZER: Jack, much more coming up. We have a debate. Lou Dobbs is standing by as well.

Isn't that awesome? Assuming the "taxpayers" don't rise up to defend their streets against you, all you protestors who aren't carrying green cards would get a ride "home" --- kind of the way they deported anyone who "looked" Mexican during "Operation Wetback," one of the earlier incarnations of anti-Latino immigration fever that erupts with depressing and predictable regularity in this country. Over and over again we bounce between tolerance and intolerance of the migration pattern that's been here forever.

I have a sneaking little suspicion that CNN is finding this nativist ranting by both Lou and Jack on Dubai and immigration an appealing way out of the partisan cage. It's a ratings grabber if not good journalism.



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digby 4/10/2006 11:01:00 PM |

 
The Future Of The United States Part Two

by tristero

Read it all. Here's an excerpt:

In the event that the woman's illegal abortion went badly and the doctors have to perform a hysterectomy, then the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute, where the government's doctors analyze it and retain custody of her uterus as evidence against her.

That's right, in El Salvador, a woman's uterus can be seized as evidence of a crime. Not figuratively. Literally. And if the fetus is deemed viable? The woman stands to get 30 to 50 years.

Welcome to the future of America.
tristero 4/10/2006 07:23:00 AM |

Sunday, April 09, 2006

 
But I Said I Was Sorry

by digby


Francis Fukuyama writes a WATB essay in today's LA Times about how mean everybody is being to him now that he's changed his mind about Iraq. He names Charles Krauthamer as being a mean rightie for saying he's "an opportunistic traitor to the neoconservative cause — and a coward to boot," but fails to name any of the mean lefties. He just claims we say stuff like he has "blood on his hands" for having initially favored toppling Saddam Hussein and that his "apology" won't be accepted. Now that's mean.

He goes on to decry the awful polarization of our politics and wrings his tiny hankie about how counterproductive it all is. (I don't recall Francis taking a stand against partisan blowjob impeachments but perhaps he was too busy documenting the end of history to notice.)

But what I really like is this paragraph in which Fukuyama illustrates how both parties are equally to blame:

This kind of polarization affects a range of other complex issues as well: You can't be a good Republican if you think there may be something to global warming, or a good Democrat if you support school choice or private Social Security accounts. Political debate has become a spectator sport in which people root for their team and cheer when it scores points, without asking whether they chose the right side. Instead of trying to defend sharply polarized positions taken more than three years ago, it would be far better if people could actually take aboard new information and think about how their earlier commitments, honestly undertaken, actually jibe with reality — even if this does on occasion require changing your mind.

Did you notice what I noticed? The example he cites has the Republican being called a "bad" Republican if he refuses to deny reality. The Democrat is called "bad" for disagreeing with the long standing policy positions of the Party. Can we all see the difference between those two things? I knew that you could.

Get ready to hear a lot of this whining now that the Republicans may be at the end of their looting spree. They made their money, got their judges, their tax cuts and their wars. Now it's time to put the past behind us and make nice nice. We're supposed to end to all this nastiness and forgive and forget. For the good of the country, of course.

I have written this before, and I'm sure everyone is tired of reading it, but the Republicans must be held accountable for their actions or they will come back like the undead and do this again. We failed as a country to properly discipline this corrupt rogue faction when they tried this executive power grab in the 70's and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and others came back to try it again. We need to drive a figurative stake through the heart of this pernicious philosophy.

Fukuyama plaintively admits:

...I believe that the neoconservative movement, with which I was associated, has become indelibly associated with a failed policy, and that unilateralism and coercive regime change cannot be the basis for an effective American foreign policy. I changed my mind as part of a necessary adjustment to reality.

That's nice. But I don't think we should take a chance that this nonsense will raise its ugly head in another 30 years. These people have proven they can't be trusted to tell the truth or follow the laws. We need to make sure they get the message this time.



Oh, and by the way. If you don't think this resurgence of victimized whining has a purpose, think again. I heard Karl Rove speaking to the Republican Lawyers Association on Friday (via C-Span) and he was going on and on and on about how the Democrats are cheating in elections. He cited "case" after "case" in which Democrats are disenfranchising Republicans all over the country. It's shocking: the voter fraud, the throwing out of Republicans absentee ballots, the partisan vote count manipulation. He's very worried about the integrity of our elections and thinks Republicans will be at a permanent disadvantage is something isn't done. I kid you not. Get ready for the cries of disenfranchised Christians. It's coming.



