Hullabaloo

Monday, October 03, 2005

 
Litmus Test

Q: What do you say when people will say he put his own lawyer on the Supreme Court? That's definitional, cronyism.

MR. McCLELLAN: I'd say look at her record. As I said, she is someone that he knows well. But look at her record. Her record is one of being a trailblazer for women in the legal profession and a record of being a tough and strong litigator who has represented clients before state and federal courts on a broad range of issues. She is someone who brings the exact kind of experience and qualifications needed on our nation's highest court, and that's why the President selected her.

But does she have any horse show experience?



.
digby 10/03/2005 04:08:00 PM |

 
The Machine Justice

I think it's kind of cute that so many conservatives are expressing such angst at the choice of Harriet Miers this morning. Seems they thought that the Bush administration was about conservative ideology. Funny.

The Bush administration is about setting up the legal and institutional framework for a Republican majority for the next generation. That is Karl Rove's raison d'etre, beyond Junior, beyond conservatism, beyond ideology.

Harriet Miers is the official machine justice, a made woman, the one whose only committment and loyalty will be to Karl Rove and George Bush. I'm sure they would have preferred Alberto Gonzales but he is too much of a known quantity to easily finesse the varying political requirements within the base. She will do just fine. She is their creature. Her purpose on the court is to assist the Republican party in any way necessary, not to advance conservatism.

Voting for business interests is, of course, a given. Now the Texas mafia and the spawn of the college Republicans have their own seat on the highest court in the land for the next 20 years. But having one on the court for the next 10 years is crucial. With the election fixing, gerrymandering, corruption and executive power cases coming before the court over the next few years, her position will be very important to the GOP machine. It may very well be personally important to Karl Rove himself. (One hopes that the Democratic senators will, at least, take the PR opportunity to extract a bunch of public statements from her that she will recuse herself if and when specific criminal cases involving big name Republicans she's worked with come before the court.)

It's important to recognize, finally, what Karl Rove and the Bush administration, with the help of the modern Republican apparatus under Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed is all about. They are building a political machine, not a political movement. I find it very amusing that the right wing "intellectuals," from their ivory tower think tanks and millionaire supported sinecures at political magazines, have still failed to recognize that.


"She's the kind of person you want in your corner when all the chips are being played," said one friend, Joseph M. Allbaugh, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.


Here's a little insight into Miers' involvement with the Texas mafia, from buzzflash.


Update: Regarding Roe vs Wade, I think she will vote to overturn Roe vs Wade if the leadership of the Republican Party feels it is in the party's best interest to overturn Roe vs Wade.

It's my belief that the GOP would love to overturn it as a payback for their base, and they will "arrange" for her to overturn if they feel it's time. But what they are most interested in is getting someone on the court who will not independently decide that the interests of democracy require that they vote against whatever GOP electoral schemes come down the pike. There can be no daylight on that. Miers can be guaranteed to do what is best for the GOP.

It's certainly possible that the elite wingnuts are in cahoots creating this little backlash against Miers, but it was orchestrated going back to last week with Pod and Frum both public dismissing her as a lightweight and a hack. I wouldn't put it past them, but I just have a gut feeling that they were taken by surprise by this one. This was a level of coordination that I've not seen on the blogs before, if that's what it was. (I think it was more what Atrios said --- they are disappointed because they wanted the satisfaction of telling the Dems to go fuck themselves.)

Many movement conservatives, whether from the Christian conservative base or the neocon cosmopolitans, really bought into the idea that Bush believes in something deeper than corporate power, cutting taxes for high earners and kicking ass. Yet, there is absolutely nothing in his performance in office that suggests he cares about anything else.

Rove, on the other hand, has the very public agenda of building a "permanent" Republican majority. That is what he's trying to do. Period. Whatever it takes to get there is what they will do -- neocons and Christian alike are just cogs in the machine.

Deep down they know the score. They sold their souls to this devil (don't tell me they didn't know what they were doing when they went after Clinton, Gore and Kerry like a pack of wild, rabid dogs) and now they are faced with the fact that they too have been punked.

The modern Republican party, at its core, is not about ideology or values or anything else that high minded mediocre intellectuals and religious zealots pretend motivates their "movement" It's about money and power. Same as it ever was. Ask Grover.




.
digby 10/03/2005 11:10:00 AM |

Saturday, October 01, 2005

 
Plame Out

I'm busy today and won't have time to post. So I will leave you with this tantalizing thought to chew over from my super-smart commenter Sara:

Judy is not the main course at all. What I suspect Fitzgerald had to do was eliminate the defense, namely that Miller and Cooper and other reporters were the source of the identity of "Wilson's Wife" as CIA NOC. Remember we have already been through this defense as PR over the past couple of years -- Wilson's wife scrubbed floors at CIA, she was a lowly secretary, an apprentise in the Directorate of Intelligence -- she ran the travel bureau -- defenses that would all exclude her identity as a NOC. I suspect that is what transpired today, so Fitzgerald's positive case can now emerge.

This makes sense to me. Now read the rest of her comment for a novel theory of Fitzgerald's case. Jane at firedoglake has been following this line too...



.
digby 10/01/2005 06:34:00 AM |

Friday, September 30, 2005

 
Channelling Scott McClellan

This. Is. Bullshit.

Judy has been released from her confidentiality agreement by her source and she is refusing to even name him publicly? Even though his own lawyer has given interviews in the press. Jesus H. Christ.

Q. Can you describe your role in this case since you didn't file a story but did go to jail? How would you characterize your role in this whole investigation?

MILLER. I was a journalist doing my job, protecting my source until my source freed me to perform my civic duty to testify.

Q. Scooter Libby's lawyer - and your source's lawyer - I suspect you're not going to tell us if that's correct.

MILLER. I am not going to tell you if that's correct.

Q. Your source's lawyer has said that had you asked, you wouldn't have had to spend any time in jail; he would have been more than willing to give you the explicit waiver you say you now accepted.

MILLER. No. Since I was not a party to those discussions, I'm going to let you refer those questions to my lawyer. I can only tell you that as soon as I received a personal assurance from the source that I was able to talk to him and talk to the source about my testimony, it was only then and as a result of the special prosecutor's agreement to narrow the focus of the inquiry to focus on the way - on that source, that I was able to testify. I testified as soon as I could. And I will ask you to please address the questions to which I was not a party to my lawyers.

Q. But Judy, a conversation you were party to: On the steps of this courthouse, when you and Matt faced contempt of court charges, you said out here, when Matt was asked the same question, your answer was different. You said no waiver would be acceptable.

MILLER. No. I said I had not received a personal, explicit, voluntary waiver from my source - what I considered that. That was my position and I said it many times. I said it before I went to jail. I said it when I was in jail.

Q. What about the perception that you spent 85 days dancing on the head of a pin?

MILLER. I will let people draw their own conclusions. I know what my conscience would allow and I was - I stood fast to that.

Q. Beyond the narrowest of principles involved, what is this really all about? Why was your testimony so important in Mr. Fitzgerald's . . .

MILLER. You'll have to ask Mr. Fitzgerald why it's important.

So this alleged reporter got a waiver handed to her on a silver platter and now refuses to tell the public what she knows? WTF???

Apparently, Judy is no longer a journalist but an official member of the Bush administration. She is using the patented McClellan non-answer "you'll have to ask Mr Fitzgerald" and "I can't speak to conversation to which I wasn't a party."

The only thing that allows Judy to pull this shit is if she's a target herself and there is no evidence of that. Otherwise, she is abdicating her responsibility as a reporter. If Libby released her to talk to the Grand Jury she has no obligation to keep it from the public, whom she allegedly serves. Matt Cooper discussed it and wrote about it. Pincus discussed it. Only Russert hasn't talked, but then nobody has had the balls to ask him about either. Novak has had to be restrained from spilling his lying guts. But Judy just can't seem to say or write a word about this.

Damn. If she had been this reticent about printing every piece of bogus bullshit that Ahmad Chalabi and the Bush administration poured into her willing little gullet, a hell of a lot of people would still be alive today.

This woman is not a journalist. She is a political operative.



.
digby 9/30/2005 04:17:00 PM |

 
Greatest Show On Earth

David Corn offers up the "rebuke" scenario and also speculates that the White House might be flogging that poor old dead pony, "the CIA did it." (You really have to wonder what they are giving Tenet if this turns out to be true. It would have to be on the order of a small monarchy somewhere or a trip around the world with Paris Hilton.)

I haven't any idea if what he says is true, but this caught my eye:

When Fitzgerald first pursued Miller and Cooper, it was easy to dismiss him as an overzealous prosecutor interested more in a vendetta than in making a case. But as the Cooper portion of this episode demonstrated, Fitzgerald was after information crucial to his investigation. From Cooper he obtained material that showed Rove had discussed the CIA identity of Wilson's wife with a reporter. Though Fitzgerald and Miller have clashed on non-Plame business previously, perhaps he has been seeking information just as critical from her.

For anyone following the matter, it's impossible not to guess about what's going on and what Fitzgerald will do. His grand jury expires at the end of October. He could impanel a new one and keep investigating. But all indications suggest he's close to done. One person who recently had contact with Fitzgerald and his attorneys says that they seem confident about whatever it is they are pursuing. The Miller matter was something of a sideshow that at times drew more attention than the central issue.

Tantalizing, isn't it? If the Punchin' Judy play is the sideshow, the main attraction must be a doozy.



.
digby 9/30/2005 01:48:00 PM |

 
Black Talk

I hesitate to get into this because people are sick of my preaching, but the hell with it. The fact is that Bill Bennett's racist statement is actually just one of many that are apparently happening all over right wing radio in the wake of Katrina:

Here's another example:

As if Hurricane Katrina victims didn't have enough going against them, now they're the latest targets of hate radio. Just listen to WFTL-AM (850), the 50,000-watt home of the Florida Marlins. It's also the home of some of the most radical right-wing voices in America.

One regular syndicated host, Atlanta-based Neil Boortz, contended after the disaster struck that a "huge percentage" of the evacuees from New Orleans were "parasites, like ticks on a dog." Then he warned, "They are coming to a community near you."

When a caller remarked that most of the evacuees were fat, Boortz readily agreed. "They didn't drown because you couldn't push them underwater if you had to," he chortled.

Then there's Kelley Mitchell, who spent a week broadcasting at the Houston Astrodome among flood victims. Mitchell, a big-boned blond who spent years on South Florida television news stations, didn't seem too concerned about the harrowing stories from the people in the stadium. Instead she was virtually obsessed with the reports of looting and railed for days against the alleged behavior of poor New Orleans blacks during the disaster. She took to calling the state "Lose-iana" and announced she was boycotting any monetary donations to the victims.

"If I heard, 'I'm looking for my mom, my dad, and my baby daddy again,' I would cringe," she said, referring to the victims who had lost relatives. "Everybody knows it's important to speak English but these knuckleheads."

[...]

Another Mitchell gem: "When I see bad behavior ... that's when it became about race. Whoever got over deep-seated prejudices is now wondering if it was right to do so."

[...]

"We need to let black America know we do want you, but we want you on the terms of the United States of America," she explained in a voice that sometimes sounds eerily similar to that of similarly built actress Kathy Bates. "And we want you to be full and complete human beings."

Isn't that special? "We" do want you. Apparently, black Americans, many of whom had ancestors wwho ere here a century or two before many right wing racist assholes' are now provisional Americans who have to adhere to certain "terms of the United States of America." I guess she wants to send them "back" to Africa if they fail to comply.

Ugh.

And, by the way, Bennett's crime is that he essentially said "blacks are born criminals." Certainly, you can say that aborting any number of discrete demographic groups could have an effect on the crime rate, but attributing it to race suggests something immutable. Males commit more crimes than females at least partly because of biological characteristics. Poor people of all races commit more crimes (at least a certain kind of crimes) because of their economic circumstances and cultural influences. Statistically, Blacks may commit more crimes than whites because of both of the above reasons, but there is nothing in the color of their skin or their DNA that makes them more likely to commit crimes than anyone else.



.
digby 9/30/2005 12:41:00 PM |

 
Libby Plus

Ok kidz. Judy's lawyer Bob Bennett just told Wolf Blitzer that Judy's agreement with Fitzgerald was limited to "the Valerie Plame matter" not just Libby. Wolf pressed. Fitzgerald Bennett reiterated that it was "the Valerie Plame matter."

Judy was worried that Fitzgerald was going to pursue her bogus WMD claims.

Bolton and Cheney and Rove all the rest aren't off the hook on Plame. Do you suppose that includes Niger?


.
digby 9/30/2005 12:24:00 PM |

 
Condolences

My blogger friend Joe Vecchio lost his wife to illness this week. She was quite young. Any of you who have enjoyed Joe's "the voice of the working man" blog over the years, (and those who've not had a chance) can go over and pay your respects --- and donate little bit if you can. He's been out of work while his wife was very ill and the family could use some help.

RIP Catherine Susan Vecchio.




.
digby 9/30/2005 12:22:00 PM |

 
He's Gonna Hold His Breath Til He Turns Blue

Via Liberal Oasis, here's the latest from rightwing land on the new supreme nomination:

“Shell shocked,” “confused,” “stumbling,” “full of doubt.” These are all words I have heard used to describe the current White House effort to find Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement. Batchelder, Williams, and Owen have all been interviewed, but the process continues to sputter along.

Several have told me not to buy into the Miers trial balloon. It is, I’m told, just that — a trial balloon. Another tells me, “The President wants Gonzales. That’s what is dragging this thing out. They’re sending out people to say he is conservative as if by telling us that enough we will say, ’sure, he really is one of us.’ That is not going to happen.”

The process is still moving. Those I have talked to in the past twenty-four hours tell me we should expect a minority or woman. The odds are that it will be a woman. Sykes’s name has gotten little play in the past twenty-four hours and Luttig’s name has gotten none. Larry Thompson’s name continues to surface. One person disputes all my sources and tells me that Thompson, not Clement, was the almost pick last time.

The jury is still out on the nominee. Says one from a phone call this morning, “The White House has gone into second guess mode. They want another Roberts, an enigma who will slip through and turn out to be a conservative. They are second guessing their picks. That, I would think, increases the chances of a Thompson or a Gonzales — someone the President’s gut tells him is conservative. My gut tells me we have to keep the pressure on or we’re [screwed].”

They don't want to put another woman on the court. Not really. The conservative Sandra Day O'Connor, who was personally distraught at the idea that Bush might not have won the 2000 election and made sure he was installed anyway, is now seen as some sort of left wing bra burner on the right. Clearly, women can't be trusted.

This is not an accident. There is a serious movememnt afoot to denigrate women's issues, and therefore, pressure Bush not to nominate another woman. Check out this story by Dahlia Lithwick on the "chick-baiting" that's going on around this supreme court nomination:

A few weeks ago I suggested that race and gender should not be the only—or even the primary—filter through which we consider Supreme Court nominees. I rejected the arguments that minority candidates serve as proxies for minority views (whatever those might be), or that they create the appearance of a court that "looks like America." I was wrong. We need another woman on the Supreme Court. And while we're at it we need a few more women on the Senate judiciary committee.

[...]

I wonder why both Ginsburg and O'Connor—who differ on virtually everything—feel so strongly that there should be two women on the Supreme Court that they'd use their offices to publicly urge the president to appoint one.

And I can't help but wonder if it has anything to do with the ways in which gender politics are starting to infect our discourse about the courts. Consider this commentary by Bruce Fein this week in the Washington Times: Fein lines up Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then levels potshots at them as believers in Supreme Court justices as "apostles over the law" because of their concern for John Roberts' positions on women's and civil rights. Oddly enough, Patrick Leahy, Joseph Biden, Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, and the other male Senate Democrats who called for Roberts' views in this area are never mentioned.

Mark Steyn is positively bilious about this feminization of the Democrats in the Washington Times on Monday. Again Feinstein (and only Feinstein) is blistered for wanting to hear Roberts "talking to me as a son, a husband and a father." For which Steyn's prescription is that she "get off the Judiciary Committee and go audition for 'Return To Bridges Of Madison County,' or 'What Women Want 2' ('Mel Gibson is nominated to the Supreme Court but, despite being sensitive and a good listener, is accused of being a conservative theocrat')."

And here's George Will this week, also taking his nasty stick to Sen. Feinstein: "Dianne Feinstein's thoughts on the nomination of John G. Roberts as chief justice of the United States should be read with a soulful violin solo playing, or perhaps accompanied by the theme song of 'The Oprah Winfrey Show.' Those thoughts are about pinning one's heart on one's sleeve, sharing one's feelings and letting one's inner Oprah come out for a stroll." Will's contempt for Senate efforts to know something about the next chief justice's "temperament and values"—to understand his heart—is absolutely laser focused on the senator from California. Odd. Never a mention of Biden, Schumer, Mike DeWine, and Dick Durbin—each of whom similarly deployed the language of hearts and feelings in their questioning of Roberts.

Now, I am not come today to praise Sen. Feinstein. Her performance during those hearings probably set the women's movement back a decade. From her ingenuous "Now, I'm not a lawyer …" questions to her tendency to turn even declarative sentences into halting questions, she hardly projected the air of mastery and confidence I've seen in her in the past. I'm not sure I can sign off on her self-appointed task of representing all 145 million American women at the hearings. I can't even get behind her efforts to force a clearly private man into vomiting up mawkish personal revelations onto the hearing-room floor.

But I do wonder why it became so very easy to blast only the woman who wanted to cut through Roberts' repeated claims to be a lean, mean law-making machine. I wonder why the woman who worried about his aloofness and disconnection from poverty or suffering was singled out for derision. Is it because the stereotype of the pathetic, whiny, "but how do you feel" nag fits so much better if the asker is wearing curlers and a housecoat? Is it a cynical effort to paint all women as hysterics or merely all Democrats as women? Or is it, in the end, the consequence of having only one woman on the committee?

I'm sure it's just an accident that Fein, Steyn (weird name-coincidence or conspiracy?), and George Will each singled out only Feinstein as their judiciary committee poster-person for the strange quest-for-feeling that characterized the Roberts hearings. But it certainly evokes something Ginsburg mentioned in her remarks yesterday at Wake Forest. According to the report, she noted that "she started in law school in the 1950s—a time when law students and law practitioners were predominantly male. She said she felt pressure to excel, to break the stereotypes about women. … 'You felt like all eyes were on you. If you gave a poor answer in class, you felt like it would be viewed as indicative of all female students.' "

Imagine being judged and ridiculed as a lightweight, when—as sole representative of your gender—you feel you must defend the achievement of all women. The solution for both Ginsburg's problem and Feinstein's is simple: Give the critics more targets. Load up the courts and Congress with enough women, and then maybe blaming them for being women in the first place will stop sounding like a legitimate critique.

Is it a cynical effort to paint all women as hysterics or merely all Democrats as women?

It's both. And one follows from the other. Lithwick says she's sure it's just a coincidence, but it isn't. These things don't come out of nowhere on the right.

One thing I hope that people think a little bit about is that this distaste for women's issues is one that can easily be internalized on both sides of the political fence. Indeed, it already has in some ways. This, like race, is much simpler for the right to deride than it is for the left to defend. These are complicated issues. Nonetheless, we have no choice. It is the essence of what we stand for --- liberty, equality. It doesn't get much simpler than that.




.
digby 9/30/2005 12:04:00 PM |

 
Grey Lady Down

Dan Kennedy writes about Michael Isikoff taking TIME and the NY Times to task for not following up on the Plame story. Isikoff has a very checkered past in these matters, but in this case he is correct. The fact that TIME and The NY Times dropped the ball on these stories because their reporters refused to reveal their sources is really unconscionable. They should have pursued the stories more vigorously, not less.

If a reporter has a confidential source who is giving them backround information, they are supposed to, you know, go look for things like documents and other witnesses so they can actually publish a story. Matt Cooper, to his credit, did at least write one story and he took the proper inference from the leak -- that the white house was trying to discredit Wilson. The magazine then failed to properly follow-up and even withheld evidence in fear of swinging an election!

Miller never writing a story at all and the Times treating the whole thing like a pile of stinking garbage in which they didn't want to dip their finely manicured hands is just shocking.


Arianna excoriates both today and asks the following very pertinent questions:

And so we don’t forget what this story is really about, and given that the aluminum tubes crap that Miller put on the front page of the New York Times was being heavily promoted by Cheney, how much of that bogus information came to Miller via Libby?

And here are a few questions for the Times:

Had a Plame/Wilson story been assigned to Miller or not?

What, if anything, did she say about the story to anyone at the paper at the time… and what did they say back?

Why did the Times hold back the story about Miller’s release and let multiple other news sources scoop them? Were they trying to miss the evening news cycle and avoid the overnight thrashing their spin has rightly received?

It would be nice if they spent the same amount of time handwringing about this as they did that puerile stunt by Jayson Blair, but I'm not holding my breath. When a newpaper is partially responsible for sending a country to war on false pretenses, they tend to circle the wagons. I thought the days of William Randooph Hearst were long dead history, but maybe not so much.


Update:

Just to be clear --- in my post below where I say that Libby's lawyers had better shut up, it was not because I thought their version of events with respect to the waivers was necessarily correct or incorrect. It was because it's never a good idea for lawyers to anger witnesses who are going to appear before a grand jury the next day.



.
digby 9/30/2005 11:15:00 AM |

 
Fat Lady Clearing Throat, Not Singing

It's kind of painful watching people talk about Libby and Miller this morning on television when it's clear that they are just riffing. Jonathan Alter is a smart guy, but his main talking point (on MSNBC) is whether Fitzgerald will issue a report that "rebukes" Rove and Libby for discussing a CIA employee even though they didn't do anything illegal. He seems to be resigned to the fact that there will be no indictments.

There does seem to be an emerging conventional wisdom (among my commenters at least) that Fitz will not indict. The fact that he doesn't intend to ask Miller about anyone but Libby feels like some sort of capitulation but let's keep in mind that any thoughts we had that he wanted to ask about anyone but Libby were always pure speculation. There was nothing in any of his court filings that indicated he wanted anything other than to question her about one specific person --- Libby. The court issued its contempt order based upon that request alone.

There was never any reason to believe that Fitzgerald wanted to discuss Judy's other sources, only that Judy didn't want to discuss her other sources with Fitzgerald. We may never know what motivated her to become the Martyr of Times Square (Hat tip Billmon.) She's a drama queen of the highest order and probably had a whole list of reasons. But Fitz has said from the beginning that he needed her testimony for one specific purpose and perhaps we snould believe that.

People are also saying that Judy will simply lie. To that I reiterate what I wrote in the post below. She never wrote a story so someone had to have told Fitzgerald that Judy and Libby spoke. Nobody knows who that was. Maybe it was Libby. Maybe it was someone that Libby told. Maybe it was someone Miller told. Judy cannot be sure what Fitzgerald knows or who he talked to. It would be very, very risky for her to lie.

Lifted from the comments down page, here's some intersesting speculation from Emptywheel of The Next Hurrah (one of the best Fitzgerald kremlinologists in the blogosphere) about what Fitz might have and what Judy might bring to the table:

What did Fitz get?

Proof that Libby's notes have been tampered with.

Notes that say WHIG carried out a plot to get Wilson (the conspiracy angle that gets Dick).

The crucial link in the chain of custody of the information.

Why did he agree to avoid other sources?

Because he already has the evidence. Before subpoenaing a journalist, you have to prove the journalist is the only source of the information. Someone else had/has that info for Fitz, so he doesn't need Judy for it. (Although she's going to look stupid in court when someone from the Times gets up and talks about her receiving some stuff from Bolton, but not testifying herself. But looking stupid never seemed to be a problem for her.)

The notes are clearly key:

“One set of documents that prosecutors repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White House aides are extensive notes compiled by I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and national security adviser. Prosecutors have described the notes as ‘copious.’” [New York Times, 2/10/04]

It would be pretty to think that Judy might have notes that conflict with Libby's about the famous WHIG meeting that Joe Wilson wrote about in his book. That's what people have been waiting for.

For those who would like a quick refresher in who the administration players in this are and how they fit into the story as we know it, here's Think Progress' handy little primer.

(My good buddy Jim Wilkinson doesn't appear, but I have a feeling that he's lurking in this story somewhere too. He was a member of WHIG.)






.
digby 9/30/2005 09:25:00 AM |

 
Judith Iscariot

Murray Waas reports on why Miller's testimony is important to Fitzgerald:

What is perhaps left out of news accounts tonight is that Miller's testimony is central to whether special Fitzgerald brings criminal charges against I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. Libby was unwavering in telling prosecutors and the FBI that he knew nothing of Plame's covert work for the CIA, even though he spoke to Miller about at length about her and her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Whether that account is truthful is something only both Miller and Libby know. Miller's testimony on that issue will be central to any final disposition of the criminal probe, sources close to the investigation have told me for some time now.

Just in case Judy didn't know what Libby would like her to say to the Grand Jury, the Washington Post helpfully printed it up for her:

According to a source familiar with Libby's account of his conversations with Miller in July 2003, the subject of Wilson's wife came up on two occasions. In the first, on July 8, Miller met with Libby to interview him about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the source said.

At that time, she asked him why Wilson had been chosen to investigate questions Cheney had posed about whether Iraq tried to buy uranium in the African nation of Niger. Libby, the source familiar with his account said, told her that the White House was working with the CIA to find out more about Wilson's trip and how he was selected.

Libby told Miller he heard that Wilson's wife had something to do with sending him but he did not know who she was or where she worked, the source said.

Libby had a second conversation with Miller on July 12 or July 13, the source said, in which he said he had learned that Wilson's wife had a role in sending him on the trip and that she worked for the CIA. Libby never knew Plame's name or that she was a covert operative, the source said.

Miller is a made man. Why would Fitzgerald think she would tell the truth when it's clear that Libby wants her to testify on his behalf?

Because somebody else has already spilled the beans. How else did Judy come to Fitzgerald's attention in the first place?

Asked why prosecutors sought Miller's testimony when she never wrote a story about Plame, Times attorney Floyd Abrams said, "We don't know, but most likely somebody testified to the grand jury that he or she had spoken to Judy."

Neither Miller or Libby can be absolutely sure what that person told the Grand Jury because neither of them can be absolutely sure that the other one didn't tell someone about their conversation. Who knows how many people could have testified before the grand jury about Miller and Libby?

One thing is certainly clear. Fitzgerald doesn't trust Judy as far as he can throw her. Here's what he said about her in court when she was asking for home detention:

The question is whether Miller would defy a final court order and commit the crime of contempt and thereby obstruct an investigation of persons who may have compromised classified information.

She has no idea what he knows. She would be an idiot to lie.

One other thing to keep in mind. For those of us who are looking for him to broaden the scope of this investigation and look into a larger set of issues surrounding the Iraq lies, if Fitzgerald hands down indictments it is only a first step. Indictments tend to focus the mind, I would think. Perhaps some people will have more to say when they are faced with serious legal trouble.

And it would certainly explain the dismal political performance of the white house lately if high level advisors have been too busy negotiating plea bargains for themselves to keep a close eye on Junior.

update: Via Anonymous Liberal I see that there is some dispute emerging about this waiver business that I hadn't heard before:

Also of note, is this conflicting account of the original waiver given by Libby to Miller over a year ago. First, from the Post.

[J]oseph Tate, an attorney for Libby, said yesterday that he told Miller's attorney, Floyd Abrams, a year ago that Libby's waiver was voluntary and that Miller was free to testify. He said last night that he was contacted by Bennett several weeks ago, and was surprised to learn that Miller had not accepted that representation as authorization to speak with prosecutors. "We told her lawyers it was not coerced," Tate said. "We are surprised to learn we had anything to do with her incarceration."

But we get this from the New York Times:

On Thursday, Mr. Abrams wrote to Mr. Tate disputing parts of Mr. Tate's account. His letter said although Mr. Tate had said the waiver was voluntary, Mr. Tate had also said any waiver sought as a condition of employment was inherently coercive.

If Abrams is telling the truth, then Libby apparently did not give Miller the kind of waiver that she required. If Tate told Abrams that the waiver Libby signed was "inherently coercive," then Abrams and Miller were correct to interpret that conversation as not amounting to a free and voluntary waiver. How else were they supposed to interpret such a comment?

Libby's lawyers probably should shut their mouths.