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digby 4/09/2006 07:05:00 PM |

 
Hiatt Held Hostage?

by digby


Jane gives Fred Hiatt a righteous fisking for his surreal editorial in the Washington Post today and I am appalled at her insensitivity.

Has it occurred to any of these critics that Hiatt may have been taken hostage by Bushian insurgents? The discordant almost drunken tone can only lead one to the conclusion that this editorial was coerced. It wanders so far from the facts that you have to figure that some sort of dark forces were at work in producing such an bizarre and disconcerting cataloging of lies and misapprehensions. Indeed, you would almost think that Hiatt went out of his way to signal that he was writing this editorial under duress --- kind of like that POW who blinked morse code in that North Vietnamese propaganda film. He had to know that discerning readers would guess that he couldn't be serious considering that the very day it was published his own paper was reporting the facts entirely differently. He's actually quite fiendishly clever.

Still, although Hiatt's abduction and strongarmed editorial may be patently obvious to you and I, like many members of the leftist fever swamp, Josh Marshall also unfairly takes the Post editorial board at face value without even granting that they might have been forced by their Republican captors to write what they wrote:

For whatever reason, the Post has chosen to throw in its lot with the flurry of mendacious rhetoric and the white-washed investigations, all of which amount to a grand pen and paper and word game truss barely holding together the body of official lies that is still barely governing the capital.

They've made their deal with power. They should justify it on those grounds rather than choosing to mislead their readers.

Sure. Jump to that conclusion with nothing to go on except the facts. Can't he see that this ludicrous editorial can only be the result of a villianous threat of violence?


I understand that some readers are complaining to the Post directly. One hates to so to see the unwashed public take their betters to task like that. I certainly hope that they start deleting comments right away. These people have no sense of decorum. Let's hope Howie Kurtz and Deborah Howell can teach these barbarians a little something about showing a little sensitivity to those brave souls who go out to Pennsylvania Avenue to get the good news ---- and never come back.


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digby 4/09/2006 05:12:00 PM |

 
Libby's Can Of Worms

by digby


So William Kristol has reluctantly come to the conclusion that Fitzgerald is on a partisan witch hunt because if Libby told the Grand Jury that Cheney instructed him to selectively leak the NIE to Judy Miller that means the rest of his testimony must have been true. Video from Crooks and Liars, transcript via Think Progress:

KRISTOL: In fact, we don’t know she was a covert operative, and Patrick Fitzgerald won’t even claim that. Patrick Fitzgerald isn’t investigating the actual source of the leak of Mrs. Wilson’s name, which was the Bob Novak column. We still don’t know who told Robert Novak, apparently Scooter Libby didn’t. You know, the leak story is absurd, but I now think the whole prosecution is absurd. And I have hesitated to say this, because I have friends who respect Fitzgerald, but I now think it’s a politically motivated attempt to wound the Bush administration. Why did Fitzgerald release — I mean, the theory of Fitzgerald’s perjury case against Libby, which is the only crime that’s alleged here, perjury and related crimes…obstruction of justice through perjury, really, for misleading the FBI or the grand jury. The theory of that case is Libby didn’t tell the truth, he didn’t say that Cheney had told him to do this, he blamed it on reporters, because he wanted to protect the Vice President or the President. Now it turns out that Libby, in testifying to the grand jury, carefully explained that he was authorized to go ahead and discuss the National Intelligence Estimate by the Vice President and the President.

Even Brit Hume recognizes that this misses the point:

HUME: But not Valerie Plame, necessarily.

Exactly. Libby was not charged with perjury for things he didn't lie about. I would think that would be perfectly obvious. Kristol realizes that at this point, so he starts to spin like a dervish:

KRISTOL: But not Valerie Plame, which was tangential, and which came up toward the end, apparently, of the conversation with Judy Miller. It was never central in those two or three weeks. It seems to me that Fitzgerald’s case is crumbling. He’s refusing to close his investigation of Karl Rove and other people. If you read his 39-page rebuttal to Libby, he focuses now on Cheney. He is now out to discredit the Bush administration. He has bought the argument that there is something improper about the Bush administration responding to Joe Wilson’s charges, and that’s the real meaning of what’s happened these last few days, which is very dangerous for the Bush administration. They now have a special prosecutor out not to convict Scooter Libby, but out to discredit the administration.

That's nonsense, but it signals that we are finally going to get the pushback we've been expecting. This thing is escalating, Bush himself has been implicated, and this is their final fallback position.

For those of you who (like me) get a headache when you read things like Kristol's spin, let me explain in simple terms what it appears Fitz was actually doing. There's no proof he's focusing on Cheney, but Cheney has become important in this discovery process because of Libby's blanket requests for documents:

• Libby hopes to show that he and others in the White House thought the Plame matter was no big deal and therefore it is reasonable to assume that he just forgot he had earlier told a number of people who she was when he testified to the grand jury that he first learned of Plame's identity from Tim Russert.
  
  
• Libby has asked to review numerous documents that Fitzgerald does not believe are germane to the case, but which Libby claims will bolster this defense. One of the claims is that he needs to review certain documents that will show the "context" of the leaks.
  
  
• Fitzgerald is obligated to show why these documents need not be produced and he makes a number of legal arguments to that effect.
  
  
• As to the "context" Fitz makes the argument that the "context" actually proves that Libby would not have forgotten these particular details of a high level operation which Libby admitted in his testimony was quite unusual. The odd and unprecedented selective declassification of the NIE, the instructions that Scooter speak on "deep backround" to Judith Miller, the fact that he was tasked with this job rather than Cathie Martin, Cheney's press secretary, all speak to the fact that this was a special job. The overt acts of cover-up show that he knew exactly what he was doing.

Kristol should probably look a little closer to his own circle if he thinks someone is trying to harm the administration with this investigation. After all, none of this would have come out if Libby hadn't first lied, and now requested that Fitzgerald allow him to rummage willy nilly through government files under the specious claim that it would help him prove that he forgot the unforgettable.

He and his lawyers know very well that his massive document "context" request would likely result in Fitzgerald presenting the court with his evidence that Bush had declassified the document. You can't blame him. He's making Fitzgerald lay out some of his case for his own purposes. But let's not blame the prosecutor for that. Libby's doing what's necessary to save his own skin. And Fitzgerald is using what he has to squeeze others who are in his sights. They both are playing an inside and an outside game.

But make no mistake. This is Libby's doing all the way (and I suspect that certain high level white house officials are rueing the day they ever met him.) He and Rove lied, crudely and stupidly, undoubtedly under the impression that they could not be caught because the reporters would never testify against him. Rove was a little slipperier and it remains to be seen if he's been caught. But Libby lost that gamble and now he may take the administration down with him. Fitzgerald is only the instrument of Bush's problems; Libby is the cause.

I think perhaps Kristol is getting Fitz confused with partisan hack Ken Starr, the man who leaked volumes of disparaging information about Bill Clinton to the press during the Lewinsky investigation. He and his prosecutors actually cooperated secretly with a political lynch mob to try to get the president to resign in disgrace. You can understand why Kristol would get the wrong idea. He, like most conservatives, erroneously believes that all prosecutors are obligated by God to be partisan Republicans. He feels disappointed and betrayed that Fitzgerald is playing it straight so he's lashing out. Poor baby.




Update: It's interesting that Fitz says he won't be calling Rove as a witness and refuses to allow Libby to see the documentation on him. After all, when you're talking about context of the "concerted effort" to smear Wilson you would certainly be interested in seeing the Grand Jury testimony in which Rove reportedly says this (from Murray Waas way back in March of 2004):

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Rove seems to have given detailed testimony about the "concerted effort. Why ever do you suppose Fitzgerald isn't planning to call him as a witness?



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digby 4/09/2006 11:33:00 AM |

 
The Reducing Of "Irreducible Complexity"

by tristero

One of the fundamental tenets of "Intelligent Design" creationism dies an ignominious death.

By reconstructing ancient genes from long-extinct animals, scientists have for the first time demonstrated the step-by-step progression of how evolution created a new piece of molecular machinery by reusing and modifying existing parts.