.
digby 9/30/2005 12:50:00 AM |

Thursday, September 29, 2005

 
Welcome To Our World


Hunter at Daily Kos responds to the delicate pearl clutchers of the right who find themselves simply overwrought at the shocking prospect of all these corruption scandals being exploited for partisan gain. If there's one thing they have never been able to abide it's despicable underhanded politics. What is this world coming to?

Well...

Welcome to the world of the politics of personal destruction, you tubthumping, chin-jutting, Bush humping gits. Welcome to the nasty and partisan world that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and a legion of insignificant lowest-rung toadies like yourselves nurtured into fruition daily with eager, grubby hands, and now look upon with dull-faced faux horror.

[...]

Step back from the edge? You poor boy, asleep in the back of the car the whole trip, finally waking up and wondering where you're at.

Swift boats. Aluminum tubes. Niger uranium. "Mushroom clouds". Whitewater.

Vince Fucking Foster.

You can't even see the edge from here. You left it behind a hundred miles back.

So don't give me chest-thumping crap about civil wars, if your politicians are indicted. Don't give me visions of a lake of fire, if all those who find you loathsome refuse to suck at your teats of scientific ignorance in the name of religion, racism in the name of freedom, and corruption in the name of the New World Order.

Get used to the world you have created, and the stench your worshipped heroes have unleashed.

Hear hear.

And might I just add ... Republicans impeached a duly elected president over a trivial sexual matter and one year later installed a moron in the presidency by one vote on the Supreme Court. Handwringing from the likes of them about partisanship is a truly impressive and unprecedented act of phony, shit-eating Phariseeism --- which is really saying something.

Just in case there's been a massive memory loss on the right, here's a little trip through the wayback machine:

In arguing for impeachment and against censure, Republican members of Congress have hinted at a trove of still-secret, non-Monica-related documents about President Clinton's sexual misconduct. "Before people look to cut a deal with the White House or their surrogates ... it is my hope that one would spend plenty of time in the evidence room," said House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. "If this were to happen, you may realize that 67 votes may appear out of thin air. If you don't, you may wish you had before rushing to judgment."

kar·ma

1.The total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person's existence, regarded as determining the person's destiny.


.
digby 9/29/2005 11:30:00 PM |

 
Idiot Abroad

Ezra Klein once asked something to the effect of "why would Bush send a seven foot tall white woman to aid our public face in the Islamic world?" It's a good question, but more importantly, why would you send a seven foot tall white woman who speaks like a 6th grader to aid our public face in the middle east and convince the entire world that all Americans are as dim-witted as the president and that Osama bin Laden is right?

Sid Bumenthal puts it like this:

This week, Hughes embarked on her first trip as undersecretary. Her initial statement resembled an elementary school presentation: "You might want to know why the countries. Egypt is of course the most populous Arab country ... Saudi Arabia is our second stop. It's obviously an important place in Islam and the keeper of its two holiest sites ... Turkey is also a country that encompasses people of many different backgrounds and beliefs, yet has the -- is proud of the saying that 'all are Turks.'"

Hughes appeared to be one of the pilgrims satirized by Mark Twain in his 1869 book, "Innocents Abroad," about his trip on "The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion." "None of us had ever been anywhere before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty to us ... We always took care to make it understood that we were Americans -- Americans!"

If you would like to read some commentary that makes George W. Bush sound downright erudite, check out Hughes' entire statement:

UNDER SECRETARY HUGHES: We're going to be visiting, as you know, three unique and very important countries, three countries we have a very strong partnership with one of them. We also face very significant public diplomacy challenges in one of them. One of my missions is to go to listen. I hope to listen, to seek to understand, to show respect. Listening is a two way street, and so I hope that those people I meet will also return that open spirit and be willing to listen. I'm going to take a lot of questions, I'm going to participate in a lot of give and take and I hope they'll be willing to listen to my discussion (inaudible).

[...]

I just wanted to talk a little bit to answer your questions about, kind of, my approach. As I said I view this trip as the beginning of a new dialogue that is very much people driven -- public diplomacy is people-driven and it's policy driven, because our policies affect people's lives. I don't see this as a matter of opinion polls or public relations, I see this as a matter of policy. That's really what drew me to public service in the first place. When I first decided to leave reporting and go to the political process it was because I realized that the decisions made in the political process made a very real difference peoples lives. So when I talk about people I'm talking about policies, I'm talking about our policies and the impact they have on people. I think that's what we've got to focus on here. I also -- I go as an official of the United States government, but I'm also a mom, a working mom, and so I hope that I could help, in some places, put a human face on America's public policy.

[...]

... just one of the points that we're going to make as we meet with people is, is talk about our American story and how it's a collective story that's written by individuals. We all have unique stories to tell. My own background as a granddaughter of a Pennsylvania coal miner and a Kentucky railroad worker. Dina, of course came here from Egypt, and we're very proud that our first stop in Egypt we're going to be taking someone who I think Egypt is very proud of Dina, the fact that she emigrated from Egypt as a young child, and has risen to the highest levels of our American government, and that's a wonderful American story.

Karima has her own American story. She is the daughter of a Palestinian father and a German mother and I'm sure that Bill has some part of an American story, although I haven't heard it yet (laughter) I'm sure he will be glad to share it with you. He currently lives in Wisconsin and I don't know what his family roots are.

When she isn't talking about being a mom, which she seems to think is a unique and important qualification for being the voice of American public diplomacy, she's actually advancing jihad. From the Blumenthal piece:

Hughes' simple, sincere and unadorned language is pellucid in revealing the administration's inner mind. Her ideas on terrorism and its solution are straightforward. "Terrorists," she said in Egypt at the start of her trip, "their policies force young people, other people's daughters and sons, to strap on bombs and blow themselves up." Somehow, magically, these evildoers coerce the young to commit suicide. If only they would understand us, the tensions would dissolve. "Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans' lives," she said. When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired why President Bush mentions God in his speeches, she asked him "whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our Constitution cites 'one nation under God.' He said, 'Well, never mind.'"

With these well-meaning arguments, Hughes has provided the exact proof for what Osama bin Laden has claimed about American motives. "It is stunning ... the extent [to which] Hughes is helping bin Laden," Robert Pape told me. Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has conducted the most extensive research into the backgrounds and motives of suicide terrorists, is the author of "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," and recently briefed the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center. "If you set out to help bin Laden," he said, "you could not have done it better than Hughes."

Pape's research debunks the view that suicide terrorism is the natural byproduct of Islamic fundamentalism or some "Islamo-fascist" ideological strain independent of certain highly specific circumstances. "Of the key conditions that lead to suicide terrorism in particular, there must be, first, the presence of foreign combat forces on the territory that the terrorists prize. The second condition is a religious difference between the combat forces and the local community. The religious difference matters in that it enables terrorist leaders to paint foreign forces as being driven by religious goals. If you read Osama's speeches, they begin with descriptions of the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, driven by our religious goals, and that it is our religious purpose that must confronted. That argument is incredibly powerful not only to religious Muslims but secular Muslims. Everything Hughes says makes their case."

We know what happened when Bush put poor little Brownie in charge of federal disaster response and it wasn't pretty. We're going to be lucky if "Hurricane Karen" doesn't set off WWIII.

She's off to a good start.

The good news is that she's listened and she's learned and she's bringing back to the White House some incredible insights:

Ms. Hughes promised to take what she learned from hearing dissenting views back to Washington. She was struck, she said, when a Turkish official told her to try to imagine the situation of Iraq, a next-door neighbor, sliding into possible civil war and engulfing Turkey from the perspective of "the common Turk."

"I will be sure to bring that message back to President Bush when I get back to Washington," she said.

Heavy.



.
digby 9/29/2005 10:44:00 PM |

 
The Big Squeeze

So Judy got her super-duper-double-special waiver finally and was sprung. Of course, it makes no more sense today than it did two months ago but the NY Times is intent upon keeping up the fiction for their intrepid girl reporter:

... the discussions were at times strained, with Mr. Libby and Mr. Tate asserting that they communicated their voluntary waiver to Ms. Miller's lawyers more than year ago, according to those briefed on the case. Mr. Libby wrote to Ms. Miller in mid-September, saying that he believed her lawyers understood that his waiver was voluntary.

Others involved in the case have said that Ms. Miller did not understand that the waiver had been freely given and did not accept it until she had heard from him directly.

What a bunch of crap. Here's the nut:

In written statements today, Ms. Miller and executives of The New York Times did not identify the source who had urged Ms. Miller to testify. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, said that Mr. Fitzgerald had assured Ms. Miller's lawyer that "he intended to limit his grand jury interrogation so that it would not implicate other sources of hers."

Mr. Keller said that Mr. Fitzgerald had cleared the way to an agreement by assuring Ms. Miller and her source that he would not regard a conversation between the two about a possible waiver as an obstruction of justice.

First of all, why is Bill Keller involved in this to this degree? He's her editor, not her lawyer. Was he involved in the negotiations or is he reporting the story? If it's the latter, why would that be? Don't they have any reporters who can interview Judy and get the facts?

More importantly it seems obvious now that Jeralyn was right; Judy's real issue was being asked about her other sources under oath. It looks like they came to some sort of agreement about that. (No Bolton?)

It also appears at least possible that Fitzgerald was threatening to charge both Libby and Miller for obstruction of justice for talking to one another --- whether that referred to the conversation noted in the article between the two of them and their lawyers this month or an earlier conversation is unclear.

The question is what Fitzgerald got in return for agreeing not to ask Judy about her lovers ..er sources. And don't think he didn't get something in return.

In case anyone's wondering if Fitzgerald is really the tough guy everyone thinks he is, check out this story from last week about the Governor George Ryan trial in Illinois. You'll notice that he flipped Ryans "political son" by arresting his mistress and squeezing her until she convinced him to testify:

Whether the jury believes Fawell, given his previous vow never to testify against Ryan and subsequent flip-flop when prosecutors put heat on his fiancee, is important for Ryan’s defense.

“I’m still not overly comfortable with participating,” Fawell told a federal judge last Oct. 28 during a teary testimonial to try to keep his mistress-turned-fiancee, Andrea Coutretsis, out of prison. “I don’t relish testifying against George Ryan.”

Fawell, 48, was once the heir to DuPage County political royalty. His mother is Beverly Fawell, a former state legislator. His father is Bruce Fawell, a former chief judge in the county. And his uncle, Harris Fawell, was a respected congressman from Naperville.

Scott Fawell rose through the GOP political ranks rapidly, serving as a driver for then-U.S. Sen. Charles Percy, lobbyist for the tollway authority and campaign operative for then-Gov. Jim Thompson. He ended up working for then-Lt. Gov. Ryan, and helped Ryan win a close race in 1990 for secretary of state.

Ryan rewarded him with the chief of staff job and then the nearly $200,000-a-year plum of running the agency that oversees McCormick Place and Navy Pier.

So if Ryan indeed has figurative bodies buried somewhere, as prosecutors allege, Fawell is in position to know the location. He gave prosecutors a 45-page sworn statement.

Fawell talked about special secretary of state office leases prosecutors say Ryan illegally steered to co-defendant Warner. He also took yearly vacations to Jamaica with Ryan, trips a businessman who got an office lease would reimburse the duo for, according to prosecutors.

Among other things, Fawell also supposedly knows about alleged selling of low-digit license plates for campaign contributions. He helped set up a scheme in which secretary of state workers would do campaign work on state time, prosecutors say. And when it came time to cover up the illegal political activity, prosecutors likely will try to prove Fawell told Ryan about massive document-shredding that was going on.

A jury found Fawell guilty for his part in the corruption scandal. He’s serving a 6¨-year sentence at a federal work camp in Yankton, S.D.

Fawell, however, gave his testimony to prosecutors reluctantly, a fact that Ryan’s defense team undoubtedly will bring to jurors’ attention.

“I’m not going to sell myself out just to save myself,” Fawell said after his sentencing in late June 2003. “I’m not sitting on any bomb of George Ryan’s. I’m not going to go in there and make up stories about him just to save myself, which unfortunately that’s the game (prosecutors) like you to play.”

That, however, was before Fitzgerald’s office charged Coutretsis, formerly of Long Grove. Coutretsis, a mother of two and Fawell’s one-time assistant at McPier, faced a prison sentence for perjury before persuading Fawell to turn on Ryan. In return, she could get six months or probation. Fawell could get six months shaved off his sentence.

Do you think that Fitzgerald was impressed with Judy's "principles" or her desire for a super-special-in-person-blood-oath waiver from Scooter? Right. He didn't do this for meaningless testimony or just for fun. He got something important.



.
digby 9/29/2005 07:16:00 PM |

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

 
Keep Your Children Out Of The Room

I spoke too soon when I said earlier that there have been no blow jobs in Washington since the Honor and Integrity crowd took over.

I just watched Brit Hume "interview" Tom DeLay.


Update: Oh Jesus, Chris Matthews just performed a full-on deep-throat on the Hammer.

It's a rather unorthodox "interviewing" technique to make your interviewees argument for him by never shutting up and only allowing him to nod in agreement while you rake his enemies over the coals on his behalf. But then, they don't call 'em mediawhores and pre$$titutes for nothin'.




.
digby 9/28/2005 04:01:00 PM |

 
Librulism 'R Us

In case you are tired of hearing me rail on about racism and other topics that make people uncomfortable, check out this extremely well-reasoned argument by Scott Lemiuex of Lawyers, Guns and Money on the topic of abortion.

I plan to take up the subjects of animal rights and freeing Mumia, so be warned...



.
digby 9/28/2005 11:58:00 AM |

 
Criminals Much?

So, we have a federal probe implicating the president's number one political advisor and the vice president's chief of staff in the violation of laws protecting CIA agents and possibly lying to federal investigators.

We have a multi-pronged investigation into a lobbyist who happens to be a very close associate of Tom DeLay,Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove and the entire Republican leadership going back to their youth as members of the College republicans. This lobbyist is now implicated in a mafia murder plot and has been arrested on charges affiliated with that crime.

A member of the Bush administration who is a good friend and associate of all of the above was arrested this week for lying to the Feds about his good friend the lobbyist.

The majority leader of the Senate is now officially under investigation by the SEC and federal prosecutors for insider trading involving potentially many millions of dollars.

The majority leader of the House was just indicted by a Texas Grand jury for violating laws prohibiting the use of corporate money in campaigns.


I am so relieved that the Republicans restored honor and integrity to Washington. There hasn't been even one blow job in that town since they took power.



Update: Oh and that reminds me --- David Drier is now the majority leader of the House of Representatives.



.
digby 9/28/2005 10:33:00 AM |

 
Your Lyin' Eyes

It's depressing that you have to get this elementary with the American press, but you do. There is something called cause and effect. Any of you out there who don't know what that means can use your friend, Mr Google, to find out what it is.

New Orleans is a largely black city. Most of those who did not evacuate were poor African Americans. In the day after Katrina, pictures of victims standing on rooftops emerged. Heroic rescues were filmed. In short order we saw pictures of looting --- which immediately sent the wingnuts into a frenzy. This immediately led to cries for martial law --- stories of shooting, killing and rape followed. (Interestingly, this story in which photojournalists on the scene were interviewed early on indicates that while looting and theft were common, the violence they observed was mostly perpetrated by nervous police.)

We do not know to what extent these stories inhibited the relief effort, but there is evidence that they did. A real post mortem should be able to sort that out.

Because of the paranoid fear of violence and many other things such as the necessary National Guard equipment being deployed to Iraq and a federal agency charged with stepping in where local and state governments are overwhelmed being incompetent in virtually every way possible --- the conditions in New Orleans deteriorated rapidly as basic necessities and evacuations were delayed.

Let's make it simple for everyone. The reports of violence were overblown. The reports of misery, dehydration, delayed medical care, no food and wretched conditions were not. And it is highly likely that it was the first that led, at least in part, to the second.

Yet, the New York Times fails to make that distinction and pretends that the the desperation was overblown.

During the first few days, as local officials grappled with the overwhelming disaster, Mr. Nagin and Mr. Compass were outspoken about how desperate the situation in their city was, though some of those statements are now coming under scrutiny, with some critics saying they exaggerated the situation.

An editorial in The Times Picayune today faulted the two New Orleans officials for their leadership during those first few days, and for their public statements about the direness of the situation.

"It's understandable that in the tense and fractured days after Katrina, frightened people reported rumor as fact, and soldiers, police and even elected officials believed what they heard and passed it on." the editorial said. "In the hell that descended after Katrina, almost anything, no matter how horrific, seemed possible.

"But now that we know better, it's essential that people like Mayor Nagin and Superintendent Compass set the record straight, just as forcefully. That might mean saying, 'I spoke too soon" or even, 'I exaggerated,' " the editorial said.

The newspaper said that during an interview by Oprah Winfrey, Mr. Compass said "that babies were being raped."

"Thank God it didn't happen," the editorial said.

The Times-Picayune editorial was quite specific. The New York Times was not.

And that, predictably, plays into this quixotic quest by right-wing bloggers to prove that the entire disaster was overblown, not just the violence. That is not going to fly.

Here's a little reminder:



I urge everyone to click on the BagNews picture in the left column or click here and take a look at the amazing images shot by Alan Chin in New Orleans. He's the one who shot the iconic picture of the elderly African American woman wrapped in the American flag. There can be no doubt of what happened in the after math of Katrina --- horrible human suffering caused by a massive government failure.

The only question is why.



.
digby 9/28/2005 08:57:00 AM |

 
Nothing To See Here

I'm sure most of you have already read Rick Perlstein's op-ed that never ran over on Eschaton this morning. If you haven't, go read it.

For some reason, no editorial board wanted to hear from a historian who was pointing out that wild rumors about racial violence are a regular feature of urban disturbances in America and should be treated skeptically by the press until real evidence emerges.

I imagine they thought that Perlstein was playing the race card --- like all us liberals do at the drop of a hat. Nobody wants to hear it.

Meanwhile, here's some more fallout --- and another little illustration of why the Section 8 idea is meeting resistence:

GREENSBURG, La., Sept. 27 - The federal government, straining to find temporary housing for thousands of evacuees from New Orleans, has generally encountered hospitality in cities and towns in the gulf area. But the reception has been very different in the small parish of St. Helena.

Here, 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, white residents have spoken up at public meetings to oppose vehemently the construction of temporary housing for the evacuees, most of whom are black. The tension could complicate tentative plans by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to buy land in the parish for trailer lots.

"The only thing we see about these people on the news is what happened in the Superdome," said Philip Devall, 42, a white resident of Greensburg, at a recent meeting of the parish government. "They're rapists and thugs and murderers. I'm telling you, half of them have criminal records. I've worked all my life to have what I have. I can't lose it, and I can't stand guard 24 hours a day."

About 2,000 evacuees have been staying with friends and family in the parish since Hurricane Katrina, and police officials here say that crime related to the newcomers has been virtually nonexistent. But many residents say that fear is the driving force behind their opposition.

"I want to know how many sex offenders they're going to move in next to me," said Marci Kent, 36, also a white resident of Greensburg, at the meeting. "And I got daughters, too."

When one white man expressed concern at the meeting over possibly losing his valuables to lawless evacuees, a black woman turned around and angrily pointed a finger at him. "We work hard for what we got, too," she said. "But these people need a place to stay."

Yeah, that race card is bogus, all right.



.
digby 9/28/2005 07:54:00 AM |

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

 
Rumors and Expectations

Pre$$titutes reports that righty bloggers are going all Claude Rains on us because they "just realized" that the media reported anarchy and violence in New Orleans that was unsubstantiated. Drudge is especially shocked that anyone would spread scurrilous rumors.

They are holding the media responsible for the Katrina aftermath and they are not entirely wrong. Of course the media should have been skeptical of these crazy rumors and should have wondered why they weren't seeing any evidence of the alleged mayhem as they waded through the city. All I ever saw was a few desultory looters hauling around some boxes of sneakers.

The media certainly need to ask themselves some probing questions about why they were so gullible. It didn't pass the smell test from the get as far as I was concerned. (But then as TBOGG pithily reminds us, it isn't exactly the first time the media have bought into rumor and speculation hook line and sinker, now is it?)

But blaming the media is missing the point. They, like many others, chose to believe something for which there was no evidence. The press saw and reported the wretched spectacle of the evacuees living in horrible conditions, waiting and begging for help, but by that time everything was seen within the prism of the earlier (and ongoing) reports of violence. They need to do some soul searching about that.

Even those who lived it, for many reasons, saw the situation as anarchic and dangerous for their own reasons.

Bud Hopes, of Brisbane, was praised for saving dozens of tourists as the supposed safe haven of the city's Superdome became a hellhole.

"I would have to say that Bud is solely responsible for our evacuation," Vanessa Cullington, 22, of Sydney, told the Sunday Herald Sun by mobile phone from a bus carrying 10 Australians to safety in Dallas, Texas.

"I dread to think what would have happened if we hadn't got out. It's so great to be free."

News of the group's escape came as reports said as many as 10,000 people might have been killed by the hurricane and its aftermath, and President George Bush ordered more troops and an increased aid effort for the stricken Gulf of Mexico states.

As the Australians left the Superdome, food and water were almost non-existent and the stiflingly hot arena was filled with 25,000 people and the stench of human waste. Gangs stalked the tourists and women were threatened with rape.

"Bud took control. He was calm and kept it together the whole time," Ms Cullington said.

Mr Hopes, 32, said: "That was the worst place in the universe. Ninety-eight per cent of the people around the world are good. In that place, 98 per cent of the people were bad.

"Everyone brought their drugs, they brought guns, they brought knives. Soldiers were shot.

"It was like a refugee camp within a prison.

"It was full on. It was the worst thing I have seen in my life. I have never been so frightened."

Realising that foreigners were a target, Mr Hopes and the other Aussies gathered tourists from Europe, South America and elsewhere into one part of the building.

"There were 65 of us, so we were able to look after each other -- especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened." Mr Hopes said.

He said they had organised escorts for the women when they had gone for food or to the toilet, and rosters to keep guard while others slept.

"We sat through the night just watching each other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning."

John McNeil, 20, of Brisbane, said the worst point had come after two days when soldiers had told them the power in the dome was failing and there was only 10 minutes worth of gas left.

"I looked at Bud and said, 'That will be the end of us'," Mr McNeil said.

"The gangs . . . knew where we were. If the lights had gone out we would have been in deep trouble. We prayed for a miracle and the lights stayed on."

[...]

Mrs McNeil broke down when she saw images of her son leaving New Orleans.

"There have been times during this past week when we didn't know if we would see him again," she said.

Mr McNeil said he could see a change in his son.

"They've been traumatised," he said. "I think they've witnessed several atrocities.".

They worked themselves into a frenzy, just as a whole lot of other people did.(98% were bad!!!) They may have been threatened. I have no way of knowing. But it was a long way from "atrocities." The reports of others -- many of whom were white -- at the Superdome don't bear out their story. These were people who were convinced that because they were the minority, they were going to be killed. But there are many other whites who didn't see themselves threatened this way at all. Perceptions were everything. Beliefs and prejudices about race and class were everything.

It was even as if some people expected it to happen, somewhere in their subconscious, even before the rumors started. Check out this post at 10:05 am on Monday, August 29th, when people still thought "a bullet had been dodged" in New Orleans, long before anyone realized that the cavalry was waiting for massive reinforcements before it would dare to enter the barbarous city:

ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg]
I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared.
Posted at 10:05 AM

You can't blame the MSM for that. They hadn't even begun to report the mayhem that shortly caused Peggy Noonan (and her latest manly hero, Haley Barbour) to call for the looters (a useful euphemism) to be shot on sight.

At 10:45 on the morning after the hurricane, Jonah has already called forth the "Lord of the Flies" image that would be emblematic of New Orleans the next few days. (This google search shows just how many references there were.) Jonah made a few more peurile remarks about how the loss was worse for middle class families and the like before he finally settled down and realized that the disaster was of epic prooprtions. But he predicted the "anarchy" even before the rumors that turned out to be false began. It existed in his mind. I think it existed in a lot of people's minds.

(If you'd like some real fun, go to the Corner link and read Rich Lowry's comments as he breathlessly clips items and snippets of news reports about violence and mayhem.)

I'm not letting the media off the hook. They too took these ridiculous stories on faith and there were serious consequences to them being circulated. But the question that must be asked isn't why the media reported them --- the question is why so many people, including the media, were so willing to believe them in the absence of any real evidence.


.
digby 9/27/2005 03:56:00 PM |

 
Modern GOP Noblesse Oblige

The internal polls must be worse that we thought. They are really grasping at straws:

Facing criticism that he appeared disengaged from the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina, President Bush has been looking for opportunities to show his concern. But the White House will take the effort a step further Tuesday, venturing into untested waters by putting the nation's first lady on reality television.

Laura Bush will travel to storm-damaged Biloxi, Miss., to film a spot on the feel-good, wish-granting hit "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." Mrs. Bush sought to be on the program because she shares the "same principles" that the producers hold, her press secretary said.

In its standard format, the popular ABC series finds hard-pressed but deserving families, sends them away for short vacations and then, in a whirlwind of carpentry and appliance-shopping, gives them new homes. This time, though, the show will broadcast from an underserved shelter near Biloxi, where a convoy of trucks stocked with everything from mattresses to pants will arrive, courtesy of Sears, one of the show's sponsors.

It's not clear exactly what Mrs. Bush will do, but Tom Forman, executive producer and creator, said he is hoping that she'll just pitch in and help unload.

Next week, the cabinet will appear on the special New Orleans version of Survivor, where the Bush team will loll around the pool in Crawford deciding what to have for dinner while the all black 9th ward team lives on bugs and swims through snake infested flood waters to safety. The winners will have their capital gains taxes cut to zero.



.
digby 9/27/2005 11:43:00 AM |

 
Twisted Psyches

Via John at Americablog, I found this article about the warporn site from the Online Journalism Review that is quite interesting.

Near the end the author briefly addresses what I think is the most disturbing aspect of this disheartening story --- the combination of sexual pornography and real violent images.

While it was difficult for me to ascertain the motivation for people who were posting gory photos to NTFU, I did talk to Steven Most, a psychology postdoctoral fellow at Yale University who has studied the effects of violent and sexual images. He helped explain what these horribly violent images had in common with the nude photographs of women.

"They both seem to be particularly arousing in an emotional way," Most said. "Emotional stimuli can be rated in different ways. You could see something and rate how positive or negative it is. But separate from that is how arousing the image is. A positive picture of a cute puppy dog could be positive but not that arousing, whereas a picture of an opposite sex nude could be just as positive but be rated as extremely arousing. And a picture of a mutilation could be rated as extremely negative but highly arousing. Lately there's been a lot of theories saying that what we're drawn to is the arousing nature of an image regardless of whether we see it as negative or positive."

I am not a psychologist but I think it would be very surprising if combining these arousing sexual and violent images did not result in twisting some people's psyches. It cannot be healthy to get your thrills through deadly, bloody violence and sexual images in the same place, at the same time in the same way. The porn site is a "girlfriend and wife" site --- it's not professional porn stars. Those images of the naked girls next door are being given away for free to men who are posting pictures of mangled bodies of people they purport to hate with every fiber of their being. It is worlds colliding in a very dangerous way.

Sexual sado-masochism has been out there for millenia but it is highly ritualized fantasy. This is all too real. I have to think that it is problematic that people are getting so negatively and positively aroused by real death and gore at the same time.

There is something very disturbing about the images of sexual torture we've seen and heard about in this war, generally. The forced masturbation, the pyramids, the female interrogators and the fake menstrual blood, the constant nudity, all of it. Violence against prisoners in the new Human Rights Watch report is expressed as "fucking" instead of beating. Not "fucking up" or "fucking with" --- just plain "fucking" as in "I walking in and saw him fucking the prisoner."

I cannot help but think that something has gone terribly wrong here. From the top of the hierarchy ordering sexual humiliation techniques, to obscure web-sites selling war gore and pictures of girls next door together, this is a very sexualized war and it's damned strange, particularly coming from a regime that pretends to be an arbiter of strict sexual morals.

It's clear that the leadership of this country is extremely concerned with consensual sex between two adults but they find images of sexual violence and kinky torture techniques to be thoroughly acceptable among soldiers and useful to the war effort. This is a very odd perception and one that leads us back to the conclusion that something extremely unhealthy has invaded our body politic.



.
digby 9/27/2005 10:37:00 AM |

Monday, September 26, 2005

 
Another "F" Word

I hesitate to bring this up because nothing is more impolitic these days. After reading excerpts from this article over at the Cunningrealist, I was quite taken aback. I knew that Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire was covered up but I was unaware that he was also a vocal opponent of the Iraq war.