The researchers say the findings, published today in the journal Science, offer a counterargument to doubters of evolution who question how a progression of small changes could produce the intricate mechanisms found in living cells.

"The evolution of complexity is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology," said Joseph W. Thornton, professor of biology at the University of Oregon and lead author of the paper. "We wanted to understand how this system evolved at the molecular level. There's no scientific controversy over whether this system evolved. The question for scientists is how it evolved, and that's what our study showed."

Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, "If it would be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Discoveries like that announced this week of a fish with limblike fins have filled in the transitions between species. New molecular biology techniques let scientists begin to reconstruct how the processes inside a cell evolved over millions of years.

Details then follow. The article is very good until the final few paragraphs which provide Michael Behe, the scientist who propounded the bogus theory of "irreducible complexity" to lie through his teeth about the importance of the study. What the article fails to mention is that Behe's definition of science is so broad he considers astrology to be a scientific theory. Worse, the Times piece doesn't mention that at Dover, when shown dozens of articles relevant to the issues raised by "irreducible complexity," and which debunk Behe's theory, Behe deployed the famous Austin Powers "That's Not My Swedish Penis Enlarger!" tactic. He merely asserted that all those studies weren't enough evidence against "irreducible complexity" without offering anything support his position (at this link, there is a link to a pdf of the full transcript of Behe's testimony).

As Krugman rightly says, "Shape of Earth: Views Differ" is not responsible journalism. Behe's 15 minutes is up, Mr. Keller.
tristero 4/09/2006 04:43:00 AM |

Saturday, April 08, 2006

 
Fingerprints

by digby


Many more qualified bloggers than I have been poring over the Fitzgerald filing and examining its every nuance, so I'm not even going to go there. I will just make one observation that I haven't read anyone else bring up.

The filing says:

"At some point after the publication of the July 6, 2003, OpEd by Wilson, Vice President Cheney, defendant's immediate superior, expressed concerns to defendant regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife. And in considering 'context,' there was press reporting that the vice president had dispatched Mr. Wilson on the trip (which in fact was not accurate). Disclosing the belief that Mr. Wilson's wife sent him on the Niger trip was one way for defendant to contradict the assertion that the vice president had done so, while at the same time undercutting Mr. Wilson's credibility if Mr. Wilson was perceived to have received the assignment on account of nepotism."

Big Time could certainly have come up with this nasty little smear about the trip being a nepotistic "junket" (or boondoggle as earlier reports called it.) He's a nasty little fellow. But this is a page right out of Karl Rove's smear portfolio: he always attempts to emasculate the opponent.

Perhaps Karl only got the "plan" after the fact and dutifully set about doing Cheney's dirty work like a good boy. But I doubt it. It's got the mark of Rove all over it. I think Cheney got it from him.


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digby 4/08/2006 03:47:00 PM |

 
Ask McClellan: Will Bush Start A Nuclear War?

by tristero

This should surprise no one. What's the point of building nukes today if you're not going to use them? Or building more unless you plan on replacing ones that will be used? And yet, even though I've been expecting to hear about this from a reputable source since 2002, actually reading about it is enough to make me vomit from horror.

George Bush seems to be planning to start a nuclear war. My God.

McClellan must be asked on Monday to state whether plans have been drawn up for George Bush to start a nuclear war. With Iran, certainly, but also against any other country. Because if Hersh is right - and so far, he has been very right - then...oh my God.

These maniacs cannot be permitted to get away with this, or even seriously contemplate getting away with it. No, that's not enough. If this country so much as opens the question to serious consideration "whether first-strike nukes are justified in the present world," then we are already halfway down the path to a nuclear holocaust. All it will take to tip it over is one more major terrorist attack, and Bush will guarantee the nukes will fall. And if you don't think there will be another major terrorist attack in America, either a real one or one faked by this administration, you have not been paying attention to what has been going on. Bush's nuclear policy is quite clear: from the start he's wanted to be the first president since Truman to drop a nuclear bomb.

On Monday, someone must ask McClellan: Is George Bush planning to start a nuclear war?

[UPDATE: A few commentators have called into question the possibility mentioned above that the administration might fake a terrorist attack as a pretext to use nuclear weapons in Iran, saying I went to far. I hope you are right, but I had Operation Northwoods in mind. Let us not forget that the people in charge of the country right now are precisely the kind of people who would propose and approve of Northwoods.]
tristero 4/08/2006 03:43:00 PM |

 
Faux Codpiece

by digby

The "liberal" makeover of Bush continues apace. Calling All Wingnuts catches Rush saying:

"I have never been under any illusion that George Bush is Ronald Reagan. Reagan, with every speech that he gave ... was also leading the conservative movement. He was defining it and people rallied to that. When you listen to Bush ... he's who he is, he does not look at himself as leading a movement, he has a job as president and he's not governed by any conservative movement."

Now, Ronald Reagan raised taxes, he negotiated with terrorists --- he even negotiated with Democrats! Government grew under his watch and he even defied the hardline conservatives by seeking out Gorbachev. (Limbaugh himself was so outraged he derisively called the ensuing media love fest a "gorbasm.")

One could make any number of arguments saying Reagan was not leading a true conservative movement any more than Bush is. But there is one big difference between the two. Reagan was popular and Bush isn't. When Bush's approval rating was in the 60's, you couldn't find a conservative who didn't revere him as William F. Buckley's wet dream. He was the uber-conservative. Now that he's down in the 30% approval area, not so much.

According to Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush has never been a leader of the conservative movement. I guess that means he isn't a leader of the movement that believes:

* We are confident in our principles and energetic about openly advancing them. We believe in individual liberty, limited government, capitalism, the rule of law, faith, a color-blind society and national security.

* We support school choice, enterprise zones, tax cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, political speech, homeowner rights and the war on terrorism.

* And at our core we embrace and celebrate the most magnificent governing document ever ratified by any nation -- the U.S. Constitution.

* Along with the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes our God-given natural right to be free, it is the foundation on which our government is built and has enabled us to flourish as a people.

* We conservatives are never stronger than when we are advancing our principles.

From American Conservatism: A Crackdown, Not a 'Crackup' Wall Street Journal op-ed October 17, 2005

Yes indeed, George W. Bush must be a liberal. Otherwise he would be "defining conservatism and people would rally to it" like St Ronnie did --- or Rush himself in that piece. Republican losers are always eventually revealed as liberal sheep in conservative clothing. How could it be otherwise? Conservatism cannot lose. It is perfect.

Of course, if Bush decides to nuke Iran, they might reconsider. For a while. There's nothing like a good bloodbath to bring true believers back into the fold.



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digby 4/08/2006 11:08:00 AM |

 
"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."

I suppose it was inevitable. The Bush Doctrine of illegal preventive war has never ruled out the use of an unprovoked nuclear attack. So why wouldn't they use it?

US considers use of nuclear weapons against Iran

The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.

The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.

"That's the name they're using," the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.

A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war."

The former intelligence officials depicts planning as "enormous," "hectic" and "operational," Hersh writes.

One former defense official said the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government," The New Yorker pointed out.

In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.

One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran's main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.

But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.

"There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries," the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.

The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.

"If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle," the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.

It's hard to believe they think that they have the political latitude to do this. But then it was hard to believe they thought they had the political latitude to govern as if they had won landslide elections or that they could survive the 2004 election if no WMD were found in Iraq. But they did. In fact, they've had their biggest successes by pushing the envelope beyond the point anyone would have imagined. I do not put it past them to believe that they can do this and somehow revive their flagging popularity.





Update: I wonder which top Democrat whose name sounds like Schlieberman the administration has been talking to?



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digby 4/08/2006 09:54:00 AM |

Friday, April 07, 2006

 
Straight Up

by digby

I've got yer journalistic expertise for ya right here:

Libby testimony shows a White House pattern of intelligence leaks
BY WARREN P. STROBEL AND RON HUTCHESON
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The revelation that President Bush authorized former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to divulge classified information about Iraq fits a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration's political agenda.

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials have reacted angrily at unauthorized leaks, such as the exposure of a domestic wiretapping program and a network of secret CIA prisons, both of which are now the subject of far-reaching investigations.