My first shocking thought after reading it was that a high profile star like him could have been seen by someone as a very dangerous guy. He might have been fragged.

It's hardly better that Americans killed him by accident. But it is better. I no longer trust what any official says about the Iraq war. There seem to be no limits. If it's true that the military routinely forces innocent people into stress positions so painful they pass out, anything could be true. Even that.



.
digby 9/26/2005 06:09:00 PM |

 
The Negroes Were Rising

Monday, April 6 1741

About ten o'clock in the morning, there was an alarm of a fire at the house of serjeant Burns, opposite fort Garden....

Towards noon a fire broke out in the roof of Mrs. Hilton's house...on the East side of captain Sarly's house....Upon view, it was plain that the fire must have been purposely laid.... There was a cry among the people, the Spanish Negroes; the Spanish Negroes; take up the Spanish Negroes. The occasion of this was the two fires...happening so closely together....and it being known that Sarly had purchased a Spanish Negro, some time before brought into his port, among several others....and that they afterwards pretending to have been free men in their country, began to grumble at their hard usage, of being sold as slaves. This probably gave rise to the suspicion, that this Negro, out of revenge, had been the instrument of these two fires; and he behaving insolently upon some people's asking him questions concerning them...it was told to a magistrate who was near, and he ordered him to jail, and also gave direction to constables to commit all the rest of that cargo [of Africans], in order for their safe custody and examination....

While the justices were proceeding to examination, about four o'clock there was another alarm of fire....

While the people were extinguishing the fire at this storehouse, and had almost mastered it, there was another cry of fire, which diverted the people attending the storehouse to the new alarm...but a man who had been on the top of the house assisting in extinguishing the fire, saw a Negro leap out at the end window of one of them...which occasioned him to cry out...that the Negroes were rising....

I wrote quite a bit about the fear of the black mob being the real reason why the response to Katrina was delayed in New Orleans and how this fear has been imprinted on the collective lizard brain of America since the early days of our history.

It appears to have been true once again:

Following days of internationally reported murders, rapes and gang violence inside the stadium, the doctor from FEMA — Beron doesn't remember his name — came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalled the doctor saying.

The real total?

Six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the handoff of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice.

State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been murdered inside the stadium.

At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies have been recovered, despite reports of heaps of dead piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been murdered, said health and law-enforcement officials.

That the nation's frontline emergency-management officials believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the news media and even some of the city's top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent.

The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees — mass murders, rapes and beatings — have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is [expletive]," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong — bad things happened. But I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything ... 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body-recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities have only confirmed four murders in the entire city in the aftermath of Katrina — making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year.

"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they [national media outlets] have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases; they just accepted what people [on the street] told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."

It is, however, entirely consistent with a peculiar type of racism that sees a large group of African Americans as a recipe for violence and anarchy in the absence of strict control. And it's this racism --- not the kind of racism that would have had George W. Bush saying that he couldn't be bothered saving people because he hates blacks --- that played into the death and destruction of Katrina. We've managed to drive a lot of that overt hostility underground in the lat 40 years. The racist fear, however, is stoked every time a wily politician runs on the "law and order" platform.

Even the cops -- or maybe especially the cops --- were whipped into a frenzy:

As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: People firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people murdered for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center.

Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.

In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people" inside the Dome. Other unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies "we couldn't count."

The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. The mayor told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."

Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of murdered bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines assert that, while anarchy reigned at times and people suffered indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.

"The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible," Compass said, admitting his earlier statements were false. Asked the source of the information, Compass said he didn't remember.

Nagin frankly acknowledged he doesn't know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Superdome and the Convention Center — and may never. "I'm having a hard time getting a good body count," he said.

Compass conceded that rumor had overtaken, and often crippled, authorities' response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to situations that turned out not to exist.

Military, law-enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of evacuees — about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the Convention Center — overwhelmed their security personnel.

The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by increasingly agitated crowds in the Dome, but that never happened, said Col. James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. While the Convention Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not resort to violence.

"Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated," said Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley. "If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them — then that became 18."

Inside the Superdome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified — and even that shooting, injuring Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested the alleged assailant.

Watt had indeed been attacked inside one of the Dome's locker rooms, where he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as they walked through about six inches of water, Watt's attacker hit him with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt's leg came from his own gun — he accidentally shot himself during the commotion. The attacker was sent to jail, Baldwin said.

Inside the Convention Center, Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state authority that runs the center, stayed in the building with a core group of 35 employees until Thursday. He said thugs hot-wired 75 forklifts and electric carts and looted food and booze, but he said he never saw any violent crimes committed, nor did any of his employees. Some, however, did report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard gunshots in the distance on about six occasions.

Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Col. Jacques Thibodeaux to put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center around noon on Friday.

It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. They found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any murders, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.

One widely circulated story, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsman, held that "30 or 40 bodies" were stored in a Convention Center freezer.

But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's Casino, said Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, who conducted the review.

I doubt that this will get the kind of wide coverage that the initial reports did. And those initial reports clearly indicate that relief was held back because of the alleged anarchy in the streets:

Violence disrupted relief efforts Thursday in New Orleans as authorities rescued desperate residents still trapped in the flooded city and tried to evacuate thousands of others living among corpses and human waste.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown said his agency was attempting to work "under conditions of urban warfare."

Police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from armed miscreants roaming seemingly at will.

Officers warned a CNN crew to stay off the streets because of escalating danger, and cautioned others about attempted shootings and rapes by groups of young men.

They had to wait for more National Guard to put down the crazy violence. Remember, nobody could come in with relief supplies because it was too dangerous.

About 24,000 National Guard members will be in Louisiana and Mississippi by the end of the week to combat looting and quell gunfire that disrupted the rescue of survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said today at a news conference that 1,400 will go to New Orleans daily for the next three days, expanding a force of 3,000 that's trying to maintain order in a city flooded and left without power by the storm three days ago.

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said National Guardsmen from Arkansas were prepared to use deadly force as they try to restore order in New Orleans, the Times-Picayune reported.

Blanco said at a news conference today that the guardsmen ``know how to shoot to kill ... and I expect they will,'' the New Orleans newspaper said.

Some rescue operations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were suspended in areas where gunfire broke out, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said in Washington, the Associated Press reported. People trying to board amphibious vehicles outside New Orleans's Charity Hospital were shot at while trying to evacuate, Cable News Network reported.

The Bush administration Official Katrina Talking Point these days is directed entirely at this situation. They are making the case that if the federal government had had direct control of the situation they could have called in the National Guard instead of ebing forced to wait for the hormonal, hysterical Kathleen Blanco to stop wringing her flighty hands and ask for them. The rationale seems to be that if they could have "secured" the city earlier there would have been a quicker response.

But it was fear of the black mob that prevented the relief agencies from entering the city --- a paranoid delusion. The red cross and others could have come into the city days earlier. There were those who said that they shouldn't be allowed to provide food and water because the evacuees would allegedly be so content that they would not be inclined to leave. But they were also told that they'd be mobbed by the crazed crowd and perhaps killed by the roving gangs of armed thugs who were raping babies and killing anyone who got in their way.

They have been able to confirm four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. The same number that there would have been if Katrina had not hit. One of them took place at the Convention Center. There were no murders at the Superdome. The cop who was famously shot down by a roving gang actually shot himself in the leg by accident.

We don't know how many people died because people were so afraid of the black mob that they would not allow relief workers with food, water and medical help into the city in the days after the flooding. I wonder if this tragic little lady made it to a more dignified place to live out her last days.


Dorothy Divic, 89, is surrounded by onlookers trying to keep her alive on a street outside the New Orleans Convention Center September 1, 2005. Several people among the thousands of stranded hurricane evacuees have died while waiting outside the building, with no sign of imminent help on the way. REUTERS/Rick Wilking



Update: If you've been denied the opportunity to read this widely disseminated e-maim Snopes has it in its entirety. It starts off like this:

I've been watching the news lately and have seen scenes that have made me want to vomit. And no it wasn't dead bodies, the city under water, or the sludge everywhere. It was PEOPLE'S BEHAVIOR. The people on T.V. (99% being Black) were DEMANDING help. They were not asking nicely but demanding as if society owed these people something. Well the honest truth is WE DON'T.

Help should be asked for in a kind manner and then appreciated. This is not what the press (FOX in particular) was showing, what I was seeing was a group of people who are yelling, demanding, looting, killing, raping, and SHOOTING back at the demanded help!

And so it goes. And FoxNews is reporting that authorities are doing backround checks on evacuees who are seeking shelter and over half have criminal records.

"It's a balancing act," said Kyle Smith, deputy director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (search). "We don't want to treat them like criminals after they have been traumatized, but we want to make sure they are in no danger nor the families they are housed with."

No word on those who have enough money to stay in hotels. Lock up the white women.


Update II:

I am aware that both Compass and Nagin are black. African Americans were also usually the ones who blew the whistle on slave revolts. It's a complicated psychology. Certainly one can understand why people in jobs of trust and authority would want to distance themselves from a group that is so widely feared and reviled.


.
digby 9/26/2005 03:15:00 PM |

 
And So It Begins


Via media matters:

LIMBAUGH: From the Associated Press, Mary Dalrymple doing the honors of writing this story. "House and Senate tax writers agreed yesterday to a package of tax breaks designed to help Hurricane Katrina victims recoup their losses and access needed cash. The Congressional Research Service, an office that provides lawmakers with nonpartisan legislative analysis, said some of those tax breaks could do more for higher income survivors than for the neediest."

Yes. People, they're going to get tax breaks for Katrina. It may help the rich more. The rich may benefit more from taxes and tax cuts that result from Hurricane Katrina. We should rethink this, ladies and gentlemen. Even though the rich were wiped out too, they still may benefit more. I will guarantee you this, ladies and gentlemen: Many of those getting tax cuts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will not have paid any taxes at all. The people who pay taxes today are primarily the upper middle class, the rich, whatever you're going to call them, and the filthy wealthy.

It's not worth it to try to specifically decifer his incoherant ramblings, but the message comes through anyway.

Poor people are going to be getting something they don't deserve. And I think we know which poor people he is talking about.



.
digby 9/26/2005 02:40:00 PM |

 
Losing Its Honor

Americablog has a long post up about the warporn, which I wrote about last week. I do not suggest that you click through to the pictures unless you have a very strong stomach.

It's worth noting that this site and the stories of prisoner torture that came out in the last week are part of a story that nobody wants to deal with --- that is, the story of individual soldiers committing depraved acts on their own. Shystee over at Corrente, takes me to task for suggesting such a thing, and I plead guilty. There is a point at which individual soldiers have to take responsibility as well as the higher ups, whom I agree bear the brunt of the blame.

But, I have seen no evidence that the military heirarchy has instituted a policy of posting gory pictures on sex sites of Iraqis whom we've liberated from their lives. It's possible, I suppose, but this looks to be a matter of individuals entertaining themselves. As I wrote before, I know that taking pictures of battlefield dead has been around since Matthew Brady --- and it has served the purpose of documenting the horrors of war for all to see. But this melding of sexual porn and bloody war gore is the sign of something sadistic and perverted (and yes, fascistic.)

There is one stomach churning picture that shows a horrible mangled stump where a foot should be, presumably blown up in a land mine or something like it --- and the naked crotch of the woman whose stump is being displayed. It's called "Nice puss/Bad foot." It's possible that the picture is photo-shopped, but regardless of the veracity of the picture itself, it's obvious that any man who gets an erection from that pic is a man who should not be carrying a gun.

These guys are allowing their ids to run wild and I don't think there is any excuse for it. They know the difference between right and wrong. They are not under orders to post these pictures nor can there be any thought that it helps the war effort by scaring the "Hajis" or giving these soldiers a forum in which to "release" their "steam." It's pure tittilation --- "warporn" in the most literal sense and it speaks to something seriously wrong with the military culture that says on the one hand that we are there to liberate the Iraqi people and on the other that these people's dead and mangled bodies are strangely sexually stimulating.

Note that there is no discussion as to whether these Iraqis are "Baathists" "bitter-enders," "terrorists," "insurgents" --- or the "good" Iraqis who we liberated from the sick, depraved Saddam. One of the pictures is simply entitled "Die Haji Die." It is assumed that any dead Iraqi is a terrorist --- and that, as we know, is impossible.

None of this is to say that the systematic sexual torture regime we've seen in both Iraq and Guantanamo is just the result of a barrel of bad apples. Clearly, the military have taken the simple-minded lessons of "The Arab Mind" to heart and believe that if they sexually humiliate the "Hajis" they'll crumple. (Big strong American men, meanwhile, wouldn't be affected whatsoever by being forced to simulate anal sex with other men or being jeered at while wearing ladies underwear.)I think it's pretty clear that the highest reaches of the government signed off on a whole lot of questionable kinky stuff in the mistaken idea that arabs are different from you and me. And it would appear that some of the soldiers have predictably taken this to heart.

And even if you are to set aside the kinky sexual nature of the War On Terror, I can't actually understand how anyone would think that even the total abdication of the Geneva Conventions allows for a cook to break a prisoner's leg with a baseball bat because he needed to relieve some stress. (Did the prisoner complain that there was too much lemon in the bernaise sauce and he just couldn't take it any more?)

I remember this fascinating letter to Josh Marshall back in May of 2004, from an unnamed ex-military officer. It was right as the Abu Ghraib story broke:

"... it is no secret that ON THE STREET the US Army was and remains openly kicking Iraqi asses whenever and wherever they want to.

About the Army - Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968.

[...]

Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit. I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.

The fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney said, "we're taking the gloves off" certainly created an environment in which the rule of law seemed to have been completely tossed aside. This country went temporarily insane after 9/11. I guess the military hierarchy lost its bearings too, which I find surprising since the highest levels of the officer corps are steeped in the lessons of Vietnam and presumably understood that this was likely the road to perdition.

The lies and misdirection conflating Al Qaeda with Saddam probably contributed more than anything to the horrors that many Iraqis faced at our hands during the first year or so of the occupation. Many soldiers surely internalized the idea that they were wreaking revenge for 9/11. In this, the buck goes all the way to the top and comes to a screeching halt on the desk of the heroic Commander Codpiece. Bush and his boys should have to answer for that, but I suppose it will be left to history to sort it out.

The Human Rights Watch Report about the beatings and torture by the 82nd Airborn does not feature the sexual humiliation and torture, but rather the good old fashioned kind.

On their day off people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all US soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the fucking cook. He shouldn’t be in with no PUCs. The PA came and said to keep him off the leg. Three days later they transported the PUC to Abu Ghraib. The Louisville Slugger [incident] happened around November 2003, certainly before Christmas.

People would just volunteer just to get their frustrations out. We had guys from all over the base just come to guard PUCs so they could fuck them up. Broken bones didn’t happen too often, maybe every other week. The PA would overlook it. I am sure they knew.

The interrogator [a sergeant] worked in the [intelligence] office. He was former Special Forces. He would come into the PUC tent and request a guy by number. Everyone was tagged. He would say, “Give me #22.” And we would bring him out. He would smoke the guy and fuck him. He would always say to us, “You didn’t see anything, right?” And we would always say, “No, Sergeant.”

One day a soldier came to the PUC tent to get his aggravation out and filled his hands with dirt and hit a PUC in the face. He fucked him. That was the communications guy.

One night a guy came and broke chem lights10 open and beat the PUCs with it. That made them glow in the dark which was real funny but it burned their eyes and their skin was irritated real bad.

If a PUC cooperated Intel would tell us that he was allowed to sleep or got extra food. If he felt the PUC was lying he told us he doesn’t get any fucking sleep and gets no food except maybe crackers. And he tells us to smoke him. [Intel] would tell the Lieutenant that he had to smoke the prisoners and that is what we were told to do. No sleep, water, and just crackers. That’s it. The point of doing all this was to get them ready for interrogation. [The intelligence officer] said he wanted the PUCs so fatigued, so smoked, so demoralized that they want to cooperate. But half of these guys got released because they didn’t do nothing. We sent them back to Fallujah. But if he’s a good guy, you know, now he’s a bad guy because of the way we treated him.

After Abu Ghraib things toned down. We still did it but we were careful. It is still going on now the same way, I am sure. Maybe not as blatant but it is how we do things.

The men who spoke out were conflicted, as I would expect anyone to be. They were bedeviled by a system of rules that broke down when the leadership of this country lost its moral moorings and they did not know how to change the situation from within. You can read their agony of conscience right there on the page. But in the end they have stepped up to report what they saw --- and even participated in. They know it was wrong. So do many, many others who have said nothing.

I understand that it is difficult to stand up against the macho military culture that makes it possible to swallow fear and face people who are trying to kill you. I know that soldiers are trained to be machines and they give up a large piece of their free will to their superiors for the good of the unit. But, at some point, each individual is still a human being and has to answer to his conscience. When someone like Joseph Darby comes forward, or this West Point officer and the two sergeants last week, they are acting against a system and peer pressure that is enormous. They are brave men who prove that it is possible to resist the immense pressure to conform. And that is why they are hated. They show that those who participated have violated basic norms of decent human behavior, even in war --- and they show that those who say nothing are cowards.

Sadly, I think our sick culture at this point is actually rewarding those who decry the sense of personal responsibility that leads a soldier to speak out against depraved behavior --- and excuse barbaric, cruel behavior as a normal way to relieve tension.

Like Rush Limbaugh who says:

I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.

[...]

You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

Or these fellows, writing on the warporn site:

Everyone needs downtime, and some need to face the demons, whatever that may be and this site is good for that...It also lets everyone know thsat when they get back they will be accepted ...let the entertainment continue.


[...]

This site allows soldiers to blow off some steam...Guys, I love this site and I love the pictures. Keep 'em coming and watch your six boys. Hajis deserve death, never forget it.

[...]

"Oh, by the way, fuck them camel jockeys. We didn't start this shit, and we certainly aren't hiding behind civilians with 20lbs of explosives strapped to our chests and hidden in a car."

Only we did start this shit, didn't we?

This is why the warmongers who type themselves into a frenzy supporting this war should have the balls to go over and fight it. Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinert and Paul Ghouley should have to stand there and ask themselves these questions --- confront the nightmares that are going to curse these soldiers for the rest of their lives as they try to reconcile what they saw and did.

It's a nice, pretty abstract concept --- fighting tyranny and terrorism for the red, white and blue. But in reality it's standing in a doorway watching a psychopathic cook break a prisoners leg with a baseball bat because he's is feeling stressed. It's hearing innocent people screaming because they have had chemicals dripped into their eyes and on their skin so they'll "glow in the dark" and amuse the soldiers. It's having your humanity and your decency challenged every single day and not knowing if you will meet all the tests of bravery, conscience and loyalty that are required in a war that is being fought for vague and inscrutable reasons.

Jonah believes that we are liberating the Iraqi people from a totalitarian dictator. Does he then agree that it's part of the mission to oggle an Iraqi womans privates while he gloats that her foot was blown off? Does he know what he would do if confronted with sadists who believe that the only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi? That "they started this shit?"

The chickenhawks can claim that it is perfectly acceptable to support a war that they have no intention of fighting. But they cannot claim that it is just fine to support a war in which our troops have behaved in an immoral and indecent fashion, which the military has covered up and which was implicitly condoned by the highest reaches of our government. If they supported this they should have to share in the trials of conscience that afflict these poor bastards from the 82nd airborn who came forward (and the ones who did not.) They should have to share in the visions of blood and gore that we see on thay sick porn site and they should have to live with what has been done in their name.

If you support this country's loss of honor you should have to get down in the mud and grovel with all those who've lost their struggle to maintain their humanity while fighting a war that has no end, that doesn't know who it's fighting that sees sex and violence intertwined in a sick and twisted way --- and that celebrates random, wanton killing of the people we are allegedly fighting for. The chickenhawks in this war, of all wars, are the ones who should have to suffer alongside those who lost their souls killing and beating and torturing for a cause that didn't exist.


If you haven't read Billmon's incredible post on this subject, you need to.



.
digby 9/26/2005 10:11:00 AM |

 
Goldilocks

The Note is a wee bit ruffled because Pre$$titutes called them "a stinking repository of Bush-licking Pre$$titution" and uses the novel defense that Bush defenders say they are biased against them so they must be juuuust right.

I suppose it never occurs to them that while it is true that they cannot be biased both for and against Bush it is entirely possible that they could be biased for or against Bush --- and one side or the other is working them. Which side, do you suppose, is most likely to be doing that?

They did not object, by the way, to being named the Karl Rove Official Fan Club and Fluffing Society, so I take that to mean they feel quite comfortable with the label. It's the Bush-licking that seems to have irritated them.



.
digby 9/26/2005 09:27:00 AM |

Friday, September 23, 2005

 
Amusement

A new horrifying prisoner abuse scandal, this time revealed by a West Point officer and backed up by two sergeants.

Support for some of the allegations of abuse come from a sergeant of the 82nd Airborne who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch quotes him as saying that, "To 'F____ a PUC' means to beat him up. We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day. To 'smoke' someone is to put them in stress positions until they get muscle fatigue and pass out. That happened every day. Some days we would just get bored so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did that for amusement.

"On their day off people would show up all the time," the sergeant continues in the HRW report. "Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the cook."

Here's what the pentagon had to say about it, by an officer who obviously studied at the Tom DeLay school of integrity:

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. John Skinner criticized the report as a predictable effort to try to "advance an agenda through the use of distortions and errors in fact."

If this is true, I don't want to hear any more bullshit about "Lord of the Flies" in New Orleans. It's pretty clear that even our own highly disciplined military can lose their humanity without a whole lot of provocation. These weren't dipshit national guard hicks either. This was the 82nd Airborn. No excuses.

As much as Katrina revealed the ugly underbelly of poverty and race in the country, 9/11 revealed the ugly underbelly of sadism and blind fury. This is a sick culture.



.
digby 9/23/2005 09:17:00 PM |

 
I Wonder Why


Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum both discuss the fact that this Section-8 business isn't catching on. Josh asks:

Just for the sake of discussion, and I'd be particularly eager to hear from TPM's right-leaning readers on this one, isn't the idea of giving rent vouchers to refugees rather than stacking them up in mobile housing projects something that folks on both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on?

In truth it is a neat right leaning idea, but it exists only in the Cato Institute's and Jack Kemp's wet dreams. In Republicanland (although I'm pretty sure this would be a problem in many places) getting enough people to rent their empty apartments to displaced, unemployed African American strangers is not nearly as easy as giving those evacuess vouchers to pay for them. There are still people who go to great lengths to not rent to gainfully employed African Americans with good credit and references.

The LA Times discussed this issue today and reports something that is completely inexplicable --- unless the reasons have nothing to do with money or expanding government programs over the long haul:

Two days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to issue emergency vouchers aimed at helping poor storm victims find new housing quickly by covering as much as $10,000 of their rent.

But the department suddenly backed away from the idea after White House aides met with senior HUD officials. Although emergency vouchers had been successfully used after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the administration focused instead on a plan for government-built trailer parks, an approach that even many Republicans say would concentrate poverty in the very fashion the government has long sought to avoid.

[...]

At least in the case of housing, critics say that the president's unwillingness to rely on existing programs could raise costs. Instead of offering $10,000 vouchers, FEMA is paying an average of $16,000 for each trailer in the new parks it is contemplating. Even many Republicans wonder why the government would want to build trailer parks when many evacuees are now living in communities with plenty of vacant, privately owned apartments.

The article compares this situation to the admnistration's reluctance to expand Medicaid, but it is not the same thing. This was an emergency voucher program that, unlike health care, would have cost a finite amount of money --- a one shot deal. There is no rational reason not to put people in existing housing if it is going to cost less than putting them in Bushville trailer parks --- unless they wouldn't actually be able to put evacuees in that existing housing for other reasons. (And yes, Halliburton will make a killing.)

"Crime" (which along with "poor" are loaded racial terms in this context) is already becoming a prime concern:

After a crisis with indisputable elements of race and class _ searing images of mostly poor, mostly black New Orleans residents huddled on rooftops or waiting in lines for buses _ some Americans worry about strains in the nation's social fabric.

Women were especially concerned. One of them is Sue Hubbard of Hueytown, Ala., 64 years old. She does not believe race played a deliberate part in who got out of New Orleans, but she is deeply worried about tensions inflamed by those who do.

"I just think it took everybody by surprise," says Hubbard, who is white. "I don't care if it would have been the president himself, they couldn't have gotten there to those people. Some people _ not everybody _ are trying to make a racist thing out of it."

The poll underscores the literal reach of Katrina as well: 55 percent of Americans say evacuees from Katrina have turned up in their cities or communities, raising concerns about living conditions for the refugees, vanishing jobs for locals and _ among 1 in 4 respondents _ increased crime.

Among respondents with incomes under $25,000 per year, 56 percent were concerned about living conditions for refugees in shelters; that was higher than among those who make more money. And the poll indicates people in the South, which has absorbed huge masses of evacuees, are most concerned about the costs to their local governments.

Ann McMullen, 52, of Killeen, Texas, who works as a school administrator at Fort Hood, says she worries about gang violence, simply because of the prodigious numbers of people flowing into Texas communities.

"They can't even locate the sex offenders," she says. "And every population has gang members. It's theft, it's murder, it's more chaotic crimes in the community. Hopefully we'll be able to put these people back to work."

In order for the Section 8 plan to work on the scale necessary, they would have to put enormous pressure on landlords to accept something like 350,000 people with vouchers. I'm not sure even huge rental subsidies at twice the market rate would persuade people that it's a good idea to take in a large number of black evacuees into their neighborhoods.

25% of the population already expressing their concerns about an influx of crime --- at the moment of people's greatest feelings of sympathy and generosity --- makes it pretty clear that this is a lurking issue. And it is one that will likely pay dividends in the long run for the GOP. Before it was a television show, "Law and Order" was the slogan for the southern strategy.

Oh, and by the way, the Richard Nixon also had another electoral strategy that reverberates to this day and was heavily influenced by race --- the suburban strategy.

Richard Nixon did not invent the politics of suburban segregation. Opposition to housing integration in suburban America was well entrenched prior to the 1970s. Yet President Nixon solidified public opposition to federal desegregation of the suburbs at a time when the nation was poised for change. He enunciated a policy declaring that the national government would not pressure the suburbs to accept subsidized low-income housing against their will. In so doing, he formally embraced a fundamental suburban belief: that government should not and could not force a community to accept economic – and by extension racial – integration. Nixon’s policy cemented [*479] the politics of suburban segregation that informally existed before his administration. He converted suburban political preferences into national public policy – a policy that remains largely intact to this day. No president between Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton revoked that policy, and Nixon’s federal court appointees perpetuated it through their judicial decisions (pp.3-4

Rick Perlstein's new book discusses un great detail the wars over the Fair Housing Act --- which were vicious and essentially broke the back of the civil rights consensus in the Democratic party. Voting, public access and employment were one thing. Forcing people to live side by side was another. And it wasn't just a southern thing.

Housing remains one of the racial fault lines in this country. Many people who are not consciously racist (or classist) consider being forced to live among people not of their tribe to be a fundamental affront to their liberty --- and an automatic threat to their equity.



.
digby 9/23/2005 04:59:00 PM |

 
The Noose Around The Hydra

Franklin Foer has written an absolutely must-read article this week in The New Republic (which, unfortunately, is subscription only.) He writes about the College Republicans, who are key to understanding the modern Republican party. I know that sounds absurd, but it is absolutely true. His thesis is that the operatives of the GOP learn to fight the Democrats by fighting with each other.

Before the election of new leadership this year, the College Republicans, fresh faced little gangsters that they are, had already been accused of corrupt fundraising by bilking little old ladies out of large sums of money. As with all College Republican elections, this one was distinguished by dirty tricks, betrayal and strong arm tactics:

Everyone who watched this summer's race for College Republican National Committee (crnc) chair with any detachment has a favorite moment of chutzpah they admire in spite of themselves. Leading the count are the following: speaking sotto voce of your opponent's "homosexuality"; rigging the delegate count so that states that support your candidate have twice as many votes as those that don't; and using a sitting congressman to threaten the careers of undecided voters. I can understand the perverse appeal of each of these incidents. But I cast my vote for the forged letter.

He goes on to describe a beautiful little piece of ratfucking that will stand the victor in good stead when he's called upon to destroy political opponents in the future. And there is much more. But the thing that is most interesting about this is that he points out what very few people seem to realize --- that this is not just a bunch of kooky co-eds having fun. It is officially sanctioned and run by the Republican establishment. After all, it was the training ground for the entire political apparatus of the modern GOP --- including a bunch of names we've seen a lot of recently in association with words like "arrest," "indictment" and "federal investigation." And there's money involved, of course.

Behind the scenes, in the campaign war rooms, small armies of veteran Republican operatives and congressional staffers toil. That's because there's much more at stake in the elections than a swish post-college gig. After campaign finance reform, the College Republicans reinvented themselves as a big-time 527--a group legally allowed to spend an infinite amount of its own money on campaigns--with a budget of over $17 million. They have a massive network of operatives to send into the field to bolster candidates, and they have patronage to spread among friends and through direct-mail firms. In other words, it's well worth tearing a Shermanesque path to the sea to control College Republicans, no matter the carnage--and no matter the expense. Michael Davidson said he spent an estimated $200,000--raised off high-rollers who normally sign checks to senators and presidential wannabes--trying to claim the grand prize.

But the significance of the crnc goes beyond that. The Committee is the place where Republican strategists learn their craft and acquire their knack for making their Democratic opponents look like disorganized children. Many of the biggest-brand Republican operatives--from Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, to Charlie Black and Roger Stone, to Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist--got their starts this way. Walking through the halls of the convention, it is easy to see the genesis of tactics deployed in the Florida recount and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Republicans learn how to fight hard against Democrats by practicing on one another first. "There are no rules in a knife fight," Norquist instructed the young conventioneers in a speech. And, while Norquist described a knife fight, the Gourley-Davidson rumble transpired around him.

[...]

... Gourley received the blessing of the outgoing chairman, Eric Hoplin. But, in reality, he had won the blessing of a force more powerful than a single politician. He had won the blessing of an entity that College Republicans speak of in hushed tones and that they compare to the Empire in Star Wars--the Establishment.

When College Republicans invoke the Establishment, they mean a clique of former College Republicans--now grown-ups playing politics at the highest level--who will trample anyone to maintain their clique's control of the organization. Like all good cabals, it is hard to know exactly who belongs to the Establishment and how Machiavellian their meddling is. Before his tumble from grace, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff would lend College Republicans his skybox at the MCI center, donate money, and lead training sessions. (In 2002, the crnc paid Jack Abramoff for "accounting & legal services.") Rove reportedly keeps tabs, and Norquist invites the group's chair to attend his celebrated Wednesday gathering of conservative big shots. But the convention offered some more suggestive examples of the Establishment's methodology. Just past 2 a.m. on Saturday, wavering delegates from Louisiana received calls from Morton Blackwell, the legendary veteran of the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns, urging them to vote for Gourley. It was a perfectly calibrated tactic. "A 19-year-old Republican will generally do whatever a demigod of the conservative movement like Morton tells them," one Davidson supporter griped.

And they are even more likely to respond to entreaties from a congressman. Patrick McHenry, a dough-faced 29-year-old freshman representative from North Carolina and former crnc treasurer, went to war on Gourley's behalf. "I got a call. They said, 'The congressman is on the line,'" University of North Carolina junior Jordan Selleck told me. "He basically said that we'd be screwed if we didn't switch to Gourley. Our careers in politics would be over." As Jennifer Holder, who served as a state chair in the '90s, lamented, "There are a lot of sharks infesting the kiddie pool."

Does everyone remember how Bush was extolled as the guy who would bring honor and integrity back to the White House? How the grown-ups were in charge? These are his people:

Back in 1981, Abramoff and his campaign manager, Norquist, promised their leading competitor, Amy Moritz, the job of crnc executive director if she dropped out of the race. Moritz took the bait, but it turned out that Abramoff had made the promise with his fingers crossed. Norquist took the executive director job and named Moritz his deputy. That demotion didn't last long, either. After discovering the talented Ralph Reed, Norquist handed the Christian Coalition godfather Moritz's responsibilities and her office space. They placed all of Moritz's belongings in a box labeled amy's desk. Even 25 years later, she hasn't shed her role as College Republican doormat. Abramoff used her think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, to funnel nearly $1 million into a phony direct-mail firm with an address identical to his own.

While College Republicans have a vague understanding of Abramoff's ascent, they all can recite the ballad of Rove and Atwater--the ultimate object lesson in how the Establishment strikes back. In 1973, Rove was the Establishment candidate, and Atwater, the original Sun Tsu-quoting College Republican, was his prime campaign operative. They spent the spring of 1973 crisscrossing the country in a Ford Pinto, lining up the support of state chairs--basically the right-wing version of Thelma and Louise. But, in point of fact, Rove was hardly the right-winger in the race. His two opponents, Terry Dolan and Robert Edgeworth, were. And, when Dolan threw his support to Edgeworth, Rove had no other alternative. He had to cheat.

When the College Republicans gathered for their convention at the Lake of the Ozarks resort in Missouri, Rove and Atwater relentlessly challenged the legitimacy of Edgeworth's delegates, even if the evidence did not justify their attacks. Because of Rove's allegations, the convention ended in deadlock. In revenge, Dolan went to The Washington Post with recordings that captured training seminars where Rove boasted of his campaign techniques, including rooting through opponents' garbage cans and other forms of campaign espionage. The Post broke the story under the headline "gop probes official as teacher of tricks." The Republican National Committee chairman, one George H.W. Bush, however, didn't punish Rove for his less-than-high-minded behavior. Instead, he gave Rove the chairmanship and sent Edgeworth a scathing letter accusing him of disloyalty. "He wrote me out of the party," Edgeworth told James Moore and Wayne Slater, the authors of the biography Bush's Brain.

(Where do you suppose anyone would get the idea that Karl Rove might be the type of person to purposefully out a CIA agent for political purposes?)

These tactics have worked well since the Nixon administration and those who use them are responsible for building the most powerful and successful political machine in the modern era. Way back when, in the glory days when Abramoff, Norquist and Reed ran the college Republicans, Norquist is quoted as saying:

[Stalin] was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got an ice ax through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.

Brownie was no accident; the placing of hacks in positions of responsibility is not just ad hoc political payback. The cronyism is by design.

Needless to say, none of these people had a clue --- or any interest --- in actual governance. They are political hit men. But they control the party apparatus and when they finally achieved what they had been dreaming of for many years, they got greedy.

I wrote the other day about the idea that the only thing that can stop these people is the legal system. This is because the press and politics are too easily manipulated by entertainment values, spin and confusion right now. It's a lot harder to bullshit someone who has the power to subpoena your records and arrest you for lying. Federal prosecutors squeeze anyone and everyone they can to get someone to flip on big fishes. And there are a lot of little fishes now. And medium sized fishes too.

Every one of these former college Republicans (the Establishment) are now in the cross hairs of the legal system. Norquist hasn't been officially named, but his affiliations with all the people who are coming under legal scrutiny are so close that it's just a matter of time. Safavian, especially, is an interesting connection because he also feeds into a nervousness among the fervent neocons about Grover's unseemly closeness to Muslims:

Norquist has for some years now been promoting Islamist organizations, including even the Council on American-Islamic Relations; for example, he spoke at CAIR's conference, "A Better America in a Better World" on October 5, 2004. Frank Gaffney has researched Norquist's ties to Islamists in his exhaustive, careful, and convincing study, "Agent of Influence" and concludes that Norquist is enabling "a political influence operation to advance the causes of radical Islamists, and targeted most particularly at the Bush Administration."

But if Norquist is indeed a convert to Islam, it could be that he is not just enabling the Islamist causes but is himself an Islamist. (April 14, 2005)

That's Daniel Pipes, neocon prince. Norquist marrying a Palestinian American woman sent him into an absolute tizzy. But Norquist has been involved with the Muslim community for some time --- for purely political reasons, in my opinion. Norquist's cause and religion is Republicanism. He was just doing what he does --- building the coalition. They've been courting Christians for decades and he thought he could court Muslims too --- except he apparently couldn't finesse the neocon fixation with Israel or the violent fixation of Osama bin Laden. The man is not a miracle worker after all.


Safavian is an Iranian American from Detroit, the home of the biggest Islamic population in the US. He's a political hack in the Norquist/Abramoff posse. Still, it is more than amusing that Norquist's ties to the Islamic community have been so well tolerated by all the right wing gasbags who have been one handedly typing the word "islamofascist!" for the past four years --- amusing but not surprising. After all, nobody but a few cranks at Horowitz's operation cared that Norquist and his pal Dana Rohrabacker were hanging out with the Taliban right up until 9/11.

But Norquist and Safavian (and Abramoff, the allegedly pious Jew) were involved with some unsavory characters that this scandal is going to bring to the surface. Grover may be in the kind of trouble his big brother Rove is in --- national security style trouble. At the very least, his effectiveness is going to be curtailed as these investigations circle around him. Money people get nervous at times like this.

I have long agreed with the old saying that if you want to kill the snake you've gotta go for the head. In the case of the modern Republican Party, it's a four headed hydra consisting of Karl Rove (strategy), Tom DeLay (party enforcer), Ralph Reed (christian right) and Grover Norquist (movement organizer.) They all interact with one another at the nexus of K Street and the RNC. They may be taken down by one guy -- their good friend, ex uber-lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. (Uncle Karl, of course, is likely in even deeper shit.)

The Democrats have never exploited (or never been able to exploit) the sheer criminality of this gang. They all learned the ratfucking business while still little sprouts in the College Republican organization. According toe Rick Perlstein's fine book about the Goldwater campaign "Before The Storm," as early as 1964, college student Morton Blackwell -- who later named the "Moral Majority" and ran Jeff Gannon Guckert's alma mater, the (GOP) Leadership Institute --- was sabotaging the competition at the GOP convention. They've been at this a long, long time.

Back in May, I wrote:

These are [Nixon's] political heirs, raised and nurtured on the mother's milk of corruption and dishonesty; scarred while very young by the ignominious downfall of their political father; driven to wreak revenge and recapture what they perceived as their rightful ownership of American politics. They are the spawn of Watergate resentment and this country will never be healthy until this group of radicals are removed from positions of power.

Watch this Abramoff scandal. It may go nowhere, but the potential for a lethal, if not mortal, wound to the conservative movement resides inside it.

The baby bad guys were on display at the College republican election --- and the baddest baby bad guy won. But the article shows that the win was really accomplished with the collusion of the anointed bad boy with the professional operatives. If they go down this chain may be broken.

As I said, I don't think that normal political processes will be able to deal with this gang of crooks. But it looks like greed and hubris may have pushed them into the sights of the justice system. There are no guarantees, of course, but it's just possible that with this particular mob of political criminals under the gun --- and some of them out of the picture --- the Nixon era may finally come to a close.



.
digby 9/23/2005 11:55:00 AM |

 
Done Good

Congratulations to local boy Ezra Klein, for just graduating from UCLA (in three years,) while blogging like a maniac and maintaining a normal 21 year old's social life. Political writer types were different in my day -- unwashed, unpleasant to look at and unsocialized. These kids today, I tell you ...

He's already moved to DC and is blogging over at TAPPED. I'm going to take a nap.



.
digby 9/23/2005 11:28:00 AM |

 
Batten Down The Hatches

Bush is flying into San Antonio in the middle of the crisis and then going to Colorado to track the storm at NORAD (now Northcom.) He says he's going to monitor the interaction between the military and the state and local authorities. He assured everyone that he'd make sure he and "his entourage" won't get in the way. Sure.

He doesn't need to be interfering with grown-ups who are trying to do their jobs under pressure. He has no more experience dealing with a large scale disaster than Brownie did. It's bad enough that he interfered with the relief efforts in New Orleans and Mississippi after Katrina. To insist on photo-ops during the crisis itself is just unconscionable.

When people complain that Bush is disengaged it's not because he isn't staging enough political pageants. They don't want him throwing on a flightsuit and putting on a show. They want him to go to his fucking office once in a while and do his fucking job. At the White House. Where the president is supposed to be during a crisis.



.
digby 9/23/2005 09:52:00 AM |

Thursday, September 22, 2005

 
Pretzel Addiction?

Jeebus. It looks like Bush has another scrape on his face today. Left temple.

This is ridiculous. How often does this have to happen before people finally ask some serious questions? Falling on your face all the time is simply not normal.

And if he's out falling off his bike again while the country is going to hell in a handbasket then people need to know that too.

Update: Maybe not. It could be something else. My bad.

On the other hand, he's flexing his jaw like crazy in a strange repetitive way. Too much coffee this morning, perhaps.



.


.
digby 9/22/2005 08:58:00 AM |

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

 
Flaking Teflon

I have been annoyed over these past five years at how the tabloids have been so solicitous of Junior when they treated Bill Clinton and his family like they were coke addicted soap stars.

Seems the teflon is finally off the codpiece. The National Enquirer is featuring a story about Bush drinking again. I have no idea if it's true --- sometimes tabloid stories are, sometimes they aren't. But they wouldn't be printing it if they didn't think it would sell...



.
digby 9/21/2005 08:22:00 PM |

 
The "F" Word

Andrew Sullivan has two posts today that it seems to me are interrelated, although I don't think he meant them to be.

First he highlights a web-site that encourages soldiers fighting in Iraq to post sickening pictures of dead and wounded Iraqis in exchange for free (sexual) pornography. He writes:

If you send in pics of dead insurgents or Iraqis, you get free access to the porn part of the site. The pics that are appended have names such as "What every Iraqi should look like," "DIE, HAJI, DIE," and "Cooked Iraqi." I would think this violates the Geneva Conventions, not that the U.S. under this president cares about those very much any more. But it's also beyond depraved. Eric Muller sounded the alarm. Like the pictures from Abu Ghraib, these images are also a propaganda coup for Zarqawi and his monsters - a consequence of war in the Internet age. Have we really sunk to this?

I think Abu Ghraib pretty well settled that question. This psycho-sexual sickness has been officially sanctioned, at least when it comes to "interrogations," and such behavior has been giddily celebrated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who is beamed to the military all over the world on Armed Forces Radio. This is not an aberration; it is an ongoing feature of the war on terrorism.

Sullivan also links to an interesting critique that draws some very compelling comparisons between the Bush administration's governance and fascism. Sullivan doesn't use the "F" word himself, of course, but the article does:

Describing the President’s panicked political response to his falling poll numbers as “compassionate conservatism”, (as New York Times columnist David Brooks did last Sunday, “A Bushian Laboratory”, September 18, 2005), borders on the ludicrous. Mr Bush has now overseen the fastest increase in domestic spending of any president in recent history. Furthermore, he has never resolved the inherent contradiction between his so-called “compassionate” spending policy and his small-government tax policy (which was ostensibly designed to “kill the beast” of Big Government once and for all, according to the President’s conservative apologists). And his casual dismissal of the remnants of civilian authority in the Gulf basin – “It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice” – evokes something more along the lines of Mussolini-style fascism than any coherent, mainstream conservative, philosophy.

[...]

The reconstruction of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama provides a fascinating picture of how the Bush administration actually works. His government represents an odd melding of corporatism and cronyism, more in tune with the workings of 1930s Italy or Spain. In fact, if one looks at fascist regimes of the 20th century, it is appears that the Bush administration draws more from these sources than traditional conservatism. Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

(Source: The Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism, Dr. Lawrence Britt, Spring 2003, Free Inquiry)

Perhaps it is unfair to characterise the Bush Presidency in these terms, because it would imply the existence of a coherent governing philosophy.

Haha.

You cannot help but be struck by the similarities between our current political culture and that description of fascism. It should not be blithely dismissed. If it walks like a duck ...

I realize that soldiers have been taking battlefield pictures since the dawn of photography. But I really don't think we've seen the sick combination of sadistic battlefield gore, sexual humiliation and pornography since some very, very bad things happened in Europe in the middle of the last century. That was not mentioned in the list of fascist characteristics, but it was certainly present in the worst fascist governments. (Read about the sexual torture that was done in the Dirty War, for instance.) This melding of sex and violence is not unique, of course, in human psychology. But it is a rare society that officially sanctions its use by the military and an even rarer one that openly celebrates it.

I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.

[...]

The thing though that continually amazes -- here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography

[...]

And these American prisoners of war -- have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture.

[...]

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

Update: Great minds and all that. I just noticed that Kevin Drum wrote about this too --- and we even used the same headline.
.
digby 9/21/2005 06:04:00 PM |

 
Naive Allegations

I've been talking a lot about race since Katrina, and I talked about it during the election too. It's not because I'm generally obsessed with the topic, but because I think it's the most politically significant issue we never talk about seriously. What else is a personal soap box good for, if not that?

Matt Yglesias notices some intersting numbers today that speak to my point:

Apropos of nothing in particular, take a look at the exit poll data from Mississippi, where George W. Bush picked up the votes of 85 percent of the white population and just 10 percent of the African-American vote. In a state whose electorate is 65-percent white, that led to a hefty 60-40 win for the incumbent. Mississippi's an unusually stark case, but not all that much of an outlier. Georgia saw 75 percent of whites and 12 percent of blacks pull the lever for Bush. It was 75-9 in Louisiana, 78-15 in South Carolina, and a comparatively minor 63-6 in Arkansas (generally speaking, whites are most monolithically Republican in the least-white states like Mississippi and more open to Democrats in whiter states like Arkansas).

All of which is just to say that an awful lot of the post-election talk about "culture" and its impact on voting serves to obscure the extent to which a lot of politics is about race. In Mississippi, Bush got a larger percentage of the vote from people who "somewhat dissaprove" of his administration than he did from black voters. He did better among self-identified Democrats than he did among blacks, and far better (23 percent against 10 percent) among self-identified liberals than with non-whites. I'm not sure exactly what follows from that, and I appreciate that commentators don't like to raise the point in order to avoid just engaging in naive allegations of racism, but it's really, really not possible to understand the politics of the South without delving into this stuff.

It's also not possible to understand why the US is the only first world nation that has rejected national health care and a robust safety net without delving into it. And it's not possible to explain these maps, in which we see the power of the southern based party having reasserted itself, without delving into it.

It's fundamental to understanding our country, our politics and our culture. Unlike any other western country, we had to fight a bloody civil war to end slavery in the middle of the 19th century and we lived with segregation for another century after that. This is built into the fabric of our nation. It's naive to ignore it.



.
digby 9/21/2005 02:00:00 PM |

 
A More Innocent Time

Speaking of corruption, here's a little blast from the past:

1992 The House Banking Scandal

On this day in 1992, the House Ethics Committee released a list of the twenty-two most flagrant abusers of the defunct House bank. The bank, which had been closed in the fall of 1991, was not a financial institution, but rather served as a common place for legislators to tuck their paychecks. The representatives in question were accused of overdrawing on this collective account. But, though the legislators' habit of overdrafting neither violated the bank's rules nor led to the loss of federal money, it reeked of fiscal irresponsibility and stirred yelps of protest from the American public. The House Ethics Committee held that legislators who had overdrafted on their payroll deposits for a minimum of eight months out of a sample thirty-nine-month stretch were indeed in the wrong. The committee's findings, as well as the decision to name names, sent Capitol Hill into a tizzy. A number of the legislators fingered on the list lashed out at what one accused representative deemed a "libelous indictment." But, such protests did little to quell the controversy: during the ensuing months, the committee revealed that some 350 former and current House members had written bad checks. With the public outcry hardly abating, fifty-three representatives tendered their resignations by May 4 of that same year.

Man oh man. 53 representative resigned over that ridiculous trumped up scandal. And here we have the Republicans selling the government to the highest bidders.

I'm not hearing the public outcry. But it is a hopeful sign that Jack Cafferty just asked if Tom DeLay has been indicted yet.(Wolf, of course, giggled nervously and quickly shushed him.)



.
digby 9/21/2005 01:49:00 PM |

 
Running On Brownie

Elections are fought on many levels and events can always derail the best laid plans. However, it appears to me that the outlines of an effective national strategy are taking shape for next year and it's long overdue.

Since the early days of the Bush administration --- when it was revealed that Junior's top campaign contributor was a crook who led his company into bankruptcy with an elaborate pyramid scheme --- cronyism, political corruption and incompetence have been the lurking back-story of modern Republican governance. The media have been uninterested in pursuing this story for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was its childlike proclivity to fall for misdirection. (Flip Flop! Shiny!) The GOP's thuggish political tactics were well known and apparently respected. Everybody loves a winner, I guess. But corruption, spin and flat out patronage of this vast a scale is unprecedented in the modern era. This combination has created a political machine of almost unlimited power, but it may collapse of its own weight as it finally hits the wall of the legal system.

The GOP has been successful the same way that Enron was successful. Kenny Boy created a series of companies and interlocking entities that were so complicated that nobody could understand how they worked. (In layman's terms, it's called dazzling them with bullshit.) Likewise, the Bush administration has created these alternate discourses, challenging the very nature of reality, using public relations and partisan media to confuse both the public and the press and make us all question whether we are seeing what we think we are seeing.

But as with Enron, as long as the party's raging nobody sees the need to look too deeply, certainly not the corporate media who are benefitting from Republican governance. Like them, Wall Street was not kind, if you'll recall, to the few analysts who dared to question whether what Enron was claiming in its financials made any sense. The day finally came, however, when the house of cards that Lay built blew apart. Reality hadn't been repealed, after all, and two plus two equalled four again. Wall Street turned on its winner and turned it into a loser overnight.

Tom Delay, Gorver Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, Tom Davis, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove and a bunch of other high level Republicans have likewise built a byzantine corrupt political machine. And just as the laws of the financial markets cannot be suspended forever, rampant illegal political behavior will eventually bump up against the rule of law.

The legal system may be the last remaining institution that is not subject to the post modern manipulation of reality that has been the hallmark of Republican crooks like Ken Lay and Karl Rove for the past decade. Facts and conclusions are tested in a rather stringent system that requires, at least, that both sides get an equal hearing and where people are held accountable for what they say. Even if the legal system becomes rife with corrupt judges and prosecutors, and its rulings keep political criminals out of jail, its procedures alone guarantee that a certain threshold of factual reality at least be tested.

David Safavian apparently thought that he could get away with "spinning" the Republican Senate and the FBI under oath. He was only half right. There is a lot of speculation that Karl Rove did the same thing, probably believing that his position as the most powerful man in the US government protected him. Tom Delay and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed and others may still believe they will get away with what they've done. And they may. We know they certainly would if it were left up to the press to pursue them on their own.

But you never know what a prosecutor will do and you never know what might offend a judge, no matter how politically powerful the subject is. Some of them might even feel they are an equal branch of government with their own perogatives. Juries are completely unreliable when it comes to understanding how powerful men should not be held liable for the same kind of crimes committed by the masses. Once inside the legal system, spin and PR lose a huge amount of their power. There is someone there whose job it is to unspin the spin and there are rules in place that force people to sit still and listen.

At some point the operators become lazy and hubristic and forget to cover their tracks and these corrupt pyramid operations lose their power when they come up against institutions based on reason and the laws of nature. Neither the financial markets or the legal system can sustain faith-based, marketing-style fantasies over the long haul. Reality is a tough competitor.

Howard Dean's "culture of corruption" was prescient. Brownie and Karl Rove are the poster boys for a national congressional campaign in 2006.



.
digby 9/21/2005 11:48:00 AM |

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

 
Oppose John Roberts

Culture Kitchen has posted a letter from bloggers to the Judiciary Committee opposing the confirmation of John Roberts on the basis of certain rulings that make it clear he is hostile to Roe vs. Wade. I think it's perfectly obvious that he's going to vote to overturn and have, therefore, signed this letter.

I believe that a woman's right to choose gets to the very heart of what it means to be an autonomous, free human being. Control of one's own body is fundamental to individual liberty. If the church believes that abortion is morally wrong it should instruct its voluntary membership not to do it. Individuals must always be allowed to follow their own consciences. But there should be no legal coercion on such a personal matter.

The only issue the government could be called upon to arbitrate is if the fetus has an equal right to life as the woman in whose body it lives. But there is really no argument about that. There is almost nobody who believes that an abortion is wrong if the life of the woman is at stake. Indeed, the vast majority (80%+) of Americans believe that abortion should be available at least in cases of rape or incest, so it is clear that the "abortion is murder" argument is illegitimate. No one can believe that it is moral to murder a person because of the way he or she was conceived, or by whom.

Therefore, the right of the fetus is not the real issue --- the reasons a woman wants an abortion are the issue. This leads us to ask which particular circumstances are so difficult for a woman that she may be allowed to have an abortion. 80% or so of Americans think that rape or incest are such circumstances. But how about a failing, abusive marriage? A terminal illness? Five other children and no job? Being 43 years old and carrying a child with serious birth defects? Being a foolish 15 year old girl in love? Should we make exceptions for some of those? Any of them? Who decides? You? Me? John Roberts?

This isn't about murder and it isn't about the right of the fetus. It's clearly about controlling women's personal moral behavior. I don't think the government has any business doing that.

Unlike some others, I think it's quite likely that the court will overturn with these two new Bush justices as soon as they get the right case. This is simply too vital to the conservative cause. The notion that they want to milk it is quite right, of course, but I think they will happily run on abortion in individual states for as long as they can. Milking the issue seems to me to be much more likely if it's turned back to the states than if it's not.

John Roberts is a professional movement conservative at the very top of the food chain. His wife is the president of "Feminists For Life." He will vote to overturn and make women fight in more than half the states of this country for a basic right they've taken for granted for over a generation. It is depressingly likely he will be confirmed, but I'm glad to go on record opposing him.



.
digby 9/20/2005 05:38:00 PM |

 
He Comes from Such A Nice Family, Too

The clueless Richard Cohen is predictably making the vapid cocktail party argument that Bush can't be a racist because some of his best cabinet members are black and because he thinks little black children are just adorable. Here's Cohen scolding those of us who suspect that all those black people down in Louisiana might be giving some red state Republicans the vapors:

We owe the poor our special consideration. We especially owe the black poor an appreciation of their plight and their dolorous history. But in general it was incompetence, not racism, that slowed the relief effort -- incompetence on the local and state levels, too, and incompetence on the part of black as well as white public officials. The search for racist scapegoats does the poor no good. This relief effort ought to start, above all, with some clear thinking.

How about simple minded bullshit? Apparently, one can't be racist and incompetent at the same time. Or racism is impossible if some of one's best friends are black and you are kind to little black children when you see them. And if some black people are incompetent then whites can't be racist. My goodness, just look at all the things that make it impossible for George W. Bush's administration to have even one racist bone in its collective body! You have to be out of your mind to think that George W. Bush isn't completely color blind.

Bush, in this case, was an equal opportunity bungler -- but ... it rests on a stereotype: Republicans tend to wear lime green pants in the summer and dislike black people all year round. There was more than a little truth to this at one time. The GOP, after all, became a safe haven for Southern bigots who fled the Democratic Party (as Lyndon Johnson knew they would) in the civil rights era. The fight for the rights of blacks turned Dixie as Republican as it once was Democratic. To its everlasting shame, the GOP continues to benefit from raw bigotry.

But Bush is not cut from that cloth. He is a contemporary Republican, a person of another generation who, you may have noticed, has a black woman as secretary of state and had a black man before her. Under him, the GOP began an outreach to black Americans, and unless the Democrats wake up it will ultimately succeed. As Karl Rove well knows, all he has to do is pick up a small percentage of the black vote and he ends the current 50-50 electoral split. Bush, who won an impressive 27 percent of the black vote in his reelection bid for Texas governor, could have been the man to do this. His task is a lot harder now.

That nice man George W. Bush is being unfairly tarred with all that old racist nonsense when all he wanted was to reach out. Damn you Kanye West, you little stereotyping bastard.

But it isn't just Kanye, is it? The more than 90% of African Americans who vote for the Democrats also need to be schooled about what a nice friendly color blind party the GOP is. They seem to think that Republican racism still exists and that George W. Bush leads a party that could quite believably refuse to respond to a national disaster promptly because many of the victims were black. Somebody needs to clue them all in about how racism is dead and the Republicans have their best interests at heart. They don't seem to have gotten the memo.

It's guys like Richard Cohen, millionaire liberal beltway pundit who know the score. African Americans are the racists and it's the millionaire conservative Republicans who are being unfairly stereotyped. He knows this because he knows George Bush. Like when he wrote:

Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush."

He's got quite the insight, doesn't he?