But secret information that supports their policies, particularly about the Iraq war, has surfaced everywhere from the U.N. Security Council to major newspapers and magazines. Much of the information that the administration leaked or declassified, however, has proved to be incomplete, exaggerated, incorrect or fabricated.

Thank You.



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digby 4/07/2006 08:42:00 PM |

 
Why'd He Do It?

by digby

The White House tried today to quell the furor over the leaking of sensitive prewar intelligence on Iraq, as President Bush's spokesman insisted that the president had the authority to declassify and release information "in the public interest" and had never done so for political reasons.

The spokesman, Scott McClellan, said a decision was made to declassify and release some information to rebut "irresponsible and unfounded accusations" that the administration had manipulated or misused prewar intelligence to buttress its case for war.

[...]

Mr. McClellan said the Democrats who pounced on Mr. Libby's assertions that Mr. Bush had given him, through the vice president, the authority to talk to a reporter about some material in the intelligence estimate were "engaging in crass politics" in refusing to recognize the distinction between legitimate disclosure of sensitive information in the public interest and the irresponsible leaking of intelligence for political reasons.

If it was a legitimate disclosure of sensitive information in the public interest, why didn't the president just call a press conference? Why all the cloak and dagger stuff?


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digby 4/07/2006 04:09:00 PM |

 
Power Tool

by digby


I think we all know that Chris Matthews is a strange fellow. And he often sounds a little bit less than with it. But this really takes the cake. He seems to think that he's figured out the secret GOP strategy for the fall:

MATTHEWS: ...I've been thinking now for a couple of days now at least that what the Democrats are going to face this fall, what the Republicans are probably going to throw at them is, "You think we're bad, we got a guy named Safavian you never heard of and we got this guy DeLay. He's gone now. And we're no day at the beach, but look what they've got. They've got a bunch of crazy guys who are going to try to lynch the president. They are going to try to censure him, but ideally they are going to try to impeach him. They are going to use the subpoena power to go crazy. Don't let John Conyers of Michigan" --

Doesn't it sound like he believes that he came up with this himself? And yet:

WASHINGTON, March 15 - Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.

The proposal this week by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr. Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives' plans to harness such attacks to their own ends.

With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal.

"Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now," Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.

The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party's demoralized base to go to the polls. With "impeachment on the horizon," he wrote, "maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all."

There goes Matthews, repeating this as if he thought it up all by himself. And in the process, of course, getting the theme out there on behalf of the Republicans.

Chris Matthews.
digby 4/07/2006 04:04:00 PM |

 
Expertise

by digby

I have always enjoyed Michelle Cottle's writing in the New Republic. She has an irreverent style and often looks at politics and culture with a fresh perspective that's interesting and fun. So, I was taken aback by this recent article about the "democratization of journalism" in which she advises the media not to forget its prerogatives:

I realize these are unsettling times for the Fourth Estate. The web is changing the way people consume news. The Bushies, along with their conservative media colleagues, have spent the past several years trashing mainstream journalists as ideologically motivated and morally bankrupt. Jayson Blair has convinced readers we're making it all up. Dan Rather has convinced them we're all unpatriotic Bush haters. And every remotely controversial news story winds up sliced, diced, and julienned by an overcaffeinated blogosphere with a chip on its shoulder about the arrogant, self-satisfied, lazy, corrupt "old media." It's hardly surprising that polls show our public credibility headed towards that of Jack Abramoff.

[...]

I realize it's very popular--not to mention economically savvy--to talk about "giving readers what they want." And I'm in no way suggesting that we ratchet back the "soft news" or "lifestyle journalism" pieces that keep readers subscribing. (Hell, without its Wedding Pages, the Sunday New York Times would only have two dozen readers.) But determining what merits serious, front-page coverage really should be left to people whose careers have been in the service of the news.

How then can we explain the decision by the Washington Post today to bury the story on page nine that a Bush administration verified that the president had, in fact, authorized Libby to leak selected parts of a classified NIE? Or how can we explain Judith Miller's bogus WMD stories, or wrongly headlining the Florida recount claims, or front page giggling over Al Gore and earth tones, or succumbing to Lewinsky madness, or pimping Republican operative Whitewater nonsense? It was the choice of these front page stories, and many, many more, that led so many members of the public to mistrust the media's ability to think for itself.

The mindless run-up to war is the perfect example. There was plenty of information at the time that could have allowed for a more thoughtful debate, but the Washington Post (just one example) chose to bury the information. Cottle scoffs at the press "self-flagellating" but the post itself admits that they did not exercise "serious, front-page" news judgment during that period:

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

"We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder," Woodward said in an interview. "We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier" than widely believed. "Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page."

Overcaffeinated or not, the public (which includes bloggers) is well within its rights to question the press' vaunted professionalism considering its recent performance. And considering that even today the flagship DC newspaper continues to miss the story, I think we are right to keep the pressure on. I know it's unpleasant for them to be questioned, what with their superior credentials, experience and expertise, but the stakes are too high to ignore.

For my part, I waited for more than a decade for the press to report what I could see with my own eyes: a powerful political party had morphed into a criminal enterprise that was bent on permanently altering our fundamental system of government. This is not hyperbole. The Republicans wrote about their dreams of empire and executive infallibility. They advertised their plan to dominate Washington. The information was available to those who had the time and patience to wade through the cacophony of media static to find it. But the media itself behaved like a flock of birds, startling to every rightwing noise and flying off together into whatever direction the Republicans wanted them to go.

The smear jobs of the early to mid-90's were not new. The Republicans did it better than most, but they didn't invent it. They fed damaging titillating information to a gullible and eager press at a time when harsh competition, 24 hour cable and tabloid ethics were starting to permeate the news media. It created a constant sense of crisis that served them well when they upped the ante.

But tabloid smears aside, using institutional power and the levers of government to deny the people their democratically elected choice of president, whether it was through impeachment or the Supreme Court deciding an election, was not business as usual. Openly abrogating treaties and setting forth an aggressive doctine of preventive war is not business as usual. Consciously governing on a strictly partisan basis in order to render the opposition completely impotent despite its near parity in the nation, is not something we've ever seen in American politics. Using the power of the executive in "wartime" (the war being purely defined by the executive) to embed a theory of a unitary executive is a dramatic shift in the constitutional design of checks and balances. None of this is benign. These are steps toward dictatorship.

I can see this. Millions of people in this country can see this. But the press has behaved for the last decade as if nothing out of the ordinary is taking place. Indeed, they have participated in this ongoing constitutional crisis, not by just turning the other cheek, but by actively taking the bait and running with the cheap tabloid distractions of the 90's and then the martial fervor of the aught years.

Cottle believes that all this anger at the press is because we bloggers think we are qualified to be journalists:

And make no mistake. No matter how half-assed or silly it may at times seem from the outside, journalism is a real, grown-up profession in which, as with nearly every other job on the planet, experience and acquired skill matter. While that may sound obvious, I'm convinced that a sizeable chunk of the public can't quite get past its belief that any idiot can be a journalist because, by and large, it doesn't require the same sort of specialized or technical knowledge as being a doctor, chemical engineer, or CPA. (Just look at all the articles and blog posts cheering the death of the exclusionary, elitist big media and the rise of the web-empowered citizen journalist.) It's a little like the disdain with which many people quietly view child care providers: It can't take much skill or smarts to tend to a child, because look at how many clueless teenage moms do it every day. Likewise, folks figure that any idiot can form an opinion and write a sentence, so what's so tough about being a journalist?

What an odd analogy. I see what she is saying and it's certainly true that parenting, like journalism, takes skill. But is Cottle then also suggesting that there is some small elite minority of parents who can do it well?

I would suggest that just as there are many millions of good parents out there, there are millions of informed, engaged citizens who can read and think and see the world around them without having to be credentialed members of the press corps. And they see a media that is not doing a proper job of speaking truth to power.

Cottle concludes:

Certainly, journalists could stand to pay closer attention to what's happening in the communities they cover--or, in the case of the national media, to venture beyond the rarefied cultural bubble of the New York-to-Washington corridor. But it's absurd, not to mention counterproductive, to think any of us can win readers' admiration by further undermining the notion of journalists as serious professionals with acquired knowledge and expertise. If members of the news media can't take what they do for a living seriously, how can they possibly expect anyone else to?