Pay no attention to the fact that the modern Republican Party remains in the clutches of a strong minority of racists --- potentially as large a faction as their conservative Christian base, which likely overlaps it. Bush may not personally be a racist, I have no way of knowing what's "in his heart." But he is quite well aware of the fact that all the racists in the country who voted, voted for him.

And this is what that racist constituency thinks of Bush's famous choices of black faces for his cabinet:

Tokenism

to·ken·ism Pronunciation Key (tk-nzm)
n.

1. The policy of making only a perfunctory effort or symbolic gesture toward the accomplishment of a goal, such as racial integration.

2. The practice of hiring or appointing a token number of people from underrepresented groups in order to deflect criticism or comply with affirmative action rules: “Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse” (Mary Daly).

While Bush's tokenism is designed to soothe gullible dipshit white urbanites like Richard Cohen it also placates the racist base with winks and nods. Cohen may not know tokenism when he sees it, but African Americans, neo-confederates and general bigots certainly do.

Tokenism does not mean that the token is unqualified. Condi Rice and Colin Powell were completely qualified for their jobs. But their purpose in this administration was to soothe the white Republicans who are uncomfortable with overt racism into believing that the Party is no longer affiliated with such unpleasantness.

We know exactly what game they are playing by simply observing that in South Carolina, George Bush made a trek to the notoriously racist Bob Jones University to make sure that certain people understood that his happy talk about Condi and compassionate conservatism wasn't anything they had to worry about. They needed to make sure they stopped John McCain dead in his tracks and they did --- with a purely racist appeal that included some very nasty stuff about his having a black daughter. This is the line they walk. The majority in this country are no longer comfortable with overt racism and frowns upon those who embrace it openly. But it is completely absurd to think that it has been eradicated or that the leader of the Republican Party rejects it. He can't reject it, even if he wants to. Racists are a significant part of his constituency.

As to whether it affected the hurricane response, it's highly unlikely that anyone sitting in Washington said, "take your time Brownie, it's just a bunch o' negroes." I don't know why people persist in thinking that this must work on the most obvious level in order to be true. It is, as I've written, far more likely that the response was delayed because the authorities in New Orleans at all levels held back out of fear of a black mob.

It's what happens going forward that will really show how the lines are drawn. Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, after all, are red states. (Louisiana is only ever Democratic by dint of the African Americans in New Orleans --- a problem that may have been solved by Katrina if Karl Rove has his way. ) These are his people and it's the very heart of the Republican south; you had better bet that Haley Barbour expects him to deliver the goods. But he also has to be careful that this federal money isn't seen as going to blacks at the expense of whites. So, they are sending signals, loud and clear, to anyone who's paying attention.

For instance, the Section 8 issue. It seems that many Washington types still harbor some idea that if only the government would beef up Section 8 money all these displaced people in New Orleans could find apartments and there wouldn't have to be any Bushville trailer parks built. And it is a nice thought. However, nobody wants to admit why it isn't being pushed despite it's long history of bipartisan support. It isn't a big guvmint liberal program after all. It's a voucher program, used in the private sector.

The reason the Bush administration is not pushing this is two-fold. The first, of course, is that the contracts for the Bushvilles are going to be very lucrative and Brownie's bud Joe Allbaugh needs to deliver some love to his employers. The other is that Karl Rove knows very well that many people in the region are very hostile to the idea of all these black New Orleanians moving into their neighborhoods. Section 8 is one of those neat idealistic conservative ideas that comes smack up against long term racist attitudes. It's all well and good in theory, but when it comes to living next door to these displaced victims, a lot of southern Republicans hit their limits. Yet these people have to live somewhere, hence the segregated Bushville trailer parks that will serve everyone's needs very well --- except, of course, the black citizens of New Orleans who have no place else to go.

One might also ask why are they making a show of eliminating affirmative action plans? It's just a three month temporary exemption for certain small firms that have never worked for the feds before, yet the headlines are screaming. Why would they hit the hornets nest at a time like this for something so insignificant? Plenty of work is going to be available so there is no serious competition for jobs. But it does make a serious statement, doesn't it, and one that seems inexplicable in light of the fact that there are so many poor black people who need jobs. Unless, of course, it's to placate a base that wants federal money but believes that blacks are always the beneficiaries instead of them. This says that Bush is making sure the money is going to the "right" people --- the ones who really deserve the jobs.

Richard Cohen does not want to believe that a nice well-educated baby boomer from a good family can be a racist. And when he sees that Bush can sit in the same room with the extremely well educated, accomplished Condi and Colin, he is assured that it is impossible for him to be one. But even if that were true, Richard Cohen needs to open his eyes and see that the Republican party's base contains a significant faction of racists who must be catered to by the well bred son of the white pompadoured lady, Barbara Bush. It's unpleasant. I understand that. But unless liberals at least learn to read the language these people are speaking we are never going to be able to combat it.

If we want to break the electoral hold the Republicans have on the south we had better recognise that listening to Mudcat Saunders wax on about fast cars and big guns doesn't really address the problem. Bill Clinton had a good ear for this kind of thing and was able to make enough inroads in the south to eke out two wins in two three person races. But he was a very talented fellow who was able to walk a fine line, drawling a middle of the road code that leaned heavily on "welfare reform" and "putting 100,000 cops on the streets" to convince certain wafflers that he felt their pain. (Of course, his FEMA would have done a much better job of managing the recovery so perhaps he could have succesfully mitigated the knee jerk racist recoil against big guvmint.)

We will never get there as long as anyone on the planet thinks that the likes of Richard Cohen speak for the Democrats. As I've said before, guys like Cohen are what's killing us. Here is exhibit #567.



.
digby 9/20/2005 01:12:00 PM |

Monday, September 19, 2005

 
Pssssst

If you like Paul Krugman, Gary Farber has a post you need to read.



.
digby 9/19/2005 06:02:00 PM |

 
Dubious Honor

Andrew Sullivan has named an award after Matt Yglesias for pointing out that the DHS was a stupid Democratic idea in the first place. Huzzah for Matt. Sullivan says:

Good stuff. Keep the honesty coming. If you see a right- or left-wing writer fessing up to their own side's errors or mistakes, let me know. We need more of it.

He is going to be very, very busy. It seems that all I ever read on the left is complaints about how the Democrats are spineless, useless fuck-ups --- which the right agrees with wholeheartedly. I could find endless examples every day of lefty bloggers howling complaints about the Democrats' errors and mistakes.

I've got one. How about the amazingly stupid idea of the leadership of the Democratic Party supporting the Iraq war?

Or how about this one? All the wimpy Democrats who signed on to the Defense Of Marriage Act and the wimpy Democratic president who signed it?

I've got a million of them.

Do I win a prize?



.
digby 9/19/2005 05:30:00 PM |

 
I Fear Huckabee and Other Blogger Laments

Along with MSNBC's Tom Curry, CNN's Jackie Schechner, the NYT's Matt Bai and a sprinkling of party operatives and interest group reps, The Note attended a regular meeting of the Internet Left at Townhouse Tavern in Dupont Circle on Sunday. Here is what we took away:

1. Mike Huckabee instills fear.

2. Hillary Clinton provokes scorn.

3. Russ Feingold inspires passion.

4. And John Edwards' early focus on poverty — coupled with Elizabeth Edwards' statement of support for Cindy Sheehan — is getting him a second look from this crowd.

How typical that the Kewl Kidz at The Note need to attend a DC gathering of bloggers to find out what the Internet Left really thinks. Bloggers' defining characteristic, after all, is that they write down every single passing political thought right on these here internets for everybody to see.

Or do they? This fear of Huckabee thing had me stumped. I haven't heard anything about it, but then it's always possible that the Internet Left is an exclusive club that someone such as I wouldn't know about. I thought I did. I even get the e-mails. I spend neurotic amounts of time scouring the blogs for the latest news and here I find out that there's a whole level of insight that apprently exists only at the elite personal Internet Left level.

So, left to my own out-of-it devices, I resorted to the outsider's friend, Mr Google, and I find out that Mike Huckabee is running for president (or acting a lot like he is, anyway.) Here's an editorial from the September 16, Arkansas Dem Gazette:

Having watched Mike Huckabee in action for nine years now, it’s clear the man has his priorities straightest when times are worst. The highlights of his career tend to coincide with lowlights: the day Jim Guy Tucker wouldn’t leave the governor’s post, the aftermath of 9/11, the ice storm, the 40 th anniversary of the Central High Crisis . . . .

Each time, Mike Huckabee stepped up. Big time.

How does he do it? It’s a simple formula, really: Do what’s right and worry about the bureaucratic red tape later. Or to quote Governor/still-Reverend Huckabee:

"What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do? I’ll tell you what he’d do. He would try to make sure these needs were met."

This guy's running for president and he appears to have all the rhetorical gifts of George W. Bush without the gravitas (although he did successfully manage Arkansas' response to 9/11 and the 40th anniversary of the Central High Crisis Crisis so he's a proven leader. Big Time.)

Ok. I'm on board with the Inner Internet Left's fear of Mike Huckabee. Dear Gawd, save us.

Atrios has more today on the Karl Rove official fan club and fluffing society, otherwise known as The Note. This one's a killer:

The press and the Democrats are still demonizing Karl Rove's involvement in anything and everything, expressing shock and horror that a deputy White House chief of staff with wide-ranging applicable experience is helping to oversee the Katrina response.

Were the Kewl Kidz still tugging on their thongs at Club Med when the whole "Man Called Brownie" thing came down? Apparently so, or these astute observers of the political scene would notice that the optics of Bush putting his primo political advisor in charge of a massive reconstruction job might just look a little as if he's putting politics over competence --- again. But hey, there's no margin in taking on the Rovester, at least if you want to be invited to insider fetes where the great man freely speaks his mind off the record:

Karl Rove, President Bush's top political advisor and deputy White House chief of staff, spoke at businessman Teddy Forstmann's annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend. Here is what Rove had to say that the press wasn't allowed to report.


On Katrina: The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government...

On The Anti-War Movement: Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally...

On Bush's Low Poll Numbers: We have not been good at explaining the success in Iraq. Polls go up and down and don't mean anything...

On Iraq: There has been a big difference in the region. Iraq will transform the Middle East...

On Judy Miller And Plamegate: Judy Miller is in jail for reasons I don't really understand...

On Joe Wilson: Joe Wilson and I attend the same church but Joe goes to the wacky mass...

In attendance at the conference, among others were: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Moonves, Tom Freston, Tom Friedman, Bob Novak, Barry Diller, Martha Stewart, Margaret Carlson, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Norman Pearlstein and Walter Isaacson.

We have the president's top advisor and political machine builder speaking before this group of media elites, all of whom are sworn to secrecy. We hoi polloi wouldn't know anything about this if it weren't for a wee whistelblower who told Arianna. Can we all see the problem here folks? (Hint: it ain't partisanship.)

Which brings me to this very intriguing article in this week's LA Weekly. Read it all, but this passage was particularly on point:

If big media look like they’re propping up W’s presidency, they are. Because doing so is good for corporate coffers — in the form of government contracts, billion-dollar tax breaks, regulatory relaxations and security favors. At least that wily old codger Sumner Redstone, head of Viacom, parent company of CBS, has admitted what everyone already knows is true: that, while he personally may be a Democrat, “It happens that I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.”

I don't know how many of you have worked for a corporation, but those of you who have know what that means. If you want to make it in a big organization you listen when the big bosses say things like that.

Whoever wrote that little blurb on The Note about Karl Rove (this past week-end's marquee entertainment for all the movers and shakers in Big Media) knows that his or her corporate bosses believe that Republicans are better for business --- and they will appreciate any employees who recognise that corporate priorities are career makers. None of this has to be stated out loud. Any ambitious journalist who wants to sit at Tom Friedman's table knows what to do without even being told. Indeed, he knows what to do without even consciously thinking about it. It's the way the world works.

And as for the people listening to Uncle Karl regale them with delicious little tidbits about which they can only talk to other privileged establishment players and courtiers, well let's just say that I cannot help but laugh out loud at the notion that they are committed to truth --- or even reality. Indeed, it seems to me that we are living in entirely different worlds. They are not custodians of democracy, they are insider usurpers of it.

This is not to say that blogs are the answer to our woes. I recognise that blogs (such as Time's blog of the year just today) are living in an echo chamber of a different sort --- as do many of us on the left. But, I think we are, or have been, a populist voice which is at this point a very necessary counterpoint to the effete, arid babble of the insider cognoscenti. There is, at least, some fresh air to breathe in the blogosphere.

Peter Daou has written an extremely interesting piece that speaks to this today in which he reveals some of his travails as someone who tried to explain the emerging power of the netroots to the staid strategists of the Kerry campaign. Among other things, he concluded that blogs need to engage the mainstream media and the party structure in order to influence the conventional wisdom.

Should we conclude, then, that the inability of bloggers on the left and right to alter or create conventional wisdom means that they have negligible political clout? If the netroots can’t change CW without the mass media and the political establishment, and if the mass media and the political establishment can change CW without the netroots (which seems undeniable), then isn’t the blog world a relatively powerless echo chamber? The answer, of course, is no.

Bloggers can exert disproportionate pressure on the media and on politicians. Reporters, pundits, and politicians read blogs, and, more importantly, they care what bloggers say about them because they know other reporters, pundits, and politicians are reading the same blogs. It’s a virtuous circle for the netroots and a source of political power. The netroots can also bring the force of sheer numbers to bear on a non-compliant politician, reporter, or media outlet. Nobody wants a flood of complaints from thousands of angry activists. And further, bloggers can raise money, fact-check, and help break stories and/or keep them in circulation long enough for the media and political establishment to pick them up.

Consequently, bloggers, though unable to change conventional wisdom on their own, are able to use these proficiencies and resources to persuade the media and political establishment to join them in pushing a particular story or issue.

The blogosphere is full of calls to arms and polemics and analysis all of which are, to varying degrees, politically empowering. I've often said that we are the heirs to the revolutionary war era's pamphleteers, only in electronic form and I proudly number myself amongst them. But, like Peter, I think that the blogosphere's most important purpose at this point in its very new history is to serve as a check on the insular journalistic elites that make up the corporate media hierarchy and the DC beltway press. And I think we already do this in a couple of different ways, neither of which were invented by bloggers but which were made possible for the masses to participate in by technology.

I realize that he is long out of fashion and probably politically incorrect to evoke in these conservative times, but I think that bloggers can be, at our best, the heirs to IF Stone, who famously said that the Washington Post was an exciting paper to read because "you would never know on what page you would find a page one story." Like Stone, we are always looking for the page one story that's buried on page 15. Our capacity to use collective energy to scour newpapers and other publications for the small details that can lead to a bigger story is one of the innovations of blogging. We are using the modern investigative tools at our disposal to follow up on the "shirt tail hanging out" as he used to call it --- the little detail that leads one to delve more deeply into the story and get to the larger truth. Technology, of course, is key --- but so is the aggregate energy of thousands of individuals putting it to work.

And I also think we change the dialog in a way that's too subtle to measure but is vital nonetheless. While we were unable to influence the media prior to the Iraq war, our arguments, honed over the course of two years of non-stop writing, analysing and fist shaking, meant that when the tide of public opinion began to turn, the media and at least some members of the public had an understanding of events that they wouldn't have had if we had not been screaming into the void. I believe that the concentration of words that had been pushed into the ether helped opinion to move faster than it would have otherwise. And it prepared the press to finally admit what they saw with their own eyes when confronted with the Katrina cock-up.

Like Stone, who was an early skeptic of Vietnem, the bloggers of the left, operating outside any party hierarchy and completely outside the establishment, were the earliest off the mark on the debacle that has become Iraq. We were skeptical because we weren't immersed in the conventional beltway wisdom that said we had to support the war. Unlike those who were angling for jobs or social approbation or credibility among the beltway elites, we just said what we thought. There is value in that.

We outsiders can probably be the worst cynics around --- but I would say that when it comes to power, we are far more likely to be right than wrong. As Stone said, "If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words: Governments lie."

For structural reasons as much as anything, the blogosphere is filling a void that IF Stone's retirement left unfilled during those long years in which the right built up its media infrastructure. We are telling the truth as we see it. That's not to say that it is always a pure and clear reflection of reality. But it is, at least, authentic and sincere which is something that one cannot say about the media elite or the climbers who aspire to it. There is value in that too.






In other blogging news:

EvolveTV, which many of my readers have asked me about about, and about which I knew absolutely nothing, is done teasing and has announced its intentions. It looks to be a lot of fun -- a streaming TV show featuring all your favorite bloggers like Atrios, Kos, Juan Cole, PZ Myers etc. Check it out.



.
digby 9/19/2005 10:49:00 AM |

Friday, September 16, 2005

 
Boondoggle Part Deux

Yesterday morning a friend sent me the following article from the Wall Street Journal:

After Katrina, Republicans
Back a Sea of Conservative Ideas
By JOHN R. WILKE and BRODY MULLINS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 15, 2005; Page B1

Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond.

Some new measures are already taking shape. In the past week, the Bush administration has suspended some union-friendly rules that require federal contractors pay prevailing wages, moved to ease tariffs on Canadian lumber, and allowed more foreign sugar imports to calm rising sugar prices. Just yesterday, it waived some affirmative-action rules for employers with federal contracts in the Gulf region.

Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims' right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction. Yesterday, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would offer sweeping protection against lawsuits to any person or organization that helps Katrina victims without compensation.

"The desire to bring conservative, free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot," says Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who leads the Republican Study Group, an influential caucus of conservative House members. "We want to turn the Gulf Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a federal city where New Orleans once was."

Many of the ideas under consideration have been pushed by the 40-member study group, which is circulating a list of "free-market solutions," including proposals to eliminate regulatory barriers to awarding federal funds to religious groups housing hurricane victims, waiving the estate tax for deaths in the storm-affected states; and making the entire region a "flat-tax free-enterprise zone."

Members of the group met in a closed session Tuesday night at the conservative Heritage Foundation headquarters here to map strategy. Edwin Meese, the former Reagan administration attorney general, has been actively involved.

Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R., Kan.) said that the plans under development "are all part of a philosophy of lowering costs for doing business." He said southern Louisiana,Mississippi and Alabama offer a "microcosm" where new ideas can be applied to speed the rebuilding.

The proposals to cut taxes and waive regulations come after Congress quickly approved $62.8 billion in federal spending for the Gulf Coast, and is expected to approve further spending that will push the price tag above $100 billion.

Some of the proposals are attracting fire from Democrats. "They're going back to the playbook on issues like tort reform, school vouchers and freeing business from environmental rules to achieve ideological objectives they haven't been able to get in the normal legislative process," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D., Ill.)

In response, Democrats are pressing for other proposals that suit their ideology. Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois has suggested creating a national emergency airlift program so that U.S. airlines can help evacuate Americans from areas before a natural disaster strike. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu unveiled a plan that would, among other things, preserve victims' Medicaid health coverage, provide $2,500 education grants to displaced students and give victims a 180-day extension on outstanding loan payments.

Trial lawyers were quick to attack the bill the House passed yesterday on a voice vote to limit lawsuits against volunteers saying it prevents airlines, hospitals, stadiums, and bus companies from being held accountable for misconduct or negligence. In a statement, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America said, "If a nursing home resident evacuated from New Orleans to a nursing home in a neighboring state dies of untreated, infected pressure sores, the out-of-state home would be protected."

The bill's chief sponsor, Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, said in a statement that the legislation removes the "threat of legal fear that stands between many willing and able Good Samaritans and the victims of Hurricane Katrina." The bill does permit lawsuits for injuries that were caused "by willful, wanton, reckless, or criminal conduct."

Some conservatives expressed concern about the growing reach of the reconstruction effort. "Everyone is attaching their own agenda to this," said William A. Niskanen, a former Reagan White House economic adviser now at the libertarian Cato Institute. "It's being seen as a test of the conservative agenda, from enterprise zones to school vouchers and the repeal of labor laws, and these ideas deserve careful thought," he said. "But [the massive spending] could also create expectations that we can do this every time a disaster hits."

Some of the proposals are unlikely to win quick passage. But congressional tax-writing committees hope to approve legislation within days to offer $5 billion in
tax relief and other aid to residents of areas hit by the storm. The legislation would, among other things, let victims withdraw money from retirement accounts without penalty, give tax incentives to those who house evacuees and give companies incentives to hire displaced workers.

Republicans, meanwhile, say they will also press for a new round of energy concessions, including incentives to rebuild and expand offshore drilling and clear the way for new refineries that were dropped from a 500-page energy bill that passed last month.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton of Texas and Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman James Inhofe are working on bills that would encourage refineries to build new plants and expand existing ones by rolling back environmental rules and making it easier for refineries to navigate regulatory channels in Washington.

Republicans hope Hurricane Katrina prods Congress to approve a second energy
bill this fall that includes several provisions that were dropped from the first bill.

The National Petrochemical & Refineries Association would like lawmakers to reduce the depreciation period from 10 years to five years in order to stimulate investment. Some refineries are talking about reviving an effort to get liability protection for producing the fuel additive methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE. Both were dropped from the earlier energy bill at the insistence of Democrats.

Then last night Bush gave a speech which many liberals are lauding, and conservatives are decrying, as a capitulation to liberal ideals. They seem to be convinced that our man Bush has had a change of heart and is going to spend lots of money on big government programs to help the poor. And, by gosh, he even admitted that the history of racism in this country had contributed to African American poverty. Praise Jesus! He's seen the light.

I missed the speech last night but I was on the road and tuned into KTALK shortly , the liberal talk radio station here in LA shortly after it was over and heard Johnny Wendell, whom I usually quite like, saying that he hadn't heard a politician say anything like this in 30 years. And he thought that it was such good news that we should give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt. It just proved that the era of Republican small government conservatism was over and liberalism was back, baby!

I was confused. I had read that article in the morning, after all. Then I came home and fired up the creaky computer and saw that Karl Rove was in charge of the rebuilding effort. Ah.

Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative" pushing the slogan of the very liberal Children's Defense Fund as one of his signature issues (No Child Left Behind.) He's always used liberal rhetoric and programmatic boilerplate to sell himself as a "new kinda Republican." It's just that being kinder and gentler has been out of fashion since he donned the codpiece after 9/11. There is nothing new in this. And it is in no sense some sort of capitulation. Republicans have been stealing liberal rhetoric for some time now, particularly when it comes to pretending to care about people they really don't care about. Gingrich showed that hard edged conservative rhetoric is deeply unpopular. People want to hear their leaders pretend to care, even if they don't. Karl Rove knows what works --- and they know that the dipshit pundits love it when a Republican says it because anything counter-intuitive becomes "bold" and "politically courageous."

And, I thought we all understood by now that there is no relationship between what the Republicans say and what they do.

The model we should look at is the Coalition Provisional Government in Iraq. That too was going to be a bold and courageous experiment in laissez-faire wet-dream governance. Instead it was the biggest boondoggle in history with more than 8.8 billion dollars officially unaccounted for and undoubtedly tens of billions more wasted on fraud and corruption. Bush's base, by which I mean corporate America, did very, very well. They will undoubtedly do well in Boondoggle Part Two as well.

I cannot believe that any liberal in the country would take George W Bush's word about anything at this point, but apparently we all haven't learned our lesson yet. I'm not sure what it will take, to tell you the truth. But for those of you who believe he has somehow capitulated to liberal ideals, I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine from an African nation whose funds have been frozen ....



.
digby 9/16/2005 05:29:00 PM |

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

 
Brownie's Brotherhood

When the argument about civil service protections first surfaced during the intitial debates about the Department of Homeland Security, a lot of us knew that the danger was that the department would become a dumping ground for political patronage jobs. That's one of the ways a party builds a successful political machine. (You need to have a way to reward your loyal ground troops --- the government contracts and tax loopholes don't get out the vote.) Indeed, it was the creation of the civil service that succesfully reduced the dominance of the political machines at the beginning of the last century.

As poor little Brownie shows, this presents serious problems for government efficiency. Working on campaigns or in a press office does not qualify someone to run a large department or give them any expertise in anything but politics.

MPetrelis over at DKos* has unearthed this little gem of an example. Meet Matt Mayer the "Acting Executive Director, Chief of Staff, and Senior Policy Advisor for the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness (SLGCP) in the Office of the Secretary in the Department of Homeland Security (Homeland Security)."

Guess what Matt's department does?

SLCGP is the primary office responsible for terrorism preparedness in Homeland Security. SLGCP provides training, funds for the purchase of equipment, support for the planning and execution of exercises, technical assistance and other support to assist states and local jurisdictions prevent, plan for, and respond to acts of terrorism. SLCGP also is the primary point of contact for state and local governments with Homeland Security.

Mayer is a young Republican lawyer who graduated from law school in 1997 and worked on redistricting issues in Colorado in 2000. Colorado Governor Owens appointed him to a Judicial District Nominating Commission in 2001.

Somewhere along the line Mayer hooked up with a rising politician named Rick O'Donnell and ran his losing campaign for congress in 2002. Shortly thereafter, O'Donnell was appointed to run a state regulatory agency where Mayer worked as his Deputy. On February 1st, 2004 Matt Mayer became the Acting Executive Director, Chief of Staff, and Senior Policy Advisor for the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness (SLGCP) in the Office of the Secretary in the Department of Homeland Security.

Matt Mayer is no Brownie, but he had almost no experience before he took on a huge role in the Department of Homeland security. His resume is a thing of padded beauty.

This article, which mentions Mayer's start date, discusses the brain drain at DHS as political appointees were brought in in 2004. It isn't only FEMA.




*My information is a bit different from the original DKOS diary. I can't account for why the news stories he cited say what they say, but it's clear that Mayer went to DHS in 2004, not 2005.



.
digby 9/14/2005 11:32:00 AM |

 
Who's Sorry Now

Kevin Drum, noticing the pundits' amazed tone yesterday, asked last night whether it was true that Bush accepted blame less often than other presidents and noted that Clinton didn't step up for anything but Lewinsky and that was after months of prevaricating.

I don't think it's that other president's accept blame more often, although some, like JFK, famously did and enhanced their popularity by doing so. The reason why it's so amazing is that Bush has presided over a terrorist attack on US soil and an intelligence failure of epic proportions in Iraq and has not only failed to take even one iota of responsibility, but actually rewarded the people who dropped the ball. It's the scope of his errors that sets his unwillingness to take responsibility on a different level than other presidents.

There are many ways that presidents admit responsibility besides publicly issuing the big mea culpa. Clinton fired people and withdrew nominations and did many things in response to public outcry. He changed course when it was clear things weren't working and announced it publicly. Bush, on the other hand, goes out of his way to pretend that he is "staying the course" even when he has quite obviously changed it. His unwillingness to even admit a small change in policy is absolute. His stubbornness on more petty matters such as his insistence on installing John Bolton at the UN just reinforces the fact that he is not only incapable of admitting a mistake or taking responsibility for his administration's failures --- he will use raw political power to get his way even when he's clearly wrong.

The response to Katrina is just the latest in a series of epic mistakes. And the shock isn't that he's finally admitted that he, as president, bears some responsibility for the failures of this latest cock-up --- it's that it's the first time political conditions have been such that he was required to do so.

It would appear that after hearing four years of "we could never have imagined" and "if we'd known we would have moved heaven and earth" and "stuff happens" people finally (if temporarily) awakened to the idea that these guys are fuck-ups. His approval ratings were sliding so precipitously that they obviously felt they had to try to stop the bleeding in some novel new way --- letting buck stop (sort of) at the president. It may very well be too late though. The cumulative effect of all those excuses and stubborn refusals to admit wrongdoing may be overwhelming now.

This speech Thursday night had better be good.



.
digby 9/14/2005 10:29:00 AM |

 
Hack Diplomacy


Someone (Josh Marshall?) put out the call the other day for examples of other federal departments filled with political hacks. I've just noticed a doozy, featuring my favorite uber-operative, Jim Wilkinson.

Here's some backround on Jimbo from last fall:

Jim Wilkinson (James R. Wilkinson), who served as General Tommy R. Franks' director of strategic communications, is deputy national security advisor for communications as of December 2003. Wilkinson "will craft long-term messaging strategy for the National Security Council" and report to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and White House communications director Dan Bartlett.[1]

Prior to his return to the White House, Wilkinson briefly served as director of communications for the Republican National Convention, which will take place in New York City Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, 2004. "His office, on the 18th floor over Madison Square Garden, is furnished with the essentials: leather-bound Bible, Yankee cap, Fox News on the flat-screen TV. ... His task: establish a communications center in the core of the media capital of the Western world."

"Mr. Wilkinson is bringing the lessons about access and message that the Bush administration learned in Gulf War II--where he helped to manage the program of embedding reporters in combat units--to the home front. ... As for talent, he had General Tommy Franks; now he's got [New York] Governor George Pataki."

"Formerly a political operative, Mr. Wilkinson was put in the position of feeding, informing and calming the most motivated media army in the world in Qatar. There, inside the massive telecommunications studio assembled by the U.S. Army and the Bush administration, he earned both the enmity and admiration of various parts of the worldwide press during war in a technologically superb and informationally sparse desert press center. ... 'It was an unprofessional operation,' said Peter Boyer of The New Yorker, who said he landed an interview with General Franks only by going around Mr. Wilkinson to the Pentagon."

"Jim Wilkinson has gone from politics to war and back since he worked for George W. Bush in Florida during the 2000 election, and his journey is a mark of the administration's utilitarian approach to marketing war, politics and the Presidency. 'He's a man who prefers to work behind the scenes,' said the spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Jim Dyke. He's also got as pure a Republican pedigree as you can wish, and an edge honed in the bitter partisan wars between Bill Clinton and the Republican House leadership.

"Mr. Wilkinson grew up in East Texas and attended high school in Tenaha, population 1,046, then gave up plans to become an undertaker to go to work for Republican Congressman Dick Armey in 1992. Mr. Armey soon became House majority leader; his communications director, Mr. Wilkinson's mentor, was Ed Gillespie, now chairman of the R.N.C."

"Wilkinson first left his mark on the 2000 Presidential race in March 1999, when he helped package and promote the notion that Al Gore claimed to have 'invented the Internet.' Then the Texan popped up in Miami to defend Republican protesters shutting down a recount: 'We find it interesting that when Jesse Jackson has thousands of protesters in the streets, it's O.K., but when a small number of Republicans exercise their First Amendment rights, the Democrats don't seem to like it,' he told the Associated Press.

"For his troubles, Mr. Wilkinson was made deputy director of communications for planning in the Bush White House, and was among the aides who set up the Sept. 14, 2001, visit to Ground Zero that redefined George W. Bush's Presidency. During the Afghan war, he managed 'Coalition Information Centers' in Washington, D.C., and London, as well as in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Qatar, he became the point man on the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch and delivered the most memorable and sellable quote of Gulf War II: 'America doesn't leave its heroes behind,' he told reporters at a late-night briefing."

He was also a member of the famous Iraq Group and one of the authors of the White House paper called "A Decade of Defiance and Deception," (which is not, as you would naturally expect from the title, a short history of the Republican congress.)

I first noticed Wilkinson when I read Michael Wolff's great article in the New York magazine and he described a barking freakshow of a white house flack strutting around the desert in a uniform:

The next person to buttonhole me was the Centcom uber-civilian, a thirty-ish Republican operative. He was more full-metal-jacket in his approach (although he was a civilian he was, inexplicably, in uniform - making him, I suppose a sort of para-military figure): "I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don't talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning." And: "A lot of people don't like you." And then: "Don't fuck with things you don't understand." And too: "This is fucking war, asshole." And finally: "No more questions for you."

Imagine my surprise to find our old friend Jim kicked upstairs again to a much more important position in this second term. He's a senior advisor to the Secretary of State. I guess since they moved Bolton out to the UN they needed another Florida Recount hit man to catapault the propaganda.

Pat Robertson has no need to call for a nuke on Foggy Bottom. Between Wilkinson and Hughes, the State Department will be turned into FEMA in no time.


Link via Kevin at Catch, who excerpts some precious Condi quotes from her interview with the CBS editorial board. I especially liked this one:

I always found – there was an argument, you know, was Iraq supporting al-Qaida and all of these things and you know, we could round and round those arguments. I think there is plenty of evidence that there is an al-Qaida presence in Iraq. But let me set that aside for a moment.

Yep. It all depends on what the definition of is, is.



.
digby 9/14/2005 09:25:00 AM |

 
"What The Hell Do You Expect Me To Do About It?"

Do yourself a favor and check out BagNewsnotes' analysis of what is now the iconic image of Bush during the Katrina crisis --- staring out the window of AF One.

There is another picture and it's truly creepy.



.
digby 9/14/2005 09:08:00 AM |

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

 
Supreme Joke

Bob Somerby brings up something today that has bothered me for some time:

A caller to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal said that Roberts should be required to state his views on the case. As a general matter, we agree. But [Charles]Lane expressed a different view—a familiar view which has never seemed to make any real sense to us:

LANE (9/12/05): Well, the dilemma of this situation is that everybody wants to know this, everybody wants to know about it, and yet if Judge Roberts were to declare flatly at his hearing, “I would vote to overturn Roe. v. Wade,” the decision that established, or recognized, the constitutional right to choose abortion, he would then be in a position where he might have to recuse if such a case came to the Court later on because the person bringing the case could sday, “He’s already said how he’ll vote.” So in a way, Judge Roberts, just like many others who have come before the Court, face that essential dilemma.

But where’s the dilemma? Surely, Roberts knows whether he thinks Roe was correctly decided. If he thinks it was wrongly decided, he must know, as a general matter, what he thinks the decision should stand as a matter of “settled law.” (Indeed, he called Roe “settled law” in his confirmation hearing for the District Court.) Would Roberts have to recuse later on if he said what he thought about Roe? We can’t imagine why. As matters stand, sitting Justices like Scalia and Thomas have openly said, in prior rulings, what they think of Roe v. Wade; indeed, in a January 30 Post profile, Lane himself described Scalia as “an opponent of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.” Does anyone think that Scalia’s prior statements would force him to recuse in the future? The notion is completely absurd—and yet the logic is widely applied to Roberts, as Lane does above.

For years judges have been dancing around hot button issues in their confirmation hearings. I understand they do this for political reasons. But people seem to just blithely accept this notion and it's never made any sense to me either.

John Roberts has repeatedly asserted today that he cannot answer questions about any cases that may come before the court because to do so would prejudge the case. He says, for instance.

"Let me explain very briefly why. It's because if these questions
come before me either on the court on which I now sit or if I am confirmed on the Supreme Court, I need to decide those questions with an open mind, on the basis of the arguments presented, on the basis of the record presented in the case and on the basis of the rule of law, including the precedents of the court - not on the basis of any commitments during the confirmation process."

So, he's basically saying that he can only speak in the vaguest of terms about abstract legal issues because otherwise he would jeopardise his objectivity.

Now consider this dissent from Planned Parenthood vs. Casey by Antonin Scalia:

My views on this matter are unchanged from those I set forth in my separate opinions in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490, 532 (1989) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), and Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, 497 U.S. 502, 520 (1990) (Akron II) (Scalia, J., concurring). The States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so. The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting. As the Court acknowledges, "where reasonable people disagree the government can adopt one position or the other." Ante, at 8. The Court is correct in adding the qualification that this "assumes a state of affairs in which the choice does not intrude upon a protected liberty," ante, at 9--but the crucial part of that qualification is the penultimate word. A State's choice between two positions on which reasonable people can disagree is constitutional even when (as is often the case) it intrudes upon a "liberty" in the absolute sense. Laws against bigamy, for example--which entire societies of reasonable people disagree with--intrude upon men and women's liberty to marry and live with one another. But bigamy happens not to be a liberty specially "protected" by the Constitution.

His views are exquisitely clear. Why then are we to assume that he can view any new case on this issue that comes before the court with an open mind?

Meanwhile, we are forced to believe that future Chief Justice John Roberts, whom Lindsey Graham just called one of the finest minds in our time, will not be able to keep an open mind if he tells the Senate where he actually stands on issues about which virtually every American has an opinion. What kind of silly kabuki is this?

Clarence Thomas got around this by saying he'd never thought about these issues, which was absurd. I don't think anyone thinks they can get away with that again. So they've created this ridiculous rationale that if prospective judges discuss their political philosophy, express their views on commonly discussed issues or even their views on a particular settled laws, they will be unable to keep an open mind when a related case comes before them. Indeed, Charles Lane said that they would have to recuse themselves!

As Somerby asks, does anyone think that Antonin Scalia believes that he should recuse himself from hearing any cases that Roe vs Wade may be a part of since he has clearly stated that it was wrongly decided in his dissents? Of course not.

Roberts certainly cannot discuss a specific case that is coming before the court.But there is no reason that he or any other judge can't say publicly whether they believe a specific case was decided correctly or if they agree with the principles on which it was decided. That's what judges do. Or so I thought. I guess now we must pretend that a person is a blank slate until the day she decides her first casepertaining to any issue, at which point she can express opinions freely ever after and still maintain objectivity.

I realize that this little misdirection makes it possible to pretend that we have confirmation hearings instead of anointment pageants, but it's insulting nonetheless.

Roberts is obviously a very, very smart lawyer. He talked circles around everybody on the committee today. There is no doubt in my mind that he will craft beautifully reasoned, elegant decisions that will result in as much destruction of the last 75 years of social and economic progress as he can politically get away with.



.
digby 9/13/2005 02:45:00 PM |

 
Report Confirms that Louisiana Took Necessary and Timely Steps

Pursuant to a September 7 request by Representative John Conyers to review the law and legal accountability relating to Federal action in response to Hurricane Katrina, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report today about whether the Governor of Louisiana took the necessary and timely steps needed to secure disaster relief from the federal government. The report unequivocally concludes that she did.

Congressman Conyers issued the following statement:

"This report closes the book on the Bush Administration's attempts to evade accountability by shifting the blame to the Governor of Louisiana for the Administration's tragically sluggish response to Katrina. It confirms that the Governor did everything she could to secure relief for the people of Louisiana and the Bush Administration was caught napping at a critical time."

In addition to finding that "...it would appear that the Governor did take the steps necessary to request emergency and major disaster declarations for the State of Louisiana in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina. (p.11)" The report found that:

* All necessary conditions for federal relief were met on August 28. Pursuant to Section 502 of the Stafford Act, "[t]he declaration of an emergency by the President makes Federal emergency assistance available," and the President made such a declaration on August 28. The public record indicates that severa additional days passed before such assistance was actually made available to the State;

* The Governor must make a timely request for such assistance, which meets the requirements of federal law. The report states that "[e]xcept to the extent that an emergency involves primarily Federal interests, both declarations of major disaster and declarations of emergency must be triggered by a request to the President from the Governor of the affected state";

* The Governor did indeed make such a request, which was both timely and in compliance with federal law. The report finds that "Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco requested by letter dated August 27, 2005...that the President declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period from August 26, 2005 and continuing pursuant to [applicable Federal statute]" and "Governor Blanco's August 27, 2005 request for an emergency declaration also included her determination...that 'the incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of disaster."

.
digby 9/13/2005 11:21:00 AM |

Monday, September 12, 2005

 
Music City

Austin must be a swingin' town right now. I want to go there and have a beer with Amanda and Twisty Faster and listen to some fineNew Orleans music.



.
digby 9/12/2005 08:52:00 PM |

 
This is a good idea:

LOUISIANA NAACP PRESIDENT
CALLS FOR EVACUEES TO TAKE CONTROL
OF THEIR OWN DESTINY AND FORM
“SHELTER COMMITTEES”

Ernest L. Johnson, President of the Louisiana NAACP called today for Katrina evacuees in shelters to take control of their own destinies by forming SHELTER COMMITTEES.

"Each SHELTER COMMITTEE should elect a Chairperson and a Secretary and begin holding meetings, organizing, and working as a team for better treatment," Johnson said. "In unity there is strength."

Johnson called for each committee to begin writing down the name, telephone number, and next of kin of every shelter resident.

This contact information must be put into the FEMA database for evacuees to receive financial assistance.

Johnson urged each SHELTER COMMITTEE to send this information to 1755 Nicholson Drive, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70802, or to fax it to (225) 334-7491.

The Louisiana NAACP is airing public service announcements on radio stations that explain the process for bringing participatory democracy to the shelter system.

"The Louisiana NAACP is with you in solidarity," Johnson said. "The NAACP will stand with all displaced people until each and every one return to a brand-new New Orleans."

Poeple need to take some control of their lives when they are at the mercy of strangers. I suspect that a lot of them are going to find themselves in need of advocacy very soon. It would be nice if they had a system set up to advocate for themselves.


.
digby 9/12/2005 08:23:00 PM |

 
Our Little Man

When that storm came through at first, people said, whew. There was a sense of relaxation, and that's what I was referring to. And I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say, the bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to.

.
digby 9/12/2005 04:21:00 PM |

 
Boo Hoo Hoo

I just threw up a little bit in my mouth watching that addled freakshow Tom Coburn shed crocodile tears about "incivility" at the Roberts hearings. Clearly he forgot to take his meds this morning. This is the same Coburn who famously said:

"lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?"

That claim is, of course, completely false, not to mention "uncivil" beyond belief.

Everybody's asking what's the matter with Kansas. I'd like to know what the hell is wrong with Oklahoma that they send both Coburn and Inhofe, two certifiably insane politicians, to the US senate.


.
digby 9/12/2005 01:07:00 PM |

 
Tripping Over His Gum

Junior just said that the American people need to understand that he can do more than one thing at a time and that the government and other individuals can do more than one things at a time.

How does that square with this?:

"We've got to solve problems; we're problem-solvers. There will be ample time for people to figure out what went right and what went wrong. What I'm interested in is helping save lives."

The American people need to understand that he can do more than one thing at a time --- unless it's answering questions about what went wrong. He's too busy solving problems and saving lives for that.



.
digby 9/12/2005 12:45:00 PM |

 
Deja Vu All Over Again

BUSH:"Look, there will be plenty of time to play the blame game," he said. "That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to say somebody is at fault. And, look, I want to know. I want to know exactly what went on and how it went on, and we'll continually assess inside my administration."

Yes, he always wants to know the truth. Indeed he demands it.

BUSH: ... There's just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.

[...]

I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business.

He has held his staff to the highest standards on that case and I'm sure he'll do the same on this one.

(Now that poor little Brownie has resigned, some enterprising reporter needs to tell him that he's measured for a scapegoat suit. He might be feeling raw enough to spill some beans.)


.
digby 9/12/2005 11:49:00 AM |

 
American Welfare

I promise that I will write about something else today, but I want to follow up on the post below just a bit to address an issue that comes up continually among liberals. It came up during the Democratic primaries and it will come up again I'm sure. There is a great desire to pivot the conversation to poverty rather than race because people believe that we will then be able to create a class argument that can appeal to working class whites and blacks alike.

Unfortunately, in America these issues are inextricably intertwined. You will never be able to separate them because the bedrock value of American "individualism" and the belief that the poor are simply unwilling to work is directly a result of our attitudes about race.

I linked to this moldy piece of mine in the post below, but I would like to put just a part of it on the front page so that people can see what I'm talking about. Ask yourself why America has never been able to put together a decent modern welfare state (or in less politically incorrect parlance --- a robust safety net) when all the other first world democracies (and some second world democracies) have.

It comes down to the veto power or dominance of the conservative southern states in electoral politics, just as we see it today. And it is one reason we have been unable to advance liberal government programs short of a national crisis or brief period of consensus --- and win much in the south since 1968.

The question has always been, why don’t southern working class whites vote their economic self-interest?

In this paper (pdf) Sociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard), who has long been interested in the question of America’s underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question --- “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality” which may give us some clues. Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, "Why Doesn't the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?" (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001) he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy goes back to the beginning of the republic. But what is interesting is that both he and the economists offer some pretty conclusive evidence that the main reason for American “exceptionalism” in this case is, quite simply, racism.

AGS [Alesina, Glazear and Sacerdote] report, using the World Values Survey, that "opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition. For example, according to the World Values Survey, whereas 70 % of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imperfections in society, not their own laziness, 70 % of Americans hold the opposite view.... 71 % of Americans but only 40% of Europeans said ...poor people could work their way out of poverty."

[…]

"Racial fragmentation and the disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities among the poor played a major role in limiting redistribution.... Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs."(p. 61)

"Endogenous" is economics-ese for saying we have the political system we do because we prefer the results it gives, such as limiting redistribution to the blacks. Thus the racial factor as well as a wider net of social beliefs play a key role in why Americans don't care about income inequality, and why, not caring, they have no great interest in expanding the welfare state.

Glazer goes on to point out how these attitudes may have come to pass historically by discussing the roles that the various immigrant support systems and the variety of religious institutions provided for the poor:

But initial uniformities were succeeded by a diversity which overwhelmed and replaced state functions by nonstate organizations, and it was within these that many of the services that are the mark of a fully developed welfare state were provided. Where do the blacks fit in? The situation of the blacks was indeed different. No religious or ethnic group had to face anything like the conditions of slavery or the fierce subsequent prejudice and segregation to which they were subjected. But the pre-existing conditions of fractionated social services affected them too. Like other groups, they established their own churches, which provided within the limits set by the prevailing poverty and absence of resources some services. Like other groups, too, they were dependant on pre-existing systems of social service that had been set up by religious and ethnic groups, primarily to serve their own, some of which reached out to serve blacks, as is the case with the religiously based (and now publicly funded) social service agencies of New York City. They were much more dependant, owing to their economic condition, on the poorly developed primitive public services, and they became in time the special ward of the expanded American welfare state's social services. Having become, to a greater extent than other groups, the clients of public services, they also affected, owing to the prevailing racism, the public image of these services.

Glazer notes that there are other factors involved in our attitudes about inequality having to do with our British heritage, religious backround etc, that also play into our attitudes. But, he and the three economists have put their finger on the problem Democrats have with white Southern voters who “vote against their economic self-interest,” and may just explain why populism is so often coupled with nativism and racism --- perhaps it’s always been impossible to make a populist pitch that includes blacks or immigrants without alienating whites.

So, we are dealing with a much more complex and intractable problem than “southerners have been duped by Nixon’s southern strategy” or that liberals have been insulting them for years by supposedly devaluing their culture. Indeed, even the nostalgia ... for FDR’s coalition is historically inaccurate. A majority of whites have never voted with blacks in the south. (In the 30’s, as we all know, southern blacks were rarely allowed to vote at all.) In fact, FDR had an implicit agreement with the southern base of his party to leave Jim Crow alone if he wanted their cooperation on other economic issues. The southern coalition went along out of desperation (and also because they were paying very little in taxes.) But, as soon as the economy began to recover, and Roosevelt began to concentrate on programs for the poor, the division that exists to this day re-emerged.

When you all get a chance to read Rick Perlstein's new book (which he generously allowed me to excerpt a bit of here) you will see how fragile and ephemeral the consensus that allowed the civil rights bills to pass in the mid-60's was. You will see that almost immediately the backlash formed against the anti-poverty programs despite the fact that, contrary to myth, they worked quite well and actually lifted a lot of people out of poverty, black and white alike.

Racism informs many Americans' ideas about poverty. It is also one of the darker philosphical underpinnings of our vaunted American individualism. From the beginning we had problems because government programs often had to help blacks as a last resort. It is why today many people believe that welfare has a black face even though far more welfare recipients are white. It is why we have developed the idea that the poor (pictured in our minds' eye as black and brown) are lazy and shiftless rather than unfortunate. (Europe, with its long history of class division doesn't see poverty this way.) It's why certain people made the assumption that the poor and black in New Orleans were all on welfare rather than the truth, which is that many of them are members of the urban working poor.

There are certainly many conservatives who hold a philosophy of small government for different reasons than racism. They may believe that power corrupts or that big government is inefficient. But there is no sense of economic self-interest in working class whites being against high taxes for millionaires and corporations and there is no reason that they should be worried about big government takeover of healthcare when thiers is terrible if it exists at all. And yet many of them vote against the party that promises to tax millionaires and corporations and provide national health insurance.

The sad fact is that in that great sea of Republican red, there are many whites who would rather do without health care than see money go to pay for programs that they believe benefit blacks to the detriment of whites. Their prejudice overwhelms their economic self-interest and always has. They vote for the party that reinforces their belief that government programs only benefit the undeserving african american poor.

That is why liberals have to accept that race must be part of the argument. We are making progress. Things are better. But progress requires staying focused on the issue and ensuring that there is no slippage, no matter how difficult and cumbersome this debate feels at times. The liberal agenda depends upon forcing this out of the national bloodstream with each successive generation not only for moral reasons, which I know we all believe, but it also depends upon forcing it out of the bloodstream for practical reasons. Until this knee jerk reaction to black poverty among certain whites (and Pat Buchanan), particularly in the south, is brought to heel we are fighting an uphill battle to muster the consensus we need to create the kind of nation that guarantees its citizens a modern, decent safety net regardless of race or class.



.
digby 9/12/2005 09:27:00 AM |

Sunday, September 11, 2005

 
Dusting Off The Manual

Kevin reports that Time magazine says the Republicans have a three point plan for a comeback after Katrina:

By late last week, Administration aides were describing a three-part comeback plan. The first: Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later....The second tactic could be summed up as, Don't look back. The White House has sent delegates to meetings in Washington of outside Republican groups who have plans to blame the Democrats and state and local officials.

....The third move:...Advisers are proceeding with plans to gin up base-conservative voters...focused around tax reform....no plans to delay tax cuts...veto anticipated congressional approval of increased federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research.

There's one other little way to gin up base conservative voters that we can already see developing on the shout fest and gasbags shows. But this is one that the leakers know very well mustn’t be mentioned to writers for Time magazine. They are already dusting off their old tried and true southern strategy manual and after more than 40 years it's like a favorite old song --- they just started regurgitating their coded talking points without missing a beat. They'll need to. This happened deep in Red territory.

On This Weak, George Will basically said that the problem in New Orleans is that blacks fuck too much. Or rather, the problem of the "underclass" can be traced to so many "out of wedlock births." I think it's pretty clear he wasn't suggesting that abortions be made available to poor women. (If Bill Clinton thought he neutralized that line with welfare reform, he was sadly mistaken.) As far as the right is concerned, it's all about that old racist boogeyman "dependency." Last night on the McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan was foaming at the mouth about "the welfare state." He was in his element, getting his "we're gonna take our cities block by block" Pitchfork Pat mojo back. These are code words. They aren't about class --- although they will certainly claim that's what they're talking about. These are code words for blacks. (And if you want to understand how it's affected our ability to create a decent liberal government, read this.)

Immigration had already reared its ugly head out of nowhere, and now this. I believe the Republicans already see the elections of 06 and 08 as an opportunity to revert to a tried and true code saturated "law 'n order" strategy. The War on Terrorism has been losing its juice for sometime --- and Iraq is nothing but an embarrassment now. It's time to go back to what works.

For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he's racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years. The coded language that signals tribal ID has obscured it, but don't kid yourselves. It is a party that became dominant by exploiting the deep cultural fault of the mason dixon line.

I know that people are uncomfortable with this, but that doesn't make it any less true or relevant. Remember that famous electoral map of 2004:



Here again is that famous map of the slave and free states.



Whether or not you believe that Ohio was overtly stolen, there can be little doubt after reading the Conyers report that African American disenfranchisement likely resulted in that close election going to the Republicans. The same was true in Florida in 2000. Nobody wants to talk about that or deal with it. It interferes with our liberal insistence that all problems must be seen through the prism of class. But white voters have not been systematically disenfranchised, regardless of class, that's just a fact. And that speaks to the larger issue.

There are strong forces at work that rival economics in people's minds --- tribalism, religion, culture, and tradition all have strong pulls on the human psyche. We are complicated creatures. And the complicated creatures who call ourselves Americans have an issue with race. It's been there from the beginning of this republic and it affects our political system in profound ways.

In the modern era, the Republicans party has developed a patented technique for exploiting it. It's been in disuse for the last few years --- war superseded their need for it. But, they only have to pull it out of the package, wipe off the filth from the last time they used it and put it back in action.

The good news is that each time they use it; it is less effective than before. Things are improving. Racism is not as immediate for younger people as it once was and the virulent strain is much less potent than it was when I was a kid. On race, this country takes two steps forward one and a half steps back. I'm hopeful that we can eradicate the systemic nature of this illness from our culture over time.

But we aren't there yet. It was only forty years ago that this country was still living under apartheid. Since then, overt public racism became socially unacceptable. That's huge and is the reason why, in my opinion,you see so much less of it among the young. But we've also seen the Republican Party very deftly develop an alternate language to appeal to those for whom this issue is still very salient --- and who talk about it among themselves. That language has helped to remake the map we see above. It's not a coincidence that the lines that divided the slave, free and "open to slavery" states are the lines that form the political divide today.

In the right wing litany of family values, small government, low taxes, god and guns the missing word is racism. They don't have to say it. It's part of all those things.

These last two weeks I've heard the old school racists dragging out the "n" word, but they are dying out. We aren't going to see a lot of that anymore, thank god. But the code words were being slung around more freely than I've seen in ages. The first thing I heard out of people's mouths was that these people had been "irresponsible" for not following the directions they were given. The next thing I heard was that "looters" were taking over the city and they should be shot. Then there was the "why do they have so many kids" and "why can't they clean up after themselves" and "defecating where they stood."

I've heard all of this before. Just as racist code language sounds sweet and familiar to the true believers, it sets off alarm bells for people like me; when you grow up in a racist household, (just as when you grow up in a black household, I would assume) you know it when you hear it.

And throughout I've heard many good people insist that race is not a factor. They seem to think that racism is only defined as an irrational hatred of black people. It's not. It also manifests itself as an irrational fear of black people.

Here's a good example of what I'm talking about. This slide show of the destruction of the city from the beginning of the hurricane until the photographer managed to finally get out on day four is spectacular. Look all the way through it. It's great. When he finally realized that he would have to evacuate from the city he went to the convention center with a friend as authorities told him to do. And when he got there he saw long lines of people. This is the caption to his picture:

My jaw dropped and a sudden state of fear grasped my body. However, I maintained utter calmness. It was obvious that they were NOT going to help these people evacuate any time soon. They had been forgotten and obviously and shamelessly ignored. And it was evident that Andy and I were merely two specs of salt in a sea of pepper. Not only would we have to wait forever, but more than anything, we would probably suffer dire conditions after it would be obvious that we wouldn't "fit in". It was clear to me that we would have to find another way out. We left the Convention Center and my first intuition is to walk around the city. I wanted to clear my head, but I also had a weird and crazy plan in mind.

This was number 193 out of 197 pictures with captions. In earlier pictures he was pretty judgmental about looters but I thought that he was maybe just a law and order type. He is also Nicaraguan, so I didn't chalk up his vague condemnation of looters to racism although I've known many non-whites who actively dislike black people. And I don't chalk the above to overt racism. It is, as I've pounded the last few days, a sub-conscious fear of the black mob. If you look at that picture (#193) you don't see a rampaging mob. You see a bunch of black people standing around. He sees their plight. But he also assumes that he is personally in danger because he doesn't "fit in." He had been walking around lawless New Orleans taking pictures throughout the crisis and the only time he expressed fear for his personal safety was when something exploded nearby. But when faced with a large group of African Americans he immediately feels terribly threatened. He is proud that he "maintained utter calmness" in the face of it.

That's subconscious racism. And many white people succumb to it without even knowing what they are doing. The New York Times reported that the Louisiana authorities were "terrified" --- just as this guy was frozen with fear. He is not a bad person. Neither are most of the cops or the others who succumbed to this fear. They just do not know themselves. And that lack of self-knowledge ends up coloring their decisions, both political and social, in ways they don't understand.

The fact is that at this point, white people don't appear to have been the primary victims of crime during that time. As far as I am able to ascertain, the deaths at the evacuation centers were all black people.

(Incidentally, the weird and crazy plan that this gentleman had was to hotwire a car and drive it out of New Orleans. That is an action that Peggy Noonan and others considered worthy of being shot on the spot. Do you think she would have thought this guy should have been shot?)

If Karl Rove is going back to basics and shoring up the base you'll hear a lot of talk about Jesus as always. But after Katrina when they rail about traditional values, they will also be talking up the traditional value of southern racism again. The Republican base is that sea of red in the deep south and Karl and his boys are going to have to reassure those people that all this talk about rebuilding and federal money isn't going to benefit black people at the expense of whites. That's always been the sticking point.

We can hope that this has a galvanizing effect on the country and that there will be a reckoning for the Republicans. But prepare for the fact that there will also be a reaction. That's how these things work in Murika.