I think the greatest "expertise" any professional journalist should develop over the course of years of reporting or editing is the ability to detect bullshit when they see it. The last ten years of collective mainstream political journalism proves that there is far less "expertise" in the professional media than the professional media thinks there is.



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digby 4/07/2006 11:44:00 AM |

 
The Essence

by digby


Scotty is having a fit trying to make a distinction between the president leaking classified information and the NSA whistleblowers leaking classified information by saying that the first leak was in the public interest and the second harmed national security. He's getting very hot under the collar trying to make that case. Clearly, they are very worried about this and they should be.

Here's the problem. The president pretended that he was disturbed by the leaks in the Plame case and said he wanted the perpetrator to come forward. Now we find out that he was personally authorizing the leak for political purposes. Scotty can call it "in the public interest" but everyone knows it was in the political interest of the president.

The illegal NSA wiretapping program depends upon the nation placing their trust in this same president not to use this warrantless writetapping for political purposes. The fact that he authorized leaking of sensitive classified information for political purposes proves that we should not do this.

They are trying to muddy up the waters with all kinds of arguments about good leaks and bad leaks and what is and isn't in the public interest. There are issues to be explored of whether or not the president was trying to set the record straight or lying further with the leaking of this NIE. And there are good arguments to be made about all of that. But it is this matter of trust that presents the biggest danger to them.

A reporter needs to ask the following question:

If the president was willing to authorize leaking of national security information to reporters for political purposes, why should we believe he won't authorize warrantless wiretaps on Americans for political purposes?


Update: Here is the president talking about leaks in October of 2003:

I've always interpreted his remarks as a threat. Think how they would sound coming from the mouth of Tony Soprano:

Randy, you tell me, how many sources have you had that's leaked information that you've exposed or have been exposed? Probably none. I mean this town is a -- is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth. That's why I've instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators -- full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is -- partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers. But we'll find out.

Update II: Haha. The reporter from CNN reports that Scotty was trying to distinguish between a harmful leak and one that serves the public interest. Apparently a harmful leak is one that harms the Bush administration and a leak that serves the public interest is one that helps the Bush administration. Good to know.


Update III: Bush's leak comments above pertains specifically to Plame so it cannot be used to illustrate his oft repeated admonitions against leaking in general.

Perhaps this one does it better. From the same period in 2003:

Q Mr. President, beyond the actual leak of classified information, there are reports that someone in the administration was trying to—after it was already out—actively spread the story, even calling Ambassador Wilson's wife “fair game.” Are you asking your staff is anyone did that? And would it be wrong or even a fire-able offense if that happened?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the investigators will ask our staff about what people did or did not do. This is a town of—where a lot of people leak. And I've constantly expressed my displeasure with leaks, particularly leaks of classified information.
And I want to know, I want to know the truth. I want to see to it that the truth prevail. And I hope we can get this investigation done in a thorough way, as quickly as possible.

Here's the president talking about leaks earlier in his presidency:

Q Mr. President, when you meet with the congressional leadership tomorrow, will you be specific about what they can and cannot relay back up to the Hill? Or, do you just expect them not to relay anything?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I'm going to talk to the leaders about this. I have talked to them about it. I mean, when the classified information first seeped into the public, I called him on the phone and said, this can't stand. We can't have leaks of classified information. It's not in our nation's interest.

But we're now in extraordinary times. And I was in the -- when those leaks occurred, by the way, it was right before we committed troops. And I knew full well what was about to happen. And yet, I see in the media that somebody, or somebodies, feel that they should be able to talk about classified information. And that's just wrong. The leadership understands that.

And if there's concerns, we'll work it out. I mean, obviously I understand there needs to be some briefings. I want Don Rumsfeld to feel comfortable briefing members of the Armed Services Committee. But I want Congress to hear loud and clear, it is unacceptable behavior to leak classified information when we have troops at risk. I'm looking forward to reiterating that message. And we will work together. We've got a great relationship.

Listen, the four leaders with whom I have breakfast on a weekly basis fully understand the stakes. They fully understand the decision I made. And they will have gotten feedback from their members, and we will discuss it. But one thing is for certain, I have made clear what I expect from Capitol Hill when it comes to classified information.

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digby 4/07/2006 10:13:00 AM