I wrote some things last year in the wake of the election, when I contemplated that election map that some of you may remember. If you are interested in this subject and you haven't read them, you might find these posts interesting:

Resentment Tribe
A very old story
It won't work
More culture war




.
digby 9/11/2005 08:39:00 AM |

Saturday, September 10, 2005

 
Is There Any Other Option?

Darrell Plant sent me this partial transcript of an interview with Ray Nagin on Nightline from last Sunday. He has the full interview, but doesn't have the bandwidth to take a lot of hits, so don't watch it unless you really have to verify what I'm posting. (Or if one of you hotshit videobloggers would like to host this vid, that would be good too.)

Nagin talks about the Crescent Connection bridge issue that I and others have been writing about:

JOHN DONOVAN, ABC NEWS: The last thing I want to ask you about is the race question.

So, I'm out at the highway — it was last Thursday — huge number of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. Jesse Jackson comes in, looks at the scene, and says it looks like the scene of a, from a slave ship. And I said, "Reverand Jackson,, the imagery suggests you're saying this is about race." And he didn't answer directly, he said, "Take a look at it, what do you think it's about?"

What's your response to that?

RAY NAGIN, MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS: (Sighs) You know, I haven't really thought much about the race issue. I will tell you this. I think it's, it could be, but it's a class issue for sure. Because I don't think this type of response would have happened if this was Orange County, California. This response definitely wouldn't have happened if it was Manhattan, New York. And I don't know if it's color or class.

DONOVAN: In some way, you think that New Orleans got second-class treatment.

NAGIN: I can't explain the response. And here's what else I can't explain: We are basically, almost surrounded by water. To the east, the bridge is out, you can't escape. Going west, you can't escape because the bridge is under water. We found one evacuation route, to walk across the Crescent City Connection, on the overpass, down Highway 90 to 310 to I10, to go get relief.

People got restless and there was overcrowding at the convention center. They asked us, "Is there any other option?" We said, "Well, if you want to walk, across the Crescent City Connection, there's buses coming, you may be able to find some relief." They started marching. At the parish line, the county line of Gretna, they were met with attack dogs and police officers with machine guns saying "You have to turn back..."

DONOVAN: Go back.

NAGIN: "...because a looter got in a shopping center and set it afire and we want to protect the property in this area."

DONOVAN: And what does that say to you?

NAGIN: That says that's a bunch of bull. That says that people value their property, and were protecting property, over human life.

And look, I was not suggesting, or suggesting to the people that they walk down into those neighborhoods. All I wanted them to do and I suggested: walk on the Interstate. And we called FEMA and we said "Drop them water and supplies as they march." They weren't gonna go into those doggone neighborhoods. They weren't going to impact those neighborhoods. Those people were looking to escape, and they cut off the last available exit route out of New Orleans.

DONOVAN: And was that race? Was that class?

NAGIN: I don't know. You're going to have to go ask them. But those questions need to be answered. And I'm pissed about it. And I don't know how many people died as a result of that.

They imprisoned those poor people in a catastrophic disaster area with no food and water because they were afraid of them. What a bunch of chickenshits.


Update: Nagin speaks out again today --- and mentions the incident at the bridge:


.
digby 9/10/2005 06:04:00 PM |

 
Stale CW

Why is that I keep hearing that Democrats are held in the same low esteem as Bush and the Republicans? The new Newsweek poll says:

Reflecting the tarnished view of the administration, only 38 percent of registered voters say they would vote for a Republican for Congress if the Congressional elections were held today, while 50 say they would vote for a Democrat.

This kind of question is actually pretty meaningless. When an election is in sight it will make more sense. Still, it seems as if the conventional wisdom of "Republicans may be unpopular but the Democrats are just as unpopular" continues to have the same shelf life as that stale a moldy trope that Bush is a popular president. He had to dip below 45 percent for many successive weeks before the media could bring themselves to refer to him as anything but popular and well-liked.

And for those who accuse the Democrats of having the same lock-step kool-aid drinking partisan impulses as the right wing borg, there's this:

The president and the GOP’s greatest hope may be, ironically, how deeply divided the nation remains, even after national tragedy. The president’s Republican base, in particular, remains extremely loyal. For instance, 53 percent of Democrats say the federal government did a poor job in getting help to people in New Orleans after Katrina. But just 19 percent of Republicans feel that way. In fact, almost half of Republicans (48 percent) either believes the federal government did a good job (37 percent) or an excellent job (11 percent) helping those stuck in New Orleans.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats are more forgiving of local and state governments (the New Orleans mayor and Louisiana governor are Democrats), though Democrats are not as forgiving as Republicans are of the Feds. More than a quarter (28 percent) of Democrats either believe the state and local governments did a good job (24 percent) or an excellent job (4 percent.) While 30 percent of Democrats believe the local and state governments did a poor job, 43 percent of Republicans believe the state and local officials did a poor job. (Thirty-five percent of Democrats and 29 percent of Republicans say they did a fair job.)

I think we need to start asking how much this Republican loyalty is for Dear Leader and how much is for the party. That's an important question going forward. Perhaps that 38/50 split mentioned at the top will turn out to have been a portent of good things to come. We'll see.


.
digby 9/10/2005 03:42:00 PM |

 
Brownie Pledge

Perhaps this made the rounds of the blogosphere and I missed it, but it truly is a great insight into why our preznit was so reluctant to dump a lowly, second rate factotum like Brownie. It's not like he's Karl Rove or something.

Via PERRspective blog, this article from November 3, 2004 in GovExec.com spells it out quite clearly. Junior owes him big-time:

How FEMA delivered Florida for Bush

By Charles Mahtesian

Now that President Bush has won Florida in his 2004 re-election bid, he may want to draft a letter of appreciation to Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Seldom has any federal agency had the opportunity to so directly and uniquely alter the course of a presidential election, and seldom has any agency delivered for a president as FEMA did in Florida this fall.

It is almost impossible to overstate the political importance of Florida, the fourth biggest election prize, with 27 electoral votes. In 2000, when Bush and Democratic nominee Al Gore battled to a 49 percent draw in the state, the official recount that gave Bush a 537-vote win also gave him the presidency. In 2004, both presidential campaigns targeted Florida with an intensity that assumed the state would be just as competitive as four years before.

Neither party, however, could have foreseen the role that Mother Nature would play. Beginning in August, Florida was flattened by four successive hurricanes that ripped up broad swaths of the state. Between hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, the storm damage was estimated to run as high as $26 billion.

In 1992, the last time a major hurricane pummeled Florida in the homestretch of a presidential election, FEMA was caught with its pants down. Its response to Hurricane Andrew was disorganized and chaotic, leaving thousands without shelter and water. Cleanup and resupply efforts were snarled in red tape. After watching the messy relief efforts unfold, lawmakers questioned whether FEMA was a Cold War relic that ought to be abolished.

For then-President George H.W. Bush, the scene proved to be a public relations nightmare. He managed to regain his footing and win Florida three months later, but his winning margin was dramatically reduced from 1988.

In 2004, George W. Bush and FEMA left little room for error. Not long after Hurricane Charley first made landfall on Aug. 13, Bush declared the state a federal disaster area to release federal relief funds. Less than two days after Charley ripped through southwestern Florida, he was on the ground touring hard-hit neighborhoods.

Bush later made a handful of other Florida visits to review storm-related damage, but the story on the ground was not Bush's hand-holding. Rather, it was FEMA's performance.

Charley hit on a Friday. With emergency supply trucks pre-positioned at depots for rapid, post-storm deployment, the agency was able to deliver seven truckloads of ice, water, cots, blankets, baby food and building supplies by Sunday. On Monday, hundreds of federal housing inspectors were on the ground, and FEMA already had opened its first one-stop disaster relief center.

By the end of September, three hurricanes later, the agency had processed 646,984 registrations for assistance with the help of phone lines operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fifty-five shelters, 31 disaster recovery centers and six medical teams were in operation across the state. Federal and state assistance to households reached more than $361 million, nearly 300,000 housing inspections were completed, and roughly 150,000 waterproof tarps were provided for homeowners, according to FEMA figures.

It's impossible to know just how much of an effect FEMA had on the Florida vote. Many of the citizens the agency served there presumably had more important things to worry about. It's also hard to imagine that, even with its shock-and-awe hurricane response, a bureaucracy like FEMA pleased all its customers. Even so, in a closely contested state where hundreds of thousands of voters suffered storm-related losses, it's equally hard to imagine that they didn't notice the agency's outreach.

There is also the allegation that Brownie used 30 million in FEMA funds to pay for damage in Miami-Dade --- which was 100 miles away from the hurricane.

It's not that Junior is refusing to fire Brownie out of loyalty. It's that he can't fire Brownie --- he knows too much.



.
digby 9/10/2005 02:16:00 PM |

 
Sealing Them In

A couple of days ago I wrote about the "single worst decision" that was made in the wake of the hurricane. I was wrong; there were actually two horrible decisions that created one horrible Catch-22.

The first part of the catch was the decision to keep relief workers with food and water out of the city. Early reports had the Red Cross saying straightforwardly that they were told by Homeland Security that the plan was to keep relief out of the city because they wanted everyone to evacuate and believed survivors might not go if they could eat or drink --- and that security was so bad they feared "feeding stations might get ransacked."

Yesterday, the story changed:

Marsha Evans, the national Red Cross president, first made the request to open its relief effort on Sept. 1, three days after Katrina struck, officials say.

"We had adequate supplies, the people and the vehicles," said Vic Howell, chief executive officer of the agency's Louisiana Capital Area Chapter. "It was the middle of a military rescue operation trying to save lives. We were asked not to go in and we abided by that recommendation."

Col. Jay Mayeaux, the deputy director of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said he had asked the Red Cross to wait 24 hours for conditions to be "set" for the operation. But by then a large scale evacuation was under way.

According to Media Matters, the Red Cross spokespeople have issued some rather strange and contradictory statements recently and point out that the head of the Red Cross is a major GOP bigwig. I don't think anyone knows yet exactly what went on. Whatever the truth of why they held back, nobody disputes the fact that the Red Cross was ready to go in last Thursday and didn't. The question is why.

The second half of the catch was that it now appears that while people were told for days they would be rescued, and were denied aid during that period, they were also shuffled all over the city and not allowed to leave on foot over the bridges. The story of the EMTs (confirmed by the NY Times today) and the reports by Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera on Friday confirm that this was true.

Yesterday UPI was able to get an interview with Arthur Lawson the chief of the Gretna police whom the EMTs accused of blocking the Crescent City connection bridge --- the bridge to which they had been sent by New Orleans police. He said this:

"We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been "a closed and secure location" since before the storm hit.

"All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down," he said.

The bridge in question -- the Crescent City Connection -- is the major artery heading west out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River.

Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.

He added that the small town, which he called "a bedroom community" for the city of New Orleans, would have been overwhelmed by the influx.

"There was no food, water or shelter" in Gretna City, Lawson said. "We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people.

"If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."


[...]

He says that his officers did assist about 4000 people who "arrived at the doorstep of (Gretna City)" either by crossing the bridge before it was closed or approaching from another route.

"We commandeered public transit buses and we took them to higher and safer ground" at the junction of Interstate-10 and Causeway Boulevard where "there was food and shelter," he said.

Kevin Drum asks the same question I asked when I read this. If the police could do this for people "approaching from another route" (not New Orleans) why couldn't they have helped others? And when it became clear that the evacuation was terribly late, why couldn't they let people walk out? I asked that question last Thursday night when I saw the report by Smith and Rivera on Fox news.

I was told by commenters at the time that it would be suicide for people to walk out, but that's turned out not to be true. As Kevin points out, it was a 20 mile trip on dry roads to safety. Many people would have gladly made that trek. I know that's exactly what I would have done --- or tried to do anyway.

As Teresa Neilson Hayden points out in this amazing post on the same subject, that's exactly what New Yorkers all did on September 11th. Indeed, New Yorkers expect to walk across bridges to safety in the case of an emergency. There is nothing about letting people walk out of a disaster zone that is in any way unusual. In fact, it's something that people have done forever. But not this time.

The reason they weren't allowed to walk out that night, of course, is simple. The police chief says it right out. They decided that saving their fully evacuated "bedroom community" from what they assumed would be "looting, pillaging and burning" by victims of the hurricane was more important than allowing people to save their own lives by walking through their town to safety up the road.

Picture for a moment young women with their children, old people, families, single people gathered together in a make-shift community in the middle of chaos approaching police officers on a bridge begging for help. Picture them being white. Do you think the police would shoot over their heads and push them back? Even if they did that would they then land a helicopter in thier midst in the middle of the night, not to rescue dying elderly, but to force their somewhat safe, visible make-shift community out into the pitch black anarchy of the city?

I'm pretty sure that the police would have let them walk through their precious bedroom community. They might have guarded their town, but they would have let them walk. And if they were under orders from others not to let them through, they surely would not have dispersed them back into New Orleans in the middle of the night.

Think about how many children we saw during those days. Lots and lots of them. And fragile elderly. Young women with tiny babies. That's who was fleeing that chaos.

Again, I'm sure there were looters and thugs in this mix. I have little doubt that people felt unsafe on the streets. Which is all the more reason that the authorities should have brought in national guard immediately and allowed the red cross to set up some relif centers so that people could feel safe, organize themselves and be evacuated in an orderly fashion. And the fact that everyone was terrified of being on the streets is the reason they should have let them flee the city across the bridge.

As it was, the victims were victimized first by the hurricane, an unpreventable act of nature, and were then frightened half to death by lawlessness, both real and imagined. When they turned to the cops for help, their lives were deemed less valuable than some well insured storefront in Gretna, Louisiana. Police, whom I assume are mostly good people doing difficult jobs, looked at mothers with 6 month old babies and saw a criminal who was going to "loot, pillage and burn" their town.

Kevin asks why the National Guard and other authorities right under the bridge at the convention center did nothing if suburban cops from the other side of the bridge were preventing people from leaving. It's a good question, but it kind of answers itself. The authorities were obviously either in a similar state of mind and obliging each other's civic desire to keep out the "mob" or they were operating under the same orders. We don't know the answer to that yet.

It's possible that FEMA issued a directive to to seal off the city, nobody in nobody out, but it's actually more likely that the second half of the catch is the result of local cops and other authorities making it clear that they weren't going to have a bunch of crazed negroes marauding through the suburbs. (The reports of "we always knew this would happen" from Baton Rouge illustrate that point.)

The New York Times, linked above, reports this:

The lawlessness that erupted in New Orleans soon after the hurricane terrified officials throughout Louisiana, and even a week later, law enforcement officers rarely entered the city without heavy weaponry.

It is becoming clear to me that this is also one of the main reasons for the delayed response. The question is whether it was true that the city had erupted into wild anarchy in the streets that required the deployment of thousands upon thousands of military to quell, or whether it was another example of primal white fear of black revolt.

We don't have the facts yet. It's clear that there were violent young men who intimidated and assaulted people at both the rescue sites, although there are differing accounts of how pervasive they were. There was looting --- but nothing on the scale of what we saw in Bagdad, when people stripped the electical wiring out of buildings and stole the toilets from the bathrooms. We will probably never know how much was stolen, but considering how hard it was to transport anything, it's probably not as bad as some thought. There were certainly reports of shots fired and snipers, but as in earlier examples of civic chaos, it's often difficult to say who is shooting and who is shooting back.

Oddly, the press wasn't able to capture much of it, at least not that they showed or wrote about. There was some footage of looting of TV's (I might have stolen a TV myself, with the thought that I could get to some electricity or a generator and find out what was going on.) There were a couple of broadcasts of men with guns being confronted by police. But, if the city was overrun by criminals, the media failed to capture the full force of the anarchy with pictures and that is curious.

I suspect it was people's imaginations that supplied that.

I may be wrong. It's possible that authorities were wise to hold back food and water for five long days because it was too dangerous to proceed into the city. Perhaps the gangs of thugs were so numerous and so dangerous that police had to keep women and children from leaving the city on foot because some criminals might sneak out with them. This could all turn out to be the case. But my suspicion is that a decision was made somewhere along the line that they were going to contain what they believed to be certain anarchy in New Orleans until they could assemble an overwhelming force of men with guns. (Why it took so long to assemble that force is another question.) Irrational fear of the mob was the reason the Red Cross didn't enter the city. And this was the reason the police didn't allow people to leave the city on foot in large numbers.

The question is if there was a real mob to fear or if the sight of large numbers of displaced black people made people assume there was one. Our history suggests the latter. As I wrote before, that's one of the oldest stories in the book.



.
digby 9/10/2005 09:43:00 AM |

Friday, September 09, 2005

 
Letdown

I can't wait to hear what Chris Matthews is going to say about the new Bigfoot that Bush has named today --- Admiral Thad Allen.

Here's a picture of him:



I think he looks the part and he certainly has the experience. And everybody loves a man in uniform. But he's no matinee idol like Rudy or Stormin' Norman. I suspect that Tweety is going to be very disappointed. Big Dick Cheney just flew on home and they appointed an Admiral nobody's ever heard of to be the new Viceroy.

He should have known better. This is the Bush administration we're talking about. They could barely tolerate having Powell in the administration. They are not going to bring in a "czar" that will show the president for the callow cheerleader he is.

"... some top Bush aides think a brand-name disaster boss like Giuliani, dubbed "America's Mayor" for his leadership after 9/11, or former secretary of state Colin Powell would remind Americans of the administration's sluggish initial response to the hurricane.

"You don't want someone overshadowing the President," said an official in the "ride it out" camp. "That leaves him looking weak."

Poor Tweety. He so badly wanted a big macho super star to head down there and take over. (I'm still willing to give him Schwarzenneger.) This admiral seems more like someone who knows how to actually do things. Tweety needs a man's man who can act like a man and talk like a man and make him feel like a man. This guy just doesn't have the "grandeur" he was looking for.



.
digby 9/09/2005 01:06:00 PM |

 
Snippy the Pinhead

I've been thinking about Nancy Pelosi's comments about Bush the other day:

At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had "absolutely no credentials."

She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.

"He said 'Why would I do that?'" Pelosi said.

"'I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'"

"Oblivious, in denial, dangerous," she added.

He wasn't oblivious or in denial. He was pissed. That is a standard immature, spoiled, frat boy comment. And he is nothing if not a spoiled, immature frat-boy.

Remember this?

Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. "He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn't get past," Allison recalled. "He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too."

That's the kind of person who comes back in someone's face with an "I know you are but what am I" comment like he gave Pelosi. Of course he knew he'd fucked up. He was just showing his snotty little shithead stripes. You can't blame him. He's under pressure. Presidentin' is hard work for a lazy, mediocre richie rich.



.
digby 9/09/2005 11:21:00 AM |

 
Wishin' and a Hopin'

When asked about why there was such a failure of response to the hurricane considering the lessons of 9/11, McClellan just launched into a litany of "that horrible day...never again...preventing terrorists attacks" as if bringing up the attacks mitigates the scope of their malfeasance rather than exacerbates it. I doubt they can wring much more out of that sponge, but maybe they can. It's been four years since 9/11 and clearly they have actually gotten worse at disaster response, not better. It doesn't seem very smart to keep pointing that out.

As the chairmen of the 9/11 commission said yesterday:

"The same mistakes made on 9/11 were made over again, in some cases worse," Kean said. "Those are system-wide failures that can be fixed and should have been fixed right away."

Added Hamilton: "I'm surprised, I'm disappointed and maybe even a little depressed that we did not do better four years after 9/11. It says we're still very vulnerable."

Josh Marshall has a full rundown on the various implications of this NY Times article, which seems to indicate that while hurricane victims were dying on national television, the Justice Department was debating the fine points of posse commitatus and worrying about whether it would look good to take command from a female governor. This is the same justice department that has declared torture to be legal and asserted a previously unheard of doctrine that the president has unlimited powers during wartime.

Perhaps Bush should have declared war on Mexico, then nobody would have been confused about whether the president of the United States could legally respond when the Governor of Louisiana said she needed all the help she could get.

Leaders prove their mettle in times of crisis. And 9/11 was a fairly simple crisis to manage. It was a terrible tragedy and a shocking act of violence but it happened quickly in one small area and then was over. The primary response required by the federal government was to figure out how it happened and take steps to prevent it from happening again. The only immediate decision the president had to make was an easy one --- whether to depose the Taliban and break up al Qaeda. And even that decision didn't have to be made on the spot in the midst of a rapidly changing situation on the ground and ongoing death and destruction. During the event itself and its immediate aftermath he was famously reading "My Pet Goat" and then flying all over the country like a chicken with his head cut off stopping only to make timorous speeches about how we were going to find "these folks" who had done this.

His reputation for great leadership and crisis management consists solely of going before the American paople with a bullhorn and saying "... and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon." That's not leadership --- that's cheerleading. Bush and his minions have never understood the difference.

This hurricane crisis required a series of on the spot decisions to be made over the course of several days, in terms of preparation and coordination. His delayed response to the event was to tell people how he "understood" there was a lot of work to do. And, of course, his administration was johnny on the spot with slime and defend. For that they have an instant response team of professionals in place.

Leaders also prove their mettle by how they learn from mistakes. Apparently, all the hoohaa we've been listening to on a loop over the past five years about 9/11 changing everything was crap. The NY Times article reports this:

... officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

The same people who never imagined that planes could fly into buildings apparently never imagined that a terrorist attack or natural disaster could incapacitate local first responders. Dear God. has there ever been a more incompetent administration?

I know it's not polite to bring this up, but the DHS has received $95.5 billion dollars over the last three years. I think we need to ask what they've been spending it on because I can't see any results.

It appears to me that the lesson that the Bush administration took from 9/11 was that we needed to prevent terrorists from ever hijacking airplanes and flying them into the world trade center again. I think we can feel confident that that will not happen again. After all, there is no world trade center to fly into.

Other than that, we are more vulnerable than we've ever been before to every other disaster scenario both manmade and natural --- they simply can't imagine them. This is the faith based, best case scenario, Peter Pan government. They literally believe that wishin' and a-hopin' is a plan.



.
digby 9/09/2005 09:22:00 AM |

Thursday, September 08, 2005

 
The Single Worst Decision

Many of you have probably already read this report from two EMTs who ended up part of that group stuck on the freeway overpass for days in New Orleans. If you haven't, read it. It's amazing.

If the order to deny relief in order to keep people from resisting evacuation is true, then somebody has committed a horrible, cruel mistake. As these two emergency techs write:

When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.

This makes sense to me. The conditions we saw at the convention center were awful and I think much of the despair and helplessness was due to the fact that these people were told repeatedly that they were going to be taken out of there at any moment. If the Red cross had been allowed in to set up their usual relief, with help from the authorities, they could have calmed that situation right down. People can organize themselves and settle in for a wait when they have the basic necessities. It was the hell of feeling abandoned and then locked in the city when they became desperate to leave, that must have been the most horrible. And as these EMT's showed, it wasn't a matter of having personal pluck or being able to organize themselves, they were actually inhibited by the authorities from dealing with the situation in a civilized fashion. The authorities actively created chaos so that people would not be comfortable:

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

This is the group that Shepard Smith was freaking out about on O'Reilly last Thursday night. I wonder if he knew what happened after he made that report.

I think we can all understand the overwhelming nature of this disaster. And there should have been more adequate planning and a better response, no doubt about it. But the decision to deny immediate aid to people in the city is the worst decision of all. Read that story. These tourists were treated like shit by the authorities everywhere they went, just like the locals. Whoever made the decision to deny those people relief and then deny them the ability to leave when they tried to save themselves has blood on his or her hands.



.
digby 9/08/2005 03:36:00 PM |

 
Waiting For Bigfoot

Chris Matthews is having an orgasm on national television. For days he has spoken of almost nothing but the necessity of Bush sending in a "big foot" like Powell or Giuliani to take charge of the situation. He has pounded on this issue over and over again.



Monday:

MATTHEWS: You know, let me ask you a more general—that‘s a pretty good answer. I like quick answers on HARDBALL. Let me ask you this. During the hell of 9/11, the one good thing about it was—well, we had a president who seemed to be in charge, but we also had somebody on the ground, Rudy Giuliani, who seemed to be the guy who was there every day standing on the street corner, answering questions. You got a sense that there was one person taking the heat, being accountable, being authoritative and being authentic.

I still don‘t see a face of this relief effort. I don‘t see one person. Would that help? Or am I being naive, one person standing there saying, I‘m in charge of relief and reconstruction right now; I will make the calls?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Right.
Congressman Livingston, you love that area. You grew up there. That‘s your home. Do you think we should have somebody like a Rudy Giuliani or a Colin Powell, some big shot on the site who says, I will make the big decisions at federal, state and level right now? Somebody is in charge.

[..]

MATTHEWS: OK. We‘re going to come back. We are going to be covering this.
Joe Scarborough, do we need one man in charge down there, do you think?

MATTHEWS: You know, during the 9/11 tragedy, we had at least a face on the ground. We had a face in the White House, the president‘s, obviously. And we had the face on the ground, Giuliani. To really make this relief effort work and this reconstruction effort work in the next several months and years, even, does the president have to name one person as sort of a man in charge, a woman in charge, who is out there and says, look, state, federal and local, come to me; we are going to make this thing work?

Tuesday:

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Howard Safir, the big question. Should the president have a person of high prestige and command ability, almost like a young Douglas MacArthur or a younger, perhaps, Colin Powell—I don‘t want to knock him—he might be the right guy—who stands ready to take charge in these tragic situations? Or should he pick them on the spot, like right now pick somebody?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Well, there‘s been a lot of buzz around Washington, as you know, David, as to whether the president will name a big name to go down there, like a Giuliani or a Colin Powell to be the man on the spot. Making the vice president that man on the spot, is he in fact not promoting the vice president once again to a very high executive position?

[...]

Yesterday:

MATTHEWS: But with what mandate? Is Cheney‘s challenge to show the flag, to show the administration cares about the suffering and wants to smarten up the relief effort and thereby lower the heat on President Bush? Is Cheney‘s challenge to chop off heads? Will Dick Cheney be the butcher who lops off some bureaucrat heads, starting with FEMA Director Michael Brown, and thereby reforge the federal relief effort? Is Cheney‘s challenge to take charge personally of the reconstruction?

Will the most powerful vice president in American history become the man who ramrods the rise of the new South and with it a legacy that could promote a draft for a Cheney presidency? The question is a big one. Is Cheney charging down South to serve as President Bush‘s executioner or full-fledged viceroy?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Coming up, Vice President Dick Cheney is headed, with or without the boots, to the Gulf Coast. Will he take the lead in the rescue of those Gulf states and save President Bush‘s legacy in the process? Is this about public relations, this trip? Is it about lopping heads in the bad work some of people have done in this relief effort? Or is he taking on a very big job down there, as the president‘s viceroy for cleaning up that area?

Former New York Police Chief Bernie Kerik was a towering figure in New York after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. He‘s going to come here and talk about whether it should be Dick Cheney‘s job or maybe Rudy Giuliani‘s job.

MATTHEWS: You know, whenever we have, Mr. Commissioner [Kerik}, a big challenge, like rebuilding Tokyo after World War II or rebuilding Berlin or saving Berlin from the communists, the president of the United States, whoever he was, would name a big figure, Lucius Clay in Berlin airlift, of course, the general, or, of course General MacArthur in Tokyo.

He became basically an American Caesar over there. I want to ask you when we come back whether the president doesn‘t have to do something like that now and pick somebody big to go in there, whether it‘s the vice president, to go down there and move down in New Orleans for six months, or put in Rudy Giuliani or Colin Powell in there, somebody who is a power figure that will take—who will give orders and put everything together and do something like you folks did up in New York during 9/11.

[...]

MATTHEWS: OK. One last time with David Gregory. Will the president let Dick Cheney be his big foot down there this week, and that‘s enough, or does he still feel the need to put a Giuliani in there or a Colin Powell in there as his viceroy in that part of the country?

He has OCD on this issue, desperate to have Bush put a big ... "foot" in charge of the disaster.

Today, he found sweet relief for his hard-on. Big Daddy Cheney has arrived:

"a tough guy...smart politician.. trying to figure out how to get his president out of a jam... smart guy, tough warrior..aware that now that he's put his [huge] boots on the ground he has a stake in this. How big a foot is he going to land on this issue."

I get the sense that he's suffering from a bad case of post coital melancholy, though. He just isn't satisfied. He wanted Rudy so badly he could taste it. And all he got was Dick.

Update: Ooops. Apparently he isn't going to have to settle for old Dick after all. According to David Gregory the buzz all over town is that the president should apppoint a Katrina Czar. Wow! (I guess "viceroy" didn't take.) Chris is back in the saddle.

He's talking up Jack Welch and Norman Schwartzkopf today. I hear Bernie Kerik is available. So is Ken Lay. How about a statue of Ronald Reagan?

And since Chris seems top think that the most important things is for the president to appoint "someone of grandeur, visible and public in America" I am personally willing to offer up Schwarzenneger. In Bush's America it's every citizen for him or herself.



.
digby 9/08/2005 02:20:00 PM |

 
Good Luck

Kevin passes on an article pointing out that there is already a high apartment vacancy rate in the south central region and that the government should just issue section 8 vouchers for people to use to house themselves in already vacant dwellings. He says this seems like something that could be passed right away on a bipartisan basis.

The only problem with this is that you would also have to pass a law that required landlords to accept them. And that, I'm afraid, is a non-starter. A large number of property owners are not going to stand for being forced to accept New Orleans evacuees as tenents and those who would be their neighbors will not accept it either.

I wish it were not true. And I wish that someone could propose something like this on the floor of congress so we could see where people stand --- it would be very illustrative of how far we've come since the discrimination in housing wars of the 1960's. That single issue almost succeeded in getting the civil rights act repealed. Sadly, I suspect we haven't come as far as we might have hoped.



.
digby 9/08/2005 12:57:00 PM |

 
Wrong Turn

There is something very dangerous happening in New Orleans and I'm not talking about the diseased gumbo that has become the flood waters. The combination of blocking the media, forcing evacuations and too many guns is a recipe for disaster. There is going to be trouble.

Via Atrios and Josh Marshall I see that Brian Williams reported on his blog last night:

An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

The media need to be in that city right now in great numbers. There has to be a record of what is going on --- for the sake of the soldiers and cops who are in there as much as the residents. This is a recipe for mayhem.

Here's a passage from the Kerner Commission about the Newark riots of 1967:

. . . On Saturday, July 15, [Director of Police Dominick] Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police officers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard.

Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building.

The Director of Police went over and asked him if he had fired the shot. The soldier said yes, he had fired to scare a man away from a window; that his orders were to keep everyone away from windows.

Spina said he told the soldier: “Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guardsman up and down this street and every state policeman and every city policeman that is present thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper.”

A short time later more “gunshots” were heard. Investigating, Spina came upon a Puerto Rican sitting on a wall. In reply to a question as to whether he knew “where the firing is coming from?” the man said:

“That’s no firing. That’s fireworks. If you look up to the fourth floor, you will see the people who are throwing down these cherry bombs.”

By this time four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived and troopers and policemen were again crouched everywhere looking for a sniper. The Director of Police remained at the scene for three hours, and the only shot fired was the one by the Guardsmen.

Nevertheless, at six o’clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass fire at the Hayes Housing Project in response to what they believed were snipers..

----------

Snapping power lines, firecrackers, and nervous, untrained police and national guardsmen caused much indiscriminate firing. The police often faced a very difficult job for which they were unprepared. According to the director of the Newark police, "Down in the Springfield Avenue area it was so bad that, in my opinion guardsmen were firing upon police and police were firing back, at them."

I cannot figure out why they have decided to do this. It's a mistake. In the past government authorities have sent in men with guns for the explicit purpose of taking down troublemakers by any means necessary. I hope that isn't what's happened. (That National Guard Colonel saying "this is going to look like "little Somalia" makes me very nervous.)

It is wrong for the government to be keeping the media out of this situation. If they are willing to take the risk of disease they should be allowed in. I hope they scream bloody murder. The media is a mitigating factor not a complication in situations like this. They need to be there.



.
digby 9/08/2005 09:52:00 AM |

 
Rotting Magnolias

I mentioned before the hurricane hit that I had lived as a child in Mississippi when Hurricane Betsy hit in 1965. I lived in Bay St. Louis, which was at the eye of Hurricane Katrina and seems to have been completely destroyed.

I'm sad to hear it. It was a beautiful little gothic southern town, dripping in drawly, molassas charm and warm hospitality. It was the location for the Natalie Wood and Robert Redford movie version of Tennessee Williams' "This Property is Condemned." I was there when they filmed the scenes down at the abandoned railroad tracks. I haven't been there in many years, but it was like a place out of time when I lived there and I doubt it changed all that much. We had heirloom roses growing in our backyard that locals said had been planted during the antebellum days. Apparently the house was on the site of an old planatation. My school was said to have been Henry Clay's summer home, although I don't know if that was true.

The period I lived in this little town was a momentous time in the south and there was a palpable undercurrent of profound disturbance. In 1965, the march on Selma hit as hard as the hurricane that came along months later.

Many of my readers know that my father is a blazing, unrepentant right wingnut. At 83 he's still going strong, but in those days he was something to behold. He had been career military (WWII and Korea vet) who retired by the mid 60's and went to work for the military industrial complex. He was such a die hard conservative that he had even hated Roosevelt. During the depression! In 1965 he was a formidable and charismatic figure. He was also a racist. Still is, but he's much less open about it. In those days it was no holds barred. And down south, in that period, he had a lot of company.

So, when I was over at Michael Berube's place last night I came across a vile comment by a reader giving a litany of crimes allegedly committed by the hurricane victims in New Orleans during those horrible days at the convention center and the Superdome, I recalled a strange episode from a period of my childhood spent deep in the heart of Tennessee Williams country.

After Selma, somebody wrote a book that made the rounds among my parents' friends in Bay St Louis that supposedly showed that the marchers had defecated in the streets, had sex in public and then made the police dogs aggressive with their "sex smell." I was not allowed to see this book, but my little friends and I got a hold of it. I'll never forget the images. It was racist pornography.

And then, exactly 40 years later I read this inside that amazing comment I linked to above:

“That same day, when it was time to board buses for Houston, soldiers had trouble controlling the crowd. People at the back of the mob crushed the people in front against barricades the soldiers put up to contain the crowd. Many people continued to yell obscenities whenever they saw a patrol go by. Some were afraid of losing their place in line and defecated where they stood.”

The commenter didn't provide links, but the quote above appears to be traced to a story in the Marine Corps Times:

Outside, thousands of civilians were mobbing a walkway leading into a mall that the military is using to process people getting onto the Houston-bound buses. Many civilians have been in the stuck waiting for more than 24 hours. People afraid of losing their places in line have defecated where they stand. People in the front of the mob have been injured from being crushed against steel barricades that separates the civilians from the military men and women trying to conduct the evacuation

Think about what the phrase "defecated where they stood" conjures up. Animals. Cows and Horses defecate where they stand. Humans don't.

The doctored quote from Berube's blog takes it to the next level, of course, and explicitly condemns that evacuees as animals (read the rest of his comment for a real treat.)But the original quote is somewhat jarring in itself. It's a "mob" that somehow "waits." The barricade is described as "separating" the military from the evacuees. The injuries of people pressed against the barricade are portrayed with out emotion as necessary to "processing" which is not defined. There is no discussion of how a "mob" can stand in a crushing line for 24 hours with no food, water or toilets. The defecation quote seems to be in the story as a prurient non-sequitor.

Here's a description of the very same scene from a tourist who stood in the same lines:

Finally, Thursday morning, Major Bush—I’m not making this up—declared on a megaphone that we would be evacuated. There was total calm for two hours.

We got in lines that went out towards the neighboring commercial center by a footbridge. They separated men and women, I don’t know why (I thought it might be in order to search people, but we weren’t searched). A guy who was with us was separated from his wife, and he had already lost his home and job.

The line was like the Paris metro at the height of rush hour. We were packed like sardines, we couldn’t even see our feet. We walked on garbage, diapers that exploded sometimes, bottles full, with urine, perhaps. There were also bottles of liquor. This lasted from midday Thursday until Friday morning, a total hell.
People fainted every two or three minutes. We heard cries of “somebody down.” They evacuated people towards the barriers. A pregnant woman’s water broke. Twice we heard gunshot and everyone dove for cover. We didn’t have anything to eat, only water.

Imagine for a minute what it would be like to stand in a crushing line for more than 24 hours in overpowering stench and blazing heat after having lived in hell for the previous three days inside the Superdome. Imagine how hard it would be to keep control of yourself, how frightened and how frustrated you would feel.

And yet, that Marine Times reporter and his racist reinterpreter do not see human beings stretched to their limits by conditions that are unimaginable --- many of them young mothers with children, old people and others who had no means to get out before the hurricane hit; they see misbehaving animals.

These stories have already become urban legends. Stories of blacks shitting in the streets are making the rounds all over the internet and becoming more and more lurid with each retelling. Just like these very same stories made their way into the homes of racist whites forty years ago and validated all their preconceived notions.

Be skeptical, my friends, and don't let these claims go unchallenged. This is the illness in our American soul that will not die. It lurks inside all of us, of all races, to some degree. I grew up inside the belly of the beast and I know that I must be vigilant to challenge certain assumptions.

Martin Luther King and the freedom marchers weren't shitting in the streets in 1965. Desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina were not animals --- they were treated like animals. Let's make sure that we understand the difference.



.
digby 9/08/2005 06:16:00 AM |

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

 
Little Pitchers

Max Boot says:

Ordinary people are sitting at home, transfixed by the spectacle unfolding on their television screens. Their hearts are breaking as they watch the horrifying spectacle of an entire city drowned. Many have already contributed what they can to the American Red Cross, to the Salvation Army, to the other armies of compassion, and only wish they could do more.

What must they think of the talking heads who treat this as if it were another bit of minor grist for the political mills? As if this were another story about some politician's war record or a nominee's nanny issues. The callowness now on display goes a long way toward explaining why politicians and the media are held in public esteem somewhere above child molesters and below bankers.

Little pitchers have big ears, don't you know. Shush with the "b-l-a-m-e" game or somebody might get the idea that somebody made a mistake.

Sometimes I wonder if these pundits ever talk to anyone but each other. Apparently, he doesn't know that "ordinary people" have lots and lots of opinions about how the leadership of this country should behave in a catastrophe. They do not have this strange, fey reticence to engage in "the blame game." They expect their leaders to take charge --- and when the task is huge and unprecedented, they expect their national leaders to take charge and mobilize the nation to help.

Jesus, George W. Bush has spent the last four years babbling about his superior leadership on a loop.

From his stump speech in 2004:

There are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn't one of those times. This is a time when we need firm resolve, clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation. (Applause.)

None of us will ever forget that week when one era ended and another began. On September the 14th, 2001, I stood in the ruins of the Twin Towers. It's a day I will never forget. There were workers in hard hats there, yelling, "Whatever it takes." I was trying to do my best to thank and comfort the firefighters and policemen and the rescuers. A guy grabbed me by the arm, and he said, "Do not let me down." (Applause.) Ever since that day, I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes

This was what he ran and won on --- the idea that he alone, the man in charge, wouldn't "let us down." But after Iraq -- and now this --- it's become clear to many "ordinary Americans" that his stirring assertions of his own committment aren't enough. There is massive failure and a complete lack of accountability. Actions speak louder than words. You don't have to be a pundit to understand that when Americans are abandoned in flood waters --- while the media were able to film their despair for days on end --- that the government let us down.

The guy who said over and over again "my greatest responsibility as President is to protect the American people," was selling people his leadership abilities in a crisis. And he let the country down. Ordinary people understand that quite well thank you. They aren't confused in the least. Even if the state a local authorities weren't on the ball it doesn't mean that the president was. And he's the man in the codpiece.

The sub-text of this crisis is that when the shit came down in an overwhelming way our national government failed.



.
digby 9/07/2005 12:43:00 PM |

 
Little Lord Pontchartrain


This story about Bush using firefighters as props should be circulated far and wide. I think it is the perfect symbol of the photo-op presidency.



I would like to see it juxtaposed with another one:




Karl Rove believes that politics is TV with the sound turned off. And that's mostly true. What he fails to understand is that people turn the sound way up during big stories like this. And they are feeling the cognitive dissonance between the images of horrible suffering and the president's dull and meaningless babbling:

"So long as anybody's life is in danger, we've got work to do. That's why I want people to be assured we're going to do it. And -- but remember, this is a project that not only deals with the immediate, we're going to have to deal with the long term, as well. The immediate needs are being taken care of right here, and I fully understand there's a lot of work to be done."

I think that there have been two important political comments these past few days. The first is this by William Kristol:

"He is a strong president . . . but he has never really focused on the importance of good execution. I think that is true in many parts of his presidency."

The second is this from the National Review:

"... an administration whose FEMA director knew less about on-the-ground conditions in the stricken city this week than the average TV viewer has a real vulnerability.

It will only address that vulnerability with a performance in coming days and weeks that is more in keeping with the GOP's image as the "daddy party," the party of competence, the party that can be trusted in times of crisis. That is the main thing."

Daddy isn't supposed to snivel about how the locals didn't do their job. Daddy whining about "the blame game" makes the kids feel like Daddy still isn't in charge and doesn't know what he's doing. And he should not be making excuses for his idiot cronies or relying on politesse and bureaucratic snafus to explain why he was late when the crisis hit. Daddy isn't supposed to be late.

I went through the LA riots in 92 and I recall that there was a delay in deploying the National Guard, ostensibly because they didn't have enough ammunition.(It turned out that they didn't have the proper locks on their guns.) The (possibly apocryphal) story that circulated at the time was that Pete Wilson, ex-marine, said, "Well then, issue one fucking bullet a piece and tell them to get their asses out there."

I have no love for Pete Wilson (and the response of the guard was very tardy) but that's the way people expect leaders to behave in a crisis. They want to see them making tough decisions, holding people accountable. Taking charge. That's the manufactured image the Republicans have been selling for decades. The reality is little Lord Pontchartrain telling his political hack "Brownie" he's doing a great job --- and using fire-fighters as props for his latest costume pageant. George W. Bush is America's deadbeat Dad.



.
digby 9/07/2005 09:25:00 AM |

 
Bad Timing

I have clearly angered the geek gods in some way. I had a massive computer meltdown of both laptop and desktop within 4 days. I'll be posting from odd distracting places for the time being.

Luckily, there isn't much going on right now...



.
digby 9/07/2005 09:16:00 AM |

Monday, September 05, 2005

 
We Always Worried This Would Happen

Spreading the poison of bigotry

BATON ROUGE, La. -- They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I'm staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.

"Because of the riots," the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.

"It's the blacks," whispered one white woman in the elevator. "We always worried this would happen."

I had the misfortune to be around some bigots this week-end as I watched the footage from New Orleans. I hadn't heard some of this stuff so frankly admitted since I was a kid (when I heard it a lot.) The twisted, subterranean, politically incorrect world of racism has reared its ugly head.

This is just the latest chapter in the oldest story in America. We should be aware of it and understand it. And we should also be glad that it isn't worse because in the past it certainly was.

Ever since 1791, there have been white Americans who get very nervous when they see a large number of angry black people in one place. That was the year that Haiti's slaves rebelled and killed almost every Frenchman on the island. The fear of slave revolt --- black revolt --- entered the consciousness of the American lizard brain and has never left. From Gabriel Prosser to Nat Turner to Malcolm X to Stokely Carmichael and the long hot summers of 66 and 67, notions of barbaric vengeance being wreaked upon unsuspecting white people has lurked in our racist subconscious. During slavery it was the immoral institution itself combined with horrible inhumane treatment. After the civil war it was the knowledge of seething anger at Jim Crow. During the 60's the anger became explicit and words like "by any means necessary" reached deep into the American psyche and fueled the backlash against the civil rights movement --- and set the conditions for the Republican dominance of politics today.

Race is America's deepest psychic wound that festers in different ways over and over again. It has lost much of its original blazing pain, but it is still there, buried and waiting to come to the surface.

The memories of Nat Turner are still fresh to many for whom the Lost Cause is their defining cultural benchmark:

Starting with a trusted few fellow slaves, the insurgency ultimately numbered more than 40 slaves and free blacks, mostly on horseback. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing all the whites they could find; men, women and children alike. In all 55 whites were killed in the revolt.

In total, 55 blacks suspected of having been involved in the uprising were killed. In the aftermath, hundreds of blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were beaten, tortured and murdered by hysterical white mobs.

In the summer of 67, the cities of this country went up in flames. The rhetoric was the same as what we heard coming from the right this past week. Peggy Noonan suggested that looters be summarily shot. And, in that summer of fire, they were. In large numbers. Only, it turned out, they weren't necessarily looters or rioters --- they were just black. Ordinary people, housewives, kids were gunned down by renegade cops and national guard who were given orders to shoot to kill. Every african american killed by police that summer became a symbol of collective punishment. If you were black, you could be asked to pay with your life for the sins of other blacks. That's just the way it worked.

In Rick Perlstein's (as yet unpublished) new book, which I've had the privilege to read a bit of, this is the real crucible of the 1960's. Here is just a little bit of what happened in Newark that long hot summer after the cops took off the gloves and started doing what Peggy Noonan and Jonah Goldberg have been agitating for this past week in New Orleans:

"The press was interested in making the carnage make sense. A turkey shoot of grandparents and 10-year-olds did not make sense. The New York Daily News ran an "investigation" of the death of the Newark fire captain [killed by police] and called it "The Murder of Mike Moran." The Washington Post left his cause of death as more or less a blank. The alternative--that when law enforcement spent days spraying ... rounds of ammunition, more or less at random, even white people can get killed--seemed too horrifying for mainstream ideology to contemplate. Twelve-year-old Joey Bass, in dirty jeans and scuffed sneakers, his own blood trickling down the street, lay splayed across the cover of the July 28 Life. The feature inside constituted a sort of visual and verbal legal brief for why such accidents might have been excusable. The opening spread showed a man with a turban wrapped around his head loading a Mauser by a window with the caption, "The targets were Negro snipers, like the one above." In actual fact the photo had been staged by a blustering black nationalist by the name of Colonel Hassan, what the copy claimed was an upper-floor vantage onto the streets actually a first-floor room overlooking a trash-strewn back yard. "The whole time we were in Newark we never saw what you would call a violent black man," Life photographer Bud Lee later recalled. "The only people I saw who were violent were the police."

Here is a link to Bud Lee's famous photograph of Joey Bass.

Today the NY Times reports this about snipers:

In a city racked by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout on Sunday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants and a fourth in a later gunfight. A fifth suspect was wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.

Perlstein reports on this incident from Newark:

And around 4 pm a group of citizens were milling around outside front of the Scudder Homes housing project off Springfield when three police cars turned the corner. The crowd assumed the police must be firing blanks at them,until a .38 caliber bullet ripped through Virgil Harrison's right forearm.

Men took off their undershirts to wave them as white flags. The cops just kept on shooting. They said they were looking for a sniper on the upper floors of the building. But they sprayed their shots at ground level. That was how Rufus Council, 35, Oscar Hill, 50, and Virgil's father Isaac "UncleDaddy" Harrison, 72, and perhaps Robert Lee Martin, 22, and Cornelius Murray, 28, lost their lives. Oscar Hill was wearing his American Legion jacket. Robert Lee Martin's family reported that money was taken from his body. Murray's body was missing $126 and a ring.

There indeed were three snipers in Scudder Homes. But they began their shooting in response to these fusillades. They killed a police detective, Fred Toto, 33, a father of three, about on hour later, though in later testimony police claimed the order of the shootings was reversed.

I'm not saying that's what happened in New Orleans in the incident I reference above --- or any others. I don't know the facts. I am saying that's the kind of thing that tends to happen when rumor and paranoia get out of hand.

Here's the Council of Conservative Citizen's web site:

Updates! Eyewitness accounts report that at least six people have been murdered inside the superdome. One dozen or more have been raped. Most of the rape victims are very young. A seven year old girl, an eight year old boy, and numerous teenage girls. The US media is extremely reluctant to report any of this because of political correctness!

Yet this doctor who was ministering to the sick in the Superdome reports nothing like this:

Perhaps it's the stench that Dr. Kevin Stephens will remember the most.
It was a stench that was a gumbo of human waste, sweat, and despair.
For four days, Stephens, the Health Department director in New Orleans, administered to the sick in the Superdome, his primary patients being those in wheelchairs and nonambulatory. He watched conditions deteriorate from one of calmness on the eve of Hurricane Katrina crippling the city, to one of frustration by the time he was evacuated to the adjacent New Orleans Arena on Wednesday. He was taken to Baton Rouge on Thursday.

[...]

"I never felt threatened and I walked around the entire place," Stephens said. "I was talking to people, administering first aid. But people were ready to get out of there. The conditions were horrid and horrible. The stench was unbearable. If we had electricity, it would have been so much better."

Here's a report from last Friday:

“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome.

In Detroit during the riots there in 1967, Perlstein reports:

"I'm gonna shoot at anything that moves and that is black" an arriving National Guardsman declared.

(He also reports that the federal government and state blame game almost perfectly mirrors the current crisis. When things are hurtling out of control, politicians will dither until they figure out what the play is, I guess. Too bad about the dead bodies.)

The story to which I linked at the beginning of this post concludes with this:

By Thursday, local TV and radio stations in Baton Rouge—the only ones in the metro area still able to broadcast—were breezily passing along reports of cars being hijacked at gunpoint by New Orleans refugees, riots breaking out in the shelters set up in Baton Rouge to house the displaced, and guns and knives being seized.

Scarcely any of it was true—the police, for example, confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter. There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes.

But all of it played directly into the darkest prejudices long held against the hundreds of thousands of impoverished blacks who live "down there," in New Orleans, that other world regarded by many white suburbanites—indeed, many people across the rest of the state—as a dangerous urban no-go area.

Now the floods were pushing tens of thousands of those inner-city residents deep into Baton Rouge and beyond. The TV pictures showed vast throngs of black people who had been trapped in downtown New Orleans disgorging out of rescue trucks and helicopters to be ushered onto buses headed west on Interstate Highway 10. The nervousness among many of the white evacuees in my hotel was palpable.

.

It's that last that we need to look for now. The evacuees are a diaspora all over the country. They are "infiltrating" a bunch of cities and towns in large numbers. Many whites fear blacks in large numbers, especially those from the big city, those who are desperate. Most especially, they fear those who are angry. (Why if they get it in their heads to be mad about how they were left behind to die like animals, who knows what will happen? Lock the doors!)

I don't honestly think there is any racist conspiracy at work. There doesn't need to be. All it takes is a reactivation of long held racist beliefs and attitudes --- attitudes that led the president to say that they had "secured" the convention center on Friday night --- which we all saw in that amazing FoxNews footage actually meant that the desperate survivors had been locked inside the sweltering hellhole. It was the attitude that had tourists staying at the Hyatt hotel being given special dispensation to go to the head of the lines at the Superdome. It was the attitude that made my racist companions disgusted by the "animals" at the convention center because they were living in filth fail to grasp that these people had been expecting to be rescued at any moment for more than four days.

It's that attitude that led these people to talk endlessly about rape with lurid imagery and breathless, barely contained excitement. This too is part of the American lizard brain.

I have no doubt that there was criminality on the streets of New Orleans. When the law disappears, that's what happens. But when you looks closely at our history you see that whenever large numbers of african americans are featured, this is the kind of thing that is said and thought and done. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't believe it or that criminals shouldn't be brought to justice. But our history suggests that when we hear reports of cops gunning down looters, snipers and rapists in the street, we should at least maintain a normal skepticism. Far too often in our history it has been shown later that things were not as they seemed at the time.

This, by the way, is not a neat black and white thing and never has been. Some black Americans have the same lizard brain reactions as do whites. In 1822:

Perhaps inspired by the way slaves coordinated their slave revolution in Santo Domingue (know today as the Haitian Revolution), [Denmark Vesey] planned what would have been the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. His insurrection, which was to take place on July 14, 1822, became known by about 9,000 slaves and free blacks throughout Charleston who were to participate. The plot was leaked by slaves loyal to their white owners who overheard talks of rebellion, and 131 people were charged with conspiracy by Charleston authorities.

Nobody will be surprised to learn, I assume, that recent scholarship indicates Desmond Vesey was framed.



.
digby 9/05/2005 04:30:00 PM |

 
Barbourous Jerk

Everyone has undoubtedly seen that dramatic and heartbreaking footage of Aaron Broussard on Meet the Press yesterday. But I wonder if most people saw Haley Barbour directly afterward. He completely ignored Broussard's emotional plea and implied in a particularly unctuous tone that something was wrong with Louisiana because everything was going very well in Mississippi:

MR. BROUSSARD: Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.

MR. RUSSERT: Just take a pause, Mr. President. While you gather yourself in your very emotional times, I understand, let me go to Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi.

Governor Barbour, can you bring our audience up to date on what is happening in your state, how many deaths have you experienced and what do you see playing out over the next couple days?

GOV. HALEY BARBOUR, (R-MS): Well, we were ground zero of the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States. And it's not just a calamity on our Gulf Coast, which is decimated, I mean, destroyed, all the infrastructure overwhelmed. We have damage 150 miles inland. We have 100 miles inland, 12 deaths from winds over 110 miles an hour.

Saturday night before this storm hit, the head of the National Hurricane Center called me and said, "Governor, this is going to be like Camille." I said, "Well, start telling people it's going to be like Camille," because Camille is the benchmark for how bad--it's the worst hurricane that ever hit America, it happened to hit Pass Christian, Mississippi. Well, Tim, Katrina was worse than Camille. It was worse than Camille in size. It was worse than Camille in damage. And so we've had a terrible, grievous blow struck us.

But my experience is very different from Louisiana, apparently. I don't know anything about Louisiana. Over here, we had the Coast Guard in Monday night. They took 1,700 people off the roofs of houses with guys hanging off of helicopters to get them. They sent us a million meals last night because we'd eaten everything through. Everything hasn't been perfect here, by any stretch of the imagination, Tim. But the federal government has been good partners to us. They've tried hard. Our people have tried hard. Firemen and policemen and emergency medical people, National Guard, highway patrolmen working virtually around the clock, sleeping in their cars when they could sleep. And we've made progress every day.

So, basically he said that Mississippi was getting the help it needed early on. I wonder if Mississippians agree with that?

Well, no, apparently not:

In a sign of the political pressure facing Bush, Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott, a former Senate majority leader, said he has been battling the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its Mississippi counterpart for help for his state and urged Bush to cut red tape.

After a one-on-one meeting with Bush in Poplarville, Lott said: "I am demanding help for the people of Mississippi to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina."

Haley Barbour is hitching his wagon to Bush and it makes sense. He's really never been anything but a political hack. But if things aren't going as well in Mississippi as he says it is --- and I doubt it is --- then he's playing with fire. I'd put my money on Lott. I have a suspicion that he understands the zeitgeist a little bit better that Barbour does.

...there are critics, particularly Jackson residents who are desperate for gasoline, and country folk still forced to scrounge for food and clean water in a world without electricity. And, there are those who say Barbour may have been too soft on early evacuation decisions.

The gulf coast was devastated. And people there are feeling overlooked in the shadow of the horrors of New Orleans. It's going to take a long time to re-build and things will not go completely smoothly. If people get impatient with this endless happy talk coming out of Barbour and the rest of the Republican leadership, there could be hell to pay. They'd better hope that Bush can deliver.



.
digby 9/05/2005 03:47:00 PM |

 
Faith Based Disaster Relief

If I am confirmed, I will pay special attention to volunteers and non-governmental organizations responding to disasters. Fire fighters are frequently the first to respond to a disaster. Faith-based groups like the Salvation Army play critical roles in disaster relief, as does the American Red Cross. And the individual actions of neighbors helping neighbors by donating time, food, and clothing should never be underestimated. These are the people who make a vital difference, without any expectation of thanks or recognition.

Joseph Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign manager at his confirmation hearing to be head of FEMA, February 13, 2001.

The government's job is to give money and recognition to charity organizations, not to actually do anything except encourage people to start a telephone prayer tree or squeeze their eyes shut tight and wish with everything they have not to die. After all, everybody wants the government out of their lives.

This is clearly the philosophy of FEMA under George W. Bush, his campaign manager and his campaign manager's roommate "Brownie." In other words, put your head between your legs and kiss you ass good-bye suckers. We aren't in the business of federal disaster relief.



.
digby 9/05/2005 09:25:00 AM |